A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 16
Belinda, though she dismissed her father on reflex, knew the difference between his whims and his serious intentions. Therefore, she saw the contest as a golden opportunity and, though certainly crass and disgustingly nouveau riche, a chance to stage a comeback after the lag of her apathetic teenage years. To this end, she devoted herself to a thorough assessment of the various loopholes and shortcuts with which she might secure a lead. Beryl, torn between her self-proclaimed psychic talents and her pessimism, warned the others of tragic possibilities. Their father was surely using the contest to veil some terrible misfortune such as imminent bankruptcy or a fatal disease. This was his way of preparing the girls for the dismal inevitability so that the real news, when finally conceded, would come as a relief. Benita, however, dismissed her sisters’ beliefs, treating the contest as a real and pressing opportunity. She had spent every minute since the announcement of the contest obsessing over the best way to win.
Benita had become completely possessed, frantically running through various schemes as though jolted by an electric surge. Winning consumed her like a poison, quickening her pulse to a drumroll. Her surroundings—dolls, trophies, teddy bears, and roommate—had faded into a blur. Nothing in the world mattered. Every inch of her imagination wrapped itself around this idea. Even a full day later, as she lay in bed she found herself chanting to herself. “Contest. Contest. Contest.” This was the new sound of her heartbeat. Plagued by the strange compulsion that affects the very successful and slightly psychotic, she simply could not stand to participate in an activity in which she did not come in first.
To this end, she had spent the better portion of Friday working on her talent show audition, propelled forward by the image of Mary Talbot’s face wrinkled into a sour grimace or, better yet, crying. But now that she’d memorized the scene and perfected the voice and costume for each character, she busied herself with other pressing tasks and commenced a brutal assessment of the playing field. Bell could basically be factored out. She lacked the initiative and energy to present any real challenge and she was unlikely to offer her father the deference competing implied. Bridget therefore was the first serious contender. Her self-obsession made her dangerous; she was likely to use the contest as an excuse to focus on herself and to exhibit all sorts of ingenuity for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. Certainly, Bridget’s surplus of suitors was a huge cause for concern, threatening to provide Bridget with an accidental victory by way of bended knee.
Beth, too, posed a real threat, her research on evolution already garnering attention from professors at school. Even worse, Beth’s subject matter was undeniably close to Barry’s heart. And yet, it was possible Belinda presented the more immediate danger. Recklessness made her bold and unpredictable. Luckily, it also made her likely to self-destruct. And so perhaps it was Beryl who was to be watched most closely. She had all the makings of a dark horse, all the stealth and tenacity of a ninth-inning closer. Luckily, proximity was on Benita’s side. Because they shared a bedroom, she could keep close tabs on her.
The first order of business was to find the perfect four costumes. It was not enough to perform the lines of every character using feats of ventriloquism. She must fashion the perfect, distinguishing costume for each of the four main characters, rigging the outfits so that all could be worn simultaneously and revealed, through strategic disrobing, at the appointed moment in the scene. For King Lear, she sought a regal brown cape befitting a man of such majesty. For this, she stole a terry cloth bathrobe from her father. Goneril and Regan both required devastatingly beautiful dresses, and yet not so devastating as to overwhelm Cordelia. For these, Benita had no choice but pilfer clothes from her two eldest sisters, singling out a blue gauzy number from Bell and a metallic minidress from Bridget. Cordelia, of course, required the most divine costume of the three and therefore justified a more treacherous act of robbery. Benita knew the very dress, though it would require some alterations. Undeterred, she waited until Beth and Belinda’s room was vacant and hurried in to steal Belinda’s beloved green taffeta strapless dress.
Satisfied with her theft, Benita searched the halls for a willing party. She was desperate for someone to read lines with her and help her workshop the scene. Surely, the sign on Bell’s door marked KEEP OUT permitted a polite inquiry. Surely Bell would welcome a visit from her. “Bell,” Benita shouted.
On sound of Benita, Bell froze and remained very quiet. “Come back later,” she finally said. “I’m asleep right now.”
“But I have a present for you,” Benita lied.
