The Weird Sisters

by Eleanor Brown

  “Well,” Cordy began, stretching the word out like salt-water taffy, relishing the moment. “The Prince of Morocco, you know?” Our father nodded. “The guy playing him was, like, Rastafarian? And he had fake dreadlocks. And an accent.”

  She sat back, having dropped her bombshell.

  Our father chuckled. “Mislike me not for my complexion, mon,” he said, in a clumsy patois.

  “Da-ad,” Bean moaned, stopping the ticking of her finger and rolling her eyes.

  “No, it was totally like that!” Cordy said, turning to Bean and then back to our father. “Dad, you should have been there. I thought I was going to pee myself, I was laughing so hard.”

  “What were they trying to do, do you think, Cordelia?” our father mused. This was, of course, the nut. Even a bad production had some value, something to be learned from it, even if it functioned as no more than a cautionary tale. “Do you have any idea of the zeitgeist? Their aim?”

  Cordy shrugged, bored now. “I don’t think there was one. I think it was a bunch of unemployed actors who think they’re deep or whatever. Depressing.” She folded her hands back in her lap as though at prayer.

  Our mother looked up from her book. “It’s the next exit,” she said, and the car became strangely still. Cordy opened her book and started to read.

  Another family might have made preparations. Another mother might have cooked casseroles in Corningware and frozen them, labeled with instructions. Another trio of daughters might have embroidered a hospital gown, written a song in her honor, brought along massage oils and aromatherapy candles to ease her transition. For all Rose’s talk, we brought only us. Unsure of what to ask, uncomfortable with the illness of a woman who had nursed us through all of ours, armed with only the books we were reading, and not entirely undamaged and unbruised ourselves. Our mother was inches away from us, but we hardly knew how she was feeling—scared? Sad? Resigned?

  At the hospital they wouldn’t let us go any farther than the front lobby, so we kissed her goodbye there. Rose hugged her awkwardly, patting her back as though she were a casual acquaintance. Bean kissed her cheek and then squeezed her upper arms. “I love you, Mom,” she said. Cordy was the only one who gave herself fully into it, hurling herself into our mother’s arms and pressing her tightly. When she finally pulled away, our mother was crying, but only lightly, and Cordy looked weepy and a little dazed. “I love you,” we all called as she and our father walked away. He wore, as he always did, a short-sleeved dress shirt and brown pants, which were too short, and revealed a splash of his black nylon socks as he and our mother disappeared down the antiseptic hallway.

  “Tragic,” Bean said, shaking her head as they turned the corner. Our mother held her purse in her arms like a child, and our father’s hand rested on her back.

  “It’s terrible,” Cordy agreed, still sniffling. Rose plucked a tissue from her heavy leather purse and handed it to our sister.

  “I mean his fashion sense,” Bean said.

  “Jesus, Bean. Have some compassion. She’s going into surgery,” Rose said, shocked. Cordy started crying again.

  “It doesn’t mean what he’s wearing isn’t tragic,” Bean said, but the fight wasn’t in her.

  “Excuse me.” A voice came behind us, and we turned to see an employee standing behind us with a large wheeled cart, laden with supplies, linens.

  “Sorry,” we said, and darted out of the way. Rose led us to the lobby, where the sun had only just begun to burn in through the atrium, the glass panels divided by heavy wood. Cordy fingered one of the plants, unable to tell whether it was plastic or real. Unyielding chairs in varying shades of blue clustered together in tiny squares. Bean and Cordy sprawled out on two rows, feet toward each other, and Rose sat primly on a single cushion. Upstairs as they prepared our mother for surgery, we imagined our parents praying, bending their foreheads together and whispering in an intimate expression of their love and their faith. We could summon neither.

  Cordy and Bean pulled out their books and opened them, disappearing behind the pages. Rose sat for a long time, staring at nothing in particular, and then opened her book as well. That was it, apparently. We weren’t going to talk about it, we weren’t going to share any feelings or discuss any arrangements, not going to bond in any kind of movie montage moment where emotional music swelled as we hugged and wept for our mother’s loss and our own fear. Instead, we were going to wrap ourselves in cloaks woven from self-pity and victimhood, refusing to admit that we might be able to help each other if we’d only open up. Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: we’d read.

