The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [10]
And it wasn’t that Rose regretted being home, exactly. Our parents’ house and Barnwell in general were far more pleasant than the anonymous apartment she’d rented in Columbus—thin carpet over concrete floors, neighbors moving in and out so quickly she’d stopped bothering to learn their names—but after she filled our parents’ pill cases and straightened the living room, after she had finally hired a lawn service and balanced the checkbook, after she went with our parents to our mother’s chemo treatments, sitting in the waiting room because they didn’t need her there, not really, they would have been fine just the two of them, her life was almost as empty as it had been before.
The tiny clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, and Rose sighed in relief. Ten was a perfectly acceptable hour to go to bed without feeling like a complete loafer. She walked toward the stairs and then paused by the mirror, warped and pale, that had hung there since any of us could remember. Rose stared at her reflection and spoke six words none of us had ever said before.
“I wish my sisters were here.”
The fox, the ape and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three.
Our father once wrote an essay on the importance of the number three in Shakespeare’s work. A little bit of nothing, he said, a bagatelle, but it was always our favorite. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. The Billy Goats Gruff, the Three Blind Mice, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). King Lear—Goneril, Regan, Cordelia. The Merchant of Venice—Portia, Nerissa, Jessica.
And us—Rosalind, Bianca, Cordelia.
The Weird Sisters.
We have, while trapped in the car with our father behind the wheel, been subjected to extended remixes of the history of the word “weird” in Macbeth with a special encore set of Norse and Scottish Sources Shakespeare Used in Creating This Important Work. These indignities we will spare you.
But it is worth noting, especially now that “weird” has evolved from its delicious original meaning of supernatural strangeness into something depressingly critical and pedestrian, as in, “ ‘ Don’t you think Rose’s outfit looks weird?’ Bean asked,” that Shakespeare didn’t really mean the sisters were weird at all.
The word he originally used was much closer to “wyrd,” and that has an entirely different meaning. “Wyrd” means fate. And we might argue that we are not fated to do anything, that we have chosen everything in our lives, that there is no such thing as destiny. And we would be lying.
Rose always first, Bean never first, Cordy always last. And if we don’t accept it, don’t see, like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters did, that we cannot fight our family and cannot fight our fates, well, whose failing is that but our own? Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.
The history of this trinity is fractious—a constantly shifting dividing line, never equal, never equitable. Two against one, or three opposed, but never all together. Upon Cordy’s birth, Rose took Bean into her, two against one. And when Bean rebelled, refused any longer to play Rose’s games, Rose and Cordy found each other, and Cordy became the willing follower. Two against one.
Until Rose went away and we were three apart.
And then Bean and Cordy found each other sneaking out of their respective windows onto the broad-limbed oak trees one hot summer night, and we were two against one again.
And now here we are, measuring our distance an arm’s length away, staying far apart and cold. For what? To hold the others at bay? To protect ourselves?
We see stories in magazines or newspapers sometimes, or read novels, about the deep and loving relationships between sisters. Sisters are supposed to be tight