“Okay, what makes it so popular?” Kath rephrased.
“Even though it's thin, it's not wrong,” Brett said. “Jenny's annoyance that Oliver poaches on the meager Radcliffe library when he can use Harvard's—that's real.”
“The quick wedding—no more people than you can crowd into a restaurant booth,” Kath said.
“And the way Oliver's father just shuts him out when he marries her,” Ally said.
Linda, frowning, said, “You can read it in about thirty seconds; I suppose people like that. No ‘The covers of this book are too far apart,’ to quote Dorothy Parker.”
“Ambrose Bierce,” Brett said.
“Really? What's the Dorothy Parker one, then?”
“‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.’”
“My sentiments exactly,” Linda said.
“Love and story, that's what I think makes it work,” Kath said. “I don't think people mind awfully a cliché or two—”
“Or two thousand,” Linda said.
“—if the plot is bolting down the tracks. High water covers a lot of stumps.”
“Cinderella meets Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “The girl we can all imagine we might be—Cinder-Jenny—gets the rich Harvard prince despite the family opposition.”
“But why do we want that lump-in-our-throats feeling?” Ally asked. “From the very first sentence, ‘What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?’ we know how it ends.”
“‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief,’” Brett said. “William Faulkner.”
“Between William Faulkner and nothing, I will take nothing,” Linda said. “Do you have to be from the South to understand him?”
“God took special pains creating the South,” Kath said.
“And Faulkner wants to inflict that pain on the rest of us?”
That discussion did leave me wondering, though: Why are we drawn to sad stories? Why did we all read the book, knowing we were in for the dying-girl ending? Why did we go to the movie that December—Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal—having already read the whole tearjerker book? No one wants to be sad in real life. You want the sad life behind door number one, Monty, or the happy ending behind curtain number two? And yet sad plays well in literature. Romance and tragedy. Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary. Why is that?
BRETT RECEIVED no encouragement at all from her first batch of agent queries, so it was pretty hard for me to feel sorry for myself when my mail-battered manuscript came back from that agent with a polite “no thanks.” It was like sending a child off to school with such hope, though, then peeking into the lunchroom to see him sitting alone. I cried in the bathtub, with the door locked, despairing of ever being a writer, thinking as I sat in that warm water that I should just give it up.
The truth is, we all thought of giving up at some point that winter, more often than you could imagine. And maybe we would have, if we hadn't had each other, but it was something, having the five of us, knowing we weren't alone.
“He didn't even read to the end,” I confessed to the Wednesday Sisters. “The last hundred pages are all nice and tidy, like they've never been touched.”
Ally put her arm around my shoulders, and Brett set a gloved hand on mine. “‘Rejections don't really hurt after you stop bleeding,’” Brett said.
At home that afternoon, I studied my two coffin photos, remembering lying alone in the tucked-velvet darkness, listening to the muffled voices of the Wednesday Sisters beyond the polished mahogany. I imagined my tombstone: simple gray marble with perhaps an angel carved at the top; beloved wife and loving mother; cherished daughter and sister. It ought to be enough. But all those years I'd watched my brothers go off to college—I didn't know if I could spend my whole life that way, playing the supporting role, having no part of me that wasn't defined by my relation to someone else.
Early the next morning, I pulled out my note-card chapter summaries, scooted Maggie's dollhouse and Davy's train track from the middle of the family room floor, and spread the cards out beside my manuscript. I closed my eyes, inhaled the varnished-wood-and-velvet smell of that coffin. Got up, made a pot of coffee. Sharpened three pencils to a razor tip. And began again.
WE ALL SAT GLUED to our televisions that April after an explosion in one of the Apollo 13 oxygen tanks crippled the rocket. “Houston, we've had a problem.” The crew was forced to scrap the lunar landing and swing their damaged ship around to the dark side of the moon, from which they could not even communicate with Earth. There was no live broadcast from the ship due to power limitations, but that didn't deter the newsmen, who used models and animated footage to explain the situation. Brett hardly stepped away from her television for those four days, worrying about those three men crowded into a lunar landing module meant for only two men and only two days. Her sister, Jenn, who'd started medical school the previous fall at the University of California at San Francisco, sometimes watched with her. Jenn had little free time, but she liked to spend what she had with Brett. They spoke the same language. They could talk together about ways the lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module might be modified to fit the lunar module's carbon dioxide scrubbers, and not an eyebrow was raised.