  Our father came to get us just before five, the air in the lobby grown stiff and warm with the glare of the afternoon sun. Bean and Rose were asleep, laid out uncomfortably, and Cordy had turned upside down, her head hanging off the edge of the cushions, her feet propped up on one of the cubicle-like walls dividing the cavernous room into smaller portions. She held the book awkwardly in front of her face, page turning a two-handed effort.

  “Harpier cries, ’Tis time, ’tis time,” our father announced loudly. Cordy raised her book, her face gone red from suspension, as Rose started awake with a loud gasp. Bean continued to snore contentedly until Cordy flipped herself right side up, kicking Bean as she moved. Bean started, blinked sleepily.

  We processed upstairs in silence, Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, our father’s shoes squeaking officiously on the wheel-worn floors. Cordy trailed her fingers along the wide blue lines spreading along the walls. When we reached our mother’s room, our father paused, turned to face us. “I just want to warn you. She doesn’t look good.”

  We nodded in acceptance and filed in after him, lined up along the wall as though preparing to be captured in a group mug shot. Everything was white. The walls, the sheets, the curtain separating our mother’s bed from the empty bed and the window beyond, her skin, her lips even. Colorless, ash white, cracked. The fluorescent light sputtered, angry bee, above her head. Bean bit her nails. Rose cried. Our mother looked so tiny, so drained, her bare head skeletally naked against the pillow, the normal blooms in her cheeks faded to paper.

  Our father sat down on the far side of the bed, the sheets folding around the curve of his body. He took our mother’s hand, stroked it gently. Bean, avoiding looking at our mother’s face, noticed again how old our mother’s hands were becoming, the knuckles going broad and bony, the skin traced with sparrow tracks and loose flesh around the backs. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked at our father, her eyes watery mud, pupils wide. A table stood against the wall, a cup of ice collapsing into an exhausted pool of water, a straw, a pitcher, a tiny fluted cup of apple juice, the foil peeled back. Rose busied herself by moving these items around in a Three-card Monte.

  Cordy sat down on the other side of the bed, and the combined pressure made our mother’s legs, wide and sturdy, stand out in relief beneath the tight-pulled sheet. After a moment’s hesitation, she took our mother’s other hand and copied our father’s movements, stroking along the bony knuckles Bean had just been eyeing. “Hi, Mommy,” she said, and our mother turned her head slowly toward her.

  “Hi, honey,” she said, her voice a dry, leafy whisper. She turned her head again, a stiff doll’s rotation, and smiled at Bean and Rose. “Hi. How are you?”

  Bean grinned. “We’re great. But we’re not in the hospital. How are you?” She tugged at the bottom of her jacket, cropped red linen above a long denim skirt. Trust Bean to be perfectly turned out in a crisis.

  Cordy continued to stroke our mother’s hand as though coaxing something from within her.

  Our mother smiled. “Tired,” she said, turning back to Cordy.

  “I know, Mommy,” Cordy said. “Why don’t you sleep? We’ll be right here.”

  She turned to our father like a child looking for permission. He nodded, picked up her hand and kissed it, his beard brushing against her skin. Rose watched them, thinking she had never seen him look at her
so lovingly, and her heart gave a soft pang for Jonathan. Our mother’s eyes closed and we watched her breathe.

  When visiting hours ended, we left our father snoring happily in the empty bed in our mother’s room and drove home, Bean behind the wheel, Rose in the passenger seat, gripping the dashboard in horror every time we changed lanes, Cordy poking her head between the seats, still the family dog. It was strange, being just the three of us, and we spent most of the drive home arguing about what to eat for dinner. Cordy claimed vegetarianism (mostly to make things more difficult, we surmised), Bean fretted about the imaginary half pound she had gained since returning to a diet consisting of more than tapas and martinis, and Rose had been dreaming all day about mashed potatoes with butter, which fit Cordy’s requirements, but not Bean’s. We finally ended up banging around in the kitchen, knocking into each other as we created our own culinary adventures, and ate in a silence interrupted only occasionally by unpleasant conversation about our mother and what we should do to prepare the house for her return.

