The Canterbury Sisters (16 page)

“And that may be why you’re going to see Canterbury,” Valerie says, “but it doesn’t explain why you’ve turned it into a pilgrimage. Walking the whole trail from top to bottom, that’s a pretty grand gesture, isn’t it? We all must have some sort of reason.”

“Trains run between London and Canterbury on the hour,” I hear myself say. Who told me that? Oh yeah, the closely cropped man at the George in London. This is the second time I’ve thought of him within an hour, and an idea bobs up from the confusion in my head. Could he have been the one who took my phone? But why would he do a thing like that? I was in the pub for quite a while after I said goodbye to him, sitting with the other Broads Abroad. If he’d seen I’d left my phone on the bar, he would have just brought it over to the table. I’m being crazy paranoid now. Making up stories out of nothing. Some busboy stole my phone. There was no cosmic message behind its disappearance. Nothing more than a random crime.

“Right,” says Valerie, shaking her finger at me. “Che is exactly right. Trains do run from London to Canterbury, hour after hour, all day long. But trains are for tourists, aren’t they? And we have declared ourselves to be pilgrims.”

“Mom,” says Becca, her voice shrill. “Seriously, slow down. Are you trying to leave me right here in this field?”

Mom.

Mom . . . Shit, I’d forgotten all about her. My hand goes automatically to my backpack, straining to reach for the familiar shape. But the ashes are crammed down into their appropriate place, a side pocket. She’s fine. She’s been there all along, right where she should be, zipped up in her little bag. I look over my shoulder at Tess, who is still at the rear of the pack. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that we’re disintegrating as a group. Walking too far apart, almost shouting back and forth to each other, and there is discord, palpable discord among us for the first time since leaving London. I wait for her to play her usual professorial card, to break in with some calming tidbit about Chaucer or the growing of apples or the legend of how some particular little burg got its queer name. But Tess seems as spacey today as the rest of us, far from her usual self, and it falls to Angelique to get us back on point.

“So you never told Adam?” she asks. “He never knew you found the tape?”

Claire shakes her head. The sun is hitting her squarely in the face now, and for just a passing instant she shows her age. “What was I going to say? It wasn’t as if he’d done anything wrong. He and Edith had been married at the time they’d made the tape and if part of their deal was that they liked to film themselves and watch it back, then who was I to judge? Besides, Adam wouldn’t have liked the fact that I’d watched the tape, I’m sure of that. He was very particular about how people viewed him. He had a sort of formality that he always said came with the job. He wouldn’t have liked to hear that anyone had seen his homemade porn.”

“Not even his new wife?” Angelique asks.

“Especially not his new wife.”

“So . . .” says Angelique, surprisingly persistent, or maybe she’s just thinking that this sort of problem is more on her home turf than anyone else’s. “Did you see it as a challenge? Try to do some new stuff to surprise him in bed?”

Claire smiles. “Is that what you would have done?”

Angelique nods. “I would have stolen all of Edith’s best moves.”

“That probably explains why you’ve only been married once and I’ve had four unsuccessful runs at it. You’re a trouper, Angelique. Good for you. You hang in there, and I admire that. Because I did the exact opposite, I’m afraid. Began avoiding him in bed altogether. First one excuse and then the next, until not only was I failing to live up to the image of Edith, I wasn’t even being a good version of Claire anymore.”

“What happened to the tape?” asks Steffi.

“On the day my dear friend was at last due back from her trip,” Claire says, inclining her head toward Silvia, “I knew I had to destroy it. I couldn’t leave it in her house and I didn’t want to take it back to mine. But I didn’t think it would be right to just toss it in a Dumpster. It might have been found. You’re always hearing of people pulling things out of Dumpsters. We lived in a small college town, remember, where everyone knew everyone, and Adam had his reputation on campus to consider. Edith did too, I suppose. So I watched them one last time and I went out in Silvia’s driveway and I put the tape down on the concrete and I ran over it in my Jeep Cherokee. Several times, back and forth.”

“You really wanted to grind it away,” Steffi says, with a twist of her mouth.

