The Wednesday Sisters

  She worked like the devil to correct that. She dug up new dinner recipes and spent hours in the kitchen; she was forever on a diet; and she was, if possible, even tidier about her clothes. But the effect of all the effort was just awful. She was a little slimmer, yes—even with her new efforts to be a gourmet chef—but it was like watching her shrink into herself, watching her revert to some Southern version of the timid souls so many of us were in junior high school, when all the girls had discovered boys while so very few of the boys had discovered us back.

  Writing-wise, we finished Aspects of the Novel that April, so that now anyone overhearing us in the park might think we actually knew what we were talking about. We’d say things like “Even when we talk to ourselves we’re never completely honest, so our characters shouldn’t be either.” (That was from Kath’s favorite chapter, the one on characters, which she called “people” because Forster did; he was forever using Jane Austen as an example in that chapter, and Kath knew the “people” in the Jane Austen novels about as well as we knew our own children.) We started typing our work, too, and making multiple carbon copies—just stick four carbons behind the original and bang as hard as possible on the keys—and we were taking each other’s writing home and reading it, which is a different experience from listening to it being read, believe me. We could reread lines and consider them more carefully, and jot down notes in the margins, which led to much more detailed critiques. And we could take each other’s notes home with us, so when we couldn’t quite remember what exactly Ally, say, had disliked about a particular line of dialogue, we could turn to her very words.

  Our writing was getting better, too. Kath’s journal pages were filling, and Ally’s “Not Some Duck” was beginning to seem like it might someday actually quack. Linda was integrating Golda Meir’s becoming prime minister of Israel and the war protests at Stanford into her stories in a way that enriched rather than overwhelmed; her setting might be the law commune on Alma, where the Shell station is now, or her character might wear a women’s lib “brassy” on a chain around her neck (as Linda herself had started doing), but the stories were more and more about the emotions of her characters, rather than their politics.

  Brett was at the head of the class in this, as in all things. Late that June, she swore that before the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon a few weeks later she would finish a draft of her novel—“her Breakfast,” we called it even though it was a mystery, even though it wasn’t anything like Breakfast at Tiffany’s except that in both books a young woman walked away from her past. By then, she was big-as-a-mansion pregnant, due at the end of July, and she was working so hard to finish you’d have thought she was afraid her free hand for writing would be taken with this second hand to hold, this new baby, and she’d never find time to write again. Never mind that she was quite sure the novel was nothing. It would be “such fun” to have a draft of a novel finished, she admitted, but she wouldn’t allow the possibility that it might be published someday. “Such fun.” That was all this was, she was quite sure of that.

  We all thought she was just being modest.

  Then it was July 16—a Wednesday—and Danny and I woke at three-thirty in the morning to follow Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins up the elevator and across the swing arm to their places on the rocket ship, and then Buzz Aldrin, too, and to watch the lines of scientists in white shirts sitting in front of monitors like gamblers at slot machines. I thought of Brett as I watched them—not trying to imagine her with a flag patch on her shoulder and a space helmet securely on her head anymore, but rather picturing her hunched over her typewriter, finishing her novel.

  We met in the park that morning, everyone showing up early because we were so excited about going to the moon and we’d been up for hours anyway. Brett was the last to arrive, and we fell upon her like Noah must have fallen on dry land.

  “Eight days,” she said. “Splashdown, I said. Not launch. I still have eight days.”

  “Splashdown!” Ally said.

  “You better get going, honey,” Kath said, “’cause your own water’ll be splashing right down your skinny li’l legs before that capsule splashes into the ocean or I’ll choke down my best Derby hat!”

  The lunar landing was scheduled for Sunday, with the first lunar walk to be Monday morning. “The astronauts have eight hours of work after they land, before they can walk,” Brett said. “They land at three eastern time, and another eight hours is midnight—too late for the East Coast to see the walk on TV.”

  “You think all the Yankees in Manhattan wouldn’t be able to keep their li’l Yankee eyes open on a Sunday night for this?” Kath said.

  “They want the astronauts to get some rest first, too,” Brett said.

  “But they’ll be sitting on the moon, honey!” Kath said. “Can you imagine shutting your eyes for even one minute with your piggy toes dangling out over the moon? You put your chapter break anywhere you want to on this one, no one is turning out the light without turning the page.”

  We all watched the landing from our homes that Sunday: the cockpit alarm sounding constantly, and you could tell from the astronauts’ voices that they didn’t know what it was and they sure wanted to know. As that was sorted out (too many signals overloading the computer), they realized it was too rocky to land where they’d planned. They kept talking about how many seconds were left—“They’re running out of fuel,” Danny said—and finally they landed, just in time. When you read the reports of it, you imagine the first thing they said was, “Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.” But it wasn’t actually the first thing they said. Just the most memorable. Which is something we remind ourselves when we’re critiquing: generally, dialogue shouldn’t be what people really say, but more like an edited version.

  Though that rule—like all writing rules—was made to be broken. The unedited version of what Blanche, Kath’s family’s cook back in Louisville, had to say about those men being on the moon? “They ain’t on no moon.” And when asked where she thought they were? “I don’t know, but they ain’t on no moon.” Sometimes real life hands you something you simply can’t improve upon.

