The Canterbury Sisters Read online

  How are you? he has texted. Where are you? We really need to talk.

  When I look up from the phone the British man is still watching me, his head cocked to one side. It’s a look Freddy gets sometimes. “So it’s off with you, I take it? Leaving now, is that the call? And you’re sure you won’t stay for just one more glass of wine?”

  I shake my head. “Sorry. It looks like I’m about to take a very long walk.”

  Three

  Apparently my sick guide took the time to text her colleague, for I seem to be expected at the Broads Abroad table. The hostess introduces herself merely as Tess, without mentioning any of her academic titles or accolades, and stands to shake my hand.

  “I wasn’t at all certain you would join us,” she says. “But nine makes our party more complete, does it not?” A strange remark. I try to think of something that naturally falls in units of nine, but I can’t.

  “What’s the most women you’ve ever taken touring at a time?” asks a pretty blonde woman with an almost ridiculously symmetrical face. She reminds me of Grace Kelly, which is probably the effect she intended, for she’s twisted her hair into a twist at the nape of her neck, a style that no one wears anymore. Looking at her, it’s hard to understand why it ever fell out of fashion. Already I’ve forgotten her real name. I was introduced to everyone when I approached the table, but it’s hard to absorb eight names at once, even when you’re not woozy and under emotional duress.

  “Twelve’s the limit the touring company will allow,” Tess says. “We pride ourselves on giving every guest individual attention. This isn’t one of those packaged jaunts where I’m waving a little yellow flag and screaming out facts as we walk.”

  “Twelve counting you, or twelve tourists?” the blonde woman persists. I can’t imagine why this matters to her. Maybe she’s hosted a lot of dinner parties and has had to be concerned with such things, or maybe she’s superstitious about the number thirteen.

  “Twelve not counting me,” Tess says, “and at Broads Abroad we think of you as our guests, not as tourists. Which makes me your host, and not your guide.”

  “It takes thirteen to form a coven,” another woman says. She’s sitting at the end of the table, has loudly pronounced her name to be Valerie, and she looks a bit mad. Her hair is parted badly, straight down the middle except for one great zag halfway through, and her makeup is smeared. If I were to be charitable I’d assume she’d flown the red-eye in from the States, just as I did, but that’s probably true of most of the women at the table and none of the rest of us look quite so blurry. At least I don’t think I do. Valerie, I repeat to myself, hoping to keep at least one of them firmly centered in my mind. I once had a doll called Valerie. It’s a charming name. It doesn’t suit her.

  “Hostess?” I say to Tess. “I assume that’s in honor of the fact that Harry Bailey was the host in The Canterbury Tales?” I don’t particularly like myself when I do this. These little pseudo questions are common at wine tastings—a display of knowledge disguised as an inquiry—and I notice the table has fallen slightly more silent since my arrival. I guess I’m a bit of a buzzkill.

  “No, we use the term ‘host’ on all our tours,” Tess says, “no matter where we’re going. But I’m glad Che has brought the subject up, because this is as good a time as any to discuss your collective expectations for our little adventure. Each group has its own personality, you know, its own dynamic. Some wish to hold more to the Canterbury Tales theme than others.” She shrugs, her narrow shoulders rising and falling in her starched oxford shirt, and it amazes me not only that she would wear white here in this boisterous pub, on the brink of a long walk, but also that she would have managed to keep herself so pristine during this long siege of eating and drinking.

  “What do you mean?” asks another woman. The only black person in the group, which should have made it easier to remember her name, but I can’t think of that one either. She has the rangy, easy quality of an athlete and she sits back in her chair, one ankle resting on the other knee. Her boots are expensive, that mellowed sort of Italian leather, and she’s ordered a salad, with the remains sitting before her on the table. A rookie mistake in a British pub. Who knows, this may have been the first salad that’s ever left the kitchen. It looks like they just threw together a pile of sandwich toppings—shredded lettuce, white onion, pickles, a bit of a sad tomato, sprinkles of olive.

