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Our mother lifted the empty basket onto her hip and speared Bean with a sharp look. ‘I appreciate it, Beany, but I don’t believe for a second that you are home just to help me.’
Bean froze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How many pictures of New York did you cut out of magazines and paste up all over your room? How many times did you watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s – completely missing the point of the story, I might add? How many books about that city did you beg Mrs Landrige to order for the library?’
‘Thousands, on all counts,’ Bean said. She recalled, just barely, the way the city had seemed like the perfect escape, the way it had glittered like a mirage in the distance. But the promise had faded until it seemed like only a memory’s memory, a copy duplicated so many times it had gone pale and blurry. All she could remember now was the harsh reality of the dirty streets and the crowded subways and the ridiculous rent.
‘It’s not like I just met you, sweetie. Whatever made you give up that dream must have been awfully bad.’ Bean made a move to speak, but our mother held up her hand. ‘No, you don’t have to tell me. I’m not sure, honestly, that I want to know. I’m happy you’re here, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.’
‘Thanks,’ Bean said, and her throat was thick with tears that our mother was, thankfully, gracious enough to turn away in time to avoid seeing. The door to the house slammed behind our mother, and Bean turned to look at the back fence, where the honeysuckle grew in thick ropes around the pickets. So many of our favourite summer memories were here in this house: chasing the Morse code of fireflies in the yard at night, eating watermelon on the wide painted concrete of the front steps, the metallic taste of water from the hose, and the delicious spread of freedom in the hours arrayed across the sunlight. Even the smell of the laundry drying on the line could take us back. But that afternoon, none of those beautiful memories could reach Bean. Our mother was dying. Bean was a criminal. Rose was a bitch. Despite any promises, life was not going to get better any time soon.
Chapter Three
I’m walking into town,’ Rose announced to Bean, who was sitting in the living room, reading. The day had not yet launched into the still, stifling air that would bring real heat. Bean was leaning against the window, knees into her chest, toes curled under in the strangely feline way she had had ever since she was a little girl. She looked up from the novel she was staring at. She couldn’t remember a word of it, though she had turned fifty pages since breakfast. ‘Do you want to come?’
Rose watched as Bean’s attention moved slowly from the book, or wherever her mind had been, back to the room. Our mother pottered around in the garden outside, a broad straw hat over the scarf covering her tender scalp, anchored with a wide, elastic band. With great, solid yanks, she pulled weeds from the earth and tossed them carelessly over her shoulder, where they landed in a pile on the brick walkway, as though they had been ordered to do precisely so. ‘Do you think one of us should offer to help her?’
‘I did,’ Rose said flatly. ‘She said she wanted to do it herself. It’s ridiculous, but if she feels up to it, I suppose it’s not going to hurt her.’
‘How generous of you,’ Bean said.
‘Do you want to come or not?’ Rose snapped. ‘I was trying to be nice.’
Bean put the book down beside her, spine splayed wide. ‘Sure. It’s better than sitting here. God, is there nothing to do in this town?’ She got up and walked to the door, slipping into a pair of espadrilles that perfectly matched her crisp cotton blouse and wraparound skirt. She looked like an advertisement. Rose sighed, pulled a bookmark off of one of the shelves beside the window, and inserted it in the book Bean had abandoned.
‘It’s not that there’s nothing to do,’ Rose corrected. ‘It just moves slower. You have to get used to the pace. If you’re going to stay.’
Bean scoffed as she moved towards the door, catching a look at herself in the heavy mirror over the hall table where we kept keys and mail and anything else that happened to need a home. She tossed her hair and it fell in sleek waves over her shoulders. Rose opened the door for her.
‘Do the Mannings still live there?’ Bean asked. They had passed a block in silence, listening to the faraway hum of lawn mowers and children shrieking in pleasure down by the lake. Rose looked up at the house, another of the many wide-clapboard Sears catalogue homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.
‘She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange programme with a college in California. He’s still here, though.’ Bean looked at the empty house. A bicycle stood sentry on the sidewalk, and a watering can lay abandoned among the trampled pansies by the porch stairs.