  When we learned the lunar walk would be Sunday night after all—the NASA doctors had apparently come to the same conclusion Kath had—we all had the same thought: Let’s watch together. Ally already had plans to have dinner at her sister’s, but the rest of us pulled our half-cooked dinners out of our ovens, gathered our families, and hightailed it over to Linda’s. Impromptu potluck. We gathered in Linda’s living room, bouncing off the walls with excitement, and introduced our husbands, which was odder than I had imagined, meeting these three men I knew so well through their wives even though we’d never met. Lee was the most surprising to me; I’d pictured a much bigger man, maybe because he was Southern or because he was a doctor or because he was an adulterous bastard (goodness, did I say that?). I had never imagined he would be so charming, either—especially to Kath. Watching him bringing her tastes of all the desserts, and Anna Page sitting on his lap with the wildness seeping out of her almost the moment he wrapped his stocky arms around her, the sweetness filling in under the pretty straw hat that she kept on all evening, I saw why Kath thought he’d never leave his family.

  Danny and Chip hit it off immediately, both in their dark, unfashionable but indestructible glasses, both so smart in a way that most of us couldn’t really grasp, but there they were finishing each other’s sentences like they’d shared a room growing up and did not once lay masking tape across the floor to define their separate, inviolate territories like my brothers had. Jeff was neither as smart as Danny and Chip nor as charming as Lee (though he was plenty smart and plenty charming, don’t get me wrong), but he won hands down in the looks category—think Warren Beatty without a hint of arrogance—and he had that same restlessness that Linda had, too, that made you think the things that happened in the world would happen to him because he would make it so. I liked them all. Even Lee. I wished Ally and Jim h
ad been able to come. I wondered if they were really at Ally’s sister’s house, and if they were having as good a time there as we were here.

  We sat on the floor, huddled around Linda’s new Zenith Giant-Screen color television—a twenty-three-inch screen set in an oak-veneer cabinet—watching the footage from Cape Canaveral for the longest time, beginning to despair of ever seeing a man step out of the landing module. When you remember it and you don’t think carefully about what you remember, you think Neil Armstrong just stepped down the ladder and onto the moon and said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but in reality it was just like “The Eagle has landed”: we listened to audio of them opening the door forever, feeling more tension than any thriller movie could ever deliver. We sat watching, and explaining things to the children: “No, honey, the man’s name isn’t Houston, but he’s in a city called Houston, Texas.” There was a picture finally, and the fellow in Houston said there was “a great deal of contrast” and it was upside down but they could make out a fair amount of detail. Even knowing it was upside down, though, I still couldn’t make out one speck of anything, just gray at the bottom and a band of sunlight cutting diagonally across the top, and something that had to be some part of the landing module but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know.

  “I don’t see it, Daddy,” Anna Page said, and Maggie echoed her, and then all the children were starting to whine that they couldn’t see. We couldn’t hear either, then, and all we could do was shush them and watch and listen more closely. Linda grabbed a box of cookies finally and said as long as they were quiet they could eat as many as they wanted.

  There was movement in one corner of the lighted slash, something blocking the sunlight right by the module. Brett leaned toward the television and touched the screen.

  “See that?” she said to the children. “That’s the . . .” Her voice faltered, and for a moment there was only the clean white of her glove touching the shadow of the screen, her eyes pooling and blinking.

  Watching her, I wondered about her gloves for the first time in months; they’d just become part of her to me, and yet there was something more than that, really. There was some sadness under those gloves that none of us—not even Linda—would ask her to revisit just to satisfy our curiosity. I suppose we all felt she’d share it with us in time.

  “That’s the astronaut coming out onto the moon,” she managed, and Chip pulled her to him then, and linked his fingers with hers.

  “It is?” Anna Page said, disappointment thick in her voice.

  Lee touched a lock of hair under her hat. “The camera has to send the signal all the way from the moon, punkin,” he said. “It isn’t as good a picture as the Saturday-morning cartoons because it has to travel all that way.”

  Linda’s Julie said, “And it’s real. Cartoons aren’t real.” And we were all silent then, absorbing that. This was real.

  The camera angle changed somehow, which made me wonder where this camera was until Chip explained they’d just flipped the image. We were seeing it right side up now, and closer in. And Houston said, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now,” and then I could see that the thing cutting off the sunlight could maybe be Neil Armstrong’s legs making their way toward the moon. You couldn’t see much, though. You couldn’t see his body or his head. Just darkness at the top of the screen.

  “These guys need to do a stint at film school,” Jeff said.

  In the laughter that followed, Chip pulled Brett closer, her cropped red hair brushing against his black glasses as he whispered something in her ear. That should be you, I imagined him saying. In a more perfect world, Brett, that would be you stepping out onto the moon.

