“So you’ll go and you’ll see.”
“But what should I do?” Rose asked, even more lost than when they had begun.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” He reached across the table and patted her hand and then picked up his book again.
Conversation finis.
Thanks, Polonius.
FIFTEEN
The night before our mother began her first week of radiation, Cordy dropped her bombshell at the dinner table. She had made bread, as she was always doing these days, and she had set it in a basket, broken grain against butter-yellow checked cloth, steam rising from the slices, scenting the air with yeast and comfort. Rose had said grace, and we were settling in to eat when she spoke.
“I’m going to have a baby,” our baby sister said.
Our father, buttering a slice of bread all at once, in strict defiance of our mother’s rule to spread only a bite at a time, stopped. His hand, holding the cream-striped knife, settled against the tablecloth. “Oh, Cordelia,” he said, and there were worlds in those words.
Bean looked up, unsurprised. She was still dressed from work, a lavender jacket over a white T-shirt, tucked into jeans she would tell you honestly had cost more than three hundred dollars. Mrs. Landrige would not have approved of the denim, despite the price tag. “Wow,” she said.
“You’re kidding.” Rose, tight-lipped, brow furrowed.
“What?” our mother asked. She was humming to herself, cutting a tomato into small pieces, her knife scraping against the plate.
There you have it. Our family in a nutshell.
“I’m pregnant. I’m having a baby.” Cordy said it again, as though we had not all heard her. Well, our mother had not, but that was nothing new. She was always delayed in her responses, spent most of her time picking up the threads of conversations as they spun across the table and weaving them back together herself.
So much was explained now, the weight gain, her quietness in the morning, the way Rose had noticed her stomach swelling against the waistband of her pants, her desperate urge to feed us all. And yet there were a million questions to be asked.
“Who’s the father?” Rose asked, leading the charge, and Cordy looked shaken, as though she had been unprepared for this question, as though it had never occurred to her that there was a father, that people might be curious as to his whereabouts.
“I don’t know,” she said, and our father flushed red, the streaks of white at his brow standing bright against his skin. “No one who matters.”
“Goddammit, Cordelia,” our father said, and his knife clattered to his plate, a sharp sound that made our mother jump. “You can’t have a child.”
“Too late,” Bean said, and smiled to herself. “I think the horse is out of the barn on that one.”
“Jim,” our mother said, a spill of silk over his anger.
“How are you going to support yourself? Pay bills? Feed the baby? Pay a doctor, for heaven’s sake?”
“I’ll manage,” Cordy said, and it was as much an oath to herself as a promise to our father. “I’ve got my job, and I’ll take another one if I need to.”
“And who will take care of the baby while you’re working all the hours God sends?”
“We will,” our mother said, and now the silk was steel. “We’re not going to leave a child of ours alone if she needs our help.”
The look that passed over our father’s face was painful to see. Had we ever seen our father cry? At his own father’s funeral, yes, he crumpled and wept in the church as the priest called a litany of Pop-Pop’s good works. But this expression was sadder, a thousand betrayals screaming across his face in an instant. He got up and stalked out of the kitchen, leaving his napkin on his chair as an afterthought.
“Nice going,” Bean said.
“Shut up, Bean,” Cordy said, and she looked miserable. “Like you’re not just as big a fuckup as I am.”
“Girls,” our mother said mildly. “Language.”
“You haven’t heard of birth control?” Bean asked. Cordy closed her eyes as the memory flashed across her mind. The painter, the desert, their last night on his tired futon. How long ago had that been? No more than three months. It seemed like forever.
“I’ve heard of it,” Cordy said.
“When are you due?” our mother asked, speared a piece of tomato delicately and chewed.
“December,” Cordy said. “Maybe Christmas.”
“Well, this is certainly going to change your life,” our mother said.
“I know,” Cordy said, and it was impossible to tell what the tears shining in her eyes were for. “I know.”
