The Canterbury Sisters (13 page)

Now I follow the entry road back to the town square, where I sit down on one of two oppositional benches and unlace a boot, pull out my foot, then ease off my sock. I bought these boots the morning I left the States and unpacked them in the taxi on the way to the airport, abandoning the big square box they came in right there on the cab seat. There was no time to break them in, and seven hours of walking today have wreaked havoc on my feet. The skin isn’t broken anywhere, but a blister is rising on my big toe and my heel is red and puffy. I rub it, counting myself lucky things aren’t worse. I have a supply of bandages and that paint-on second skin somewhere in my suitcase. Tomorrow I’ll have to protect myself a little better, or I’ll be completely hobbled by the time we reach Canterbury.

Or maybe these damn two-hundred-dollar boots don’t really fit
, I think, and then I squash the thought back down as quickly as it sprang up. It’s too horrible to contemplate that I might be out here, as Steffi says, twenty-eight miles from nowhere, and my only pair of shoes doesn’t fit. That would make me an American Cinderella or, more accurate, one of her unlikable stepsisters. Because I suspect Tess is right; every woman’s life comes back to a fairy tale in the end. So I sit on one of the only two benches in this strange little town, my boot in my hand, and stare into space. Precisely why was Cinderella my favorite story? She’s a cliché, the most predictable of princesses, and I usually steer clear of clichés, but I watched her movie so frequently as a child that even now I can close my eyes and it plays against the screen of my mind.

Maybe I had loved her simply because there hadn’t been that much else to love. We only picked up the three major networks out on the farm, back in the days before cable, but we had a VCR, which was a noteworthy machine for its time. I don’t remember how we came to first possess it, or why my parents, who were normally so insistent that everything we owned should reflect the homesteading values of the commune, would have ever allowed such an item in the house. Most likely my grandmother sent it, along with the stash of Disney movies, in a last-ditch attempt to assure that at least one thing in my childhood was normal.

One day I was watching
Cinderella
and my mother walked into the room. She seemed a bit surprised to see me there—she always seemed surprised to see me, even if I was exactly where she’d left me. If I were to be unkind, I would say that my mother frequently failed to remember she even had a daughter, but it’s truer to say that she had trouble remembering all kinds of things. Diana was like a baby playing peekaboo who forgets the face the minute it disappears behind the hands, and who is thus amazed and delighted each time it reappears.

“Your mother is easily distracted,” my father used to say, whenever we would be walking through the woods or down a city street and would suddenly realize that she was no longer with us. She had invariably been pulled from her intended path by what Daddy called “one of Diana’s bright shiny things”—a book in a store window, a piece of twisted driftwood, the elegantly exotic face of a Mongolian refugee, the bones of a rabbit. She probably had what they now call adult ADD, for she would say “Che?” whenever she saw me, always with that lift of a question, as if finding me there on the couch watching TV each afternoon was a lovely little miracle.

On this particular day she was with the religious leader of the commune, a man named David, although he pronounced it
Da-veed.
I can’t remember exactly what sort of pagan he was—Druid, most likely. They were popular at the time. It must have been the mid-seventies, which would have made me eight, nine, maybe ten. Conventional Christianity was beginning to fail, and churches were combining or closing, even out in the sticks where the commune was located. All I can remember about David’s particular brand of preaching is that he once spontaneously began to channel a message from somebody’s dead brother in the middle of the love offering and that he had a pet axiom with which he closed every service: “Religion,” he would intone, “is nothing more than the study of other people’s experiences with God. But true spirituality is the opportunity to have your own experience with God.”

It was the sort of statement that would cause all of the women in the fellowship to swoon, and half the men as well. My father was not among them. He had limited patience with the Davids of the world and despite all this talk of share and share alike, no one was ever quite allowed to forget that it was my daddy’s family who left him the farm where we all lived. That his name was the one on the deed. He had rebelled once, fifteen years earlier, and now he was stuck with the lees of that rebellion, all these little flecks of sediment sinking all around him to the bottom of his half-empty glass. He disappeared a lot—hiking, fishing, inventing, reading—and so I was largely left to my mother’s machinations, as I imagine most girls of my generation were. I think of Becca, and her daddy going off the bridge. It was a brutal shock, no doubt, but only in the swiftness of the departure. All daddies go off the bridge to some degree.

