The Canterbury Sisters (20 page)

“Like
Romeo and Juliet,
” Becca says. “It’s my favorite Shakespeare play.”

An unlikely choice for a girl who claims to be in search of a happy love story, but then again, Becca’s still in high school.
Romeo and Juliet
is probably the only Shakespeare she’s ever read and it’s designed to appeal to teenagers, this idea that the star-crossed lovers could have been eternally happy if only their stupid parents had managed to get their shit together.

“
Romeo and Juliet
crossed my mind too,” I tell her. “But then I thought he was more like Stanley out of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Randy’s a little too rough around the edges to play Romeo.”

I’ve decided I may as well confess the whole thing. If I don’t, Valerie might bring it up, and who knows how bad her version of the story will be, me making out with a stranger in my sock feet and bleeding everywhere and not having any money. Which is all true enough, so my only hope is to beat her to the punch and when I finish describing my adventures of the previous evening, everyone laughs. It’s sympathetic laughter, the inclusive kind.

I should go around all day long confessing my mistakes
, I think
.
List them in alphabetical order, like the capitals of the states. Or maybe in chronological order, and then in ascending and descending degrees of severity. Add in accents and hand gestures as I talk, show them what it looked like when I hopped through the bar or Randy threw the dart. It’s a piece of vital information from another lifetime that I keep having to relearn—that when you tell people exactly how and when you screwed up, it only makes them like you better. All the accomplishments in the world won’t earn you as many friends as one embarrassing story, and I remember how I once overheard two baristas in a coffee shop, standing behind the bar steaming their milk and scooping their foam. And one of the girls had said to the other, “What’d you do last night?” and the second one answered, “The wrong thing.” They’d laughed, just as the women on the trail are laughing now, in that true camaraderie that only exists among the fallen. The sort of friendship that can only arise from the ashes of failure.

“He may have been dumb,” I say. “But he was a hell of a kisser.” And at this Claire and Valerie erupt in fresh gales of giggles, which echo throughout the group. Everyone is in high spirits this morning. The sun is bright, the air is fresh, the temperature feels more like October than November, and we have just passed a marker that Tess said indicates we’re more than halfway to Canterbury. The combination of a night in a comfortable inn with ample showers, a breakfast of eggs and sausage in our stomachs, and the story of my midnight tryst has cheered us all up.

“What made you go down to the pub in the first place?” Angelique asks.

“I woke up from a really strange dream. I think Claire’s story made me horny.”

At this more laughter, and a couple wails of protest, because I think we all know that Claire’s story wasn’t supposed to make a person horny.

“It’s sick to get off on something like that,” Becca says, but for once she’s giggling too.

“Don’t let them make you feel bad, Che,” says Claire. “I never told you what I was doing while I was watching that videotape.”

Now the loudest chorus of denial yet arises, with Steffi yelling, “TMI!” Becca saying, “That’s gross,” and Silvia moaning, “Oh God, my poor cat.” We walk a bit more without speaking, but every single one of us is smiling.

“We have an option today,” Tess says. “A ten-kilometer route that takes an extra loop around some stables or a more direct seven-kilometer route. Thoughts?”

“The ten,” says Steffi. “I want to see it all.”

“Me too,” I say. It comes out automatically, even though what we’re talking about seeing is a stable and even though I’m a bit worried about how my feet are going to hold up now that I have both a blistered toe and a punctured heel.

“If we walk farther will we have to walk faster?” asks Valerie.

“A bit,” says Tess.

“Then I’m not sure we’ll see more,” she says.

“Of course we will. The faster you walk, the more ground you cover and the more you see,” says Steffi. Slowly, in a tone of voice most people save for toddlers. “That’s how it works.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” Valerie says, and then Jean and Silvia chime in too. Even Claire. It’s okay to slow down, they all murmur. Take a breath now and then. We don’t have to circle every stable in Kent trying to prove something. Sometimes we walk too fast.

Steffi looks at me and I shrug, as if to say it’s not worth the fight. And it isn’t. Ten miles don’t necessarily take you any farther than seven. Thirty men don’t necessarily teach you more than one. The closer we get to Canterbury, the more it’s beginning to dawn on me that whatever answer I’ve been seeking, it isn’t numerical. I still don’t know what success in life is, exactly, but I can almost hear Diana’s voice in my ear, whispering one of her fortune-cookie sayings.
If you can count it, it doesn’t count.

“Are you up-to-date on your tetanus shots?” Steffi asks, and it takes me a beat to figure out what she’s talking about. The puncture on my heel. Of course a doctor would wonder about it. I nod.

“I tour vineyards for a living,” I say. “I keep up-to-date on all that stuff.”

“Your parents had a vineyard, didn’t you say?” Valerie asks. “It’s kind of sweet you went into the same work.”

“They had an orchard.”

“Same thing, more or less,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

Is it? Damn. She has a point. A very obvious point. Apples to grapes, that’s about as far as I’ve come. I’ve always thought I escaped the world of my parents, but maybe I didn’t get as far as I thought.

“How did you know your Randy under the window was dumb?” asks Angelique. We are moving again and she tosses the question over her shoulder. “What’d he do to give it away?” She says it lightly, but there is a slight twinge of worry in her voice.
She’s been singled out as the dumb one from the first moment she went on her TV show,
I think.
Made fun of by every magazine and talk-show host in America, but she’s not stupid, not at all. And she has more heart than most of us here on this trail.

