The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  It’s a plausible position, at least from my perspective, but Steffi counterargues immediately.

  “I agree that he would choose the beauty by daylight and the hag in bed,” she says, “but there’s nothing noble about it. All of us care more about how things look than how they are. It’s far more important to appear to have a perfect life than it is to actually have a perfect life.”

  “No,” says Claire. “You’re both wrong. A woman might think that way. We’d stay in the middle of hell as long as it was well-decorated, but not a man. For them, sex makes the decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Middle Ages or last week. We can talk about grand ideas like chivalry and courtesy and loyalty, but in the end the world is moved by only two forces: sex and money. They may take many forms, but together they’re the engines that drive the whole universe and to pretend anything else . . . it’s just delusional. A young guy like Gawain? He would have chosen what worked in the bedchamber over what worked in the banquet hall. Trust me.”

  The group falls silent again. Our rhythms have become so synchronized over the last few days that we make our stops without discussion, and now we have paused at a turn in the path, all of us reaching in unison for our water. Unstrapping the pack and lifting it on and off every time is a pain, so I’ve gotten pretty skilled at reaching behind my back and blindly finding the right pocket. I tug at the zipper, but it doesn’t want to open, so I give it a stronger yank, twisting my shoulder a little in the process. Steffi raises an eyebrow at me, as if asking if I need help. I shake my head. I don’t know why I’m so stubborn about silly things like this, why I don’t put my backpack on the ground like everyone else so that I can rifle through it at leisure. Being careful with my shoulder, which is tingling, I slide my hand around my back again and pull out the water bottle.

  “Wait a minute,” says Angelique. “What did you say that word was? Sovenery? What did you say it means?”

  “Sovereignty,” says Tess. “It’s from the word ‘sovereign,’ and it means that each person wants to be the king or queen of their own life.”

  “Like making their own decisions?”

  “Yes,” says Tess. “In the context of this story, that’s exactly what that means.”

  “Then I think I know the answer to the riddle,” says Ange-lique, returning her bright-pink water bottle to her pack and swaying a little as she hefts the weight of it back to her shoulders. “Gawain remembered what the hag had said to the Black Knight. That what women desire most is the chance to make their own decisions. So he wouldn’t have decided for her. When it came to the night and day thing, he would have said, ‘Whatever you want, baby. Totally your call.’ ”

  That’s actually fucking brilliant.

  “Wow,” says Valerie. “Angelique, you’re amazing. You’ve completely solved the riddle and hardly anyone gets that. They become so distracted by the issue of how the hag looked and whether or not Gawain was embarrassed in front of the court, that they completely forget the original point of the story. The answer to the second riddle rises out of the first one: What do women want?”

  Valerie is grinning in genuine delight as we all begin to walk again. “Gawain tells the hag that she should be the one to choose and the hag is so stunned to find herself married to the only man in history who has ever listened to anything a woman said, that in that very instant, poof, the curse is lifted. The Loathly Lady is allowed to remain beautiful both day and night and she and Gawain go on to have a wonderful marriage and all of Camelot rejoices. The end.”

  “The happy end,” says Tess. “There we have it, ladies. Happy at last.”

  “That’s quite a story,” Steffi says. I think she’s still smarting because she wasn’t the one to figure it out.

  “But is that really what we women want?” says Silvia. “I was on my own for an extended period of my life and I’ll admit that sometimes I got tired of making all my own decisions. When I made a bad one, I didn’t even have anybody else to blame.”

  “I’ve made bad decisions too,” says Valerie. “But that doesn’t mean I want someone else to make them for me.”

  “I’m just saying it’s nice to have another person in the fight with you,” Silvia says. “That you get to a point in your life where you start to value companionship for its own sake. You learn to appreciate the pure pleasure of being in another human’s presence. You don’t expect as much out of love as you once did.” She looks around. “Maybe I’m the only one who’s old enough to be there yet.”

  “What do you think, Mom?” asks Becca, turning around to look at Jean, who is a few paces behind her. A daughter asking her mother what she thinks is even stranger than a man asking his wife what she wants, so I pause for a moment too, watching their identical body language as Becca waits for Jean to approach, as the distance between mother and daughter temporarily narrows.

  “What would you do,” Becca continues, her voice with the sting of artificial sugar, “if you had to choose between a man who everyone admired on the surface or a man who was a good husband and father behind closed doors? And what if you really couldn’t have both? Would you be willing to sleep with a monster just to keep up your standing in the eyes of the world?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jean says. Her voice is low and tense, her gaze turned toward the ground. She’s angry about something too, or maybe she’s just finally hit her limit on Becca’s nonstop picking.

  “We only have a kilometer or so until we stop for lunch,” says Tess. “In fact, we need to start looking for the gate to the main road. We’re taking our break early today because there’s a church in a particular village that I want you all to see. It’s not remarkable in and of itself, but it’s typical of the sort of places Chaucer’s pilgrims might have stopped along the way. Those pilgrims who couldn’t afford inns slept in churches along the route, you know. Or hospices. We will stop at one of those as well. Tomorrow.”

