The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  “Men don’t like to be seen,” says Claire.

  “Oh, please,” says Valerie. “Are you kidding? They strut like peacocks.”

  “That’s not the same thing as being seen,” Claire says.

  “No, it sure as hell isn’t,” says Silvia, putting her hand on her friend’s shoulder. It looks like Claire is wearing cashmere, like the woman is hiking in a cashmere sweater. We’re all just a tiny bit seedier today than we were back in London, except for maybe Valerie, who was such a wreck yesterday that she had no ground to lose, and Claire, who stepped out of her room this morning ready for a photo shoot in Town & Country. I wonder how she got her hair so smooth without a blow-dryer or flatiron, or if she’s one of those women who travel so frequently that they have a whole other set of European-wired hair care appliances.

  “Eros flew away in anger,” Angelique says, vigorously flapping her hands. “And Psyche’s left standing there with the knife, so at first she thinks she’ll just kill herself on the spot. But something stops her. I don’t remember what.” She hesitates and looks around again, this time her eyes slipping over the rural scene, pausing on the sheep, the barns, the shabby little trailers in the distance where Tess has told us the Polish migrants live during harvest. The farms we are walking through are all part of conglomerates now, even here, even on the trail that leads to sweet Canterbury. The local kids don’t hang around the county after graduation—they go to London looking for opportunity, or maybe farther still. Farmworkers from eastern Europe come in on buses to harvest most of the hops, and the apples too, and they shear the sheep. The migrants do it all, except for when Londoners travel down sometimes on Sundays, claiming they want to work the fields. Tess says it’s the new thing among the pseudo-humble, eco-conscious fashionable city set: to take the train south for the day, lugging along their Wellies and a picnic basket full of pâté and pear tarts from Harrods. They play at farming for an hour or two, take lots of pictures to put up on Instagram, and return home, no doubt having brought more trouble to the Poles than help. But I’m hardly in a position to sneer. Some might say that paying to walk somewhere is ridiculous, that Americans playing pilgrim are no better than Londoners playing farmer, and I wonder at the solitary woman weaving now between the trailers, what she thinks of us as we pass. She is pregnant and her arms are full of wet laundry.

  “There was a point where I thought about killing myself too,” Angelique says. “Dr. Drew stopped me. You might have seen that episode. You might have seen the whole thing, because the private investigator I let my sisters hire . . . he came back with this shit about Nico owing a fortune to the IRS. That’s the tax man,” she adds to Tess, who soberly nods. “Do you have a tax man here?”

  “Everywhere has a tax man,” says Valerie.

  “Did you know that if you turn someone who is delinquent in to the IRS you get ten percent of whatever it is that person owed to the government? So the more in arrears a person is, the bigger the payday for the snitch.” She laughs, an ugly sound. Angelique may stumble over some words but she has no trouble with the language of the courtroom. Terms like delinquent and arrears roll right off her tongue. “My sisters sure as hell knew it. That’s the kind of fact women like them make a point of knowing. So yeah, I’m the dummy in the story. I let them talk me into hiring an investigator and when he comes back with his dirt, they turn around and use it to screw Nico. He goes to jail and they go to Barbados.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” says Jean, who’s made a lifelong career out of blaming herself.

  “Do you really think that’s true?” Valerie is asking Tess. She is suddenly serious, with none of her usual silly jokes. “What you said a minute ago? That every woman is living her own hidden myth?”

  Tess shrugs and takes a sip from her water bottle. “It’s a tenet of child psychology. We recognize our story when we’re very young, which is why children can be so passionate about fantasy play. You know, superheroes and princesses and the like. It’s why as little girls we may have demanded to hear the same fairy tale over and over, because we somehow knew that it was our story. But as we grow older, our lives become more complex and blurred with details. We no longer see the patterns in ourselves as clearly.”

  “Mine was Cinderella,” I say.

  “And that would not have been my first guess,” Valerie says softly, straight back to the snark, but I let it slide. Because the memory has suddenly come back to me, full force.

  “My mother hated it, of course,” I tell them. “She did everything she could to try and guide me toward a more politically correct story. She told me that Cinderella started as a Chinese legend, that it came from a culture of foot-binding, because in the end the girl with the smallest foot won the man. And after that every time I wanted to watch Cinderella, she made me watch this documentary about foot-binding first.”

  “Jesus Christ,” says Silvia. “Your mother must have been a barrel of laughs.”

  “Actually, she was,” I say. “In her own way. You all would have liked her, a lot better than you like me.”

  Maybe I meant it as a joke. I don’t know why I ever said it, that part about nobody liking me—it just came out, but there is a brief, painful beat in which no one denies it. And then Jean says, a little too quickly, “If your parents were truly hippies, I’m surprised you were allowed to watch Disney movies at all.”

  “They were revolutionary hippies,” I say. “Out fighting the good fight. I was left alone a lot.”

