“Hell, it’s bad enough I’m living here again,” Bean said, and her sharp edge returned, slicker than a knife blade. “I’m not going to go back and work there, too. It’d make me feel like a failure.”
We sat for a moment, no one pointing out that we were all failures, whether we allowed ourselves to feel it or not. Rose, least comfortable with that idea, finally slapped her hands on her legs, brushing away invisible dust. “I’m going to bed. Anybody need me to wake you up tomorrow?”
“Me,” Cordy and Bean both said.
When Rose had climbed inside, Bean finished her cigarette and stared into the quiet night. The full trees blocked our view of the town, but she knew somewhere in the sleeping darkness lay sin and salvation, both equally tempting. But the path of sin was so comforting, so well tread, so easy to slip down into quiet numbness.
“Seen the Very Reverend lately?” Cordy asked, as though she were reading Bean’s thoughts.
Bean exhaled, shook her head.
“Too bad. He’s cute.”
The words lingered on Bean’s lip a moment, hesitating, before she spit them out. “I’m going to have dinner with Dr. Manning tomorrow.”
“Oh, really? That’s cool. You haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Not her. Him. She’s in California or something.”
“Oh,” Cordy said. Did she know what Bean had meant? Did she know the way that he had been drawn to the curve of Bean’s lip, her breast, the quiet sadness that could be lost in a rustle of sheets?
But even if she knew, Cordy would not criticize. Who was she to judge our Bean and all that lay hidden inside her, when she carried her own secrets, warm and sweet in their pain?
Bean rubbed her forehead and then flicked her cigarette over the roof in the same trail as the first. Her mouth was dry and bitter from the smoke. “Could you live here forever, Cordy?”
Our sister considered for a moment, toying with the loose end of a braid, rubbing her fingers up and down the exhausted split ends. “It’s no different from anyplace else,” she said finally. “Just on a smaller scale.”
“Much smaller,” Bean said. She pulled her knees up to her chest and laid her cheek against her knee. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe here.”
Cordy hesitated for a moment, and then reached over and gently ran the back of her hand along Bean’s bare arm.
“That’s not Barnwell,” Cordy said. “That’s you.”
NINE
It might seem callous that when we drove into Columbus the next morning, we went dress shopping instead of going to the hospital. We didn’t desert our parents entirely, of course, because we arrived at the hospital by eleven, but we didn’t go there immediately to commence with the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
Instead, there was trying on of garments at a discount bridal store with toothy saleswomen who cooed over us until Rose was sweating uncomfortably in stiff satin and Bean was nearly snarling. Cordy, her wide-legged jeans trailing into threads at the bottom, sat curled in a chair, shaking her head sadly at each meringued concoction.
“I look ridiculous,” Rose sighed at her umpteenth attempt in a stiff white dress. The store was quiet, which was good, because if Rose had had to contend with the chirping and pecking of a million happy mothers and twentysomething brides, she might have become homicidal. The dress was relatively simple, and pretty, with a fitted Empire bodice sealed with a dainty bow, flowing out into a chiffon skirt, but inside it Rose just looked tired and miserable. She made a face at herself in the mirror. “Ridiculous,” Rose repeated. “Mutton dressed as lamb.”
“Puh-leez,” Bean groaned, giving the long skirt a sharp yank to make it fall properly. “Thirty-three is hardly mutton. I swear nobody who’s anybody gets married anymore until they’re at least thirty anyway.”
Rose pouted at herself in the mirror, smoothing back her hair. Cordy picked at her nails. “Fine. I’m not mutton. But I still look foolish.”
“Because you’re insisting on this stupid tradition,” Bean said. One of the saleswomen she had chased away fluttered by, ready to alight and push for a sale, but Bean bared her teeth, and the woman scatted just as quickly as she had come. “Come on, Rose, we can do so much better, I swear, if you’ll just let me do some picking. Somewhere that doesn’t look like a marshmallow factory.”
Rose lifted the layers of skirt and let them float back down along her thighs, like Daisy deflating in Tom Buchanan’s presence. “But I don’t want to look weird,” she groaned. “I want to look like a bride.”
