Free The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown Page A

the car for a trip so everything fit and nothing was forgotten, pick the perfect fresh flowers to make the breakfast table seem like a celebration, hold us after a nightmare, put herself aside to make sure we were happy? Would he see why we loved her so? We held our breath.
    “Would you like to go to lunch?” he asked.
    He saw it.

    P erhaps you never liked your name. Perhaps you took every opportunity to change it: a new school, for example, where you would test out life with some pale echo of your real name—Elizabeth to Bitsy, wouldn’t that be cute? A whole new you. You tried your middle name, provided it was suitable and not embarrassing, as middle names are wont to be. Or perhaps you were one of those poor souls whose well-meaning parents, in honor of some long-dead ancestor, gave you a name no contemporary soul should have to bear. Like Evelyn or Leslie or Laurie for a boy. Or Florence or Mildred or Doris for a girl—not bad names, you understood, just woefully dated, guaranteeing years of playground torture or a feeling you were destined for a rocking chair and an old folks’ home long before your time.
    But what if it weren’t so much a matter of having a name with unfortunately predetermined gender identification, or one you felt just didn’t suit you? What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?
    At one of Cordy’s many temp jobs, she had worked in an office with a harried secretary by the name of Elizabeth Taylor. Huddled in her cubicle, desperately pretending to be worth the twenty-five dollars an hour the company was paying to her agency (without, of course, doing any actual work), Cordy watched and listened as Elizabeth Taylor answered the phone. At least a million times a day, Cordy thought, running her fingers back and forth across the office supplies she hoarded as props in her one-woman burlesque of industry, Elizabeth Taylor said, “Yes, really.” And every time, she said it with a smile. Cordy supposed it was at least partially due to the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had married into her name, so had only had it for fifteen years or so. Given time, we were sure, she would tire of the National Velvet jokes, of the comments on her enthusiasm for matrimony, and one day, Elizabeth Taylor would snap, lashing out at her husband, wishing she had never married him.
    With a father like ours, and with names like ours, we had reached that state years ago.
    First came Rosalind, a fair choice; probably our mother’s intervention spared her from something weightier. But after that, it was all our father’s doing, we are sure. Because then came the second daughter, and what can you name a second daughter but Bianca? And then the third, and if it had been anything other than Cordelia, the heavens might have shaken. Bean and Rose were grateful, true, that the Lear comparisons could not have been made until the troika was complete, or they might have been dubbed to match the play’s older sisters, and they knew there was no way to survive being named Goneril and Regan. Not in this day and age.
    We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.
    It’s unlikely that our parents ever looked up any of our names in one of those baby name books. The Riverside Shakespeare had obviously been the repository of choice. Once Rose had a summer camp counselor who, as an icebreaker, looked up the meanings of all the children’s names, and Rosalind was horrified to learn her name meant, yes, “beautiful rose,” but also “horse serpent.” Horse serpent ? If that won’t give a girl body image issues for life, we don’t know what will.
    But mostly the thorn in our Rose’s side—Cordy again with the punny—was love. For really,