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‘Of course,’ Bean said. She was still frozen, wondering how she’d managed to miscalculate so badly, wondering if she really was going to squeak out of here with nothing but a slap on the wrist, or if she’d be nabbed halfway out of the lobby, handcuffs on her wrists, her box of personal effects scattering on the marble floor while everyone looked on at the spectacle.
‘It might be worthwhile for you to take a little time. Go home for a bit. You’re from Kentucky, aren’t you?’
‘Ohio,’ Bean said, and it was only a whisper.
‘Right. Go back to the Buckeye State. Spend a little time. Re-evaluate your priorities.’
Bean forced back the tears that were, again, welling out of control. ‘Thank you,’ she said, looking up at him. He was, miraculously, smiling.
‘We’ve all done foolish, foolish things, dear. In my experience, good people punish themselves far more than any external body can manage. And I believe you are a good person. You may have lost your way more than a little bit, but I believe you can find your way back. That’s the trick. Finding your way back.’
‘Sure,’ Bean said, and her tongue was thick with shame. It might have been easier if he had been angry, if he’d taken her to task the way he really should have, called the police, started legal proceedings, done something that equalled the horrible way she’d betrayed their trust and pissed on everything she knew to be good and right in the service of nothing more than a lot of expensive clothes and late-night cab rides. She wanted him to yell, but his voice remained steady and quiet.
‘I don’t recommend you mention your employment here when you do seek another job.’
‘Of course not,’ Bean said. He was about to continue, but she pushed her hair back and interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
His hands were steepled in front of him. He looked at her, the way her makeup was smudging around her eyes, despite her impressive ability to hold back the tears. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You have fifteen minutes to get out of the building.’
Bean fled.
She took nothing from work. She cared about nothing there anyway, had never bothered to make the place her own. She went home and called a friend with a car he’d been trying to sell for junk, though even that would take nearly the last of her ill-gotten gains, and while he drove over, she packed up her clothes, and she wondered how she could have spent all that money and have nothing but clothes and accessories and a long list of men she never wanted to see again to show for it, and the thought made her so ill she had to go into the bathroom and vomit until she could bring up nothing but blood and yellow bile, and she took as much money as she could from the ATM and threw everything she owned into that beater of a car and she left right then, without even so much as a fare-thee-well to the city that had given her . . . well, nothing.
Because Cordelia was the last to find out, she was the last to arrive, though we understand this was neither her intention nor her fault. It was simply her habit. Cordy, last born, came a month later than expected, lazily sweeping her way out of our mother’s womb, putting a lie to the idea that labour gets shorter every time. She has been late to everything since then, and is fond of saying she will be late to her own funeral, haw haw haw.
We forgive her for her tardiness, but not for the joke.
Would we all have chosen to come back, knowing that it would be the three of us again, that all those secrets squeezed into one house would be impossible to keep? The answer is irrelevant – it was some kind of sick fate. We were destined to be sisters at birth, and apparently we were destined to be sisters now, when we thought we had put all that behind us.
While Bean and Cordy were dragging their baggage (literal and metaphorical) across the country, Rose was already safely ensconced in our childhood home. Unlike Bean and Cordy, Rose had never been away for very long. For years she had been in the habit of having dinner with our parents once or twice a week, coming home on Sundays. Someone, after all, had to keep an eye on them. They were getting older, Rose told Bean on the phone, with exactly the right amount of sighing to convey that she felt she was doing Bean and Cordy’s duty as well as her own. And usually her visits to our house for Sunday dinner felt like duty, equal parts frustration and triumph as she reminded our father that he had to mow the lawn before the neighbours complained, as she bustled around the living room putting bookmarks in books left open, their spines straining under the weight, as she reminded our mother that she actually had to open the mail, not just bring it inside. It was a good thing, Rose invariably told herself when she left (with not a little satisfaction on her face) that she was here. Who knows what kind of disarray they’d fall into without her?
But moving home? At the advanced age of thirty-three? Like, for permanent, as Cordy might say?
She should have been living in the city with her fiancé, Jonathan, having recently signed her first contract as a tenured professor, waving her engagement ring around wildly whenever she came back to Barnwell just to show that she was, in fact, not just the smart one, that Bean was not the only one who could land a man, and our father was not the only pro fessorial genius in the family. This is how it should have been. This is how it was:
ACT I
Setting : Airport interior, and Jonathan’s apartment, just after winter break
Characters : Jonathan, Rose, travellers
Rose had changed positions a dozen times as the passengers on Jonathan’s flight came streaming through the airport gates. She was looking for the right position for him to catch her in; the right balance of careless inattention and casual beauty, neither of which would betray how much she had missed him.
