The Wednesday Daughters

  I’d smashed a plate once, in the middle of an argument with Kevin. Not smashed, exactly, but set it down hard in the sink so that it cracked—I’d meant for it to crack. What had that fight been about? It was hard even to remember. Was that the anniversary Kevin had prepared a fancy seafood gumbo and opened a bottle of champagne that had grown flat by the time I arrived home, hours after I’d said I was on my way? Was it the disappointment on Kevin’s face or in my heart that had started that red-hot crinkly fire? I’d have called if I’d realized how much time it would take, if I’d been in my office instead of stopping by a conference room to check some closing-documents changes on my way out the door. A last-minute disaster of a problem for my biggest client—what was I supposed to do? I’d wanted a romantic evening together as much as Kevin had. I wasn’t the one who’d grown so impatient as to open the champagne and drink a glass by myself.

  Beside me, Julie reached a ringed finger toward Lucinda and Jane Doll-cook but didn’t touch them. “Jamie and I had a dollhouse,” she said, blinking and blinking.

  “I remember that,” I said.

  “We each had our own dolls for it, but we shared everything else. The house. The furniture. The tea set.”

  I intertwined my fingers with hers and leaned my head against her shoulder as Anna Page joined us.

  “You used to sit your dolls at the table and put real tea in the tiny cups,” Anna Page said. “A drop each, that’s all that would fit.” She stroked Julie’s hair like she stroked mine when she was comforting me. “I was too old for dolls when you got it, but I used to wish I weren’t.”

  “It’s funny how those few years that separated us grew less and less important over time,” I said.

  Anna Page smiled a little. “You both used to be envious of how old I was, and now I’m envious of how young you are.”

  Julie, too, managed something like a smile. “Isn’t it weird to imagine that Beatrix Potter was once as young as we were, playing with dolls?”

  “The dollhouse isn’t from Potter’s childhood,” a docent informed us. She stood unobtrusively in the corner. We hadn’t seen her there. “It belonged to a niece of her publisher, Norman Warne. Potter meant to visit Surbiton to sketch it for The Tale of Two Bad Mice, but her mother intervened, as there had been entirely too much visiting with Mr. Warne already.” The docent lowered her voice. “Mr. Warne was in trade, you know.” Then more brightly, “He sent Miss Potter photographs, as well as the dolls which became Lucinda and Jane, and later, some of the dollhouse furniture and a box of the food on platters. Miss Potter began sending miniature letters—ones that folded up to form tiny envelopes—to her favorite young people about then. Conversations between animal characters that continued the stories in the books, they were, weren’t they? Squirrel Nutkin writing to Old Brown ‘Dear Sir, I should esteem it a favour if you will let me have back my tail, as I miss it very much. I would pay postage.’ ”

  We all laughed at that.

  Egged on, the docent quoted another letter: “ ‘Miss Lucinda Doll requires Hunca Munca to come for the whole day on Tuesday. Jane Doll-cook has had an accident, she has broken a soup tureen and both her wooden legs.’ ”

  We all laughed again, Julie and Anna Page wiping tears from their eyes together. What a blessing humor is, what a balm for grief.

  The dumpling had been peeled off Tom Kitten, and made separately into a bag pudding, with currants in it to hide the smuts. They had been obliged to put Tom Kitten into a hot bath to get the butter off.

  —FROM The Tale of Samuel Whiskers BY BEATRIX POTTER

  SOMETHING ABOUT TOM THUMB’S PERFECTLY INTACT LITTLE HAM, where in the book he’d smashed it to bits, haunted me all the way home from Hill Top Farm. While everyone else settled in at Ainsley’s End, I collected the Labradoodle book Mom had done with Graham and escaped to her cottage, where I washed my face in the tiny sink that, I realized as I did it, was the sink in which Lolly washes her little piano-playing paws. With my face still damp, I stretched out on my mother’s bed and opened the book again. The illustrations were very like Potter’s and yet not. They were watercolors, and they were charming little animals in charming little settings, but they weren’t derivative. I read through the text again—charming in its own way, except maybe the part about the parvo vaccine. Yes, Lolly Labradoodle was a ridiculous name, but so were Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb.

