“Dust Commander?” Chip said. “What kind of name is that for a horse?”
Then the two minutes were over and none of us had won. Or placed. Or showed. Not even Kath. The best we'd done was Silent Screen, in sixth.
Brett at first refused to accept the winnings—“I'm not taking forty-five dollars for picking the middle of the pack”—but Kath looked so devastated that Brett, thinking it was because of her refusal, said she was just kidding, of course she'd take the money, she'd won fair and square.
With Kath looking so dreadful, and Jim not much better, we started making our excuses to say good-bye as soon as it was reasonable to do so. Linda said she would stay and help Kath clean up and Jeff could let the sitter go.
As the door closed behind us, leaving Linda to comfort Kath, I said to Jeff, “Lee wasn't on call today, was he?”
Jeff sighed, and he didn't answer, but we all knew the truth soon enough.
BEFORE THAT DERBY PARTY, before Lee moved out late that summer—1970, this was—the Wednesday Sisters had been watching the women's movement from the sidelines in the same way we'd watched the antiwar movement, notwithstanding the San Francisco march we'd attended. We weren't so different from the rest of the country: a poll in June showed that 60 percent of men and 43 percent of women—college-educated ones—still thought a woman should be wife and mother first and foremost, a view even we would have called old-fashioned. But maybe we wouldn't have if Lee hadn't finally left Kath that August, if he hadn't come home from work early one evening and put the children to bed rather than assuming Kath would, then packed a suitcase and told a stunned Kath he'd signed a lease on an apartment in Menlo Park.
He didn't think they ought to tell the children just yet, what with school about to start, the specter of homework for Anna Page, who was going to be a fourth-grader, and Lee-Lee needing to keep a smile on his face for a full day now that he'd be in first grade. Lee would come back for breakfast or for dinner sometimes, he said, and since he was so often at the hospital anyway, they wouldn't know he'd moved out.
Kath just sat staring at him until finally he waved a hand in front of her face and asked if she'd heard a word he'd said. She said yes—just that one word, yes—and he said, “Okay, then,” and walked out the door.
He came home for dinner the next night, and Kath, so hoping he'd changed his mind and come back that she'd convinced herself it was true before dinner was over, was devastated when he gave her his new address and telephone number, as if she were simply one more person who might need to note it in her book.
He still paid the bills and gave her a little money each week—enough for groceries, barely, but what about clothes and toys, medicines and trips to the zoo? She couldn't bear the thought of asking him for more, though, much less taking him to court. She would have welcomed him back in a heartbeat, and she didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize his return. And she wasn't sure Lee had more money to give her, anyway. Yes, they had a big house and plenty of silver, fancy cars, but those were bought with family money, gifts in one way or another from her family or his, doled out at their parents' or grandparents' whim. What they lived on day to day was the same thing Linda lived on, the meager salary of a resident, with only the promise of a doctor's income someday, and though Kath might have gotten help from her parents, that would have raised questions, and she couldn't bear to tell them about Lee moving out.
So that August we started seeing things a little differently, we started seeing a world where any one of us might be abandoned in one way or another by her husband, and where would that leave us? What choice would we have but to get a job, to leave our children in someone else's care while we went off to work?
Linda once said people don't give to causes, people give to people, and I think that's what happened to us. It wasn't so much that our consciousness was raised in any abstract way as that Kath, after a brief and unsuccessful stint trying to get wallpaper-hanging gigs to make a little money, was trying to get a real job. She would step up her job search in earnest after school started that September, while the Cubs were battling for first, getting as close as a half game out, and we would all be incensed on her behalf at what she encountered in her interviews. Men called her “babe” and “honey”—she called people “honey” herself, she knew that, but not in the condescending tone these men used, men who asked why she was looking for a job when she had a husband and children at home.
It wasn't that we thought of ourselves as women's libbers, not for a minute. The media generally dismissed every gathering of women in the name of liberation as a “flop” and stereotyped women's rights advocates as ugly man-haters and left-wing radical lesbians, and I suppose we bought into that as much as anyone did. Our conversation still focused on the breakup of the Beatles and the new Joni Mitchell song (about paving paradise for a parking lot) more often than on the Equal Rights Amendment (though we did cheer when the ERA finally made its way out of the House Judiciary Committee that summer), and the books we read tended toward The French Lieutenant's Woman rather than Sexual Politics—much less The Female Eunuch. Still, we began to see what it was like for women who had to work, and it cast events in a little different light.