“It was just me being goofy and pointless like I always am,” I say. “I started telling him about the names for groups of birds. I know, I know, it’s pathetic, but collecting collective nouns has always been a quirk of mine. They call a bunch of pheasants a bouquet. A peep of chickens. And then you have a watch of nightingales, an ostentation of peacocks, a pitying of turtledoves.”

“You’re kidding,” says Valerie. “A pitying? That’s kind of weird and amazing.”

“And nerdy,” I say.

“And nerdy,” she agrees. “Is this normally how you try to pick up guys in bars?”

We all laugh again, because once again, she has a point. I am a nerd and it’s sort of funny, now that I consider it in the light of day, safely sober and surrounded by women. They can put it on my tombstone:
HERE LIES A NERD WHO KISSED THE WRONG MEN
. Then they can chisel below, in smaller letters,
AND SHE SOUGHT THE BLESSING OF GOD
.

It’s not a bad epitaph. I’ll take it.

Tess is smiling. “Che has something in common with Chaucer,” she says. “He wrote a poem titled
A Parliament of Birds
.”

“What do you call a group of pilgrims?” Jean asks.

“I don’t think there’s a special word,” says Tess.

“I’ll google it,” says Steffi, whipping out her phone. “Shit, we’ve already lost service.”

“Maybe we’re a google of pilgrims,” Angelique says softly.

“We can be a parliament of pilgrims as far as I’m concerned,” says Valerie. “Lift the term straight from Chaucer.”

“It’s suitable, in a way,” says Tess. “Seeing as how there will be a judgment of the stories in the end. Speaking of which, are we ready for the next one? And who goes after that? Silvia drew a ten.”

“I have an eight,” I say.

“Nine,” says Becca.

“Me too,” says Steffi. “Nine.”

Now that’s a little odd
, I think.
I would have thought an eight bought me a place in the middle of the pack, but I’m going to be one of the last ones. After me, only Valerie will be left.

“I’m last of all,” says Valerie, echoing my thoughts. She reaches beneath her jacket and pulls a card from her shirt pocket, which is nothing but strange yet again, that she would carry her card in her pocket every day. It’s an ace of spades.

“Good God, girl,” says Silvia. “An ace is the highest card. You should have gone first.”

“An ace is a one,” says Valerie. “So I’m last.” She looks around, as if taking a survey. “Right?”

Some mumbling and shaking of heads, but the general consensus is that an ace is the highest card in the deck. I don’t know why no one noticed she had an ace back in the George. That was only three days ago, although it feels more like three weeks. Time stretches on the trail, becomes elastic in the way it always does when you’re on vacation and away from your routines. A single morning can feel enormous.

“You should go ahead with your story right now,” Silvia says. “It’s bad karma that we’ve gotten out of sequence. No, seriously, don’t look at me like that. I can wait. If you’re ready to tell yours, that is.”

Valerie seems a little nervous, surprised to find herself the focus of attention, but she nods. “I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say since we started on the trail, but my tale is different from the ones the rest of you have told. I mean, this isn’t my personal story, it’s just a story. About Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the Round Table. I thought it might be fun to go old school, tell one of the classics.” She looks at Tess, who is beaming in encouragement, obviously thrilled that we’re going to spend at least one morning talking about Camelot instead of pornography. “But the theme does fit with everything we’ve been talking about.”

“You know the stories of the Round Table right off the top of your head?” I ask.

“I read up on
The Canterbury Tales
for the trip,” Valerie says. “In fact, I read up on a lot of medieval literature, which I guess is my own nerdy pleasure, like your peep of chickens. This is the story on which the Wife of Bath’s Tale is based.” She tilts her head and studies Claire for a moment before continuing. “It’s called ‘Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady’ and I like the original better than Chaucer’s version, although I hope saying that doesn’t get me struck by lightning.”

Tess is still smiling, that same satisfied smile she’s carried all morning, and I don’t think it’s just because Valerie is sucking up to her with the bit about King Arthur. As our leader, she seems to be feeling the shift in the group dynamic more strongly than anyone and it furthermore seems to please her that we have now decreed ourselves to be a parliament and not just a random bunch of wanderers. “Actually,” Tess says, “the Chaucer version came first, but I prefer the later one by Mallory as well. I’ve said as much for years, and I’ve never been struck by lightning. So are you ready? Do you agree to be the next storyteller?”

“If Silvia really doesn’t mind getting skipped again,” Valerie says. “But it’s not . . . you know, it’s not a confession.”

“Bring it on,” says Becca. “I’m tired of confessions. Is this a happy story?”

“‘Loathly Lady’ doesn’t sound too happy,” says Claire. “Are you sure it’s loathly, not lovely? I’ve never even heard such a word.”

“It’s a riddle,” says Valerie.

“A riddle?” says Jean. “I think we’re ready for a riddle. By all means, yes, Becca’s right. Bring it on.”

 The Tale of Valerie 

“Once upon a time,” says Valerie, “in the kingdom of Camelot, Arthur was out stalking deer in the forest and wandered onto a spot of property not his own. He was unaware that he had done this, but when he shot and killed a stag, the owner immediately appeared. It was the fearsome Black Knight.

“Now, poaching was a serious offense, even if one was the king, and Arthur was alone, separated from the rest of his party and dressed in simple hunting attire. In other words, he was without the normal trappings of his office and, in the moment of the confrontation, just an ordinary man. The Black Knight said that Arthur must be beheaded for his offense, unless he could solve a riddle. In order to escape death, he must return in exactly one year with the answer to a single question: What is it that women most desire?”