  I looked up from the book to see the tub that was the slipper tub on the pages, the fireplace with its odd insert that was behind the tub in the book. Perhaps Mom had sat on this bed writing that scene. Perhaps Graham had sat with his back against these pillows and a sketch pad in his hands, the two of them chatting easily as he drew and she wrote. It was the kind of thing Sammy and I had done as kids: sat with our backs propped up against the same headboard, watching television in our parents’ bedroom while they hosted a dinner party downstairs. It was what we’d done after the undertaker had come for Mom’s body, sat side by side on the bed where she died. And it was what I’d done later the night Mom died, with Kevin—sat beside him on our own bed and talked about when I soaked the stuffed Mr. Jackson Aunt Frankie had given me, the first real memory I have. “Isn’t it weird, Kev,” I’d said, “that my first memory is about drowning some poor stuffed toad in a bathroom sink?”

  “Your first memory is of your mother loving you, Asha,” Kevin said, taking my hand. “The toad was just the medium for that, or maybe for the whole Wednesday Gang loving you.”

  If I left Kevin, if I started over with someone new, they would never understand that. They wouldn’t know the sound of Mom laughing together with all the Wednesday Sisters, like Kevin does. They wouldn’t know what all the Beatrix Potter quotes meant and had always meant, something beyond the books. They wouldn’t have built Taj Mahal sand castles with Dad, making magic for the Wednesday Grandkids that I was always sure was meant for me as well. They would never laugh with me when I said “Heavens to Betsy.” They would have no idea that “Heavens to Betsy” was my mom.

  And yet the hurts had piled up between us: the snaps at each other when we were tired or crabby, the all-out arguments that weren’t about what they appeared to be. “What kind of a child would Kevin and I have?” I’d asked my mother once when she was pushing me. “A redhead who looks like the altar boy his father once was but would quote Richard Dawkins—‘You keep believing, I’ll keep evolving’—even to his poor great Ama if she were still alive.” Mom had said I was being melodramatic, that no one had ever wanted me to be anything but who I was except maybe Ama, who couldn’t be blamed for wanting her granddaughter to perform laxmi puja the way she did. And maybe I was being melodramatic, like with cracking the plate. But there was hurt there, too, the hurt of my opinions being dismissed. My feelings being dismissed. Kevin was always so sure of everything, and he was always so reasonable. How could I care more about the color of a bike than the smoothness of its ball bearings if smooth ball bearings kept me safer? How could I argue with the idea that my clients should respect a lawyer who made dinner with her husband a priority? How could I defend in the face of men throwing acid on young girls’ faces my amorphous belief that something somewhere must have started this world, my vague notion that God was a comfort, that the existence of some god somewhere was more humane than making those girls live without hope of some better afterlife. My compromise God might not make sense to Kevin or to anyone else, but it was the place where my mother’s Christianity and my father’s Hinduism overlapped. It was what I grew up with, what I had.

  It was a way my parents had compromised that Kevin and I seemed unable to. I bought the safer bike helmet or lawn mower or car because it was easier than not doing so. I brought work home and did it after he went to sleep. I listened without contradiction to his soliloquies on religion that came with each new article on Afghanistan, each new pedophilia charge or proclamation against birth control. I’d given up trying to defend my compromise God against Kevin’s barrage of science long before I needed a heaven for Jamie
and Dad and Mom, before I wanted that comfort for myself.

  I set the Labradoodle book aside, put the stopper in the tub, and let the water run. Mom’s bubble bath was on the marble tabletop that had been empty when we’d arrived here, where at home the tub edge was crowded with the scents and textures of her. I uncapped the bottle and smelled—the vanilla of my childhood, almost without fragrance and yet as warm and comforting as the thin, crispy sugar cookies Mom and Aunt Kath used to make together. I’d almost forgotten that, all of us in Aunt Kath’s kitchen, making those cookies. Aunt Frankie and Aunt Linda and Aunt Brett talking with Mom and Aunt Kath while they helped us cut the dough into shapes and decorate with colored sprinkles, silver candy balls, smashed candy-cane pieces that looked like Tom Thumb’s smashed ceramic ham.

