The Canterbury Sisters (28 page)

“This is strange,” mutters Becca and we all in turn whisper that it’s fine even though of course she’s right. It is strange.

Tess spreads one of the quilts over her legs and assures us that this café, while small, has the best beef stew in all of County Kent. A bowl will warm us up. We nod, adjust our quilts to imitate her, and stare out at the nonexistent view. Not a single car has driven by since we’ve arrived in town and the only human activity in sight is a little boy on a bicycle, evidently the owner’s child. His mother must have instructed him to keep to the sidewalk, for he is forlornly riding his bike to the absolute end of the concrete, then getting off, pushing it in a U-turn, and riding it as far as possible back to the other end. He probably does this all day long.

The stew is out within minutes, piping hot and as good as Tess promised.

“How’s your mother hanging in there today?” Valerie asks quietly as the other women begin to chat and eat.

“Still dead,” I say.

“Is that what your story is going to be about?” Valerie persists, handling me a rough loaf of bread to break. It’s all very biblical. “Your mom dying?”

“If I can’t think of something better. I’m still trying to think of something better.” Which is a bit of a lie. I started practicing the story in my head on the walk from Dover. I think I have a good first line. Deceptively simple, but with real emotional punch.
My story begins with the death of my mother
 . . . That’ll grip them.

Valerie smiles. “Somehow I get the feeling your mom provided you with plenty of stories to tell.”

“Oh, she did. When a narcissist dies, it tears a great big hole in the world.”

“Your mother was a narcissist?”

“Certifiable.”

“Damn. Mine too. What are the odds?”

“Given how the two of us have turned out, I’d say pretty high.”

“Che, do you want to order the wine?” Tess asks, and I can only assume that she’s joking. A place that doesn’t have a food menu likely won’t have a wine list, and this poor woman, glancing at her son on his bike as she works her way around the table refilling the steaming bowls, appears to be the restaurant’s hostess, cook, waitress, cashier, and dishwasher.

“Bring us whatever kind of wine you have,” I tell her. “Red, if possible. Or white. Pink’s fine.”

“And Becca,” Tess says, turning with a smile, “Since we have two stories to tell this afternoon, would you mind starting yours over lunch?” But Becca is checking her phone, or at least trying to, turning it one way and then another in search of bars, and doesn’t answer.

“She’d be happy to start,” says Jean.

“Come on, Mom,” Becca says, still shaking the phone. “She asked me, not you.”

“And you didn’t answer. So I answered on your behalf.”

Becca smiles back at Tess, all sweetness and cooperation. “Of course I’ll go.”

“Concentrate on your food for five minutes,” Jean says. “Then you won’t have to talk with your mouth full.”

“Maybe I want to talk with my mouth full,” Becca says and thus they are off, a mother and daughter having just one more argument about something neither of them can name. There’s no point in any of us trying to tell them they should stop for a moment and really appreciate each other, for of course they know their time together is limited, that someday the girl will be grown and the mother will be gone. But for now they must fight with every step along the path. It’s a mother’s job to say all the words in the world, just as it’s a daughter’s job not to hear any of them. Each woman must make her own mistakes. To retrace every step of the path her mother walked, and to learn, for the first and millionth time, the untransferable lessons of womanhood.

 The Tale of Becca 

“Last year, my junior year,” Becca says, “I was cast as the lead in my class play. Okay, maybe not. Shit, I guess I’m lying already.” She looks around the table, where most of us are on our second bowls of the stew and are tearing off hunks of the bread, smearing it with that strong yellow butter the pubs bring out with every meal. Real butter, and irresistible. I will miss it when I get back to the States.

“I wasn’t exactly cast in the role,” Becca amends. “I was the understudy and then the girl who they really wanted got sick and I took her place. Her name was Hillary McAllister. Still is, I guess. And when I said ‘class play’ that wasn’t entirely the truth either. We do two plays each year in drama, one for the student body and one that we take to the local elementary schools and that’s the one I was in, the kiddie play.
Sleeping Beauty.
And that’s who I was. Sleeping Beauty.” She looks around the table again. “Jesus. This is harder than I would have thought, trying to tell your own story.”

“Hillary was cast,” her mother says tonelessly, “and then Hillary got sick. Some form of mononucleosis.”

“I didn’t think kids got mono anymore,” says Silvia.

“Of course they do,” says Jean. “Mono never goes out of style, like kissing.”

“I think all the old ailments are coming back into fashion,” I say. “I even know a woman who recently had her appendix taken out.” From the end of the table, Tess makes a face at me.

“The CDC in Atlanta keeps frozen cells of all sorts of ancient diseases,” Valerie says. “They have bubonic plague. Which makes you wonder what would happen if somebody, like, dropped the jar.”

“Oh, they could probably knock out the bubonic plaque with penicillin now,” Silvia says. “They just didn’t have anything to fight it with back in the old days.”

“You think?” Valerie says. “Penicillin?”

“It’s entirely possible,” Steffi says. “We have so many more weapons now in the war against germs and we—”

“Hey,” says Becca. “Remember how we set that rule that nobody can interrupt the storyteller? And let’s go back to how Hillary got mono because this story is all about kissing and how somehow I had managed to make it to eleventh grade without ever having been kissed. That’s an awful thing to admit and it makes me sound retarded and save your breath, Mom, I know I shouldn’t say ‘retarded’ like that. I know it’s like ‘fat,’ it’s just a word you’re not supposed to say. But most girls . . . by junior year, anybody even halfway cute has already had sex and that’s just the truth. By the time they were my age they had finished something I hadn’t even started and I would have died if anyone knew the truth. Virgins are . . . unchosen.”

