The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [57]
“Of course not. It’s just, you know, odd, having you both back here.”
“Not as odd as it is being here,” Bean interjected. “I thought I was well shot of this town. I hate this place.”
“Funny,” Cordy mused. “It always had such nice things to say about you.”
“It feels alien. Like I’d gotten really used to being the only child and now I’m not,” Rose continued, as though we hadn’t spoken.
“You haven’t been an only child since the day I was born,” Bean said sharply. “Just because we’re not here doesn’t mean we don’t exist.”
“I know. It just kind of feels like that. You know, because I see Mom and Dad all the time . . . Oh, never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Yeah, because it’s bullshit,” Bean said. She sat up, balanced her cigarette on her thumb, and used her index finger to flick it into the air. The tiny projectile shot out in a fireworks arc, leaving a trail of sparks as it fell toward the garden. We sat in silence again, the still air humming, bustling with summer life. Bullshit, sure, yet we all knew what she meant. We have all had the experience of being the only one in the house with our parents and there is something special, something different about it. Neither Bean nor Cordy ever would have been so callous as to call themselves the only child, but we knew what Rose meant. Competition for attention came only intermittently, in phone calls from Cordy, desperate for a Western Union injection, or from Bean, a call from a taxicab on the way to a party, or, when Rose was off getting her Ph.D., careful letters on her elegant stationery, written painstakingly in her excellent Palmerian hand. These interruptions were more aberrations than the norm, and when they were over, they were forgotten, and the one at home could resume her post as most favored nation.
Bean lay back again, her hands behind her head. “What’s your job, Cordy?”
“Working at the Beanery. Dan Miller said he’d hire me if I wanted to work.”
“If you’d finish your degree, you could get a far better job than service. Actually, you should apply for a job at the college. Then you’d get free tuition,” Rose suggested.
“Don’t I get free tuition anyway, because of Daddy?” As the baby, Cordy was the only one who put the diminutive suffixes on our parental appellations. It was, at this age, a little annoying, but we put up with it.
“You’re twenty-seven. I think that benefit ran out a few years ago,” Bean said, not unkindly.
“Well, whatever. I don’t care about the degree. I just want to be happy.”
“Is working in a coffee shop going to make you happy?”
“It’s a perfectly noble profession.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t noble. Rose is the one who thinks it’s beneath you. I’m just saying that if your major life goal is happiness, make sure what you’re doing is going to make you happy.”
“I didn’t say it was beneath her. I just said she could do more.”
“Same difference,” Bean shrugged. Rose gave a long sigh, indicating that she disagreed but would not fight it. We are all gifted with communicating great depths of emotion through the semaphores of our sighs.
“I wish we had some pot,” Cordy said sadly.
“Ask your new boss,” Bean said. “He had all the good shit in college.”
“I think he’s gone respectable,” Rose said.
“Alas the heavy day,” Cordy intoned deeply, and we all giggled. “What about you, Bean?” she asked, turning her head the other way now, and noting how much Bean looked like Rose from the side. And herself the same, she supposed. No one would ever not know we are sisters.
“What about me? I don’t have any pot, either.”
“No, I mean are you going to get a job? Stay awhile?”
Bean lifted her hands and rubbed her eyes hard, the way that leaves starbursts and darkness when you open them again. “I guess so. For a while at least. I want to be around to help with Mom.”
“So you’re not going back to New York?” Rose asked.
Silence huddled around us. The owl hooted again, from a different tree this time. Or a different owl, similarly melancholy. When Bean finally spoke, we could hear the dryness as her lips parted. “Not right away.