‘Oh,’ Bean said, somewhat sadly. Professor Lila Manning – Mrs Dr Manning they had called her, to distinguish her from her equally academically inclined husband – had been one of her favourite professors: a small, somewhat elfin woman with a charmingly gruff attitude. She had become, at one point, a sort of mentor to Bean, who had spent evenings at their house, drinking red wine and watching the sun set in the backyard as the conversation drifted like clouds. They had been a young couple, though they had seemed worlds away at the time – married, two young children, a life of stability and normalcy she had hated as much as wanted. Her heart squeezed momentarily with nostalgia, but they had grown apart as Bean became immersed in city life and The Doctors Mannings’ world had filled with other students, china replicas of the ones who had come before.
The birds and insects kept up a low hum that pulsed in Bean’s ears as they walked along. She had lived in the city for so long that these sounds had become foreign to her, and she felt in a way assaulted by them, the way a tourist in New York would have felt at the sirens and screeching of taxi brakes. The thought of the city made her stomach flip, and she said the first thing she could think of, too loudly, the volume pushing aside the still of the summer morning. ‘So how’s the wedding planning going?’
Sweat stood out against Rose’s bare upper arms; Bean could see the way the drops arrayed along the pores from which they had emerged, like synchronized swimmers poised for a Busby Berkeley number. Rose shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess. I don’t know, I never really thought about weddings. I look at these bridal magazines, and they all say things like, “You’ve been dreaming of this day since you were a little girl,” and I haven’t. I never did.’
‘Me, either. Is that odd? Do little girls really dream about their weddings and dress up like brides?’
‘I have no idea. Certainly no one we know did. But then again, we’re hardly a representative sample. And neither Jonathan nor I would want the kind of wedding a little girl would dream of anyway. All that foof,’ Rose added dismissively.
‘Foof,’ Bean repeated, trying out the word, unconsciously letting it slip over the tip of her tongue. Rose shot her a doubtful glance, and they both laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s a funny word.’
There was a pause. Rose put her hand in her pocket, checking to make sure her wallet was still in there.
‘So where will you have it?’ Bean asked.
‘Oh, the chapel on campus, you know. And then the reception in Harris. The college doesn’t usually rent the space over holidays, but Dad got them to make an exception.’ Bean nodded, remembering vaguely a concert she had attended in the Harris ballroom, during her sophomore year, she thought. The band had been some hippie-folk experience, probably one of the ones Cordy had seen recently at some mud-flung venue, and Bean had spent most of it pressed up against the back wall, drunkenly permitting some boy to fondle her. She tried to remember his name for a moment, and then mentally waved her hand, dismissing it. O, is it all forgot? All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?
‘So how will it work, everything? With Jonathan being in England and all?’
Rose gritted her teeth and looked over at one of the houses across the street. ‘We haven’t worked that all out yet exactly. The wedding’s still scheduled for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to lose the deposit. So maybe I’ll go over there a bit for a honeymoon, and then when he’s done with his fellowship there, he’ll come back.’
Bean couldn’t honestly imagine anyone wanting to come back from Oxford to Barnwell, but she didn’t say anything. Just hummed a few bars of ‘How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree)’.
‘Have you started looking for a dress yet?’
Rose laughed. How like Bean, to go directly for the clothes. ‘No. I fear it, actually.’ She tugged self-consciously at her shorts, which were threatening to ride up the insides of her pale thighs. ‘I can’t see myself in one of those big white monstrosities.’
‘No one says you have to wear a big white dress. Wear what you want. It’s not going to be a big formal wedding, right? Not black-tie or anything?’
Rose shook her head.
‘Then it doesn’t matter if it’s not traditional.’
‘I guess,’ Rose said, but looked slightly confused by the idea.
They had come to the head of Main Street, and Bean stopped. ‘I’ll look with you. We’ll go to Columbus; there won’t be anything here,’ Bean said. She turned to Rose for a moment and smiled, a sharp-toothed strangeness that was nonetheless kind. ‘You’ll be beautiful,’ she said, and squeezed our older sister’s sweaty palm.
Rose smiled back, a more genuine smile of surprise and pleasure, and came to a stop in front of the post office. ‘Thanks.’ She wanted to say more, but the moment had passed, and it wasn’t in our nature to prolong sentimentality. She felt, for a moment, that she could tell Bean about how betrayed and confused she felt about Jonathan’s departure, how torn she was about what she would do, that somehow Bean would understand, would be able to help. But then she pushed it aside. Bean couldn’t help her with something like that. A dress, Bean could do. A life, no. ‘I’ve got to go in and mail this.’