  “Tradition has always demanded that pilgrims travel to Canterbury in a group,” Tess says. A hush has fallen over the table and we have unconsciously taken on the postures of schoolgirls, shifting in our seats and watching attentively as Tess folds her slim white hands before her. “The surface explanation is that the trail started a trade route between London and the port of Dover, and thus attracted robbers. A lone traveler might have been beset at any moment along his journey and there was safety in numbers. In other words, the spirit of fellowship so long associated with Canterbury began as a matter of pure survival. Am I boring you yet?”

  Eight heads shake no.

  “Most of the pilgrims, like Chaucer’s characters and like us, did not know their fellow travelers before their journey began,” Tess says. “They called each other ‘companions,’ from compagnons, an old French word which was not in wide English use at the time. They didn’t need it. Before pilgrimages came into fashion, most people stayed at home, rarely straying from the village of their birth, and thus not coming in contact with many strangers. ‘Companion’ means ‘someone you eat with,’ nothing more and nothing less. But the idea of breaking bread with new people, those whom one had so recently met . . . The conversations that must have arisen along the trail and this sense of a shared mission . . .”

  She shakes her head, as if stunned at the wonder of it, as if she has no trouble at all imagining the excitement of the medieval pilgrims leaving the gates of their villages, turning their backs on the small and familiar, setting forth to find death or salvation, or both. She must be a good teacher. She’s probably given this speech a hundred times and yet she’s not jaded. The everyday miracles of life have not yet been lost upon her.

  “But of course here in our happy party of nine we are not all strangers, are we?” she continues. A rhetorical question, for she knows the composition of the group better than anyone. “There are two pairs among us. Jean has come with her daughter . . .”

  And here she nods toward Grace Kelly, who yes, of course is Jean, I remember now, and a teenage girl at the other end of the table. Becca, she turns out to be, and I find it interesting that she’s not elected to sit beside her mother, not even at this first meal. Of course she’s much younger than anyone else at the table, save Tess, and most likely has been dragged on this trip against her will, just as I was swept up in so many of my own mother’s madcap adventures through the years.

  I feel a surge of sympathy for the girl, who, now that I look closely at her, has the same sort of all-American prettiness as her mother. Or at least the potential of it. But where I let my resemblance to Diana slowly erode throughout years of neglect, Becca seems to be trying to consciously obliterate any similarity between her and Jean. She has dyed her short, spiky hair a cartoonish shade of orangey-red, has bitten her nails to tiny turquoise-painted dots, and is wearing glasses so heavy and dark that I wonder if she really needs them. They seem like an affectation, a prop, like Sir Walter Raleigh’s red cape, a way for you to know what game our young Becca is playing the minute you meet her. The glasses and the hair all but scream I am not my mother. You make that mistake on point of death.

  Jean smiles and flaps a well-manicured hand in the direction of her daughter. “Yes, Becca and I have been planning this trip for years,” she says. “My younger two are boys, both athletes with all the practices and schedules and tournaments that come with that sort of life. It’s hard to get some real mother-daughter time, so when her fall break rolled around . . .”

  Her voice trails off. Becca sa
ys nothing, so Tess smoothly weaves back in. “And we have a pair of friends from Texas,” she says. “Claire and Silvia . . .”

  Now these two are an even odder duo than the mother and daughter. Because you expect daughters to boomerang off their mothers, to assert themselves by trying to be wildly different. But friends are often similar, and these women seem to share nothing. It’s hard to tell if they are even close in age, although somehow I suspect they might be, that their friendship is one of long standing. If they were in an ad, Claire would be the one who’d been wise enough to purchase the two-hundred-dollar skin cream and Silvia would be the one who had not. Claire is blonde like Jean, but icily so, silver instead of gold, almost Nordic, and her face is so flawless that she’s probably had work done, but done so well that you can’t quite be sure. While Jean comes off as a woman who has graciously accepted the mantle of her fifties—your most serene highness of some minor kingdom—Claire is edgier, almost hip. I want her earrings. I want her scarf. When I get to know her better, I suspect there’s a good chance I might want her life.

