The Weird Sisters (15 page)

“You’re tracking grass all over the floor,” Rose said. She held her book open with her thumb.

Bean lifted one shoe, then the other, admiring the grass clippings decorating the bottom of her shoes like green tinsel. Then she looked pointedly at the floor, which was, while not exactly squalorous, not exactly clean, either. “I can’t see how it makes a difference,” she said, one well-plucked eyebrow raised.

Cordy watched us, eyes flicking back and forth, watching the Ping-Pong match. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and make her happy?” Cordy asked, ever the peacemaker. “What’s the big deal?”

Bean considered that for a moment and then slipped off her sneakers, flexing her toes wide within her white socks. She made an exaggerated seated bow.
“I willingly obey your command,”
she said.

“Thank you,” Rose replied, clipped. She turned back to her book, but we could see her heart wasn’t in it. Sometimes she didn’t know where it came from—she didn’t mean to be so harsh, only to help keep us in line. She wanted to apologize for her sharpness, but something in her heaved up and cut off the words.

“What’s wrong, Rosie-Posie?” Cordy asked, pulling herself up on the sofa and adopting Rose’s posture: knees bent, feet resting at her bottom. It was so like her, to call Rose something that our oldest sister would not have tolerated from anyone else. Cordy, the darling, the favorite.

“Nothing,” Rose sighed, still staring into her book.

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,”
our father murmured, turning a page in his book. Rose looked at him, surprised he was paying attention.

“Okay, fine. Something’s wrong, and I don’t want to talk about it,” Rose snapped, somewhat unceremoniously, and went back to her book.

“Where’d you go running?” Cordy asked, smoothly changing the subject.

“Oh, you know. Down by the creek, and then through town the back way.”

“By Saint Mark’s, right?” Cordy asked, a rhetorical exercise. She knew exactly where the path led. Its course had been our escape on Sunday mornings when we were younger. We’d tear off our tights and shoes, leaving them dangling like octopuses in our mother’s hands, and sprint off, a study in contrast between our pretty little girl dresses and bare, dirty feet. By the time we got home, our dresses might be stained with blackberry juice, or smeared with grass stains, but they were never torn, never beyond the mildest of repairs. We weren’t that foolish. And we became adept with stain removers from a young age, because our mother wasn’t about to put up with dealing with cleaning them herself.

“Yeah.” Bean shrugged carelessly.

“There’s a new priest, you know,” our father said, peering over his glasses at Bean. “Young man. Handsome. But more Benedick than Claudio, so it’s all right.”

“As long as he’s not more Don John than Benedick,” Cordy said, curling her dirty toes.

“He’s nice. I met him at the library the other day, and he was out in the garden today,” Bean said.

“Oooh,” Cordy said, leaning her book against her chest, now fully invested in the conversation. “Making friends with the locals. So is he cute?”

“You don’t trust my assessment?” our father asked, turning another page in his book.

“Of course I do,” Cordy soothed. “But I want to know if
Bean
thinks he’s cute. It’s a totally different thing.”

“Sure,” Bean said. “I guess. But he’s the vicar.”

“Oh, please. He’s not
dead,
” Cordy replied, and then, butterfly-minded, poked our father with her heel and changed the subject. “What happened to Father Cooke?”

“Put him out to pasture,” our father said.
“And toil’d with works of war, retired himself to
Arizona.
”

“How sad,” Cordy said wistfully.

“There’s nothing sad about it,” Rose interjected. “The man’s retired, playing golf in Arizona. What’s sad about that?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But in a way it is sad that he doesn’t have a congregation or anything anymore, you know? Wouldn’t that be hard for him?”

“I imagine it’s a relief. Listening to other people’s problems day in and day out for years? Having to work every weekend?” Rose smiled at her own sacrilege.

“And never getting invited anywhere except if people want a vicar handy. All the pretty ladies and not a drop to drink,” Bean added. We all recoiled at the thought of the ancient Father Cooke and any romantic exploits in which he might have been involved. “Or not,” she said.

“Father Aidan writes excellent sermons,” Rose said, turning the tide of the conversation back. “I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate to be talking about whether he’s cute or not.”

“Rose, relax. We’re not going to buy him a hooker,” Bean said. “We’re just talking.”

“Besides, church is way more fun when the vicar is cute,” Cordy said.

“How would you know? We only ever had Father Cooke,” Bean said.

“I have an imagination,” Cordy said indignantly. “Besides, it’s not like Saint Mark’s is the only church I ever went to.”

“And in your vast ecclesiastical survey, were there lots of hot reverends?”

“Enough,” Cordy said mysteriously, and went back to reading. Bean picked up her shoes and went upstairs to shower, leaving a trail of grass on the carpet. Rose looked after her thoughtfully. She never had been able to tell how much of Bean’s boy-craziness was real, and how much of it was artifice, like her makeup and perfectly coordinated outfits. Because she certainly couldn’t be setting her cap for Father Aidan, could she?

Because Bean? Dating our minister? That was the most ridiculous idea Rose had ever heard.

SEVEN

T
he best part of being in a relationship, for Rose, was that Jonathan was the first person she saw when she woke up, and the last before she fell asleep. This love had a nice symmetry to it, and before she fell asleep. This love had a nice symmetry to it, and she found it insulating; the gentle rhythm of morning chores and evening relaxation with him closed a gentle circle for her, cocooned her from the world.

