The Three Sisters
Joanna was content, sitting in the armchair they always called “the lady chair” with a book and an apple from the basket on the floor. She was even wearing a dress, for the occasion, because she wanted to please Harriet. Meg sprawled in a reverie on the old green sofa, one foot on the floor and one foot on the cushion beside her, trying to be ladylike and comfortable simultaneously in an old red shirtwaist dress of Janet’s that made her feel like a thrifty housewife from a Life magazine advertisement for Frigidaires. Amy sat awkwardly on the floor at their feet wearing a strange getup of her own devising, little shorts and a shirt which made her look, her kind sisters said, not just like a ten-year-old but like a ten-year-old golem. The sound of her crunching as she devoured an apple made Joanna call her Mr. Ed.
“You crunch too! There’s no way to eat an apple silently,” Amy protested.
The late summer heat lay heavily in the un-air-conditioned room, and everyone was drowsy. Resisting the urge to lie down and curl up on the rug beside Amy, Harriet looked through the viewfinder and asked Joanna to cock her right leg flat over her other knee, which Joanna did without looking up, giving Harriet the complementary angles she needed.
“Amy, are you comfortable teetering in that pretzel position?” Harriet asked. “Put your right hand behind you for balance. Good. Isn’t that better? Now, can you turn your head and look over your shoulder just a little more? Good.”
She made a small adjustment to the shutter setting and looked at her composition for another long moment. She loved the way the verticals united the three figures although each was isolated in her private space.
“Can Benedict come over for dinner?” Amy asked. Amy had developed a severe and forthright crush on him. She admired everything about him and was very funny about it.
“We had dinner with you night before last,” Harriet reminded her. “Your parents might not want to see us again so soon, the way we devour everything Janet cooks. I am sure she was planning on leftovers the other night, but we must have eaten five chickens.”
“That’s okay,” Amy said. “Lou doesn’t really like meals of leftovers anyway. I heard him say so. We had sushi last night, so it was perfect that you guys ate all our food.”
“Benedict is like Teddy,” Meg added. “He can be quite grownup in his manners for someone who actually eats like a pig.”
“So I was right! Anyway, we’re going to a movie. Stop talking. The three sisters at home.” Harriet snapped off a dozen exposures, the shutter clicking like a series of tumblers opening an internal lock. “The three sisters on Seventy-fifth Street. Everyone look out in front of you without changing the angle of your heads. Just kind of gaze into space, okay, try not to focus on anything. Good, good, good.” She took more exposures in a long racheting burst. “Anyway, Teddy is coming for the weekend, right? You don’t want a crowd, do you?”
“We love a crowd,” Joanna said without looking up from her book. She was on the last page of Gatsby again.
“The three sisters in a room. The three sisters reading and eating apples and thinking and being. The three sisters exist. When do Janet and Lou get back from their walk? No, nobody answer.
That’s perfect, hold it. Who was the one with the apples, Snow White?”
“That was the first movie I ever saw and for a long time I thought it was called Black Snow,” Amy said. “Do you like these shoes? I got them in Paris.”
“You’ve told us that about thirty times,” Meg said gently. “Yes, the shoes are very nice. Where did you get them? Paris?”
“Snow White and the Three Stooges,” muttered Harriet, moving a few inches back and then forward again. “The three sisters at home. I said that, didn’t I? Three tall women. Olga, Masha, and Irina contemplate the universe. The three sisters sit around and get photographed on a summer afternoon,” Harriet rattled on, aware that her babbling was eliciting precisely the half-tuned gazes she had envisioned.
“The three sisters meet the three bears. The three sisters need a title for this photograph. The three sisters meet three men in a boat.”
“‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,’” Joanna intoned, closing her book with a satisfied sigh.
“What does that mean again?” Amy asked, but then didn’t wait for an answer before launching into a cascade of rhyming words, “Boat, doat, foat, gloat—”
“Emote,” Meg contributed.
“Stoat,” suggested Joanna. “Goat. Bloat.”
“Don’t you think it means we remember everything that happens and even when we’re in the present, the past is still happening to us?” Harriet said from behind her camera. “You could probably get a far more brilliant analysis from your mother.”
“I’ll ask her later,” Joanna said. “Or we can ask Teddy. He wrote a whole paper on the last chapter, I think.”
“I think it means that utopia is a myth,” Meg said. “And you have to go back to go forward.”
“Myth, pith, width—” Amy began.
“Okay, just a few more,” Harriet focused again. “The three little sisters and how they grew. The Green sisters. The three Green sisters. Joanna, don’t jiggle your leg, we’re almost done. The sisters Green. Sisters three. Help me out here, you guys!” Harriet made a few final exposures, her shutter clicking more slowly and deliberately now.
“Just the three sisters,” Joanna said.