The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [93]
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t take it.”
“I’m not saying anything other than pointing out, quite logically, my little mathematician, that there’s nothing forcing you to take it.”
“But what if I can’t get another job here?”
“Then you’ll go somewhere else.”
“I can’t leave you,” Rose said.
Our father beetled his brow. “And why not?”
Rose faltered. “Well, Mom. And Bean and Cordy are here now.”
“And none of these is your responsibility, Rose. No one ever asked you to care for us. I suppose it is your mother’s and my failing that we have allowed you to do so for so long. It’s always been your gift to care for others, but it’s a gift that’s come with a certain amount of sacrifice for you, whether you know it or not.”
Allowed. Rose had never thought of all the responsibility she had taken on as having been permitted by someone. It was something that she just had to do. At dinner in a near-empty Italian restaurant, Bean and Cordy playing hide-and-go-seek between the legs of deserted tables, their shrieks making the waiters jump as they carried full platters to the table where our parents ate with their friends, Rose escorting them to the entryway and keeping them occupied with crayons and a long white strip of butcher paper. At a summer department picnic, Cordy tearing off her clothes to run through a sprinkler until her diaper was heavy with water, Rose, embarrassed by Cordy’s childish nudity, taking her inside to dry her off and put her back in her yellow seersucker dress, tying the bow neatly on her back. At the grocery store when our mother had forgotten to buy anything we could pack for lunch, Rose having learned where the grocery money was kept, in a jar by the sink, carefully picking out white bread and bologna so our sandwiches would look like those of every other child at the table (until we went to Coop, of course, where the kid next to us was more likely to have hummus than Campbell’s in his thermos). In the living room, Rose carefully knocking the ashes out of our father’s pipe as he slept peacefully in the chair. Truly, no one had ever asked her to do these things, but we had relied on her to do them, relied so heavily that it had never occurred to us how unfair to her it might be, how much she had begun to think of herself as the person who did those things.
But if she didn’t do those things—if she no longer took care of us—then who would she be? Who would Bean be if she dropped her beautiful mask? Who would Cordy be if she stepped up to the plate in her own life? Who would Rose be if she weren’t the responsible one anymore?
“You’re going over for a visit, right?”
Rose was surprised that our father had registered this fact. She’d announced her trip, written it on the family calendar in the kitchen, but she’d fully expected to have to remind everyone a dozen more times before she left. When had our father started paying attention to things?
“So you’ll go and you’ll see.”
“But what should I do?” Rose asked, even more lost than when they had begun.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” He reached across the table and patted her hand and then picked up his book again.
Conversation finis.
Thanks, Polonius.
FIFTEEN
The night before our mother began her first week of radiation, Cordy dropped her bombshell at the dinner table. She had made bread, as she was always doing these days, and she had set it in a basket, broken grain against butter-yellow checked cloth, steam rising from the slices, scenting the air with yeast and comfort. Rose had said grace, and we were settling in to eat when she spoke.
“I’m going to have a baby,” our baby sister said.
Our father, buttering a slice of bread all at once, in strict defiance of our mother’s rule to spread only a bite at a