“Oh?” Rose asked. She shifted, crossed her arms. The prescription bag crinkled under her arm.
“I’m retiring after this year. Carl’s been retired for a while, as you know, and he’d like to move. Be closer to the family.”
A little spark of hope lit up inside Rose, and her heart beat faster. This could be the answer to her prayers. She’d always wanted a job at Barney, and now that her current university wasn’t going to renew her contract, the timing was perfect.
“So we’ll have a tenure-track position open. One of the current faculty will move up to department head. Are you still interested?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I’m interested.”
“I thought maybe with Jonathan abroad, you might be joining him.”
“In England?” Rose laughed. “No, you know me. I’m a homebody. I’d be thrilled to join the Barnwell faculty.”
Dr. Kelly tilted her head slightly, looking at Rose, who was beaming so brightly she could have lit up the whole store. “Then you’d better start getting your application packet together. We’ll announce the opening in the fall. And Rose, I wouldn’t go repeating this, but your name was the first one to come up when we began to discuss candidates. I’m fairly sure the job would be yours if you want it.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Kelly!” Rose said. She hugged her tightly, surprising even herself, and ran out the door. “Come by anytime,” she called over her back.
She ran nearly all the way home. When we were little, Bean liked to have fashion shows, Cordy liked tea parties, and Rose liked to play school—she always got to be the teacher, of course. But it was never an elementary school classroom where she saw herself when Bean and Cordy would cooperate long enough to play. It was always one of the classrooms at Barnwell. When our father took us to work with him, she’d wander into one of the empty rooms and sketch on the board, delivering a lecture to an imaginary class until some actual college student came along and burst her bubble.
And now it was happening. She ran inside, dropping the pharmacy bag in the kitchen, and bounded up the stairs to her room. She called Jonathan, but there was no answer, and he didn’t have a machine. Where was he? She was bursting to tell him—it was the answer to all their problems. He could finish his year in England and then come back and get a job at Barney or one of the city universities. And then she wouldn’t have to leave. Nothing would have to change.
Impatient, she called again, but it wasn’t even five minutes later and there was still no answer.
More irritated than deflated, Rose checked in on our mother, who was sleeping, and our father, who was working in his study and didn’t even hear her greeting. Cordy was at work, and Bean was out looking for a job again. What was the use of having wonderful news if there was no one to tell it to?
She reached for the phone to call Jonathan again, and then dropped her hand to her side. And then she realized, what if he wasn’t excited for her?
Odds were that he wouldn’t be. He’d said the first time they met that he was a wanderer, and he’d proven that by wandering off when the first opportunity presented itself. And Rose wasn’t a wanderer at all. Jonathan probably would be better off with someone like Cordy, whose feet tapped impatiently when she was in any place for more than a week, it seemed.
This thought made her irrationally jealous, and she nearly laughed at herself.
She’d just have to make him see how perfect it was. Explain it carefully, show him how much sense it made to settle down here when his time at Oxford was done. How important it was that they be close to our parents, and only a brief plane ride from his. It made such good sense, and Jonathan was so logical. He’d see it her way. Of course he would. He had to.
TWELVE
Sunday morning, thunderheads loomed above, thick and rich with rain. Cordy had been up before us all making pancake batter with blueberries purloined from the neighbor’s bushes, their delicate bodies splitting against the wooden spoon, staining the batter with violent violet. Lately she had been a culinary one-woman band, serving up symphonies of simple, delicious food. Even Bean could not resist, but she limited herself to two pancakes, with only the delicate veil of a sneer touching her lips as she watched Cordy, her arms still stick-thin, but her skin blooming pink again, devour an enormous stack until her chin was sticky with syrup.
Our mother ate with us, though she could barely finish one serving, and mostly drank water, complaining of heartburn. After breakfast, without discussion we changed and headed to church together, as we had done every Sunday morning of our childhood. Whenever we came home, our parents just assumed we would join them at church, probably assumed that we were all going regularly even when we weren’t at home. And because it was important to them, because though their faith never came out in bombast or brimstone, it was just as much a part of who they were as the books they read, we always agreed.