Cordy finally stood from her chair, having successfully torn her nails into ragged shreds. “Nobody’s going to mistake you for anything else at your wedding. But the big white dress just isn’t for you, Rosie. Why don’t you let Bean pick something out? She’s a way better dresser than you or me.”
Rose looked at Cordy, who wore a ragged black tank top and jeans settled low on her hips, leaving a stretch of belly poking out. Back in the dressing room hung Rose’s own clothes, a pair of olive walking shorts that left her legs sticking out like white, stumpy sausages, and a loose white shirt that made her look wide and unkempt. She had worn them for the ease of donning and doffing, but now she regretted it. Bean would have dressed up, and made sure to remain clean and perfect through the experience. The very train of her worst-wearing gown / Was better worth than all my father’s lands.
In the center of the dressing room, in front of the wide span of mirrors that sent Rose’s image spinning back at her, square, heavy, plain, sat a wooden box brides could climb on to admire the spread of a train, the detail of a hem. Rose thumped down on it sadly and buried her face in her hands. A moment passed in silence before we realized she was crying.
“Oh, Rosie,” Cordy said, and climbed toward our sister on her knees. She put her hands on Rose’s knees and shook them gently. “What’s wrong?”
Rose cried.
Bean stood apart, wrapping a veil around her hand, tulle scraping against her fingers.
“Rosie-Posie,” Cordy said again, looking sweetly up at our sister’s face. When Rose pulled her hands away, her eyes were red and streaks of tears mapped across her cheeks.
“I’m supposed to be beautiful,” she said, and sniffed. “For one day, I’m supposed to be beautiful.”
“But you are,” Cordy said. “You’ll be the most beautiful bride we’ve ever seen.” And bless her heart, Cordy really meant it.
Rose turned to look at herself in the mirrors, bare arms swelling out of too-tight sleeves, her face gone red with the effort of sadness. It was, we’ll admit, even Cordy might admit, not her best moment.
“No, no, I am as ugly as a bear; for beasts that meet me run away for fear,” Rose said, and set herself off again. Cordy lifted a hand to Rose’s face, and Rose batted it away. “Don’t patronize me with your hippie crap,” she said sharply, and Cordy pulled away, stung.
Bean shook the veil off her arm and marched over to Rose’s side, hands on her hips. Her heels sank into the soft carpet, and she wobbled slightly. “Rosalind,” she said, and she pulled our sister’s full name out like a warning. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Bean,” Cordy cautioned, but her softness was cut by the sword of Bean’s voice.
“You look like shit because the dresses are shit,” Bean said.
Rose’s head drooped like a thirsty flower, and a fat teardrop landed on the satin. Bean reached down and yanked Rose up by the hand.
“Be serious,” Bean said. “Is this really what you want to look like?” She flicked an angry finger at a cheerfully juvenile bow on Rose’s sleeve. “This is kindergarten crap.”
“I want to look like a bride,” Rose said. “I’m supposed to look like a bride.”
“Is this seriously about the dress?” Bean asked. “Because this is a whole lot of drama over an overpriced pile of cheap fabric.” She picked up the price tag under Rose’s arm and shook her head.
“It’s not the dress,” Rose said, flopping down onto the box again. “It’s everythi
ng. Everything’s just”—she flailed her arms—“out of control.”
“You don’t have to get married,” Cordy said. Seeing Rose in that white dress had made her feel uncomfortable and sad. She didn’t know if it was the idea of the wedding, or the marriage, or the dress itself. She had not even the slightest urge to see herself up on that platform. Ever.
Rose and Bean looked at her as though she were a noxious substance we had just stepped in. This was a look best performed as a duet, and Cordy cringed, just as she had the million times we had delivered it in concert before. How was it possible, all these years and experiences later, that no one could wound us like the others?
“Well, you don’t,” Cordy said sulkily. She retreated into a shell of frayed hems and sloppy hair.
“Hi, Cordy,” Bean said. “Not helping.” She turned to Rose, took her hands, lifted her up. “Take off the damn marshmallow and let’s go see Mom. We’ll go somewhere else and find you a dress that doesn’t want to eat Manhattan.”
“If you make me look weird, I swear I’ll disown you,” Rose said. Her hands felt slippery and warm inside Bean’s cool fingers.
Bean rolled her eyes. “What a tragedy that would be.” She stripped Rose out of the gown with deft, impatient fingers, and shooed her back into the curtained dressing room.
