The Weird Sisters (34 page)

“You live here, right?” the mother asked, and it took Cordy a moment to realize the woman had addressed her.

“Yes. Born and raised.”

The mother raised her eyebrows and nodded slightly at her daughter, as if to say, “You see what befalls people from a place like this?”

“Isn’t it difficult, being so isolated?” the mother asked.

Cordy hesitated. She couldn’t have cared less whether the girl came to Barney or not, but it seemed so unfair not to let her try it on for a little while, to stand in front of the mirror and turn this way and that, modeling the possibility of her future.

She turned toward the daughter, uncomfortable in her interview clothes, a green suit that hemmed in whatever personality she had. “It’s true, Barney is a bit isolated. But you’d be amazed how the campus comes alive during the school year. There are a million things happening—the admissions office usually has a calendar they can give you to show you what a week might look like—and if you want to take advantage of it, you can.” She found herself consciously guarding her accent, watching the betraying Midwestern vowels. “I think you’d find most people who go to college in a city are so wrapped up in the campus anyway they don’t go out much. And as a college student, you’d be too poor anyway.”

The daughter gave her a grateful smile. The mother looked cold.

“And besides, we’re only an hour from the city. Enjoy your lunch.” She smiled and headed back behind the counter. Dan was in his office, flipping through papers and sighing, so she set herself to work. Pushing her hip against the counter as she cleaned, she felt the crinkle of paper in her pocket and pulled out our father’s note again. She knew he was not warning her away from sex—it was completely obvious it was too late for that—so from what?

The towel in her hand drew circles on the counter, cold white imitation marble traced with gray veins. She remembered herself, maybe eight? When Bean and Rose had begun to draw away from her again, when she had become a less amusing plaything as she developed a will of her own. Rose had begun her quest for her Shakespearean prince, and Bean had become involved with anything more interesting than Cordy, who was so useless she could not even be bothered to remember to finish doing her hair, and consequently ran around with one ponytail and one loose shock of hair flopping against her neck on the opposite side.

Finding herself abandoned like that was lonely, somewhat stunning. She threw herself into books, emulating each character she met. She read a story about a girl who read in her closet while eating chocolate-chip cookies, so she did that. She read her way through Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and looked for clues everywhere she went, noting them down in her
Harriet the Spy
notebook, though she found their unwillingness to add up to anything a perennial disappointment. She tried to run away, emulating a million children in a million books, but she and her suitcase, printed with the image of a little old-fashioned girl in a bonnet, never made it past the rhododendrons before she lost her nerve.

She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, “We’ll take it.”

The idea of the magic set came from a novel about a boy whose magic set turned out to be really magic, and led him on adventure after adventure into strange worlds, guided by his tiny plastic wand and rescued from peril with a multicolored scarf, or a Gordian knot of string.

Our family was not big on store-bought things. This was part of our parents’ somewhat indeliberate effort to opt out of consumer culture, symbolized by their anti-television stance. Our toys were hand-me-downs, too, puzzles with missing pieces, blocks that never fit together quite right, our dolls not name-brand, their clothes made by our mother on her sewing machine. Our parents greeted Cordy’s request for the magic set with skepticism and the surety that she would cast it aside quickly in favor of the next internal fad.

Except she didn’t. She begged and begged and begged for it, until finally, on her birthday, she was rewarded with one of those rarest of all gifts in our house: something shrink-wrapped.

Mastering the tricks didn’t take long; the set had been made, like the book from whence the fascination had come, for a younger child. She trailed us around the house, knocking on Rose’s closed door, begging for admittance, digging a skirt she used as a cape out of the dress-up box and putting on a show for us in the basement. And then, a few days later, it was forgotten. In Cordy’s defense, the tricks had been somewhat flimsy; the beads slipped off the string and rolled away under one of the couches (where, we assume, they remain to this day), the wand lost its lovely white tip. But soon she had moved on to another fascination: a doll with hair that grew so she could learn how to braid.

Abracadabra.

This was it, of course. To this day, when she expressed interest in something, someone in the family would invoke the cursed magic set, with a roll of the eyes as if to say, “Oh, there she goes again.” So to us, the baby was another magic set, another afternoon eating chocolate-chip cookies in the closet, reading by the light of the flashlight.

But it wasn’t.

Was it?

A pair of students working on campus for the summer came by and ordered iced coffee. As they moved away from the counter, Cordy went to put the money in the till, her fingers pausing on the bills. She’d never stolen like Bean had stolen, but if her boss was particularly awful, she wasn’t above mis-ringing a few orders and pocketing the difference, especially if it meant the difference between a bus ticket and hitchhiking her way out of town.

Why had she defended this place? It was a trap. Our father was tying silken cords around her ankles, tying her to Barnwell with his impenetrable messages. Our mother held her hands with her sickness. And we tripped each other up with our pasts, made mincemeat of the future with our thousand failures. Cordy felt stifled by her anger, felt an urge, an itch, a burn to get out, to be anywhere but here.

O
xford, in summer, was not as Rose had expected. The City of Dreaming Spires, where she imagined students rushing to class clad in robes, professors discussing earnestly the teleology of Plato’s
Republic,
yards of ale, and serene campuses bedecked with gargoyles and stern English gardens, was busy and well-touristed and more modern than she had hoped. Through the film of jet lag, she found the motion exhausting, overwhelming, and it made her understand, for the first time, the wisdom in a quiet cup of tea or a mid-morning pint.

