He was already lifting my nightgown, though, kissing my breasts. My body was responding even as my mind was thinking What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi? and reaching for the next few words that I’d had, the start of the second sentence, the thought that had already dissipated in the morning exchange, leaving me with a question that had no answer, no little bit of ankle, no enticing glimpse of leg.
WHEN I RECEIVED the first positive response to my query letter the second Tuesday in January, my thrill was overrun with panic by the time I got to the agent’s bold, blue-ink signature. Before I knew it I’d revised two chapters entirely, screwing up the pagination. I was frantically retyping the whole thing when Danny got home late that night, and yes, he was happy for me, but I’d imagined him more excited. I’d imagined him not caring one whit about his dinner, which, by the time he got home, was three shriveled new potatoes, a pile of dried peas, and a hard lump of chicken left forgotten in the oven. I’d imagined him wrapping me up in a great big hug and calling me “the future famous novelist, M. F. O’Mara” again, saying we ought to open a bottle of champagne.
The next morning, though, the Wednesday Sisters made up for Danny’s restraint. They all wanted to touch the letter, as if it were literary spring water from the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.
“So, what in the world is a jiffy bag?” I asked. “And what does ‘on exclusive’ mean?”
By late afternoon, I was standing at the post office window handing over my manuscript, not completely retyped but with two page 34s labeled A and B as Danny had suggested. And even as I pushed Davy’s stroller toward home I was holding my breath, sure that at any moment the phone would ring and my literary life would begin.
Minutes turned into hours, days, and weeks, though, my initial euphoria dipping to cautious optimism, souring into apprehension, then rotting almost immediately into massive, Oreo-eating dread. Perhaps the manuscript was so bad that the agent was not even going to grace it with a rejection, too concerned any further correspondence with me might taint him.
WHEN ERICH SEGAL’S Love Story was serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal starting that February, Kath insisted we’d be fools not to read it. “It’s the biggest publishing sensation in a thousand blue moons, y’all. Don’t you think we can learn something from this year’s May Queen?” She, like the critics, for all the fault they found with the novel, thought it charming. “It’s like the bad boy we all fell for at school,” she said. “You know you should not even be talking to this fella, he’s got a reputation and so does any girl seen with him, but he’s charming your bobby socks off and the next thing you know you’re unzipping your own skirt without him even having to ask.”
Like nearly everyone in America, we did read it, and we argued about every aspect of it, from the story (Oliver Barrett IV defies his wealthy father to marry poor Jenny Cavilleri, only to watch her die) to the prose (“‘It skips from cliché to cliché with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,’” Linda quoted from a Newsweek review) to the cover, loud red and green and blue letters against a white background (half the copies at Stacey’s already looked dirty from people handling it, Ally said, a comment Kath would remember later, about the impracticality of white covers). I was the only one who swallowed the book whole, reading it in one late-night sitting and bawling at the end, having neither the English literature background to call out its flaws nor any idea whether poor Radcliffe music majors really called rich Harvard boys “Preppie,” or whether Harvard hockey stars really called their fathers “sir.”
“So, what makes it work?” Kath said.
“How can anyone possibly care about this nonsense when hundreds of women are conducting sit-ins at Ladies’ Home Journal?” Linda said. “When Harvard College and Newsweek magazine are being sued for sex discrimination—and with more to come, mark my words.” Leaving me imagining Linda holding the book physically away as she read it. Leaving me wondering if any of us could bear to read Love Story if Jenny had left behind not just her husband but also two sons and a daughter under the age of ten.
“Okay, what makes it so popular?” Kath rephrased.
“Even though it’s thin, it’s not wrong,” Brett said. “Jenny’s annoyance that Oliver poaches on the meager Radcliffe library when he can use Harvard’s—that’s real.”
“The quick wedding—no more people than you can crowd into a restaurant booth,” Kath said.
“And the way Oliver’s father just shuts him out when he marries her,” Ally said.
Linda, frowning, said, “You can read it in about thirty seconds; I suppose people like that. No ‘The covers of this book are too far apart,’ to quote Dorothy Parker.”
“Ambrose Bierce,” Brett said.
“Really? What’s the Dorothy Parker one, then?”
“‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.’”
“My sentiments exactly,” Linda said.
“Love and story, that’s what I think makes it work,” Kath said. “I don’t think people mind awfully a cliché or two—”
“Or two thousand,” Linda said.
“—if the plot is bolting down the tracks. High water covers a lot of stumps.”
“Cinderella meets Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “The girl we can all imagine we might be—Cinder-Jenny—gets the rich Harvard prince despite the family opposition.”
“But why do we want that lump-in-our-throats feeling?” Ally asked. “From the very first sentence, ‘What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?’ we know how it ends.”
“‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief,’” Brett said. “William Faulkner.”
“Between William Faulkner and nothing, I will take nothing,” Linda said. “Do you have to be from the South to understand him?”
“God took special pains creating the South,” Kath said.
“And Faulkner wants to inflict that pain on the rest of us?”
