The Weird Sisters (13 page)

“In a former life, yeah. And I just liked it better here. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?”

Cordy shrugged and picked up her glass, taking another sip before she replied. “Just unexpected, I guess. I mean, I was reading one of the alumni magazines last night and everyone else has joined the Peace Corps or become some important cancer-curing researcher.”

“And here we sit. Depressing, isn’t it?”

“Hey, I never graduated. I have an excuse.”

“I am a Small Business Owner,” Dan said, sitting up straight. “And a respectable member of the community. I need no excuse.”

“You own this place?” Cordy looked around. As it was summer, there were few people in here, but during the school year, like everything else around campus, it would be hopping.

“Yes, it’s all mine,” he said, gesturing expansively. “I’m the food service magnate of Barnwell. Bow to me.”

“No thanks,” Cordy said coolly, but she gave him a slight smile, turning up the corners of her lips, Chapstick-pink.

“How long are you around for?” he asked.

“Dunno. A while. My mom’s sick, you know. And Rose is getting married. And I kind of got to think about what’s going to come next. Save a little money.”

“Shit, that’s a lot going on all at once.” His eyebrows bent together slightly, a vee of concern. “You working?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, if you need a job, you let me know. Miller’ll give you the hookup.” He patted his chest, then rubbed it. At the hollow of his throat, thick hair curled up from under his shirt. She remembered watching him play Frisbee on the quad, shirtless, and the way she had been amazed by how hairy he was. Neither repulsed nor attracted, but scientifically fascinated, curious about the texture.

“But I hate coffee. I mean, drinking it. I love the smell,” Cordy said.

“So there’s a start, right? And it smells awesome in here, doesn’t it?” Dan asked, leaning back so far that he had to hook his booted foot around the table leg to keep from falling off as he drew an exaggerated, enormous breath.

Cordy giggled.

“The pay is crap, but you’re living at home, right? So no worries. Call me.” There was a moment’s pause. She’d had dozens of jobs over the years—a job didn’t mean she was committing to anyone or anything. Taking a job in Barney did not mean she would owe her soul to the proverbial company store. It wouldn’t mean she’d have to stay forever. She wouldn’t even have to stay through a shift if she didn’t want to.

“Okay,” Cordy agreed, and Dan hopped out of his chair, placing his hand on her shoulder and squeezing lightly.

“Jesus,” he said, prodding at her clavicle. “You need to gain some weight, girl. I’ll send over a pastry or something.”

“Thanks,” Cordy said, reaching up to squeeze his hand in return. He walked off, whistling, and she watched him go, looking at the loose fabric of his baggy jeans. He seemed so happy, and it made her a little sad to realize how alien that emotion had become.

I
t could have been worse, Cordy knew. She could have been Ophelia, with all the illicit sexuality and going mad and committing suicide. She could even have been Bianca, with all the beauty
and
obedience to live up to. So being Cordelia was, she was well aware, not as bad as it could have been.

Cordelia’s problem—that is, the Shakespearean Cordelia, but hang on and you’ll see where we’re going with this—for Cordy was that she was just so un
form
ed. Her great moment of rebellion was in refusing to swear her love to her father precisely because she loved him too much. (Though Cordy was, truth be told, always kind of pleased at the middle finger that sent—albeit indirectly—to the older sisters.) And then there she was at the end, loyal and cooperative, until she, you know, dies. Okay, so there is the part where she becomes Queen of France and leads the French forces against Evil Edmund, but (a) she loses and (b) it’s not like she
wanted
to lead them. If there’s any way you could be a major military leader and be totally passive about it, that’d be Cordelia for you. Everything happens
to
Cordelia; she never makes anything happen.

To be named after Cordelia should have invited some kind of dignity, but Cordy had never really felt it. The only thing she had absolutely inherited from her name was a gentle rage against injustice, and like Cordelia, she was hesitant to speak up about it, though Cordelia’s reluctance came more from some overinflated sense of goodness and Cordy’s came from . . . what? Laziness? Fear? She wasn’t really sure. In her most recent incarnation she had sat in hazy, smoke-filled rooms with sagging floors and listened to people mouthing off about The Patriarchy and The Establishment, and while she agreed, felt a great weight of sadness about the terrible things she knew existed in this world, she felt powerless to change them. After all, Cordelia had been executed for doing The Right Thing, and while Cordy didn’t think that was likely to happen to her, she wasn’t exactly eager to test the waters.

In love, too, Cordy had always been compliant. While Rose searched, and Bean made herself available, Cordy had rarely bothered to seek anything out. Her sweet and comical nature had drawn men to her, true, but mostly she took them as they came, and did not let herself be drawn into the drama falling in love entailed. She accepted these suitors, but did not care about them, not really. She had found herself, more than once, below the body of a sweating, heaving man whispering endearments in her ear, hot breath on her skin, and wondered idly how she had
gotten
there, and what all the
fuss
was about anyway. Sex had given her a bed more often than not in the past few years, but it had never held any passion, and Cordy always felt it was more companionable than anything else.

To Cordy, life was filled with things that were simply what you did when they were required of you, like sleeping with someone in exchange for a bed, or working as a hotel maid to get money to go to the next town, or marrying the king of France and leading his troops into certain death.

Rose will tell you that Cordy, being the youngest, has always gotten away with murder, and that this is entirely unfair.

Bean will tell you that Cordy, being the youngest, has always been the favorite, and that this is entirely unfair.

Cordy will tell you that both of these things are true.

