The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Read Free Book Online

being a young, blond athlete, more cute than beautiful. “I’m so glad,” Judith Ann Ford gushed from under her crown. “I feel like it’s a breakthrough.” And something made me shift uneasily in my paisley dress. Maybe it was the way she spoke or her silly flipped-up hairstyle, or maybe it was that protester’s paisley dress or the bra strap cutting into my own shoulder, or maybe it was knowing Brett had wanted to be an astronaut and Linda wanted to be a writer even still—I don’t know. But for some reason I couldn’t shake the image of the naked woman on the poster, the stark black capital letters written on her skin: ROUND and RIB and RUMP.

I COMMANDEERED the picnic table nearest the playground the following Wednesday, the poem that had seemed so remarkably brilliant that morning before anyone else was awake already losing its luster inside my purse. I brushed away the dried leaves and pulled the worst of the splinters from the tabletop, and I was setting out a big thermos of coffee and a plate of cookies when Kath arrived, defiantly empty-handed, followed by Ally, less defiantly so. I didn’t confess to them the existence of my poem—not even after Linda arrived admitting to a few paragraphs and Brett came bearing an entire first chapter. “A whole chapter!” we said more or less in unison. Linda didn’t even give her a hard time about the fact that it was a mystery.
    “Really, there is no possibility I could read it aloud, though,” Brett said.
    Linda almost single-handedly got the kids squared away, no small task; Anna Page was back in school, a big second-grader, leaving us nine under-five-year-olds to settle in the sandbox with bowls and measuring cups and sifters. “If everyone is good,” Linda promised them, “Maggie and Davy’s mommy will get Popsicles for us before we go.” “
    “Before lunch?” Jamie asked. Or maybe it was Julie.
    We poured coffee and set to work on Brett then, nudging and cajoling her to read. Even Kath and Ally, despite their resistance to Linda’s bludgeoning us all into writing, were dying of curiosity.
    “I couldn’t even read it to my mother,” Brett insisted.
    “You couldn’t read it to your
mother
?” Linda said.
    “Could you?”
    There was a stunned silence, Brett’s bow lips forming an
O
as she remembered: while the rest of our teenaged selves were struggling for turf with our moms, Linda was making her own after-school snack in an empty house.
    “I couldn’t imagine reading anything to my mom either,” I said. “It would be like standing naked in front of her, waiting for my flaws to be called out.” I looked to Maggie on the swings (the first to abandon the sandbox), wondering if my mom would even
want
to read what I wrote.
    Though she would,
I thought. It was my father who would have considered my writing foolish.
    “I brought a poem,” I confessed. “But I just can’t read it.”
    Linda tipped the bill of her cap against the shifting sun. “Some writers we are.”
    She suggested we could just write instead, and while Kath and Ally were still balking I ran back to my house for paper and pens—actually three decent ballpoints, one respectable pencil, and an eraserless stub of a chewed-up pencil that was the only other writing utensil I could find besides crayons. But what exactly were we supposed to write? How could we come up with stories that hadn’t been written before?
    “Willa Cather says, ‘There are only two or three human stories,’” Brett said, “‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.’”
    Linda said her college writing professor had just dumped a bag of interesting things on the table and told them all to pick one and write about it for five minutes.
    “But we don’t have a bag of interesting things,” Ally said.
    “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Linda grabbed her purse and upended it over the picnic table, spilling a brown leather wallet with dollar bills sticking out