The Weird Sisters (6 page)

“You don’t have to bite my head off,” Rose said. “I was just asking.”

“You never just ask, Rose. You just want to criticize me.”

“I’m not criticizing. Forgive me for showing a little interest.”

“Girls,” our mother said. We ignored her.

“I quit my job. I didn’t want to work there anymore. I was sick of New York. What more do you want?
Take thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh.
”

“Don’t get dramatic. If I were going to quit a job I wouldn’t just up and do it without planning. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. But we just can’t all be as perfect as you are, Rose.” Bean walked over to the refrigerator and yanked the door open, staring blindly at the contents inside. The cold air pushed the tears in her eyes away. She closed the door and turned back to face them.

“You can stay as long as you want. It’s nice to have you girls home,” our mother said, as though she hadn’t heard our fight, rinsing her hands and shaking them dry. The last of the sunlight drifted through the window, illuminating the lines on her face, and Bean was surprised, as she always was when she came home, by how our parents were aging. Like the changes in the furniture, Rose hardly noticed it. It was gentle as erosion to her. To Bean, it was a seismic shift. Since we were young, our mother had gathered her hair in a large, loose bun near the crown of her head, secured with invisible bobby pins. But the chemotherapy had stolen her hair, the deep brown we’d always shared with her, and her eyes, an intense blue that had lost the genetic battle with our father’s chocolate brown, looked pallid. The scarf tied around her head outlined her paling skin, her eyes looking huge and lost in her face. There were the beginnings of a wattle under her chin, yet her hands seemed frail and bony, the skin taut over sharp bones.

Bean ran her own fingers nervously under her chin, which, thankfully, was still firmly hugging her jawline. When had this happened? When had our mother gotten so old? Was it just because she was sick? Or was this happening to all of us, without our noticing?

A rush of fevered guilt swept over her and she gripped the edge of the countertop, willing herself not to faint. There was no use wondering about it—we were all getting old. And while time had been passing her by, Bean had been drowning her youth in a sea of clothes and meaningless men.

“I’m going to change,” she whispered to herself, as if the words had the power to do the hard work for her. Beside her, our mother and Rose chattered away, ignoring her distress. It didn’t matter. Bean had a long road to go before her vow would mean anything anyway. We all did.

B
ianca, will you help, please?” our mother asked. She was hunched over, dragging a basket of wet laundry to the back door. The house had a perfectly functional dryer, but our mother insisted, when the weather allowed, on hanging sheets and towels out to dry. We’d put our collective foot down long ago about having our clothes swinging on the line for the neighbors to see, but we hadn’t won the linens battle, so we put up with slightly stiff sheets and towels.

Bean was lying on the couch, her feet hooked along the back, reading a history of World War II with one hand, staining the pages with the juice from the plum she was eating with the other. She’d been home for three days, and had done nothing but sleep and read and eat, and only the fact that our mother didn’t typically keep corn chips and chocolate in the house had kept her from turning her hibernation into a fully bear-like preparation for winter.

“Oh, leave it,” Bean said. She shoved the rest of the plum in her mouth, working the flesh off the pit with her tongue as she got up, wiping her hands on her shorts. “I’ll get it,” she said, mouth full. She was barefoot and bare-legged, her shorts revealing the slight shadow of her last spray tan. There was a dribble of pale juice along the neckline of her tank top.

Our mother pushed open the back door and Bean hoisted the laundry basket up, in one motion stepping out the door and spitting the plum pit toward the garden in a graceful arc.

“Lovely,” our mother said. “Very classy.”

“Hey, maybe you’ll grow a plum bush. Or tree? Do plums grow on trees?”

“Yes, trees. Classy and lacking in horticultural education.”

Bean dropped the basket under the clotheslines, the whites inside jumping and resettling on impact. “I can do this, Mom. You should go inside and rest.”

“All everyone wants me to do is rest,” our mother said. “I feel like I’m on a rest cure in some Victorian novel.” She bent over and shook out a sheet with practiced ease, the damp fabric bursting against the thick air.

“Sorry,” Bean said. “I didn’t know.” She knew she had missed so much of what our mother had been through, that her phone calls hadn’t yielded the entire story, wouldn’t have even if Bean had made them more regularly.

“Get the other end of this, will you?” our mother asked. “It’s not you, Beany, I’m sorry. I do get tired quite a lot, and it’s frustrating not to be able to do all the things I’d like to do.”

“Rose and I can help.” Together Bean and our mother spread the sheet across one line and fastened it with a pair of wooden clothespins.

“You can, but that’s not entirely the point. The point is that I’d like to be doing these things myself, not having you girls do things for me. Getting sick takes some getting used to.” She straightened the sheet with an impatient snap that matched her irritated tone.

Bean pulled a heavy towel from the stack of laundry, unwinding it from the lascivious position it had gotten into with a pillowcase. “How do you really feel?”

Our mother shook her head, and her face softened. “Not so bad right now. It goes in waves with the treatments. It’ll be bad for a few days after the next round—it’s worst on the third day for me, and then it’ll get better. But I think I’m going to be tired for a long time, and I’m already fairly tired of being tired.”

“But the chemo won’t be forever. And then you’ll feel better.”

“No, but then there will be the surgery. And maybe more chemo. And maybe radiation. And maybe more surgery, if I decide to have the breast reconstructed. It’s going to be a long road.”

Slinging another towel over the clothesline and snapping the pins around it, Bean felt the same clutching feeling she’d had when she looked at our mother in the kitchen. “Are you scared?”

