The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  ACCORDING TO Wikipedia, Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey in Southwark, then a sketchy part of London. Southwark was outside the city limits, the medieval equivalent of a suburb, and thus beyond the reach of the law. The district was filled with prostitutes, thieves, and drunkards.

  Now it’s full of tourists. The entire London Bridge area, in fact, is a hub of amusements designed for foreigners on holiday. The bridge itself, as well as the dungeon and the tower and several full-size reproductions of sailing ships, which are moored and bobbing on the Thames. People are even walking the streets in costume, handing out flyers for museums and tour buses, and I am barely within Southwark when I’m accosted by a man dressed like Sir Walter Raleigh. I know he’s Raleigh because he makes a grand gesture—steps back and bows, taking off his shabby red velvet cloak as if he might lay it across one of the rather sizable puddles that have formed on the street. I guess the idea is for me to walk over the cloak like the original Queen Elizabeth, but I shake my head to show him this isn’t necessary. To show him that, despite the fact I’m wearing a backpack and dragging a suitcase, I’m not your typical American tourist. No matter how gallant he pretends to be, I will not follow him back to the dock and pay ten pounds to tour his boat. He’s got the wrong sort of fool entirely. To emphasize my independence and busyness, I step directly into the puddle.

  He smiles.

  “Fare thee well, milady,” he says, his voice rising a bit on the last syllable, as if it were a question.

  Is he mocking me? Is “Fare thee well” Elizabethan for “Fuck you”? I’ve always suspected that British men consider themselves wildly attractive to American women, and let’s face it: they have a point. They know we love them for their accents . . . that a British man can be pimply, broke, and rude, and yet an American woman will fawn over him, favor him without question over one of her own countrymen. But what is a woman supposed to say in response to “Fare thee well”? Is it “Fare thee well as well,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, or is it more proper to say “Thank you” or “I’m fine”?

  I look back over my shoulder as I walk away. Sir Walter Raleigh is already unclasping his cape for another tourist. Someone more appreciative, more feminine and helpless and lovable. She is giggling and her friends are taking a picture as she steps, one tentative foot hovering in midair above the moth-eaten red velvet. He bows before her, his plumed hat in one hand, her fingertips in the other. She is smiling in a way that suggests she will give him ten pounds. Smiling as if she would gladly give him anything he asked for.

  Even with the long walk, I get there early, nearly an hour before the women are due. The George Inn is not quite what I envisioned. Dark, yes, with red trim on the windows and copper pots, all that sort of inn-ish nonsense. But it’s larger and more upscale than I would have guessed and crowded, apparently with locals as well as tourists. I take a seat at the long oak bar and order my first drink. My state of mind is probably best illustrated by the fact that I think of it precisely like that. As “my first drink.”

  RESTAURANTS ARE the churches of my generation. These are the places where we congregate to confess our sins, drink wine, search for glimmers of hope, and most important, find community . . . or at least a momentary sanctuary from our loneliness.

  And if the George Inn truly were a church, this bar would be its shrine. I gaze up at the rows and rows of brightly colored bottles, all carefully lit from behind, as if they are jewels on display in a museum. Or maybe books on a library shelf. No, not quite. Not books. Because books contain stories of things that have already happened and the liquor bottles on these high shelves before me hold stories of what is yet to be. Lovers who have not met, swords still in their sheaths, journeys that may or may not be undertaken. And this goblet, I think, looking deeply into the one in my hand . . . something unexpected waits for me in the bottom of the glass. Some story will begin when I take my last sip.

  Almost two hours have passed and, obviously, I’m drunk.

  The group of women I’ve been waiting for entered some time ago and took a long, picnic-style table near the back. I can’t hear their conversation from this distance, but I can see their reflection in the mirror behind the bar. They don’t seem to have the awkwardness one might expect to find in a group of strangers who are about to spend six days together. They are talking and laughing, adjusting their chairs. They have shucked their coats and scarves, and raised the large beer-stained menus to their faces.

