The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  “Why did you say this was a story about love?” Becca says, although even she seems tired of the question. “It’s about everything except love.”

  “But I haven’t finished,” says Steffi. “Give me time. It’s a love story because a man saved her. Broke her out of her prison of fat. Her tower of fat, maybe that’s a better way to say it. Because if we’re all living fairy tales, Tina was Rapunzel, locked away from the world. The prince was a doctor with a contract from a pharmaceutical company, who was doing a medical study on obesity, and she was one of his guinea pigs. They met three times a week as part of the protocol and then, out of nowhere, on Valentine’s Day he gave her a box of Godiva chocolates. No man had ever given her anything, much less Godiva chocolates—” She stops to wipe the collected mist from her brow and I think about the gold box I’d seen in her bag that first day in London. She had seemed so surprised to find it there.

  “That’s awful. He was trying to ruin her chances before she even finished the study,” says Claire. “Because secretly he liked his women fat. I’ve heard about men like that on the Internet. They call them chubby chasers. Bastards.”

  “That does seems cruel,” says Jean. “You take a man who has some sort of obsession with heavy women, and of course he goes into obesity research. It’s a perfect target-rich environment. And he finds someone, this poor girl who has never been loved, not really, who thinks it isn’t possible, and he sabotages her. Singles her out, feeds her chocolate, makes her feel special, and keeps her just like she is.”

  “No,” says Steffi. “You’re both wrong. Or maybe I’ve described it wrong, because it wasn’t like that at all. Tina never ate the chocolates. She didn’t have to. It was enough to know that he had given them to her, that he wanted her to have them. After a lifetime of food being locked away, even her mother withholding . . . No, she just kept them. They were a symbol of the fact that he could see through the fat to the real person inside of it. Because he had done what a normal man does when he likes a normal girl. He brings her candy. It’s been fifteen years now, and she still has the box. Do you know what chocolates look like after fifteen years? They turn white. They’re like rocks. But she still has them. She knows what they mean.”

  “What do they mean?” asks Claire. “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe this is the story of Beauty and the Beast,” says Steffi. “Yes, not Rapunzel, I don’t know why I said that. Tina’s story was more like Beauty and the Beast, and I don’t blame you for not seeing it, because I didn’t see it myself, not for years. In order to have the miracle of transformation, something must be loved before it is really lovable.”

  “Like Sir Gawain and the hag,” says Valerie.

  “That too,” says Steffi. “We’re all just telling the same story in different forms. I thought about that last night, when I was in the shower. Because there have been these strange little overlaps, haven’t there?” She shrugs, not waiting for an answer. “Okay, maybe it’s just me. But the point is that in order for a cursed creature to become beautiful, for the magic to work, someone has to see that she already is beautiful. Because the moment the doctor gave her those Godivas, she lost the taste for them. She never craved chocolate again.”

  “That’s impossible,” Claire says flatly. “All women crave chocolate.”

  “No, all women crave the forbidden,” Steffi says. “And when food was no longer forbidden, it lost its power over her. She found, for the first time in her life, that she could think of other things. Because someone had loved her just as she was right then, in the here and now, and not because of what she might be someday if she could just learn a little bit of self-control.”

  “Well, if that’s magic, it’s only magical because a man did it,” Claire says. “Women love the unlovable every day. We fall in love with a man’s potential and then we marry his scruffy, unemployed ass. We treat him like a house we’re trying to flip, a fixer-upper, and we convince ourselves all he needs is a little imagination and some elbow grease. That’s how we get stuck. How we end up with all those losers sleeping on our couch. But men never fall in love with a woman’s potential. They just aren’t capable of it—a woman’s beauty has to be served right up on a plate for them to see it, and then half the time they still can’t. And you’re saying this man was a doctor, which means he was successful, which means he could have had anyone he wanted. For a man like that to see past a fat body and fall in love with the woman hidden inside of it . . . I’m sorry, but I find your story completely unbelievable.”

  Jean is frowning. “But you wouldn’t find it unbelievable if a beautiful woman fell in love with an overweight man.”

  “Of course not,” says Claire. “That’s my whole point. As a gender, women have a hell of a lot more experience in loving the unlovable.”

  “It’s because we get pregnant,” says Angelique. The statement is so her. Out of nowhere and bizarrely genius. She does this. She says nothing for miles and then she suddenly comes up with one of these epic pronouncements, always delivered in her weird Jersey voice.

  “What does getting pregnant have to do with it?” says Becca, but Jean is already cutting her off.

  “It’s true,” she says. “Women have to protect a life that isn’t quite there yet. Our biology programs us to sacrifice everything for a mass of cells, which is just another way of valuing something for its pure potential. It’s what makes us the superior gender. Because there’s grace in that, this willingness to love something that you can’t see.”

  “You may find it unbelievable, but I swear it happened just the way I told you,” says Steffi, who is still looking at Claire. “He was a man, and yet he loved her even when she was fat. I promise, all of this is true. Or most of it.”

