The curtain opened, the gas fireplace crackling coldly behind us, and we began, our own carefully cribbed scripts set in front of us as we stirred the giant pot full of air.
“Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue!” our father cried out before we could speak, and he and our mother applauded wildly. Rose hushed him, breaking character in frustration before turning back to the long wooden spoon we had liberated from the jar above the stove.
Rose had neatly excised all the extraneous characters, which made it an extremely abbreviated production. We had, at one point, dispatched Cordy to our mother to request a brother, as he would have been enormously helpful, but our mother said it was not likely, and in any case it would take an awfully long time even if it were to happen, so we settled for the abridged version.
Rose kept the first witch’s part for herself, being as it was the one with the monologues, and first to speak, besides, and Bean played her part with a great deal of hair-flipping, which she had seen on a television show during a sleepover at a friend’s house, and Cordy got lost repeatedly, until Rose hissed at her in frustration to keep her finger on the lines. Cordy found this no help at all, and it resulted primarily in her shouting out the lines she did know, so it sounded a bit like this: “The weird sisters, HAND IN HAND! / Posters of the sea and LAND! / Thus do go about, about; / Thrice to thine, AND THRICE TO MINE! / And thrice again to make UP NINE! / Peace! The charm’s wound up.” Cordy was big on rhyming.
When we finished, Rose was nearly in tears, frustrated with the way her great dramatic vision had failed to align with reality. “That wasn’t right at all!” she cried, and would have commenced to pointing fingers, had our parents not stepped in to console her. Bean and Cordy couldn’t have cared less, as Bean was still practicing her curtsy from the curtain call, and Cordy was chasing Mustardseed around, attempting to complete his costume with her witch’s hat, which he (not surprisingly) wanted no part of.
“Your play needs no excuse,” our father said. “I found it lovely. It covers all the important parts without any of the major characters. Brilliant adaptation.” He kissed Rose’s slightly hat-haired head.
“I agree,” our mother said. “I always thought the three witches were the best part of the play anyway.”
“Of course,” our father said. “It was convenient of us to have you three so we could have our very own Weird Sisters.” He gave our mother a wink over Rose’s head.
“But Cordy did it wrong!” Rose objected again.
“No, she just did it differently,” our mother soothed. “But it doesn’t matter, because aren’t the best plays the ones that are different?”
Well, no. Not always. We saw one production of Much Ado set in a USO in World War I, and that was quite good. But then there was an infamous naked Midsummer, and the reverse-race Othello, and those were both awful.
But Rose learned an important lesson: people don’t always do what you tell them to do. In the interests of fairness, though, we must remind you of the other side of this. Rose is the only one who can get us out the door on time when we have theater tickets or are trying to get to church services. When our mother left pans of carrots boiling away to charred messes on the stove, Rose made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cutting them neatly into sailboats for Cordy. When she got her driver’s license, she drove Bean to the nearest mall (which isn’t really near at all) almost every weekend night, and didn’t even tell on her the time she met those boys with the Trans Am and came home with vodka on her breath and vomit down the front of her blouse. And she helped Cordy sew her graduation dress even though she thought it looked hideous, and she was the professor in the math department whose course evaluations from her students always began, “I always thought math was boring until I met Dr. Andreas. . . .” and as much as she hates us for taking away her throne, she has never ever pushed us off of it.
And she would be none of those things if she weren’t the firstborn.
We had sent Bean to the store—Rose was helping our father move furniture in the bedroom for our mother’s impending confinement, and Cordy was too unreliable to be trusted. Even with a list she would wander aimlessly through the aisles and come home with a mysterious assortment of products: a bag of sugar-encrusted gumdrops, an apple corer wide as a cupped hand, an unloved, dented box of flavorless crackers that would sit, ignored, in the pantry until they crumbled to paste. Whatever we had sent her for in the first place would be mysteriously absent.
A list clutched in her hand, the ink gone sweaty and the paper soft from the heat, Bean strolled through Barnwell Market. We hated the occasional necessary evil of the supermarket outside town: its painfully bright, wide aisles, the cold industrial-tiled floor, the incessant chirp of the cashiers’ scanners twining with the music in an unsettling soundscape. We far preferred this tiny store a block from the Beanery, with the dusty shelves holding homemade jams from the farms on Route 31, local produce teetering dangerously in piles outside the store, and Mr. or Mrs. Williston waiting patiently behind the counter to ring up our purchases on a cash register that shook agreeably with each press of a key.
Bean filled a tired bushel basket, the bottom bowed with use, with the items on her list, and headed toward the front, stopping short at the sound of her name.
“Bianca Andreas,” a man’s voice said, and she turned, surprised. She had brushed right past Mr. Dr. Manning, who was standing behind her, wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and blue nylon running shorts. He seemed older than she remembered, though it had been less than a decade; his blond hair going silver in the dim light, the tiny creases at the corner of his eyes deeper, his bare legs indecently muscled.
“Mister Doctor!” she said, the old name coming naturally to her.