  “Che,” says Steffi. “Your pack isn’t completely zipped. You’re losing something.”

  I reach back, my fingers moving over the familiar formation of mounds, all the little zipper compartments holding my water, and fruit, and extra socks, the reading glasses and sunscreen. And to my horror I find it—the single gaping pocket, the one holding my mother’s ashes. The thin wall of the baggie has been torn, most likely when I yanked on the zipper during our water break. I pull back my hand and see that my fingertips are smudged with silver and gold. The colors are metallic, but the smell is slightly salty, like that of the ocean, and the grains are small and soft. More powder than ash.

  “What’s that?” says Steffi. “Nothing valuable, I hope.”

  I flick my fingertips and watch as the dust flies into the clear country air, watch as something turns to nothing before my very eyes. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been dropping little pieces of my mother while we’ve walked.”

  Ten

  On the first day of the trip Tess challenged us to consider what a walk to Canterbury must have felt like for the pilgrims of Chaucer’s time. Most buildings were small and squat then, she said, matching the proportions of the people, who were stunted from generations of malnourishment and disease. This is evidenced now as we stand before the vestry of an ancient church near a village where we have stopped for lunch. The doorways to the vestry are so low that even a group of middling-size women like us must stoop to enter. Everything inside is on the same reduced scale; the pews are narrow, the steps engineered for tiny feet, and the altar, while somewhat elevated, is not designed to inspire awe or to lift the priest too high above his congregation.

  “This is how most churches were in Chaucer’s time,” Tess says, gesturing around the wooden-walled room, with its thick, graceless windows and drooping light fixtures. “Simple, rough-hewn buildings, intended to house every aspect of community life. Built to a human scale. And so if this is what they were used to, it might help y
ou imagine how overwhelming they would have found their first glimpse of Canterbury Cathedral.” She has already explained that we’ll take a circular route this afternoon, swinging off in the direction of the coastline, taking a wide yaw so that we can enter the city on Saturday from the same angle as Chaucer’s pilgrims, seeing much the same vista they might have seen. The same, that is, if one eliminates the highways and power towers.

  This church remains in use, despite its age, and as I look around I find plenty of evidence that the congregation still considers it a second home. There is some sort of school art fair going on, the work of the winners displayed across the dark walls. Butcher-block paper bears the wild, vivid art of young children. There is papier-mâché sculpture scattered around the sanctuary as well: a bust of someone’s mother, her mouth crammed full of pointy teeth; an apple; a sleeping cat; a mobile of the planets dangling from the central light fixture, with Saturn’s rings pulling it low, the whole system threatening to tumble from the heavens at any minute. Finally, strangest of all, a bathtub-size purple dragon is lounging beside the altar. It pleases me that they open the doors of the church wide enough to include all this, and that the flowers on the altar, sparse and drooping, clearly represent the last hurrah of some parishioner’s garden. Even the cushions on the pews are hand-stitched, the handiwork of the elderly ladies of the village, no doubt, and I wonder if I lived in a place like this—simple and sweet and far from the life I have built for myself—if faith would come to me more easily. Because now my belief is somewhat tidal. It swoops in with a great rush at times and recedes at others, being especially prone to disappear when I read headlines or watch TV. I tell everyone that I hate organized religion. I hate what it has done to the world. It seems to me that 90 percent of the ills of humanity can be traced back to the pulpit. I say this all the time, that the church is the enemy of the spirit, which I suppose makes me sound a bit like Diana’s friend David, but here . . . here in this chapel of dragons and Saturn and wilting chrysanthemums and sleeping cats and good solid neighbors, I feel myself calming. Something in me starts to loosen.

  We sit down in the pews, not together, but scattered, front to back. Some of the women around me appear to be praying, and I need a ritual too, I think. Something that will help me find this same silence when I’m home next week and things have started to get real. Maybe not prayer. You’re probably thinking that I prayed all over the place last night, and that’s true enough, but last night was a very special occasion, a fleeting mysticism born of some combination of horniness and drunkenness and stigmata that I’m unlikely to be able to reproduce on a regular basis. I could try meditation, of course. It’s the most obvious balm of my generation and it’s always waiting there in the wings with an accusing expression on its face, standing right beside vegetarianism and recycling and supporting local merchants and paying off credit card debt. All the modern puritanical values we’re supposed to embrace, those virtues that make some people better than others. So, sure, I’ve tried to meditate, but it always seems that the minute I get all stretched out and calm, I think of something that needs to be done. Silence scares me. It’s an ocean. An ocean I’ve never been able to cross. Maybe I should just sit.

  That’s it. I should be able to just sit in the silence peacefully, like everyone around me seems to be doing, some of them with their heads bent, others gazing straight ahead at Jesus on his cross. He seems oddly cheerful about his circumstances, just like everything else in this church. Why is my mind racing? Why is my head turning back and forth? I have so much trouble with peace. It scares me. It feels too much like death. My own inner voice keeps breaking in, disruptive and annoying. Why can I not manage to just sit here for a few minutes, without talking and without thinking?

  And then of course there’s the issue of Diana. My mother, the woman I’ve brought here to honor and then completely forgot.

