id="ua3b67f85-3862-5dfe-98dd-bb4e91a30b6a">
the weird sisters
ELEANOR BROWN
Dedication
TO CHRIS
For springtime, for a rock-and-roll show, forever
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eightteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Epigraph
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, ‘Would you like anything to read?’
– DYLAN THOMAS,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
Prologue
We came home because we were failures. We wouldn’t admit that, of course, not at first, not to ourselves, and certainly not to anyone else. We said we came home because our mother was ill, because we needed a break, a momentary pause before setting off for the Next Big Thing. But the truth was, we had failed, and rather than let anyone else know, we crafted careful excuses and alibis, and wrapped them around ourselves like a cloak to keep out the cold truth. The first stage: denial.
For Cordelia, the youngest, it began with the letters. They arrived the same day, though their contents were so different that she had to look back at the postmarks to see which one had been sent first. They seemed so simple, paper in her hands, vulnerable to rain, or fire, or incautious care, but she would not destroy them. These were the kind you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.
We should tell you what they said, and we will, because their contents affect everything that happened afterward, but we first have to explain how our family communicates, and to do that, we have to explain our family.
Oh, man.
Perhaps we had just better explain our father.
If you took a college course on Shakespeare, our father’s name might be resident in some dim corner of your mind, under layers of unused telephone numbers, forgotten dreams, and the words that never seem to make it to the tip of your tongue when you need them. Our father is Dr James Andreas, professor of English literature at Barnwell College, singular focus: The Immortal Bard.
The words that might come to mind to describe our father’s work are insufficient to convey to you what it is like to live with someone with such a singular preoccupation. Enthusiast, expert, obsessed – these words all thud hollow when faced with the sandstorm of Shakespeare in which we were raised. Sonnets were our nursery rhymes. The three of us were given advice and instruction in couplets; we were more likely to refer to a hated playmate as a ‘fat-kidneyed rascal’ than a jerk; we played under the tables at Christmas parties where phrases like ‘deconstructionist philosophy’ and ‘patriarchal mal -feasance’ drifted down through the heavy tablecloths with the carols.
And this only begins to describe it.
But it is enough for our purposes.
The first letter was from Rose: precise pen on thick vellum. From Romeo and Juliet; Cordy knew it at once. We met, we woo’d and made exchange of vow, I’ll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray, That thou consent to marry us to-day.
And now you will understand this was our oldest sister’s way of telling us that she was getting married.
The second was from our father. He communicates almost exclusively through pages copied from The Riverside Shakespeare. The pages are so heavily annotated with decades of thoughts, of interpretations, that we can barely make out the lines of text he highlights. But it matters not; we have been nursed and nurtured on the plays, and the slightest reminder brings the language back.
Come, let us go; and pray to all the gods/For our beloved mother in her pains. And this is how Cordy knew our mother had cancer. This is how she knew we had to come home.
Chapter One
Cordy had never stolen anything before. As a matter of pride, when our friends were practising their light-fingered shuffles across the shelves of Barnwell’s stores in our teens, she had refused to participate,