  After dinner, Bean climbed out her window and sat on the roof, smoking and staring up at the stars. In New York she had never noticed their absence, but here she could see them clearly, constellations and the punctuation marks in between, the creamy swirl of the Milky Way, pushing through the thick summer darkness like the lights at the Coop prom so long ago. The sounds were strange, too; no horns, no sirens, no shouting, no electric hum, just the urgent calls of the crickets and a few early owls.

  “Can I join you?” Cordy asked, sticking her head out the window and peering awkwardly up at Bean.

  “Of course,” Bean said, and scooted over. Cordy climbed out, legs first, and clambered along the gentle slope of roof beside the dormer. The slate had worn down to a smooth flow where we lay in silence together.

  “She looked awful,” Cordy said finally. An owl hooted its mournful agreement from one of the trees at the bottom of the backyard. “I didn’t think she’d look so bad.”

  Bean shrugged, exhaled a plume of smoke that hung in the thick air for a moment, and then dissipated. “I think she’s going to look pretty crappy for a while if she has to do chemo again.”

  “Yeah,” Cordy said. “I know. It was just weird to see her that way. You know. Weak.” Bean knew. We all knew. The sturdy peasant stock we all resented was what made our mother seem formidable. She wasn’t, of course, she was subject to the same flights of fancy as all of us, maybe more, and we had all seen her cry. She wasn’t one of those iron women who would have been able to raise a dozen kids during the Potato Famine and still make it to Mass every Sunday. But she had always looked like one of those women. “Do you think we’ll get it?”

  “Guar-an-teed,” Bean said in a slow drawl. “No point in even quitting smoking. The boobs are going to get me first.”

  “Rationalize all you want,” Rose said, poking her head out the window and climbing clumsily out to join us. “It’s still a nasty habit.”

  “Life’s a nasty habit,” Bean replied, nonchalant. Cordy elbowed her and she moved over, and Rose sandwiched in on the other end. We lay in a neat row, staring up at the sky together.

  Once, long ago, our parents had gone out to a faculty dinner and left the three of us alone. Rose, sixteen; Bean, thirteen; Cordy still trailing along at ten. It was a cool night, it must have been late fall, and Bean had just bought a 45 of a pop song that had enchanted her completely, one of those one-hit wonders with a synth-pop backbeat and an infectious chorus.

  We did the dishes together and then Bean put on the record, opened the front door wide, and danced on the porch below the yellow light, moths beating anxiously against its warmth. By the end, she had pulled Rose up from the porch swing, and they danced together, breathless and wild, sweating in the chill air. “Again!” Bean cried, and Cordy scampered inside to place the needle back at the beginning, her corduroys whisking above her bare feet. We played it again and again and Cordy stood at the door and watched us dancing together, running back and forth each time the song wound to a close, and finally we pulled her out with us and the three of us whirled and spun until we knew all the words and were breathless as much from singing along as from dancing. “They dance! they are mad women!” Bean cried, grasping Rose’s hands and spinning her into dizzy oblivion. And then we climbed up on this roof and looked for falling stars together until Cordy fell asleep and nearly slid off.

  Being on the roof again made us think of that night, but now we were older, if not wiser. “I’m going to get a job,” Cordy announced.

  “So you’re staying,” Rose said.

  “Yar. Is that a problem?” Cordy turned, her braid snagging on a loose tile, and she tilted up to set herself free before lying back down, looking at Rose’s profile.

  “Of course not. It’s just, you know, odd, having you both back here.”

  “Not as odd as it is being here,” Bean interjected. “I thought I was well shot of this town. I hate this place.”

  “Funny,” Cordy mused. “It always had such nice things to say about you.”

  “It feels alien. Like I’d gotten really used to being the only child and now I’m not,” Rose continued, as though we hadn’t spoken.