Our father and our mother went in the car—she was still too weak to walk even as far as St. Mark’s—but the three of us headed down the path we’d walked a million times, the trail that curved through the silent woods behind the church and spilled out again between the houses of our street. When the path narrowed, we walked in a line, Rose at the head, small puffs of dust bursting from her heels each time she put one comfortable sandal in front of the other. Bean followed behind, her cardigan, ready to preserve the modesty of her haltered vintage dress, swinging from the tips of her fingers, the skirt brushing against her knees. And last, of course, came Cordy, humming to herself and dragging a stick along the bushes lining the inside of the path.
“Who owns this?” Cordy asked, her voice breaking the still of the air.
“The town,” Rose called over her shoulder. A tiny curl had escaped from her taut bun and bounced cheerfully as she strode. Bean watched our older sister’s clunky steps, her hips wide and heavy, weighing her down, and tightened the muscles in her own calves.
In the heart of the woods, the buzz of insects grew quieter, muffled by the waxy green of the leaves. Bean paused to hear the symphony above them. Cordy, staring at the tip of her stick bouncing along the bushes, nearly bowled her over. “What?”
“The birds. I never hear birds like this in New York.” Oddly, she’d gotten used to it. When she was little, she would wake up and lie in bed, listening to the conversations of the wrens outside, the flutter of angry wings as the blue jays strutted into each other’s territory. We had built a house for robins in the yard, and Bean remembered being lifted up, leaving the sharp, thick grass beneath her feet and pushing up the top of the birdhouse to see two tiny eggs, deep as Mexican turquoise, resting in the nest inside. They had seemed impossibly bright inside the darkness of the box, and Bean had been filled with an ache to touch them, but when she had reached her hand inside, our mother had pulled her away. Not until the birds had been born and shrieked in hungry, wet-feathered anger every day did our mother pull the shells from the nest, presenting them to us in the palm of her hand like a precious gift. Bean had put them on her dresser, stroking them gently every night, memorizing the delicate variations in color until she knew the fragments better than she knew her own face.
“When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,” Cordy sang, somewhat tunelessly, which couldn’t be helped, for, lack of musical talent aside, the music for Shakespeare’s songs had long fallen by the wayside, though our father was always interested in contemporary efforts to reconstruct the tunes.
Ahead on the path, Rose had stopped and was waiting, a hand resting imperiously on her hip. “We’re going to be late,” she said.
Bean was still staring up, sightless, like those baby robins in the nest. The shadows of the sunlight slipping between the trees cast a spiderweb on her face. She turned to look at Rose, but her eyes held no recognition, only a vacant freeze.
“I got fired,” she said.
No one said anything, but Cordy stopped poking at the ground with the stick, and Rose’s hand dropped off her hip.
“They fired me.”
“What did you do?” Rose asked, and then wished she could take back the question. It sounded sharp. Whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile. But Bean didn’t seem to notice.
Keeping it inside had been easier. Her stomach had held a heavy, leaden ache she knew to be the weight of the secret, but it was easily reduced to a dull roar, muffled into submission with the simple distractions of daydreams and job-hunting. Speaking it aloud made it impossible for her to ignore. Running from New York had given her distance, made it seem like someone else’s life, someone else’s disaster, but to say it here, in these woods?
“What simple thief brags of his own attaint?” Bean asked. We stood still. We waited. Finally, she turned again to Rose, and her eyes looked clear and direct this time, bright with tears. “I fucked up,” she said. “I stole. From my job. I stole money. I stole so much fucking money.”
Her shoulders shook as she began to cry, pained, keening wails, ululations of grief and shame. Mascara ran thick trails down her cheeks, wiping away the subtle glow of health that makeup had put there, leaving dark shadows beneath her eyes and pale lines along her mouth, pulled down and aching in grief.
