The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  So I’d crept halfway back down the stairs and looked through the abandoned paperbacks, finally choosing a techno-thriller with a screaming black and silver cover, the sort of thing I would never read at home. And sure enough, along with the purrs of the cat, the book put me right to sleep. In fact, it was the best night of rest I’ve had in as long as I can remember and I needed it, although now in the light of day, the other women are all chatting easily among themselves and I’m the one who still isn’t sure of their names.

  “Jean has the first story,” Tess is saying to Steffi, who seems nearly panicked at the thought that there is some field somewhere in England we’re not going to tromp through. “So she will be the one continually walking and talking, which can be rather draining, even for someone who is fit. It’s hard to say what rhythm she will fall into, and the one who tells the story is the one who establishes the speed of the group. That’s an unbreakable rule of Canterbury—that the listeners adapt to the storyteller, and that each story demands its own pace. For listening is a bit like a dance, isn’t it? You move to the music of the moment. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I’m sure you understand” is what you say to people who clearly don’t, but as she speaks, Tess glances pointedly from Steffi to Jean. Jean knows how to dress for her body, so she looked slim enough yesterday in the George, but now, in boots and pants and the harsh light of day, it’s obvious she’s heavier than she first appeared. In other words, Steffi is just going to have to get a grip on herself. With Jean as our storyteller, we’re not going to be breaking any land speed records this first morning.

  “And we won’t walk single file,” Tess says, this time turning to speak to the whole group. “If we march in a straight line, like good little soldiers, the one in the front won’t be able to hear the one in the back, and vice versa. So we shall travel like true pilgrims, walking abreast.”

  Great. Now the Broads Abroad are the Broads Abroad Abreast. The furrow in Steffi’s brow deepens. She’s probably thinking that walking in a clump will slow us up even more. She’d be better off unclipping that Fitbit right now and flinging it into whatever cosmic black hole has sucked up my iPhone. Otherwise she’s going to spend the entire trip in torment.

  “And the route won’t be especially picturesque until we’re farther out from the city and the landscape opens up,” Tess continues, speaking as if we’re walking out of New York. The town seems utterly picturesque to me, kind of like the front of a jigsaw puzzle box. But Tess is pointing into the distance, toward a vista of rolling hills in colors of sage and moss and gold. The light is already beginning to grow slowly around us.

  “I may walk in circles around the group so I can keep up my pace,” says Steffi. “Promise you’ll speak up if anyone finds that irritating.”

  And so we start. We move down the sharply pitched road that leads from the town toward the fields, our boots skidding a little in the pebbles. Becca hangs back and I find myself dropping a bit away from the clump of women too, falling in step with her.

  “Don’t you want to hear your mother’s story?” I ask, even though I know it’s a loaded question. Diana’s ashes are jostling along with me in the backpack. I debated keeping the ziplock bag in the suitcase and sending it ahead with Tim to the next inn down the trail, but then decided that to do so would be to defeat the whole point of the trip. She wanted to walk to Canterbury, not ride in a van to Canterbury, so it would seem that her remains must come along with me, pressed into their own little pouch.

  Becca shoots me a sour look. “I’ve heard it.”

  I bet you have, I think, because I realize, maybe more than the others, that whatever we’re about to hear from Jean is not a spontaneously told story, but a tale that she has recited many times to many listeners, a narrative that has been polished and sharpened through the years. This is why Jean was not alarmed at the idea of going first. She’s more than ready. And Becca has heard it all so many times before that she’s gone numb to the meaning. The girl has long ceased to be able to distinguish fact from fantasy in her mother’s pet stories, even if they’re about events she herself witnessed, even if the events happened to Becca as much as they happened to Jean. My mother collected family legends too—stories of how my parents came to Aunt Letitica’s orchard and cleared the land, stories of how my father built the first cider press with coat hangers and the shell of a broken washing machine. The pond in the back, so bountiful that sometimes fish leapt unprompted into rowboats. How much I loved that pond, how I could swim before I could walk. Could I really swim before I could walk? Did the fish really leap into rowboats? Does it matter?

  Most families have their official stories, I imagine, and they tell them to each other over and over, each repetition reassuring both the speaker and the listeners that the world is an understandable place. I suppose you could even argue that the very act of telling a story is an act of faith, for it advances the belief that life truly has a beginning, middle, and end. The belief that we’re all headed somewhere, that the seemingly random events of our lives mean something, that tomorrow will be more than just a repeat of yesterday, all over again.

  “Here’s the gate,” says Tess, as we step off the country road and turn toward an open field. A small blue tile nailed to the fence shows a stick man walking with a staff and a pack on his back. Google was right. A trailhead like this would be easy to miss.

  “So this is where the official route to Canterbury begins?” Steffi asks, her voice doubtful. I think we were all expecting something more.

  “Our feet are now on the path,” Tess says as we step, one by one, over the muddy ditch and through the gate. She nods at Jean. “So begin whenever you wish.”