“Of course,” our mother said. Her voice was sure, but her face looked troubled and distant. Our mother took the last pillowcase from the basket and hung it, her fingers sure and practiced. The sheets and towels hung around them, a cool, damp fort in the blooming heat of the day. A slight breeze shifted through, and Bean watched the shadows of the fabric move across our mother’s face. “I’m not done yet,” she said, as though she were a long way away, and then paused, shook it off. “But I’ve got wonderful doctors, and I’ve got your father, and you girls, of course. We will make it through.”

“Whatever I can do to help,” Bean said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Our mother lifted the empty basket onto her hip and speared Bean with a sharp look. “I appreciate it, Beany, but I don’t believe for a second that you are home just to help me.”

Bean froze. “What do you mean?”

“How many pictures of New York did you cut out of magazines and paste up all over your room? How many times did you watch
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
—completely missing the point of the story, I might add? How many books about that city did you beg Mrs. Landrige to order for the library?”

“Thousands, on all counts,” Bean said. She recalled, just barely, the way the city had seemed like the perfect escape, the way it had glittered like a mirage in the distance. But the promise had faded until it seemed like only a memory’s memory, a copy duplicated so many times it had gone pale and blurry. All she could remember now was the harsh reality of the dirty streets and the crowded subways and the ridiculous rent.

“It’s not like I just met you, sweetie. Whatever made you give up that dream must have been awfully bad.” Bean made a move to speak, but our mother held up her hand. “No, you don’t have to tell me. I’m not sure, honestly, that I want to know. I’m happy you’re here, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“Thanks,” Bean said, and her throat was thick with tears that our mother was, thankfully, gracious enough to turn away in time to avoid seeing. The door to the house slammed behind our mother, and Bean turned to look at the back fence, where the honeysuckle grew in thick ropes around the pickets. So many of our favorite summer memories were here in this house: chasing the Morse code of fireflies in the yard at night, eating watermelon on the wide painted concrete of the front steps, the metallic taste of water from the hose, and the delicious spread of freedom in the hours arrayed across the sunlight. Even the smell of the laundry drying on the line could take us back. But that afternoon, none of those beautiful memories could reach Bean. Our mother was dying. Bean was a criminal. Rose was a bitch. Despite any promises, life was not going to get better anytime soon.

THREE

I
’m walking into town,” Rose announced to Bean, who was sitting in the living room, reading. The day had not yet launched into the still, stifling air that would bring real heat. Bean was leaning against the window, knees into her chest, toes curled under in the strangely feline way she had had ever since she was a little girl. She looked up from the novel she was staring at. She couldn’t remember a word of it, though she had turned fifty pages since breakfast. “Do you want to come?”

Rose watched as Bean’s attention moved slowly from the book, or wherever her mind had been, back to the room. Our mother pottered around in the garden outside, a broad straw hat over the searf covering her tender scalp, anchored with a wide, elastic band. With great, solid yanks, she pulled weeds from the earth and tossed them carelessly over her shoulder, where they landed in a pile on the brick walkway, as though they had been ordered to do precisely so. “Do you think one of us should offer to help her?”

“I did,” Rose said flatly. “She said she wanted to do it herself. It’s ridiculous, but if she feels up to it, I suppose it’s not going to hurt her.”

“How generous of you,” Bean said.

“Do you want to come or not?” Rose snapped. “I was trying to be nice.”

Bean put the book down beside her, spine splayed wide. “Sure. It’s better than sitting here. God, is there nothing to do in this town?” She got up and walked to the door, slipping into a pair of espadrilles that perfectly matched her crisp cotton blouse and wraparound skirt. She looked like an advertisement. Rose sighed, pulled a bookmark off of one of the shelves beside the window, and inserted it in the book Bean had abandoned.

“It’s not that there’s nothing to do,” Rose corrected. “It just moves slower. You have to get used to the pace. If you’re going to stay.”

Bean scoffed as she moved toward the door, catching a look at herself in the heavy mirror over the hall table where we kept keys and mail and anything else that happened to need a home. She tossed her hair and it fell in sleek waves over her shoulders. Rose opened the door for her.

“Do the Mannings still live there?” Bean asked. They had passed a block in silence, listening to the faraway hum of lawn mowers and children shrieking in pleasure down by the lake. Rose looked up at the house, another of the many wide-clapboard Sears catalog homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.

“She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange program with a college in California. He’s still here, though.” Bean looked at the empty house. A bicycle stood sentry on the sidewalk, and a watering can lay abandoned among the trampled pansies by the porch stairs.

“Oh,” Bean said, somewhat sadly. Professor Lila Manning—Mrs. Dr. Manning they had called her, to distinguish her from her equally academically inclined husband—had been one of her favorite professors: a small, somewhat elfin woman with a charmingly gruff attitude. She had become, at one point, a sort of mentor to Bean, who had spent evenings at their house, drinking red wine and watching the sun set in the backyard as the conversation drifted like clouds. They had been a young couple, though they had seemed worlds away at the time—married, two young children, a life of stability and normalcy she had hated as much as wanted. Her heart squeezed momentarily with nostalgia, but they had grown apart as Bean became immersed in city life and The Doctors Mannings’ world had filled with other students, china replicas of the ones who had come before.

The birds and insects kept up a low hum that pulsed in Bean’s ears as they walked along. She had lived in the city for so long that these sounds had become foreign to her, and she felt in a way assaulted by them, the way a tourist in New York would have felt at the sirens and screeching of taxi brakes. The thought of the city made her stomach flip, and she said the first thing she could think of, too loudly, the volume pushing aside the still of the summer morning. “So how’s the wedding planning going?”