Read Online The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton - Free Book Online
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
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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
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
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