The Canterbury Sisters (27 page)

Steffi’s voice trails off, becomes faint, briefly lost in the wind. “But the worst part is, the boy caught her like that. He’d come back for something. He’d left his keys or a glove or hat . . . who knows? None of us will ever be able to explain why that boy turned around. He had walked her to the door and shaken her hand, then walked to his car, and then for some reason he’d come back. He was looking through the glass panes in the kitchen door, getting ready to knock, and he saw Tina on her hands and knees in front of the dog dish, chewing on a bone.”

We exhale as a group. Turn our heads away from the center, afraid to even look at one another. We had known something bad was coming, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be as bad as this. Save for Valerie and her slight midriff pudge, which she wears rather defiantly, you wouldn’t call any of us fat girls. But yet, in a way, all girls are fat girls. We all have our oversize shirts, our ways of folding in upon ourselves, our instinctual three-quarter turn from the camera. Everybody’s trying to hide some sort of ugly, so that image of that boy looking at Steffi through the window, seeing her eating from a dog dish . . . it’s a lot to take.

“Why did you say this was a story about love?” Becca says, although even she seems tired of the question. “It’s about everything except love.”

“But I haven’t finished,” says Steffi. “Give me time. It’s a love story because a man saved her. Broke her out of her prison of fat. Her tower of fat, maybe that’s a better way to say it. Because if we’re all living fairy tales, Tina was Rapunzel, locked away from the world. The prince was a doctor with a contract from a pharmaceutical company, who was doing a medical study on obesity, and she was one of his guinea pigs. They met three times a week as part of the protocol and then, out of nowhere, on Valentine’s Day he gave her a box of Godiva chocolates. No man had ever given her anything, much less Godiva chocolates—” She stops to wipe the collected mist from her brow and I think about the gold box I’d seen in her bag that first day in London. She had seemed so surprised to find it there.

“That’s awful. He was trying to ruin her chances before she even finished the study,” says Claire. “Because secretly he liked his women fat. I’ve heard about men like that on the Internet. They call them chubby chasers. Bastards.”

“That does seems cruel,” says Jean. “You take a man who has some sort of obsession with heavy women, and of course he goes into obesity research. It’s a perfect target-rich environment. And he finds someone, this poor girl who has never been loved, not really, who thinks it isn’t possible, and he sabotages her. Singles her out, feeds her chocolate, makes her feel special, and keeps her just like she is.”

“No,” says Steffi. “You’re both wrong. Or maybe I’ve described it wrong, because it wasn’t like that at all. Tina never ate the chocolates. She didn’t have to. It was enough to know that he had given them to her, that he wanted her to have them. After a lifetime of food being locked away, even her mother withholding . . . No, she just kept them. They were a symbol of the fact that he could see through the fat to the real person inside of it. Because he had done what a normal man does when he likes a normal girl. He brings her candy. It’s been fifteen years now, and she still has the box. Do you know what chocolates look like after fifteen years? They turn white. They’re like rocks. But she still has them. She knows what they mean.”

“What do they mean?” asks Claire. “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe this is the story of Beauty and the Beast,” says Steffi. “Yes, not Rapunzel, I don’t know why I said that. Tina’s story was more like Beauty and the Beast, and I don’t blame you for not seeing it, because I didn’t see it myself, not for years. In order to have the miracle of transformation, something must be loved before it is really lovable.”

“Like Sir Gawain and the hag,” says Valerie.

“That too,” says Steffi. “We’re all just telling the same story in different forms. I thought about that last night, when I was in the shower. Because there have been these strange little overlaps, haven’t there?” She shrugs, not waiting for an answer. “Okay, maybe it’s just me. But the point is that in order for a cursed creature to become beautiful, for the magic to work, someone has to see that she already is beautiful. Because the moment the doctor gave her those Godivas, she lost the taste for them. She never craved chocolate again.”

“That’s impossible,” Claire says flatly. “All women crave chocolate.”