Later that night, we sat in the living room, pretending to read. After years living in this house with wooden floors, we had learned each other’s steps. Our mother, quick and light. Our father, heavy and purposeful; Rose, heavy and hesitant. Bean, firm and sharp, and Cordy, a flat run every few steps. We listened to the steps passing above us, our mother walking across the bedroom to the vanity, sitting down to put on her moisturizer. Standing again, walking across to the bathroom door, where her nightgown hung. Our father, ponderous and mournful, trodding into the bathroom, water running, plodding back to the dresser where he would empty his pockets onto the top, the coins clattering into the tiny dish where they would lie until one of us claimed them in the name of an ice-cream cone. And weaving through it all, the vibration of voices. Our father, loud and angry. Our mother, softer. Our father, angry again. Our mother, her voice raised to match his. The squeak of the bathroom door.
Bean looked up at Cordy, who was crying, silent silver tears streaking down her face, slipping—plop—off her chin and spotting the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “Hey,” she said, and stood, walking over to our sister, who sat on the couch. Though Cordy was not any smaller than us—we were all the same height—she seemed impossibly tiny right then in the middle of the couch, her legs crossed under the book, her tank top and olive green pants ill fitting and old. Bean sat down beside her, stroked her arm. Cordy kept crying.
“Hey,” Bean said again. “It’s going to be okay. You threw him for a loop, you know?”
“I know,” Cordy said, in the crying way of hearing without believing a word of it. She wiped her nose with the inside of her wrist. Rose stood up, grabbed a box of tissues, and carried it over to her, sitting on her other side. Cordy took a tissue and blew her nose.
We sat on either side of her, our hands consoling her in a steady rhythm. “He’s just surprised,” Rose said softly. “He’s not really angry.”
“He’ll come around. He’s going to have a grandkid. That’ll totally blow him away. And he’ll help you out, he always does. He’s just upset right now,” Bean said.
“I know,” Cordy said again. She took another tissue, wiped under her eyes. She looked up at us, our little sister, with dark circles under her eyes and streaks of tears drying on her cheeks. “I just wish he could be a little happy for me. Just a little. I know this is stupid in a million ways, but I want this baby. And I will be a good mother.”
“Of course you will,” Rose said. “And we will help you.”
“You’ll be a great mother,” Bean said, stroking Cordy’s hair. These were the supportive things to say, but we don’t think anyone on that couch entirely believed them yet. Lions make leopards tame.... Yea, but not change his spots. Will alone could not make Rose brave, could not make Bean honest, could not make Cordy sensible. Weren’t we proof of that, this sad sisterhood, bound as much by our failures as by our hopes?
A few days after Cordy’s announcement, Rose was sitting in the living room reading when she heard Bean and Cordy thumping around in Bean’s room together. Jealousy rose, a smooth wave inside her, before she pushed it down again. Had she come this far only to be twitched by the decades-old tug-of-war between the three of us? Resolutely, she put down her book and headed upstairs. She lingered for a moment, afraid we wou
ld not welcome her.
In Rose’s first two weeks as a freshman at Barnwell, she had lost twelve pounds. Not intentionally, but because, confronted with the daunting task of approaching the dining hall with no knowledge of its workings and no sure friend to sit with, she chose to eat in her room instead. Day after day, she ate cereal in the morning, milk from the tiny dorm fridge her roommate had brought, careful to keep the clatter of the spoon from waking said roommate. At lunch, she skittered into the Student Union, where our father had bought us hamburgers a thousand times, and ate alone. At dinner, she strolled into town, ate in the safety of the diner or the bookstore, or snuck home, claiming she missed our mother’s cooking, even when she had pulled one of her mental disappearing acts and there was no cooking of hers to be had. Not until a frothy, pretty girl with a hemp necklace and a slightly wide-eyed stare Rose would soon learn was chemically induced invited her to dinner with the other girls on the floor did she set foot in that place, and then she stepped so carefully after her savior, eating exactly what she did, placing her feet, her silverware in precisely the same place, you would have thought she was a shadow.
