The Canterbury Sisters (23 page)

It’s not Canterbury, but I like the place. I think Diana would have too.

Outside, I find Silvia leaning against a tombstone, one of her boots off, inspecting her left foot. If they ever erect a new statue in honor of the modern-day pilgrims, it should be in just this pose. A woman sitting on a tombstone with a boot in her hand, grimacing down at the sole of her foot. Silvia appears to have the same patterns of damage I have, save the pierced sole, of course, and I offer her my liquid skin and Band-Aids, but she shakes her head. “I may as well stock up on my own,” she says, “while we’re in a good-size town.”

“There’s a chemist on the square,” says Tess.

“A chemist?” says Angelique. She is still preening a little from the autograph session. Smoothing down her hair and checking the effect in the reflection of a brass cross on another of the tombstones. “It sounds so strange when you say it like that.”

“A chemist is what the British call a pharmacy,” Jean tells her.

“I know,” says Angelique. “It’s just that’s what Nico used to call a meth lab. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” says Jean. “Is it funny? If you say so, then I believe you. I never seem to understand jokes.”

Eleven

O
ur afternoon’s walk will be an arc along what Tess calls the coastal wall, which is easy enough to spot, even from a distance, although I don’t yet hear or see the ocean. I’ve read enough to know that the shore of southern England features sharp drops to the sea, exposing broad expanses of stone or chalk, like the white cliffs of Dover. So we’re now entering a dramatic and forbidding landscape, nothing like the gentle hills we’ve trod so far. And although we’re barely an hour into this second segment of our walk, the path is already less hospitable, and the ground is dotted with boulders that have erupted through the soil. The breeze carries the iron-rich smell of brine and kelp, and seagulls are circling in the distance, crying out to one another in the high cool air.

“What do you call a group of seagulls?” Claire asks me.

“A pod, a herd, sometimes a rookery,” I say. “That’s a tricky one. Most people say flock, but that’s not technically right.”

“All right,” says Silvia, cracking her knuckles in front of her, not waiting for permission to begin. “We’re going back to an autobiographical story, I’m afraid. It’s about how marriages change over time, go in and out of seasons. And it’s about how things can sometimes come full circle, just when you least expect it. It’s my story, as true as I can remember, but I’m going to tell it as if it were someone else’s. In the third person, I mean. I think that will make it easier for me. And I would furthermore prefer that you not interrupt me. Save your questions and comments for the end, just as we did this morning with Valerie.” It’s the first sign that maybe she’s not as utterly at ease as she always seems to be.

“The story lies within the domain of the storyteller,” says Tess.

“The third person?” asks Angelique. “What does that mean?”

“That I call myself ‘she’ and not ‘I,’ ” says Silvia. “It’s just distance. Sometimes distance helps.”

“There’s nothing wrong with distance,” Claire says. “And Tess is right. It’s your story. You should tell it any way you want to, isn’t that the case, ladies?”

We nod. In the distance, the gulls scream.

 The Tale of Silvia 

They met in college, the year she was a junior and he was a senior. They were both music majors and they were seated beside each other in the string section of the student orchestra. First and second violin.

Just like the violins, everything about their courtship seemed preordained. They were so much alike. Both tall and slim, from the Midwest. Quiet, outdoorsy, the children of teachers. Talented enough to be able to make careers out of their music, but not talented enough to be stars. Or maybe it was more a matter of temperament, that neither of them had a star personality. Their names were alliterative, Silvia and Steven, and when you’re young and inexperienced in the world, even a silly coincidence like that can pass as evidence of destiny.

After graduation they married, just as everyone expected them to, and began ticking items off the list. A modest Methodist ceremony, a starter home in a subdivision, the birth of twins. A boy and a girl—marvelous efficiency, that, getting the whole thing behind you in one fell swoop. Then came the minivan, the trips to Disney, half-marathons, rescued cats. In the tenth year of their marriage, they moved from Kansas to Texas. A different latitude, a brighter light, but the same time zone.

Shortly after their arrival in Houston, a relative died. A distant but childless one, the best kind, and the unexpected inheritance, falling like manna from heaven, meant they could afford a bigger house. But luck is such a tricky thing, is it not? Looking back years later, Silvia would sometimes wonder if this was where they first got off course—with the purchase of this larger house, the sort that they could never have afforded on their own. Their presence in the new neighborhood always felt a little dishonest, for it placed them among richer, older couples who held different sorts of jobs and, more to the point, it implied a value system that never quite fit. It was the smallest shift in direction, but you know what they say. A pilot altering his course by a single degree can take a plane to Phoenix instead of Denver.

Steven was the band director at the local high school, while Silvia taught piano lessons and played accompaniment for the community theater. As parents of twins so often do, they became adept at swapping off tasks. Their innate Midwestern practicality helped them develop a stratagem for every hour of the day and Steven called it The Plan. The Plan covered bedtimes and homework and household budgets, even the correct way to pack the car for road trips.

It was a good life and they congratulated each other sometimes late at night, or driving home from parties where they had been forced to behold the Technicolor unhappiness of other, less fortunate couples. The Liz-and-Dicks of the world, they would call them. The Scott-and-Zeldas. Those couples who shouted, threw wineglasses, declared bankruptcy, and went into rehab, the people who wept and slept around. Those who seemed determined to have big messy lives, while their own lives, Steven and Silvia agreed, were exactly the right size.

