The Weird Sisters (10 page)

“Give me a break,” Bean said. She walked to the wall and chalked her cue, running her hand with firm, practiced strokes along the wood, and then blowing gently, her lips puckered just so. The men ignored her. One of the girls gave her a pitying glance, and Bean caught her breath as she recognized the look—she’d been cocky enough to give it herself once or twice—of a woman so confident in the unearned beauty of youth that she could afford to feel sorry for someone like Bean. And instead of feeling superior, Bean felt as though she were in the wrong, as though she had tried too hard, was overdressed and overage and just plain over. Any fight that had been brewing in her burst into steam, like water thrown on a fire.

“We’ll teach you,” one of the men said, and Bean watched the way their chests puffed out, peacock-proud, at the thought that they could rescue these helpless women from the dangers of the vicious pool table.

There was a rustle of activity as the girls shimmied their way around, pretending that they didn’t know which end of the pool cue to use, and the men sidled into place beside them, swapping partners like they were all in some complicated square dance with an absent caller until everything settled down. One of the girls bumped into Bean, pushing her up against the edge of the table. “Should we just start over?” one of the guys asked.

Bean, who had been winning the last round with her partner, restrained the urge to whack him over the head with her pool cue. She looked to her partner to support her objection, but he looked like he was about ready to dive headfirst into the prodigious cleavage of one of the gigglers. Bean twisted her body, placed a hand on her toned hip. Nothing. She flipped her hair. No response. One of the men leaned over and whispered something in his partner’s ear. She shrieked with laughter and he tilted back, draining his beer bottle, looking pleased with himself. “Fine,” Bean said, and moved back from the table again. One of the men stepped forward and racked the balls.

She stepped back into the shadows, fumbling for her glass with one hand while she watched the show unfolding in front of her. She drained the shot, not even tasting the bitter liquid, but the buzz of the bar receded and her vision tunneled out. In the darkness by the wall, she felt as though she’d stepped off the stage straight into the audience. Because there was no doubt about it—this was really happening. She wasn’t waiting in the wings for her chance to come back onstage. She’d been replaced by a group of far inferior understudies—women who were louder and dumber and uglier and tackier, but who were inarguably younger.

The alcohol had turned sour in her stomach, and she realized she had to get herself home somehow now, since clearly she wasn’t going to get even the runt of that litter of men. Not tonight. And while Bean wasn’t usually one to walk away from a challenge, she could see the way this would play out, and she didn’t like the image of herself fighting with these silly girls over these worthless men. There was so little dignity left in her life, she didn’t want to waste it on them.

Since the men had paid her tab, Bean asked the bartender to call her a cab and went and waited in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching people drift out of the bar as the night grew old and the hope drained slowly out of it.

What did this mean for her? What do you do when you are no longer the one worth watching? When there are women less beautiful, less intelligent, less versed in the art of the game who nonetheless can beat you at it simply because of their birth date?

The cab pulled up and Bean flicked her cigarette into the gravel. She leaned her head against the window, cool from the air-conditioning against the heat of the night. What would she do now? Who could she possibly be if she was no longer Bianca? Who would want Bean? She felt cruelly sober, probably could have even driven home, and regretted that the last of her cash was going to go to pay for this ride, and that she’d have to ask someone to drive her back to the scene of this humiliation in the morning so she could get her car. A waste. Her whole night, her whole life. Wasted.

G
et up,” Rose ordered Bean. She kicked the foot of the bed for good measure.
“Fie, you slug-a-bed.”

“Jesus, Rose,” Bean moaned. “It’s not even seven. Shut the hell up.” A lock of hair caught on her dry lips and she shoved it out of the way before rolling over and burrowing back into her pillow.

“Mom has an appointment in Columbus at eight. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“Goody. Shove off.”

Rose’s nostrils flared and she put her fists on her hips, glaring down at the covers piled on top of Bean. She was clearly the one who’d turned the air-conditioning down so low last night, buried as she was under a feather duvet. In June. Out of pure meanness, Rose reached out and yanked the covers off of Bean, who howled in protest and yanked them back.

“Your mother is sick, you selfish brat. I told you last night we were going up for her next round of chemo, and you said you’d come.”

“I did?” Bean asked curiously, peering up at Rose’s glowering silhouette against the sunlight. It seemed remarkably unlike her to have agreed to something like that. And frankly, she didn’t remember it. Ever since the night at the bar, she’d been putting herself to sleep by drinking, and last night had gotten a little fuzzy after she’d polished off the bottle of wine she’d found in the refrigerator. Maybe she’d been in one of those happy drunk moods. Or more likely she’d agreed with whatever she assumed would make Rose shut up fastest.

“Yes, you did. Now if your highness would kindly get dressed, we can leave. It’s not bad enough I’ve got to get them ready, now I’ve got to worry about you, too?”

“I’m up,” Bean said, tossing aside the covers and sitting up. “I’m up.” The “bitch” at the end of the sentence was understood.

Our parents listened to the radio the entire drive, while Rose sat in the back and fumed, and Bean marinated in the fumes of alcohol seeping out of her skin and tried not to vomit. The toothpaste had helped with her breath, but not at all with the dehydrated headache of white wine the morning after, and the minty taste on her thick tongue made her throat feel clogged.

