The Wednesday Sisters(76)

“Jesus, Kath,” he said, and he turned away.

It seemed impossible even to her that she could humiliate herself further. She knelt there for the longest time, his back to her, telling herself to give up, to go to sleep. “Please, Lee,” she said quietly. Pleading. Like a little girl who can't bear to be left out.

He rolled onto his back, said, “Jesus, Kath,” again. Then lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

She climbed on top of him.

“I can't, Kath,” he said.

She started moving against him, moving, moving until she knew she could slip his boxers off and she would have him. She took him in her mouth, even, which she never had liked, but she knew he loved. She would have done anything he wanted that night.

She faked an orgasm, to flatter him.

He took her angrily after that. He rolled on top of her and banged into her, the bed frame squeaking under them in the quiet of the crowded house.

“Jesus,” he said when he'd spent himself, and she felt a small moment of hope. He still loved her. She could still please him.

“Jesus,” he said again. “I'll say this, Kath. You still have the warmest pussy I've ever had.”





I WAS UPSTAIRS getting Maggie a sweater she could wear to school one Friday morning in September when the phone rang. I answered it on our new upstairs extension. My agent, Fred: “I have good news.”And the next day, as luck would have it, was the Saturday of the Miss America Pageant. When we gathered—at Kath's that year—we popped champagne.

“Novelist Frankie O'Mara!” Kath said. “Lordy, Lordy, that beats the band, doesn't it?”

We hadn't turned on the pageant that evening before we were well into planning our futures as if this were the very first step for all of us, as if one of us achieving a dream meant we all could, which was how we felt. We were all writing pretty regularly by then. Brett was rewriting her novel, and Linda had felt so affirmed when she'd sold her first story that she'd written several more, having in mind a collection that could be published as a book. Even Kath was writing, despite that awful vacation with Lee. Or maybe because of it. Or because the week after they got back from North Carolina, she “just happened to drive by Lee's apartment” and found a rent-a-van unloading the other Kathy's medical books and albums, her bicycle, her pillow and her childhood teddy bear, her powder-blue cosmetic bag that was identical to the one Lee had given Kath as an anniversary gift. At any rate, she'd begun writing the novel Linda had urged on her, a Pride and Prejudice–type comedy of manners set in the modern South. She'd finished two chapters, both written in her journal—it was less intimidating that way, she said—and she was writing a little nearly every day despite the fact that she was working full-time and raising Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy essentially alone. When we asked how she did it, she said it was better than staying up crying every night. At least she was getting something done when she couldn't sleep.

Ally had reverted to her journal, too, having abandoned her porcupine story. She'd begun writing about the packages that came from her mother-in-law. The latest offering included a length of silk and several pouches of powder: kumkum, which was vermilion powder, haldi, which was yellow turmeric, and gray ashes called bhasma. Jim's parents had taken them to their ancestral place, where they'd offered them as a pooja to their kuldaivat, their family god. An offering made in Ally's name, Jim said—for a grandchild, Ally knew, although Jim didn't say that. The length of silk, a sari, was so soft that Ally wanted to feel it on her bare skin. She'd wrapped herself in it as best she could, and it hadn't seemed so odd then to have Jim put the red kumkum along the part of her hair and on her forehead—just a dot between her eyebrows—and a pinch of the turmeric and ashes on the bridge of her nose. It was like being in costume, Ally wrote in her journal, and yet not: in that sari, she was a more sensual, more exotic version of herself, but still herself. She and Jim had made love the night she donned the sari, the soft silk intertwining with their bodies. And though she hadn't said anything to us about thinking maybe they'd made a baby that night, I imagined the evening had been blessed in the way his parents had meant it to be. I imagined that she would tell us before the pageant ended that she was pregnant again.

What Ally started talking about when the conversation turned away from our writing that night, though, was how thin Linda had become. Which she had. If anyone we knew today got as thin as Linda was back then, we'd worry it was some kind of eating disorder. That term wasn't even in Brett's extensive vocabulary in those days, though. And Linda didn't seem unwell or even the least bit lacking in energy: when it came out that the state of Virginia had turned down twenty-one thousand women for admission to state colleges in 1970 while not turning away a single man, she ranted with her usual energy, at her usual admirable volume. But the way Ally was pushing Linda that evening seemed sort of a slap back at Linda for all that pushing Linda had done late that spring over Ally's drugs. Still, Kath agreed with Ally. “You best starting eating better, Linda, or you'll have to stand up twice to cast a shadow,” she said.