Skeptical, Bell crawled out of bed and opened her door.
Benita stood, obscured by a pile of stolen clothes, decidedly devoid of presents.
“Do I look like him?” Benita asked.
“Like who?” Bell asked.
“King Lear,” Benita said.
Bell scrutinized her sister, looked past her into the hall, then forced her mouth into a half-hearted smile, the kind intended to look half-hearted and half-hateful.
“Will you read lines with me?” Benita asked. “I really need to rehearse.”
“You said you had a present for me.”
“Oh,” Benita said. “I was lying.” Smiling, she produced a large red book from the bottom of her pile. “You read this,” she said, flipping to the correct page. “I already know it by heart.”
Deciding that compliance was the quickest way to get rid of her sister, Bell searched the page for the first line and read the part of Lear. “‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most? Goneril, our eldest, speak first.’”
Benita took a loud, deep breath and assumed a pious look. “Sir,” she said, “I love you more than words can wield the matter. Dearer than eyesight, space, or liberty, beyond what can be valued rich or rare, no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor, as much as child ever loved or father found, a love that makes breath poor and speech unable, beyond all manner of so much I love you.”
Bell regarded her sister with unfettered disdain.
“You know,” said Benita, indulging in an aside, “I think most people misunderstand this play. King Lear’s daughters aren’t really evil. The play is told from Lear’s point of view. And Lear is an unreliable narrator, delusional, paranoid, and otherwise insane from curtain rise to fall.”
Bell paused to consider this in spite of herself. Finally, she dismissed the theory. “I think they’re all rotten,” she said, slamming her door. “Every single one.”
* * *
Due to their twinlike telepathy, neither Bell nor Bridget slept much on Friday night. Bell’s bed was a cruel parody of a bed, providing the opposite of comfort, reminding her, throughout the night, that she had outgrown it and her surroundings. As a result, she spent most of the night praying for daylight. At six o’clock, she finally gave up, pulled a sweater on over her sweats, and set out to find a phone from which she could call Bridget in private. Knowing Bridget, she would be terribly judgmental about her pregnancy. Still, Bell felt, she had to tell someone. Keeping the secret was too great a burden. And perhaps talking to her sister would lift her spirits. Bridget was sure to find the levity in the situation, or at least the hilarity. Bridget would think of all the fun to be had, all the new stores in which Bell could now shop, the delicious food she could now eat, all the wonderful baby names available when one considered the twenty-five letters in the alphabet other than “B.”
But to Bell’s great annoyance, no one answered Bridget’s phone until well after ten o’clock. Finally, Trot answered, his voice thick with sleep and offered only the most vague and ominous insight. He had no idea when Bridget would be back, nor did he particularly care. Thwarted again, Bell paced the halls, desperate for a distraction. Luckily, she had only walk to the living room. In it, she found squadrons of Bridget’s luggage and, obscured by the luggage, Bridget sleeping soundly on the sofa, her clothed body draped by a cardigan sweater like a drunken debutante at the end of a wild night. Bell stood above her sister for a moment, attempting to integrate the various clues. Either Bridget had forgotten several critical belongings and returned in the middle of the night to retrieve them or she was in the process, and Bell shuddered at this thought, of moving back into the house.
Bell cleared her throat loudly, anxious to wake her sister. Rousing from sleep, Bridget squinted her eyes and regarded Bell with confusion then, after remembering her surroundings, scowled angrily. Within seconds of encountering Bridget, Bell’s mood plummeted, her initial relief to find a companion turning quickly to resentment. Thinking better of smiling, she returned Bridget’s scowl with a frown. Bridget simply stared at Bell, her face devoid of emotion as though she were trying to remember the name of an old acquaintance.
After several rounds of this silent exchange, Bridget sat up from her repose and launched into a brief summary of her predicament. Trot had issued an ultimatum: Bridget must marry him or move out and Billy, though he lacked Trot’s leverage, ostensibly wanted the same. Cursed with the overwhelming burden of all this love and attention, Bridget was desperate for a reprieve. She felt her childhood home the best place for peaceful contemplation. Despite the inconvenience of the move and the awkwardness of living so close to Billy, she was back indefinitely, she told Bell. And she had every intention of staying in their old bedroom.
