“Rebecca?” Linda said after she’d gotten over the shock of my having cut up a book. “Come on, Frankie. The protagonist is a spineless dishrag who lets the hired help walk all over her. Middlemarch,” she insisted. “You should read Middlemarch.”
“Though this is ‘just for fun,’” Kath repeated. “‘Nothing serious.’” And she started talking about Pride and Prejudice in the most insightful way, and they were all talking about the books they’d reread—Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Brett, The Bell Jar for Linda, and for Ally, Charlotte’s Web—as I sat wondering why I was drawn to Rebecca. Because the narrator was an unremarkable girl who’d landed a remarkable man? Because she, like me, imagined other women’s lives in great detail, and always imagined those women as better than herself?
“Fitzgerald says, ‘All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,’” Brett said.
“What’s with all the quotes, anyway, Brett?” Linda said.
“‘She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit,’” Brett said. “W. Somerset Maugham.” She just read things and they stuck in her mind, she said. She had no idea why.
I thought Brett might be the only person I knew who was as smart as Danny. And felt the shortcomings of my own education: when I’d read Forster’s description of the novel as “most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature—irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into swamps,” I’d had to look up rill in the dictionary (“a small brook,” in case you don’t know either). And I’d never read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, whom Forster claimed were better than any English novelist, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to; they wrote big, fat books that were only slightly less intimidating than those of the other author he recommended, Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past was several volumes even though he was not Russian but a seemingly more reasonable French.
Linda volunteered to read what she’d written that week, and as she read I wondered how to say diplomatically that this new passage—which she’d obviously worked very hard on—was stilted and dull compared with what she’d whipped off in five minutes the week before. Kath jumped in immediately after Linda finished, though, gushing about how “nice” it was, and everyone hopped right onto that “nice” bandwagon. And that’s how it would go after that: Brett would bring whole chapters of a mystery that was not particularly mysterious. Linda would bring pages of a short story about . . . well, I couldn’t begin to describe it, so what does that say? Ally would occasionally bring a few journal lines about a duck who was not “Some Duck,” at least not in the way Wilbur was “Some Pig.” And the things I wrote were no better. Still, Kath—who never brought a word—would invariably start off with how nice each was, and we’d all follow suit. We meant to be encouraging each other. We did. And I wallowed in the praise as much as anyone at first. But it began to leave me strangely discouraged. I found myself listening carefully to gauge whether “nice” had any enthusiasm to it, wondering how we’d ever get better if we just sat around whacking each other on the back as if we were the next Monsieur Proust even if we weren’t French, or anything close to it.
ONE WEDNESDAY morning that fall we sat sharing what we’d heard about the rock concert “gather-in” at Lytton Plaza that weekend, and trying to fend off Linda’s efforts to recruit us to one of her causes (getting a mental-health services bill passed by the California legislature, I think it was that day), and waiting for Ally to show. We weren’t worried at first that she hadn’t arrived—she went to her sister’s for breakfast every Wednesday morning, and frequently pulled back into her drive after the rest of us were already in the park. She and Kath were the only ones who had their own cars. (Ally’s was just a white Chevy Nova two-door, but Kath’s was a brand-new powder-blue Mustang convertible, with air-conditioning and power windows and seat belts—only the lap belts that had just been made mandatory, but Kath did use them, which was a good thing, it turns out.) By midmorning, we’d gone ahead and started critiquing our writing, and still Ally hadn’t arrived.
“You don’t think anything happened with the baby, do you?” I said.
“With Carrie?” Linda said at the same time Brett said, “I thought she was pregnant, but she hasn’t uttered a word.”
“And how can you ask?” Kath said. “I mean, if you’re wrong? ‘Oh, I see. You’re not pregnant, you’re just getting fat as a porker pie.’”
Which made us all laugh; I had no idea what a porker pie was, but it sounded so funny the way she said it, with the long Southern i. Everyone laughed, too, at a story I told about my cousin patting my belly at a family gathering and asking when the little guy was due when the “little guy,” my Maggie, was at that moment safely nestled in Danny’s arms. It was a story I’d never told before, a humiliation I’d never wanted to recall, but it was funny, it really was. That was something I was beginning to realize: with these new friends of mine, I could laugh at myself.