“No, all women crave the forbidden,” Steffi says. “And when food was no longer forbidden, it lost its power over her. She found, for the first time in her life, that she could think of other things. Because someone had loved her just as she was right then, in the here and now, and not because of what she might be someday if she could just learn a little bit of self-control.”

“Well, if that’s magic, it’s only magical because a man did it,” Claire says. “Women love the unlovable every day. We fall in love with a man’s potential and then we marry his scruffy, unemployed ass. We treat him like a house we’re trying to flip, a fixer-upper, and we convince ourselves all he needs is a little imagination and some elbow grease. That’s how we get stuck. How we end up with all those losers sleeping on our couch. But men never fall in love with a woman’s potential. They just aren’t capable of it—a woman’s beauty has to be served right up on a plate for them to see it, and then half the time they still can’t. And you’re saying this man was a doctor, which means he was successful, which means he could have had anyone he wanted. For a man like that to see past a fat body and fall in love with the woman hidden inside of it . . . I’m sorry, but I find your story completely unbelievable.”

Jean is frowning. “But you wouldn’t find it unbelievable if a beautiful woman fell in love with an overweight man.”

“Of course not,” says Claire. “That’s my whole point. As a gender, women have a hell of a lot more experience in loving the unlovable.”

“It’s because we get pregnant,” says Angelique. The statement is so her. Out of nowhere and bizarrely genius. She does this. She says nothing for miles and then she suddenly comes up with one of these epic pronouncements, always delivered in her weird Jersey voice.

“What does getting pregnant have to do with it?” says Becca, but Jean is already cutting her off.

“It’s true,” she says. “Women have to protect a life that isn’t quite there yet. Our biology programs us to sacrifice everything for a mass of cells, which is just another way of valuing something for its pure potential. It’s what makes us the superior gender. Because there’s grace in that, this willingness to love something that you can’t see.”

“You may find it unbelievable, but I swear it happened just the way I told you,” says Steffi, who is still looking at Claire. “He was a man, and yet he loved her even when she was fat. I promise, all of this is true. Or most of it.”

“She’s thin now?” Jean says.

Steffi nods. “As it turns out, what she wanted all along wasn’t food as much as she just wanted permission to eat.”

“My father was like that,” I say, the words coming out in a rush. “He was an alcoholic, although nobody used that word, because he just drank beer and nobody paid much attention to beer, at least not in an era where there was so much worse stuff floating around. But I guess it must have been a lot of beer, because one day he said to my mother, ‘I’m going into the woods and in three days, I’ll either come out sober or you’ll find me in there dead.’ ” And all at once it hits me how that must have been for my mother. The cofounder of the commune, designated as one of the keepers of the flame, but yet she was so often alone while my father went off to fight his demons. He was a walker too, like I guess I am, although this is the first time I’ve ever really pondered this particular similarity in our natures. One time he walked so far that he came out on the other side of the woods disoriented and it turned out he was in a completely different state. He found a pay phone in the parking lot of a truck stop and called my mother collect to pick him up and when she said, “Where are you?” he had to ask some trucker. She always laughed about the time Rich called her from New York, but I wonder how funny it really was, being left so often on her own with no idea where he’d gone or when he would return. It puts the Davids of the world in a different light.

“Exactly,” says Valerie. “That’s exactly the point I was trying to make, that whenever you deny yourself something, it turns into an obsession. But if you know you can have it, you don’t have to have it, and that’s the key to all of life, isn’t it? And if a man offered you the one thing you’d always been denied, the one thing even your own mother wouldn’t give you . . . of course you’d fall in love.”

It’s a telling moment. Valerie said “you” instead of “she,” but Steffi ignores the shift in pronouns and keeps talking.

“I’m not suggesting it was easy,” she says. “She lost a hundred and forty pounds over the course of a year, but the day her doctor gave her chocolate was the start of it. And eventually she went back to school, and moved on with her life, and married the doctor and if you met them today . . . you would never guess that they started out as Beauty and the Beast, you would just think
What an attractive couple.
Oh, and after she had lost the weight she had to have skin-reduction surgery, all over her body. Around the hips and waist mostly, with little tucks in the arms and legs. More than fifteen pounds of skin was removed, can you imagine that? Fifteen pounds of nothing but skin?”

