The Wednesday Sisters(34)

“Don't tell anyone, not even your husbands,” Brett said.

I supposed her reluctance stemmed from the same source mine would, even if she was Phi Beta Kappa from a great college and with three majors to boot. I supposed she, too, thought the only thing worse than failure was having everyone see your disgrace. I was wrong, it turns out. It wasn't failure that Brett feared. But in the time that passed before I would come to learn that, I would take great solace in believing I was in her fine company on this.

The first responses to Brett's essay were discouraging—if that essay could draw return-mail dings, what hope was there for the rest of us? We all started looking at our own writing with increasing doubt. Then one day in late August, as the first coed students were registering for classes at Vassar and Princeton and Yale, Brett's phone rang. Redbook wanted to publish her essay, and would pay her a hundred dollars to boot!

We were sitting at our picnic table when she told us, the children tended by Arselia, who had baby Mark in her arms.

“But I can't let them publish it,” Brett said.

“I swear on my aunt Tooty's grave, Brett!” Kath said. “Just because a thing comes easily to you doesn't mean it isn't good enough.”

Brett looked down at her hands resting on the picnic table. “But Brad . . . my brother . . .”

“He's the most charming person in the essay!” I said. “I'm sure he'll love it.”

Brett shoved her hands under the table and met my gaze, as if she wanted to say something but couldn't find the words even with her incredible vocabulary.

“You can't make his dream come true,” Linda said quietly.

“You don't know what Brad's been through, Linda,” Brett said, speaking even more quietly than Linda had, as if Mark were asleep in her arms.

“You can't make anyone's dream come true but your own, Brett,” Linda said. “Only your own. That's it.”

Did we buy a bottle of champagne and celebrate? You bet we did. And when that essay appeared on newsstands, we opened a second bottle to celebrate that.

It came as a huge surprise when, just a few weeks later, Linda sold her first story—to a small magazine no one had ever heard of, with no circulation whatsoever, but that didn't matter one whit to us. It was that first story she'd given us, a simple thing about a mother putting her children to bed, and I remembered how critical we'd been of it, and how she'd listened and taken notes.

“You never told us you were even fixin' to send it out, Linda,” Kath said—not an accusation, but with a hint of feeling betrayed.

I swallowed against the same swelling emotion, the little voice saying Linda must think this was some sort of a competition and she'd just won—or at least come in second after Brett. I remembered a boy I'd dated in high school, who told me I wasn't hurt that he'd broken up with me, I was mad that I hadn't broken up with him first. “Well, it's wonderful anyway,” I said.

Linda met Kath's eyes, then mine. “It wasn't like that,” she said quietly. “I was afraid you'd say it wasn't ready—which it wasn't, but I guess I needed to get it out there, to get those rejections to see that. After a few revisions, some editors wrote back with personal notes, sometimes even with comments, and I wanted to ask if you guys agreed with them, but how could I when I hadn't even told you I'd sent it? So I just revised again and mailed it back out. Sixty-three times.”

“Sixty-three!” In unison, all four of us.

“I have a lot of index cards to add to our collection,” she said.

“Sixty-three,” Kath repeated. “Lordy, Linda, how in the world could you take that much of a whippin'?”

“Heavens to Betsy, sixty-three rejections,” Ally said soberly.

Linda sat back in her chair, crossed her legs. “If I don't believe in my own work,” she said, “how can I expect anyone else to? Besides, it was only sixty-two rejections. The last one was a yes.”





LINDA WAS STANDING in front of the bathroom mirror one Tuesday night that August, still smiling over a Woodstock joke Johnny Carson had told in his opening monologue, when she raised her arms to slide on her pajama top and noticed a funny pucker in the skin on her left breast. Her fingers went to the spot, her pajama top dropping to the floor. She could feel something, not in the skin but underneath it. A small hardness, the size of a pea.

She thought of her mother, how she'd run from her mother and her awful arm, how that must have broken her mother's heart.

She felt again, sure she must be mistaken. But the lump was still there. “

Jeff?” she said, a whisper. She opened the door into the bedroom and stood there in her pajama bottoms, still naked from the waist up.