  I recapped the bottle without adding any to the water and set it on the low marble table. Not bothering to light the coal fire, I took off my clothes, folded them carefully, set them at the end of the perfectly made bed that had been my mother’s bed, where she’d slept alone. I stepped into the water, which smelled faintly of iron, and adjusted the faucet so that more cold mingled with the hot. I sank down, leaned against the smooth white slipper back, and closed my eyes. The water splashed warm on my feet.

  The bath was growing cold when the cottage door opened and Julie barged in without apology, closed the door behind her, and stretched out on my mother’s batik bedspread. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked. “It’s about that damned umbrella.”

  I looked for a washcloth to cover my chest, the way Mom always had in her bathtub, but there was nothing but the bubble bath bottle unopened on the table beside me.

  “Do you think she loved him?” Julie asked.

  I frowned at my unmanicured toes underneath the faucet, trying to figure out who “he” and “she” might be. “My mother and Graham?”

  Julie’s silver-ringed fingers went to her temple, her straight-across brow, and she said she was sorry, she shouldn’t be bothering me. “God, aren’t you freezing?” she asked.

  She laid a coal fire, lit the paper in the grate, and flicked out the match. “Only one left,” she said, holding up the burnt end. She blinked surprise. “That’s the answer.”

  “The answer?”

  “To the dates in your mom’s journals. Like with the alphabet, the code. If you add one, it makes sense. The A is B, and the one is two. 1998 is 2009. 1999 is 2010.”

  I toed the cold faucet with my bare wet foot. “1999 would be 2000 if you add one to each digit.”

  “Not one to the whole thing, to— Oh, I see.” Julie tossed the spent match on top of the coals, in the center of the fire-starter flame. “Your mom makes a mistake, then. If you’d been writing 2009 in your journal as 1998, when you got to 2010, would you stop to realize you didn’t just add one to the prior code?” She settled on the bed, her back against the pillows. “So do you think she loved him?” she asked. “Not your mom. Beatrix Potter.”

  The umbrella, she’d said. “The publisher fiancé who died?” I asked.

  “The other one,” Julie said. “The husband.”

  I watched the smoke wafting up into the chimney, the ashes falling into the drawer at the bottom. “Because she wore the first fiancé’s ring for the rest of her life, you mean?”

  “And kept his damned umbrella and the dollhouse food, but she married the second guy, and they used to go boating in the evening at that pond we hiked to. It sounds so very romantic. I think she did love him, despite what Aunt Kath said.”

  I looked to the fireplace, the paper burned up, the coals reddening. What had Aunt Kath said? “It’s a hard thing to let go of a love who has died.”

  Julie stood and picked up the tongs she’d thrust into Anna Page’s face. Uncle. Aunt. Second cousin thrice removed. She scissored up another coal and set it on the grate, then added another the fire didn’t yet need.

  I toed the faucet again. She’d never said it, but I supposed she thought if Jamie had lived, her marriage to Isaac would have fallen apart, too. Same genes, she might say. Same inability to be satisfied with what you have. It’s perhaps the only advantage to dying early, she might say: you’re left without the time to make the mistakes the rest of us eventually make.

  “Jamie’s been dead a year,” Julie said. “In the Jewish faith, even children mourning their parents are supposed to set aside their mourning after a year.”

  I sank lower in the water, the smooth porcelain against my shoulders and a thin skin of water between the tub and the small of my back. Could Oliver let go of his mother? Could anyone expect him to? I was almost forty, I didn’t need my mother every day like Oliver did, and yet it seemed impossible that I might love anyone who asked me to let go of her.

  “Isaac still wears his wedding ring on his left hand,” she said, “but Potter wore Warne’s engagement ring her whole life.”

  I climbed from the water and went into my mother’s tiny bathroom, pulled a towel from the towel warmer, and wrapped it around myself. It was cream-colored. The contrast to my skin made me think of my parents’ hands intertwined. They’d held hands their whole lives. I wondered if Julie and Isaac ever held hands.

  I returned into the main room and sat on my mother’s bed, beside Julie. I took her hand. Her left hand, where there remained a pale indent from all those years she’d worn Noah’s ring. “Oliver is only six,” I said.

