The Weird Sisters (20 page)

Bean was really the only one who wouldn’t have seemed out of place at an actual prom. Her dress, which would have looked ridiculous on anybody but her, was silver lamé with a sweetheart neckline and a wide, flouncing skirt straight out of Tara, if Scarlett O’Hara had been partial to silver lamé. Her date, one Nick Marchese, wore a stiff, rented tuxedo with a silver lamé bow tie and cummerbund. They would have made
Seventeen
proud.

Even Rose came by, standing on the corner halfway between the kids on the dance floor and the unneeded chaperones, perched like fat chickens on the edge of the porch. And though Rose is not prone to saying things like this, she will indeed tell you that night held magic: the way the paper lanterns we had made, decorated with Chinese characters someone had been studying, swayed in the breeze, the way the false stars of the light strings twinkled below the real stars, giving the impression that she could have reached up and held the light of a thousand years ago in her hands. She stood for a while, watching Cordy’s serious, studious waltz with Dr. Ambrose, Bean and Nick’s stiff-armed rocking, and, most wistfully, Lyssie and Daniel’s chastely impassioned repetitive circle. When Bean and Nick turned again, she caught Rose’s eye, and they paused for a moment. And then Rose smiled at Bean, showing in that simple expression how proud she was of the way we had transformed that undernourished scrap of yard into something so beautiful, and Bean smiled back, and then Rose disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind the enchantment for her cruelly cinder-blocked dormitory.

W
hen we got to the hospital, our father was sitting in one of the chairs, reading a wide-spined tome, while our mother poked suspiciously at a tray of food. She looked sallow and tired, the blush we so love in her cheeks still absent.

“Ah, it is my
dog-hearted daughters,
” our father said, barely looking up from his book. His clothes were rumpled, stray hairs crawled up his cheeks from his beard.

“A decrepit father takes delight to see his active child do deeds of youth,”
Cordy shot back.

“That’s a sonnet,” our father retorted.

“No one ever said sonnets didn’t count,” Cordy said.

“Ignore him,” our mother said, and her voice sounded reedy and thin. “Come give me a kiss.”

“Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,”
Cordy singsonged. “Is that better, Daddy?”

Our father humphed again and went back to his book. We went over to our mother’s bed and gave her kisses. Rose hugged her tightly, and our mother squeaked at the pressure. Bean gave her a whisk of a kiss, like a broom sweeping clean, and Cordy climbed into bed on her good side and curled up in the crook of our mother’s arm, cat-like.

“How was traffic? You’re here late,” our mother said, shifting gently, leaning back against the pillows, white as her skin.

“Bean drove,” Cordy said. “We got here lickety-split.”

“We went dress shopping for Rose,” Bean said, leaning up against the wall, her legs crossed, fashion-model.

“Find anything?” Our mother reached up to scratch her scalp, which had begun to itch as her hair grew back in, and winced at the stretch of the skin under her arm.

“I’ll do it,” Cordy said, and sat up, rummaging in the thick wool satchel hanging across her shoulder until she produced a mangy-looking, soft-bristled brush, and sat beside our mother in the bed, stroking the brush over the wisps that were appearing along the shocking bare skin of her scalp. We sat in silence for a moment, wondering at the sight, the contrast between the thick spill of hair we remembered, the way it fell, dark wood, over her shoulders when she loosened it, and the sparse fur that was her hair now. When we were little, we loved to watch our mother brush her hair, the long, luxuriant strokes bringing forth the shine, and then the quick, efficient movements as she twisted it into a bun. Cordy’s hands looked thick and inept in comparison, our mother’s head as delicate as an unopened bloom.

“No,” Rose said. The fact that other mothers might have been more eager, flipping through bridal magazines, begging to come along or even organizing the trip themselves, did not go without notice. But this was not our mother. She was not the kind of woman to raise her daughters to read bridal magazines, and therefore, of course, would not read them herself. “Everything looked hideous on me.”

“That’s because everything was hideous,” Bean said.

“It’s a hideous culture,” our mother said as Cordy finished brushing the light fuzz of our mother’s hair. Cordy had propped her up awkwardly, the pillows pressed into the small of her back, and when her gown gaped across her clavicle, we could see the spread of gauze across her skin, and the trail of clear tubing draining the wound. “Why would you want something like that anyway, Rose?”

Rose’s cheeks burned with angry shame, and she fumbled for the right words, pushing her lips into silent protestations.

“It’s her wedding, Mother,” Bean jumped in. “Besides, it’s not like she can wear your wedding dress. Cordy ruined it.”

“I did not,” Cordy objected. She dropped the brush back into the unexplored caverns of her bag, and our mother relaxed into her pillows again, Cordy curled beside her like a question mark.

“You spilled punch all over it at the prom.”

“I had it cleaned, dumb butt,” Cordy said. “You can’t even tell. Rose could wear it if she wanted to.”

Rose did not reply, but we all knew our mother’s swinging sixties minidress would be about as flattering on her as any of the hysterical poufs of fabric we had suffered through that morning. In any case, the subject had been changed, Cordy had been blamed, which was the way it ought to be, and at least nominal peace had been restored.

“Out, out, out,” a nurse shooed us, as she walked into the room, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking insistently against the floors. We outed, scooting around the portable toilet the nurse had rolled in with her. Standing in the hallway, Cordy went back to shredding her cuticles until Bean batted her hand away from her mouth. Cordy stuck out her tongue at Bean, and Rose shot them both a disapproving glance.

“When’s she coming home?” Rose asked our father, changing the focus from our disobedient sister.

