The Weird Sisters (42 page)

“And the men?”

“What men? I’ve slept with one man since I’ve been home, and that’s over. It was over before it began. I can’t take it back, but the only person I hurt there would be hurt even more if she knew. And it’s not likely to happen again, anyway. You’re the only available man I know in Barnwell who’s not sleeping with my little sister, and, well . . .” She didn’t have to finish the sentence.

“I’m not asking about potential. I’m asking what you’ll do when you’re faced with that temptation again.”

Bean looked up at him boldly. “I’m not becoming a born-again virgin.”

Aidan laughed, leaning back in his chair to match her posture. “That’s not what I mean. I’m supposed to tell you premarital sex is strictly forbidden, but I can operate on the level of the prescriptive and the probable at the same time. But what I’m worried about is what all these things mean. The stealing, the promiscuity, the lying”—and oh, how it hurt to hear him say those words, to apply them to her—“they’re all part of a bigger pattern. What’s the pattern, Bean?”

“That I’m an idiot?”

He said nothing. She looked at him, looked away. Her eyes were red and raw, and she felt bone-achingly tired. Her ankle throbbed, her stomach hurt. “Can I have another glass of water?”

He nodded, took the glass, and walked through the archway leading to the dining room. Bean leaned her head against the back of the chair and exhaled, long and slow. When he came back, she sipped carefully at the glass of water he put in front of her. He still said nothing, waiting for her.

“Rose was always the smartest. She can do anything. She can be a total bitch, and everything always has to be perfect, but she can make it that way, so it doesn’t matter. She’s got a Ph.D. She’s got this perfect fiancé. She can speak in public and talk about all these things I couldn’t understand in a million years, and she makes me feel stupid all the time. And Cordy . . . everyone loves her. You know, she flits around and drops out of college and goes and lives like a backpacker for years, and everyone’s like, ‘Wow, that’s so adventurous.’ She comes home pregnant, and she doesn’t even know who the father is, and Dan falls in love with her and everyone’s lining up to throw her a baby shower. She’s everyone’s favorite.”

Aidan looked puzzled for a minute. “But we’re talking about you, Bean. We’re not talking about Rose and Cordy.”

“But don’t you get it?” Bean threw her hands up in the air and leaned forward. “There is no me. There’s only Rose and Cordy. I’m just like this speed bump in the middle, slowing everyone down because I keep fucking up. And I’m not smart like Rose or cute like Cordy, so I don’t get that free pass. No one’s throwing me a parade.”

Aidan mulled this for a moment. “So if Rose is the smart one, and Cordy is the cute one, what are you?”

“I’m nothing.”

Aidan frowned at her. Bean met his gaze, belligerent. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window, where the barest edge showed the dark of the night beside their reflections. When he spoke again, he did not turn his head, but continued staring into the window as if reading a crystal ball.

“We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done—maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.”

He leaned forward, and Bean, who had turned away, felt pulled back into his eyes. “Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don’t just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave. There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”

On the sofa, Bean knotted her hands in her lap and began to cry again.

“You wouldn’t have asked to talk to me tonight if you hadn’t wanted to change your story, Bean. So what’s it going to be?” He held out his hands, palms up.

A very long time passed before she took them.

W
hen our mother came home from the hospital, we put her to bed immediately. We changed her compression bandages, massaged her arms and legs, led her through the exercises they had given us. The radiation was done, the medications were tapering off, but we could not do enough to try to make up for how we had been so wrapped up in ourselves that we had nearly lost her.

After a week or two of our exhaustive caretaking, our mother had had enough. She got out of bed one day, did her physical therapy exercises herself, demanded that Cordy help her shower, and then stalked down to the kitchen, where she and Cordy began to bake bread as though it were an Olympic event.

Cordy and our mother had transformed the kitchen into their workspace. On every available surface, and some unavailable, were bowls of rising dough, cooling breads. The air-conditioning was no match for the heat of the oven, and the still air held the scents of yeast and bitter chocolate in a thick sweat on our skin, unstirred by movement. Our mother had finally recovered her taste buds and her stomach, and Cordy was always hungry. They were in an ecstasy of creation, testing, sampling, trying combinations and recipes and taking pleasure in the rush of discovery.

Bean wandered in and out, complaining they were determined to make her fat, but accepting eagerly the rich, steaming slices they handed her to try. The living room was cooler, so she retreated there, letting the smells tempt her back in mid-chapter, when her mind wandered.

Hands sticky with dough, Cordy was hand-kneading a loaf of heavy gingerbread when she paused, putting her hand to her stomach, where it left a floury handprint on her shirt. “Mom,” she said.

Our mother was whisking icing, her good wrist spinning expertly inside the bowl, churning the sugar into a sweet froth. “What?” she asked, not looking up.

“Do you think I’m going to be a good mother?” Cordy asked. She pressed the gingerbread into a pan and then checked the oven. Her hands fluttered to her stomach again.

“I believe you will be an excellent mother.” She poured the icing over a Bundt cake resting on tinfoil, watching it drip and streak its way artistically down the sides.

“You don’t think I’m too irresponsible?” Her mouth pulled down, her eyes shaded.

Our mother put down the bowl again and rested her hands on her hips. “Oh, Cordy, it’s so hard for us, you know? You’re our baby—all of us. Your father and I—we look at you girls and we don’t see the adults. We see the children, the nights awake with you with colic, lost teeth, skinned knees, all those handmade cards. And with you I suppose it’s even harder, because you were Rose and Bean’s baby, too.” She shook her head, carried the bowl over to the sink where it clattered, the dirty dishes resettling like silt shifting to the bottom of a pond.

