‘It just moves slower. You have to get used to the pace. If you’re going to stay.’
Bean scoffed as she moved towards the door, catching a look at herself in the heavy mirror over the hall table where we kept keys and mail and anything else that happened to need a home. She tossed her hair and it fell in sleek waves over her shoulders. Rose opened the door for her.
‘Do the Mannings still live there?’ Bean asked. They had passed a block in silence, listening to the faraway hum of lawn mowers and children shrieking in pleasure down by the lake. Rose looked up at the house, another of the many wide-clapboard Sears catalogue homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.
‘She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange programme with a college in California. He’s still here, though.’ Bean looked at the empty house. A bicycle stood sentry on the sidewalk, and a watering can lay abandoned among the trampled pansies by the porch stairs.
‘Oh,’ Bean said, somewhat sadly. Professor Lila Manning – Mrs Dr Manning they had called her, to distinguish her from her equally academically inclined husband – had been one of her favourite professors: a small, somewhat elfin woman with a charmingly gruff attitude. She had become, at one point, a sort of mentor to Bean, who had spent evenings at their house, drinking red wine and watching the sun set in the backyard as the conversation drifted like clouds. They had been a young couple, though they had seemed worlds away at the time – married, two young children, a life of stability and normalcy she had hated as much as wanted. Her heart squeezed momentarily with nostalgia, but they had grown apart as Bean became immersed in city life and The Doctors Mannings’ world had filled with other students, china replicas of the ones who had come before.
The birds and insects kept up a low hum that pulsed in Bean’s ears as they walked along. She had lived in the city for so long that these sounds had become foreign to her, and she felt in a way assaulted by them, the way a tourist in New York would have felt at the sirens and screeching of taxi brakes. The thought of the city made her stomach flip, and she said the first thing she could think of, too loudly, the volume pushing aside the still of the summer morning. ‘So how’s the wedding planning going?’
Sweat stood out against Rose’s bare upper arms; Bean could see the way the drops arrayed along the pores from which they had emerged, like synchronized swimmers poised for a Busby Berkeley number. Rose shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess. I don’t know, I never really thought about weddings. I look at these bridal magazines, and they all say things like, “You’ve been dreaming of this day since you were a little girl,” and I haven’t. I never did.’
‘Me, either. Is that odd? Do little girls really dream about their weddings and dress up like brides?’
‘I have no idea. Certainly no one we know did. But then again, we’re hardly a representative sample. And neither Jonathan nor I would want the kind of wedding a little girl would dream of anyway. All that foof,’ Rose added dismissively.
‘Foof,’ Bean repeated, trying out the word, unconsciously letting it slip over the tip of her tongue. Rose shot her a doubtful glance, and they both laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s a funny word.’
There was a pause. Rose put her hand in her pocket, checking to make sure her wallet was still in there.
‘So where will you have it?’ Bean asked.
‘Oh, the chapel on campus, you know. And then the reception in Harris. The college doesn’t usually rent the space over holidays, but Dad got them to make an exception.’ Bean nodded, remembering vaguely a concert she had attended in the Harris ballroom, during her sophomore year, she thought. The band had been some hippie-folk experience, probably one of the ones Cordy had seen recently at some mud-flung venue, and Bean had spent most of it pressed up against the back wall, drunkenly permitting some boy to fondle her. She tried to remember his name for a moment, and then mentally waved her hand, dismissing it. O, is it all forgot? All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?
‘So how will it work, everything? With Jonathan being in England and all?’
Rose gritted her teeth and looked over at one of the houses across the street. ‘We haven’t worked that all out yet exactly. The wedding’s still scheduled for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to lose the deposit. So maybe I’ll go over there a bit for a honeymoon, and then when he’s done with his fellowship there, he’ll come back.’
Bean couldn’t honestly imagine anyone wanting to come back from Oxford to Barnwell, but she didn’t say anything. Just hummed a few bars of ‘How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree)’.
‘Have you started looking for a dress yet?’
Rose laughed. How like Bean, to go directly for the clothes. ‘No. I fear it, actually.’ She tugged self-consciously at her shorts, which were threatening to ride up the insides of her pale thighs. ‘I can’t see myself in one of those big white monstrosities.’
‘No one says you have to wear a big white dress. Wear what you want. It’s not going to be a big formal wedding, right? Not black-tie or anything?’
Rose shook her head.
‘Then it doesn’t matter if it’s not traditional.’
‘I guess,’ Rose said, but looked slightly confused by the idea.
They had come to the head of Main Street, and Bean stopped. ‘I’ll look with you. We’ll go to Columbus; there won’t be anything here,’ Bean said. She turned to Rose for a moment and smiled, a sharp-toothed strangeness that was nonetheless kind. ‘You’ll be beautiful,’ she said, and squeezed our older sister’s sweaty palm.
Rose smiled back, a more genuine smile of surprise and pleasure, and came to a stop in front of the post office. ‘Thanks.’ She wanted to say more, but the moment had passed, and it wasn’t in our nature to prolong sentimentality. She felt, for a moment, that she could tell Bean about how betrayed and confused she felt about Jonathan’s departure, how torn she was about what she would do, that somehow Bean would understand, would be able to help. But then she pushed it aside. Bean couldn’t help her with something like that. A dress, Bean could do. A life, no. ‘I’ve got to go in and mail this.’
‘Okay. I’m gonna walk down the street and check things out. I’ll meet you in the Beanery in, like, a half hour?’
‘Sure,’ Rose shrugged and watched Bean walk away, her hair still bouncing back and forth, the creases in her clothes unbeaten by the heat. Rose shook her head and went inside to buy the stamp to mail a letter to Jonathan in Oxford.
The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week. When we were young, we had three little red wagons that we would pull into town like a parade each Saturday morning, our mother at the head like the high-stepping grand marshal. Rose liked to go last, to keep an eye on the rest of us, particularly Cordy, who was usually in desperate need of it. Cordy would be eating a Popsicle, letting it drip along her arm, stopping to lick the sticky sweet slug trails off her skin. Or she wouldn’t have stacked her books well and they would fall over the sides of the wagon, Rose picking them up like a flower girl in reverse. Or she would halt, squatting down to stare at an anthill in the cracks of a sidewalk, mesmerized by the to-ings and fro-ings until Rose poked her in the behind and made her waddle on. Bean, who liked to arrive first, would be following our mother, peppering her with questions that she answered when she found the time between social conversations along the way.
The building smelled the same – dusty and damp, and Bean stopped inside the door and inhaled. With all the money the town got from the college, she would have thought they would have changed the library, but it had remained the same. The carpet was dirty marigold, step-worn. To her right was the adult fiction, in the back, by the wall of windows looking out on a spreading willow tree and an ill-tended batch of hedges, the children’s section. A woman browsed in the new fiction shelves, and two children, presumably hers, sat contentedly at the yellow plastic