The Wednesday Sisters(74)

Danny looked all skinny and leggy and vulnerable standing there in the bright moonlight, dwarfed by the palm tree looming over him, unable to come up with a comeback, witty or not. It reminded me of our wedding night, of Danny slipping his tuxedo shirt off, then inhaling self-consciously, trying to make himself look more manly, as if I needed to be impressed, as if I weren't already madly in love with him.

I wondered if he could see that all the men around him were pulling their stomachs in, too, and trying to flex their arms. That it was as impossible to look comfortable in nothing but your under-shorts as it was to stack yourself up favorably next to a Miss America, or even just a Miss Illinois. Even Bob was sucking in his stomach; I wanted to laugh, it seemed so incongruous. I wondered then how I'd failed to see that despite Danny's bravura he doubted himself sometimes, too, just as I did. That everyone sometimes doubted themselves, even if they were college graduates or held swanky positions at swanky companies, even if they'd published a dozen novels and won the Pulitzer Prize.

I climbed up to stand on a teak beach chair, wobbling, nearly losing my balance, but I could see it didn't really matter, no one was looking at me, all the women were looking at their husbands in their boxer shorts (or maybe at the other husbands, what did I know?), and all the men were comparing themselves with the fittest of their colleagues. I put my thumb and middle finger to my lips then, “charmingly unladylike.” Femininity, I thought as I let that whistle rip, consists in being myself, in not putting myself or my sisters down.

The whistle pierced through the crash of the ocean and the drunken chattering of the assembled group, and everyone was suddenly looking at me as surely as they had that morning I'd tripped in church. I took my lei from my neck and wrapped it in a circle just smaller than the circumference of a head, steadying myself again on the beach chair, looking up at the moon, not quite full. I cleared my throat and, in my best Bert Parks imitation, called out, “Mr. Illinois, in shredded orange monkey shorts, hails from Chicago, where he graduated valedictorian at Northwestern University at the age of nineteen.” I dropped the lei-crown on Danny's head and started singing, “Here he is, Mr. America . . .” And I'm here to tell you, there is a reason I volunteered to read at church rather than sing in the choir. There's a reason my talent for the Miss America Pageant would have been the baton.

Everyone was laughing then, Danny hardest of all.

“Damn, Danny. Nineteen?” Andy said. “But I knew you were a genius. Wasn't that the first thing I told you, Bob, when I said we should hire him?”

You could practically see Danny's chest expanding. He hopped up on the beach chair beside me, put his arm around my shoulder and, sloshed as he was, still I could feel him standing up straighter, looking as though he'd finally realized he might actually belong with these men after all.

Bob took the opportunity to show off then, plunging headfirst into the ocean—only to discover the tide had gone out. He came up scraped raw and cursing and laughing at the same time. And everyone laughed with him, even harder than we'd laughed before. I watched Danny watching him, laughing as hard as I was, and I thought, Of course he's jealous, of course he would be, with all the admiration he has for this crazy lunatic boss of his.

And laughter is a wonderful thing, it really is. It's hard to hold tight to disappointment when your whole body is shaking with laughter, when you're having to stand with your legs crossed so as not to wet yourself.

We were still laughing as we returned to our room late that night, as Danny sat on the chair swing and I straddled him, shrugging off the thought of my diaphragm, maybe not wanting to break the mood or maybe thinking if we made a baby that night, then it was meant to be. We made love like that, with the sliding doors wide open and the warm night breeze on our bare skin, with the moonlight reflecting so beautifully off the white-capped water it would have made you hold your breath if you weren't making love in a swing.

Have you ever made love in a swing? It's not quite as easy as it looks.

And the next night—our last night on the island—I overheard Danny and Bob talking about me, Danny saying yes, it was wonderful that I'd gotten an agent, wasn't it? Saying “Michelangelo's Ghost” hadn't sold yet, but he was still sure it would.





THAT SUMMER OF 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times, eighteen-year-olds gained the right to vote, Danny's company settled into new digs in a pear orchard in Santa Clara, and Kath and Lee went together to the Outer Banks.

Yes, that was our reaction, too: You aren't even living together in that big old house of yours anymore; how are you going to do it in the small confines of a North Carolina vacation? We didn't put it quite so bluntly to her, but we said it. And it gets worse: they were staying at his family's summer house, with his parents and his grandparents, his brothers and even his aunts and uncles and cousins all there, and all hers a few houses down the beach.