“A writer,” I said. “If I could have written anything, it would be Rebecca.”
“Wouldn't you just die and be buried in a croaker sack to live in a house like Manderley?” Kath said just as Linda said, “Do you write, Mary?” with a hopefulness in her voice that made me look around, confused: Who in the world is Mary? In the moment it took me to realize I was Mary—of course I was—she said, “Frankie! You're Frankie. I knew Mary wasn't right.”
“Mary Frances, but sometimes I go by Frankie,” I said.
We all looked at each other, and there was a moment when I might have admitted I used to try to write before Maggie was born, when we all might have confessed to dreams we'd once dreamed. We were still just strangers who'd met in a park, though, and so Linda said, “I love that name, Frankie,” and she started in on what color my shutters should be painted. “Dark green, like on that house there,” she suggested, pointing to a house past the intersection at Center and Channing, one with shutters the green of the circle of pine trees in the front yard, with a bare spot in the middle where the original pine must have been before it died. Just as we turned to look, a curtain dropped to cover the front window of the house—Ally's house, it would turn out—but if anyone else noticed, they didn't say so. They considered color possibilities for my shutters until Linda's girls came squawking over, deep in some four-year-olds' dispute. Then Davy accidentally bonked Brett's Sarah on the head with a truck (at least I hoped it was an accident), and we were all a flurry of realizing it was lunchtime and we needed to get the children home and fed and down for their naps.
Linda, coaxing J.J. into his stroller, looked to Brett and asked, as if it were pure afterthought, “Wherever did you find those gloves . . . what did you say your name was?”
Brett, unfazed, replied, “I'm Brett Tyler.”
You could practically see Linda gearing up to ask again about the gloves, but Kath cut her off, saying, “Well, nice to meet you, Brett.”
Linda shot Kath a look but said only, “And welcome to the neighborhood, Frankie,” leaving me to set off with Maggie and Davy toward the empty front porch of my pink-shuttered house, thinking, It could be worse, I could be Fanny, but still.
I'D BEEN MEETING Linda and Kath and Brett in the park every Wednesday for six weeks by the day we met Ally, the day we learned about Linda's mom. Any other day, it would have seemed the oddest thing, Ally arriving in the park to offer iced tea to strangers she'd never in her life seen before—or that's what we thought, that she'd never seen us. But early that morning, Bobby Kennedy had been shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and the whole country was waiting with the same held breath, and nobody was a stranger, no one wanted to be alone.
“I'm Ally Tantry,” Ally said in a shy, almost whispering voice, and we all turned to see this unfamiliar mom: big brown eyes in a pale-as-white-flour face; full-length batik cotton skirt and sandals; dark hair that fell to her waist in smooth, shiny waves. She wanted only a fresh-daisy headband to look like one of those flower children on the news.
None of us could have said how long she'd been standing there, with her pitcher of iced tea and five matching plastic cups.
We all introduced ourselves: “Linda Mason.” “Katherine Claire Montgomery.” “Brett Tyler.” I said I was Mary Frances O'Mara, not that it did me any good. Then we all looked a little awkward for a minute until Ally offered us tea and filled a cup for each of us, nearly emptying the clear plastic pitcher, leaving only half a cup for herself, but she said she didn't mind.
Over the weeks before that, our conversations had broadened from books to things we'd read in the paper or seen on the news. Linda had gone on and on one week about a woman who'd snuck into the Boston Marathon using her initials, who'd finished only because some men running with her had physically prevented officials from throwing her off the course. That was as personal as it had gotten, though: us saying what we thought about the Columbia student uprising or the Paris peace talks, or what we liked and didn't like in a book—or not saying about John Updike's Couples after Kath declared it a “dirty book,” which speaks volumes, too. But that morning, by way of explaining ourselves to Ally, we talked about what our husbands did, which was how we defined ourselves in those days: I'm a doctor's wife, a painter's wife, the wife of the president of the United States.
Brett said her husband, Chip, was a small-particle physicist working at SLAC. “The Stanford Linear Accelerator. You know: for experiments in high-energy physics and synchrotron radiation research,” she said, and Kath and Linda and I said, “Oh, sure,” to which Ally responded in her soft voice, “Heavens to Betsy, you all understood that?” Brett understood it all, though; she'd graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe, with majors in math, physics, and English literature, of all things, and she'd done graduate work in physics, to boot.