He laughed, a deep, warm sound that purred along Bean’s spine. “Oh, come now. Call me Edward. You passed the Mister Doctor stage the moment you walked across the quad in your cap and gown. What are you doing back in the cornfields? I thought you’d abandoned us all for your big-city dreams.”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Bean sighed, with a coquettish little shrug that pushed the light cotton of her shirt down in a deep vee. She was rewarded when his eyes followed the line of her cleavage and then darted back up to her face. Perhaps she hadn’t lost her touch after all. Take that, bar boys.
“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” he said in agreement. “Still queen of the Shakespearean retort, I see.”
“It’s in my blood, sadly. How are you? I hear Mrs. Doctor is off in sunny California.”
“With the offspring. I’m back to lonely bachelorhood,” he said, and we swear to you he winked.
Perhaps if Bean had been a stronger person . . . perhaps if it hadn’t been so cold when she lay alone with her regrets in bed at night . . . perhaps if one of the only eligible bachelors in town hadn’t been a priest, even of the non-celibate variety . . . perhaps if all those things had been true, she wouldn’t have done what she did next.
But she did.
Bean stepped forward slightly, turning her foot out, red-carpet ready, and tilted her head so her hair fell across her face just so. “What a pity,” she said. “And nothing at all to keep you busy all summer long.”
“Oh, I’m teaching the summer workshops, but it’s hardly the same. A handful of students, a handful of hours, and then the thrill of a Barnwell summer evening in an empty house.”
“It certainly hasn’t gotten any more exciting since I left,” Bean said, her eyes darting over him, taking his measure, toying with the possibility. He’d always been handsome, more movie star than any professor had a right to be, but she’d never looked at him as a man, really, only as Dr. Manning’s husband, as the father of the children who played in the waning sunlight of the evenings she spent with them. And those children were nearly grown now, weren’t they? And she was so far away, in both memory and fact. And he was very much here, going soft around the middle, but still broad-shouldered and strong,
a toothpaste-commercial smile, and so focused on Bean that her breath seemed to catch in her throat.
“I fear Barnwell in particular would suffer in comparison to New York. You must come over for dinner and tell me all about it. Well, dinner such as it is,” he said, gesturing with the can of soup in his hand.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve always been an incredible cook. Surely you can do better than that on my account,” Bean said.
“Ah, but I recall your being a tremendously picky eater,” he said. It’s true—his gift for culinary invention had rarely pleased her, and she had often replaced his offerings—cold butternut squash soup, buffalo medallions in a wine reduction—with glasses of wine and plates of salad. “But I’ll be happy to challenge myself for you.”
“I’ll drop by, then. Maybe the day after tomorrow?”
“Seven,” he agreed, and it was done without either of them noticing it, or even paying attention to the fact that their bodies were nearly touching, her breast by his arm, her hip along his, a most indecent pose rarely seen in the Market.
“Should I bring the wine?”
“Please don’t. You’ve always had horrible taste in wines.”
“I was nineteen,” Bean shot back, recalling the night she’d arrived at the Mannings’ with a bottle of wine she’d liberated from a roommate’s bookshelf, a sour, watery affair that they’d poured into the garden after one sip. She pushed down the memory of Lila, his wife who had invited her to all those dinners, given Bean knowledge and attention and warmth and asked for nothing in return, except the understood expectation not to try to seduce her husband.
“Neither age nor beauty excuses bad wine. Just bring yourself,” he said. “That’s all we need,” and Bean swayed away charmingly, a trail of tension stretching between them like vibrating wire.
O, let the heavens give him defence against the elements, for I have lost us him on a dangerous sea.
Oh, poor Bean.
EIGHT
Our family has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years. But on the subject of cancer (here comes Cordy’s wording), he is silent as the grave. The word “cancer” appears only once in all of Shakespeare’s works, and it is not a reference to the disease, but comes in Troilus and Cressida in the same stanza as the classical names of Ajax, Achilles, and Jupiter. So we found ourselves mostly at a loss for words to describe what was happening to our mother.
We don’t know how she found the lump, which Bean thinks is clear evidence that our father found it while they were having sex, but it doesn’t matter, really. There was a lump, and they had been to the doctor, first in Barnwell, and then in Columbus, and there had been a biopsy. And the word “malignant” had entered our family’s vernacular.
The morning of our mother’s surgery, we all got up without Rose having to wake us. How long had it been since all of us had piled into the car like this? Long enough for us to realize that though we had found the backseat uncomfortable when we were younger, it was nothing compared to how dreadfully inconvenient it was for three fully grown adults. Barnwell was small enough that we always walked, even in the winter, and regardless of the weather, and we were unused to such close quarters with each other anyway.
Rose and Cordy stood by the door for a moment and stared at each other expectantly, until Cordy rolled her eyes and climbed into the middle. “The hump,” we had called it when we were younger, because whoever sat there had to contend with the bump where her legs should go.
“I haven’t been the smallest for a long time,” Cordy complained as we squeezed her in on either side.
“You’re still the youngest,” Bean said, flicking Cordy’s bare leg with her fingertip. Rose noticed Bean had cleaned and trimmed her nails, and repainted them shell pink. The effect was both sad and a relief, and Rose felt the unfamiliar urge to hug her, to let Bean know that she didn’t have to try so hard anymore.
