The Weird Sisters (8 page)

Practical, Rose would reply.

“I miss you,” she said, sighing at the sound of his voice. She walked over and closed the door to her room. These conversations always seemed both too much and too little—how could she be sure that he wasn’t doing something else while they talked? How could she be sure that he really was happy to talk to her? The distance was both amplified and removed over the wire.

“I miss you, too, love. How are you?”

“Okay. Bean’s home.”

“The prodigal sister returns? It must be nice to have her around.”

Rose whuffed out a breath of annoyance. Jonathan didn’t understand us. His family was huge and boisterous and loving—six siblings, now multiplied exponentially by marriages and children. Visiting his parents’ house at Christmas had felt like being surrounded by a litter of overly enthusiastic puppies. “Not really. She doesn’t do much. Just lies around and reads. She’s no help with Mom.”

“How long is she staying?”

“That’s the funny thing. She quit her job. Moved all her stuff home. Like she’s staying forever.”

“That is funny.” Jonathan and Bean had met at Thanksgiving, and had, oddly, hit it off. Rose had felt a little sick at the prospect of introducing our most femme fatale sister to him, but Bean had been perfectly appropriate, entertaining him with spot-on New York accents and cursing an amusing blue streak through card games they played ’til the wee hours of the morning. “I’d always thought she’d be a city girl forever.”

“Me, too,” Rose said. “I think something’s wrong, actually, but she won’t say anything to me. I tried to bring it up and she bit my head off.”

“Give her time. If something really is wrong, if it’s enough to send her away from there forever, it’s probably pretty bad.”

“But I could help,” Rose said plaintively.

Jonathan laughed. “That’s my little Miss Fix-It. Never met a problem she couldn’t lick.”

“Don’t tease. I’d like to help, if she’d let me. She offered to go with me to buy a wedding dress.”

“Take her up on it. You hate shopping, she loves it. Perfect.”

Rose looked out the window. Our father and Bean were sitting on the chairs on the back porch, reading side by side. “Am I going to need it?”

“A wedding dress? Of course you are. Unless you’ve got something to tell me.”

“No, it’s not me. I just thought . . . I don’t know, I don’t feel right about this whole thing. What if you meet someone there? What if you decide you don’t miss me at all? What if you don’t want to come back?” Rose lay back on her bed, burying her face in the pillow, ashamed at having exposed so much of her fear, and too afraid not to ask.

“Rose.” Jonathan’s voice was soft, but firm. “You are the one I love. You. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, and I’m not going to give it up now. I miss you so much, and there’s nothing I want more than to make you my wife. And that’s not going to change. Got it?”

“But you could decide to stay there. . . .”

“Wherever I go, I’m going with you. That’s the deal. And I don’t get to make unilateral decisions anymore. We made the decision for me to come here together, and wherever we go next, we’ll make that decision together. Right?”

That wasn’t an entirely fair characterization. They hadn’t made it together : Rose had simply grudgingly decided not to fight his desire to go abroad. Despite her misgivings, she knew this was important to his career, and though the thought of living without him for so long made her ache when she thought about it, she knew it wasn’t worth losing him over. But she hadn’t exactly been in favor of it. “Right,” she said.

“Buy the dress. Order personalized matchbooks and hire the Cleveland Symphony to play. Whatever makes you happy. But I will absolutely be there on New Year’s Eve, and you had better be there, too.”

“I will,” she said with a smile, picturing his hand in hers and pushing down the inevitable question of, if they couldn’t even decide where to live, what was going to happen to them after the wedding was over, when they actually had to start forging a marriage?

R
ose would be lying if she said she actually liked her job. Since she had refused to take a job out of state, she had accepted a position at Columbus University, where she was a cog in the wheel. The mathematics building was cold concrete; hallways on the outside by the windows, classrooms inside, devoid of natural light. Her students stared at her, their beer-bloated, sleep-deprived faces gone sickly under the fluorescent lights glaring and sputtering above her, punctuating her lectures with an angry hum.

She shared a tiny office with two other professors, one of whom was perennially missing, the other who had an annoying propensity for leaving his coffee mug on her desk, a habit that left miniature Venn diagrams on any papers she had the ill fortune to leave exposed. His own desk was so swollen with the detritus of years of disorganization that on the one hand she sympathized with his plight, but on the other, well. You know Rose. In these conditions she graded papers, took meetings with students prone to tears at the sight of a coordinate plane, stared blankly at the walls when she was supposed to be writing, and doodled polytopes around the circles of coffee stains on her papers. The walls were cinder blocks, the white paint yellow in the light.

Rose felt as though she had been jailed, Kafkaesque, for an unspecified crime.

In a university so large, the staff interacted little, ships in the night; she felt unmoored, washing from classroom to office to faculty parking lot. Some days the only people she spoke to were her students, and you could hardly call that an actual interaction (or, Rose might say on a particularly bad day, you could hardly call them actual people). Occasionally she met a man, an alumnus at a university function, a textbook representative, a professor at another university who came to give a lecture. Her easy power drew them to her, to the challenge of making her smile, lighting her face in candlelight. But these dates were distractions, and poor ones at that, leaving her to drift the halls like Banquo’s ghost, seen and yet unseen, feared and misunderstood.

And then came Jonathan.

