The Wednesday Sisters(42)

Facts had always soothed her brother, Brett would tell us later, when she told us about Brad finally. She thought maybe men and women were different that way.

When Linda awoke a few hours later, crawling up from the fog of anesthesia, she found she could breathe freely, no heavy push of pressure bandages on her chest, not the least bit of swelling in her arm. She didn't say so, but you know she cried with relief the same way Jeff did when the doctor came from the operating room to tell him it had all gone well, that they'd excised the one lump, that was all there was, and of course they couldn't be certain until the pathologist finished the more definitive tests, but the preliminary results were good, the preliminary results suggested the lump was benign, harmless. Nothing to worry about.

I sure cried when Jeff told us.

Jeff fell asleep in the chair in Linda's hospital room afterward, and slept soundly the whole night that way. It was against hospital regulations, but no one was going to tell him visiting hours were up.

A scar at the side of her breast, that was all. It didn't even show when Linda wore a bikini, which she did later that summer. That physical scar never did show.





THAT SEPTEMBER Maggie, along with Kath's Lee-Lee and Linda's twins, started kindergarten. Linda and I just basically blubbered, and even Kath, who'd been through this before—Anna Page was starting third grade—was as sappy about that as she was about little Lee. Our babies were growing up. But the children were not the least bit nervous. Maggie, dragging along her Allo blanket for her rest-time “friend,” let go of my hand as if she'd been doing it for ages. It made me a little sad, realizing how little she thought she needed me.

I would be thirty-eight when she went off to college, I remember thinking that morning. Forty when Davy left. They would grow up and go off on their own in a bigger way, just like in Brett's essay, and though I would always be their mother, I would cease to be their mother in the every-moment way I was now, in the way that Danny would continue to be an every-moment engineer even without the children at home. And who would I be then?

“You should join the AAUW with me, Frankie,” Linda said. “The American Association of University Women.”

Yes, some women did belong primarily to play bridge, she said in answer to Brett, who said that's what she thought they did. “But doesn't everyone like to play a hand every now and then? You all learned in college, right? And anyway, the Palo Alto branch is much more than a social club.” They campaigned for women running for political office, she explained, and they were helping write an environmental handbook and working to get a San Francisco Bay wildlife refuge off the ground. They presented programs on topics such as “Foreign Policy: Dilemmas and Realities” and “Human Use of Urban Space.”

“My study topic is ‘This Beleaguered Earth: Can Man Survive?’” she said, leaving me to wonder what exactly a study topic might be. “We're trying to show it would be cheaper to preserve the foothills behind Stanford as open space than to develop them. It's a cool group, really. One you can all join. It doesn't matter which college you went to.”

I nodded like I'd nodded about the whole bridge-at-college thing when I had no idea how to play bridge.

Linda had met a Northwestern alumna at the AAUW meeting that week. “You must have known her, Frankie. She's just our age, and she was in engineering, which is where Danny was, right? There can't have been three women in engineering. What year did you graduate?”

I didn't know the woman, but I did know that someday Linda would bump into someone who knew me, who'd say, “Frankie? Wasn't she an engineering school secretary?” Or Danny would say something. He had no more idea that these women thought I'd gone to Northwestern than he did that I'd been even chubbier in high school or that I'd once let Sean Casey feel me up even though I didn't like him because I wanted a date to the prom (never mind that he hadn't asked me to the prom anyway).

“I . . .” I adjusted my glasses, not meeting anyone's eyes. “I didn't graduate from Northwestern. Danny. That was Danny.”

“But you still had a class, honey,” Kath said. “That doesn't make you not part of a class. Lordy, most gals I went to school with never did graduate either. They got married when their husbands were done, and they went and moved with them to whatever sorry town had a job. What year did you start?”

I pulled my sweater closed, too unsure of my hands to venture the buttons. I knew Kath wouldn't care. None of them would care, really. Why hadn't I just told them before?

“I never did start,” I said. “I never went to Northwestern. Danny did, but not me.”