The Weird Sisters (12 page)

“The wedding’s not until December,” Rose said, pulling down a glass from one of the cabinets and reaching past Cordy into the refrigerator for the milk carton. “You’re about six months too early.”

Cordy peeled back the foil from a white platter and spied a couple of ears of corn. She picked one up and began to eat it, cold. “Do you want me to heat that up for you?” Rose asked.

“No,” Cordy said. There were bits of corn stuck between her teeth, and a piece on the edge of her mouth, and Rose fought the urge to clean it off for her. “I was kind of tired of traveling, you know, and then Mom and everything. I thought maybe I could help.” She shrugged. “Besides, what the hell do I have to do that’s better?” She laughed, and Rose was struck by how bitter it sounded.

“It’s nice to have you home,” Rose said, after a pause. “Bean’s here, too.”

“Mmm. How’s she?” Cordy asked around a mouthful of corn. She ate around the ear in tiny circles—always had, though the rest of the family ate in long lines.

“Don’t know, really. We haven’t talked much. She looks good. As always.”

“Weird, huh?” Cordy finished the ear of corn and held it delicately between two fingers as she walked it over to the compost basket and dropped it in. “How we’re all home together now?” She came over to the table and sat down, putting one foot on the edge of her chair and hugging her leg close to her like a teddy bear, a comfort object. There was a tear in one of the patches of her skirt.

“Weird,” Rose agreed.

“I heard Jonathan is in England? That stinks.” Cordy picked corn from between her teeth, examining each kernel before sucking it off the tip of her finger. Rose grabbed her hand and stopped her. Cordy ran her tongue along her teeth and then grinned. “Got it all anyway.” Her fingernails were filthy, Rose saw, and her hair had a greasy sheen to it. “How’s Mom, anyway?”

Rose stopped herself from rolling her eyes. Anyway. As though it were an afterthought. How nice to be Cordy, to assume that everything would always turn out just fine, to let everyone else watch out for the danger. “Doing okay. They’re doing chemotherapy to try to shrink the tumor before they operate. She had a treatment a couple of days ago, so she’s only just getting over that. She’ll be pretty tired, so no drama, okay?”

Cordy considered this for a moment. “Cool,” she said finally. “Well, I’m ready for bed. How about you?”

Rose shook her head. Typical Cordy. Not interested in anyone besides herself. Draining the last of her milk, Rose padded softly over to the counter, rinsing her glass and leaving it on the drainboard. “I’ll carry your bag,” she said.

Rose led the way, Cordy’s damp army green duffel resting on her back, soaking through the light fabric of her nightgown. Cordy followed behind, the neck of her guitar case bumping cheerfully into every available object. “Oops,” Cordy kept saying. “Oops.”

Rose opened the door to Cordy’s bedroom and walked inside. For some reason, Cordy had never redecorated the way Bean and Rose had as we grew older. The room was still the room of a child: pink and white, ribbons and bows. She had changed her own look a thousand times, but her room had always remained the same.

Cordy came inside and stepped out of her skirt, hurling herself on the bed wearing only her shirt and underwear. Her legs were hairy, and the bottoms of her feet nearly black with dirt, Rose noticed with a light sense of revulsion. “G’night,” she said, and closed her eyes, halfway to sleep in a moment. Rose paused for a minute, wanting to tell Cordy to brush her teeth, or wash her face, or some other motherly bedtime reminder. But she thought better of it.

For now, Rose would let her sleep.

“Good night, sweet prince,”
she said finally, and closed the door on Cordy’s hollowed face.

O
ur father and Rose had taken our mother for a follow-up to have the tumor measured, so when Bean woke up, she wandered outside to pick up the newspaper to keep her company during breakfast. The flag on the mailbox was down—our mail had always been delivered egregiously early, so she grabbed that, too, flipping through the letters as she walked back inside.