  “You haven’t been an only child since the day I was born,” Bean said sharply. “Just because we’re not here doesn’t mean we don’t exist.”

  “I know. It just kind of feels like that. You know, because I see Mom and Dad all the time . . . Oh, never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Yeah, because it’s bullshit,” Bean said. She sat up, balanced her cigarette on her thumb, and used her index finger to flick it into the air. The tiny projectile shot out in a fireworks arc, leaving a trail of sparks as it fell toward the garden. We sat in silence again, the still air humming, bustling with summer life. Bullshit, sure, yet we all knew what she meant. We have all had the experience of being the only one in the house with our parents and there is something special, something different about it. Neither Bean nor Cordy ever would have been so callous as to call themselves the only child, but we knew what Rose meant. Competition for attention came only intermittently, in phone calls from Cordy, desperate for a Western Union injection, or from Bean, a call from a taxicab on the way to a party, or, when Rose was off getting her Ph.D., careful letters on her elegant stationery, written painstakingly in her excellent Palmerian hand. These interruptions were more aberrations than the norm, and when they were over, they were forgotten, and the one at home could resume her post as most favored nation.

  Bean lay back again, her hands behind her head. “What’s your job, Cordy?”

  “Working at the Beanery. Dan Miller said he’d hire me if I wanted to work.”

  “If you’d finish your degree, you could get a far better job than service. Actually, you should apply for a job at the college. Then you’d get free tuition,” Rose suggested.

  “Don’t I get free tuition anyway, because of Daddy?” As the baby, Cordy was the only one who put the diminutive suffixes on our parental appellations. It was, at this age, a little annoying, but we put up with it.

  “You’re twenty-seven. I think that benefit ran out a few years ago,” Bean said, not unkindly.

  “Well, whatever. I don’t care about the degree. I just want to be happy.”

  “Is working in a coffee shop going to make you happy?”

  “It’s a perfectly noble profession.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t noble. Rose is the one who thinks it’s beneath you. I’m just saying that if your major life goal is happiness, make sure what you’re doing is going to make you happy.”

  “I didn’t say it was beneath her. I just said she could do more.”

  “Same difference,” Bean shrugged. Rose gave a long sigh, indicating that she disagreed but would not fight it. We are all gifted with communicating great depths of emotion through the semaphores of our sighs.

  “I wish we had some pot,” Cordy said sadly.

  “Ask your new boss,” Bean said. “He h
ad all the good shit in college.”

  “I think he’s gone respectable,” Rose said.

  “Alas the heavy day,” Cordy intoned deeply, and we all giggled. “What about you, Bean?” she asked, turning her head the other way now, and noting how much Bean looked like Rose from the side. And herself the same, she supposed. No one would ever not know we are sisters.

  “What about me? I don’t have any pot, either.”

  “No, I mean are you going to get a job? Stay awhile?”

  Bean lifted her hands and rubbed her eyes hard, the way that leaves starbursts and darkness when you open them again. “I guess so. For a while at least. I want to be around to help with Mom.”

  “So you’re not going back to New York?” Rose asked.

  Silence huddled around us. The owl hooted again, from a different tree this time. Or a different owl, similarly melancholy. When Bean finally spoke, we could hear the dryness as her lips parted. “Not right away. No. Maybe not for a while.”

  “What happened, Bean?” Cordy asked, and her voice was as gentle as her fingers had been on our mother’s hand. She watched a single tear roll down Bean’s cheek, moonlight-paled, but didn’t move to touch her. Bean let it trickle back toward her ear, and when she spoke, her voice didn’t waver.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. We could see that her face was taut from holding in emotion. She looked old, Cordy thought, but she never would have said it aloud. “But yeah. I’m going to be here for a while. I’m going to get a job, too.” Bean sat up and lit another cigarette, and Rose didn’t even complain when she had to fan the smoke away from her face. Something in Bean’s tone was weak and unfamiliar, and slightly unsettling to us, who had grown used to the prickly pear of her nature.

  “You could get a job at the college,” Cordy suggested. “You’re an alumnus. Alumnae?”

  “Alumna,” Rose said.