The Weird Sisters (17 page)

We don’t know how she found the lump, which Bean thinks is clear evidence that our father found it while they were having sex, but it doesn’t matter, really. There was a lump, and they had been to the doctor, first in Barnwell, and then in Columbus, and there had been a biopsy. And the word “malignant” had entered our family’s vernacular.

The morning of our mother’s surgery, we all got up without Rose having to wake us. How long had it been since all of us had piled into the car like this? Long enough for us to realize that though we had found the backseat uncomfortable when we were younger, it was nothing compared to how dreadfully inconvenient it was for three fully grown adults. Barnwell was small enough that we always walked, even in the winter, and regardless of the weather, and we were unused to such close quarters with each other anyway.

Rose and Cordy stood by the door for a moment and stared at each other expectantly, until Cordy rolled her eyes and climbed into the middle. “The hump,” we had called it when we were younger, because whoever sat there had to contend with the bump where her legs should go.

“I haven’t been the smallest for a long time,” Cordy complained as we squeezed her in on either side.

“You’re still the youngest,” Bean said, flicking Cordy’s bare leg with her fingertip. Rose noticed Bean had cleaned and trimmed her nails, and repainted them shell pink. The effect was both sad and a relief, and Rose felt the unfamiliar urge to hug her, to let Bean know that she didn’t have to try so hard anymore.

“Didn’t that stop meaning something about the time we could legally buy alcohol?” Cordy asked.

“Let’s leave this town; for they are hare-brain’d slaves,”
our father said, settling himself into the driver’s seat and looking at Cordy in the rearview mirror.

“O-KAY,” Cordy said loudly, and pushed out with her knees so both Rose and Bean had to squeeze back to defend their space.

“Quit it,” they both whined. Cordy smiled angelically. She looked better. Her skin had lost the yellowish pallor it had gained on the catch-as-catch-can diet she had consumed in her stint as an American malcontent, and her hair looked shiny, bound in a thick braid that fell down her back. She had even gained some weight, Rose noticed, though she could still feel a sharp elbow digging into her ribs. That, however, was more malice than malnutrition.

“Isn’t it nice to have our girls home?” our mother asked our father, batting her eyelashes at him in false adoration.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,”
our father replied, and pulled out of the driveway. No one had yet mentioned where we were going.

When we were growing up, we took a trip each summer, driving somewhere in our old, wide-bodied station wagon with its painfully sticky vinyl seats that left angry red tattoos on our bare thighs below our shorts. Our parents traded driving duties, steering us down roads that split pastures in two, through tunnels blooming into mountainous vistas, along coastal roads where the only thing between us and our Maker was a thin, low afterthought of a guardrail. We alternated arguing in the backseat with reading, coloring, and playing our father’s infamous sonnet round-robins, in which we passed around a sonnet, each of us composing a line until we had an entire poem that, at the end, usually bore absolutely no resemblance to the initial topic.

The game did, however, make us uniquely good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter, not that this is a skill that benefits one much in any world other than our father’s.

In this way, we saw Fourth of July fireworks in Maine, were terrorized by bears in Yosemite (Bean’s fault—she had left the marshmallows out of the bear bag), had our photo taken by Mount Rushmore, sweltered through an unseasonably early hurricane in Florida, and had our tongues burned off by tamales in Austin.

When we look back on it now, it seems odd that we did not do things more fitting to our family’s named interests. These trips, many of which could have been summed up by a bumper sticker bearing the name of some self-referential tourist attraction like South of the Border or Wall Drug, seemed, if you will forgive the obviousness of it, so
American.
When we stayed at a motel with a pool and made friends with the other children shrieking around its concrete deck, half the time they might as well have been speaking another language. We didn’t know their television shows, the songs they sang from the radio. We didn’t know junk food, or fast food, and the only handheld game we had in the car was Etch A Sketch. We faked it well, of course, and it didn’t matter because we would never see these children again, headed as they were to California, to Arkansas, to Virginia, places far from us. But we would be untruthful if we didn’t admit it made us feel a little strange.

So, yes, it might be more expected for us to have summered regularly in Stratford, or London, or Padua, or anywhere in Europe with some vague Shakespearean connection, really. But we think our father genuinely enjoyed these forays into Americana. For all his high-minded ignorance about its ways, he found the lives of everyone else all around him, outside our little Barnwell-shaped academic bubble, fascinating. He marked these trips on a mental checklist he carried, some way of bringing himself—and us—into the mainstream, if only for a few weeks.

On this roadtrip to our mother’s date with breastiny (™ Cordy), we had all brought books, of course, no one in our family would ever think of being without reading material, but Rose and our mother were the only ones reading. Our father was driving, holding the steering wheel loosely in his right hand while his left stroked his beard obsessively. He did this so often we sometimes wondered if he would wear tracks in it where his fingers moved. Bean was staring out the window, balancing Edward and her conscience on a mysterious set of mental scales, and Cordy was talking to our father about some avant-garde production of
The Merchant of Venice
that she had seen at a fringe festival somewhere.

“And then there was this whole thing about how the boxes Portia’s suitors are trying to unlock are, like, symbolic of her
virginity,
so she kept grabbing her crotch while she was talking.”

“That’s not exactly a new theory,” our father interjected. “It’s not a difficult leap of imagination to make. The word is actually ‘casket,’ and there’s the connection to the death of her father because of the word choice, but they are really just boxes.”

“But did she have to
fondle
herself onstage?” Cordy asked.

“No, I suppose that’s a bit much.”

“Oh, but you haven’t heard the worst part yet,” Cordy said. She had clasped her hands in her lap, leaning slightly forward, her chin resting on the shoulder of our mother’s seat, the earnest family dog. Bean raised one finger and dragged it carefully, metronome-like, back and forth along the window, ticking away the miles in her mind.

