The Wednesday Sisters(3)

Another gal pushed a baby buggy up to our bench just then, a big-haired, big-chinned brunette who had already pulled a book from her bag and was handing it to Linda, saying she'd finished it at two that morning. “No love story, but I liked it anyway. Thanks,” she said, her y's clipped, her i's lingering on into forever. Mississippi, I thought, though that was probably because of the book: To Kill a Mocking-bird.

Linda, polite as anything, was introducing us, saying, “Kath, this is Frankie . . .” Frowning then, clearly drawing a blank on my last name.

“Mary Frances O'Mara,” I said, remembering this time: Mary Frances or Frances or Fran.

“Frankie is moving into that cute little house with the awful pink shutters,” Linda said.

“Linda,” Kath said.

“In the spring, right?” Linda said.

“Maybe not that house,” I said.

“Oh, right. She hasn't bought it yet. But when she does, she's going to paint the shutters.”

“Lin-da!” Kath blinked heavily darkened lashes straight at her friend's lack of manners. Then to me, “You can see why she doesn't have a friend in this whole wide world except me, bless her cold, black heart.”

Kath said how pleased she was meet to me, her head bobbing and her shoulders bobbing along with it, some sort of Southern-girl upper-body dance that said more loudly than she could have imagined that she was an agreeable person, that she just wanted to be liked. I said, “Me, too,” nodding as well, but careful to keep my shoulders straight and square and still; probably I'd done a Midwestern version of that head bob all my life.

Kath began to unpack her baby from the stroller, placing a clean white diaper over the shoulder of her spotless blouse first, the careful pink of her perfect nails—the same pink as her lipstick—lingering on baby hair as neatly combed as her own, which was poufy at the top and flipping up at the ends the way it does only if you set it, with a big fat braid wrapped above her bangs like a headband. Not a real braid like Linda's, but a fake one exactly the color of her hair. Still, it was easy to imagine that she slept propped up on pillows so her hair in big rollers would dry through, and that when it rained her hair might revert to disaster like mine did, even when it didn't get wet. She wasn't like my girlfriends back home, exactly, but she was more like them than Linda was. Not Twiggy thin. Not Doris Day blond.

Although Linda had lent Kath To Kill a Mockingbird. There was that.

“How old?” I asked Kath, glancing down at my own three-month-old Davy.

“This punkin?” Kath said, admiring her little Lacy. “She's three months. My Lee-Lee—Madison Leland Montgomery the Fifth, he is really—he's three and a half. And Anna Page—”

A young girl with Kath's same chin, her same chestnut hair left alone to fall in its own random waves under a straw hat with a black grosgrain band, tore off across the park, the hat flying back off her head, tumbling into the sand behind her. She tripped and slid in the sand herself, and her dress (this smocked thing with white lace at the cuffs and neck) . . . well, you could see she was not a girl who kept her dresses clean. But she picked herself up without so much as a pout and continued on to the jungle gym, where she climbed to the top cross bar and hung upside down, her sandy dress falling over her face.

“I swear, she'll be drinking bourbon straight out of the bottle before she's eighteen,” Kath said.

Linda asked Kath who was coming to her Miss America party that Saturday night, then, and they started talking together about the other doctors' wives they'd met—or the residents' wives, to be precise. Kath had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Linda in Connecticut. They'd both just moved to Palo Alto. They didn't know any more people than I did, really. But they'd spent every Miss America Saturday they could remember gathering with their girlfriends to watch the pageant, like I had, all of us imagining taking that victory walk ourselves even if we were the homeliest things in town. Or Kath had always watched with her girlfriends, anyway, and Linda left the impression she had, too. She didn't say anything that first afternoon about how lonely her childhood had been.



• • •



I WATCHED THE PAGEANT in my hotel room that Saturday night, rooting for Miss Illinois while Maggie slept and Davy nursed and Danny was out drinking beers with the Fairchild Semiconductor fellows he would join that spring after he finished school. I lay there on the generic flowered bedspread in the beige-walled room, watching in color—that, at least, was nice—and wondering which contestant Linda and Kath and all the other Stanford doctors' wives were rooting for, and if the Fairchild wives got together to watch the pageant, too. I imagined my girlfriends back home in Chicago watching without me this year. I imagined a future of watching Miss America by myself, rooting for Miss Illinois while all the neighbors I didn't know rooted for Miss California, or for Miss Whatever-State-They'd-Moved-to-California-From.