The Wednesday Sisters(32)

When she finished reading, there was a long silence.

“What?” Brett said. “I'm splitting my infinitives? Mixing my metaphors? Just tell me! If I can take that drubbing on my novel, I can take anything.”

Kath wiped her eyes, and Ally pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.

“Have you thought about where you'll send it?” Linda asked. And we all started talking about where we'd seen anything like this in the magazines we read.

“But it's just a little essay about nothing,” Brett said. And despite all our protests—of course Chip would love it, and Sarah did not come off as clingy, no one could read it and think Brett didn't love Sarah to the ends of the universe, that's what the whole essay was about—no amount of our saying so could convince her to send the essay out.





EVEN AFTER WE PILED into Ally's Nova the next morning, Linda remained mum about our destination. “Special outing, nine a.m., no excuses. I've got a sitter and Ally will drive” was all she'd said on the phone the night before, and this morning all we got was “Turn right here, then right again at the corner.” On University, we crossed over the freeway into East Palo Alto, then right again on the frontage road. And let's just say you could have knocked us all over with a light breeze when we made a quick right into the parking lot.

“A funeral parlor?” Kath said. “You're taking us to a wake?”

We stepped through a hushed entryway into a single large room, rectangular and completely silent. The room was split by a center aisle, with slipcovered folding chairs on either side and carpet that was a deep, dark red.

“In case there's some spillage?” I whispered, and we laughed uneasily.

The room was lined with pots of lilies, roses, and freesia, fragrant flowers that did not quite cover a pinch of formaldehyde, a reminder of dead frogs laid out on lab tables and awkward teenagers thrusting frog guts on tweezers into each others' faces. At the front of the room stood an ornate coffin, carved and dark, its lid ominously closed.

A man in a somber suit—vintage funeral-parlor director—stepped through a side door near the coffin and called a startlingly cheery hello to Linda, who introduced him as a friend of Jeff's and hers.

“Don't worry, there's no dead body in the coffin,” she said to us as we approached it. “That isn't the point.”

“So there is a point here?” Brett said.

“For you, Brett,” Linda said. “Especially for you.”

The director smiled, nothing somber or sympathetic about him.

“This is one of our best models, a toe pincher,” he said. Its shape rather more diamond than rectangular, with the head pinched in, the toes even more so, Count Dracula–like. He pointed out its special features: the mahogany carved in crosses and grapevines (all hand-polished, which gave it that luster); the Last Supper depicted on the handle backplates and pietàs at the corners, all in antique gold. He opened the head half of the lid to reveal a diamond-shaped, pleated center panel on the lid, the entire interior done in beige velvet “with full-shirr roll and throwout, and matching pleated pillow.” He asked us to knock on the side door when we were finished. No one would bother us until then.

Almost before he was gone, Linda was saying, “Okay, you first, Brett. Climb in.”

“Climb in?!”

“Into the coffin.”

“Why?”

“Brett,” Linda said. “I know you always know everything, but trust me this once.”

“But I'll get it dirty, for one thing.”

Music began to pipe gently through the speakers, a sad trumpet solo at first, joined shortly by other instruments. An oboe. A violin.

“Take your shoes off,” Linda said. “Take your shoes off and climb in. Frankie can be next, then Ally and Kath and me. Because that's the order in which we're going to be published.”

That, of course, started a flurry of protests. Brett didn't even want to be published, for one thing, and none of us believed Linda would be last. “You're just putting yourself last to be polite, you know you are,” Kath said, and Linda said of course she was, but what did it matter?

“What does that have to do with a coffin, anyway?” Brett asked.

“Just get in, Brett,” Linda insisted.

She opened the other half of the lid to make it easier, and Brett finally skinned her shoes off and climbed in. At Linda's direction, she lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. The room was completely silent for a moment, even the trumpet music ceasing, a short pause before the next piece of music began.

“Now,” Linda said. “What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking I do not want to be in this coffin,” Brett said.