She stops here and dips a fingertip into a smear of butter on her plate. Takes her time licking it off. It’s as if she’s expecting someone to say something, like she’s waiting for some chorus of protest to rise from the older women. That we will all rush in to say that virgins are not the unchosen, but rather the ones doing the choosing, and that sometimes the best way a woman can take charge of her sexual destiny is by remaining chaste. There’s power in restraint—this is what the girl expects us to tell her. That it’s smart to wait for the right man to come along. Test him, make sure he’s worth it, before you give up the goods.

So Becca lingers over the next bite of stew, her spoon making a scraping sound against the bottom of the bowl. A bottle of wine—red, as luck would have it—has manifested itself at my elbow and I uncork it and begin pouring, but no one speaks. Each woman in the parliament holds her counsel as to whether or not virginity is a desirable state and, even though Becca has claimed to want a silent stage, I can tell that our refusal to respond has flummoxed her. Ever since we left London she’s been waiting for a simple love story and none of us has been able to give her one. She has walked mile after mile, hour after hour, through the English countryside listening to tales of compromise and reinvention, stories of jealous sisters and royal curses and dementia and pornography because once a woman gets past a certain age—thirty? twenty-five? or, God help us, is it even younger?—she’s forced to accept that when it comes to love, things will never be simple again. Simple love stories are for virgins or, better yet, those who are utterly unconscious. Of course she played Sleeping Beauty. What else could a girl like Becca be?

“If you’re thinking I’m wrong to gloat because Hillary McAllister got mono, get over it,” Becca says. “Because she was always mean to me. Mean to everybody. So she deserved to get mono. That’s just justice and there’s nothing wrong with wanting justice.”

Once again, no one steps in to confirm or correct this last observation. There are no debates about justice versus mercy, only the stacked bowls that mark the end of the stew and the gurgles that mark the beginning of the wine. Valerie pushes her chair back and props her knee against the side of the table. Lunch, after all, isn’t just our midday meal but also our chance to rest. We’ve learned to settle in for a while.

“The thing about getting the lead in
Sleeping Beauty,
” Becca goes on, when she finally realizes no one intends to take the bait, “is that you’re onstage the whole time, but you don’t have to memorize many lines. You speak during the first part where Beauty pricks her finger . . . there’s that word again, ‘prick.’ Didn’t somebody else prick something, in one of the other stories?”

Eros,
I think,
in Angelique’s story.
He pricked himself on one of his own arrows just as Sleeping Beauty pricked herself on her spinning wheel. They brought their enchantment upon themselves, seemingly by accident, more likely by destiny. Because that’s the real story, isn’t it? The one none of us can stop telling. That the end is the beginning, and the beginning marks the end. That no matter how far or fast we walk, everyone eventually circles back. Comes face-to-face with whatever they were trying to escape.

But I don’t say anything. No one does. It seems the longer we stay silent, the more powerful the silence grows.

Becca shrugs and fluffs the hair around her face. Normally it’s slicked back but today, perhaps in concession to the morning rain, she’s wearing it differently. It’s brushed forward into bangs and as she peers out from beneath the orangey-red fringe, she looks even younger than usual. “The prince,” she says, “was played by Josh Travis, and he’s the best-looking guy in my whole school. I forgot to tell you that part, but it matters, that I got a good prince and not a crappy prince. Because in drama class, they don’t have many guys so you just never know.” Someone has poured wine in her glass and she pauses again, looking down at this unexpected gift with surprise. On previous meals the bottle has never stopped at her, but rather has been passed across her plate, the alcohol flowing from woman to woman but never from woman to girl. It’s a moment. She lifts the glass and takes a small sip, taking care not to make eye contact with her mother. Becca is what, seventeen now? Eighteen at most? Too young to drink in an American restaurant, but this is England, where those rules don’t apply, and besides, her mother doesn’t seem inclined to stop her. She’s not even looking at her daughter, merely gazing at the child in the street. It’s another unspoken rule of the Canterbury Trail, I suppose, that the storyteller is allowed to drink.

Becca puts the glass down, a thoughtful frown on her face. “So here’s where we are. Hillary gets sick and stays sick and I get my chance. Each afternoon in rehearsals I lie there on the bed pretending to be in a coma while the action goes on all around me. And I know that it’s building up to the big kiss, even though we never rehearse that part. Our teacher, Mr. Grayson—I think he’s gay, Gayson Grayson, that’s what all the kids say—he says we’ll save the kiss for the first performance because that way it will be fresh. The only note he gives me is that I shouldn’t respond too soon. That when Josh bends down and kisses me, I have to remember that I’ve been asleep for a long time, and that I’m slowly coming out from under the spell that’s been cast. ‘Emerge in layers,’ he would say. ‘Like a butterfly leaving its cocoon.’ So maybe he was gay, because that’s a gay thing to say. But the point is that for most of the play, all I have to do is lie there on the plywood bed the shop class built and wait to be kissed.”

Becca runs a fingertip around the rim of her wineglass. “You’re all thinking I’m not right to play Sleeping Beauty,” she says, with her normal defensiveness, but I for one am thinking nothing of the sort. Behind the bright hair and dark glasses, the oversize ear holes and floppy clothes, Becca truly is a beauty. As lovely as her mother probably was in her own youth, with the same porcelain princess prettiness, the sort that no degree of rebellion can totally eradicate. “But they gave me a long blonde wig and a long blue dress and I think—” She stops. “I can’t say for sure if Josh wanted to kiss me. He expected he’d be kissing Hillary and she was the right sort of girl for a boy like him to kiss. They were already going out. They had probably already done it. Done everything. I don’t know.”