That discussion did leave me wondering, though: Why are we drawn to sad stories? Why did we all read the book, knowing we were in for the dying-girl ending? Why did we go to the movie that December—Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal—having already read the whole tearjerker book? No one wants to be sad in real life. You want the sad life behind door number one, Monty, or the happy ending behind curtain number two? And yet sad plays well in literature. Romance and tragedy. Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary. Why is that?
BRETT RECEIVED no encouragement at all from her first batch of agent queries, so it was pretty hard for me to feel sorry for myself when my mail-battered manuscript came back from that agent with a polite “no thanks.” It was like sending a child off to school with such hope, though, then peeking into the lunchroom to see him sitting alone. I cried in the bathtub, with the door locked, despairing of ever being a writer, thinking as I sat in that warm water that I should just give it up.
The truth is, we all thought of giving up at some point that winter, more often than you could imagine. And maybe we would have, if we hadn’t had each other, but it was something, having the five of us, knowing we weren’t alone.
“He didn’t even read to the end,” I confessed to the Wednesday Sisters. “The last hundred pages are all nice and tidy, like they’ve never been touched.”
Ally put her arm around my shoulders, and Brett set a gloved hand on mine. “‘Rejections don’t really hurt after you stop bleeding,’” Brett said.
At home that afternoon, I studied my two coffin photos, remembering lying alone in the tucked-velvet darkness, listening to the muffled voices of the Wednesday Sisters beyond the polished mahogany. I imagined my tombstone: simple gray marble with perhaps an angel carved at the top; beloved wife and loving mother; cherished daughter and sister. It ought to be enough. But all those years I’d watched my brothers go off to college—I didn’t know if I could spend my whole life that way, playing the supporting role, having no part of me that wasn’t defined by m
y relation to someone else.
Early the next morning, I pulled out my note-card chapter summaries, scooted Maggie’s dollhouse and Davy’s train track from the middle of the family room floor, and spread the cards out beside my manuscript. I closed my eyes, inhaled the varnished-wood-and-velvet smell of that coffin. Got up, made a pot of coffee. Sharpened three pencils to a razor tip. And began again.
WE ALL SAT GLUED to our televisions that April after an explosion in one of the Apollo 13 oxygen tanks crippled the rocket. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The crew was forced to scrap the lunar landing and swing their damaged ship around to the dark side of the moon, from which they could not even communicate with Earth. There was no live broadcast from the ship due to power limitations, but that didn’t deter the newsmen, who used models and animated footage to explain the situation. Brett hardly stepped away from her television for those four days, worrying about those three men crowded into a lunar landing module meant for only two men and only two days. Her sister, Jenn, who’d started medical school the previous fall at the University of California at San Francisco, sometimes watched with her. Jenn had little free time, but she liked to spend what she had with Brett. They spoke the same language. They could talk together about ways the lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module might be modified to fit the lunar module’s carbon dioxide scrubbers, and not an eyebrow was raised.
“I’m glad you decided not to become an astronaut, Brett—that could be you,” Jenn said as they sat anxiously in front of the television that last morning, waiting for the reentry, praying like everyone else on earth that the command module would work when they reactivated it. And while Brett was considering that—had she decided against being an astronaut? Or had it all been decided for her?—Jenn said, “They could sure use your help now, though.”
“My help?” Brett said.
“I used to want to be an astronaut, too,” Jenn said. “Like you and Brad. But I was never smart enough.”
Brett laughed. “But you’re in medical school, Jenn!”
Jenn looked at her, and something in her sister’s green eyes reminded Brett of how she had looked on Brett’s wedding day: a fourteen-year-old in a long, silver bridesmaid dress, trying to look grown-up.
Jenn shrugged. “Like that’s a big deal, a doctor.”
“Of course it is!” Brett insisted. “It would be for anyone, even if you weren’t a girl.” At the same time still thinking of her wedding day, thinking how her brother had promised not to miss it for the world, how she’d waited at the back of the church for such a long time until finally her father said, “You just have to let Brad go, Brett. We all just have to let him go and hope he finds his way.”
“I wanted to be more than a doctor, Brett,” Jenn said. “I wanted to be like you.”
“Like me? I change diapers, Jenn!” Wondering if it was the eight years that separated her from her sister that made the difference, or if there was more to it than that. Wondering if she, too, would have gone on to become someone if she hadn’t met Chip, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant before she finished graduate school.
“But you’re so you, Brett. You do everything easily while I’m pedaling as fast as I can. I swear, one day you’re going to be halfway through changing a diaper and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem will just come to you.”
Brett laughed, thinking that seemed like another lifetime, the days when she’d thought she might be the one to solve anything.
“While you’re changing a darn diaper, I swear!” Jenn insisted.
On the screen, three bright red-and-white-striped parachutes burst open against the blue sky and the white puffs of cloud, and the capsule splashed safely into the sea.
“A poopy or a wet?” Brett said, and they laughed as they watched the men being lifted by helicopter and the capsule being loaded onto the USS Iwo Jima, the crew waving from the deck of the ship.
It wasn’t until later, as Jenn’s car was pulling out of the drive, that Brett started thinking: What am I doing? What am I writing, exactly? Thinking: Couldn’t I write something more meaningful than this failure of a book that is really about nothing at all?
