The Wednesday Sisters (31 page)

The camera panned to us: no stage makeup like Brett had, and you can see if you watch the tape how flustered we look:
Us?
our faces say. And we stood—I don’t even remember this part, us sliding out into the aisle, although obviously we did, you can see us there on the film. I don’t remember slipping my glasses off or tripping on my way up the stairs, either, though you can see that on the clip, too. The first thing I do remember—and even this did not seem the least bit real—is standing there in front of Johnny, who’d gotten up to welcome us, as had Brett.

Standing there on the Carson show, the most watched talk show on television, wearing a wig that hadn’t looked great to start with and was now slightly askew.

That flustered even Johnny. You can see in his eyes on the film that he wanted to reach up and straighten it. Every time I watch the clip I want to straighten it myself, but as I stood on that stage I had no idea the thing had shifted when I’d tripped. I was too busy trying not to look out at the fuzzy blur of colors that was the audience, sure that if I did, my knees would rattle even more and I’d collapse.

Brett reached one hand toward her hair, but then stopped at one of those wonderful globe earrings and smiled easily. “This is Ally Tantry. Kath Montgomery. Linda Mason,” she said, indicating each in turn. “And this is Frankie O’Mara. M. F. O’Mara. Her novel,
Michelangelo’s Ghost,
is terrific.”

“
Michelangelo’s Ghost,
” Johnny repeated. “I like that title, don’t you, Ed?” he said, and Ed said he did, he liked that,
Michelangelo’s Ghost.
And me half thinking,
My title mentioned not once but three times on
The Tonight Show
!
and half trying to determine if Linda was really shooting me a funny look or if it was just that I couldn’t quite see without my glasses.

“And the book is even better than the title,” Brett said. Then to the audience, “If you haven’t read it yet, you should get up from your seat right now and rush out to your local bookstore to buy a copy.”

Johnny faked leaving, heading toward the curtain for a moment before turning back to us.

Then Linda, suddenly reaching toward me, said, “Frankie’s real hair looks better anyway,” and before I knew what she was doing, she’d pulled off my wig. There was a startled Oh! in her eyes, one that echoed the intake of breath throughout the audience as she stood with the long, smooth strawberry-blond length of my wig in her hand.

She looked down at it, then back to me, to the funny arc of my ears, to my eyes and nose and lips and high, high forehead unsoftened by the drape of all that dead protein (which even on the most humid days, I’d seen the moment I’d shaved it off, had been beautiful).

“Frankie!” Linda said, looking confusedly from the wig in her hand to my bald, bald head. “You didn’t—?”

The audience exhaled a stir of
Oh my God
s and
What in the world
s as Linda, too stunned to think to hand the wig back to me, and I, too mortified to move, just stood there.

Sweet Jesus,
my mother, watching from her couch at home, reportedly said.

Somehow, I managed the smallest little bit of smile (a nice smile, really; you can see it on the clip). “I’m afraid I did,” I said. Or croaked, actually, to tell the truth.

“Lordy, Lordy, life sure doesn’t give us all the practice we need,” Kath murmured, the
What is happening here?
expression in her big brown eyes in her big-chinned face working its way into a big, self-conscious smile. I felt her hand taking mine, her palm as damp as my own. Then heard the audience again as Kath slipped off her brunette curls.

That’s when Linda started laughing. No doubt about it.

Ally, muttering “Heavens to Betsy,” eased off her long blond locks just as Brett, slipping her free hand into Ally’s, touched her white-gloved fingers to her overly poufy strawberry coif and removed her hair, too.

Linda, laughing so hard by then that tears were rolling down her cheeks, pulled off her own wig. She dropped it, and mine as well, and as they flumped onto the floor she linked hands with Ally and me, and we stood there in front of the whole world, bald-headed and together and proud.

Johnny, quick on his feet, pulled on his own hair. It didn’t come off, of course, but the crowd certainly laughed.

