The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Page A

other’s sentences like they’d shared a room growing up and did not once lay masking tape across the floor to define their separate, inviolate territories like my brothers had. Jeff was neither as smart as Danny and Chip nor as charming as Lee (though he was plenty smart and plenty charming, don’t get me wrong), but he won hands down in the looks category—think Warren Beatty without a hint of arrogance—and he had that same restlessness that Linda had, too, that made you think the things that happened in the world would happen to him because he would make it so. I liked them all. Even Lee. I wished Ally and Jim had been able to come. I wondered if they were really at Ally’s sister’s house, and if they were having as good a time there as we were here.
    We sat on the floor, huddled around Linda’s new Zenith Giant-Screen color television—a twenty-three-inch screen set in an oak-veneer cabinet—watching the footage from Cape Canaveral for the longest time, beginning to despair of ever seeing a man step out of the landing module. When you remember it and you don’t think carefully about what you remember, you think Neil Armstrong just stepped down the ladder and onto the moon and said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but in reality it was just like “The Eagle has landed”: we listened to audio of them opening the door forever, feeling more tension than any thriller movie could ever deliver. We sat watching, and explaining things to the children: “No, honey, the man’s name isn’t Houston, but he’s in a city called Houston, Texas.” There was a picture finally, and the fellow in Houston said there was “a great deal of contrast” and it was upside down but they could make out a fair amount of detail. Even knowing it was upside down, though, I still couldn’t make out one speck of anything, just gray at the bottom and a band of sunlight cutting diagonally across the top, and something that had to be some part of the landing module but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know.
    “I don’t see it, Daddy,” Anna Page said, and Maggie echoed her, and then all the children were starting to whine that they couldn’t see. We couldn’t hear either, then, and all we could do was shush them and watch and listen more closely. Linda grabbed a box of cookies finally and said as long as they were quiet they could eat as many as they wanted.
    There was movement in one corner of the lighted slash, something blocking the sunlight right by the module. Brett leaned toward the television and touched the screen.
    “See that?” she said to the children. “That’s the . . .” Her voice faltered, and for a moment there was only the clean white of her glove touching the shadow of the screen, her eyes pooling and blinking.
    Watching her, I wondered about her gloves for the first time in months; they’d just become part of her to me, and yet there was something more than that, really. There was some sadness under those gloves that none of us—not even Linda—would ask her to revisit just to satisfy our curiosity. I suppose we all felt she’d share it with us in time.
    “That’s the astronaut coming out onto the moon,” she managed, and Chip pulled her to him then, and linked his fingers with hers.
    “It is?” Anna Page said, disappointment thick in her voice.
    Lee touched a lock of hair under her hat. “The camera has to send the signal all the way from the moon, punkin,” he said. “It isn’t as good a picture as the Saturday-morning cartoons because it has to travel all that way.”
    Linda’s Julie said, “And it’s real. Cartoons aren’t real.” And we were all silent then, absorbing that. This was real.
    The camera angle changed somehow, which made me wonder where this camera was until Chip explained they’d just flipped the image. We were seeing it right side up now, and closer in. And Houston said, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now,” and