‘Okay. I’m gonna walk down the street and check things out. I’ll meet you in the Beanery in, like, a half hour?’
‘Sure,’ Rose shrugged and watched Bean walk away, her hair still bouncing back and forth, the creases in her clothes unbeaten by the heat. Rose shook her head and went inside to buy the stamp to mail a letter to Jonathan in Oxford.
The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week. When we were young, we had three little red wagons that we would pull into town like a parade each Saturday morning, our mother at the head like the high-stepping grand marshal. Rose liked to go last, to keep an eye on the rest of us, particularly Cordy, who was usually in desperate need of it. Cordy would be eating a Popsicle, letting it drip along her arm, stopping to lick the sticky sweet slug trails off her skin. Or she wouldn’t have stacked her books well and they would fall over the sides of the wagon, Rose picking them up like a flower girl in reverse. Or she would halt, squatting down to stare at an anthill in the cracks of a sidewalk, mesmerized by the to-ings and fro-ings until Rose poked her in the behind and made her waddle on. Bean, who liked to arrive first, would be following our mother, peppering her with questions that she answered when she found the time between social conversations along the way.
The building smelled the same – dusty and damp, and Bean stopped inside the door and inhaled. With all the money the town got from the college, she would have thought they would have changed the library, but it had remained the same. The carpet was dirty marigold, step-worn. To her right was the adult fiction, in the back, by the wall of windows looking out on a spreading willow tree and an ill-tended batch of hedges, the children’s section. A woman browsed in the new fiction shelves, and two children, presumably hers, sat contentedly at the yellow plastic table in the back, studiously examining books too big for their hands. A man sat at one of the battered wooden study carrels, his head bent forward so Bean could see only the curl of his red-touched blond hair over his collar.
Mrs Landrige, the librarian who had been here in the red-wagon days, had been white-haired and stooped even then, but Bean could see her at the desk, stamping library cards with a patient hand. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she found herself des perately wanting to give the old woman a hug, not that Mrs Landrige would have trucked with that. Mrs Landrige, as a point of fact, didn’t truck with much.
Bean strode over to the desk and leaned forward, her voice falling immediately to a whisper. We’d been well-trained. ‘Mrs Landrige.’
The old woman’s head popped up, her eyes sharp, watery blue. ‘Bianca!’ she said without a moment’s hesitation. Her recall amazed Bean. With the way professors and their families shifted in and out of this town, she wondered how many patrons this otherwise small-town place would have had, how many cards Mrs Landrige could associate with a face. ‘How lovely to see you!’
‘It’s good to see you, too,’ Bean said honestly. ‘I thought you might have retired.’
Mrs Landrige smiled. ‘I’m too old not to work. Keeps my mind off the inevitable.’ She gave a wheezy little chuckle, the red and black checked bow of her dress trembling against her chest.
Bean didn’t quite know what to say, so she smiled back and cast her eyes around the room again, taking in the desk with the stacks of paper, the eroded rubber stamps leaning drunkenly against one another on the desktop. The children in the back squabbled for a moment about a book in the centre of the table, and the man in the study carrel lifted his head for a moment, giving Bean a flash of his profile – strong cheekbones fading down into a goatee, his hairline crawling back genteelly from his forehead. Bean thought he could have been handsome. Pity about the goatee.
‘Back for a visit?’ Mrs Landrige asked. She had gone back to her careful work, leaving a date in the future stamped, slightly askew, in a column of its relations. ‘Or to stay?’
‘To stay,’ Bean said, and then stammered it back in. ‘I mean – I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I might go back to the city after . . .’ After what, exactly? After our mother dies? After no one wants to throw you in jail any more? When will it be safe, Bean? ‘After a while,’ she finished weakly.
Mrs Landrige stopped, mid-stamp, and rested her weapon on the desk. She peered up at Bean for a moment, considering, and then gave a little nod, as though she’d decided something for herself. ‘Then you’ll need a library card, won’t you?’ she said finally, as though that solved everything (which, in our family, it nearly did). She opened a drawer with one vein-knotted hand and flicked out a stack of cards. She wrote Bean’s name down on one of them in her precise, schoolroom script and handed it over with a flourish. ‘It’s nice to have you back, dear,’ she said, and smiled, and Bean suddenly felt like crying.