Cordy moved first, dropping her stick and pulling Bean into her arms, her fingernails, still stained with blueberry juice, stroking quietly along our sister’s back, tracking the lines of the fabric. Rose came forward tentatively, questions on her lips, but Cordy shook her head, and when Bean dropped her forehead to Cordy’s shoulder, Rose reached out, delicate, as though to touch a feral cat, and stroked Bean’s hair softly.
She told us, then, the whole story. Yes, she’d been naïve, not understanding fully how much it would cost to live in New York. But that wasn’t what had made her do it. It was everything Bean needed to play her part effectively: the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, the drinks at bars and clubs where a bottle of water alone ran nearly ten dollars. One of her roommates, a bitter-faced young woman named Stella, worked for a publication house that owned a number of women’s magazines, and would scour the beauty closet for the complex range of grooming products that turned Bean into Bianca. And she learned how to get invited to sample sales, and to make friends or sleep with people in PR, who had all the best collections (she attributed her pièce de résistance, a fabulous crocodile handbag even A-list celebrities hadn’t been able to get ahold of for months, to a particularly adventurous romp in a limousine on the way home from a completely forgettable book launch party). But it still wasn’t cheap.
You might forgive Bean for what she did if some kind of desperate need—rent, food, protection payments to the Mafia—had inspired the first embezzlement. But it wasn’t like that. Let’s be honest. It was too many nights out at too many nightclubs, too many drinks bought for herself on a slow night when no man offered to buy for her, too many (and one was too many, really) pairs of shoes that cost more than a semester’s worth of textbooks at Barney. But she was sitting at her desk doing the payroll. The firm was small enough that she wrote the checks out by hand and took them to one of the partners for signature, and she realized, though the thought had never crossed her mind before, that it would be so easy to add a little extra to her own. The partner never looked at them, he just signed them, and she would just do it once. Just to recoup some of the exorbitant overdraft charges she had accumulated. And she would pay it back.
And since it didn’t go missing once, and there was a sample sale at a handbag warehouse where she knew some people and could get in and get first shot at some of the current season’s bags, she did it again. And then a delicious Hollywood star had taken over the lead in some revival on Broadway, and Stella was absolutely dying to go, so Bean took her for her birthday. And there was a completely swish winter coat on sale, and she really couldn’t wear her old winter coat; not in this city. And on. And on.
This is not to say Bean didn’t feel guilty. She did. Every time she deposited her check at the bank, thanking her stars the firm hadn’t gotten around to direct deposit, she expected the teller to look at her, to see her burning cheeks and the lies in her eyes and call her out for what she was. A thief. But it was so easy to forget in the simple pleasure of spending, of treating her girlfriends to a night out. Until the next time payday came around and her bank account was empty and she had to do it again.
It wasn’t pure selfishness either; she gave as generously to others as she did to herself. The one thing she never did was travel, and this is part of the ugly truth as to why Bean came home so rarely. She knew the one day she was out was the day she’d be discovered, and so she was there, day in and day out, and she felt a little sick about the way people in the firm complimented her on her excellent work ethic, on the way she showed up even when she was burning with fever, brushing it off as enthusiastically applied makeup, and she grew to hate herself for it, but she couldn’t stop.
Now, if you are a psychologist, you might say something about how Bean hated her job, and might even have hated New York, and this was all her way of getting the hell out of it all without having to do any of the heavy lifting herself.
And you might well be right.
She had not told us everything, of course, not nearly. She hadn’t told us how she’d been hiding the sick, dark feeling inside by burying it in dangerous fantasy. She hadn’t told us about Edward and the way she’d betrayed Lila. She had told us none of this.
Sisters keep secrets.
Because sisters’ secrets are swords.