But when he finally did emerge, cresting over the gentle grade of the ramp that led from the gate, when she could see his rumpled hair bobbing above the heads of the other passengers, the graceful way his tall, reedy shoulders were bent forward as though he were walking into an insistent wind, she forgot her artifice and stood, dropping her book by her side and smoothing her clothes and her hair until he was in front of her and she was in his arms, his mouth warm against her own.
‘I missed you,’ she said, running her hand down his cheek, marvelling at the fact of his presence. Light stubble brushed against her palm as he moved his chin against her touch, catlike. ‘Don’t ever go away again.’
He laughed, tipping his head back slightly, and then dropped a kiss on her forehead, shifting his bag over his shoulder to keep it from slipping. ‘I’ve come back,’ he said.
‘Yes, and you are never allowed to leave again,’ Rose said. She’d think back on that later and wonder if his expression had changed, but at the time she didn’t notice a thing. She picked up her book and slipped her hand into his as they headed to pick up his luggage.
‘Was it that awful? Your sisters didn’t come home when they got your father’s letter?’ He turned to face her so he was standing backwards on the escalator, his hands spread over the rails.
‘No, they didn’t come home, and thank heavens, because that would have been even worse. It’s just been me and Mom and Dad.’
‘Lonely?’ He turned back and stepped off the escalator, holding his hand out to help her step off. Swoon-worthy, as Cordy would have said.
‘Ugh. I don’t want to talk about it. How was your trip?’
Jonathan had been gone for two weeks, nearly the entire break, presenting at a conference in Germany and stopping on the way back to visit friends in England. Rose had carefully crossed each passing day off in her day planner, feeling like a ridiculous schoolgirl with a crush but unable to stop herself. Ridiculous, she knew. When they had been a couple for only a few months, she’d been the one to utter the magical four-letter word first, breathless and laughing as they lay on his bed and he alternated between kissing her neck and tickling her mercilessly. She’d been thinking that this was love for weeks, but she couldn’t say it first, and then the words slipped out in a rush of giddiness. She’d frozen, horrified at her own lack of control, but then he’d whispered back that he loved her, too, and her relief and happiness made her feel faint. Being without him had felt like a cruel amputation, and she reached out for his hand to remind herself that he was there, after all.
He took her hand in his and lifted it to his mouth, kissing her fingertips. ‘You look lovely,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.’
Rose blushed and shook her head, smoothing her clothes again with her free hand. ‘I look awful. I didn’t have time to change and –’
Jonathan cut her off with another kiss, this time in the centre of her palm. ‘I wish you could see yourself through my eyes,’ he said softly. ‘My vision is better.’
She drove them back to his apartment and they hauled his suitcase inside. She hadn’t been here since he’d left – he had no pets, no plants, and there was no reason for her to visit unless he was there – and the air was thick and stale. She opened the windows and turned on the fan, and they sat together on the sofa, fingers entwined, until he cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I’ve got a little news.’
‘Good or bad?’ Rose wasn’t quite listening. She reached out with her free hand and stroked a wayward lock of hair behind his ear. It had gotten long – she’d have to make an appointment for him to have it cut.
‘Excellent, actually. While I was in Oxford with Paul and Shari –’
‘How are they, by the way?’ Paul had been Jonathan’s roommate in their doctoral programme, and many of Jonathan’s best stories revolved around their misadventures.
‘Great – sleep-deprived, you know, but head over heels with the baby, and they seem happy. I’ve got pictures. They’d love to meet you.’
Rose laughed. ‘Not likely, unless they’re considering a transatlantic flight with a newborn.’
Jonathan swallowed awkwardly. ‘Well, that’s the thing, love. When I was over there, Paul and I had lunch with his dean.’ He paused, searching for the next words, and Rose felt her heart growing colder, a thin sheet of ice covering its surface like frost on a windowpane.
‘He’s very interested in my research. He wants me to join the faculty there – a lab of my own, graduate students to work with me. It’s ideal. A perfect opportunity.’
Rose reached for the glass of water he’d left for her on the coffee table. Her mouth was painfully dry, her throat ached. Alone again. It seemed it was Just Her Luck to have finally found her Orlando, her perfect love, only to have him leave her. Shakespeare’s Rosalind had never had this kind of problem; she was too busy cross-dressing and frolicking around in forests with her servant. Rough life. Rose set the glass back on the table and slipped her other hand from his.
‘So you’re leaving,’ she said dully, when she could push her parched lips into words again.
‘I’d like to,’ he said softly. He reached for her hand again, but she moved so she was facing forward, away from him, her ankles crossed primly, hands folded in her lap, as though she were waiting to be served at a particularly stuffy tea party.
