The Wednesday Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

was putting my kids down for their naps that first week, I supposed, for a doctor’s appointment or some father-daughter something, because Ally and Carrie—a quiet little thing with Ally’s dark wavy hair, her chipmunk cheeks—arrived at the park again the next Wednesday, and the next.
    Within minutes, Kath and Linda and Brett had arrived at my door, too, and we were settling into my family room with potato chips and sour-cream dip and popcorn made in a pan on the stove, and with gin and tonics or vodka gimlets or, for Kath, a sidecar—not that far evolved from Anna Page’s bourbon straight out of the bottle. We felt awkward outside the familiar surroundings of the park, though, unwilling even to take the first chip from the bowl. We started talking about who we would root for, with Bert Parks not even on the TV yet.
    What
was
on was special coverage from outside the pageant, hundreds of women picketing like autoworkers without a contract: girls in tidy dresses or skirts and blouses, wearing shoes like we wore, their hair styled like ours. Four hundred women walking up and down the Atlantic City boardwalk, from Florida and from Wisconsin and from California just like the girls inside putting on their makeup and gowns, except that these girls were carrying signs and some were swinging bras like lassos and chanting slogans as they dumped mops and steno pads and girdles into a big trash can.
    “Can you imagine not wearing . . .” Ally asked, not saying
brassiere,
a word she spoke aloud only in the lingerie section, and even then she blushed.
    I thought of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
in that black dress with the long black gloves, the five-strand pearls and the tiara in her hair, the extravagant cigarette holder. That dress would have needed a strapless bra, and why would she bother, with nothing for a bra to hold up? And in the movie she’d left her husband behind forever to start a wild life in New York, and I’d loved her for it, and I’d sort of imagined doing something that dramatic myself. Still, I couldn’t imagine doing what these real women were doing, leaving their husbands or boyfriends for one day to try to point out that women weren’t just for gawking at.
    Linda pulled an issue of
McCall’s
from my coffee table and, keeping an eye on the protesters and awaiting the start of the pageant, flipped to an article about the balance of power in marriages. “So here’s the fifty-dollar question,” she said. “Are you the dominator or the dominatee?” And we leaned over the magazine, reading “The Sexual Wilderness” together, glad of the excuse to ignore those girls on the TV.
    “The spouse who handles the money has the power?” Brett said. “That’s definitely me.”
    “I’m the wily old gal who foists the money worries off on her husband,” Kath said.
    “The more powerful spouse chooses the friends?” I said. “Danny wouldn’t know a friend if he announced himself on the evening news.”
    As we laughed, we all glanced at the TV. The camera was focused on a sign showing a brunette in a cowboy hat, her naked back and bottom marked into sections with labels like rib and loin and chuck, like a cow about to be butchered. break the dull steak habit, the sign read. The protester carrying it looked young and innocent in her paisley shift, square-necked and falling just above her knee like the one I wore that night, but still the newscaster—his beer gut hanging over his trousers—looked down on her as if
she
were the disgusting one.
    We all turned away, back to the magazine. “The one who takes the car to be repaired?” Ally said. “That’s an odd sign of power, if you ask me.”
    “Okay, so which kind of marriage are you in?” Linda asked. “A, ‘The Minimal-Interaction Marriage’? That’s where you and your hubby basically don’t speak.” She tipped her head as if to say
Go ahead, admit it, that’s you.
“Or B, ‘The Peripheral-Husband