Before Rose had to summon up the courage to open the door, Cordy flung it wide. “Who talks within there? ho, open the door!” she cackled.
“Oh, we were wondering who was creeping around in the hallway like that,” Bean said, glancing over her shoulder at Rose, and then returning, disinterested, to the pile of clothing on the bed. Rose suppressed a sigh at the sight of the room. It looked not unlike Bean had opened every box and bag she had brought with her—and she had fit an impressive number into that tiny compact, like a clown car—and sprayed their contents around the room. Cordy was clomping around in a mismatched pair of stiletto heels, pants, a skirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a pashmina draped around her head as though she were expecting to be picked up for a ride in a convertible. In 1952.
“I was hardly creeping,” Rose said. “What in God’s name are you doing in here?”
Cordy paused, cocked her hip and waggled a critical finger at Rose. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, dahling,” she said. “It’s so gauche.” She flipped the edge of the shawl back over her shoulder and pranced off in another direction.
“I’m cleaning. And Rita Hayworth here is helping. Or so she claims,” Bean said, waving her fingers at Cordy.
Rose walked over to the bed, leaning her thighs against it, and fingered some of the fabric splayed across it. “You have a lot of clothes,” she said.
“I know.”
Questioning, Rose flipped up the sleeve of a rose-pink jacket, silk shantung. “This one still has the tags on it.”
In the corner, Cordy retrieved a bright green leather handbag from a box and clomped back across the room, skidding slightly in her heels. Bean has always had the biggest feet of the three of us. Cordy paused halfway in her circuit, blew Rose a kiss, and then continued her runway sashay.
“I know,” Bean said again, her voice shy with regret. God, how many of these did still have their tags on? So much of it had been the will to possess, to own, to open the tiny broom cupboard of her closet and see the spoils of war bursting forth. And then there was fashion, of course, the fickle courtesan who changed her mind seemingly in the time it took to order a drink, leaving her stranded with last night’s shoes or this morning’s hair.
“Do you really need all of these?” Rose asked.
Bean looked up sharply, her eyes narrowing defensively.
“No, I’m not being mean. I was just wondering. Because you could take them to a consignment shop in the city. Sell them.”
Bean’s hands moved quickly, folding, sorting, shaking out the lines of a suit. She paused, hands on a gray pencil skirt, a matching jacket. Bad luck. This was the suit she had worn when they had fired her; she could still remember herself tugging the hemline down to an acceptable length as she sat. She tossed the piece aside, shaking her hands afterward. Did other people feel that kind of voodoo about their clothes? Certainly there were lucky socks, favorite items, but Bean felt the opposite, too, that if something bad happened when she was wearing a specific item of clothing, she would never wear it again. This certainly counted.
But if she sold them, she could be rid of that memory altogether. Or closer to it, at least.
“You’d make a crapload,” Cordy said. She hopped up on the bed, Bean’s heels dropping off her feet with a clatter, and obediently lifted up her hip so Bean could pull out the clothes she was sitting on. Cordy opened the purse she had claimed and began to go through the pockets, pulling out tissues, a half-eaten roll of mints, and far too many pennies.
“Well, I owe a crapload, so it’s all fair,” Bean said. She had furrowed her brow in a way she might once have tried to wipe away, already considering cosmetic surgery.
After her breakdown in the woods, when Bean had told us her story, we had stood in awe of the amount of money she owed, and the impossibility of raising it, but we had not counted on Bean’s couture. Rose, who neither knew nor cared about what was in vogue in Paris this season, peeked at a label, her eyes widening. A crapload, imprecise as that measurement was, was exactly what Bean would net.
“You might even make more than you owe. You could keep what’s left over,” Cordy said.
Bean and Rose looked at each other, and both shook their heads. “I don’t want the money,” Bean said, and Rose smiled—surprised, but proud.
“I just want to pay it back,” Bean said. “This is a good idea, Rose. Thanks.”
