The Weird Sisters (16 page)

H
ere is the good thing about being the oldest: control.

Here’s the bad thing about being the oldest: control.

When Bean arrived, something in three-year-old Rose’s mind clicked, and she knew that if her coveted role of only star in the Andreas sky had been wrested from her, then she at least would have the glory of playing the director. Chips would fall not where they may, but where she said they would. It was still Rose’s world, Bean was just living in it.

When Cordy turned six, Rose finally deemed her old enough to take a speaking part in the frequent plays we performed for our parents. Cordy took the part of the loyal (and mute) maidservant, the one-lined extra, the spear-carrier in all of our sheet-curtained productions in the basement, until Rose decreed that she had enough maturity to play, finally, the part that would make us complete, the three witches in the Scottish play.

Though we weren’t technically in a theater, and therefore it wasn’t bad luck to say the name—
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,
there, we’ve said it—Rose still insisted we call it “the Scottish play.” We clad ourselves in cast-off clothes from the dress-up box, mostly old dresses from our grandmothers. We sent Bean on a mission to the neighbors’ houses to find witch hats from Halloween costumes gone-by, which she produced admirably, and we pressed Mustardseed, our long-suffering cat-cum-Globe-extra into service as a familiar (Bean insisted; she figured the lack of a cat in the original play was Shakespeare’s problem, not hers).

Musical accompaniment was provided courtesy of the plastic record player that had belonged to all of us and therefore rested, as things ultimately did, in Cordy’s accounts. We had a scratched LP of Halloween sound effects that bumped and groaned along behind our lines, the regular sheets hung up as curtains for the stage, and Rose had secured a lobster pot from our mother large enough to boil Cordy in (and don’t think the thought hadn’t crossed our minds on more than one occasion).

So there was the premiere, with our parents seated in the dingy love-seat that hid an exceptionally squeaky pull-out bed, holding the two-of-a-kind original programs (created in Rose’s perfect penmanship,
bien sûr
) with “The Weird Sisters”—the witches of
Macbeth
—written in her hand, and a little cauldron (no more than a black bubble at the bottom) drawn by Cordy, who had thrown a whale of a temper tantrum until we allowed her to help. Rose bit her lip as she watched Cordy’s careful scrawl, sure it had destroyed the program, but she had learned that you must give in to the talent if the show is going to go on at all.

The curtain opened, the gas fireplace crackling coldly behind us, and we began, our own carefully cribbed scripts set in front of us as we stirred the giant pot full of air.

“Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue!”
our father cried out before we could speak, and he and our mother applauded wildly. Rose hushed him, breaking character in frustration before turning back to the long wooden spoon we had liberated from the jar above the stove.

Rose had neatly excised all the extraneous characters, which made it an extremely abbreviated production. We had, at one point, dispatched Cordy to our mother to request a brother, as he would have been enormously helpful, but our mother said it was not likely, and in any case it would take an awfully long time even if it were to happen, so we settled for the abridged version.

Rose kept the first witch’s part for herself, being as it was the one with the monologues, and first to speak, besides, and Bean played her part with a great deal of hair-flipping, which she had seen on a television show during a sleepover at a friend’s house, and Cordy got lost repeatedly, until Rose hissed at her in frustration to keep her finger on the lines. Cordy found this no help at all, and it resulted primarily in her shouting out the lines she
did
know, so it sounded a bit like this:
“The weird sisters, HAND IN HAND! / Posters of the sea and LAND! / Thus do go about, about; / Thrice to thine, AND THRICE TO MINE! / And thrice again to make UP NINE! / Peace! The charm’s wound up
.
”
Cordy was big on rhyming.

When we finished, Rose was nearly in tears, frustrated with the way her great dramatic vision had failed to align with reality. “That wasn’t right at all!” she cried, and would have commenced to pointing fingers, had our parents not stepped in to console her. Bean and Cordy couldn’t have cared less, as Bean was still practicing her curtsy from the curtain call, and Cordy was chasing Mustardseed around, attempting to complete his costume with her witch’s hat, which he (not surprisingly) wanted no part of.

“Your play needs no excuse,”
our father said. “I found it lovely. It covers all the important parts without any of the major characters. Brilliant adaptation.” He kissed Rose’s slightly hat-haired head.

“I agree,” our mother said. “I always thought the three witches were the best part of the play anyway.”

“Of course,” our father said. “It was convenient of us to have you three so we could have our very own Weird Sisters.” He gave our mother a wink over Rose’s head.

“But Cordy did it wrong!” Rose objected again.

“No, she just did it differently,” our mother soothed. “But it doesn’t matter, because aren’t the best plays the ones that are different?”

Well, no. Not always. We saw one production of
Much Ado
set in a USO in World War I, and that was quite good. But then there was an infamous naked
Midsummer,
and the reverse-race
Othello,
and those were both awful.

But Rose learned an important lesson: people don’t always do what you tell them to do. In the interests of fairness, though, we must remind you of the other side of this. Rose is the only one who can get us out the door on time when we have theater tickets or are trying to get to church services. When our mother left pans of carrots boiling away to charred messes on the stove, Rose made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cutting them neatly into sailboats for Cordy. When she got her driver’s license, she drove Bean to the nearest mall (which isn’t really near at all) almost every weekend night, and didn’t even tell on her the time she met those boys with the Trans Am and came home with vodka on her breath and vomit down the front of her blouse. And she helped Cordy sew her graduation dress even though she thought it looked hideous, and she was the professor in the math department whose course evaluations from her students always began, “I always thought math was boring until I met Dr. Andreas. . . .” and as much as she hates us for taking away her throne, she has never ever pushed us off of it.