“But they’re right, aren’t they?” Cordy looked around the kitchen, her hands held wide, helpless. “I’ve pissed away my whole life.”

“That’s Rose talking.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Rose would never say ‘pissed,’ ” Bean said, coming in and poking a finger into the icing that had pooled on the tinfoil. Our mother idly smacked her hand away.

“What do you think all those years were for if not for this?” our mother asked. “We don’t just come from the womb bearing our talents. They grow from all the things we learn. And if you hadn’t worked at restaurants, or you hadn’t learned to throw together meals from whatever you had, you’d never be the kind of cook you are now.”

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,”
Bean said. “And some of us couldn’t find it with both hands. But we survive.”

“I don’t want to be great,” Cordy said. “You were the one who always wanted to be famous. I just want to be happy.”

Our mother had not heard either of us; she was sitting sidesaddle in one of the chairs by the kitchen table, having moved a loaf of dark wheat from the seat and put it to cool on top of the refrigerator. Her forefinger rested on her chin, Classical. Though the exhaustion had passed, she was still weak, and her skin was both pale and bright, as though she burned a constant fever. “I’ve always admired both of you for your resourcefulness,” she said. “You’re fearless. Bean’s moving to New York and making her way in what I’ve always found to be a completely inhospitable city.”

“And you,” Bean said, nodding at Cordy, “surviving all those years without anything, really, but your hands and your brain. I never could have done it.”

“I couldn’t have, either,” our mother said, shaking her head.

Cordy had never considered those years as an achievement. She had, in the days when it was still heady and romantic to her, believed she was a sort of anthropological pioneer, that she was breaking trail and broadening her horizons with each new person she met, each story she heard, but she had never thought of that time as a success. And to hear it from Bean was even more of a surprise.

“That’s why you’re going to be a good mother,” Bean said, nodding as though she knew whereof she spake. “Because you’re a survivor, Cordy. You’ll do what you need to do to get it done.”

“Daddy doesn’t think so,” Cordy said sadly.

Our mother cast this thought aside as she brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “It’s not about you, Cordy, really. Not about your capabilities. Your father is just concerned. He doesn’t want it to be difficult for you.”

“That’s what he said to me,” Bean said. “He said he didn’t understand why we made it so difficult for ourselves. Why we always chose the hard way.”

“And end up doing nothing,” Cordy said. “Except Rose.”

Our mother shook her head. “By whose calculations? You girls are all the same like that. I don’t know what we did to give you the idea that you had to be some master in your field by the time you were thirty.”

She might not have known, but we surely did. The idea had come from living in the shadow of our father, in this tiny community where nothing mattered but the life of the mind, when the greatest celebrity came not on the movie screen or the world stage but behind the lectern, in the footnotes of journals.

“I don’t really want to be a master in my field,” Bean said. “But I’d like not to be a complete and total fuckup.”

Here we expected our mother to rebuke Bean for her language, but she didn’t. She just smiled indulgently and said, “Oh, honey, we’re all fuckups in our own special ways,” which made Cordy laugh so hard she sat down on the floor in a pile of flour, which caused Bean to laugh so hard she started to cry, and the only thing we wished was that Rose had been there to see the whole thing.

TWENTY-THREE

I
n the library, Bean hoisted a heavy monitor up onto the circulation desk. She had pushed all of the tools of Mrs. Landrige’s trade to the side: stamp pads, stamp with tiny rolling digits, tiny pencils shaved to within an inch of their lives, and oh the paper, paper, paper.

Her first order of business as officially knighted, coronated, and installed Barnwell Public Library Librarian (Head of All Matters Library, Cordy called her) had been computerizing the system. Surprisingly, the great town fathers were not only willing, they had set aside money years ago, waiting for the rather Luddite Mrs. Landrige to see the technological light. Which had, of course, never happened. So there the funds had sat, and all Bean had to do was ask for them, and lo, she received.

She had just finished aligning the wires, crawling out from under the desk, brushing the dust and burn from her knees, when the door opened and Aidan came in. “Madam Librarian,” he greeted her with a nod.

“Father Aidan,” she returned with an achingly poor Irish accent. He winced, winked. “What can we do for you today?”

“Just need a quiet place to work,” he said.

“Saturday procrastination?”

“No, standard-issue weeklong procrastination leading to emergence of Saturday work ethic. Speaking of which, are you on for service next Saturday?”

“I’m in. What are we doing?”

“Driving into Columbus to work at a food bank. Stacking cans, handing out rations. Glamorous and sure to be attended by all the finest paparazzi.”

“Then how could I say no?” Bean tossed her hair and struck a pose.

“I’ll call you to set things up. Will Rose be back? We could always use extra people.”

“She might be. But I’m pretty sure most of what she’ll be doing when she comes back is packing.” Bean bent down and pressed a button, and the computer whirred to life.

“So she’s going, then?”

“Ayup. Odd, isn’t it? That she’s off to the jet-setting life and I’m consigned to indentured servitude to Barnwell?”

“England will be good for her,” Aidan said. He leaned against the counter, holding his books and papers beside his hip, long fingers curled around the edges. “She’s been long overdue to get the heck out of Dodge. And Barney will be good for you. You’ll see.”