Our father cleared his throat, stroked his beard with the hand not holding his place in his book.
“Tomorrow, I know not whether God will have it so,”
he said, as though he were lecturing to a particularly erudite class of undergraduates, which we suppose we are, in a way. “The hospital is sending a nurse to let us know what to do.” He looked somewhat confused by the idea, as though he were not sure what would possess them to do such a thing. Bean looked relieved. She was wearing high heels like railroad spikes, and elegantly loose trousers draped in a cunning camouflage over the Andreas family thighs. This was not a woman any of us could see acting as home health aide, least of all Bean herself.

“You should come home with us tonight, Daddy,” Bean said. “You look a mess.”

Our father shrugged. “Your mother and I haven’t spent a night apart since we were married, and I’m not about to start now. I’ll clean up in the bathroom.”

True, that. Our parents had married impossibly young, our father a fresh-faced master’s candidate, our mother a recent graduate, and possibly already pregnant (scandalous!). Our favorite photo of them shows them recessing down the aisle, the guests at the ceremony fashionably turned out in a blur of bobbing hats and elbow patches. Our father walks slightly ahead of our mother, whose veil trails out behind her in an invisible wind. He is smiling as though he has just won the jackpot. She is smiling as though she has discovered a secret.

In any case, even the night Rose was born, back in the days when men were not typically present in the delivery room, let alone acting as paramedical assistants in cutting the cord, and babies were dutifully welcomed into the world with a hearty slap on the rump to elicit an (unsurprisingly) objectioned reaction, our father slept in a chair much like the one we had found him in today, having insisted Rose’s bassinet be brought into the room. With one hand extended to clutch the plastic edge of the container, he slept happily through both mid-night feedings.

There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents’ love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.

How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?

TEN

C
ordy, come on!” Bean hollered from the foot of the stairs.

“I’m coming!” Cordy shouted back. We were headed to a medical supply store to pick up some things the nurse had arranged for but that they had refused to deliver all the way to deepest, darkest Barnwell—a seat for our mother for the shower, a special camisole that wouldn’t press the drain into her skin, a pillow to allow her to sleep without moving too much, some kind of hand exerciser to help her recover the full range of motion in her arm.

In her room, Cordy was frantically digging through her clothes, trying to find a shirt that fit. Her breasts had been tender for a long time, but in the past week it seemed they had grown enormously, and June was busting out all over. Her hippie skirts were doing the trick on the bottom half, but the little T-shirts and tank tops she was accustomed to wearing made her look like a stripper. She had snuck one of Bean’s sports bras out of the laundry, its compression making the change at least slightly less noticeable.

“Cordeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelia!” Bean shouted again.

“I am coming!” Cordy howled, stubbing her toe on the edge of the bed as she leaped over a pile of shoes she’d abandoned in the middle of the floor. “Dammit.” She finally found one of Rose’s loose tops, also liberated from the laundry room, and yanked it over her head. She shoved her feet into two sandals from the pile, fairly certain they belonged to the same pair, and clomped down the stairs.

“Nice outfit,” Bean said. “Good that you took the time to put it together.”

Cordy looked down. The top was batik, the skirt patchwork. She looked like she’d rolled in a bin of fabric remainders. “W.E.” she said.

“We?”

“What. Ever. Let’s go.” She hopped down the last two steps and grabbed her bag. How much longer was she going to be able to get away with forgiving elastic waistbands and pilfering clothes from our laundry piles? It was a good thing she’d given up the indie rock look—the miniskirts and baby tees would have given her away already. She’d have to buy new clothes soon. Maternity clothes.

And she’d have to tell us.

She sat in the passenger seat biting at her ragged cuticles as Bean drove, singing tunelessly along with the radio. It was all happening too fast. She’d already gained weight, back in our parents’ house where food was plentiful and actually tasted good, and her nausea was abating slowly. Time was ticking away. Maternity clothes were just the beginning—there needed to be doctor’s appointments and baby clothes and all those things meant money.

She was going to have to take Dan up on his offer of a job. But how much would that pay? And what if our parents kicked her out when she told them?

She could tell Rose first. Rose would come up with some kind of plan. Except Rose was even touchier than usual. Cordy tugged at a scrap of skin at the edge of her nail with her hands and it started to bleed.

It might not be too late to have an abortion. The fog around her head cleared for a moment. The father—if you could call him that—wouldn’t care. He didn’t even know. And our family wouldn’t care if they didn’t know, either.

But she cared. She didn’t want to but she did.

Putting a hand on her stomach, she pushed against the tiny swell. We knew what the church had to say about abortion—we knew what it had to say about a lot of things, but that had never stopped us before. Cordy would be hard-pressed to say that it was anything to do with our faith that was giving her pause.

She looked over at Bean, whose eyes were hidden behind designer sunglasses, still singing along with the radio, wandering in and out of pitch as though she were embroidering around the notes. Bean would have an abortion, no doubt. Probably already had had one. Rose would have the baby.

But what would she do?

She pictured herself with an infant, a toddler, a preteen, a teenager. Impossible. Hadn’t she just been a teenager herself? Wasn’t she still? Reaching out, she flipped the air-conditioning vent up so the cold air blew into her eyes, making her squint against the pressure.

She couldn’t make this kind of decision. She never had—people always made decisions for her, or the wind took her where it would and she made the best of it. She’d make an appointment with the doctor and she’d think about it then. Not now.

When they got back from the store, where Cordy had plopped herself into a wheelchair with pink bicycle streamers coming off the handlebars and been little to no help at all to Bean in checking items off the list, they walked inside to a quiet house.