My own father died in the woods, the blood vessels of his brain betraying him in the middle of one of his long, lonely walks. Rather surprisingly—for he was a young man, younger than I am now—he had left a will of sorts and instructions for his funeral. He did not pull a Diana and ask for his remains to be scattered. Instead, he was buried in the most conventional manner possible, lying placidly in a box at the feet of his own father, vaguely eulogized by a Presbyterian minister whom he had never met. His one request was that the box be pine, a simple unadorned affair, but of course the local mortuary didn’t stock that type of coffin, so the funeral had to be delayed a week while an ostentatiously plain pine box was special ordered, at great expense, from the Amish. There’s a clue in all that somewhere, but I can’t think what.

And, before you can even suggest it, I know . . . I know. All signs point to the possibility that my mother and David were having an affair. There was certainly enough gossip in the commune hinting as much, and God knows Diana was the type. Braless, feckless, with a morality that could best be described as “flexible,” and she was always dashing about with one man and then another. More than once, bags were packed late at night and she and I were loaded into someone’s car. There were men who claimed they would save us from the commune and there were men who furthermore wanted to save us from the men who were saving us.

And yet, when push came to shove, I don’t think Diana would have ever had the guts to actually leave my father. He was the stable one. The rock that everything else grew around, and she simultaneously relied upon and resented that stability. The other men? They may have been nothing more than the way she tested him, for my mother was an indiscriminate flirt, a woman who pumped out rounds of sexuality shotgun-style, with the bullets of her charm hitting all sorts of innocent bystanders, leaving complete strangers wounded and shell-shocked in her wake. She would smile suggestively at the random man paying for gas at the next island, at our elderly family dentist, the fathers of my friends, and then, as I grew older, even my friends themselves. It was all surface. She needed to be perceived as sexy far more than she needed the actual sex.

Or so I suspect. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe none of us knows anything about anybody else, especially our parents. The covers of some books must remain closed. But I can say that, physical affair or not, this minor-league holy man named David was Diana’s latest conquest and he was the one who first tried to ruin Cinderella for me. He sat down on my grandmother’s brocade couch that afternoon, the one with the lumpy afghan stretched over it in an attempt to hide the fact that once upon a time my family had been rich, and started telling me how in China they bound the girls’ feet. They began this cruel ritual, he said, when the children in question were not much older than I was at the time. Just as they approached puberty, at that point in life when young women are at their most malleable, when the forces brought to bear upon them have the most lasting and damaging effects.

“How would it feel to have your feet bound?” David asked, and he dug under the blanket and extracted my left foot, pulled it out and shook it at me to prove his point. It was an unanswerable question, but he didn’t care. A lifetime in the pulpit had made him accustomed to asking questions that would go unanswered. “How would you like it if you couldn’t even walk?”

I watched
Cinderella
over his shoulder. We were just getting to my favorite part, near the end. The ball is over, the magic has receded. Cinderella has been locked in a high turret and it seems all is lost. But when the Grand Duke comes to the house looking for the owner of the glass slipper, the animals free her from her cell and she rushes down the stairs at just the last minute. Her stepsisters have already tried and failed to cram their own feet into the slipper. Their large, puffy, inappropriate feet, with their cartoon toes poking out in every direction. And when the Grand Duke pulls out the glass slipper for Cinderella to try, the evil stepmother trips him and the glass shatters and it’s all disaster until Cinderella says, in that impossibly sweet voice of hers, “But you see . . . I have the other slipper.”

It was the best movie moment ever, or at least that’s what I thought as a child and even now, so many years later, I can’t think of any subsequent scenes that have pleased me more. The Duke slides the slipper on, it fits perfectly, and soon the whole world becomes a montage of confetti, wedding bells, and joyfully leaping mice.