Example. New Year’s Eve, Cordy is fifteen years old. Rose is with her boyfriend and his family in Connecticut. She thinks she might marry this one. (She is wrong.) Bean is out somewhere unspecified. She has told our parents that she’s with Lyssie (short for Lysistrata—whenever we complain about our unfashionable names, we remember that we could have been the daughters of a classics professor), that they’re going to a movie, but we know she is at a party. At this party, no one will know who our father is, or care, and the house will be dirty, with peeling wallpaper and furniture racked into slanting, exhausted postures. There will be beer and pot and mattresses in unlikely places, and long before midnight Bean and Lyssie will be wholeheartedly ’round the bend and in the sweaty, beer-soaked arms of some boy they will forget the next day. This adventure is possible only because Bean has always been an excellent liar, and not because our parents would ever approve of such an outing.

Cordy and her best friend had decided they wanted to go to a New Year’s festival in Columbus, a party with a band, fireworks, and thousands of drunk celebrants, courtesy of the beer company sponsoring the event. Cordy has never been a big drinker, really, so we didn’t think she was escaping for the alcohol, the way Bean was. But still, a fifteen-year-old girl and her barely pubescent escort loose on the streets on a night known for its debauchery?

Our parents said yes.

When Rose heard this, she was a teakettle at full steam. When, having won a prize in the state history fair, she and her friends wanted to go to Columbus for the day to compete at the next level, our mother had insisted on going along as a chaperone. “For an
academic
event!” Rose screeched.

Our parents once grounded Bean for a week after she stole a stick of penny candy from the bookstore, sneaking it inside the arm of her winter coat. Her crime was discovered when, upon returning to the house, she refused to remove the coat, despite the enthusiasm of our radiators.

Having knocked one of the new Middle Eastern Studies professor’s children off of his bicycle in order to commandeer it for herself, an act that left him with a split lip and a lifelong fear of the Andreas girls, Cordy received a stern talking-to.

“See?”
Rose asks.

But what Rose does not so much see is that this permissiveness is also a sign of neglect. Cordy’s insistence upon conception surprised our parents, who had decided Bean would be the last subatomic particle of our particular nuclear family. And they were, in many ways, worn out by the time Cordy came along. So if they allowed her to go places and do things they would never have allowed Rose or Bean to do, it would be fair to take that as a measure of preference, yes, but preference toward the older of us, not the younger.

We think, too, by the time Cordy came along, they had figured out that pretty much no matter what they did, she would turn out okay. She was cuddled and loved more, photographed more, laughed and played with more, but she was a little like a new toy in that way; as often as we adored her, we equally ignored her.

These things in concert are understandably why Cordy developed what she calls her performing monkey traits. At family dinners, preferably ones in which important college officials or visiting lecturers sit at our table, she will be the one who encourages us all to hang spoons from our noses, to test the level of the table by rolling peas across it, to stage a reading from the Berlitz travel book of important Spanish phrases such as, “Meet me at the discotheque,” “Do you have any coconuts?” or, most vitally, “Please leave me alone.” And Cordy being Cordy, everyone at the table (visiting dignitaries included) will participate.

She became, unsurprisingly, the actress among us, and directed, produced, and starred in every possible vehicle at our school. Puberty left her heartbroken, because up until then the theater department had called upon her to play the child’s roles in every production at Barney as well, male or female. She can still sing the lisping songs from
The Music Man.
“If anyone is going to Broadway,” people would say after the show had ended, “it’s her.”

But going to Broadway would have required a tenacity Cordy just did not possess. We were too easy on her, yes, and when she forgot to do her chores and skipped off to the pool, or pulled us away from our own work to build a fort in the dining room, we forgave her those trespasses, and did her chores for her. We helped her with her homework, we babysat for her, we let her sit in the library at Coop and read for hours at a time, and when it finally came down to it, Cordy was sorely underprepared for the fact that her smile and her ability to get an entire room full of Shakespearean scholars to do the Macarena (true story) would not necessarily guarantee her perennial success.

Still, Rose would tell you Cordy always got the best Christmas presents.

Bean would tell you Cordy never lost a board game in her life, even when she did.

Cordy would tell you all these things are true.

SIX

O
ur father does not cook. This had always been the way. Both he and our mother would have objected to the idea of the kitchen being the wife’s domain, but they clearly had no problem with it in practice. So with our mother’s being out of commission, barely able to eat, let alone cook, it fell to us. Bean cobbled together a vegetable soup from the odds and ends in the refrigerator, and Rose defrosted some bread from the freezer and made a cheese plate. Cordy moped around, getting in the way.

“What are you doing?” Rose asked our father. She was finishing setting the table, and he was wrestling one of the armchairs from the living room through the door into the dining room.

“Getting a chair for your mother. She won’t be able to sit in one of the wooden ones long enough to eat.”

“We’ll take her a tray. Put that back.”

“Your mother wants to eat with us.
We must needs dine together.
”

And so it was.

She came downstairs under her own power, tired and delicate as bone china, but present. “It’s so wonderful to have us all home together,” she said, beaming.

“Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table,”
said our father. He slipped his book onto the edge of the table, where he could pretend he wasn’t reading it as we ate.

Cordy, gifted in the art of taking credit where no credit was due, brought dinner to the table with a flourish. Bean was reaching for the soup when our mother cleared her throat. “May we say grace before we begin?” she asked. Bean’s hand stole guiltily back to her lap.

“Grace!” Cordy said cheerfully. Our father grinned at her, and then reached across the table. We joined hands and bowed our heads, a ritual that struck us all as so old-fashioned and sweet that Rose got a slight case of the sniffles, and our father said grace, his voice rumbling quietly, and Bean was struck by the way that our father’s evening grace always reminded her of sunset.