The Weird Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

Living with our parents? At her age? She felt like a swimmer who had been earnestly beating back the waves only to find herself exhausted and just as far from shore as when she had begun. She was lonely and tired.
    Embarrassed even by the thought of herself in this rudderless life, she flushed and stood impatiently from the window seat, where she’d been staring in irritation at our mother’s wildflower garden. The garden had, in the way of wildflower gardens, grown out of control. Our mother loved it—the way it drew butterflies and fat bees, the dizzy way the purples and yellows blurred together as the stems tangled—but Rose preferred her gardens to be more obedient.
    She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favorite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices—disorder and literature—captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate. Our father, of course, limits his reading to things by, of, and about our boy Bill, but our mother brought diversity to our readings and therefore our education. It was never really a problem for any of us to read a children’s biography of Amelia Earhart followed by a self-help book on alcoholism (from which no one in the family suffered), followed by Act III of All’s Well That Ends Well , followed by a collection of Neruda sonnets. Cordy claims this is the source of her inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, but we do not believe her. It is just our way.
    And it wasn’t that Rose regretted being home, exactly. Our parents’ house and Barnwell in general were far more pleasant than the anonymous apartment she’d rented in Columbus—thin carpet over concrete floors, neighbors moving in and out so quickly she’d stopped bothering to learn their names—but after she filled our parents’ pill cases and straightened the living room, after she had finally hired a lawn service and balanced the checkbook, after she went with our parents to our mother’s chemo treatments, sitting in the waiting room because they didn’t need her there, not really, they would have been fine just the two of them, her life was almost as empty as it had been before.
    The tiny clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, and Rose sighed in relief. Ten was a perfectly acceptable hour to go to bed without feeling like a complete loafer. She walked toward the stairs and then paused by the mirror, warped and pale, that had hung there since any of us could remember. Rose stared at her reflection and spoke six words none of us had ever said before.
    “I wish my sisters were here.”
     
     
     
     
    T he fox, the ape and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three.
    Our father once wrote an essay on the importance of the number three in Shakespeare’s work. A little bit of nothing, he said, a bagatelle, but it was always our favorite. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. The Billy Goats Gruff, the Three Blind Mice, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) . King Lear —Goneril, Regan, Cordelia. The Merchant of Venice —Portia, Nerissa, Jessica.
    And us—Rosalind, Bianca, Cordelia.
    The Weird Sisters.
    We have, while trapped in the car with our father behind the wheel, been subjected to extended remixes of the history of the word “weird” in Macbeth with a special encore set of Norse and Scottish Sources Shakespeare Used in Creating This Important Work. These indignities we will spare you.
    But it is worth noting, especially now that “weird” has evolved from its delicious original meaning of