Free The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Page B

Josephine—” I protested.
    “Those nuns ought to have more sense than to meddle in people’s lives.” He stood and smashed the new cigarette into the ashtray. “If God wanted women to have a say in anything, He’d have made them priests,” he said. “Now, that’s enough.”
    And when I’d gone back to Sister Josephine, the old nun had sighed and started talking about “honoring thy Father,” which I was pretty sure meant God, not my dad. “God will have a different path for you, then, child,” she said. “He doesn’t make children like you without some purpose.” Which I can see now she meant as encouragement, but at the time I was left feeling an obligation to do something noble to honor whatever these gifts were that God had given me, with no idea what in the world it might be that I
could
do, much less how to start.
    In the park with Linda and Brett and Kath that morning, I just sat there watching Maggie for a long moment, imagining her in a cap and gown approaching my old desk at the university, résumés in hand.
    “What do you think, Kath?” Linda said. “You haven’t said anything yet.”
    Kath stared at Linda for a moment, as if trying to remember where she was. “Maybe Dritha’s spine is just a little catawampus, Frankie?” she said finally. “You might could pull her up a touch straighter, give her just a pinch more backbone?”
    “It could be something as simple as . . . she’s dishwater blond, like you are, right?” Brett said. “But you’re not just dishwater blond, you have this wildness to your hair that can’t be tamed. Give her that, too. Make her one of those ‘round characters’ Forster likes to talk about, ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way.’”
    “Exactly,” Linda agreed. “If your Dritha is really sacrificing her dreams for the sake of her brothers, we need to see her sticking a black-gloved fist in the air and—”
    “
That
wasn’t sacrifice, that was radical trash!” I said. A little too loudly, I’m afraid. Mothers around the park turned to stare. Funny how we do that, how when we’re losing control of our emotions about one thing, we pop off over something else.
    When I look at that Olympics photograph now—of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in that black-power salute—it looks so innocuous, but I sure didn’t see it that way then. Those two athletes standing stocking-footed on the Olympic awards podium, thrusting black-gloved fists in the air and bowing their heads as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in their honor—it scared the hell out of me, as it did much of the world. That’s what I’d felt as I’d watched them, before my emotions got all tangled up with my writing: scared as hell. You’d have thought from the world’s reaction that those two boys had brought machine guns up to that podium. Those two young men, giving up their own moment of triumph to draw attention to the plight of their race. And do you know what Tommie Smith was doing while he was standing on that gold medal podium? He was praying to God.
    We still talk about that moment sometimes, and I think I understand better now than I did then. I can understand being so frustrated with the lot you’re dealt that you turn in a direction you never imagined, you explode. That’s what happened to me that day in a small way, what would happen to Ally with Linda and the Tylandril three years later, and to Linda the week we didn’t call. It’s what happened to Kath in a bigger way the next Halloween, and I sure understood it in her, I might have done exactly what she ended up doing—and I might have ended up
killing
Lee since my temper is, on the whole, more capricious. Sometimes you have to stand up for your own dignity. And those boys didn’t do anything violent themselves that I ever heard of. They just stood up and said what is wrong is wrong and, as Linda said even then, they sacrificed their futures in the bargain. They were banned from Olympic competition for