Eleanor Brown - The Weird Sisters

‘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 favourite 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 any time soon.

Chapter 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 scarf 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 towards 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 catalogue homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.

‘She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange programme 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 favourite 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?’

Sweat stood out against Rose’s bare upper arms; Bean could see the way the drops arrayed along the pores from which they had emerged, like synchronized swimmers poised for a Busby Berkeley number. Rose shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess. I don’t know, I never really thought about weddings. I look at these bridal magazines, and they all say things like, “You’ve been dreaming of this day since you were a little girl, ” and I haven’t. I never did.’

‘Me, either. Is that odd? Do little girls really dream about their weddings and dress up like brides?’

‘I have no idea. Certainly no one we know did. But then again, we’re hardly a representative sample. And neither Jonathan nor I would want the kind of wedding a little girl would dream of anyway. All that foof,’ Rose added dismissively.

‘Foof,’ Bean repeated, trying out the word, unconsciously letting it slip over the tip of her tongue. Rose shot her a doubtful glance, and they both laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s a funny word.’

There was a pause. Rose put her hand in her pocket, checking to make sure her wallet was still in there.

‘So where will you have it?’ Bean asked.

‘Oh, the chapel on campus, you know. And then the reception in Harris. The college doesn’t usually rent the space over holidays, but Dad got them to make an exception.’ Bean nodded, remembering vaguely a concert she had attended in the Harris ballroom, during her sophomore year, she thought. The band had been some hippie-folk experience, probably one of the ones Cordy had seen recently at some mud-flung venue, and Bean had spent most of it pressed up against the back wall, drunkenly permitting some boy to fondle her. She tried to remember his name for a moment, and then mentally waved her hand, dismissing it. O, is it all forgot? All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

‘So how will it work, everything? With Jonathan being in England and all?’

Rose gritted her teeth and looked over at one of the houses across the street. ‘We haven’t worked that all out yet exactly. The wedding’s still scheduled for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to lose the deposit. So maybe I’ll go over there a bit for a honeymoon, and then when he’s done with his fellowship there, he’ll come back.’

Bean couldn’t honestly imagine anyone wanting to come back from Oxford to Barnwell, but she didn’t say anything. Just hummed a few bars of ‘How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree)’.

‘Have you started looking for a dress yet?’

Rose laughed. How like Bean, to go directly for the clothes. ‘No. I fear it, actually.’ She tugged self-consciously at her shorts, which were threatening to ride up the insides of her pale thighs. ‘I can’t see myself in one of those big white monstrosities.’