When Rose was in second grade at the local public school, one of the professors at Barney had an idea. Why, given the amount of pedagogical talent and intellectual creativity at the college, did they all send their children to such traditional schools?
A consortium of professors bought one of the old mansions near the campus, wide wraparound porch, spreading green lawn, three floors and a basement smelling of dirt and broken jars of jam. They moved furniture into some of the rooms, but left others empty, so footsteps echoed emptily against the walls. The kitchen was filled with lab equipment, the bedrooms with groaning bookshelves, and the parlor and sitting room were pressed into service as a tiny auditorium. And with this completely haphazard preparation, the Barnwell Cooperative School was born.
For Rose, who had loved every minute she had spent at what she called her real school, Coop, as it came to be known, was a complete culture shock. She had loved everything the professors had so denigrated—the uniformity of the desks, the tidy, old-fashioned cloakroom, the inflexible, predictable schedule, the tight single-file lines on the way to the cafeteria.
Coop had no such things. We held classes, certainly, but they tended to take place on the whim of the professors who taught them; one week Monday might begin with biology, followed immediately by theater and then sculpture, and the next week Monday might have no classes at all. The idea behind the school was that the students would be captains of their own academic destiny, mastering all subjects through their pursuit of their interests, guided and informed by the great academic minds of the Barnwell faculty. Such a system wasn’t an entirely new idea, but decades passed before Coop’s philosophy was given a name: unschooling (which all of us found particularly objectionable).
Rose also blames this haphazard educational system for our flightiness, but we wouldn’t have had it any other way. When the other students at college talked about locker combinations, visits to the principal’s office, and Scantron forms, Cordy would mentally drift back to Coop, remembering the large brown armchair in the upper guest room she had claimed as her own, the hours she had spent there, reading Shakespeare, or Austen, or Marx, writing papers on Derrida or Pascal or Curie, or simply staring at the ceiling and wondering.
During what was, in essence, Bean’s senior year—though nobody bothered with such formality, we just said we went to Coop and that was enough—she decided we needed to have a prom. She took the idea to what served as the board, who, as always, encouraged her to do it, but in the traditional Coop spirit. Which meant, of course, that the prom would include everyone, from wee babe to angsty adolescent.
We worked for months under Bean’s direction to make it happen. (Well, Rose had started college by then, and was doing her level best to pretend not to know us, as Bean was already making noise at some of the keg parties on campus, and Cordy was liable to be found wandering around the college’s black box theater, clad in something strange like pink leg warmers and combat boots, so Rose wasn’t too interested in helping, but the rest of us were all in.) While the kids at the high school a few towns over danced in a gymnasium, high heels clicking over the basketball court, abandoned tables along the foul lines and a weary cover band imported from Columbus to play “Stairway to Heaven,” we had our own celebration.
It turned out more like a low-budget family wedding. We held it in Coop’s backyard, a ceiling of stars created with criss-crossing Christmas lights tied to the cottonwoods and red maples, a faux parquet dance floor crushing the patchy grass beneath. The Christian brothers acted as DJs, shuffling carefully cued tapes and records with surprising mastery, and punching each other good-naturedly when boredom set in.
On the wide porch, the elementary school-aged children, ostensibly in charge of refreshments, scrambled back and forth (more often over one another than around, more often dismantling than helping). A few of them—Carrie Obertz, clad in a lemon-yellow pile of chiffon she had once worn as a flower girl dress, adding to the general nuptial air of the proceedings; Michael Taylor, who discarded his clip-on tie, leaving it dangling over the edge of the punch bowl, adding a dapper and unique touch to Professor Shapiro’s crystal; and Hannah and Henry Holtz, who now run the best, albeit only, chocolatier in Barnwell—were of actual use, until, around nine o’clock, they collapsed into small, fluffy heaps on the patio furniture like tiny wilted flowers.