  The Tale of Jean

  “My father didn’t think Allen was good enough for me,” Jean says. “That’s where it all starts. Maybe that’s where all love stories start. Daddy could be like that—critical, always measuring everyone around him, and so of course Allen was determined to do what he could to prove him wrong. He said he would provide for me and the kids, provide not just adequately but spectacularly, that’s what he always said. That he would not be content until our children went to the best schools and I didn’t have to work and we lived in a house . . . in the sort of house that even my father would have to acknowledge was a fine place.”

  But here she pauses, as if doubting herself already. “Of course it wasn’t just that. I don’t want you to think Allen was some sort of workaholic, one of those men who rose at dawn and left with a briefcase. He was always there for us, especially on Sundays. Those were our family days. Isn’t that true, Rebecca?”

  “This is your story, Mom.”

  “So it is. But where do you start the story of a marriage? I could tell you how we met. It was on a boat, on one of those cruises around New York Harbor, which is silly, but if I go back that far we will be halfway to Canterbury before we finish the first story, and that won’t do, will it?” Jean pushes back a strand of her golden hair with a nervous little titter, but no one says anything, so she goes on.

  “We had been married ten years when Allen got the chance to go to Guatemala with his company. He was in oil, you know. It was a huge opportunity, a much higher salary, and on top of that there was an additional cost-of-living stipend that they paid anyone willing to live out of the country for eighteen months or longer. The stipend was so generous we knew we could bank virtually all of his salary. This was our chance, and you don’t get many. He knew it and so did I. Most of the men didn’t take their families with them on these assignments, or at least not those going to Central America. Guatemala could be unpredictable in those days, especially if you got away from the tourist areas. Americans were often the target of kidnappers, and we had heard of one family . . . Well, we knew the people, actually, at least in a social sense, and they had a daughter, just fourteen . . .”

  “Skip that part, Mom,” Becca says. “No one needs to hear it.”


  “You’re right. It’s a dreadful story. Suffice to say Guatemala was not always safe for Americans who were known to be rich, and all Americans were rich by Guatemalan standards. Allen wanted me to stay in Houston with the kids, but I couldn’t bear the thought we’d be separated for so long, that the children would only see their father two or three times a year.” She sighs. “So it was all my fault in a way, you see, everything that happened while we were down there. Because I was the one who insisted we pack up and go with him. Even the dog. Even Taffy. He was supposed to be for the boys, this big bounding golden retriever. But he always slept on your bed, do you remember, Rebecca?”

  Becca doesn’t answer. She’s evidently thrown in the towel. Decided to force her mother to tell this guilty tale on her own, for better or for worse.

  Jean lets a beat pass, then continues. “We had so much to take and we had the dog, so we drove. It took forever and it seemed with each mile of road we put behind us that we were leaving more of the world we once knew. I think I began to realize, somewhere in the southern part of Mexico, that it might have been a mistake. It always works like that, doesn’t it? You get these little glimmers now and then that you’ve lost your way, that you’ve somehow gotten on the wrong road, but by the time you realize it . . . there was no turning back. I’d pulled the children out of school, leased the house. Everything we owned was in that U-Haul.”

  She pauses midstride and automatically we all match her rhythm, stopping to adjust our backpacks, bending to pull wrinkles out of our socks. We’ve walked just long enough to realize what’s chafing, which of our clothing or packing choices may have been a mistake.

  “But that’s what makes a marriage a marriage, right?” Valerie says. “What holds it together? Doesn’t every couple get to a point somewhere in Mexico and you realize it would be even more trouble to turn back than it is to go forward?”

  She’s probably right. It sounds right. But none of the married women say anything and the silence just sits there like a brick. Finally Valerie shrugs. “I’m only guessing,” she says. “I’ll always be single . . .”

  Okay, another beat. Another awkward moment, all of us standing in a circle, facing each other for once, scratching and stretching and drinking water, and here out of nowhere Valerie feels compelled to announce not just that she’s single—which puts her in the same category as me and probably several of the others—but that she’ll always be single. That’s completely different, and a rather extraordinary thing to say. Such a matter-of-fact closing of a door, and marriage is a door that sooner or later almost everyone walks through.

  Maybe she’s gay, I think. I should try to like her better.