“Didn’t that stop meaning something about the time we could legally buy alcohol?” Cordy asked.
“Let’s leave this town; for they are hare-brain’d slaves,” our father said, settling himself into the driver’s seat and looking at Cordy in the rearview mirror.
“O-KAY,” Cordy said loudly, and pushed out with her knees so both Rose and Bean had to squeeze back to defend their space.
“Quit it,” they both whined. Cordy smiled angelically. She looked better. Her skin had lost the yellowish pallor it had gained on the catch-as-catch-can diet she had consumed in her stint as an American malcontent, and her hair looked shiny, bound in a thick braid that fell down her back. She had even gained some weight, Rose noticed, though she could still feel a sharp elbow digging into her ribs. That, however, was more malice than malnutrition.
“Isn’t it nice to have our girls home?” our mother asked our father, batting her eyelashes at him in false adoration.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” our father replied, and pulled out of the driveway. No one had yet mentioned where we were going.
When we were growing up, we took a trip each summer, driving somewhere in our old, wide-bodied station wagon with its painfully sticky vinyl seats that left angry red tattoos on our bare thighs below our shorts. Our parents traded driving duties, steering us down roads that split pastures in two, through tunnels blooming into mountainous vistas, along coastal roads where the only thing between us and our Maker was a thin, low afterthought of a guardrail. We alternated arguing in the backseat with reading, coloring, and playing our father’s infamous sonnet round-robins, in which we passed around a sonnet, each of us composing a line until we had an entire poem that, at the end, usually bore absolutely no resemblance to the initial topic.
The game did, however, make us uniquely good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter, not that this is a skill that benefits one much in any world other than our father’s.
In this way, we saw Fourth of July fireworks in Maine, were terrorized by bears in Yosemite (Bean’s fault—she had left the marshmallows out of the bear bag), had our photo taken by Mount Rushmore, sweltered through an unseasonably early hurricane in Florida, and had our tongues burned off by tamales in Austin.
When we look back on it now, it seems odd that we did not do things more fitting to our family’s named interests. These trips, many of which could have been summed up by a bumper sticker bearing the name of some self-referential tourist attraction like South of the Border or Wall Drug, seemed, if you will forgive the obviousness of it, so American. When we stayed at a motel with a pool and made friends with the other children shrieking around its concrete deck, half the time they might as well have been speaking another language. We didn’t know their television shows, the songs they sang from the radio. We didn’t know junk food, or fast food, and the only handheld game we had in the car was Etch A Sketch. We faked it well, of course, and it didn’t matter because we would never see these children again, headed as they were to California, to Arkansas, to Virginia, places far from us. But we would be untruthful if we didn’t admit it made us feel a little strange.
So, yes, it might be more expected for us to have summered regularly in Stratford, or London, or Padua, or anywhere in Europe with some vague Shakespearean connection, really. But we think our father genuinely enjoyed these forays into Americana. For all his high-minded ignorance about its ways, he found the lives of everyone else all around him, outside our little Barnwell-shaped academic bubble, fascinating. He marked these trips on a mental checklist he carried, some way of bringing himself—and us—into the mainstream, if only for a few weeks.
On this roadtrip to our mother’s date with breastiny (™ Cordy), we had all brought books, of course, no one in our family would ever think of being without reading material, but Rose and our mother were the only ones reading. Our father was driving, holding the steering wheel loosely in his right hand while his left stroked his beard obsessively. He did this so often we sometimes wonder
ed if he would wear tracks in it where his fingers moved. Bean was staring out the window, balancing Edward and her conscience on a mysterious set of mental scales, and Cordy was talking to our father about some avant-garde production of The Merchant of Venice that she had seen at a fringe festival somewhere.
“And then there was this whole thing about how the boxes Portia’s suitors are trying to unlock are, like, symbolic of her virginity, so she kept grabbing her crotch while she was talking.”
“That’s not exactly a new theory,” our father interjected. “It’s not a difficult leap of imagination to make. The word is actually ‘casket,’ and there’s the connection to the death of her father because of the word choice, but they are really just boxes.”
“But did she have to fondle herself onstage?” Cordy asked.
“No, I suppose that’s a bit much.”
“Oh, but you haven’t heard the worst part yet,” Cordy said. She had clasped her hands in her lap, leaning slightly forward, her chin resting on the shoulder of our mother’s seat, the earnest family dog. Bean raised one finger and dragged it carefully, metronome-like, back and forth along the window, ticking away the miles in her mind.
“Do tell,” our father said. He delights in precisely this kind of thing. In the same way Mount Rushmore was, to him, glorious in its baseness, he revels in the dreadfulness of various interpretations of Shakespeare. This meant that throughout our childhood, much of the live theater we saw was just that: dreadful interpretations of Shakespeare, including, memorably, that one all-nude production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which (after Bottom—in full ass-head regalia—sported an erection upon being fondled by Titania) gave us nightmares for a week. The benefit, besides being able to quote liberally from nearly every play, was that we all became quite good at critiquing theater. And at sleeping upright.
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