The Weird Sisters (4 page)

The ice in Rose’s throat grew solid, and she grabbed for her still-scalding cup of tea, taking a long swallow, letting the liquid burn away the freeze inside her, leaving a bubble on her tongue she would feel every time she spoke for the next few days. There was silence. The few other diners in the restaurant kept eating, oblivious.

“Mom,” Rose finally said. “Are you sure?”

Our mother nodded. “It’s early, you see. But I found a lump—what was it, a month ago?” She looked at our father for confirmation, the quiet ease of cooperative conversation they had developed years ago. He nodded.

“A month ago?” Rose’s voice cracked. She set down her teacup, hand shaking. “Why didn’t you call me? I could have . . .” She trailed off, unsure of what she could have done. But she could have done something. She could have taken care of this. She took care of everything. How had she missed this? A month, they’d been going to doctors and having quiet conversations between themselves, and she hadn’t seen it at all?

“We’ve been to the oncologist, and it’s malignant. It doesn’t look like it’s spread, but it’s quite large. So they’re going to do a round of chemotherapy before surgery. Shrink it down a bit. And then . . .” Our mother’s voice caught and trembled for a moment, as though the meaning behind the clinical words had only just become clear to her, and she swallowed and took a breath. “And then a mastectomy. You know, just get the whole problem dealt with.” She said this as though it were something she had woken up and decided to do on a relative lark. Like going on a cruise, say, or taking up tennis.

“I’m so sorry,” Jonathan said. He reached across the table and put his hand over our mother’s, squeezed. He was so elegant in his sympathy. “What can we do?”

Rose stared wildly around the restaurant, at the gilt and red and paper placemats. This is what she would remember, she knew, not the fear in our mother’s eyes, or the pounding of her own heart, but how desperately tacky this place was, how cheap it looked, how the chopsticks had not broken properly when she had separated them but splintered along the center. This is what she would remember.

But when the shock passed, it had become something, forgive her for saying it, something of a relief. Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed. A reason to turn Jonathan’s abandonment into something important. So the next day she broke her lease, packed up her things, and moved back home, uninvited.

It wasn’t until she had been home for a while, had straightened out the little messes around the house and helped our mother through the first rounds of chemotherapy that the shame of her situation had hit her. How humiliating to be living at home again. If she told people that she had moved back to help care for our mother, of course they would nod and sigh sympathetically. But still, where was she? Living with our parents? At her age? She felt like a swimmer who had been earnestly beating back the waves only to find herself exhausted and just as far from shore as when she had begun. She was lonely and tired.

Embarrassed even by the thought of herself in this rudderless life, she flushed and stood impatiently from the window seat, where she’d been staring in irritation at our mother’s wildflower garden. The garden had, in the way of wildflower gardens, grown out of control. Our mother loved it—the way it drew butterflies and fat bees, the dizzy way the purples and yellows blurred together as the stems tangled—but Rose preferred her gardens to be more obedient.

She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favorite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices—disorder and literature—captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate. Our father, of course, limits his reading to things by, of, and about our boy Bill, but our mother brought diversity to our readings and therefore our education. It was never really a problem for any of us to read a children’s biography of Amelia Earhart followed by a self-help book on alcoholism (from which no one in the family suffered), followed by Act III of
All’s Well That Ends Well
, followed by a collection of Neruda sonnets. Cordy claims this is the source of her inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, but we do not believe her. It is just our way.

And it wasn’t that Rose regretted being home, exactly. Our parents’ house and Barnwell in general were far more pleasant than the anonymous apartment she’d rented in Columbus—thin carpet over concrete floors, neighbors moving in and out so quickly she’d stopped bothering to learn their names—but after she filled our parents’ pill cases and straightened the living room, after she had finally hired a lawn service and balanced the checkbook, after she went with our parents to our mother’s chemo treatments, sitting in the waiting room because they didn’t need her there, not really, they would have been fine just the two of them, her life was almost as empty as it had been before.

The tiny clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, and Rose sighed in relief. Ten was a perfectly acceptable hour to go to bed without feeling like a complete loafer. She walked toward the stairs and then paused by the mirror, warped and pale, that had hung there since any of us could remember. Rose stared at her reflection and spoke six words none of us had ever said before.

“I wish my sisters were here.”

T
he fox, the ape and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three.

Our father once wrote an essay on the importance of the number three in Shakespeare’s work. A little bit of nothing, he said, a bagatelle, but it was always our favorite. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. The Billy Goats Gruff, the Three Blind Mice,
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)
.
King Lear
—Goneril, Regan, Cordelia.
The Merchant of Venice
—Portia, Nerissa, Jessica.

And us—Rosalind, Bianca, Cordelia.

The Weird Sisters.

We have, while trapped in the car with our father behind the wheel, been subjected to extended remixes of the history of the word “weird” in
Macbeth
with a special encore set of Norse and Scottish Sources Shakespeare Used in Creating This Important Work. These indignities we will spare you.

But it is worth noting, especially now that “weird” has evolved from its delicious original meaning of supernatural strangeness into something depressingly critical and pedestrian, as in, “ ‘ Don’t you think Rose’s outfit looks
weird
?’ Bean asked,” that Shakespeare didn’t really mean the sisters were weird at all.