“So her story has a happy ending?” says Becca.

“The happiest,” says Steffi. “She now weighs a hundred and twenty-three pounds, and for women I don’t think there could be any happier ending. We should rewrite all the fairy tales—Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Little Mermaid. Forget the princes and the castles. Just type the line ‘And she weighed a hundred and twenty-three pounds happily ever after,’ and we would all close the book with a tear and a sigh.”

“How do you know all this?” asks Valerie. “How do you know what she thought and what she felt and how she ate the dog food but she didn’t eat the chocolates?”

“I’m being stupid, aren’t I?” says Steffi and she stops. Drops her backpack, pulls her shirt from the waistband of her jeans, and lifts it. “Here. You may as well look.”

The scars have faded over time to a watery shade of beige, pale slashes across her strong brown abdomen. Two of them, one on the right and one on the left, stretching around her waist from both sides, almost touching in the back and almost touching in the front. It is the body of a woman who, at some point in her life, has been virtually cut in half.

Fourteen

O
ur final lunch will be in a village so small it doesn’t have a name. It’s no more than a swell in the road, really, a place where a sidewalk suddenly appears beside the main road, but according to Tess it is the site of one of the oldest hospices in all of Kent. She leads us through the shell of an abandoned building and I follow at the end of the line as we walk among crumbling walls and shattered door frames, noting that a tree is even growing in the corner of the largest room. It’s taller than I am, pushing its way up through the remnants of the stone floor.

“They called them hospices because you could find hospitality there,” Tess is saying, “and over time it evolved into our modern word ‘hospital.’ Remember that Canterbury was reputed to be a site of medical miracles, which means many of our pilgrims were already ill when they began their journey. It’s easy to imagine how the rigors of the trail might prove too much for them. The churches in the various villages along the route opened these hospices as a gesture of goodwill, a thank-you to the travelers who were bringing commerce to their towns and also, in their minds, a way to curry favor with God. If you couldn’t afford to undertake a pilgrimage of your own, it was considered almost as virtuous to offer help to those who had answered the call.”

She squats down at the roots of the tree and gazes up at the sky before continuing. The day has cleared, the canopy above us having brightened from gray to blue. A shaft of muted sunlight falls across her face as she raises her chin and she closes her eyes for a moment in sheer pleasure before sighing and then going on with her little speech. “Most travelers would only stay at a hospice for a night or two, resting and gathering their strength before once again taking to the trail, but for a few of the most ill . . . that’s how these stopping places along the road became the first hospitals. Records show that a fair number of the pilgrims died en route to Canterbury and are buried in the cemeteries of towns not their own, another act of charity. Sometimes the graves are entirely blank except for a cross, because the people who nursed and buried them might never have known their names.”

She makes one of her professorial gestures, an elegant little motion toward the largest split in the largest wall, evidently the location that had once held the entrance. Through it we can see a small, ill-kept cemetery. None of us ventures out except for Valerie, and even she is back in a minute. Tombstones that tell the person’s life story can be interesting, as are those which offer poems or phrases for contemplation. But each unmarked grave is dispiriting in its own special way, a sign of just one more pilgrim who never told his story.

After meandering through the hospice, we move on to the café next door for an early lunch. It has three tables inside, two of them occupied, but there is a collection of mismatched chairs on the front sidewalk outside, clustered around a long table. The owner springs into action when she sees Tess, who apparently brings groups here regularly, and they begin to speak so quickly that it’s hard to understand them.

But she’s gesturing toward the street, so it would appear that the woman is directing our cumbersome party of nine to the outside table. The temperature has mellowed since morning, and the wind has calmed, but just in case, the café owner pulls a stack of quilts from behind the bar, thin and worn but folded neatly. We each take one and walk back out the door to choose a chair.