And she would be none of those things if she weren’t the firstborn.

W
e had sent Bean to the store—Rose was helping our father move furniture in the bedroom for our mother’s impending confinement, and Cordy was too unreliable to be trusted. Even with a list she would wander aimlessly through the aisles and come home with a mysterious assortment of products: a bag of sugar-encrusted gumdrops, an apple corer wide as a cupped hand, an unloved, dented box of flavorless crackers that would sit, ignored, in the pantry until they crumbled to paste. Whatever we had sent her for in the first place would be mysteriously absent.

A list clutched in her hand, the ink gone sweaty and the paper soft from the heat, Bean strolled through Barnwell Market. We hated the occasional necessary evil of the supermarket outside town: its painfully bright, wide aisles, the cold industrial-tiled floor, the incessant chirp of the cashiers’ scanners twining with the music in an unsettling soundscape. We far preferred this tiny store a block from the Beanery, with the dusty shelves holding homemade jams from the farms on Route 31, local produce teetering dangerously in piles outside the store, and Mr. or Mrs. Williston waiting patiently behind the counter to ring up our purchases on a cash register that shook agreeably with each press of a key.

Bean filled a tired bushel basket, the bottom bowed with use, with the items on her list, and headed toward the front, stopping short at the sound of her name.

“Bianca Andreas,” a man’s voice said, and she turned, surprised. She had brushed right past Mr. Dr. Manning, who was standing behind her, wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and blue nylon running shorts. He seemed older than she remembered, though it had been less than a decade; his blond hair going silver in the dim light, the tiny creases at the corner of his eyes deeper, his bare legs indecently muscled.

“Mister Doctor!” she said, the old name coming naturally to her.

He laughed, a deep, warm sound that purred along Bean’s spine. “Oh, come now. Call me Edward. You passed the Mister Doctor stage the moment you walked across the quad in your cap and gown. What are you doing back in the cornfields? I thought you’d abandoned us all for your big-city dreams.”

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,”
Bean sighed, with a coquettish little shrug that pushed the light cotton of her shirt down in a deep vee. She was rewarded when his eyes followed the line of her cleavage and then darted back up to her face. Perhaps she hadn’t lost her touch after all. Take that, bar boys.

“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,”
he said in agreement. “Still queen of the Shakespearean retort, I see.”

“It’s in my blood, sadly. How are you? I hear Mrs. Doctor is off in sunny California.”

“With the offspring. I’m back to lonely bachelorhood,” he said, and we swear to you he winked.

Perhaps if Bean had been a stronger person . . . perhaps if it hadn’t been so cold when she lay alone with her regrets in bed at night . . . perhaps if one of the only eligible bachelors in town hadn’t been a priest, even of the non-celibate variety . . . perhaps if all those things had been true, she wouldn’t have done what she did next.

But she did.

Bean stepped forward slightly, turning her foot out, red-carpet ready, and tilted her head so her hair fell across her face just so. “What a pity,” she said. “And nothing at all to keep you busy all summer long.”

“Oh, I’m teaching the summer workshops, but it’s hardly the same. A handful of students, a handful of hours, and then the thrill of a Barnwell summer evening in an empty house.”

“It certainly hasn’t gotten any more exciting since I left,” Bean said, her eyes darting over him, taking his measure, toying with the possibility. He’d always been handsome, more movie star than any professor had a right to be, but she’d never looked at him as a man, really, only as Dr. Manning’s husband, as the father of the children who played in the waning sunlight of the evenings she spent with them. And those children were nearly grown now, weren’t they? And she was so far away, in both memory and fact. And he was very much here, going soft around the middle, but still broad-shouldered and strong, a toothpaste-commercial smile, and so focused on Bean that her breath seemed to catch in her throat.

“I fear Barnwell in particular would suffer in comparison to New York. You must come over for dinner and tell me all about it. Well, dinner such as it is,” he said, gesturing with the can of soup in his hand.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve always been an incredible cook. Surely you can do better than that on my account,” Bean said.

“Ah, but I recall your being a tremendously picky eater,” he said. It’s true—his gift for culinary invention had rarely pleased her, and she had often replaced his offerings—cold butternut squash soup, buffalo medallions in a wine reduction—with glasses of wine and plates of salad. “But I’ll be happy to challenge myself for you.”

“I’ll drop by, then. Maybe the day after tomorrow?”

“Seven,” he agreed, and it was done without either of them noticing it, or even paying attention to the fact that their bodies were nearly touching, her breast by his arm, her hip along his, a most indecent pose rarely seen in the Market.

“Should I bring the wine?”

“Please don’t. You’ve always had horrible taste in wines.”

“I was nineteen,” Bean shot back, recalling the night she’d arrived at the Mannings’ with a bottle of wine she’d liberated from a roommate’s bookshelf, a sour, watery affair that they’d poured into the garden after one sip. She pushed down the memory of Lila, his wife who had invited her to all those dinners, given Bean knowledge and attention and warmth and asked for nothing in return, except the understood expectation not to try to seduce her husband.

“Neither age nor beauty excuses bad wine. Just bring yourself,” he said. “That’s all we need,” and Bean swayed away charmingly, a trail of tension stretching between them like vibrating wire.

O, let the heavens give him defence against the elements, for I have lost us him on a dangerous sea.

Oh, poor Bean.

EIGHT

O
ur family has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years. But on the subject of cancer (here comes Cordy’s wording), he is silent as the grave. The word “cancer” appears only once in all of Shakespeare’s works, and it is not a reference to the disease, but comes in
Troilus and Cressida
in the same stanza as the classical names of Ajax, Achilles, and Jupiter. So we found ourselves mostly at a loss for words to describe what was happening to our mother.