She blinked hard and turned her gaze away from Mrs Landrige, lest the urge to cry, or worse, to hug her, returned. The man in the study carrel gathered his things and strode towards the desk. He wore jeans and a Superman T-shirt, and his boots were battered and faded in spots. No wedding ring, about the right age. Worth a hair flip, at least.
‘All ready, Father?’ Mrs Landrige asked, taking the books from the man.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said.
‘Have you met Father Aidan?’ the librarian asked Bean, who was busy blushing a little at her idea of flirting with a priest.
‘No,’ Bean said, and thrust out her hand, a little too quickly. ‘I’m Bianca Andreas. My father’s a professor here. At Barnwell,’ she added, as though the town were an academic Gotham, teeming with institutions of higher learning.
He smiled, revealing teeth that were bright white, and slightly crooked, as though his mouth were off-balance in some way. ‘Charmed,’ he said. ‘I’m Aidan.’
‘Father Aidan is the new priest at Saint Mark’s,’ Mrs Landrige advised Bean, neatly closing the last book and pushing the stack across the desk to him.
Well, at least he wasn’t Catholic. St Mark’s was our church – Episcopalian, not so progressive that it would have let our Bean actually bed the man standing in front of her (at least not with any expediency), but she wasn’t going to go to hell just for thinking of it. Episcopalian priests could date, could fall in love, could marry. Maybe they could even engage in some heavy premarital petting. Bean had never really had the opportunity to consider this before.
‘That’s great!’ Bean answered, too cheerfully. She felt stymied by her inability to engage her powers of flirtation, Puck without his love spell flowers. It was great, actually, that the church had a new Father; the last one had passed his sell-by date years ago, but had hung stubbornly on, boring the populace with his creaky Christmas services long after Bean had departed for less green pastures. But she didn’t want to say that. ‘My parents go there. To Saint Mark’s.’
Aidan nodded. ‘You’re Dr Andreas’s daughter, right? Your father read for us a few Sundays ago. He’s an excellent speaker.’
This is true. Years of lecturing has created a monster of a presenter – his voice dips and swoops like a roller coaster, flashing forward at important moments like fireworks, and then retreating back, pulling his audience with him. His overgrown eyebrows wiggle, Marx-like, and he spreads his broad hands across the podium, as if he has to struggle to hold the papers down, lest his high-minded thoughts spirit them away.
‘Thanks,’ Bean said, though none of this is to her, or our, credit.
‘How’s your mother? She’s got chemotherapy in a few days, doesn’t she?’
Bean took a step back, surprised at the question. She’d forgotten how involved our parents were in the church – how they’d raised us to be involved in the church, too, not that it had stuck, particularly. She didn’t think about God a lot. None of us did. He was just there if we needed him. Kind of like an extra tube of toothpaste under the sink.
‘She’s okay. She says she’s tired. But that’s to be expected. And, you know, now I’m here to help.’ Bean was fairly pleased at putting forth this idea of herself as a latter-day (if better-dressed) Florence Nightingale to a clergyman.
‘So, I’ll see you for services, then?’ Aidan asked, bending over to hoist his books under his arm. His hand, broad and dusted with gold hair, spread easily over the span of the covers, and Bean stared at it while she concocted an answer. She hadn’t been to church in years, other than when she came home for Christmas, which hadn’t been often. Our parents had wanted us to believe, but they had also taught us, outside of church, to question nearly everything. It has never made a great deal of sense that our father, a man who spends his days analysing the most finite syllables contained in one book, should so easily accept the even less believable tenets of another. And this is part of the reason why the mystery of faith has escaped all of us, and why Bean – why none of us – had ever bothered to make even a pretence of making church a regular part of our adult lives.
But it’s not like she had any other pressing engagements, right?
‘What the hell,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes.’ Aidan looked at her oddly for a moment while she blushed again – twice in only a few minutes, a record – and then he smiled and said goodbye, heading out the doors into the sunshine.
‘Would you like to check anything out today?’ Mrs Landrige asked, settling back down into the repetitive stamp, stamp, stamp of making due date cards.
‘No thank you,’ Bean said. ‘I have to meet my sister.’
At least we made good excuses for each other.
The next night, Rose was sitting on her bed, watching dust motes dance in the air while she dialled Jonathan’s number. ‘Right on time,’ Jonathan said, picking up the phone an ocean away.
Rose and Jonathan had a scheduled once-a-week phone call. Not very romantic, Cordy might say.
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 you 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 any more. 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 favour 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?
Rose 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.