There was a thick, padded envelope from New York, addressed to her. She recognized her ex-roommate Daisy’s passive-aggressive debutante scrawl.

She tore open the envelope, dropping the newspaper and the other mail on the table, and reached inside. There was a pile of envelopes, all addressed to her New York apartment. A couple of wedding invitations, two postcards inviting her to gallery openings, and then, what she’d been dreading. Bills. A dozen, at least. Credit cards, all of them maxed out, all of them with usurious interest rates.

And at the bottom of the stack, a note on Daisy’s obnoxiously proper Southern belle stationery. A detailed accounting of what she owed her erstwhile roommates: rent, electricity, water. The sum at the bottom made her swallow, hard.

Bean had purposely left no forwarding address, but clearly it hadn’t been beyond Daisy’s limited finishing-school ken to track her down, which meant that the credit card companies wouldn’t be far behind.

She’d been in the habit, for too long, of refusing to open the bills, as though not knowing the exact numbers she owed would make them smaller, or, if she were really lucky, nonexistent.

This, unfortunately, hadn’t turned out to be the best strategy.

Bean thought of the ugliness that these envelopes contained. She thought of the way the men in the bar had turned away from her the other night when the girls had come in. She thought of the empty days she’d spent at home so far, and all the empty ones spreading out ahead of her. She thought of the way our mother collapsed against the pillow after fighting another losing battle with her nausea, out of breath, ashen and sore, smudges of purple around her eyes. She thought of the new priest asking her if she’d be at church.

She sat down at the table and opened the first envelope slowly.

Cordy slept late, awakening only when the noises of the house and the insistent sunlight became too obvious to be believably incorporated into her dreams any longer. A near-decade of roaming had made her cautious upon opening her eyes—she had grown used to a slow awakening, testing the space, telling herself the story of how she had landed in that particular bed, in that room, at that moment. She lay in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling of her childhood. The same crack curved over the door, the same fluted light fixture hung from the rippling, aged plaster. She had the corner room by our parents, under the attic, and the dormer windows in Rose’s and Bean’s rooms were offset here by the sharply sloping eaves that made the room seem shaded and womb-like.

Sometime during the night, she had climbed under the covers, and she emerged now, rummaging through her bag for something with a semblance of cleanliness. For months now, she had been living out of people’s vans, crashing periodically in some youthfully enthusiastic group home, mixing with people who were milling around, desperately trying to find some lost Kerouacian glory.

It had sucked.

All of her clothes were dirty and smelled like a well-marinated mixture of sweat and pot. Her hair had grown long and shaggy, and she had been clean so rarely that she had begun to scratch idly at the film on her skin, leaving dull marks down her arms. When she woke in the morning, often staring at the scruffy-haired, anonymous boy-man lying beside her, the first thought that had sprung into her mind had usually been, I am too old for this crap. The people she had met had been kind, certainly, but not a natural kindness, more of a benevolence stemming from a cocktail of illicit substances and a quiet, frantic desire to be
liked.

She was fairly certain none of them would have characterized themselves in this way. They were young enough to be fooled by the grandeur of their own plans, to be so absorbed in the intense romanticism of the lifestyle they were building, one hovel at a time, that they never cared to notice that there was nothing romantic about a case of scabies. But at the same time she couldn’t help but love them for it, in the condescending way an adult can love the idiocy of a child. Because, and Cordy had recently come to face this, she had aged into an adult among children, and it was past time for her to move on. But given there was nowhere to move on to, she had simply moved back.

Accepting the fact that her bag held nothing clean at all, Cordy yanked open the bottom drawer of the antique dresser in the corner alcove, and dug out a pair of loose-fitting bell-bottom jeans and a T-shirt that might fit, thin as she had gotten. The other downside to the lifestyle she had been living was that she had been hungry much of the time. If they were at a concert, for instance, given by one of the seemingly millions of interchangeable nostalgic folk-rock bands, there would be some dirty, dreadlocked couple selling sandwiches within her meager budget, but they would be dry, tasteless things, homemade twelve-grain bread with cruelty-free alfalfa sprouts and unsalted butter. She grimaced at the thought, but her stomach rumbled traitorously. She placed her hand over her belly to quell the sound, and instead felt the beginnings of the hard lump that reminded her of why she’d finally come home.

