The Weird Sisters (11 page)

We washed and dried in uneasy silence for a few minutes. Outside, the sounds of summer continued—the buzz of bees, shouts of children free from school, a sprinkler whisking in circles. It seemed wrong and harsh for there to be such happiness in the world at that moment.

“Is she going to die?” Bean asked uncertainly. Her voice shook a little, and she stared hard at the plate in her hand, watching the streaks of damp disappear into the air.

Rose snapped off the faucet. “Don’t say that. Don’t even say it. She’s going to be fine.”

“But . . .”

“Don’t.” Rose held up her hand, her fingers wrinkled and white from the water. She wouldn’t meet Bean’s eyes. “We can’t even think about it. It’s bad luck.”

Bean said nothing. She finished drying and put the last dishes away and then disappeared into the living room.

Rose went upstairs and peeked in the door to our parents’ room, looking at the dim shape of our mother lying on the bed. She was sleeping; Rose could hear the steady whisper of breath. When we were little and had nightmares, we would slip into our parents’ room and beg to sleep in their bed. Our mother rarely agreed to this, usually walking us back to our own beds and giving us a kiss as protection against the darkness. Now she only shifted slightly, her mouth falling open as she slept. Rose felt the urge to crawl into bed beside her. Instead she tiptoed back down the hall and down the stairs. Bean had assumed her position on the sofa, a book held loosely between her fingers. On the floor beside her was a glass of water she’d tipped over.

An impotent fury caught in Rose’s throat. “Bean, look at what you’ve done.”

Bean bent her head slightly so she could see over the edge of the sofa. She lifted a hand enough to right the glass and then went back to her book.

Rose stomped into the kitchen and returned with a towel. Kneeling, she dabbed at the water on the floor and then, less successfully, the rivulets of liquid already soaking into the edges of the rug.

“It’s just water, Rose. Relax.” Bean tugged at one of her nails with her front teeth. Having the acrylics removed had exposed the weakness of the nails beneath, and they constantly folded in on themselves, tearing down to the nail bed so the edges of her fingers were always bloody and sore.

“Water causes damage, Bean.” Rose finished mopping up and pushed herself to her feet. She restrained herself from throwing the wet towel onto Bean’s perfectly made-up face in order to prove her point.

Bean looked up at Rose and then waved her hand dismissively. “Move along,” she said. She hooked one leg over the top of the sofa and went back to her book.

“You are impossible. Do you have any idea what life would be like without me here?”

“It’d be a hell of a lot quieter, that’s for damn sure,” Bean said. She bit another nail, tearing the white off, and spat it into the air.

“I do everything around here. Everything.”

Bean sighed and rested her book on her chest. “Which is precisely the way you like it. Now, do you want to talk about what’s really bothering you, or would you prefer to shut the hell up and let me read?”

“What’s really bothering me is the way you just come back here and take everything for granted, like we’re here to serve you. You get to go out all night and no one says a word. And I’m sick of running around like Cinderella, cleaning up your messes.”

“No one’s stopping you from going out, Rose. Go wherever you want. You’re free and twenty-one.”

“Right. So I’ll just go off to England and live with Jonathan. How’s that?”

“Fine with me,” Bean shrugged. She lifted up her hair so it spread out over the arm of the sofa, like Ophelia drowned in the brook.

Rose sat down, the wet towel still clutched in her hand. “Don’t be silly. I have to be here to take care of Mom.”

“They have people for that, you know. I like to call them doctors.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay. Then how’s this?” Bean sat up, putting her book down beside her. Rose winced at the broken spine, the leaves of the book spread out like a bird’s wings. “How’s about you stay here until Mom is through her treatment, and then you go to England and wherever else Jonathan wants to go?”

“I have a job. I can’t just leave it.”

“Does Jonathan get a salary?”

“Of course.”

“Do they put him up in housing?”

“In Oxford they are, but in the next position, who knows?”

“Then you don’t need to work.”

“This may shock you, Bean, but not everyone works exclusively for the money.”

“Of course they do. That’s why they call it work. If we got paid just to sit around and look cute, they’d call it something else entirely.”

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a housewife. I don’t want to be like . . .” Rose censored herself, but the sentence was hanging in the air and Bean pounced.

“You don’t want to be like Mom? This may shock
you,
Rose, but I’m fairly certain Mom could have worked if she wanted to. It’s not like Dad was keeping her in some kind of pre-suffrage dungeon. Besides, I’m not suggesting that you never work again. I’m just saying that you don’t have to worry about a job right this very second. Lots of people would love to be in that position. Me, for one.”

“I don’t exactly see you running right out to get a job.”

“I’m gearing up for it.”

Rose huffed and looked out the window. The afternoon was gathering into gray clouds. There was a storm coming. She pressed her hands together and then pulled at each finger, stretching the muscles, while her mind played over the future. Planning to leave after our mother was better would make it look like she didn’t care, like she saw our mother’s brush with death as an inconvenient delay to her own plans. What kind of daughter—what kind of person—thought like that? And what if she planned to leave and then our mother didn’t get better? What if it turned out that she was sitting around, plane ticket in hand, waiting for our mother to die?

“What if she doesn’t make it?”

“You just said it was bad luck to say it.”

“I know. But now I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Don’t get so dramatic, Rosie. I was just saying. It’s not going to happen.” Bean turned back to her book.

Rose fidgeted with her fingers nervously for another minute, until Bean put down her book and looked at her, long and hard. It wasn’t like Rose to look ill at ease, and it made her a little nervous.

“What will I do? What will I do if she dies?” Rose asked, and she spoke so quietly the words seemed to disappear in midair.