We considered the possibilities. Maybe Ally had morning sickness? Car trouble? Maybe she’d gone on vacation? (Though wouldn’t she have told us?) Maybe a relative was sick or had died?
Her car wasn’t in the drive, but we decided Brett and I would go knock on her door anyway. There was no answer even after we knocked and rang a second time. When I tried the doorknob, though, it turned easily.
Inside, the house was dark and stale, the drapes closed against the beautiful day. No radio or TV. No little Carrie chattering to her dolly or throwing a fit over having to eat oatmeal or pulling on Ally’s hem and telling her it was time to go to the park.
“Ally?” I called.
No answer.
“Ally?” Brett called a little louder.
The faucet dripped in the kitchen. In the park, the children were screaming the way kids in parks do, all overly excited and dramatic and joyous.
“Ally?” we called a third time, together.
A sound came from upstairs, not a voice or a word, but a human sound. Fear?
Brett and I looked at each other: Should we call the police? But this was Palo Alto in the middle of a sunny Wednesday morning, for goodness sakes. I imagined the police showing up and taking one look at Brett’s white gloves, the event replayed in the crime column of the Palo Alto Times under the heading “No Crime at All” with some long-winded rant about how kooks like us distracted the police from important business. And Brett was already creeping up the stairs, whispering, “Ally? Ally, are you here?”
There was a louder sound then, a sob, and Brett and I bolted up the stairs and started opening doors until we found Ally curled up on a double bed in a dreary, drape-shrouded room, her hair sprawled in a tangle across sheets and blankets and pillows that were a single gray hue in the lightless room.
Brett sat gently on the edge of the bed and lay a white-gloved hand on shoulders so thin they ought to have belonged to a young girl. After a moment, she smoothed Ally’s hair from her face, tucked it gently behind her ear, stroked her cheek. “Ally, what happened?” she said.
Ally’s shoulders shook soundlessly.
“What’s wrong?” Brett insisted, but so kindly that I wondered how this came so naturally to her. “Has something happened to Jim?” she said. “Or to Carrie?”
I sat at Ally’s feet and put my hand on the blanket over her calves, trying to echo Brett’s ease. We sat there for the longest time, Ally sobbing silently, a tissue buried in her fist, unused. I tried to imagine how long she must have lain like this; there must have been twenty tissues scattered across the carpet, and the basket was full. I imagined Jim—whom I’d never met—picking them up and loading them in the basket, torn between not wanting to leave her that morning and having to get to a court appearance that his job depended on.
“Did something happen to Carrie?” Brett said again, gentle but insistent. “Tell us.”
Ally shook her head.
“Was it the baby?” I guessed.
That awful sob again.
“You lost the baby,??
? I whispered.
Brett stayed with Ally while I slipped out to tell Kath and Linda—they wanted to come, too, but we thought that might be too much for Ally, and anyway, someone had to stay with the kids.
When I returned to Ally’s house, I put a kettle on for tea. No Lipton’s in Ally’s cabinet, nothing remotely resembling a tea bag, but there was a copper teapot inlaid with silver at the handle and spout, and on the shelf beside it two cylindrical containers made of thin wood. The first one I opened smelled of spices: cloves and ginger and something else I couldn’t identify, maybe a whole bunch of different things. But the other container held a dark, powdery substance that, though it looked finer than tea leaves, did smell like tea.
By the time I came back to the room with the steaming cup, Brett had gotten Ally to sit up. She was leaning against a pile of pillows, and the light on her nightstand was on now, raising the room from dreary colorlessness to chalky blue. I handed Brett the tea, discreetly picked up the tissues, added them to the pile in the basket, and sat back down at the end of the bed.
Brett was trying to be soothing, saying that sometimes a miscarriage happens because there is something wrong with the baby, maybe it was for the best.
Ally’s face crumpled in on itself like a dying leaf. “But I always lose my babies. A year ago Easter, and the summer before that, and now.”
From Brett’s kicked-in expression, I saw she was having as much trouble absorbing this as I was. Three miscarriages in as many years. She set the tea on the nightstand. “But you have Carrie, Ally.”
Ally choked back another sob, her chin sinking into her soft neck, her face even paler than usual. She closed her eyes, her lids red at the edges and a weak and veiny blue.
