Kath suggested Brett explain what she meant the story to be, and Brett tried, but she lost us by the third sentence of a five-minute explanation that concluded, “I guess it's mostly about . . . beauty versus brains?”
“That's what I thought. That's the big ol' heart of the story, this idea that intelligence in a woman is about as desirable as a trapdoor on a canoe. But that doesn't hardly get a mention until”—Kath flipped through the carbon copy she and Brett were sharing, the faintest copy—“here on page 305, Brett, in this scene with Lizzy and her mama. I was wondering, though, if her mama couldn't be in the hunt from the get-go. You might could split this last chapter, make the first part of it prologue.” She turned to one of the last pages. “See here? Couldn't that be the end of the prologue? Then you turn the page to chapter one. Boom: here's Lizzy before she even knows she has a real mama, much less how brilliant she is. But the reader does know.”
Brett nodded after a moment.
Linda, who looked as if she'd been about to bust ever since Kath spoke, said, “I like that idea. I like that,” and I silently applauded her for waiting for Brett to like it first. She'd come a long way since that morning she'd bludgeoned us into reading after she'd sworn we wouldn't have to read, that first meeting of what I just that minute began to think of as the Wednesday Sisters.
“The Wednesday Sisters,” I said, not meaning to say it aloud.
They looked at me for a moment with puzzled expressions, trying to sort out what in the world I was saying about Brett's book.
“We are!” Linda said. “We're the Wednesday Sisters!”
“The Wednesday Sisters Writing Society!” Ally said.
And we all smiled, seeing even then, I think, that our friendship would change our lives, that it already had.
Linda asked Brett then what she liked about Breakfast at Tiffany's, why she'd chosen it as her model book, and Brett, after a moment, said she supposed she liked the way Holly just decides whom she wants to be and becomes that. “And the way she so easily abandons her past without ceasing to love it,” she said.
“Think about that when you think about Elizabeth,” Linda said.
Brett sighed. “But this will be so much work.”
“God doesn't believe in the easy way,” Kath said.
“Like you told us Hemingway said, Brett: ‘First drafts are shit,’” Ally said.
Kath kicked her under the picnic table—this was a sixth draft—but it was too late, Brett's tears spilled over. She looked like I imagined her character Elizabeth looked in the flashback to when she was eight, when her classmates ridiculed her for using words like paucity and atmospherics and lithe.
“Oh, shoot, I didn't mean that, Brett,” Ally said. “I just meant even great writers . . .”
But that wasn't why Brett was crying, exactly, I didn't think—or why I would have been crying if I were her, anyway. Which I would have been. Maybe it was just postpartum blues, all those hormones jumping around, but I thought it had more to do with feeling as vulnerable as that girl in her story. It had to do with knowing we were opening ourselves up, cutting ourselves open at our guts and letting the others see inside us in ways we couldn't even see ourselves. It had to do with beginning to imagine opening ourselves up not only to each other, but also to the whole world. Because wasn't that what we were hoping? That someday the things we'd squirreled away behind our little white gloves would be right out there on the bookshelves for anyone to see, our souls so pitifully disguised by our tortured prose.
BRETT SHOWED UP the next Wednesday with new pages. Not a rewrite of the novel—none of us works that fast. Just something she'd banged out on the typewriter the day before. She read it aloud, shyly, a piece that, on the surface, was about watching the lunar landing, and remembering how she and her brother had dreamed of being astronauts, wondering if he watched with the same mixture of awe and pain that she felt, the pain of seeing someone else achieving that dream they'd shared. But underneath that surface, the essay was as much about watching her daughter watching it, too, and somehow it was about the wonder of the landing and the wonder of Sarah and how those two things were the future right there in her living room, and how one day Sarah would go off to school, and then to college, and then to walk on the moon or Mars or on into another galaxy altogether, and how Brett could not imagine letting her go. I watched, riveted by her words, seeing Sarah's bare little hand slipping from Brett's white cotton grasp. Sarah all grown up, the astronaut Brett herself had once dreamed she'd be. Brett removing her gloves to touch her daughter's smooth cheek one last time before she boarded her spaceship, only to find that it was too late, that all her bare fingers could reach was the cold not-glass, the bubble dream of the space suit in which her daughter was now encased.