But at that moment, we were thinking not of what Bean had done wrong, but how she could make it better. “It’ll be okay, Bean,” Rose said softly, her words as gentle as her fingers on our sister’s head. “We’ll make it okay.”
Rose was waiting with a towel when our mother stepped out of the shower. She genteelly averted her eyes, but the angry red incision, hatched with dark thread, persisted in her mind. The empty space where her breast had been looked odder than a missing limb, Rose thought. More like a face without features, the absent nipple a missing mouth. Our mother winced as she lifted her arm for the towel, and Rose handed it to her, let our mother pat herself dry and then drape it carefully across her chest, ignoring the water pooling on the floor. She still could not raise her arm enough to fold a towel around herself or to tie the scarves that she wore to cover her head. The fabric had a tendency to loosen into sloppiness until one of us was annoyed enough to rewrap it for her. Rose stepped behind our mother and turned off the tap in the tub, which was still dripping. Our mother reached out with her good arm and wiped away the steam on the mirror.
“Do you want help?” Rose asked.
“No thank you, honey,” our mother said. She was staring at her reflection.
“I’ll be in the bedroom. I’ll help you with your exercises and we can put on new bandages.”
“Goody.”
Rose slipped outside the door, pulling it shut behind her, and as she moved, she saw our mother let the towel slip down to reveal her cockeyed chest, and place a bare hand across the emptiness of her skin.
It must be so strange, Rose thought. We had never made much trade in our breasts, small as they were on all of us, but to lose one? Or both? And our mother’s breasts, the ones that had fed us, against which we had cried when we were young. Oh, it was selfish of us to think it, but we missed them as well.
Sitting on our parents’ bed, so high that an old-fashioned step sat at the foot to aid entry, Rose felt the comforter sink down below her as she pulled the lotion and gauze out of the bedside table. Once, when she was a teenager, she had walked into the kitchen to find our mother, her hands in soapy dishwater, our father behind her at the sink, his hands cupped over her breasts possessively. He kissed her neck, whispered something in her ear, and they laughed. Rose had retreated, embarrassed not so much by the scene but by the way her inopportune entrance had violated their privacy. Now she wondered when they made love again, would her father kiss the scar? Caress the empty space?
When it happened to her—it no longer seemed a maybe—
would Jonathan?
“I feel so much better,” our mother announced, coming into the bedroom. She held the towel in front of herself again as she lay down on the bed, leaning on Rose, grimacing slightly as she shifted toward the center. “But I’m sick of these stupid scarves. I wish my hair would grow faster.”
“We could get you hats. Or you could just not wear them at all. It’ll be long enough soon that it would just look like you cut it that way,” Rose said. She pulled the towel down carefully, preserving what little modesty remained in our relationship by exposing only the wound—it was still a wound, wasn’t it? Not yet a scar.
“I think it’ll be a long time before it looks like anything intentional.”
“Do you miss it?” Rose stretched our mother’s arm gently, moving it in the patient way the physical therapist had shown us.
“I do. I still haven’t gotten used to it—every time I look in the mirror I think it’s a skeleton in the reflection, not me.” Our mother took a deep, shuddering breath, and Rose saw tears in the edges of her eyes. “Well, maybe it’s for the best,” she said finally. “It’s impractical for a woman my age to have that much hair. It’s like the Sphinx’s riddle, isn’t it? We start with short hair, grow it long, and then cut it all off again. Haven’t you noticed that?”
“Noticed what?” Cordy asked, coming into the room and bouncing onto the bed enthusiastically, causing Rose to shoot her a scolding look. Cordy ignored it, rolling onto her side and propping herself up on one arm.
Our mother turned to her and smiled as Rose continued to manipulate her arm. “That older women never have long hair.”
“I think you’re still too young for the once-a-week hairdo,” Cordy said.
“You’re getting flour on the bed,” Rose said. “Are you baking again?”
Cordy peered at the spread. “It’s white. It doesn’t show. And yes—I’m making challah.”
The Weird Sisters Page 17