  And good luck with that, I’d like to tell them. I’ve eaten, but just barely.

  The leisurely quality of European service has always annoyed me. All around me, plates sit unbussed and glasses unfilled. Credit cards lie uncollected on their black folders and yet the young man tending the bar before me leans back against the wall with his arms folded across his chest, staring thoughtfully into space. I want to inform him he’d better hurry up, that I have somewhere else to be, but of course that’s a lie. I have absolutely nowhere else to be. No one on earth—save the owner of the dog kennel where I left Freddy and the college professor who, even as we speak, is slipping under the dark waters of anesthesia—has the slightest idea where I am right now. No one even knows what country I’m in. I am expected nowhere, by no one, and the free time yawns before me like a mouth. If I’m not careful, I might fall in and be swallowed on the spot.

  The eight women have arranged themselves with four on one side and three on the other, with the head of the table claimed by a woman who is clearly one of the youngest in the group. In fact, I’d call her a girl, midtwenties at best. Thin and dark with a low ponytail and an air of natural dignity. Evidently she’s the classics professor, the academic prodigy, and thus the leader of the tour. Suitcases and backpacks and purses are piled around their chairs and the group is drinking steadily, stopping every few minutes to toast something, most likely the beginning of their journey. Something about them seems strangely out of control from the start, but they’re the most animated table in the whole pub and I think there’s a foolishness in our lives—how we women make such a business of finding men, cajoling them, seducing them, taking care of them, and all the while on some level we know it would be so much easier, in some ways so much more fulfilling, to just allow ourselves to . . .

  Quick, I tell myself. Think a new thought. Type it over the last one and hit ENTER again, because I’m right on the verge of becoming That Woman. You know the one I’m talking about. That woman who has been recently burned and who has now sworn off men. The one who has to flag down everybody she passes on the street and tell them about what the bastard said when he was walking out the door and all the ways she’s been done wrong. The woman whose bitterness shows on her face, who walks through the world with clenched fists. The sort who shakes her head impatiently at Sir Walter Raleigh. I need to change my thinking, to pull my eyes from this long, bright table of laughing women and back to the other people in the pub.

  There’s a game I play when I get like this. I look around whatever room I find myself in and try to figure out who are the most attractive three men in the place. It doesn’t matter if a man is married, or way too young, obviously gay, or in some other way unattainable, because the point of the game is not to approach him or even to smile and flirt. The point is simply to notice that he’s out there. To remind myself that attractive men are everywhere.

  The most obvious choice here in the George is one of the waiters, another figure I’ve been following in the mirror. He’s not languid like most of them, but rather intense and full of energy. His eyes dart around the room, slipping from table to table as he walks among the diners, putting some things down and picking up others. There’s a calculated bit of stubble on his chin and he wears a white shirt and jeans with a stone-colored apron tied around his waist like a cummerbund.

  The second attractive man is not so obvious. I have to twist in my seat and really study the room before spotting him, sitting at a table of businessmen. Closer t
o my age and actually a little goofy looking, with his eyes too large behind his glasses. He has a deep cleft in his chin and dimples and he has what my father used to call a hail-fellow-well-met quality. Like he would insist on picking up the check for everyone, even people he doesn’t know. Not handsome, exactly, but there’s something in his face I trust.

  Okay. The third one. That’s harder yet again, but finally I settle on the man sitting right beside me. Balding, or perhaps it is just that he has clipped his gray hair so short that at first glance it looks as if there’s nothing there. It gives him the air of a Roman senator in one of those lavish BBC productions, the air of a man with power. He is thin—not with the thinness of a man who is naturally slender and has been so all his life, but rather thin like someone who’s been sick and is now slowly finding his way back toward the light. I’ve seen the same expression on people in Diana’s nursing home—those in the rehab wing, the recovering ones, the lucky ones, those who have bruised their shoulder against the dark wall of death but somehow survived. They have this same wary look. He wears a navy V-neck sweater, which I like, and he notices me noticing him. Of course he does. The fact that I play this game often has not made me particularly good at it.