“Do tell,” our father said. He delights in precisely this kind of thing. In the same way Mount Rushmore was, to him, glorious in its baseness, he revels in the dreadfulness of various interpretations of Shakespeare. This meant that throughout our childhood, much of the live theater we saw was just that: dreadful interpretations of Shakespeare, including, memorably, that one all-nude production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
which (after Bottom—in full ass-head regalia—sported an erection upon being fondled by Titania) gave us nightmares for a week. The benefit, besides being able to quote liberally from nearly every play, was that we all became quite good at critiquing theater. And at sleeping upright.

“Well,” Cordy began, stretching the word out like salt-water taffy, relishing the moment. “The Prince of Morocco, you know?” Our father nodded. “The guy playing him was, like, Rastafarian? And he had fake
dreadlocks
. And an
accent.
”

She sat back, having dropped her bombshell.

Our father chuckled.
“Mislike me not for my complexion,
mon
,”
he said, in a clumsy patois.

“Da-ad,” Bean moaned, stopping the ticking of her finger and rolling her eyes.

“No, it was totally like that!” Cordy said, turning to Bean and then back to our father. “Dad, you should have been there. I thought I was going to pee myself, I was laughing so hard.”

“What were they trying to do, do you think, Cordelia?” our father mused. This was, of course, the nut. Even a bad production had some value, something to be learned from it, even if it functioned as no more than a cautionary tale. “Do you have any idea of the zeitgeist? Their aim?”

Cordy shrugged, bored now. “I don’t think there was one. I think it was a bunch of unemployed actors who think they’re deep or whatever. Depressing.” She folded her hands back in her lap as though at prayer.

Our mother looked up from her book. “It’s the next exit,” she said, and the car became strangely still. Cordy opened her book and started to read.

Another family might have made preparations. Another mother might have cooked casseroles in Corningware and frozen them, labeled with instructions. Another trio of daughters might have embroidered a hospital gown, written a song in her honor, brought along massage oils and aromatherapy candles to ease her transition. For all Rose’s talk, we brought only us. Unsure of what to ask, uncomfortable with the illness of a woman who had nursed us through all of ours, armed with only the books we were reading, and not entirely undamaged and unbruised ourselves. Our mother was inches away from us, but we hardly knew how she was feeling—scared? Sad? Resigned?

At the hospital they wouldn’t let us go any farther than the front lobby, so we kissed her goodbye there. Rose hugged her awkwardly, patting her back as though she were a casual acquaintance. Bean kissed her cheek and then squeezed her upper arms. “I love you, Mom,” she said. Cordy was the only one who gave herself fully into it, hurling herself into our mother’s arms and pressing her tightly. When she finally pulled away, our mother was crying, but only lightly, and Cordy looked weepy and a little dazed. “I love you,” we all called as she and our father walked away. He wore, as he always did, a short-sleeved dress shirt and brown pants, which were too short, and revealed a splash of his black nylon socks as he and our mother disappeared down the antiseptic hallway.

“Tragic,” Bean said, shaking her head as they turned the corner. Our mother held her purse in her arms like a child, and our father’s hand rested on her back.

“It’s terrible,” Cordy agreed, still sniffling. Rose plucked a tissue from her heavy leather purse and handed it to our sister.

“I mean his fashion sense,” Bean said.

“Jesus, Bean. Have some compassion. She’s going into surgery,” Rose said, shocked. Cordy started crying again.

“It doesn’t mean what he’s wearing isn’t tragic,” Bean said, but the fight wasn’t in her.

“Excuse me.” A voice came behind us, and we turned to see an employee standing behind us with a large wheeled cart, laden with supplies, linens.

“Sorry,” we said, and darted out of the way. Rose led us to the lobby, where the sun had only just begun to burn in through the atrium, the glass panels divided by heavy wood. Cordy fingered one of the plants, unable to tell whether it was plastic or real. Unyielding chairs in varying shades of blue clustered together in tiny squares. Bean and Cordy sprawled out on two rows, feet toward each other, and Rose sat primly on a single cushion. Upstairs as they prepared our mother for surgery, we imagined our parents praying, bending their foreheads together and whispering in an intimate expression of their love and their faith. We could summon neither.

Cordy and Bean pulled out their books and opened them, disappearing behind the pages. Rose sat for a long time, staring at nothing in particular, and then opened her book as well. That was it, apparently. We weren’t going to talk about it, we weren’t going to share any feelings or discuss any arrangements, not going to bond in any kind of movie montage moment where emotional music swelled as we hugged and wept for our mother’s loss and our own fear. Instead, we were going to wrap ourselves in cloaks woven from self-pity and victimhood, refusing to admit that we might be able to help each other if we’d only open up. Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: we’d read.

O
ur father came to get us just before five, the air in the lobby grown stiff and warm with the glare of the afternoon sun. Bean and Rose were asleep, laid out uncomfortably, and Cordy had turned upside down, her head hanging off the edge of the cushions, her feet propped up on one of the cubicle-like walls dividing the cavernous room into smaller portions. She held the book awkwardly in front of her face, page turning a two-handed effort.

“Harpier cries, ’Tis time, ’tis time,”
our father announced loudly. Cordy raised her book, her face gone red from suspension, as Rose started awake with a loud gasp. Bean continued to snore contentedly until Cordy flipped herself right side up, kicking Bean as she moved. Bean started, blinked sleepily.

We processed upstairs in silence, Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, our father’s shoes squeaking officiously on the wheel-worn floors. Cordy trailed her fingers along the wide blue lines spreading along the walls. When we reached our mother’s room, our father paused, turned to face us. “I just want to warn you. She doesn’t look good.”