  “But I love Oliver,” she said, blinking back tears. “Nobody loves Oliver more than I do.” She fingered a chain of silver beads at her throat. “He doesn’t call me anything,” she said. “I think he dreads making that mistake.”

  “Oliver?” Thinking of the Christmas cookies. I hate you I hate you I hate you.

  She held the tissue box from the bedside table out to me, and we each took one. “Isaac,” she said.

  The light through the window cast a reddened softness on the wide-planked floor, the smooth white tub, the batik spread that Aunt Frankie must have made for Mom. So many things I’d lose if I left Kevin, all the things he understood that no other man would: the sound of my mother’s laughter, the stories. But was that love, or was it, as Aunt Kath suggested, simply shared grief?

  All the difficulties Jamie and Isaac had endured, they had survived. That tough first year, Jamie teaching and trying to complete her Montessori training at the same time. Jamie’s pregnancy, when, let’s be honest, no one in his right mind would have endured how crazy she was with all those hormones running rampant. Their marriage had lasted through the first year of nonsleeping Oliver, and his terrible, terrible threes. It had lasted through Jamie’s diagnosis and her treatment. Till death did they part.

  Julie’s brows gathered, and she swallowed once, twice. “Before Jamie died—”

  “But you both knew she was dying!” Not wanting to hear her admit it aloud, not wanting the certainty of a confession that she’d done that to her own sister while Jamie was dying. “Don’t you think the grieving starts with the certainty that someone is dying, even if we fight against it?” I said. “That on some level we all accepted that Jamie was dying before it happened? That we had to, to get used to the idea of losing her before she was gone?”

  “Oliver didn’t,” Julie sobbed. “Poor Oliver, he couldn’t understand any more than Jamie and her brother and I understood what our mother was saying over those damned strawberry waffles.”

  A flutter of honking came from some geese down by the boathouse, leaving in its wake an awareness of other sounds that had been there before: the lap of water, the tapping of a woodpecker some way in the distance, the rustle of a bird in the tree outside the cornflower-blue door.

  “The thing with Oliver, with the Christmas cookies, that wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  Julie took the tissue box from the bedside table and extended it to me again. I tightened the towel around my chest. She pulled a tissue, blew her nose, and set the box on the table, beside the book my mother had done with the brother she hadn’t even known she had.

&nb
sp; “It must have been hard to lose your mom without any warning,” Julie said.

  I reached across her and took “The True Tale of Lolly Labradoodle” in hand, not turning the pages, only feeling the steadying weight of the open book. You get to say goodbye or you don’t. Either way, the person you love is gone.

  Julie wiped the tears from her cheeks with her fingers like her sister’s fingers, and Oliver’s. “At least you have Kevin,” she said.

  “I don’t, not really,” I said. “Indian-lawyer Barbie in her fancy home with the double tub has Kevin. The suits and pumps, the briefcase—all of it so much more attractive than the reality of a wife who doesn’t always come home for dinner.”

  “He doesn’t care about the suits and pumps,” Julie said.

  “He … keeps assuming I agree with him when I don’t, Jules, talking about things as if no one but a fool could disagree with him, the implication being that if I want to disagree, then I’m a fool. It leaves me wanting to retreat into the warm world of the Wednesday Gang.”

  Julie smiled just a little. “Where Aunt Kath can question your reading choices?” she asked. “Where my mom can assume you will do exactly what she wants to do—write, run, whatever—because who wouldn’t want to be like her?”

  I got up and traded the towel for my clothes, thinking: Where Aunt Frankie says I’m beautiful, even if I’m not, and believes it. Where Aunt Linda admonishes everyone to focus on my brains rather than my looks.

  Dressed again, I sat beside Julie on the bed. It was more comfortable than the love seat. “I’m not sure I could go through losing all those babies, like Mom did,” I said.

  “You didn’t miscarry, you were just late. There’s no reason to—”

  “I’m almost forty.”

  Julie shrugged.

  “Mom took DES.”

  We both looked to the empty tub, as if Mom might be found there, as if this thing she never talked about might be explained without her.