Brett mouthed to me, “It happened Sunday.”
“I’m sorry,” Ally said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that . . .”
“There, there,” Brett soothed, setting her hand on Ally’s. “There, there.”
“It’s just that the baby is there, he’s my baby, he’s my son, I can feel him inside me, and I know . . . somehow I know all about him almost, I know him, I can feel his needs, I can feel him saying ‘Take care of me, oh please take care of me’ just in the way I can’t even smell fish and I can’t get enough meat and I have to sleep and sleep and sleep. Then I don’t, somehow, I don’t take care of him. I want to and I try to, I try to do everything so right but I don’t and he . . .”
And he dies, I thought. The word she can’t say. Her baby dies inside her. He starts dying inside her and she knows it, and there is the awful rushing to the hospital, and the pain, the wrenching of her gut, and the doctors and the nurses and the sterile instruments and then nothing, just emptiness.
“I wake up every morning and there’s this moment of . . . of possibility,” Ally whispered. “Of maybe it’s just a nightmare and the baby is fine.”
Brett tilted her head up, blinking back tears. “I know. Getting out of bed is . . . impossible sometimes,” she said so gently I was sure she did know, and I wondered again what had happened to Brett, why she wore her gloves, why she never offered a word of explanation, why none of us ever dared ask.
“And Jim, he just curls up around me in bed when he gets home, and he puts his hand on my . . . on my skin, on my belly, and he . . .” She swallowed once, twice, still with her eyes closed, tears spilling from her unparted lids. “He sings.” The last word spoken so softly I wasn’t sure of what I’d heard. “He just sings, words I don’t even understand,” she said in the same almost inaudible voice. “He just sings to his baby son as if he’s still there.”
I set my hand on Ally’s foot under the blue blanket. Outside, a car accelerated. A train whistled. One bird scolded and another cawed. Ally pulled her other foot up, tucked it beneath her leg, still under the blanket. She blew her nose and tossed the tissue on the bed. She leaned forward, and for a moment I thought she might get up, but she only pulled another tissue from the box. Something in the way she held herself made me feel she wanted us to leave now, that she’d drained herself and wanted to be alone. That she regretted, already, telling us about Jim. That she felt she’d shown us something about him she shouldn’t have shown anyone.
I took a tissue, wiped my eyes under my glasses, blew my nose.
Brett frowned but made no move to leave. After a long silence, she asked where Carrie was, and whether she was okay.
Ally’s hand tightened around her tissue, and she looked away from Brett, to the shaded windows. It was a moment before she whispered, “She’s . . . she’s . . .” In the park, a child called for her mother—not my Maggie. Ally closed her eyes, tears streaming again. “. . . my sister’s,” she whispered.
I patted the sad hump of Ally’s blanket-covered foot encouragingly, giving her space to say more. But it was Brett who spoke, who said, “She’s at your sister’s. Good. Good.” Then, after a moment, “All week?”
WE ALL CALLED ALLY that next week to see if we could bring her groceries or take Carrie off her hands for a few hours, or if she just wanted some company, but the answer was always no. We suggested we meet in the park Thursday or Friday, or the next Monday or Tuesday, mornings we had church or school volunteer work or the like that we usually hated to miss. I took her a tuna casserole, which she accepted reluctantly, without asking me in. Kath made fried chicken and potato salad, which is what you do in the South, she said, but she swore she didn’t think anyone was eating anything at all in that house. “I wouldn’t be eating, either,” Linda said, remembering the parade of dishes brought to their door in the days after her mother died—trays of cold cuts, Jell-O molds, pastries, and lemon cake. The dishes had filled the refrigerator, the freezer, the countertops, turning awful shades of green and yellow and brown before her aunt Maud finally threw them into the garbage, casserole pans and all.
Ally didn’t show up that next Wednesday, or the next or the next. We went to her door, tried in vain to coax her out, and we talked about it endlessly—wasn’t there something we could do?
“Maybe she thinks she can’t have a baby,” I said.
“But she has her li’l Carrie,” Kath said. “Of course she can have a baby.”
“It may be Rh incompatibility,” Brett said as I sat frowning, not sure what more to say. “She wouldn’t have had a problem with Carrie, but in that first pregnancy she would have developed an immunity to Rh-positive babies that would cause her to miscarry subsequently.
