The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [91]
But the others in the St. Mark’s group were nice, were kind, were welcoming. She knew some of them from the library, a young mother who came in with her children, the couple who had bought the hardware store and had donated supplies for today. Three professors, fresh-faced and newly anointed. And all of them, Bean found, were more useful than she was. We lived a life of the mind in our house, which was all well and good, but sometimes Bean wondered, back when the threat of The Bomb had hung above our heads like the Sword of Damocles, what would happen to us if the end did come? No one would need people like us. Poetry and art would be useless. We would need farmers, and carpenters, and scientists, and leaders. But not a disgraced adulteress of an office manager with a useless ability to quote Shakespeare and a budding knowledge of the Dewey decimal system.
For she could now, admittedly not with the panache of Mrs. Landrige, surely, take you easily and directly to the section you wanted, occasionally hone in on the exact book, pull it off the shelves and place it into your grateful hands, and then wave away your thanks carelessly. But here, put to fetching and carrying, she felt clumsy and in the way, arms spread awkwardly across plywood, rushing back and forth between the spit of the saw and the noisy sting of hammers in her ears. Soon she was sweaty and tired and she knotted her hair in on itself and wiped off the mascara sweating its way down her cheeks and tried to forget who she really was and why she was really there.
At lunch, she sat in the shade next to the young mother from the library. “It’s so nice to meet someone my age,” the woman said. Amanda.
Bean started at that. She looked at Amanda, the tiny bouquet of wrinkles beside her eyes as she smiled, the bow of a frown line between her nose and her mouth, her hair messy, her hips widening. Were they the same age? Bean had grown so used to thinking of herself as a twentysomething, just another fabulous gal about town, living some glamorous roman-à-clef-to-be. When she was little she would calculate how old she would be at the millennium, and it had seemed so ancient, so far in the future that it could not possibly be connected to the girl she was at that time. But now, here she was, past that inconceivable age, even.
She folded in on herself and ate her sandwich silently as Amanda chattered on beside her, until it was, mercifully, time to go back to toting barges and lifting bales.
At the end of the day, Bean was sore and splintered, divested fully of makeup, hair gone wild (but alluringly so, she had checked in the windows of the roofer’s truck).
“How are you feeling?” Aidan asked. His hand rested on her back, Bean automatically straightened, her shoulder blades wings on her back, the same way she did whenever she saw an old woman hunchbacked with age.
“I’m beat,” Bean said, twisted her lips into a humble smile. “But I feel good. Like after a really good kickboxing class, but better.”
Aidan laughed. “Maybe we should consider selling it that way. Community service as physical fitness.”
“Franchises in strip malls with pictures of us holding out our enormous jeans.”
“Now that’s something to aspire to,” Aidan said. A few of the St. Mark’s workers flitted by. Aidan greeted them, a hand on the shoulder, the other in a firm handshake. He laughed, told Amanda he’d see her in church on Sunday. Amanda lingered for a moment, possibly hoping for an audience with Bean rather than with Aidan, but then she slipped off and they were alone again. “I’m glad you came,” Aidan said.
“Me too,” Bean said, and she half meant it. It was nice to find forgetfulness in something other than a bottle of wine or Edward’s bed.
“We can really do something with this young members group if everything