Coop being the kind of place it was, Barnwell being the kind of place it was, and the student body consisting of the children of disaffected, geeky ex-hippies, most of the twelve- to eighteen-year-olds didn’t come in traditional prom style. Cordy arrived in our mother’s wedding dress (an oh-so-sixties Empire-waisted minidress of a disturbingly quilt-like fabric), and danced with every available man, including Dr. Ambrose, a Cretaceous relic in the mathematics department, and Henry Holtz, whose head came approximately to Cordy’s hip, but who presented her with a lovely hydrangea blossom that she tucked into her bra strap, leaving a trail of impossibly blue petals wherever she walked for the rest of the evening. Her best friend Lyssie came in a pair with Benjamin Marcus, she in a Heidi-esque dirndl, he in a saggy pair of lederhosen, but they redeemed their shall-we-say-unorthodox attire by spending the entire evening together in a slow, sweet clinch in one corner of the dance floor, no matter the tempo of the Christian brothers’ selections.
Bean was really the only one who wouldn’t have seemed out of place at an actual prom. Her dress, which would have looked ridiculous on anybody but her, was silver lamé with a sweetheart neckline and a wide, flouncing skirt straight out of Tara, if Scarlett O’Hara had been partial to silver lamé. Her date, one Nick Marchese, wore a stiff, rented tuxedo with a silver lamé bow tie and cummerbund. They would have made Seventeen proud.
Even Rose came by, standing on the corner halfway between the kids on the dance floor and the unneeded chaperones, perched like fat chickens on the edge of the porch. And though Rose is not prone to saying things like this, she will indeed tell you that night held magic: the way the paper lanterns we had made, decorated with Chinese characters someone had been studying, swayed in the breeze, the way the false stars of the light strings twinkled below the real stars, giving the impression that she could have reached up and held the light of a thousand years ago in her hands. She stood for a while, watching Cordy’s serious, studious waltz with Dr. Ambrose, Bean and Nick’s stiff-armed rocking, and, most wistfully, Lyssie and Daniel’s chastely impassioned repetitive circle. When Bean and Nick turned again, she caught Rose’s eye, and they paused for a moment. And then Rose smiled at Bean, showing in that simple expression how proud she was of the way we had transformed that undernourished scrap of yard into something so beautiful, and Bean smiled back, and then Rose
disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind the enchantment for her cruelly cinder-blocked dormitory.
When we got to the hospital, our father was sitting in one of the chairs, reading a wide-spined tome, while our mother poked suspiciously at a tray of food. She looked sallow and tired, the blush we so love in her cheeks still absent.
“Ah, it is my dog-hearted daughters,” our father said, barely looking up from his book. His clothes were rumpled, stray hairs crawled up his cheeks from his beard.
“A decrepit father takes delight to see his active child do deeds of youth,” Cordy shot back.
“That’s a sonnet,” our father retorted.
“No one ever said sonnets didn’t count,” Cordy said.
“Ignore him,” our mother said, and her voice sounded reedy and thin. “Come give me a kiss.”
“Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,” Cordy singsonged. “Is that better, Daddy?”
Our father humphed again and went back to his book. We went over to our mother’s bed and gave her kisses. Rose hugged her tightly, and our mother squeaked at the pressure. Bean gave her a whisk of a kiss, like a broom sweeping clean, and Cordy climbed into bed on her good side and curled up in the crook of our mother’s arm, cat-like.
“How was traffic? You’re here late,” our mother said, shifting gently, leaning back against the pillows, white as her skin.
“Bean drove,” Cordy said. “We got here lickety-split.”
“We went dress shopping for Rose,” Bean said, leaning up against the wall, her legs crossed, fashion-model.
“Find anything?” Our mother reached up to scratch her scalp, which had begun to itch as her hair grew back in, and winced at the stretch of the skin under her arm.
“I’ll do it,” Cordy said, and sat up, rummaging in the thick wool satchel hanging across her shoulder until she produced a mangy-looking, soft-bristled brush, and sat beside our mother in the bed, stroking the brush over the wisps that were appearing along the shocking bare skin of her scalp. We sat in silence for a moment, wondering at the sight, the contrast between the thick spill of hair we remembered, the way it fell, dark wood, over her shoulders when she loosened it, and the sparse fur that was her hair now. When we were little, we loved to watch our mother brush her hair, the long, luxuriant strokes bringing forth the shine, and then the quick, efficient movements as she twisted it into a bun. Cordy’s hands looked thick and inept in comparison, our mother’s head as delicate as an unopened bloom.
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