  Houston said something about shadow photography, and the camera view changed again, and there was Neil Armstrong—ghostlike, yes, but you could see the ladder and the whiteness of a huge-headed man in a white space suit, with a big pack strapped to his back. You could make out that he was turning toward the camera, and looking down, and he was talking about the surface, saying it was like powder and the feet of the landing module had sunk into it, but not too far. Then he said he was stepping off “the lam,” and it was just as Maggie was saying, “Daddy, he’s standing on a baby sheep?” that Armstrong finally said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Not until then. His words were all crackling, too, and I wondered if that was the transmission or if the tears were welling in his eyes the same as they were in mine.

  “Mama, why are you crying?” Anna Page said, and I saw that Kath’s eyes were tearing, too, and Linda’s were moist, and Brett was wiping whole streams from her cheeks.

  And while Neil Armstrong was talking about his footprints, how he only sank into the surface a little bit and he had no difficulty moving around, Lee put his arm around Kath and pulled her toward Anna Page and him. “It’s the first time in history, Anna Page, that man has his feet down on something other than this earth or what was made on this earth,” he said. “You watch closely, punkin, this is something to remember your whole long life.”

  The children, tiring of a picture that was often too wavy or too dark or too fuzzy to make out anything much, began dropping off to sleep. They missed Neil Armstrong half running, half floating across the moon’s surface, the sunlight reflecting off his space suit so he looked like the Holy Ghost himself. They missed Buzz Aldrin’s joke about being sure not to lock the door on his way out of the module, and the plaque we come in peace for all mankind, and the raising of the flag—not so much a raising as an opening and planting, the Stars and Stripes sticking straight out as if hung from a taut laundry line.

  “No wind on the moon,” Brett explained, “so they ran a pole through the top of the flag, to make it look good.”

  And it did. It looked beautiful, catching the sun, the stripes so clear even the children could have seen they were watching an American flag being placed on the moon. Then President Nixon was saying the heavens had now become a part of our world, and for once all the people of the world were truly one, which seems a little sappy now, and, yes, it was Nixon, but he wasn’t Watergate Nixon yet, and it was moving. It was.

  As the children slept, we watched the shadow men in their space suits floating back and forth across the screen, taking soil samples and running experiments, negotiating their way back into the capsule, closing the hatch again, all while the camera left on the surface of the moon sent back footage of an unwavering flag posted in front of the silent ship. I remember thinking about Michael Collins, the command module pilot who was destined to become the trivia question, the final Jeopardy! even though he spent the same eight days in space that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did. Not even able to watch these first steps on the moon that could not have been made without him. I wondered how they chose who did what; if it was alphabetical he got a bad draw, even as a C. I imagined him still orbiting in the spaceship, alone on the dark side of the moon, and how very happy he must be to see the earth rise over the moon’s surface each time he came back around.

  BRETT ARRIVED at the park by car that next Wednesday morning, and she got out on the passenger side, without Sarah in tow. She grinned bigger than you’d think that little-pout mouth of hers would go as she approached us, holding her very pregnant belly with one hand and four copies of her manuscript with the other. We launched into a big round of congratulations, but she interrupted us, saying she couldn’t stay. “I’ve been in labor since four this morning,” she said. “Chip will burst a vessel if I don’t hand you these and march right back to the car.”

  She had the baby forty-three minutes later, a seven-pound, four-ounce boy: Mark Edward Tyler. He was the easiest baby there ever was to spot in the nursery, even through the fingerprint-smudged glass. That child had more hair than any newborn you’ve ever seen, the same remarkable strawberry blond as his mother’s. It would all fall out over the next week, leaving him bald as the moon before the Apollo astronauts planted their unflappable flag. But it would grow bac
k improbably thicker, a portent of things to come.

  THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, Brett arrived pushing little Mark in a baby buggy while trying to hold Sarah’s hand—she’d insisted we meet to go over her manuscript even though she’d just had the baby. The novel was a mystery in which a female graduate student, Elizabeth, finds a dead body in the physics lab and, in the course of disentangling herself from suspicion, learns that she is adopted and that her birth mother is a research scientist at the university. But the improbability of that coincidence wasn’t even the biggest problem with the book, nor was the fact that only one credible suspect remained after page 42. The biggest problem was the protagonist, Elizabeth, who was, frankly, dull and unlikeable.

  We all started with what we liked about the manuscript: the Stanford campus setting, the science (which was surprisingly interesting), the way Elizabeth talked things out with her favorite lab rat. “Ratty! I loved Ratty!” Linda said. “If Elizabeth were half as likeable as Ratty—”

  “Y’all can laugh,” Kath said, cutting Linda off, “but I swear, Ratty reminded me of Brett’s brother in that thing she wrote about the marble machine.” And we all did laugh, but she was right, there was a certain charm the two characters shared.

  “It’s awfully good for a first draft, Brett,” Kath said. “A mighty good li’l mystery.”

  Brett, her watering eyes betraying her earlier insistence that this was just for fun, looked down at her gloved hands. “But it isn’t a first draft,” she said. “It’s a fourth or a fifth or a sixth draft, I don’t even know anymore. What is a draft, anyway?”

  Kath, not missing a beat, said it was great for a sixth draft as the rest of us sat there, trying not to look incredulous. A sixth draft?