Read The Wednesday Sisters for Free Online

Marriage’? That means, near as I can tell, that you don’t need your man, you just need his
paycheck
!”
    “You’re skipping all the good ones, Linda,” Kath protested. Then to the rest of us, “Don’t you know she would?” She grabbed the magazine from Linda and started reading. “‘The Fun Marriage’? That’s you and Jeff, Linda. I have never heard anyone giggle together like you two. ‘The Colleague Marriage’? That’s you, Brett, ’cause you’re just as clever as Chip is, I’m sure, even if I never have met the fella. ‘The Nestling Marriage’—that sounds awfully nice, doesn’t it? That’s Ally and Jim, don’t y’all imagine?” (Ally blushed pink, an admission.) “And ‘The High-Companionship Marriage’? That’s got to be you and Danny, Frankie.”
    I faked a loud snore—it really did sound like the most boring of the alternatives.
    “Best friends!” Kath insisted. “You do everything together, talk over every little thing in this world.”
    “So in which bailiwick does your own marriage fall, Kath?” Brett asked.
    “Bailiwick?” Linda teased, because Brett was forever doing that, using bigger words than a situation called for.
    But Kath simply smiled her big-chinned smile, closed the magazine, and held it away from Brett’s reach, bobbing her head so agreeably that you might have thought her answer was E, “All of the good choices above”; you might have forgotten all about the Minimal-Interaction Marriage or the Peripheral-Husband one, you might simply have laughed like Brett and Ally and even Linda did when Kath answered, “Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
    The TV cut to inside finally, where Bert Parks was greeting us as if he were oblivious to the goings-on outside, though he’d refused to leave the building between the rehearsal and the show with all those protesters there. It does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Was he afraid of being hit in the face with a B cup? And maybe they burned those bras that evening, and maybe they burned Bert Parks in effigy, I’m not really sure because I, like him, pretty much just tried to dismiss them, tried to pretend they hadn’t taken this thing I loved watching and made me feel bad about wanting to watch.
    Kath, Brett, and I declared for the contestants from our home states, Miss Kentucky, Miss Massachusetts, and Miss Illinois, all of whom were beautiful and thin, of course, and not wearing eyeglasses. Ally chose Miss Hawaii, a cute brunette you could imagine wearing the same long, informal skirts Ally wore, the kind of girl who, in the movies, is completely overlooked by the male lead while he’s falling for the statuesque blonde but who ends up with the wedding ring. Only Linda refused to narrow her choices. “Not until the talent competition,” she said.
    “Talent? It’s a
beauty
contest!” Kath insisted, but Linda, her long blond hair not in a braid that night but brushed straight and pulled back with a headband so you could see her clear skin, just raised her straight eyebrows and looked at Kath with those multicolored eyes. No makeup, but you could easily picture her in one of those swimsuits, and it didn’t take much to imagine her in a pretty pink gown with a little mascara, her hair swept up in a bun—a chignon, Kath called it. Or maybe not a pink gown; for all Linda looked like a pink-gown girl, she wasn’t, not back then. And she was barely even looking at the gowns.
A gown, fine,
she seemed to be saying,
but can she sing? Can she play the piano?
Or—because this is Linda we’re talking about, right?—
can she hit a tennis ball like Billie Jean King or run as fast as Wilma Rudolph?
Though of course Wilma Rudolph was black and these girls were white and always had been. Laws barring nonwhites from participating were still firmly in place. There was to be a second pageant that night, though, for African-American girls—black girls, we called them—starting at midnight, after the “real” Miss