  We fall back into a pack and walk on for a minute, past the Polish woman who has shifted the basket of laundry to her hip, and whose face is tilted back, bathed in the soft afternoon sun. She looks like a painting. Maybe a Vermeer. The effect is marred only by the fact that when she turns, I can see she has earbuds in, the source of her music evidently tucked in some sort of pocket. They look like the same kind Becca has pulled out a couple of times, when it’s late in the walk and she’s completely had enough of all these old women who just don’t understand love.

  “What happened next?” Claire finally asks. “With Psyche, I mean.”

  “She spends her whole life trying to get back what she lost,” Angelique says. “And her sisters . . . after they’ve driven Eros away from Psyche, they actually have the gall to make a move on him themselves. They figure if it worked for her, it’ll work for them, so they go up to the same cliff where she was supposed to meet her snake husband all those years ago and they jump off, thinking the same wind that carried her gently down will carry them down too. But it doesn’t, so it’s just splat, that’s all, a great big splat at the bottom, and I wish my sisters would jump off a cliff too, but they don’t. They just gloat.”

  “Do you still speak to them?” asks Jean.

  “Fuck no, I don’t speak to them. I guess you don’t watch the show. My sisters are dead to me. Dead,” she echoes, looking down at the ground.

  “I watch the show,” says Valerie, surprising everyone. “I love TV.” Which may be the most shocking statement that’s been made along the trail so far. Nobody says “I love TV,” especially not people who love TV. I mean, everybody loves TV, we all have our guilty pleasures, those shows on the high channels that we gobble compulsively, late at night, but we don’t admit it. We say, in fact, “I don’t watch much TV,” even if we know damn well that we grew up on the stuff, that it’s pressed into our collective DNA. That we can name every kid on The Partridge Family and quote whole scenes of Will & Grace by heart.

  Angelique smiles at Valerie. She seems anxious about the possibility that people might watch her show, but then she isn’t totally comfortable when people don’t watch it either. For what does it mean if she’s sacrificed her fortune and her family for Thursday night glory and yet here, in this lonely hops field, fifty miles north of Canterbury, we all tilt our heads and look at her quizzically? It must be some very low circle of hell, I would imagine, to have sold one’s soul for fame and to stil
l not be quite famous enough.

  “I’m off the series now,” she says. “And as long as Nico’s in the New Jersey State Correctional Facility, I just go from one place to another, even if I don’t know why. I went to the Great Wall of China, and to Iceland and Crete, and I cruised through the Panama Canal.”

  “Psyche was doomed to circle the world in search of her husband,” says Tess. I’m not surprised she knows the details of the story. It seems the more random and obscure the fact, the more likely she is to possess it. “And now you must wander too, it would seem.”

  “I don’t really mind,” says Angelique. “I liked China. I got a lot of cheap shirts there.” I have a sudden urge to hug her, to pull her black slick little head to my shoulder and let her cry it out. I bet she’s wanted to cry it out for a very long time.

  “How did they get him?” Becca asks. “Nico, I mean.”

  “I guess you don’t—” Angelique stops herself. “No, you’re all classy ladies. Out of my fucking league, that much is sure. Of course most of you don’t watch the show. Tell them, Valerie.” She seems suddenly drained—somber, exhausted from her recitation.

  “Nico came to her,” Valerie says. “Up in her high white bedroom that looked just like a cloud. He put one of his hands on each of her shoulders and he looked her right in the eye and he said, ‘So I guess this is adios, babe.’ It was like something in a movie. South America, is that where he was going? Columbia?”

  Angelique nods.

  “But they nabbed him in Newark Airport,” Valerie finishes. “Took him straight to jail with his passport still in his hand.”

  We’ve come to another hill, the biggest of the afternoon, and my thighs are already aching. When I look over at Silvia’s watch I see that it’s almost three, which means we have walked for six hours so far today, not counting the stop for lunch. Tess had said that our goal was to cover thirty kilometers on this first leg of the journey, which converts to about twenty miles, which is a lot for a group of women who are probably used to working out an hour a day, if that. And our pace has been slowed by the fact that this is country walking. Rolling hills and rugged footpaths, not the paved suburban streets we’re used to, meaning that we’ve probably progressed more like three miles per hour than the four I’d originally predicted. But the stories have distracted me, just as Tess no doubt intended them to do. I’m only conscious of my exhaustion when no one is talking.

  “Is Psyche ever reunited with Eros?” Becca finally asks. “Does she ever find him and get to apologize for having doubted him in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” says Angelique. “When I was a little girl and my mother told the story to me, I always fell asleep during the part where Psyche was wandering. She wandered a long way. There were a fucking lot of chapters. I’ve never stayed awake all the way to the end.”

  “Oh, come on,” Steffi says sharply. “You think your fate is linked to this mythic girl and yet you expect us to believe that you never had the slightest curiosity about how her story ended?” She pulls out her phone. “I have a bar out here,” she says. “Half a bar, at least. Do you want me to google Psyche? Put it all to rest right here and now?”

  But Angelique is biting her pale, dark-lined lip with anxiety. It’s clear she doesn’t want to know what happened to Psyche. She shakes her head, somewhat violently, and walks faster, the other women trailing behind her until Steffi and I find ourselves at the end of the line.

