Eleanor Brown - The Weird Sisters

With a father like ours, and with names like ours, we had reached that state years ago.

First came Rosalind, a fair choice; probably our mother’s intervention spared her from something weightier. But after that, it was all our father’s doing, we are sure. Because then came the second daughter, and what can you name a second daughter but Bianca? And then the third, and if it had been anything other than Cordelia, the heavens might have shaken. Bean and Rose were grateful, true, that the Lear comparisons could not have been made until the troika was complete, or they might have been dubbed to match the play’s older sisters, and they knew there was no way to survive being named Goneril and Regan. Not in this day and age.

We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.

It’s unlikely that our parents ever looked up any of our names in one of those baby name books. The Riverside Shakespeare had obviously been the repository of choice. Once Rose had a summer camp counsellor who, as an icebreaker, looked up the meanings of all the children’s names, and Rosalind was horrified to learn her name meant, yes, ‘beautiful rose’, but also ‘horse serpent’. Horse serpent ? If that won’t give a girl body image issues for life, we don’t know what will.

But mostly the thorn in our Rose’s side – Cordy again with the punny – was love. For really, the transformation of As You Like It comes through the love between Rosalind and Orlando. How can you live up to that? How can you possibly find a man in twenty-first-century America who would paper an entire forest with love poems to you?

Well, Rose will tell you, you can’t.

And if he did, he would probably also be rather creepy.

But she can tell you this only after sixteen years – sixteen years ! – of searching through the forest, of weeding out unsuitable suitors in some sort of romantic scavenger hunt: Emotionally unavailable? Check! Oedipus complex? Check! Stalker? Check! Inability to commit? Check! Inability NOT to commit? Check! It wasn’t until long into her dating career, when a particularly callous date had taken her to a production of the offending play that Rose had realized the trap of her name. Because of course, being Rosalind meant she would always be searching for her true love, but would require such extraordinary lengths to prove it that she would never find him, at least not outside of fiction.

So she dumped the playdate and vowed to give up entirely, because it’s not as though her life was unsatisfying, she promised herself, and this is of course precisely when she met Jonathan, who was not the type of man to write poems and post them all over campus, but who was the type of man to agree to do that if that’s what she wanted, and she figured that wasn’t too shabby.

Chapter Four

Even if it hadn’t been summer, had been fall or spring or winter, if the campus had been alive with students and more than the skeleton crew of staff that kept the town on life support during the long, slow pull between graduation and orientation, there still wouldn’t have been anything to do at night. Maybe a concert by a visiting performer, or a misguided experimental piece in the black box theater would take you through to the anemic hour of nine or so, but then what? Bean had always been a night owl, had more than once been caught by Rose reading under her sheets with a flashlight when we were children and had fully embraced the ethos of the city that never slept.

And now here she was back in Barnwell. Our parents had drifted toward sleep in stages, like a series in tableau, here doing the dishes, then sitting on the sofa reading, then their voices talking softly upstairs, and now silence. Rose had taken a long walk, and when she’d gotten back Bean had been nearly desperate enough to suggest a game of Spite & Malice, a card game we had played as children that was terrible with only two players but would have at least whiled away some time, worked her into sleep. But Rose had been grouchy and silent, so Bean had thought better of it and curled up on the sofa with a book until Rose, too, had stomped up the stairs, taking her ill will with her like Pooh’s little black rain cloud.

‘This would never happen in New York,’ Bean told her book, a weepy novel she had discovered half-read in the pantry.

The book remained, unsurprisingly, quiet.

The whole drive home she had pictured her stay in Barnwell, imagining an ascetic, nun-like existence that would serve as spiritual penance for what she had done. She would wear drab colors and eat dry bread and her skin would take on the cinematic pallor of a glamorous invalid as she modestly turned down creature comforts. But the reality of that hair shirt was beginning to chafe already. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud. At this hour in the city, she would only just be getting ready to go out, and here she was seriously considering going to bed.

‘Ridiculous,’ she told the book, and shut it firmly. There was gas in the car, and she had a few tens folded in her wallet, not that she was going to be buying her own drinks. Some lonely yokel would be more than happy to take care of that for her. She slipped up the stairs and into her room, opening the closet and flipping through her clothes until she found something acceptable – not good enough for New York by half, but too good for any of the bars around here. Her makeup and hair took barely any time at all – that was one benefit of being someplace with such low standards – and then she was out the door into the night, lighting a cigarette as she eased the car out of the driveway in neutral, the lights off until she hit the street, just like old times. She was Bianca again, or nearly so, if only for the night.

Bean carried the burden of Bianca Minola’s name as heavily as Rose carried Rosalind’s. Rose might argue that Bianca’s hardly burdened her – to be the perpetual belle of the ball, argued over by multiple suitors, beloved by her father, described, after one meeting, ‘I saw her coral lips to move, And with her breath she did perfume the air; Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her . . .’ How difficult is that?

Truthfully, the three of us look almost exactly alike (we have been slightly suspicious of siblings who do not resemble one another; it seems to be, somehow, cheating), but Bean has always been the beautiful one. Okay, so she has spent far more time at the gym, beating the odd figure bestowed upon us by our parents – our mother, mostly – into submission: the Scarlett O’Hara waist and small, lifted breasts, the spread into muscular arms and broad shoulders, the ballooned hips and thighs. And Bean, too, has spent fortunes at hair salons, taking our thick but notoriously independent and undeniably dull brown hair to the best stylists. She is like a parent dragging a difficult child to stiff-necked, tweedy psychiatrists, desperate to find the one who will understand.

Even if you look at us together and see that our eyes are identical: large, cow-brown, slightly too close together; our noses the same straight, strong, broad-bridged lines; our mouths identically thin-lipped but wide, you might still say Bianca is the beautiful one. We are all our father’s daughters – Your father’s image is so hit in you – but it is Bianca who turns that face into beauty.

She pulled the car into the parking lot of a bar a few towns over, spritzing a sample bottle of perfume into her hair to blur the smoke. The door gave its aching groan when she opened it and she tilted across the gravel in her heels until she hit the sidewalk. She felt better already. A little male attention, a few shots, she’d be as good as new. She could be Mother Teresa tomorrow. As long as she wasn’t too hungover.