30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 20, The Pale Sisters

A tapestry hung in the large dining room. A unicorn, a rainbow, a lion, and two ladies with the strangely white-ish silver faces of medieval embroidery lay, as they had for ages, upon the wall. It was a very old tapestry, it was not a copy. It had come to the lady of the house through her relatives; her great aunt had left it to her in her will. The dining room was large, but fairly humble. It was the meeting place of the family, and sometimes a broader set of people from the community at large.
The pale ladies hung upon the tapestry, one in the front, looking toward the edge of the hanging, and the other, behind her, peering curiously, somewhat possessively, over her shoulder. They were a pair; they seemed to relate to each other silently, without really having to acknowledge each other's presence.
They had hung on the lady's wall for ten years now. They were not a new addition. And they had watched the proceedings in the lady's house for that whole period. They had watched, observed, and thought about it deeply.
It was the eve of the day that the lady's daughter left for college. There was a strange sort of mood in the household. She had been a good student in high school and now she had been accepted to a high-ranked university in the region. She was angling for something in engineering.
The ladies had watched, perturbed.
The daughter was a good and studious girl. She was positive and popular, and over everything, quite confident. She wanted to help others, but she also wanted a good paycheck. She wanted security, and she knew the best way to get this was through a good education, a good job, and a steady career.
The ladies watched, perturbed.
The problem was - and perhaps it was not a problem to her mother, or to her mother's good friend, Steve - the girl had no passion, and she had no great desires. She liked engineering: she was good at it, and that was natural, she supposed. It was like showering. But noone had a passion for showering, at least not usually.
And so the ladies, when noone was listening, whispered to each other, concerned. How was she to find herself in thirty years? (And to the ladies, this was quite a short period of time - just around the corner, in fact.) How would she like a life she realized had not been lived? That was seriously upsetting.
They didn't know what to do. But Adelaide, the one behind, had a sudden idea. Katherine, the one in front, nodded in mute agreement. Adelaide climbed down from the tapestry that night. She rolled it up, she put it in the girl's large duffle bag.
Noone noticed the absence in the great shuffle that was the girl's departure for school. They left the house, and they arrived at the university. Adelaide hired a cab, and paid with the gold from her belt. The cabbie nearly didn't take it, but he thought it better not to naysay a woman who looked so crazy.
When the girl was finally in her room, her parents gone, that evening, she was surprised by Adelaide at the door. Adelaide was tall, and winsome, but not particularly beautiful. However, she had the same glowing confidence in her brown eyes that the girl had, and a definite sense of mischief. She asked if the girl had found the tapestry.
That night, the girl did not know what to do, but Adelaide and Katherine decided that a good rolicking party was just what was in order; so they went out and found one.
The girl trailed behind, watching the two - conversing almost wordlessly - both dressed in her best party clothes. She was bemused, uncertain, and rather irate.
They decided, as a group, to go the arts building to do some mischief. Adelaide and Katherine, though both having a wonderful time, were keeping a close watch on the girl. If the chance for passion was going to come, it would come now. They slipped in through the cracks of the closed windows (tapestry thinness did have its pluses from time to time) and unlocked the doors. Then Adelaide very carelessly fell into the girl, just as she was passing.
Katherine ran and angled a light into the great, windowed halls.
All around her, paintings and sculpture met the girl. There had been painting classes at high school, but nothing like this. Nothing like these sculptures, done by students and non-students alike, nothing like any of it she walked like she was in a dream.
That night, the two sisters climbed back into the folded tapestry, again dressed in their medeival garb. But on Katherine's wrist hung a bangle of the girl's and Adelaid had carelessly left a tell-tale shade of lipstick upon her lips.
The girl awoke the next day and put the tapestry in a corner, carefully, to return (gingerly) to her mother. But eventually, due to the lack of decorations in her suitcase, the tapestry made it up onto her wall. And the sisters figured, prominently in many of the following pieces that the girl created - engineering and art are really so close to each other, and when at university, there is no reason not to try for two goals at once.