Bean sighed. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d quit your job and go to England to be with Jonathan. Do you see the theme here?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Then you’re out of excuses. Whatever happens with Mom or doesn’t means absolutely nothing to you in terms of your future.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, sister mine, that the only thing keeping you here is you.”

FIVE

I
n Rose’s dream, she was sitting in the backseat of Jonathan’s car as it moved down the highway, the trees whipping by in a blur of green. There was no front seat and no driver, and she scrabbled with her fingers, reaching desperately forward, trying to grab the steering wheel and the pedals. When she looked out the windshield at the road ahead, it was dark and blurred. The car sped faster and faster, and Rose reached forward again, her hands still falling in empty space, no matter how she twisted her body.

A clap of thunder so enormous it rattled the windowpanes jerked her awake, and she sat up in bed, clasping her hand to her pounding heart. Calm, Rose, calm, she thought to herself, breathing in and out slowly, in through her nose, out through her mouth, deep yogic breaths that stilled her mind and brought her heart back from its racetrack speed.

Rose had taken yoga classes for over a year, from a gentle woman about our mother’s age, with shining silver hair and a body both soft and limber, combining a grandmother’s warmth with an athlete’s musculature. The instructor, Carol, seemed so at home in herself that it had made Rose feel more comfortable with her own body, which she hid in billowy T-shirts, hanging to her knees over loose-fitting sweatpants, despite the way they restricted her movements.

Our mother’s ancestors were Russian, sort of, from that small area of Poland that had been annexed so many times by so many different conquerors the residents had entirely ceded their nationality and stopped bothering with any such appellations. So we were what you might call sturdy peasant stock, built for farming, for breeding, for work. Rose en-vied Carol’s slim-hipped elegance as the instructor shifted from pose to pose, but she found, in time, the legs she had hated for so long allowed her to do much the same things. This period had coincided with the most passionate lovemaking she had ever had, with anyone, even Jonathan, and she wondered sometimes if she had agreed to marry him partly because of the yoga. It had made her feel beautiful, luxuriant, pliant.

But then a few months ago Carol had announced that she and her husband were retiring, to Florida of all places—and the new instructor, a bleached blonde named Heidi, who wore kitten heels with her yoga pants, terrified Rose. Heidi had come in for the first class and turned the heat up fifteen degrees, so Rose found herself red-faced and sweating, clumsy in a space where she had learned to feel so lovely. As Heidi moved around the class, correcting Rose’s stances repeatedly, Rose’s heart had begun to pound, and she gasped for air. Finally, she had grabbed her mat and stuffed her feet, swollen from the heat, into her flip-flops.

“Leaving, dear?” Heidi had asked, coming up beside Rose, her hands icy on Rose’s fevered skin. She looked at Rose pityingly, as though she had known Rose would not be able to make it through.

Rose nodded, blinking back tears, and escaped.

She had not gone back since. She could feel the difference in her body, the tightness in her muscles where there once had been flexibility, the hitches in her heartbeats becoming more frequent, but Rose had not even considered going back to such a painful failure.

But the breathing still worked, she noticed, checking her heart with her palm once more before she pushed the sheets away, sliding her legs over the side of the bed and sitting for a moment before pushing herself away from the protesting mattress. Her knees popped, an auditory reminder of her unstoppable slide toward forty, and she moved gingerly until the muscles warmed. She padded down the hallway to the stairs. Our parents would sleep through any noise, she was fairly sure of that, but she didn’t want to wake Bean, asleep next door.

She was nearly to the kitchen, guided by the light our mother always left on over the sink, when she heard the sound of the screen door slapping open, and then the rattle of the doorknob. Her heart pounding again from a shot of adrenaline, Rose leaped inside the kitchen door, peering out at the interloper. Outside, a car gunned its engine and tore into the night, the sounds nearly buried under another clap of thunder.

The light from the lamps at the foot of the front steps illuminated Cordy from behind, transforming her into a shadowy outline smelling of rain and wet grass.

“Hey, Rose,” Cordy said, stepping inside as though it were a perfectly natural thing for her to arrive home at two o’clock in the morning, and just as natural for Rose to be standing by the door to greet her. Last time we had seen Cordy, her hair was black and she wore a pleated school uniform skirt with a slew of rotating band T-shirts. Tonight her hair was back to our deep brown. She wore a white peasant top with puffed short sleeves, spattered with thick raindrops, and a swirling patchwork skirt. She held a battered duffel bag in one hand, a guitar case covered with stickers in the other, a neo-hippie sent from Central Casting.

So there it was. We were all home again, just as Rose had wished. And though she’d regret that wish frequently in the future, at least the house wasn’t so still around her.

Rose sighed.

“Hello, Cordy,” Rose said. Cordy kicked the door shut, mindless of the noise, and dropped her bag and the guitar, kicking off her sandals and then stepping over them to give Rose a hug. Rose embraced our youngest sister. She could feel Cordy’s shoulder blades like wings through the thin, wet cotton of her shirt. The smell of her sweat clung to Rose’s nightgown when she pulled back. “I was just about to get something to eat. Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” Cordy agreed, walking into the kitchen. One of our mother’s perpetual cardigans hung over the back of the closest chair, and Cordy grabbed it, pulling it around her body for warmth. “This rain is crazy. We could hardly see on 301.”

“Who drove you?” Rose asked.

“A friend of mine. Max. He’s on his way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” The way she said this made it unclear as to whether she meant Max was headed to Cleveland to visit the Cheopsian building, or if she expected he would be inducted one day. Cordy flung open the refrigerator door, her features thin and drawn in the bluish bright of the light inside. “So I said, you know, my sister’s getting hitched, wanna drive me?”