And it was just at this point in the story that David sat down on the couch, wrested my foot from beneath the afghan, and went into his long speech about the little girls in China. How painful it was to submit to the binding chair, the infections, the broken bones, the agony, the premature deaths, all done in the pursuit of some warped idea of female beauty. And our Western minds, he added, were just as warped as the Eastern girls’ feet. He gestured contemptuously toward the television screen with my foot. The idea of Cinderella may have come from China, but once it reached Europe it became darker still. In the old fairy tales, before that repulsively cheerful Walt Disney cleaned them up, the stepsisters would cut off parts of their own feet in their doomed attempts to cram them into the shoe. That’s where the idea of the glass slipper had first come in, a transparent way to prove that Cinderella was the one true princess. That her foot really fit and she had not mutilated herself in her greedy desire to marry the Prince.

My mother was enchanted by David’s story. She was possibly the only person on earth who would have been enchanted by such a bloody tale, but then she was always collecting evidence of the ways women had suffered throughout history under the fist of male oppression. And she was not about to let the fact that David’s story was actually a tribute to self-mutilation slow her down at all.

“So you see, Che,” she said, perching on the armrest beside him, “this is a lesson for you. If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.” And then she and David had both laughed long and loud, as if this were a fantastically witty thing to say, and he had offered to loan her some series of videos on the worldwide plight of women so that she could, in his words, “head me off at the pass.” I wasn’t sure what pass he was talking about, where I was going from or to, and I didn’t want to hear tales of bound feet or amputated toes, warnings about what could happen to a girl if she chooses the wrong prince or the wrong shoe. The fairy tale was coming to its close. The little mice were wearing their tiny palace uniforms and waving at the departing carriage, and there it was, the happy ending, hovering just over the holy man’s shoulder.

“All girls go through their romantic phases,” my mother said, frowning at the television screen, at Cinderella and the Prince leaning in for their first and final kiss. “But they grow out of them soon enough, don’t they?”

Now I look down at my own foot, puffy and swollen too, and wonder how in the hell I’m going to get back to the inn. Probably I’ll have to put the boot back on without lacing it and limp my way up the street. I wasn’t being totally honest when I said they are my only shoes. I do have a pair of those bedroom socks that are almost slippers somewhere in my bag, thrown in at the last minute. I can wear them down to supper. I can’t imagine the dress code in the pub will be very strict and I’m determined to join the women tonight. To talk and to agree and sympathize, to graciously drink whatever wine they pour, and for once in my life to not be so strange.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see Valerie approaching the square, coming from the opposite direction of the inn. Odd. She complained of being tired and yet she must have also opted to take an additional lap of the town. The sun is setting behind her and I have to squint to even make out her form. Just as I do, she pauses, and looks around and sees that these two benches are the only place to sit. Despite all this brave self-talk about being charming at dinner, I dread her approach. I’m not ready to be charming quite yet. If she joins me, she will offer me her phone or ask me why I have one of my boots off or make
tsk-tsk
ing noises at the wounds on my foot.

But she does none of these things. She merely nods and sits down on the bench across from mine.

Now I’m the one who feels obligated to say something. Greet her at least, maybe begin to gossip about the two stories we’ve heard today. Speculate as to what they might indicate about the women who told them, or perhaps we could talk about ourselves. There’s probably an ocean of things Valerie and I could discuss, a million words we could spew out into this empty village square.

She says nothing. We look in opposite directions, Valerie away from the sun and me into it.

A minute passes. Maybe two. This is why you should never sit still. If you sit still, you might think, and if you think you might . . . what? Remember your parents, and your childhood, and every stupid thing you’ve ever lost? If you start to think, who knows, you might start to feel and there’s no telling where that winding road might lead. This is why we must have our books, and phones, and earbuds, and lovers, even if they’re the wrong people, even if they seem to be taking us to places where we don’t want to be. Because otherwise we’ll end up just like this: sitting on a bench in the middle of nowhere, starting that ugly cry. You know, the kind where you snort. I try to wipe the tears . . . unobtrusively at first, but then they pour.