“But I couldn’t,” says Claire. “The case broke and went flat but the tape itself was still intact, hanging out the sides. So I went back into Silvia’s house and got a pair of scissors and I cut it up, into a hundred pieces, none of them any bigger than a postage stamp, and I threw some of them in one trash bin and others in another and then another until pieces of that tape were scattered all over town. I just kept driving from one mall to the next, putting a handful of celluloid into every Dumpster I found. And all the time I was thinking to myself,
No one must ever know this tape existed.”

“You were that determined to protect his reputation?” asks Jean. She has slowed down and looked back at us at last, but her face is flushed. That unhealthy mottled sort of flush that I’ve come to associate with her.
My first impression of you was so wrong,
I think, watching her blot perspiration from her forehead with the cuff of her chambray shirt.
I thought you were Princess Grace, the serene royal highness of some minor kingdom, but as it turns out, I was only fooled by your hair. Once the bun comes loose, there’s nothing serene about you.

“That’s what I told myself at the time,” Claire says. “That it was all for Adam. But in retrospect, I was only trying to protect my own reputation.” She says it flatly, without embellishment. They’re so different from each other, Jean and Claire, one of them spinning a tale meant to inspire envy, the other delivering a story so honest it makes the roots of your teeth ache. Despite her sweaters and hair and jewelry and figure and obvious wealth, it hits me that this is what I really should admire about Claire. Her willingness to turn the garment of her life inside out, exposing all the frayed seams and hasty alterations. It’s her flaws that make her likable. I need to remember this.

“I was the second wife, the trophy wife,” Claire goes on. “It was my job to be the bombshell, and I’d failed miserably. Here I’d managed to get myself married to an incredibly sexy man and . . . I hadn’t even noticed. So my first step was to destroy the evidence, and my second step was to avoid Adam.”

“That marriage didn’t last long,” Silvia says quietly. “Not quite two years, was it?” She hasn’t spoken much in the last mile or two and I suspect Claire’s story has shocked her more than anyone. It’s one thing to learn that you don’t really know your husband or your lover. That’s sort of a given, really. And I think most women would admit that they don’t understand their mothers or their daughters all that well either. But it’s a real kick in the gut to consider the possibility that maybe you don’t know your best friend.

“No, that was the shortest marriage of all four of them,” Claire says. “Not two years, soup to nuts, just as Silvia says. It was easy to leave Adam. I’m good at leaving men. Can pack and unpack in an instant, remember? But the irony is, I’ve never quite managed to leave Edith. The image of her on that bed still plays in my head and no matter how many times I try, I can’t destroy it. It’s like by cutting her up and spreading her over town I made her stronger. Maybe she’s one of those sci-fi characters who turn into everything after they’re dead. Who was that?”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I say.

“Exactly,” says Claire. “Edith was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of sex. I struck her down and she became more powerful.”

“Did you ever see her again, after your divorce?” Steffi asks. “The real her, I mean.”

“Never,” says Claire. “Well, hold on, that’s not quite true. In fact, what am I saying? I ran into her in a bookstore not that long ago. It had been years, of course, and there was another husband since Adam, and I was with my new man, Jeremy. He’s thirty years younger, so it’s all very racy and forbidden. Started out as our pool boy, and I hope that doesn’t make it sound as if I’m stereotyping him or just using him to shock people.”

“I’m pretty sure Jeremy’s using you to shock people too,” Silvia says, running a grimy hand through her hair. Now that we’ve warmed up enough to pull off our jackets, I can see she’s wearing a shirt that’s oversize, not in that deliberately oversize, faux-jacket Chico’s-catalog sort of way, but as if it’s simply too large for her frame. It’s a man’s cast-aside oxford, the work shirt of a husband who no longer works, with the sleeves badly rolled up and the neck gaping. Silvia’s one of the three pilgrims among us who is still married—and happily, evidently. Otherwise why would she bring her husband’s shirt on vacation?

“No doubt you’re right,” Claire says. “But Jeremy and I ran smack into Edith in the cookbook section of that bookstore and the years . . . the years have not been kind to Edith, and there wasn’t that much to work with from the start. I recognized her at once, but the funny thing is, when I first approached her I’m not sure she even knew who I was. I introduced Jeremy and later, when I told him, ‘That woman and I were married to the same man,’ he was the one who was shocked. He said all the right things, that I’m a thousand times prettier and sexier and more desirable. But while he’s whispering this in my ear, Edith was paying for her books and leaving. When she got to the door I thought that surely she would turn and look back at me. Get one more eyeful of the woman who replaced her. But she didn’t. She just walked out. I was nothing to her, and she changed my life.”

