The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [81]
But she hadn’t confessed everything, had she? She was no cleaner than she had been when she arrived. Drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence. When she had woken that morning, wrapped in the sheet, what had seemed so giddy and right in darkness looked only violent and sad in the light. A bottle of wine empty on the floor beside his crumpled, abandoned clothes. Her mascara, crusted dark under her eyes. The film in her mouth, sour and dry. His sleeping face, drawn and empty without his lust for her.
Bean turned her head, shook it. She passed a family on their way home, the mother and father, each holding a hand of the little girl between them, lifting her high in the air and swinging her for a few steps before setting her down again.
In trying to apologize and repent, she had betrayed someone else she cared about, someone who had been nothing but good to her, who had opened her heart and her home and her family only for Bean to twist into something ugly. Again. She hadn’t changed. She hadn’t changed at all. Suddenly, she was filled with a hatred for herself so intense she had to dig her fingernails into her palm, letting the burn of physical pain take away the emotions, but it was too late. She was already crying.
Bean tried on identities the way she now tries on clothes. She considered entomology (Rose was better at science), acting (Cordy was a better performer), dancing (our thigh issues have been mentioned), poetry (all our work was judged against standards you can probably guess at, and obviously deemed lacking), being the first female president (Cordy was a better public speaker), modeling (thighs again), fashion design (as a family, we are decidedly lacking in artistic talent, which is also why she could not go into painting), and business (Rose had to hold Bean’s money if we went into town to buy something, because Bean would either spend it on something pointless, or lose it before we rounded the corner onto Main Street).
The hardest cuts were the ones where we beat her at her own game, where she tried something only to discover Rose had done it first (not a problem) and better (problem), or for Cordy to swoop in and do it second (not a problem) and better (problem). In some ways, we think this is why Bean ended up in a lifestyle so unlike the Andreas family value system, because there was simply nothing left.
What do you do if you keep losing the game? You take your marbles and go home. Or in Bean’s case, you take your marbles and go to New York, and you decide to care about things like clothes and designer martinis and how best to pick up and bed an investment banker and still make it home before the city’s night life fully kicks into gear. And this makes you different, but it will not make you special.
Caught in the middle, Bean felt sometimes as though she were jumping up and down, waving her arms and shouting, “Notice me! Notice me!,” but the only times she got the attention she wanted were when she was very, very bad. So in high school she learned to stay out late, and came home coated in the thick, sweet smell of dope, and she snuck out with boys and they teepeed trees until they were caught and brought home by the apologetic town police, and she skipped her classes in college until her professors pulled our father aside as he strolled along the paths, and she worked out until she was sick-stick-thin, and still she could have jumped up and down for a thousand years and waved her arms and not gotten enough of our parents’ attention.
We could have told Bean we were screaming and waving, too, and none of us ever got what we wanted, not when it came to attention. No one does.
THIRTEEN
During the summer in Barnwell, even in August, the educator’s longest Sunday, everything closes early. Without the restless hum of students to fill the businesses until decent (or indecent) hours, the locals shut down and head home before dinner. Walking around the town after six in the summer, you might expect to see tumbleweeds or hear the squeak of a saloon door,