Judging by the angle of the sun, she figured it was almost eleven in the morning, so she padded out of her room and down the hall to the bathroom, dropping an enormous pile of laundry down the chute on the way. Bean’s door stood open, and she could see her back, taut and crooked forward like a beckoning finger. She held a phone to her ear, her fingers mottled white and red against the receiver, and she was crying. Cordy stopped, putting her palm lightly against the door as though she could give comfort through the walls.

“I’m not coming back,” Bean said, giving the choked gasp that is the sign of exhausted bawling. When she spoke again, her voice had lowered to a whisper. “No, it won’t,” she hissed.

Silence again. Cordy shifted slightly on her feet, goose bumps rising on her bare legs. “I’m going to,” Bean said, and then, “I know. I know.”

Something in our sister’s tone made Cordy pull back, step away from the door. There was a secret here, a secret Cordy was not sure she wanted to know, because she could not remember the last time Bean had cried, at least not in someone else’s presence. Something smelled sour and painful to her. She turned on grimy feet and walked down the hallway loudly, stepping purposefully on every aching board, making her presence known.

C
ordy sat slumped at a table in the Barnwell Beanery. Nothing had changed, really. Mismatched furniture, heavy and chocolate brown, swaybacked and tired from constant use; battered wood floors crossed with the dark streaks of traffic patterns. There were Magic 8 Balls and Barrels of Monkeys on the tables, and paintings by local artists hung beseechingly on the walls. Cordy, looking pure Beanery—olive cords, a faded T-shirt, and a woven hemp bag—rested her head on her arms on one of the tables, her sandaled feet curled around the chair’s legs. A glass mug sat in front of her, the tag of a tea bag resting on the lip, sending smoke signals of steam into the air. Cordy looked at it morosely.

“Hey, Cordy! I heard you were back in town!” Dan Miller sat down across from her, tossing a dirty dish towel over his shoulder. “How you been?”

Cordy pushed herself up sleepily. She had pulled her hair into two messy braids, which she flipped over her shoulders as she turned to him. “Miller,” she said, smiling. “Bad news travels fast.”

He chuckled, his smile breaking his face into a dimpled glow. His hair was darker than she remembered, nearly black, and his face was stubbled with a day’s growth of beard. “It’s not so bad. The bad news is that Bean is back, too.”

“Oh, man. What’d she do to you?”

“Nothing. Dicked over one of my roommates pretty bad, but I think we’ve all recovered from it by this point. I shouldn’t be picking on your sister anyway.”

Cordy waved her hand magnanimously and picked up her drink, wrapping her fingers around the glass, warming herself despite the summer sun pouring in through the windows, oozing its way across the floor. “Pick away.”

“So how the heck are you? You look like crap.”

“I see your legendary charm hasn’t faded,” Cordy said, eyeing him over the rim of the glass before she set it down again, fiddling with the string of her tea bag. “I’ve been on the road for a while. Following bands, you know. Hanging out.”

“Wow. That’s awesome. I thought most of us had gotten too old fart for that.”

“Well, I am two years younger than you. Obviously thirty is the cutoff point for old fartdom.”

“But you’re back,” Dan observed. He reached up, tugging at the neck of his camo green T-shirt with a broad finger. The backs of his hands were furred with dark hair. “Obviously old fartdom has come early for you.”

“Okay, so maybe I hit my cutoff point, too. You know it’s bad when Barnwell starts looking good by comparison.”

“Hey now,” he warned, tut-tutting a finger at her. “Forget not to whom you speak. I live here voluntarily.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you from Philly or something?”