Rose, flattered, blushed slightly.
“And thanks, by the way, for talking to Mrs. Landrige about hiring me. That was really nice. You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to help,” Rose said. “I still do. If you need anything.”
“Naughty, naughty, Beany,” Cordy said, her ticking finger wagging like a metronome again. She had produced a silver cigarette case from the depths of the purse and was holding it open like a locket. When she turned her hands to reveal the contents, Rose blinked.
“You carry your marijuana in that?” Rose asked, nodding at the case, smudged with careless fingerprints but clearly antique, and clearly expensive.
“Well, you have to carry it somewhere,” Bean said.
“That is so true,” Cordy said, mock-serious, as though Bean had just shared the secret of perfect happiness.
“I’d forgotten about it, actually,” Bean said, reaching out to Cordy, who had pushed the pashmina off her head, leaving her looking turtle-like inside the folds of fabric. Our baby sister sniffed one of the joints like a fine cigar.
“Obviously,” Cordy said. “This is some stale crap.” She passed the case to Bean.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Bean said.
We cannot believe Rose had never gotten stoned before, but she definitely was now. After all, if she ever would have been, it would have been with us, and by the time Bean and Cordy discovered pot, Rose was in college, and refused to have anything to do with us anyway. The only disappointment here was that Cordy couldn’t indulge along with us. We lay on the roof, watching the clouds weave in and out of the blue. Rose rested, fully supine, her feet, broad and pale, dangling off the edge. She felt sleepy and disconnected, and the effort of keeping her eyelids open was too much, so she had let them fall shut, a heavy thud that shut out the world but still left her feeling strangely open.
“Are you going to move to England?” Bean asked Rose.
Rose’s jaw felt unbelievably heavy, as though she were moving through sand, and there was a long pause before she responded. “England is very far away,” she said, her words dreamy and smoky against the push of her lips. “Very far away.”
“But you’re the only one who hasn’t been far away,” Cordy pointed out. “You’ve never even lived outside of the state.”
This was true. Rose clung to Barnwell, climbing it like a vine on a trellis, tendrils reaching the top before winding their way down again.
“I think it’s good to live som
ewhere else,” Bean said. “It changes your perspective. I mean, it even changes the way I see Barney now.”
“I like the way I see Barney,” Rose said petulantly, and her lower lip moved into a pout, causing Cordy to giggle. “Barney is my friend.” This made Cordy giggle even harder.
“But Jonathan’s your friend, and he’s going to be in England,” Bean pointed out, as though she were talking to a small child, which was precisely the effect the drug seemed to have had on Rose. “Don’t you want to be with Jonathan?”
With a tremendous, languid push, Rose sat up, her eyes still closed. She crossed her legs, yogi-style, her back stiff and straight. She had always had such good posture, which we forgot sometimes, as she hid her body under folds of fabric that made her look prematurely matronly. “I want to be with Jonathan. I miss him,” she said, and her voice held heavy sadness. “But I don’t want to be in England.”
“You loved England when we went to Stratford,” Cordy said.
“We were on vacation,” Rose said. “This would be living there. British people all the time.”
“With their funny accents,” Bean said supportively.
“And their weird food,” Cordy added.
“Iago said England was sweet,” Bean said, flicking ashes from her feet, her arms wound tight around her calves.
“I don’t think he meant sweet—like, sweet!” Cordy said.
“Iago was a liar,” Rose said.
“Forget Iago,” Cordy said. “I say we take a vote. Everyone who says Rose should move to England, raise your hands.” Bean and Cordy put their hands in the air. “All opposed?” Rose made no response. “The ayes have it,” she said triumphantly.
Silence fell for a moment, and then Bean reached out and put her hand gently on Rose’s. “It wouldn’t be forever, you know. Maybe it’s a sign or something.” Rose snorted lightly, but Bean pressed on. “Like you were meant to do something else. You’ll see when you go visit him. You’ll see if it’s the right thing.”
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