The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [48]
“They’ve been upgraded to crazy already? I would have thought the reunion would have lasted a few more days.”
This, unexpectedly, made her feel guilty. “It’s just . . . they’re the same, you know? I think Bean’s trying to pick up Father Aidan.”
This time Jonathan’s laugh was loud and delighted. “That’s a riot. Well, at least it’ll give those biddies in the vestry something to argue about besides who gets to make up the collection plate schedule.”
“You don’t think it’s . . . inappropriate?”
“Father Aidan can take care of himself. And Bean only does it for the attention, you know that.”
“Of course I know it. That’s what drives me crazy. And Cordy? My parents will support her forever while she figures out what she wants to do. I don’t know why she can’t just settle down.”
“She’s the baby,” Jonathan said, as though that explained everything.
Rose thought of Lear, of the way he had kept Cordelia as his own, staving off the threats of old age with his tenuous connection to her youth. “You’re so lucky you and your siblings get along,” she sighed. She already knew that if she and Jonathan had children, they would have only one. None of this cruel bait and switch our parents had pulled on her, setting her up to be the One and then going and having two more.
“Ah, but I never got to boss anyone around,” he teased. “Where would you be without all those years of acting as general?”
“I’d probably have a less intense antacid habit.”
“Let it go,” Jonathan said. “It’s not your responsibility to take care of them anymore. Let them take care of themselves. People can change.”
After she hung up, she sat on the floor in the kitchen, the linoleum cool against her bare calves where the nightgown had ridden up, and listened to the quiet hum of the house asleep—the purr of the refrigerator as it cycled, the air conditioner kicking on and off, keeping the temperature steady, the occasional aged creak of wood settling. Was it true, what he said? Could people change? Or would we remain this way, forever and ever? Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the way things were Supposed to Be? There were days, yes, when Rose felt as though she had been on this earth forever, since the dinosaurs at least, but she knew she was young. It seemed so early to have signed her whole life away, but it seemed so exhausting to change anything.
Here is the good thing about being the oldest: control.
Here’s the bad thing about being the oldest: control.
When Bean arrived, something in three-year-old Rose’s mind clicked, and she knew that if her coveted role of only star in the Andreas sky had been wrested from her, then she at least would have the glory of playing the director. Chips would fall not where they may, but where she said they would. It was still Rose’s world, Bean was just living in it.
When Cordy turned six, Rose finally deemed her old enough to take a speaking part in the frequent plays we performed for our parents. Cordy took the part of the loyal (and mute) maidservant, the one-lined extra, the spear-carrier in all of our sheet-curtained productions in the basement, until Rose decreed that she had enough maturity to play, finally, the part that would make us complete, the three witches in the Scottish play.
Though we weren’t technically in a theater, and therefore it wasn’t bad luck to say the name—Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth, there, we’ve said it—Rose still insisted we call it “the Scottish play.” We clad ourselves in cast-off clothes from the dress-up box, mostly old dresses from our grandmothers. We sent Bean on a mission to the neighbors’ houses to find witch hats from Halloween costumes gone-by, which she produced admirably, and we pressed Mustardseed, our long-suffering cat-cum-Globe-extra into service as a familiar (Bean insisted; she figured the lack of a cat in the original play was Shakespeare’s problem, not hers).
Musical accompaniment was provided courtesy of the plastic