“Oh God,” Bell said before her inner censor could temper her response. Bridget’s return finally ruled out the possibility of a good night’s sleep.
Bridget issued a chilly glare.
“Oh good,” Bell said, revising. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Bridget said nothing. She lifted herself from the sofa with a melodramatic sigh then, shaking her head in response to an invisible oppressive force, she walked across the room to appraise her luggage head-on.
Bell remained still, watching her sister struggle. It was difficult to muster sympathy for Bridget’s plight considering her own. Bridget was cursed with a surplus of suitors, while she had a shortage. As she stood, she admired Bridget’s matching luggage in spite of herself. Perhaps she should be more like her sister and travel with her very own monogrammed set. But before Bell could consider this fully, she gave in to a pettier notion. She wondered how Bridget had shouldered the cost of all this expensive leather and, deducing their father had paid, nearly exploded with resentment.
“Bridget,” Bell called.
Bridget turned her head before exiting the room, as though even uttering the word “what” required more effort than she could spare.
Finally, acknowledging Bridget’s distress, Bell walked toward her sister and opened her arms, offering a mandatory embrace. Bridget returned the gesture with minimal effort, opening her arms more to block Bell’s affection than hug her back. Once they’d dispensed with these formalities, the girls resumed their previous activities, Bridget whimpering at her luggage and Bell staring at Bridget with open disdain.
With a deep sigh, Bridget began applying herself to the heaviest piece, pursing her lips with determination and emitting, with each new tug, another in a crescendo of indignant grunts.
Begrudgingly, Bell brought herself to lift the smallest bag of the bunch but, finding it heavier than it appeared, she quickly replaced it on the floor.
“If it’s too much trouble, don’t bother,” Bridget sneered.
Bell set herself to the task of testing several other bags until she had found one whose size corresponded to its weight.
“Bell, you’ve been lying in bed for days. Why are you so fatigued?”
“If you must know,” Bell blurted out, “I’m three months pregnant.”
“Oh,” said Bridget. She stared at Bell for several moments, narrowing her eyes skeptically. “Whose is it?” she demanded, her tone more accusatory than inquisitive.
Bell raised her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug then looked at the floor.
Softening, Bridget dropped her bag on the floor. She rushed toward her sister to offer her first truly affectionate embrace of the day. She remained like this, cooing, shushing, and patting Bell’s back for several moments. Then, as though she’d just remembered a critical item on her grocery list, she pulled back, held Bell literally at arm’s length, and regarded her with overt suspicion. “So, that means you could win,” she said.
Bell stared at her sister with sincere confusion.
“It means you could win Daddy’s contest,” Bridget clarified. “If you’re carrying a boy, you’ll be the first to carry on the Barnacle name.”
Bell said nothing, just stared at her sister, immobilized by rage. “That was the first thing that entered your mind? Not ‘wow’ or ‘oh no’ or ‘congratulations’ or ‘are you going to keep it?’ or ‘have you thought of any names?’”
“Sorry,” said Bridget in the manner designed to prove that one is not. “I’m just stating fact,” she said. “You’ve got it in the bag.”
Bell stared at her sister another moment, weighing her options. She could either engage in this idiotic debate or refuse her sister the respect of such an acknowledgment. Unfortunately, pride tipped the scales. Bell raised her voice to an appropriate fighting volume. “First, let me say, I’m not going to address the particularly disturbing self-absorption you have betrayed with your response. Nor will I bother educating you about the various fallacies of your statement. I will only say that it saddens me to see you say something so inane. It is patently clear to anyone who has lived half a day with our father, not to mention who has half a brain in her head, that his outbursts are to be taken, if at all, with a very large grain of salt. If his absurd little challenge has any meaning, it is surely symbolic. And, more likely, this is simply the first stage of a debilitating mental illness.”
Bridget regarded her sister now with her full attention, then shook her head suddenly as though avoiding a fly. “Well, either way,” she said, “I plan to be prepared. You never know when he’s going to follow through.”