  “Do you buy all that?” Steffi hisses. “It’s obvious she’s put two and two together and has gotten, like, four and a half. Not the perfect answer, but close enough. It’s not like she tried to tell us that two plus two equals twenty-seven or something. She’s not near as stupid as she seems on TV. So why doesn’t she want to know how Psyche’s story ended and thus, presumably, what lurks in her own future?”

  “Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Want to know how your own story ends?”

  “Of course. And so would you.”

  “I’m not so sure. I feel sorry for Angelique.”

  Steffi snorts. “Don’t. No matter how much the government seized, I guarantee you there’s still plenty left, and then a book deal and maybe a spin-off show, who knows? All this traveling is just a way for her to drop from sight while her agents and managers prepare for the big comeback. Because she’s a hot mess now and everybody loves a hot mess. And besides, I’d kill to know the future,” Steffi adds, abruptly lengthening her stride so that I have to trot beside her just to keep up. “Anything you see coming, you can prepare for. It’s a fair fight. I don’t want anything to ever sneak up on me again.”

  “Again? If your story is about the first time something snuck up on you, it would have to have been a cheetah.”

  She grins like a schoolgirl. Walking fast, even now when we’re scrambling to catch up with the group, doesn’t seem to affect her. “You’ll have to wait to find out,” she says. “But not too long. I pulled a nine of clubs.”

  When we fall back in step with the others, they’re talking about how men hide things. Bank accounts, mistresses, medical diagnoses, porn. “There’s a whole school of myths,” Tess is saying, “where the reality of a man must remain unknown from the woman he loves or else the truth will destroy one or both of them. These stories mostly fall along the lines of Angelique and Psyche, that the man can be himself with his wife, especially in bed, in the dark. That’s where he can let his guard down. But each morning he changes back into the beast or monster or god, or whatever part of him she is forbidden to behold in this particular story. Think about it. A man who must keep his true identity hidden is the basis of so many of the superhero myths. Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Whateverman. It says a lot about the male ego, don’t you think? That they would create so many of these stories, the man with the split and half-hidden self?”

  “But in the stories,” says Claire, “I assume the woman always finds some way to uncover his secret?”

  “Almost always,” says Tess. “Otherwise there’s not much of a story, is there?”

  “And then, when she sees him, what does he do?”

  “Sometimes he dies . . .” says Tess. “But mostly when she learns the truth, he has to leave her. Flies away like Eros. For her sake, he always says. That’s a built-in part of the story. That knowing the full truth about a man places a woman in danger.”

  I think of Ned. The other women are doubtlessly thinking of their own men. Most of them probably found a way to remain forever in darkness and those are the ones we left, in exasperation, describing them as dead and cold or unknowable. And then there are the others, that unfortunate few who we managed to drag into the light . . . and damn if we didn’t lose them too, just in a different way. The man dissolving before our very eyes in the process of feminine discovery, fading from existence even as we’re still trying to analyze him. The man who disappears without a trace while we’re asking our girlfriends what it all means.

  “But sometimes men go away and come back,” Becca says. “Come on, don’t you guys ever go to the movies? That happens all the time, that the girl thinks she’s lost the cute guy but he comes back, right at the very end and then the music plays. Like, what’s that old movie? Pretty Woman?”

  “Once a man is out of my life he’s dead to me,” Claire says. “I don’t believe in reunions and second chances and booty calls with the ex.”

  “Nico’s in for so long he may as well be dead,” Angelique says. “And I’d like to say my sisters were my stepsisters, because then it would be okay for them to be so evil, but there’s no way that’s true. They’re blood, I just know it. We all used to have the same nose.” She stops and spits, and when she lifts her chin her eyes are bright with determination. They are blue, brilliantly so when the light hits them, a beautiful shade, and I am surprised again by the prettiness that sometimes breaks through the mask. Priscilla Presley, I think. On
the day she married Elvis. That’s who Angelique looks like.

  “But it was really my fault in the end, you know?” Angelique is saying. “Because me and Psyche just couldn’t leave well enough alone. That’s why I’m going to Canterbury. To get a high-powered priest to forgive me, and then to tell me what I have to do to make it right.”

  “A Canterbury priest can’t tell you how to make it right,” Tess says. “They’re Anglican. He can’t even forgive you, not really. He can offer you a blessing, but each person has to find the way to make her own story come out right.”

  “But that’s why I’m here,” Angelique says. “For a blessing and maybe, I don’t know. Maybe when I get to the Cathedral and actually see it, something will pop in my head and tell me what I have to do next. That’s all I’m asking. But enough . . . Enough about me. I’ve talked for a million miles. Who’s next?”

  “I am,” says Silvia. “I have a ten.”

  “I have a ten too,” says Claire, smiling at her friend. “Now that’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Mine is hearts,” says Silvia.

  “Diamonds,” says Claire.

  “Then Silvia will go next.” says Tess. “Love before riches.”

  “Good. We’re due for a happy story,” Silvia says. “And mine is happy.”

  “But mine was a happy story too,” Jean says. We all stare at her.