When she arrived, she threw herself into Jonathan’s arms, the stress of the flight, the absent months, her own heartbeat, collapsing in a pile of sticks when she saw him. Her body, confused by the lack of sleep, by the bright sun when there should be darkness (and where was the rain? wasn’t it supposed to always be raining in England?), moved on its own.

They took the train to Oxford, her eyes bouncing from Jonathan to the blur of pastoral land out the window. At home, she had watched the suburbs grow farther and farther from the city, the gap between their tiny tracts and the wide fields of Barney growing less and less, and something in her lurched and prayed at the green space she saw here, the stone houses left free from progress, the simplicity of a flock of sheep.

How like a winter hath my absence been from thee!
Rose thought as she felt the warmth of his body beside hers, his warm, dry palm in her cold one. They arrived at his rooms, fell into bed, and rediscovered each other. After, she lay with her head on his chest, allowing herself to feel small, feminine, protected, the splay of her hand on his beating heart. She dozed, he woke her with gentle reminders of the dangers of sleeping through her first day, she dozed again.

They went to dinner embarrassingly early, Rose still dizzy from exhaustion and newness. Jonathan led her into a pub, its beamed ceilings so low she had to bend when she crossed from one room to another, the staircase to the second floor more like a crawl space than a passage. “The oldest pub in England!” Jonathan announced, or maybe it was the oldest pub in Oxford. It was not fair to test her comprehension at that moment. He ordered a couple of pints at the bar, and they climbed upstairs. They sat down across a table, battered and scarred, burned dark between the scrapes, and held hands. She had not forgotten what he looked like, but seeing him in person, she realized what she had lost in memory was the intensity, the precise deep of his eyes, the geometric angle at which his perpetual cowlick rose, the burn of his skin on hers.

“I’m so glad to have you here,” he said. “You don’t know how I’ve missed you.”

Her smile matched his, a quiet blush in her cheeks. “I’ve missed you more,” she said. “Going through all this without you has been so hard.”

“How is your mom?” he asked, his brows pulling together.

“She was better, but the radiation has made her so tired. She just seems miserable.”

Jonathan exhaled. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’d think by now they’d be able to come up with a better solution than poison.” She looked up at him, smiled. “You’re a scientist. You fix it.”

He lifted their hands and slipped his fingers through hers so they pressed palm to palm. “You know full well that’s not my area. But I can assure you they’re working on it.”

“Not in time for her,” Rose said.

In time for us?

“How’s she feeling, you know, mentally?”

“She rests a lot, and we read to her, and that’s what she needs most of all. If Bean and Cordy . . .” She stopped herself.

“Bean and Cordy what?”

“Well, I was going to say if Bean and Cordy would help more, but that’s not fair. They’ve actually been tremendously helpful, both of them. Surprisingly.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m still with her more, but they’re working. So I guess I understand.” Rose felt a stab of guilt at this assessment, but she was so used to criticizing us she could not stop herself.

“And how’s Cordy . . . progressing?”

Rose pulled her hands from his and took a sip of her drink. In some ways she hated talking about us with Jonathan. He was so damn level-headed.

He saw her hesitation. “Be fair, now.”

“Physically, she’s fine. I took her to the doctor and she’s healthy and everything’s as it should be. She’s actually managed to keep the job. But . . .” She took another sip. Jonathan curled his hands around his own glass, and she marveled at the beauty of his fingers, loved him anew. “But I worry about her. She asked so few questions at the doctor’s, she doesn’t know who the father is, and doesn’t really seem to care, and the job at the coffee shop is fine for now, but she can’t live on that with a baby, and it’s totally unfair to ask our parents to support her when they’ve got their own problems.”

Jonathan nodded, said nothing.

“She’s not ready to have a baby,” Rose said.

“She’s not ready to have the baby the way you would,” he said.

“Ouch.”

“No, I mean it. You know one of the things I love the most about you is your ability to marshal everything—tangible and intangible—into some semblance of order. But that’s the Rose way. That’s not the Cordy way.”

“I’m afraid the Cordy way won’t be enough.”

“Cordy’s survived this long, in circumstances that would have had you running for the hills long ago. Obviously she’s figured out some kind of way to take care of herself.”

“But we’re not talking about taking care of herself. We’re talking about taking care of the baby. I’m scared for her. I don’t want it to be hard for her.”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling. She found him maddening that way, serene in the face of the storm. His peace made it impossible for her to have anything to rail against. She shook her head. “And what of fair Bianca?”

When Bean had confessed her sins to us, she had begged for our secrecy, but Rose had been unable not to tell Jonathan. So he knew the whole sordid story, or as much as Bean had told us, at least. “She’s better. She’s gotten quite involved at Saint Mark’s. Going to do service projects, hanging out with Father Aidan. It’s like a conversion.”

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” Jonathan said.

Rose considered that, looking around. “I’d like to think that’s all it is. But Father Aidan is handsome. . . .”

“Bean?” He clutched his heart in mock horror. “Getting involved with something for a man? I’m shocked you would suggest such a thing.”

“Believe it,” she said. “Though I have the feeling she’s going to be tremendously disappointed when she discovers he probably adheres to that whole no-sex-outside-of-marriage thing.”

“Ah, it’ll be good for her,” Jonathan said.

“She’s working on paying it back, too. I don’t know—I thought she might just go into hiding, but she’s really working to make amends.”

“So maybe she is genuinely repentant,” Jonathan said.