By the time Chip arrived home from SLAC—he’d worked late that evening—Brett was stooping at the fireplace, watching the flame creep from the match in her hand to the paper under the grate. Stacks of paper littered the coffee table, the couch, the La-Z-Boy recliner, and the new shag rug. Every single page of all twelve drafts of her novel, including all the carbon copies.
“Brett?” Chip said. “What are you doing? It’s already hot as blazes in here.”
She grinned up at him. “I’m burning this rubbish,” she said, and she sat on the hearth, crumpled the top page of the stack nearest the fireplace, and tossed it onto the fire. Yes, the fire. The garbage was not permanent enough.
She’d decided everything she’d written to date was utter dross, not worth the paper it was typed on, so much worse than the worst dreck she’d ever read that she would be mortified to see it in print.
“Rubbish?” Chip said.
Brett crumpled a whole fistful of pages and tossed them in with the first page, which was collapsing black into the flames. “Rot,” she said. “Tripe. Twaddle.”
And maybe Chip thought Twaddle? or maybe he didn’t, maybe he understood—I rather think he did because what he said was “I see. Well. Do you need some help, then?”
He stacked several of the piles from the coffee table one atop the other and set his briefcase and the evening paper in the space he’d cleared. He sat on the floor in front of the fire, on the other side of Brett’s stacks, and picked up the top sheet, pausing to read the first few words.
She wrested it from him, her bare fingers brushing against his. “Drivel, that’s what Frankie would say,” she said. “Linda would say garbage because that’s about as direct a way of saying it as there is. Ally would say . . . maybe blather—that seems like an Ally word. And I can hear Kath now: ‘This dog won’t hunt.’” She crumpled the page he’d tried to read and tossed it gleefully onto the fire.
Chip looked around dubiously at all those pages. “None of these dogs?”
“They don’t even bark,” Brett assured him. “They don’t even know how to wag the silly little stumps of their tails.”
BRETT BEGAN WRITING manically the next morning—the same story, with Elizabeth and Ratty, but completely from scratch. Was it any good? We had no idea. “It’s the same novel in a way, and yet not the same at all” was all she would tell us. She didn’t want to show us one word until she was far enough along to be certain it wasn’t as inconsequential as everything else she’d ever written—that was the way she put it, those aren’t my words. But there was this, at least: that draft came pouring out in a great gush she could barely type fast enough to catch.
“THE ONLY RULES you’ve got to follow,” Kath said when she invited us to a Derby party at her house that spring, just the Wednesday Sisters and our husbands for some good ol’ Kentucky fun, “are that you wear a hat, and you tuck a little money in your pocketbook, to wager, like. Study well on that hat, too, ladies, because sure ’nough it will give you luck with your bets!”
No, Lee had not left Kath yet. And yes, Kath was still clinging to the illusion that nothing was wrong, as if the whole Gatsby car-bashing fiasco had never occurred.
Kath and Lee lived in Old Palo Alto, which was—then even more than now—the most exclusive neighborhood in town (and I mean that in a good way, although a neighbor who was one of the first engineers at Hewlett-Packard did once tell me he moved into the Community Center neighborhood in the 1940s because even Stanford-educated kind-as-anyone-you’ve-ever-met Asians weren’t welcome in the Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park, or Professorville neighborhoods back then). Still, I’d been surprised the first time I saw Kath’s house, a great big old thing that looked like a miniature version of the Museum of Science and Industry back in Chicago. It was stone, with huge, frilly columns out front—Corinthian?—and eve
rywhere else those column façades plastered against the house (pilasters, Danny says). It was the kind of place that might have had a fountain out front. Kath said it reminded Lee of the Governor’s Mansion back in Kentucky; it was the first house they’d seen in California that looked like a real house, so they bought it even though it cost twice what they’d planned to spend.
Madison Leland Montgomery IV. But they’d been just Kath and Lee, and I’d written off Kath’s careful presentation of herself as insecurity. I was glad I’d gotten to know her before I saw her house.
“What does Lee do again?” Danny asked as we stood on Kath’s front porch that Saturday afternoon, waiting for the bell to be answered. Before I could remind him that Lee was a surgery resident at Stanford, though, Lee opened the door, cigarette in hand.
Inside, a two-story foyer with a sweeping stairway opened to huge, high-ceilinged rooms with substantial moldings and an elaborate chair rail. The furniture was dark and serious, antiques that had been in their families for generations, and on the walls were paintings of their ancestors in heavy gold frames: a forbidding lady in folds of satin, whose chin was Kath’s wide chin; a gentleman in judicial robes with the same arc of her brow; a young boy dressed in a lace christening dress, who had Lacy’s curls encircling his chubby face.
“You’re here and I haven’t even got the mint juleps made yet,” Kath said when we found her in the kitchen dumping a big slug of Kentucky bourbon into a crystal pitcher. She smiled, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pasty. “And they’re already running the races back home, too, aren’t they, sugar?”
“Not the Derby,” Lee assured her. Then to Danny and me, “It’s the ninth race this year. I don’t quite understand why they only televise the Derby, but who am I to say?”