“Look out, world,” he said. “The Wednesday Sisters are coming. They’re not sisters and they don’t meet on Wednesdays, and for reasons I’m sure we’ll come to understand because I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about
all
these ladies, they shave their heads together—though only one of them wears gloves!”

D
ID WE WATCH
the Miss America Pageant the night after the Carson show, when we were in Los Angeles with so many other things to do? Well, we thought we wouldn’t. We were sure that would be the year we’d let go. But then it seemed it might jinx us, what with the great success of
The Mrs. Americas,
a title Kath never would have thought of and Brett never would have agreed to without those Saturday nights in September spent with just us girls.

Or that was the excuse we used, anyway.

We watched Colorado’s Rebecca King be crowned Miss America for the next year, 1974. She was not your typical Miss America, though, which somehow made it all right to watch her win: she’d entered for the scholarship money, which she would use to attend law school, and her vocal pro-choice stance would get nationwide publicity in a country as torn over
Roe
v.
Wade
as it is now.

The country just tore and tore that fall. It started lightly, with Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes with more than fifty million people watching on TV (a smaller thing than King refusing to play the U.S. Open that year unless they paid equal prize money to women, which they then did, but the match with Riggs got more attention). Within months things got more serious. Vice President Agnew resigned, OPEC started its first oil embargo, and Congress passed the War Powers Act over the president’s veto, limiting his power to make war. By the next Miss America Pageant, Nixon would have resigned, and the following spring the last Americans in Vietnam would be evacuated by helicopter from a rooftop as Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City, a retreat from a mistake we never really would admit.

And the Wednesday Sisters?

As you can imagine, there isn’t much that could get more attention than five bald women appearing together on
The Tonight Show
—which sure didn’t hurt our writing careers. True, Kath never has published a word—she just keeps on editing ours—and Ally, when it came down to it, said selling the novel she’d written for Hope seemed too much like sharing with others the gift she’d made for her daughter; she didn’t want to publish it. But
The Mrs. Americas
made it as far as number ten on the bestseller list,
Michelangelo’s Ghost
came back from the dead to haunt bookstores again, and Linda began selling to magazines: the pieces she’d written that summer about searching for mastectomy photos, cutting off her braid, and saying good-bye to her kids, as well as a new piece about her own mother’s death, one she developed from those exquisite few paragraphs about the key and the girl and the dead mother she didn’t want to share, that five minutes of her writing from that first time the Wednesday Sisters had gathered to write, when she’d spilled the contents of her purse on the picnic table and directed us to start moving our pens. Pieces she would, at Kath’s suggestion, eventually collect in a single volume, a book dedicated to her mom.

That Carson show seemed a sort of turning point for the Wednesday Sisters in other ways as well. Brett started talking to surgeons about her hands later that same September, the September I started classes at Stanford, where I did not graduate valedictorian as Danny and Brett had, but where I acquitted myself pretty well for a mother of two who was writing novels while she attended school. English literature, that was my major. No physics. No math. No graduate school. But my life isn’t over yet.

By year end, Ally was pregnant with a baby she again miscarried. She was as devastated as she had been before Hope was born, but she held herself together, for Hope’s sake. Three years later, she would give birth to a son she and Jim named Santosh Amar—Santosh meaning “happiness” and Amar “forever.” Sam’s birth was nearly as premature as his sister’s, but in the interim, corticosteroids had been introduced to speed lung development of babies likely to be born prematurely. Like Hope, Sam wasn’t allowed stuffed animals in intensive care, but he was born breathing on his own, and he wasn’t even all that small.

As for Kath, no, she didn’t divorce Lee, and Lee didn’t move back in. But there was a shift in their relationship, a little of a letting go by Kath. I think she might actually have left him back then but for the children, but Linda says no, Kath will never leave Lee, hard as Linda has tried over the years to make her. “‘Life and livin’ aren’t the same,’” those conversations always end, Linda throwing one of our favorite Kathisms right back at the source. Kath has had her reasons over the years. Health insurance is the one she touts most often now, which is ridiculous, of course, because she has her own health insurance, through her publishing house. But if you point that out to her, you get back that you never know when a girl might be fired, and anyway, she’s fixin’ to leave publishing to write her own novel any day. Never mind that she now heads up the West Coast office. Never mind that she’s thrown out that “fixin’ to leave” line for years, without ever once meaning it.

