The Wednesday Sisters(4)

The winner that year was Miss Kansas, a near twin of the reigning Miss America who crowned her. She looked like a too-eager-to-please Mary Tyler Moore, if you can imagine such a thing, with gobs of brunette hair piled so high it stuck up above her crown. When she walked the Miss America walk, I was afraid that shiny thing would slide right off her head and plaster someone. She played a lovely piano, though. She played “Born Free.”





WE WEREN'T the Wednesday Sisters when I first moved to Palo Alto that next spring, of course. We'd only met that once, when it hadn't been all that hard for me to meet people, when I wasn't really looking for anything, I was just looking. But it's a harder thing to do to go out and say, “Hi, I'm new to the neighborhood and I don't know a soul.” The nights were the worst, the hours after Mags and Davy went to sleep and before Danny got home, while he was working late or getting to know his co-workers over a beer at the Wagon Wheel. I'd sit on the front porch reading or simply looking out at that old mansion, its disrepair softened by the night's darkness, leaving it looking mysterious and rather romantic. A Miss Havisham house, that's what Danny called it, and he was right, or nearly right: the woman who'd built it was not a Dickens character but a real woman with real sadness to bear, one who'd lost first her husband and then her only child, her daughter, Eleanor, for whom the park was named.

No one lived in the mansion any longer. It was a museum of sorts, and hardly that. It was open to the public only one Sunday a month, to comply with the provisions of the woman's grant of the property to the city, to keep it from reverting to her heirs. But staring across the long lawn that ran beside the playground to the circle of drive in front of the abandoned old place, a circle that connected to nothing, not to the road or to any of the other homes, I imagined the old woman coming out onto the porch in the evening, sitting on the rickety Victorian rocker, looking down the drive that must once have come a long, straight, empty stretch to Center, just across from my house. I imagined her looking across at a lonely newcomer sitting on my front step, looking back at her. I imagined her standing and walking down her drive, crossing the street, saying, “Welcome to the neighborhood, Mary Frances,” and telling me about the families that had lived here before me, saying she was sure we'd be happy here. “How could you live in a house with such wonderful pink shutters and fail to be happy?” she'd say.

When I saw Linda and Kath in the park the first sunny morning after we'd moved in, I tripped on the curb hurrying to join them—familiar faces!—and arrived at their bench with grass-stained palms. I introduced myself as Mary as I let Mags head off to the swings.

“Mary Frances,” I said, suddenly uncertain—if anyone called me Mary, would I realize they were talking to me? “I met you last fall, didn't I?”

The way they looked at me, I felt I'd interrupted. “Mary Frances?” Kath said. “Oh. Of course.” But you could tell by the look in her heavily mascaraed eyes that she didn't remember me.

“You're Kathy, right?” I said, saying Kathy instead of Kath as if I weren't quite sure I remembered right, my hand going to my glasses. “And Linda?” As if I only dimly recalled that she had two daughters who were Maggie's age, twins born in different years, Jamie just before midnight, December 31, 1963, Julie a half hour later, on January 1.

“That's right, I'm Linda.” Linda smiled a little, her blond lashes blinking as she shifted her newborn in her lap. “That's right.”

Brett, in her white gloves, showed up across the park then, just as I was settling onto a bench that cornered Kath and Linda's bench, putting Davy and his favorite trucks on a blanket in front of me.

“Lordy, I haven't seen that girl all winter,” Kath said to Linda. “I thought maybe she'd moved away.”

They stared as she settled her daughter into a baby swing—stared at her long, thin nose and her thin little face and her thin legs, stick legs, really. Skinny, you'd call her. Like Twiggy, but without the poise despite the white gloves. Only her hair was remarkable: the most gorgeous strawberry blond, cut into a pageboy that her tiny ears peeked through now and then. Without that hair, she might have disappeared entirely; you might not even have noticed the gloves.

Linda lowered her voice theatrically. “Maybe she slit her wrists,” she said to Kath. “Maybe she wears them because her wrists are jagged blue with scars and—”

“I swear on my aunt Tooty's grave, Linda!” Kath glanced in my direction and lowered her voice. “Didn't I tell you not to scare off one more gal before I got in a how-do-you-do?”