  But Jean has bristled at Valerie’s comment. “I never seriously entertained the notion of turning back,” she says, a bit snappishly, as we all re-heft our packs and resume the trail. “I had made the decision to follow my husband and that’s not the sort of commitment a woman breaks. And besides, Guatemala turned out to be wonderful in its own way, at least when we first got there. We had a bigger house, much larger than the one in Texas, almost an estate, really. The owners before us had named it Paradiso Blanco, and there was all sorts of security. There was even a school within the American enclave, although there weren’t many children and I don’t think the kids liked it much. They missed their friends back home, and I missed mine, but we did have the servants. Five of them, counting the chauffeur.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, she laughs. “When I say it that way, it all sounds very grand, doesn’t it? Like we were characters in a movie with a cook and a gardener and both an upstairs and downstairs maid and of course Antonio, the driver. He’s the one I’ll always remember best because he was always with us. Allen said it wasn’t safe for me to drive. So I didn’t, and when I finally got back to Texas, it was almost as if I’d forgotten how. I remember sitting in a car that first time, sitting there in the driver’s seat behind the wheel. It had been two years, maybe a little more, and for a second I couldn’t even remember how to crank it. I hadn’t truly forgotten, of course. Driving is such an automatic thing, like swimming or breathing, but at first . . . well, the point is that Guatemala was a different world, and there was good and bad in that. Allen left every morning after breakfast with the driver and then Antonio would come back and take the kids to their little school. He had to drive them, even though it was just down the street. The level of fear was that high, you see, and then Antonio would return again, in case there was someplace I wanted to go.”

  Another pause. Her face is red and she is panting gently. The chore of walking and talking has taken something out of her, just as Tess predicted it might do. Jean is a woman who unravels easily, I think. The sort of woman who might come completely apart if you found a certain thread and pulled it.

  “Of course,” Jean says, regaining her poise, “the trouble with Antonio waiting on me is that there was never anyplace to go or anything to do. Five servants sounds like a fine thing, until you have five servants. So I flitted around the house all day and then somehow, at some point, I heard of a church that was doing a ministry in the dump. For there are these enormous garbage piles, you see, in the cities of Central America, and people actually live in them. Whole families, from grandparents to infants, and it’s appalling, but that’s how they live, scavenging among the garbage for food and clothes, anything they can use for shelter. This church had plans for a clinic and a school.”

  “Mom,” Becca says sharply. “That isn’t part of the story.”

  “Isn’t it? I’m not so sure. Because that’s something else I blame myself for. Everyone warned me that it was dangerous to work with the ministry. The other women who lived in the enclave tried to tell me. You go through those gates, they’d say, and you take your chances. If there’s anything you need from the outside, can’t you just send your driver? For some reason they never suffered with the isolation like I did. They were happy with the situation, or at least happy enough, and they played bridge and had dinner parties and changed clothes three or four times a day. You would have thought we were living in one of those British manor houses in an Agatha Christie mystery—you know, one of those books which start out so peaceful and then someone gets knifed? But the point is that the other wives were far more clever than I was. They found ways to fill their days. Are there manor houses near here, Tess?”

  “A few,” Tess says. “Old family estates.”

  “And are they lovely?”

  “We could stop at one if you like. There won’t be much to see in the gardens this time of year, I’m afraid.”

  “I would very much like to tour the gardens.”

  “Come on, Mom, focus,” Becca says. “You’ve been talking for twenty minutes and nobody has the slightest freakin’ idea what this story is even about.”

  “It’s about how I killed my husband,” says Jean. “Or rather, how he died trying to protect me. Me and Rebecca and the boys.”

  “That’s not what happened, Mom.”

  “Of course it is. Where was I? Where in the story, I mean.”

  “You found yourself in a land that managed to be simultaneously dangerous and boring,” Tess says gently. She must be used to prompting people in their stories, used to nudging them back onto the trail of the narrative when they have wandered off.

  “And it was all my fault,” Jean says, blinking back tears. “Allen knew from the start that the kids and I shouldn’t come with him, that a family like us would be a target. But yet there I was every morning, traipsing around the trash dump dispensing gloves and cartons of milk and these bizarre comic-book Bibles. They had the strangest and most distorted images of Christ. I remember thinking that they had drawn him to look like an Incan, all short and squat and actually rather frightening . . .”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” someone says. I turn my head to look. Silvia, squinting into the distance as always, looking past us to something only she can see.
“Those people had nothing, and you were just trying to help.”

  “Yes, trying to help, trying to give the kids milk and trying to give myself something to do,” Jean says. “I was hardly Mother Teresa. Because that’s what originally drew them to us, you see, the sight of our stupid limo going back and forth between Paradiso Blanco and the dump. The license plate was 487, I remember that too. The Americans always had low numbers. No, volunteering with this church was just one more thing I did wrong, one more thing that caught their eye. Or maybe they would have found us anyway. We had the driver, of course, and the children are all so blonde . . .”

  All the children used to be blonde, I think, looking at Becca’s shock of Crayola-colored hair. The girl is right—her mother’s story is rambling and nonsensical and yet my heart is pounding slightly and not just with the effort of getting up that last hill. Tess’s promise has come true . . . now that we are a couple miles out of the village, the land has opened up around us. The world seems bigger, as if God has exhaled, and the meadows stretch in every direction. Clumps of sheep graze here and there, but the land is otherwise empty, gone fallow with the season. There are no signs of human occupation. No houses or cars or power lines or farm machinery. It could be 1515 instead of 2015. There’s nothing to place us in time except ourselves, our hiking boots and backpacks and shiny water bottles. And of course, Jean’s story.