‘But we were supposed to get married,’ she whispered.
‘And we will, of course we will. I’m not saying that at all. But I’d be a fool to turn this down. You can see that, can’t you?’ His voice was pleading, but she turned away.
‘When are you going?’
‘I haven’t said I am, as of yet. But I could start at the beginning of the third term, just after Easter.’
‘Your contract here goes through the end of the year, doesn’t it? You’re just going to break your contract?’
‘Rose, don’t be like that. Please hear me out. I want you to come with me.’
Rose turned her head towards him and barked a short, harsh laugh. ‘To England? You want me to come to England with you? You have got to be kidding, Jonathan. I have a job. I have a life here. I’m not like you. I don’t get to go globe-hopping every time I get a whim.’
‘That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?’ he asked, recoiling from the bite. Our Rose, whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth! He rubbed his hands quickly on his knees and stood up, rumpling his hair impatiently. ‘It could be good for us – for both of us. For me, yes, but for you, too. You haven’t got a job past next year, right?’
‘Is this supposed to make me feel better?’ Rose had been told this spring, in no uncertain terms, that her adjunct contract wouldn’t be renewed after this year. No hard feelings, nothing personal, but they hadn’t any tenure-track positions open, and it was so important to keep the department adjuncts fresh, to keep the curriculum vital, you know. Yes, Rose had thought sourly, and because you can keep milling through those brand-new PhDs and never have to give them a penny more than you think you can get away with. The thought of having to find a new job paralysed her, the thought of being without a job paralysed her, and she was highly tempted to stick her fingers in her ears and sing until the entire thing blew over.
‘I don’t know about better. But I’d hoped you’d be at least a little happy for me.’
She looked up at him, his eyes sad and wounded, and she crumbled a little. ‘I am. I’m sorry. But it’s so big . . . It’s such a huge change from what we were planning.’
‘We always knew we’d have to consider it, love. My position here is only temporary, you know that.’
‘But I thought maybe . . .’ Rose didn’t want to say what she had thought. She’d just assumed that he would give up this fancy academic jet-setting and find something nearby, something where she wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Where she wouldn’t have to change at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘Oh, Rose, I’m sorry, too. Let’s not talk about it any more. Let’s just enjoy being together for a bit.’
He came over to her and put his arms around her and kissed her, and that did only a little to soothe the ache inside where her heart had been bruised. So that was it. He wouldn’t stay, and she wouldn’t – couldn’t – go. It was ridiculous to even think about it.
His hands were in her hair, slowly pulling the pins out and letting it fall down her back the way he liked it, stroking the tresses the way she liked it, the gentle pull against her scalp so soothing. She wasn’t paying attention. Bean and Cordy were sitting on her shoulders, whispering in her ears like a cartoon devil and angel. Or two devils, really. ‘You could go if you wanted to, Rosie,’ our youngest sister said. ‘Just pick up and go. It’s not so hard. I do it all the time.’
‘What are you afraid of?’ Bean mocked. ‘Don’t want to leave your glamorous life behind?’
Okay, so it wasn’t a glamorous life. But it was important. She was important. We needed her. Didn’t we?
Bean and Cordy didn’t answer. Bean was adjusting her horns, and Cordy was chasing her own forked tail. You need me, Rose thought fiercely. They turned away.
‘Hush,’ Jonathan said, as though he could hear the busy spinning of Rose’s thoughts, and he kissed her, and we fell off her shoulders as though we’d been physically brushed aside.
ACT II
Setting : Interior, the Golden Dragon, a small Chinese restaurant a few towns over, famed more for its convenience than its cuisine. Also the site of an infamous embarrassment for Bean, aged eight, in which she devoured a sweet and sour pork entrée all by herself and then regurgitated the entire thing tidily into the mouth of a fake dragon hidden behind a plant, certain it would never be found there. Characters : Rose, Jonathan, our father, our mother.
They sat around the table, the four of them, sharing dishes and companionable chatter. Tea steamed in tiny cups, and Rose was fumbling with her chopsticks, envying Jonathan’s easy grace with the infernal things.
‘We have something to tell you,’ our father said, clearing his throat.
Rose looked up quickly, warily. This was the sort of announcement that had preceded the game-changing births of both Bean and Cordy. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t bound to be good.
Our father cleared his throat again, but it was our mother who spoke, leaping in, tearing off the conversational Band-Aid. ‘I have breast cancer,’ she said.
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 centre. 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 favourite 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, neighbours 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 cheque book, 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 towards 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.’
The 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 favourite. 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.