Bell searched the room for a potential weapon but, finding nothing, dropped the bag on the floor with all the strength she could muster. Due to its ample cushioning, it landed with only the mildest of thuds. Disappointed, Bell regarded the impotent weapon with the sum of her frustration, then, forgetting they shared the same destination, she pushed past her sister, rushed down the hall, and slammed her, or rather their, bedroom door with terrifying force.
Sadly, Bell had made not one but two tactical errors by confiding in Bridget without conducting a thorough sweep of the apartment for traitors and spies. Benita loitered nearby, sheltered by the crook in the hall, anxious to learn any new curse words or gather incriminating information. At the sound of Bell’s angry footsteps, Benita scurried to the end of the hall, disappearing just in time to avoid being sighted. Unfortunately, her new position placed her perilously in between Bell and Bridget’s and Beth and Belinda’s bedrooms. She crouched in this awkward spot, poised between two hostile territories, praying for a swift resolution. Luckily, a flurry of exhalations and muffled swears indicated a ceasefire. Bridget soon followed Bell to their bedroom and remained that way for the next several hours, pounding on the door, demanding to be let in. This escalation of tension between her elder sisters afforded Benita the opportunity to sneak behind Bridget back to the safety of the first crook in the hall. She remained there for hours, gathering information about her older sisters’ fight as well as follow-up details on Bell’s astonishing announcement.
Later, when it became clear that Bell had no intention of letting Bridget in, Benita procured a chair from the kitchen so as to spy on the unfolding discord in comfort. For a moment, compassion overwhelmed, compelling her to secure a second chair for Bridget. But deciding the generous act would compromise her camouflage, she decided against it, allowing Bridget to stand while she watched in comfort. For Benita, there was no denying the benefits of Bridget’s return. One extra sister multiplied household intrigue exponentially; but two extra sisters brought the Barnacle family to the brink of disaster.
10
Predisposition to Flight
It was always difficult to convince the Barnacle girls to separate after spending time together, but this time it was harder than ever. Bell and Bridget’s nearly simultaneous return made it almost impossible to convince Beth and Belinda to return to school. Beth, usually restless by her second day of vacation, explained that college had become stifling; even graduate-level courses felt cruelly redundant. Belinda also expressed an uncharacteristic aversion to school. She usually enjoyed it immensely; her enjoyment, as with most things, a direct function of the rules it offered to break. But now she found the apartment offered an excitement of its own. It was simply too rare an occasion; with so many sisters in the house, things were sure to get interesting.
The apartment’s high female occupancy endowed it with a decided hum and, due to Bell and Bridget’s dangerously close quarters, the promise of fights yet to come. Both Beth and Belinda sensed that they would be missing out and, as a result, campaigned to stay, both girls informing the family, independent of the other, that she planned to boycott school. Belinda employed the odd and ingenious strategy of admitting to transgressions she’d made in the past in the hopes that Barry, newly aware of the school’s lenience, would forbid her to return. Beth, in turn, announced her plans to take the rest of the semester off. She would volunteer her services at the family veterinarian and continue her research in her own makeshift lab.
As though in reflection of Beth and Belinda’s discord, the standing volume in the house increased. Fights broke out in all corners of the apartment, provoked less by the stated subject than by general malaise. This strife combined with various environmental factors, such as the first prickle of April heat, turning the apartment into a hothouse of female consternation. A walk down the hall that connected the girls’ bedrooms revealed the most disparate and peculiar noises. A low murmur accompanied by sporadic sounds of rustling paper emerged from Benita and Beryl’s room as Benita rehearsed her lines out loud and Beryl folded and unfolded a large map of Central Park. From Beth and Belinda’s room, one could hear the muffled sounds of dueling musical eras, angry punk rock alternating with moody French ballads. Both types of music were punctuated by occasional outbursts of yelling as Beth and Belinda fought over a mutually acceptable soundtrack. Bell and Bridget’s room emitted the least audible noise, but inside the silence was deafening. Both girls sat on their beds, facing in opposite directions, seemingly engaged in a contest of who could produce the more meaningful sigh.