“Changed your life?” Silvia says. “That’s a strong way to put it.”

“Maybe so, but it’s accurate. Because you know, when I married Adam I was pretty much on track. I’d been divorced a couple of times, but a lot of people have been divorced a couple of times. And I’d had a few beaus in college . . . but a lot of people have had a few beaus in college. I wasn’t significant in the way I am now.”

“Significant?” Silvia asks. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Other women call me a slut, darling,” Claire says, her bell-like laugh echoing through the orchard. “Maybe not in front of you, because you’re fiercely loyal, but that’s what they say about me behind our backs, and I’ll admit they have a point. I have been with a lot of men and they weren’t always the right men, or even the close-to-right men. It adds up to more than all the rest of you combined, I’m sure. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not apologizing for my past, or making excuses, but it does have something to do with Edith. She rattled me. So for the past twenty years I’ve moved from man to man, and I wait, each time, for him to tell me that I’m the prettiest and the sexiest and their praise, you know, it’s like a tiny pill. I take it and I feel better for a while, but the next day I need another tiny pill. Turning sixty has slowed me, I’ll admit it, but not as much as you younger girls might guess.”

God,
I think.
Is that what Diana was doing all those years, with all those men in all those cars? Simply self-medicating?

“You haven’t had more men than all of us put together,” says Silvia. “You’re just exaggerating, like you always do.”

“You said this was going to be a happy story,” wails Becca. She needs to put the phrase on a T-shirt.

“Did I?” says Claire. “I thought I said it was going to be a sexy story. Isn’t that what I said?”

“I think you said happy,” says Angelique, her face illustrating what the rest of us are likely thinking—that Claire’s story was neither particularly happy nor sexy. But it certainly was different, I’ll give her that.

“Oh God,” says Becca. “This is all so depressing. Nothing anyone has said so far has made me want to get old.”

“Who do you think is winning?” Steffi asks.

“Winning?” says Becca in confusion. Steffi’s question was thrown out to all of us but Becca seems to have assumed it was directed just at her.

“Winning the story competition so far?” Steffi clarifies, slowing her pace. “For the free dinner in Canterbury?”

“Oh dear,” says Jean. “What’s this?”

We have come to a little stream. It is perhaps ten steps wide at its narrowest point and it would seem we will have to cross it one at a time. Tess gamely wades in to show us the least treacherous route. She steps from one shallow to another but as she nears the other side, the water grows deeper, rising almost to the top of her boots. We all stand on the bank, watching and thinking.

“See?” she says. “You need to use a bit of ginger, but it’s quite crossable.”

“I’d forgotten we even had a bet,” Claire says to Steffi.

“Me too,” says Silvia. “And the three stories so far have all been totally different. There’s no way to compare them.”

“The easiest way to lose a competition,” Steffi says, “is to forget that you’re in a competition.”

“Eleven,” says Valerie.

“Eleven?” Tess echoes. She has climbed to the top of the bank on the other side and now is pointing to the shallow places in the stream, trying to show Jean where to step. Tess’s boots, I note, are wet almost to the top but the waterline stops short of her pants. She crosses streams competently, just as she does everything else.

“That’s how many men I’ve slept with,” Valerie says. “Claire threw a gauntlet down, didn’t she? I’m not afraid to meet the challenge. Eleven.”

“Only six for me,” Angelique says. “That’s not many, is it? When you consider where I come from? I bet most girls in my high school had done six guys before they got out of tenth grade.”

“Only the one,” says Jean, then she makes a little yelp as water sloshes over the top of her boot and into her sock.

“Come on, Mom,” says Becca. “You don’t have to lie for my sake. I don’t care if you’ve been with other men since Daddy. Of course you have. It would be downright sick if you hadn’t.”

“One,” Jean repeats grimly, and Tess extends a hand to help her to the bank. She is splattered up to the knee on her left side and when she gets on dry land she finds a mossy place to sit down and unzip her backpack. We all carry extra socks on the advice of the Broads Abroad website and today I suspect we’ll all use them.