And then, after seventeen years, the impossible happened. Steven fell in love.

The woman was the president of the Band Booster Club at the high school where Steven taught. Her children were close in age to the twins, who were fifteen by this point. Their daughters, in fact, had been to each other’s birthday parties. Her name was Carol.

Carol had not been part of The Plan.

And yet, now she was here. Startlingly and unavoidably here, like a tree that falls through your roof during a storm, so that you suddenly look up from your bed and see something you never expected to see, like the sky. Carol appeared to be an ordinary enough woman, at least to most people. She certainly seemed ordinary to Silvia, who’d been aware of her existence in that slight peripheral way you know people whose kids are the same age as your kids. But she’d never taken any particular note of her. Carol . . . well, Carol was a bit of an Edith. She didn’t look like a threat. She wasn’t younger or thinner or more accomplished than Silvia, and that was part of the problem. As dreadful as it may be when your husband leaves you for a twenty-two-year-old bubble-breasted blonde, at least there’s an explanation for it. He’s an asshole, an upgrader, a man stuck in a midlife crisis, the punch line of an unfunny joke.

But when Silvia told her girlfriends Steven was leaving her for this woman, this Carol, one of them blurted out, “Her thighs are bigger than yours,” a sentence which tells you everything you need to know, I suppose, about what life was like in an upper-middle-class suburb of Houston, Texas, in 1982. And it was true. Whatever special powers Carol possessed, they were not the sort that were visible to the naked eye, and yet Steven had told Silvia, quote:
I’ve never felt this way before. I can’t describe it. Just to be in the same room as her is enough.

And then he had added, with the kind of gentle cruelty that only a man who has recently fallen in love can muster,
And Silvia, my only hope is that someday you too can know how this feels.

It was this last bit, of course, that was inexcusable. In all the subsequent years that passed, Silvia never told anyone that he said that, not until now, when she is walking through the English countryside with her friend Claire—who, as it turns out, has also had her secrets—and this pilgrimage of sisters. It’s the most embarrassing part of an embarrassing story, and so on that day back in the early ’80s when she told her girlfriends Steven was leaving, she omitted what he’d said on the way out the door.
Just to be in the same room with her is enough.
She didn’t want other women to know that she was married to a man who would say such a thing, or that she had chosen, even back in college, such a thoroughly ridiculous sort of person. So she held this last part deep inside her chest, this confession that confessed too much. It was bad enough that Steven no longer loved her, but then he had to go and imply that he had never loved her—at least not in the huge and all-encompassing way he now loved Carol. She told her girlfriends everything else, but she did not tell them the worst.

Moving on. If Silvia’s life in the 1960s and ’70s with Steven had been one sort of cliché, then her life in the ’80s and ’90s was another. She did not find it hard to rebound from her divorce. In the upwardly mobile neighborhood in which they now lived, multiple marriages were the norm and, in fact, staying with your original spouse seemed to indicate a shocking lack of imagination. Most people were on their second, third, or even fourth run at wedded bliss, dragging any number of stepchildren and half siblings in their wake. Her girlfriends would come over on the Fridays when Steven had the kids and they would drink too much wine and watch romantic movies and curse the boys of their youth. After the children left for college, some friend or another would come over almost every night. They would have potluck dinners, each woman bringing whatever she found in her refrigerator or swinging around a drive-through for a domed salad. There was no judgment among them. They did not pretend. Silvia cut her hair, lost weight, adopted two more cats. She was up to five now, which was a dicey number, a sign she may have been on the verge of utter withdrawal from polite society.

She did not think of herself as happy. But she didn’t think of herself as unhappy either. She’d never used that type of language. And yet, at some point in the tenth or eleventh year of her singledom, Silvia began to consider the possibility that Steven had been right. That by leaving, he really had—just as he claimed was his goal—done her a favor as much as him. Yes, it had taken nearly a decade’s worth of distance, but at last she began to see things more clearly. She and Steven had never been a love match. Not at all.

Oh, they’d been well suited. Perfectly aligned and evenly yoked. But they had not been in love. Instead, they’d lived almost like brother and sister, two people who share the same memories, who have endured the same relatives . . . it was almost as if they had spent seventeen years riding in the backseat of the same car. A car driven by someone else, maybe that stern and joyless adult called “marriage,” and all they could say was, “Are we there yet?” knowing that if you have to ask the question, it’s proof you haven’t arrived. Even the circumstances of their first introduction, on that college campus so long ago, had begun to take on a new meaning to Silvia. She’d always loved telling that story—him on first violin, her on second—but now that she stopped to consider it, even that once-charming little detail seemed dark and foreboding.

The feminists had it right. She’d been playing second fiddle to that man since the day she met him.

And she furthermore saw, as she stood on the edge of that high cliff they call fifty—for Claire is wrong about that, it isn’t forty that rips a woman’s life into bits, it’s fifty. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that forty upends the circumstances of a person’s life, making them wonder if they’ve done the right things, but fifty parts your ribs and yanks on your heart, giving you the uneasy suspicion that even if you somehow managed to do those right things, it’s beginning to look as if you did the right things for all the wrong reasons.