“You never know,” she says. “I might could just up and quit tomorrow.”

And we’re talking about the woman who rammed her husband’s car while speeding down the freeway, the one who, when the rest of us were hesitating in that hotel room, set the electric shears to her hairline right smack-dab at the peak of her forehead and cleared a path across the top of her head before she could lose her nerve. Yes, Kath “might could” do just about anything. She “might could” even divorce Lee someday.

And Linda?

Well, Linda is a survivor, going on thirty-five years now. But then, she always was.

We all were, it turns out.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful beyond words for the support of my husband, Mac Clayton—without his belief that my Wednesday Sisters were something special, this book would be in the proverbial drawer—and for that of Brenda Rickman Vantrease; both read and reread, listened at every turn, and inspired me. They are truly my Wednesday Sisters, even if one is male and our little writing group met on Tuesdays rather than Wednesdays.

I can’t say enough about the newest sisters on my team: Marly Rusoff, who took this manuscript under her amazing wing when no sane person would have done so, and über-editors Robin Rolewicz and Anika Streitfeld, my own two dear and wonderful Kaths. The early enthusiasm and unflagging efforts of Libby McGuire, Kim Hovey, and Brian McLendon have been an author’s dream, as has the care Beth Pearson has taken in helping me get the words just right. The great kindness of the entire Ballantine team has been remarkable; thanks especially to Kate Blum, Katie O’Callaghan, Robbin Schiff, Victoria Allen, Victoria Wong, Nancy Field, Christine Cabello, Margaret Wimberger, Kate Norris, and Jillian Quint. Thanks, too, to everyone at the Rusoff Agency, especially Anna Lvovsky and the wonderfully spirited Michael Radulescu, whose good cheer even through the great flood is one for the books.

As befitting an ensemble novel, I have an ensemble of others to thank for their help and support: Leslie Berlin, Adrienne Defendi, Harriet Scott Chessman, Casey Feutsch, Leslie Lytle, Liza MacMorris, Carol Markson, Kirsten Moss, Madeleine Mysko, and Manjiri Subhash (who gave me the gift of Ally’s meddling mother-in-law). WOMBA, Ellen Sussman, and my Monday night poker gang were touchstones throughout, as was the entire Waite/Clayton family, including my own never-meddling mom-in-law, Page Clayton. Special thanks to my sons, Chris and Nick, who provided all of the charm and originality of the Wednesday Sisters’ children, as well as more joy than any mother could hope for.

The list of sources I relied on would be, I fear, longer than the book itself, but Leslie Berlin’s wonderful
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley,
Ward Winslow’s
Palo Alto: A Centennial History,
and Dorothea Lynch’s heartbreaking
Exploding into Life
deserve particular mention. My apologies to the folks at Intel for the imposition of my fictional Danny upon them, and for the other liberties I took with their history. Thanks, too, to Steven Staiger and everyone at the Palo Alto Historical Association (without whom the old mansion might not exist), and to the Palo Alto Public Library staff and volunteers, who retrieved old magazines, called up books, and answered questions with amazing patience and cheer.

My mom, Anna Tyler Waite, and her many friends in the many places we lived in my youth were invaluable examples to me of what friendship can be; thanks to all of them, and especially to Dritha Ethel Pearson McCoy, Ginna Kanaga, Joyce Lindamood, and Elsie Minor. And although I am blessed with too many friends who have supported me over the years to list them here (you know who you are, and thank you all!), I want to thank in particular Jennifer Belt DuChene, who taught me to laugh at myself and led me, by her incredible friendship, to the heart of this book.