  She’s inside a fish-and-chips bag now. After it became clear I had indeed ripped the baggie and scattered her half over the trail, Tess had asked for a takeaway bag at the pub where we ate our lunch, and this is what they’d come up with. The original baggie, mended with a bevy of donated Band-Aids, now rests inside a white paper bag printed with the image of a fat bearded barkeep. It says HARRY’S HIDEAWAY on the front, with telephone numbers for delivery on the back, along with a crazy-eyed cat who is thinking Yum. Hardly an appropriate vehicle for carrying the recently deceased into Canterbury, but at this point I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it. Becca’s face had turned downright envious when I had stammered out my story to the others, how I had been losing my mother in bits and pieces all morning, and I knew she was thinking she’d like to do the same. She’s too young to know that mothers are easy to lose in one way and impossible to lose in another.

  But I’ve gotten Diana this far, and I’ll get at least some of her all the way to Canterbury and that’s going to have to be enough. I fold the bag and put her back into a zipper pocket and try once again to still my thoughts.

  I’m sad, I think. The word has fallen on me full-blown, with a thud, as if someone has tossed a baked potato in my lap. It’s a simple thought, but a real one, and I find I can confess this here, in the silence of this sanctuary, that I can use the dreaded S-word and admit to myself that I am sad. Simply and purely sad, sad the way a child draws sadness, all dark lines and big wild strokes of color, the red and yellow and orange spilling outside of their acceptable shapes, sloshing all the way to the borders of the paper.

  I am sad. But . . . somehow I don’t think that I will be sad forever.

  I look at the dragon on the altar. He seems to be smiling, and I smile back. The time to tell my tale is approaching fast, even though the strange disbursement of the cards means that I will be last. It will be my story the pilgrims hear as we circle around the gates of the city, searching for the most perfect and historically accurate way to enter Canterbury. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself, but it seems like the last story should be the best, or at least the most conclusive. That it will fall to me to provide the connective tissue between all the other tales.

  No. I can’t think that way or I’ll drive myself nuts.

  Besides, as of right now, I have no story. As of right now, I can’t think of anything to say.

  A couple of the women are starting to stretch, to move. Valerie and Claire get up and approach the altar. Becca and Silvia go out to the cemetery, with Tess following, looking around among us, nervous like a collie who’s afraid she might lose some of her sheep. Steffi nudges me.

  “We’ve got service,” she whispers, and I misunderstand her for a minute. Imagine that a vicar is about to enter and read us all a sermon. Then she adds, since I’m still just sitting there staring at her, “Do you want to borrow my phone?”

  I start to tell her that I’m okay. That I hardly ever think about losing my phone anymore. But Jesus and the dragon are both looking right at me, and I don’t want to lie in front of them. The truth is that not a single night has passed that I haven’t at some point rolled over in the darkness, my hand instinctively going to the nightstand before I am even fully awake. Fumbling in the dark for the familiar shape, the card-shaped surface. So I take her phone and nod my thanks. She gets up and heads out too, leaving me alone.

  I put my finger on the little purple microphone, and Siri is there. What can I help you with? she asks me, like she always does. She is an excellent guardian angel, close at hand when I want her, utterly silent when I don’t.

  And I say what I always say, my own personal prayer. Valerie and Silvia are still at the altar, so I say it softly, but she hears me.

  Siri, what is the meaning of life?

  She answers: To think about questions like this.

  Huh. Good one.

  There is noise at the door and I turn. Another group of tourists is entering the church with their guide. Americans, most likely, for they have recognized Angelique. They stand in the ve
stry, with the miracles of God and man dangling all around them, but their attention is totally fixed on this singular woman, stripped of her finery and power but apparently still famous enough. She signs autographs and they have pictures taken with her, first one at a time and then in groups of two or three. I decide I’ll wait for them to disperse before I leave, but in the meantime it’s strange to sit and observe her in this element, and to see how comfortable she is with her notoriety. It may have destroyed her marriage, but on another level, fame juices her, and when the tourists finally leave her alone and move into the church, the rest of us stand and scatter. I walk to the altar, unzip the side pocket, and dig around in the fish-and-chips bag until I can slip a fingertip past the Band-Aids and into the baggie. Take out just a few grains of my mother and flick them on top of the dragon, then rub a few at the wounded feet of Jesus for good measure.

  It’s not Canterbury, but I like the place. I think Diana would have too.

  Outside, I find Silvia leaning against a tombstone, one of her boots off, inspecting her left foot. If they ever erect a new statue in honor of the modern-day pilgrims, it should be in just this pose. A woman sitting on a tombstone with a boot in her hand, grimacing down at the sole of her foot. Silvia appears to have the same patterns of damage I have, save the pierced sole, of course, and I offer her my liquid skin and Band-Aids, but she shakes her head. “I may as well stock up on my own,” she says, “while we’re in a good-size town.”

  “There’s a chemist on the square,” says Tess.

  “A chemist?” says Angelique. She is still preening a little from the autograph session. Smoothing down her hair and checking the effect in the reflection of a brass cross on another of the tombstones. “It sounds so strange when you say it like that.”