  Silvia, in utter contrast, is worn and weathered, like a woman who spends her days training dogs or maybe even breaking horses. Something outdoors in the brutal elements of Texas. Age spots dot her forehead and temples, the splotches undimmed by makeup, and she seems to be locked in a permanent squint. It’s difficult, keeping track of three women who are so close in age or at least far enough north of me that the actual number hardly matters. And yet they are all different and I need to stop for a moment and figure out how. Okay. If Jean is warm and golden and Claire is cool and silvery, then Silvia could be called bronze. Solid and matte, less pricey than the other two but more durable, a woman who has been tested by time, who has a sheen rather than a shine. I look at their hands for confirmation of my theories, for hands are the purest indication of a woman’s way of life, the one part of the female anatomy that cannot be frozen, dyed, lifted, sucked, or tucked, although I’m sure they’re working on a way to remedy even that. Jean’s hands are plump and soft, with oval pink tips and a wedding band cutting into the flesh. Claire has the square, dark nails of a city manicure, a single oversize amber ring. Silvia’s hands are utterly unadorned and unpolished, as if she has recently been digging in a garden. As if she is accustomed, in fact, to ripping potatoes from the black earth.

  Okay, so the older three are straight enough in my mind, but Jesus, all these names. I forgot half of them the moment I heard them, and I can hear the accusatory tickle of my mother’s voice in my ear. You never listen, Che, she would say. You never slow down long enough to really listen. So I make up a series of my little mnemonics to help myself keep it clean. Becca broods but Jean is genteel. I dare not ask Claire if that’s her real hair, and Silvia sits in the sun. Our host is Tess, no more, no less.

  From the end of the table vile Valerie speaks up again. “You asked us how much we wanted to make this trip about The Canterbury Tales, right? Does that mean you expect us to tell stories as we walk?”

  “I don’t expect you to do anything, but storytelling is certainly an option,” Tess says. “Some groups enjoy it.”

  “I like the idea,” says Claire, and there are nods of agreement from around the table. “But how do we decide what sort of stories to tell?”

  “Chaucer’s pilgrims told romances,” Tess said. “They challenged each other to see who could best articulate the nature of true love.”

  “Love,” I hear myself blurt out. “Are you sure we want to spend the whole trip talking about that?”

  “Your stories can be about whatever you choose,” Tess says. “I’m just describing the tradition. And of course, in Chaucer’s time they were talking about courtly love, which is quite different from what we think of as love today. Courtly love was a bit—I suppose ‘forbidden’ is one way to say it. Forbidden love.”

  Forbidden Love sounds like one of those romances you only buy online, for your Kindle, because you can’t bear the thought of someone seeing the cover. I think I know what Tess is really getting at—there was a lot of adultery in The Canterbury Tales—but most of the other women look confused, so Tess takes a dainty sip of beer and tries again to explain. “Courtly love was spiritualized and pure but always thwarted in some way. The object of your desire was married to another, or not of your social class. Perhaps they were even dead. But the point is that your great love was somehow unreachable, so you are doomed to worship them from afar, knowing that your passion would never be consummated.”

  “Depressing,” mutters the Athlete, licking a fingertip and picking up a fleck of olive from her plate. “Why bother to play a game you can’t win?”

  Tess smiles. “It does sound rather dark, doesn’t it? But the medieval mind was already—well, some might say it was already clouded by an unhealthy preoccupation with religion, with realms both above and below. So Chaucer and his pilgrims were ripe for an obsession with the unattainable.”