  “You’re an American,” he says.

  An interesting comment, since I don’t believe I’ve spoken since he’s arrived. “How did you know that?”

  “You smiled at the waiter. That’s what you Americans do, you know. You smile at everyone.”

  He says it as if smiling is some sort of character fault. Despite the fact that this is a gross oversimplification, and this irritates me, I find myself smiling at him the whole time he’s speaking. We each flick our gaze to one another’s hands, note the absence of rings. He looks at my iPhone beside me on the counter. Freddy is my wallpaper, which I suppose tells this man my whole story, or at least as much as he needs for present circumstances. A woman with a dog for her wallpaper is a woman without children, without a husband. I scratch my hand. The bee stings are still itchy, especially this one so inconveniently located in my palm.

  “And what do you call your little dog?” he asks.

  “Freddy,” I say, and for some reason just saying the name out loud makes me want to weep. I’m exhausted, I think. Burned out by that half-assed plane sleep and now drunk as well and lost somehow, carried on the wings of fate to this strange pub. So when he furthermore asks what brings me to London, he’s probably expecting a simple answer, maybe just a single word like “business” or “holiday,” but instead I find myself telling him the whole story. The urn, the bees, the cancer, the appendectomy, the Broads Abroad. I run my fingertips around the edges of my iPhone as I talk, and perhaps I should say I tell him almost the whole story because I skip over the part about Ned. It’s too humiliating and if I were in a restaurant back in the States I wouldn’t even be talking to this man. I would be on Twitter, or checking email, alone in my virtual office, so I suppose it’s a bit of a small miracle that I’ve even noticed he is here. Hell, it’s a miracle that I’ve even noticed I am here. And yet I still hold my phone in my hand as we chat, just as I always do, even when it’s turned off, even when I am out of range or low on bars. It’s my talisman, and I clutch it like a Christian holds her prayer beads, my fingers restlessly flicking over the edges.

  “So you’ve brought your mum’s urn with you,” he says. He has a habit of pinching his lower lip between his thumb and pointer finger when he finishes a sentence, although he also has that same odd cadence that Sir Walter Raleigh had, where every statement sounds like a question, and every question sounds a bit like a statement. It’s a British thing, I suppose. The raised note at the end of the sentence implies uncertainty, but also a “haven’t you?” that confirms he already knows the answer to the question he just asked. It’s incredibly distracting, or maybe it’s his eyes, which are clear and gray-green and a little crinkly around the edges, that are distracting, or more likely it’s just that I am even drunker than I thought.

  “Not the urn,” I say. “It’s heavy and it requires more paperwork to get it through airport security. I’ve got her in a ziplock bag.”

  “Your mum’s in a ziplock bag?” he asks, and I can’t tell if he’s shocked or amused.

  “Enough of her. The gesture is symbolic, after all.”

  “Then why are you taking time to walk the whole trail? It’s rather long, isn’t it?”

  “Sixty miles.”

  Now it’s his turn to smile, but more with the eyes than the mouth. “I meant in a proper measure.”

  I stop and think. “About a hundred kilometers. They say it will take five days, which sounded like way too long until I got a look at these Broads Abroad people. The ones in the corner, the long table. They don’t look like brisk walkers, do they? In fact, they all look drunk.”

  He twists in his seat and studies the group but makes no comment on their sobriety, which is probably several notches higher than my own. I sound like a total bitch, I think. Why is a man like him even talking to me? The most obvious answer is that I possess a faint echo of Diana’s attractiveness—I have the same long legs and long neck, prompting comparisons to giraffes and colts or even sometimes swans. The same coloring, reddish-gold hair with blue eyes, and, when I am careful not to tan or freckle, my pale complexion makes the resemblance between us even stronger. Everyone says it is a beautiful and unusual combination, but I do not guard this birthright with the same zeal Diana employed. She wore wide-brimmed hats on the commune in the days before sunscreen and rinsed her hair with cider to bring out the sheen. That is the smell I most associate with her, the lingering whiff of apples, still there even after she would leave a room.