The word he originally used was much closer to “wyrd,” and that has an entirely different meaning. “Wyrd” means fate. And we might argue that we are not fated to do anything, that we have chosen everything in our lives, that there is no such thing as destiny. And we would be lying.

Rose always first, Bean never first, Cordy always last. And if we don’t accept it, don’t see, like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters did, that we cannot fight our family and cannot fight our fates, well, whose failing is that but our own? Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.

The history of this trinity is fractious—a constantly shifting dividing line, never equal, never equitable. Two against one, or three opposed, but never all together. Upon Cordy’s birth, Rose took Bean into her, two against one. And when Bean rebelled, refused any longer to play Rose’s games, Rose and Cordy found each other, and Cordy became the willing follower. Two against one.

Until Rose went away and we were three apart.

And then Bean and Cordy found each other sneaking out of their respective windows onto the broad-limbed oak trees one hot summer night, and we were two against one again.

And now here we are, measuring our distance an arm’s length away, staying far apart and cold. For what? To hold the others at bay? To protect ourselves?

We see stories in magazines or newspapers sometimes, or read novels, about the deep and loving relationships between sisters. Sisters are supposed to be tight and connected, sharing family history and lore, laughing over misadventures. But we are not that way. We never have been, really, because even our partnering was more for spite than for love. Who
are
these sisters who act like this, who treat each other as their best friends? We have never met them. We know plenty of sisters who get along well, certainly, but wherefore the myth?

We don’t think Cordy minds, really, because she tends to take things as they come. Rose minds, certainly, because she likes things to align with her mental image. And Bean? Well, it comes and goes with Bean, as does everything with her. To forge such an unnatural friendship would just require so much
effort.

Our estrangement is not drama-laden—we have not betrayed one another’s trust, we have not stolen lovers or fought over money or property or any of the things that irreparably break families apart. The answer, for us, is much simpler.

See, we love one another. We just don’t happen to like one another very much.

TWO

S
ummers are always the same in Barnwell—thick, listlessly humid days, darkened occasionally with rolling thunderstorms that keep lushness in the lawns and fields. We remember the heat like an uninvited guest. When we were small, it was not so bad; we ran through the sprinkler, bribed our parents into trips to the college’s outdoor pool, let our hair stick to our foreheads as we cooled ourselves with homemade Popsicles. But as we grew older, it became our enemy. We sat in our bedrooms, the largest fan we could find placed inches away, beating the still air into an angry frenzy that did nothing at all to reduce the heat. Sleeping was impossible, and we would often be found wandering the house, our white nightgowns gleaming in the darkness, a trio of Lady Macbeths, driven mad by the mercury.

After we had all moved out, our parents had central air-conditioning installed, too late to save the doors from warping, or halt the omnipresent mildew that plagued books that alit anywhere for longer than a few weeks, but making living here in August at least bearable. In the winter, we were still subject to clanking, hissing radiators, liberal use of space heaters, and, in one disastrous experiment on Cordy’s part, the employment of an antique colonial warming pan that had obviously lost its ability to insulate the coals and keep them from burning through the sheets.

Bean arrived in the afternoon, clad in a designer suit completely inappropriate for Barnwell, sweating desperately and cursing violently. Rose heard a car pull into the driveway and, closing her book carefully around a bookmark, peered out the window. Bean hoisted herself from the front seat of a cheap white compact with a painful scrape down the driver’s side. She bent over, reaching into the backseat, and Rose could see a run down the back of one unquestionably posh stocking. Bean’s hair had escaped from the tight French twist she had spent countless hours in front of her bedroom mirror perfecting. She looked as though she’d slept in her clothes (which, as a matter of fact, she had, pulled over into a rest stop parking lot when she was too tired to drive anymore, her legs draped over the gearshift, her suit wrinkling in the heat). Rose climbed up from the window seat in her bedroom and went downstairs.

“You look dreadful,” she said, opening the door for Bean. The heat rushed in, pressing itself against the coolness inside, leaving Rose struggling for breath.

Bean glared at her. “Thanks,” she said. “That makes me feel loads better.”

Instantly contrite, Rose reached out to take one of the bags our sister was lugging. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m just hot and I’ve been in the car forever. Will you move?”

Rose complied, and Bean stepped into the foyer, her eyes casting around for changes in the landscape. She brushed past Rose, dropping her bag beside the staircase and heading into the kitchen. Rose followed dully, feeling underdressed, as she always did next to Bean. Even after what looked like an unfortunate encounter with a herd of angry cats, Bean still looked elegant, chic. Rose looked like our mother—they both favored loose linen skirts, wide-legged pants, batik-print tunics. Normally, Rose felt exotically comfortable, but suddenly she felt dowdy. She tugged at the back of her pants, felt the line of her staid cotton panties, and swallowed a bubble of irritation, whether at Bean or at herself, she didn’t know.

When she walked into the kitchen, Bean was standing by the sink, one hand resting on the silver faucet, drinking water greedily from a jelly glass. She drained it with an exaggerated smack and leaned over to refill it, leaning on the counter. Rose saw, with some relief at the crack in Bean’s bedraggled perfection, a wet spot spreading on the fabric of her red suit where she had leaned against the counter. “What are you doing here?” Rose asked. “Mom and Dad didn’t say you were coming.”