  “But weren’t some of the stories in The Canterbury Tales dirty?” I say. “All this stuff about belching and farting and affairs with the neighbor’s wife?” I got this off Google, the same place where I picked up that Harry Bailey was the name of the host, but the other women are openly staring at me now. I showed up late and I hate true love and I know way too much about Chaucer, that seems to be the general consensus of the table.

  Tess nods. “Exactly so. Yes. Right again. As they sat together in this inn, or one very much like it, the pilgrims may have made a pledge to tell tales of courtly love. But once they got on the trail and began walking and talking and getting to know each other, all sorts of stories came out. Some rather surprising and . . . yes, bawdy, just as Che says.”

  “Bawdy,” Jean says thoughtfully, as if she’s unsure what the word means.

  “Well, I like the idea,” says Valerie, making an ineffectual attempt to fluff her matted hair. She’s evidently one of those people who thinks that if she keeps repeating herself, her opinion might count as two votes. “We can tell whatever stories we want. How people get through . . . Oh, you know, all of it. Love. Death. Having the rug pulled right out from under you just when you think you’re set. How you keep your heart alive in the middle of this fucked-up world. You know, everything.”

  The 6:42 express to Canterbury is sounding better by the minute.

  Becca’s lips are pushed into a pout. “I don’t know why the stories have to be so heavy,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple love story, is there?”

  “Of course there isn’t,” her mother says. “But in the original Chaucer, wasn’t there some kind of bet?” Everyone is nodding. We’ve all read the same Wikipedia articles.

  “More of a contest,” Tess says. “The host declared that the pilgrim who told the best tale would be treated to a feast at the expense of the others when they returned from Canterbury.”

  “Then let’s do that,” says the Athlete, whose name I still can’t recall. “I love contests.”

  “Who won?” asks another woman. This is the first time I’ve heard her speak. She’s small, and her hair is as black as if someone has drawn it on with a Magic Marker. She has a rough voice that echoes Jersey, or Long Island, or maybe one of the lesser boroughs, a voice that brings to mind mobsters and pasta and TVs sold from the back of a van. Something about her seems familiar, although maybe I’m just thinking that I know her type. “In the real book, I mean.”

  “No one won,” Tess says. “They never reached Canterbury because Chaucer abandoned the tales halfway through.” She wrinkles her nose. “Some say he died. Others say he just got tired of the project and switched to other work. Either way, most of the pilgrims’ stories went untold.”

  “Then it’s decided,” says Claire, and I think she’s smiling, but her face is so taut that it’s hard to tell. “We will each share a story, and I think we should follow the example of the original pilgrims and challenge ourselves to explore the
nature of love. Tess will judge which one of us comes closest to the mark. Must the stories be true?”

  “She’s hoping the answer is yes,” says Silvia, and I swear that when she throws back her head and laughs, she all but whinnies. “Go ahead, darling. Tell them how many husbands you’ve had.”

  “Just four,” says Claire, her tone kind of coy and teasing. It’s the kind of voice most women save for when they’re talking to men, not each other, but I don’t think she can help herself. She reminds me of Diana. Seduction is her default mode. It’s like she has some sort of sexual Tourette’s. “Is that a lot?”

  It’s four more than I’ve had, but Silvia isn’t finished. “And tell them how old your present boyfriend is.”

  “Age isn’t an issue between us,” Claire says airily, so evidently he’s a freaking child.

  “I don’t think we should say the stories have to be true,” says Jersey. “I think we should say they can either be like reality or we can make them up, or it can be a little bit of both, and it’s the teller’s choice. Whatever she wants.”

  Becca glances at her mother and her mouth gives a little twist. I can’t quite read her expression, but there’s some problem brewing between them. Of course, there’s always something brewing between a teenage girl and her mother, the only question is what. Maybe they’ve argued at some point about the suitability of a particular boy—or perhaps they’ve argued about the suitability of a girl. It’s hard to say. Becca has an androgynous look, a sort of carefully calculated rebelliousness, but I imagine that’s typical of girls her age, so I’m probably reading this part all wrong.