She walked into her office one bleak January day a year ago, and he was sitting at the desk of the Mystery Professor, his feet up casually, his lower lip stuck out as he stared at a book in his lap. Jonathan, had he been so inclined, could have been terribly handsome. But as it was, his hair was sloppily brushed, a tiny shock standing up in the back as though preparing a mutiny. The rims of his glasses were nearly as black as his hair, and the lenses wanted cleaning in a bad way. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, an ensemble that always reminds us of our father, but Jonathan’s shirt was burgundy, his tie a matching shade, showing evidence of some dandy tendencies. Then again, his pants were black, his shoes, brown, evidence of the same professorial fashion sense our father possessed.

Her mind a million miles away, his presence so unexpected, Rose shrieked when she saw him, the papers in her hands jumping out of their orderly stack into a sloppy bouquet. He looked up, less startled than she, and, shockingly, laughed. He’d tell her later that the improbable sound she had made, like an asthma patient on helium, had caused his laughter, but at the moment Rose thought he was laughing at her, so she blushed sharply and stared down at her papers.

“I guess I startled you,” he said. He flipped his legs up and then down to the floor. He was tall, slender. One sideburn longer than the other. “I’m a visiting professor. I’ll be here through next year.”

Still staring at her papers, Rose said, “You must be the Mystery Professor,” then blushed harder as she realized what she had said. She shuffled the pages back together, walked toward her desk. She had to turn to get between the desks, shoved together like connecting blocks to fit in the space that had really only been designed for one. This action embarrassed her, for some reason, the wide spread of her hips near him.

Jonathan barked a laugh, pure pleasure. “Is that what you call me?” He stood, crossed the tiny distance between their desks, extended his hand. “I’m Jonathan Campbell. I teach chemistry, but there’s no office space over there so I’m exiled here. Which is why you never see me. I’ve been here since September.”

“Pleased to meet you. Where are you from?” she said, and took his hand. She raised her eyes to meet his, brown to nearly black, the shadow of stubble on his face like the shadow of the leaves in the Shakespearean forest of Arden.

“I’m a bit of a wanderer. I was born in Michigan, but I’ve lived all over.”

“So glamorous Columbus, Ohio, is just one stop on your world tour?” Rose asked, her cheeks flushing. Was she flirting?

He chuckled. “You could say that. Last year I was in Paris.”

“Coming here must have been a letdown.” Her heart was beating quickly and she couldn’t stop smiling, stupidly, like a preteen. She wondered what Bean would do. Flip her hair, probably. Rose patted the conservative bun at the back of her neck awkwardly.

“Not at all. Paris was overrated. So many French people. I didn’t catch your name?” he asked, coaxing.

“Rose Andreas,” she said.

“You teach in the math department?” he asked. Rose stared at him, tongue-tied.

“Yes,” she said, finally. “This is my office.”

Jonathan nodded, looking thoughtfully at Rose. Oh, our Rose. Her hair up like a Gibson girl, her skin stained pretty pink from the blushing, face bare of makeup, one of those flowing outfits that hid her curves,
beauty and honor in her are so mingled
. . . but would he see it? Would he see, beneath her self-consciousness, the way she could clean that stain off his tie with only club soda and the edge of her shirt, catch spiders we would be too afraid to touch, marshal our forces to pack the car for a trip so everything fit and nothing was forgotten, pick the perfect fresh flowers to make the breakfast table seem like a celebration, hold us after a nightmare, put herself aside to make sure we were happy? Would he see why we loved her so? We held our breath.

“Would you like to go to lunch?” he asked.

He saw it.

P
erhaps you never liked your name. Perhaps you took every opportunity to change it: a new school, for example, where you would test out life with some pale echo of your real name—Elizabeth to Bitsy, wouldn’t that be cute? A whole new you. You tried your middle name, provided it was suitable and not embarrassing, as middle names are wont to be. Or perhaps you were one of those poor souls whose well-meaning parents, in honor of some long-dead ancestor, gave you a name no contemporary soul should have to bear. Like Evelyn or Leslie or Laurie for a boy. Or Florence or Mildred or Doris for a girl—not bad names, you understood, just woefully dated, guaranteeing years of playground torture or a feeling you were destined for a rocking chair and an old folks’ home long before your time.

But what if it weren’t so much a matter of having a name with unfortunately predetermined gender identification, or one you felt just didn’t suit you? What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?

At one of Cordy’s many temp jobs, she had worked in an office with a harried secretary by the name of Elizabeth Taylor. Huddled in her cubicle, desperately pretending to be worth the twenty-five dollars an hour the company was paying to her agency (without, of course, doing any actual work), Cordy watched and listened as Elizabeth Taylor answered the phone. At least a million times a day, Cordy thought, running her fingers back and forth across the office supplies she hoarded as props in her one-woman burlesque of industry, Elizabeth Taylor said, “Yes, really.” And every time, she said it with a smile. Cordy supposed it was at least partially due to the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had married into her name, so had only had it for fifteen years or so. Given time, we were sure, she would tire of the
National Velvet
jokes, of the comments on her enthusiasm for matrimony, and one day, Elizabeth Taylor would snap, lashing out at her husband, wishing she had never married him.

With a father like ours, and with names like ours, we had reached that state years ago.

First came Rosalind, a fair choice; probably our mother’s intervention spared her from something weightier. But after that, it was all our father’s doing, we are sure. Because then came the second daughter, and what can you name a second daughter but Bianca? And then the third, and if it had been anything other than Cordelia, the heavens might have shaken. Bean and Rose were grateful, true, that the
Lear
comparisons could not have been made until the troika was complete, or they might have been dubbed to match the play’s older sisters, and they knew there was no way to survive being named Goneril and Regan. Not in this day and age.

We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.