But his departure had ruined the safety of their communion for her. You have to understand, our parents had raised us as good feminists, we are aware of the whole woman/man/fish/bicycle equation, but Rose was different. Rose needed security, stasis, and she had grown used to Jonathan as part of that so quickly. Some days she felt torn inside because he wasn’t there, as though it were the fact of his absence, rather than his absence itself, that offended her so. It was curious to us, who had so long enjoyed the benefits of Rose’s strength, had leaned on her for everything from ensuring our socks matched to keeping the secret of exactly how late we snuck out of the house to providing a sweet shoulder to cry on when things went horribly wrong, that Rose would need her own rock. But that was why he loved her better than we did—we loved her so much for her strength that we could never let her be weak, and he loved both parts of her equally.

Some nights, Rose ignored their scheduled call and set her alarm for the wee small hours, slipping it under her pillow so she wouldn’t wake anyone else. When the beeping jarred her from whatever pale sleep she had tempted her body into, she got up and padded downstairs, the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the darkest of midnights, to call Jonathan, dialing the extended series of numbers and listening to the strange double buzz of the transatlantic ring.

He didn’t usually head into the lab until nine or so, and if she timed it right, she could catch him as he lingered over his coffee, a tradition she respected him for maintaining in the face of all that infernal tea-drinking. Rose found the time difference extremely inconvenient—if he called before he went to bed, or when he got home, it was the middle of her day, her mind occupied with the thousand things she came up with to keep herself busy during the long, slow stretch of summer. The darkness of early morning made the conversations magical, sealed on either side by sleep, her tone low and hushed, both of them still in the cradle of home before the violation of the world penetrated the steady pace of their souls.

“’Allo,” he said, in the ridiculous Cockney imitation he reserved (she hoped) for answering the phone when he knew it was her.

“Good morning,” she whispered, smiling at the warmth that spread through her, unbidden, when she heard his voice.

“How’s my favorite midnight caller?” Jonathan asked. He had sent pictures of his tiny student rooms, the kitchen with its funny half-sized refrigerator, the dining table against the wall of the living room, the bedroom only a nook, an afterthought between the bathroom and the back of the worn sofa. She liked to picture him there, the dull English sun pouring its syrupy way across the carpet, catching the glints of gold in his eyelashes. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Never can,” Rose said. “How’s the weather?”

“Gray with a chance of charcoal,” he said. “What’s it like there? Disgustingly humid?”

“As ever.”

“Have you thought at all about coming over here?”

“For a visit?”

He paused. “Sure. For starters.”

“Jonathan, I can’t move to England.”

There was silence across the lines. She could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, a gesture of frustration she had always found curiously familiar until she realized our father had the same habit. Hello, Freud. “Okay. Fine. Not to stay, then. Just for a visit. When can you come?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Mom’s surgery is coming up.”

“That’s great news.”

Rose furrowed her brow. “I don’t see how.”

“It’s great news that the tumor has shrunk enough that they can operate. Not great that it all has to happen in the first place. So after the surgery, maybe you could come over for a while. A few weeks?”

“Weeks?” Rose squeaked. Her mind was instantly filled with the potential disasters we could wreak without her around to take us firmly in hand. “I don’t know about weeks.”

“Why not? If Cordy and Bean are going to be around, and you don’t have to be back until the end of August . . .”

“I’ll think about it,” Rose said doubtfully. If all went well, our mother could be up and around within three weeks. But if it didn’t go well? And even if it did, who would go grocery shopping and pay the bills and schedule our mother’s doctors’ appointments and the dozens of other things we would need to do to care for her while she recovered?

We would, we whispered to her. And we’d be just fine.

“Okay,” Jonathan said, resigned.

“I miss you,” she whispered, suddenly, passionately.

He laughed, warm and low, surprised by her uncharacteristically free expression. “I miss you, too. You’re lovely to let me go do this.”

Rose shrugged, the phone brushing against her shoulder. “What would I do? Say you couldn’t go? That you had to stay here with me and my crazy sisters?”

“They’ve been upgraded to crazy already? I would have thought the reunion would have lasted a few more days.”

This, unexpectedly, made her feel guilty. “It’s just . . . they’re the same, you know? I think Bean’s trying to pick up Father Aidan.”

This time Jonathan’s laugh was loud and delighted. “That’s a riot. Well, at least it’ll give those biddies in the vestry something to argue about besides who gets to make up the collection plate schedule.”

“You don’t think it’s . . . inappropriate?”

“Father Aidan can take care of himself. And Bean only does it for the attention, you know that.”

“Of course I know it. That’s what drives me crazy. And Cordy? My parents will support her forever while she figures out what she wants to do. I don’t know why she can’t just settle down.”

“She’s the baby,” Jonathan said, as though that explained everything.

Rose thought of Lear, of the way he had kept Cordelia as his own, staving off the threats of old age with his tenuous connection to her youth. “You’re so lucky you and your siblings get along,” she sighed. She already knew that if she and Jonathan had children, they would have only one. None of this cruel bait and switch our parents had pulled on her, setting her up to be the One and then going and having two more.

“Ah, but I never got to boss anyone around,” he teased. “Where would you be without all those years of acting as general?”

“I’d probably have a less intense antacid habit.”

“Let it go,” Jonathan said. “It’s not your responsibility to take care of them anymore. Let them take care of themselves. People can change.”

After she hung up, she sat on the floor in the kitchen, the linoleum cool against her bare calves where the nightgown had ridden up, and listened to the quiet hum of the house asleep—the purr of the refrigerator as it cycled, the air conditioner kicking on and off, keeping the temperature steady, the occasional aged creak of wood settling. Was it true, what he said? Could people change? Or would we remain this way, forever and ever? Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the way things were Supposed to Be? There were days, yes, when Rose felt as though she had been on this earth forever, since the dinosaurs at least, but she knew she was young. It seemed so early to have signed her whole life away, but it seemed so exhausting to change anything.