They have a vaccine for it now—I saw an article about it in Time this summer—but it’s brand new.”
“Three miscarriages,” Linda said. “I guess that would make you wonder.”
“But she couldn’t have had three,” Brett said. “Carrie is barely two. I think that was just her being overwrought.”
That was the third week Ally didn’t show at the park, the week she didn’t even answer the door when we rang the bell, even though we knew she was home.
We were at Brett’s that morning—a Friday, not a Wednesday. Brett had invited us to her house to watch the Apollo 7 launch. We sat on the carpet, as close as we could get to the TV screen without blocking each other, our children in our laps or sitting with their noses practically pressed to the screen.
“That’s Cape Kennedy, in Florida,” Kath explained to Anna Page. “You’ve been there, though you don’t remember. Your daddy and I took you there on vacation one summer, when we lived in Nashville.”
“With Lee-Lee and Lacy,” Anna Page announced with confidence, and Kath had to say no, little Lee and Lacy had not been born yet.
Anna Page, unfazed, turned to Maggie and the twins and announced that she had gone all by herself to Florida, with her mom and dad and not with Lee-Lee or Lacy. Linda’s Julie, not to be outdone, insisted that she had, too, and without Jamie—her twin—or J.J. “Didn’t I, Mommy?” she said, and Linda was forced to distract her, turning her attention back to the television, where they were counting down the last few seconds.
A huge bloom of white exploded on the screen
, making my heart pound as the rocket disappeared behind all that smoke. I was sure the thing was about to blow—I couldn’t help thinking about the explosion of the first Apollo—but Brett said that was the way rockets launched. She knew all the crew’s names and what they were supposed to do, too, and she talked about them that way—Commander Wally Schirra, Command Module Pilot Donn Eisele, Lunar Module Pilot Walter Cunningham—when the rest of us were just saying “the guy with the Cary Grant hair” or “the fella with the smile the size of Jupiter” or “the goofy-looking one.” Yes, we did that. We talked about the astronauts the way we talked about the Beatles or Miss America, as if the sole criterion for sending them into space ought to be how handsome their faces looked through the glass bubbles of their space helmets.
Which were not glass, but rather an ultraviolet plastic. Brett told us that.
As I watched the arms holding that big white monster of a rocket swing away and the thing rise slowly, almost as if it wasn’t going to make it more than a few feet, I imagined Brett’s face peeking out at me from one of those not-glass bubbles. It seemed as far-fetched as imagining a woman president, or a woman priest, or a woman God.
“Brett,” Linda said with a measure of clairvoyance, “have you ever considered writing about this space stuff?”
“Miss Marple in Murder on the Moon!” I said.
Brett didn’t write about “this space stuff” that week, though, and Linda didn’t write any more about her mother, and Kath and I didn’t tap into our deepest emotions either, though Kath did say she’d written a few lines in her journal—a fact we did not make a big deal about, for fear of scaring her off. Linda didn’t write about the Olympics even though she was as wild for them that fall as Brett was for the space race, not even after Brett suggested it and I echoed her, saying, “Sylvia Plath Goes to the Olympics: A Girl Jock’s Guide to Suicide”—which I could tell amused Linda by the way she tugged at the bill of her Stanford cap. She went on and on the way she does about the state of women’s sports, then—“Out of five thousand Olympians, only eight hundred are women.” “Only three sports to the men’s eighteen.” “Only twelve athletics events to the men’s twenty-four, with no races longer than eight hundred meters because fifty years ago, some woman collapsed in a longer race!”—at which point Kath threw up her arms and asked, “What are you wantin’, Linda? For the girls to be boxing? Wrestling? Or, I know, how about weight lifting?” Which cracks me up every time I remember it, because Kath lifts weights at the gym three times a week now—free weights, too; she stands there looking at her muscles flex in the mirror, and she has muscles to flex, too, which she didn’t much back then. But as I said, Linda didn’t write about any of that. What she wrote was page after page of her amorphous stories (often political rants disguised as fiction, I thought), while Brett wrote chapters of her unmysterious mystery and I wrote beginnings that never seemed to go anywhere. We hadn’t yet learned that our best writing comes from pushing our emotional buttons with the kind of force needed to push that rocket ship into space.