Inside the hospital, Rose led the parade. Bean veered off toward a coffee cart, Rose yanked her back in line. Bean watched our parents walking together, the stroll of the long-partnered. Our father is an inch shorter than our mother, his hair shot through with gray, his neatly clipped beard gone respectably salt and pepper. They always walk with her arm in his, his free hand darting up a thousand times an hour to adjust his glasses, their steps matched perfectly, knowing each other’s gait. But at the doors to the outpatient clinic, Rose halted and sent our parents through alone. As the doors slid open, our father turned and kissed our mother lightly below the line of the silk scarf on her forehead. She accepted the tenderness like a benediction.

“We’re not going in?” Bean asked. She’d found the end of a roll of mints in her purse and popped one, only slightly linty, into her mouth. She snapped it with a firm crunch and grinned at Rose’s frown.

“Only one visitor allowed. There’s not enough room. We’ll wait outside.”

“We can’t go in? Then what the hell did we come up here for?”

“Moral support.” Rose hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and about-faced toward the seating area.

“I could have been moral support at home,” Bean grumbled quietly, but she followed along, procuring coffee on the way. “How long does this take?” she asked, settling into the seat beside Rose.

Rose glanced at her watch. “We’ll be out of here by noon, I’d say. They have to check her blood first, and then the pharmacy has to put together the treatment, and then the chemo itself takes a few hours.” She produced a book from her bag and opened it pointedly.

“What are they going to do?”

“He reads to her, usually. You did bring a book, didn’t you?”

Bean reached into her purse and pulled out a thick paperback, the covers hanging by the barest edges. Rose nodded and turned to read her own book. Inside, our mother would sit in one of the forgivingly vinyl hospital recliners while a tube dripped benevolent poison into her veins, and our father perched his reading glasses on his nose and read to her.

How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages? Even at Coop, the tiny professor-run cooperative school we’d attended, a refuge of overly intellectual families, we were different. “What do you mean you don’t watch television?” one girl had asked Bean. She was new, her parents visiting professors who passed in and out in one calendar year, their sojourn so brief Bean cannot even remember the girl’s name. She remembers only the strange furrow to her brow, signifying the complete and utter incomprehension at the idea of a life without.

Except to us, it wasn’t a life without. It was a life with. For Rose, a life where, after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week’s reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air. One of her friends, a little girl with sunken blue eyes and parchment skin, laid her costume jewelry out in the same way, and even then, Rose had recognized the metaphor, standing in her friend’s white wicker bedroom, looking at the sparkle of paste, to her, dull by comparison. For Bean, a life where the glamour and individuality she sought was only the gentle flick of a page away. For Cordy, always slightly detached no matter how many people surrounded her, clucking for her attention, a life where she could retreat and be alone and yet transported.

In college, when it became clear people might think there were more interesting things to do than read, when it was apparent the only books appropriate for decorating one’s room were textbooks, weighty and costly, worth only their end-of-the-semester resale value, we were faced with a choice. Rose, who had never paid attention to the requirements of cool, carried on reading, her one concession choosing a single room after her first year, though this was probably more due to her penchant for cleanliness than for fear of being unmasked as a reader. Bean spent afternoons in the library, having discovered the classics room, filled with huge leather armchairs and ottomans, and walls lined with books into which she could escape. Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages. The difference between Rose and Cordy in this respect was that Rose, upon interruption, would fix the interrupter with a baleful glare, keep the book open, and reply curtly until a break in conversation allowed her reentry into the world in which she had been basking. Cordy would close the book, or slapjack it down on its open pages, and join the fun.

In New York, Bean chose the subway because of the reading time it afforded, free of questions but not of distractions—the frotteurs, the over-the-shoulder-readers, the panhandlers, the nosy parkers with opinions going spare—though Bean rapidly learned to dispatch each one of these with ease while keeping one eye moving down the page. She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. “A few hundred,” she said.

“How do you have
time
?” he asked, gobsmacked.

She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/ staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am
reading
!

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging.

This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.

I
t hadn’t really sunk in to Bean what our mother’s illness meant until the third day after the chemotherapy treatment. Everything hurt our mother. She was cold, but the blankets felt heavy and hard against her skin. The barest sliver of light coming through the curtains made her turn her head away, slicing through the delicate skin of her eyelids with scalpel-like precision. She was bored, but our reading to her made her head ache until she begged us to stop. Lonely, she would call to us to be with her, and then beg us to leave, as if our presence made it harder to breathe. She vomited and then asked for food, and then vomited again. Bean hovered uncertainly in the hallway outside our parents’ room, stepping in and then out again with each changing request.

“Is it always like this?” she asked Rose, who was standing at the sink doing dishes, handing them to Bean, who dried them ineffectively with a wet cloth and then put them vaguely where they belonged.

Rose shook her head, put her lips in a thin line. A soap bubble floated up from the sink and she jabbed it with a finger, watching it pop in the sunlight. “This is bad. I read that it gets worse throughout the treatment, but I didn’t expect this.”

“I hate not being able to do anything for her. How long will it last?”

“Usually it’s only a couple of days—maybe longer this time, since it’s so bad. I’ll have to call the doctor and ask. And then she’ll be tired for a few days longer than that. She’s got an appointment to get the size of the tumor rechecked, and then they’ll schedule the surgery.”