  “You know, a train runs from London to Canterbury at least twice an hour,” the man says, turning back from his survey of the Broads Abroad table to face me. “Hardly necessary to cross the route step by step, is it?”

  “So I just barrel down to Canterbury, toss my mother’s ashes in the direction of the Cathedral, barrel back, and I’m on the plane home to the States tonight, is that what you’re suggesting?” It’s nothing more than the plan I considered myself this morning, sitting on the tarmac, so I don’t know why my voice has suddenly gone all sharp and accusatory. I hate it when people quote me back to myself.

  He raises his palms in surrender. “I’m only saying that it’s an option. It’s hardly April out there, and you don’t look like you’re particularly longen to goon on a pilgrimage.”

  Okay, so he’s smart. Or at least smart enough to remember that “longen to goon” bit from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. And he also has a valid point. The short dark days of November are a strange time to undertake this sort of walk. A true pilgrimage should commence when the trees bud in the spring. It should earmark the start of something, not the end, and all around me things seem to be coming to a close. I’m as brittle as a leaf fallen from a tree. If someone brushed against me, I might crack.

  “Your phone,” he says, aware that he’s upset me and changing the topic. “You never put it down.”

  I’m not sure if that statement is intended as an observation or a criticism or even if it matters, because once again I feel myself bristle. “There’s no way of knowing how long I’ll have a good connection. Once we get on the trail . . .”

  He looks at me as if to say, “But you could talk to me because, after all, I’m right here in front of you,” and that annoys me too. I don’t know this man, and I guess you’re thinking that at this rate I never will. That I’ll never slow down or open up enough to know any man, but I haven’t come to England to chat up strangers in bars, have I? No. I’ve come for a very specific mission, and it lies in a different part of the George.

  I look at the group of women behind me in the mirror and then I finish the last swig of wine and rummage through my backpack for my credit card. My wallet is under the ziplock bag with Diana’s ashes. Even from the afterlife, she
nags me. Take a chance, I hear her say. Go on, baby, ’cause what’s the worst that can happen? You waste a week? That’s nothing in a world where people waste years at a time, waste decades without ever thinking of it. Hell, most people waste their whole lives.

  “I’ve offended you,” the man says.

  “Not at all,” I say, snapping my bag shut. “In fact, I should thank you. I’ve just been dumped, you know, two days ago back in the States. A man I was with for years—we even bought a cottage together and painted the porch—he up and left me for a wounded bird and now I have to start over, even though I’m at a god-awful age. Forty-eight, neither here nor there, too old to start over and too young to die and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. Plus I’m drunk and being a bit of a bitch, which I guess is obvious, and I know I haven’t been the easiest woman in the world to flirt with. But I do appreciate you for trying.”

  “A wounded bird?”

  “Oh, you know. One of those women who flap around and make little cheeping sounds.” I wave my hands to illustrate.

  The eyes crinkle again. “You don’t strike me as much of a wounded bird.”

  I don’t? I feel like I’m flapping and cheeping all over the place, like I’m weak and abstracted and dizzy, like I’m getting ready to tumble to the pub floor and just lie there until someone comes to sweep me away. But it pleases me that it doesn’t show. I glance down at my phone, on which a new message has just popped up. Odd. It’s the middle of the night in America, so I can’t think who would be texting me. But then I see that it’s Ned. He must have called and not gotten an answer or maybe he’s been calling, over and over, out of guilt, for the past two days and now he thinks I’ve gone and jumped off a cliff or something. I put the phone down on the counter and wave my credit card at the waiter.