The Wednesday Sisters(45)

Not that we learned any of that at that Miss America gathering, any more than we learned that Ally had never met Jim's parents, either, a fact Jim explained away with the ocean gulf between them, but Ally knew better, she knew they saw her miscarriages as a sign of their own brand of offended gods, and that they, too, thought the offense was hers; their Jaiman could do no wrong.

What we did learn that evening—before the talent competition had even started—was that our quiet little Ally could storm out of a room with the best of them. Which was exactly what she did, but not before she made it perfectly clear—perfectly audibly—that we were “prejudiced morons,” “idiots,” “fools.”

“It's one thing to have to deal with it from strangers,” she said. “The policemen who stop us to make sure I'm okay, that I'm not being kidnapped or raped. The maître d's and ticket sellers who pretend they don't see us. The people who do see us, who stare at us every time we go anywhere together—and those are the nice people, the people who don't insult us outright. I get plenty of cruelty from strangers. I don't need it from people I thought were my friends. If I don't need my parents, I surely don't need you.” And she grabbed her purse and stomped out of the house, and Linda followed her, looking as disgusted as Ally was.

Brett and Kath and I didn't know what to do. We just sat there, watching in silence as those flawless white girls tromped across the stage and back again.

“Ally's husband is colored?” Kath said finally, as if she still couldn't believe it was true.

“Indian, Kath,” Brett said. “From India.”

“My mama's Blanche isn't any darker than I am in the summertime,” Kath said, “but that doesn't make her white.

“Ally is such a pretty girl, too,” Kath said, giving voice to a thought I hate to admit had crossed my mind, too, even if I never would have said it aloud. She's plenty pretty enough to marry a nice white boy, we meant. So why did she marry Jim?

I'm not saying I'm not ashamed of how I was then. Of course I'm ashamed. I'm not saying I shouldn't have changed sooner, or that we can't change our views about things until we have to deal with them in real life. But I'm trying to get down to the raw truth of it all here, even if it doesn't show me at my best. I'm trying to be as honest as I possibly can.

Well, that was when Brett exploded into a lecture about skin color being just a pigment, nothing more. Which Kath said was a lot of scientific hooey because anybody could tell a person was black just by looking. At which point Brett said Kath was being simplistic and moronic and prejudiced and several other words I didn't know, and she couldn't believe Ally hadn't told us—this was her beef with Ally, that she hadn't told us, which Brett felt meant she didn't trust us to take the news more rationally than her parents had. Which of course we hadn't, but that wasn't Brett's doing, it was Kath's and mine, which Brett pointed out in no uncertain terms. And before I knew it, Brett was shutting her door in my face as firmly as in Kath's, and I was left standing on the porch with Kath, wondering what had happened to the friends who'd sat in the park together every Wednesday morning, helping each other through everything. Wondering how we'd ever get past this and back to that.





THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY was an awful, drizzly day—Chicago weather, not California weather, though it wasn't raining in Chicago, where the Cubs, having dropped to second in a loss to the Phillies, were trying to stanch their late-season slide. Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was the Cubs' slide or the Wednesday Sisters' explosion and the days of silence that followed, or maybe it was the squabble I'd had with Danny that morning, I didn't know, but the abandoned mansion across the park with its cracked windows and peeling paint, its slanting roofline and side porch, seemed to have fallen even further into disrepair. And the park, too, was empty, as deserted as the house. A few minutes after the time we usually gathered, Brett trolled by in her car—she must have taken Chip to work that day so she could have it. By the time I got to the door, though, she was around the corner. Linda came by, too, but she didn't stop, either, and all I could think of was how awkward Danny and I had been after we'd argued that morning, how very hard it is to say you're sorry even when you are, even to someone you love. Sitting there watching the rain fall on the empty park, I could not believe our friendship was really this fragile, that it could blow apart over a few ill-considered words. It was as ridiculous as my aunt Dotty and her brother, my uncle Jojo, who hadn't spoken in more than ten years, not since Uncle Jojo had said something derogatory about Dotty's affection for her cat—a nasty little animal, Jojo was right about that, but Dotty had never had children, the cat was all she had. It had been dead for years, though, and I doubted anyone else could recall what words had been slung, but I was sure Aunt Dotty remembered, and probably Uncle Jojo did, too. Memory is an unmerciful thing sometimes.