The Wednesday Sisters(91)

BRETT'S PUBLISHER had big plans for The Mrs. Americas, including a substantial first printing. The only pothole in her smooth, wide, newly striped road was her first review—like mine, a real stinker, and from the same trade magazine, too. Within a week, though, Woman's Day called, and then Cosmopolitan. Could they send interviewers? Photographers? By late July, still more than a month before her book was to be released, her publisher went back for a second printing. Then the clincher came: The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Johnny wanted Brett to appear on his show—or his scheduler did, anyway. The exact date was a little up in the air, but it would be either the Friday night before or the Monday night after the Miss America Pageant, playing off the book title.

“I swear, my hair is going gray with worry,” Brett said. We were sitting in the park Sunday morning, already long after dawn.

Linda, next to Brett, tugged at the brim of her Stanford cap and peered closely at Brett's cropped red hair. “It really is, isn't it?” she said. “Just a few little grays at the temple, but you're barely thirty, right?”

“I read somewhere that stress can cause you to go gray practically overnight,” I said.

“You should dye it, honey,” Kath said.

“Dye it?” Ally and I said.

“She can't go on Johnny Carson with gray hair,” Linda said. “Don't be ridiculous. She'd look . . .”

Like an elderly twelve-year-old, wearing her grandmother's gloves.

Like the weedy ground that reminded you, by its emptiness, of how haunting the dilapidated mansion had been. They'd seeded the dirt finally—without removing the rocks or the weeds—and for a while it had become the neighborhood's most popular bird breakfast café. But already the seed was gone, the only trace of it a few little shoots of grass trying to survive.

“You could just wear a hat, like Linda,” Ally said, and she pulled Linda's Stanford cap off and put it on Brett's head.

In response to the astounded looks on the rest of our faces, Brett said, “What?”

Linda's braid had come off with her hat. Just come off completely. Gone with the hat to Brett's head, an incongruous plait of blond against her red hair. All that was left on Linda's head was a short bob of blond hair, flattened and chaotic from being tucked up under her hat.

“Lordy, Lordy, Linda, you whacked your hair off?” Kath reached up and touched her own hair, trying to make some sense of Linda's braid being removable now, like the braid headband Kath rarely wore anymore.

“But . . .” Brett reached to Linda's Stanford hat perched on her own head and fingered the long blond braid coming from the back. “Why is the . . . What is it”—she pulled the cap off hurriedly, as if she'd just realized she was wearing someone else's underwear—“sewn to your hat?”

“I . . . I felt naked without it.” Linda's eyes started pooling—a real shock because Linda never cried, only that once when she'd found her first lump. “I've never had short hair, but I wanted a change, and . . .” She glanced at the playground, which was empty, all our children safe in their beds at home. “God, I hate it!”

“But you look as pretty as a speckled pup,” Kath said.

“She means that as a compliment, as improbable as that seems,” Brett assured Linda, and we all laughed a little nervously. Linda did look good, really. She always looked beautiful, but in some ways she looked even more so now. Short hair brought out those stunning eyes of hers, and masked the persistent thinness of her face.

“I know how you feel, though, Linda,” I said. “What is it with hair? A bad cut—one I think is bad—can put me in a funk for days.” And we talked for a long time then about how important our hair was to how we saw ourselves, how much money we wasted on hair products, how ridiculous we were to sleep in those big curlers and to sit under the hot hoods of our hair dryers, how great the new handheld blow-dryers were supposed to be. All with our writing set on the picnic table in front of us, uncharacteristically ignored.

“Who'd think we could make such a big fuss out of a bunch of dead protein,” Brett said.

“Do go on,” Kath said. “How pretty I feel depends on how well my thick skull sprouts dead protein?”

“Hey, sweetheart, you want to run your fingers through my dead protein?” I joked, a lame attempt to cheer Linda up.

“It is easier to wash short hair,” Linda said, pulling herself together, beginning to pretend she hadn't cried. “And I wash it so much more now. I get so sweaty running.”

And while Kath assured Linda that ladies never sweat, they “glisten,” I sat trying to remember if I'd seen Linda running since she'd returned from New York, thinking I had not.