  “She’s thin now?” Jean says.

  Steffi nods. “As it turns out, what she wanted all along wasn’t food as much as she just wanted permission to eat.”

  “My father was like that,” I say, the words coming out in a rush. “He was an alcoholic, although nobody used that word, because he just drank beer and nobody paid much attention to beer, at least not in an era where there was so much worse stuff floating around. But I guess it must have been a lot of beer, because one day he said to my mother, ‘I’m going into the woods and in three days, I’ll either come out sober or you’ll find me in there dead.’ ” And all at once it hits me how that must have been for my mother. The cofounder of the commune, designated as one of the keepers of the flame, but yet she was so often alone while my father went off to fight his demons. He was a walker too, like I guess I am, although this is the first time I’ve ever really pondered this particular similarity in our natures. One time he walked so far that he came out on the other side of the woods disoriented and it turned out he was in a completely different state. He found a pay phone in the parking lot of a truck stop and called my mother collect to pick him up and when she said, “Where are you?” he had to ask some trucker. She always laughed about the time Rich called her from New York, but I wonder how funny it really was, being left so often on her own with no idea where he’d gone or when he would return. It puts the Davids of the world in a different light.

  “Exactly,” says Valerie. “That’s exactly the point I was trying to make, that whenever you deny yourself something, it turns into an obsession. But if you know you can have it, you don’t have to have it, and that’s the key to all of life, isn’t it? And if a man offered you the one thing you’d always been denied, the one thing even your own mother wouldn’t give you . . . of course you’d fall in love.”

  It’s a telling moment. Valerie said “you” instead of “she,” but Steffi ignores the shift in pronouns and keeps talking.

  “I’m not suggesting it was easy,” she says. “She lost a hundred and forty pounds over the course of a year, but the day her doctor gave her chocolate was the start of it. And eventually she went back to school, and moved on with her life, a
nd married the doctor and if you met them today . . . you would never guess that they started out as Beauty and the Beast, you would just think What an attractive couple. Oh, and after she had lost the weight she had to have skin-reduction surgery, all over her body. Around the hips and waist mostly, with little tucks in the arms and legs. More than fifteen pounds of skin was removed, can you imagine that? Fifteen pounds of nothing but skin?”

  “So her story has a happy ending?” says Becca.

  “The happiest,” says Steffi. “She now weighs a hundred and twenty-three pounds, and for women I don’t think there could be any happier ending. We should rewrite all the fairy tales—Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Little Mermaid. Forget the princes and the castles. Just type the line ‘And she weighed a hundred and twenty-three pounds happily ever after,’ and we would all close the book with a tear and a sigh.”

  “How do you know all this?” asks Valerie. “How do you know what she thought and what she felt and how she ate the dog food but she didn’t eat the chocolates?”

  “I’m being stupid, aren’t I?” says Steffi and she stops. Drops her backpack, pulls her shirt from the waistband of her jeans, and lifts it. “Here. You may as well look.”

  The scars have faded over time to a watery shade of beige, pale slashes across her strong brown abdomen. Two of them, one on the right and one on the left, stretching around her waist from both sides, almost touching in the back and almost touching in the front. It is the body of a woman who, at some point in her life, has been virtually cut in half.

  Fourteen

  Our final lunch will be in a village so small it doesn’t have a name. It’s no more than a swell in the road, really, a place where a sidewalk suddenly appears beside the main road, but according to Tess it is the site of one of the oldest hospices in all of Kent. She leads us through the shell of an abandoned building and I follow at the end of the line as we walk among crumbling walls and shattered door frames, noting that a tree is even growing in the corner of the largest room. It’s taller than I am, pushing its way up through the remnants of the stone floor.

  “They called them hospices because you could find hospitality there,” Tess is saying, “and over time it evolved into our modern word ‘hospital.’ Remember that Canterbury was reputed to be a site of medical miracles, which means many of our pilgrims were already ill when they began their journey. It’s easy to imagine how the rigors of the trail might prove too much for them. The churches in the various villages along the route opened these hospices as a gesture of goodwill, a thank-you to the travelers who were bringing commerce to their towns and also, in their minds, a way to curry favor with God. If you couldn’t afford to undertake a pilgrimage of your own, it was considered almost as virtuous to offer help to those who had answered the call.”

  She squats down at the roots of the tree and gazes up at the sky before continuing. The day has cleared, the canopy above us having brightened from gray to blue. A shaft of muted sunlight falls across her face as she raises her chin and she closes her eyes for a moment in sheer pleasure before sighing and then going on with her little speech. “Most travelers would only stay at a hospice for a night or two, resting and gathering their strength before once again taking to the trail, but for a few of the most ill . . . that’s how these stopping places along the road became the first hospitals. Records show that a fair number of the pilgrims died en route to Canterbury and are buried in the cemeteries of towns not their own, another act of charity. Sometimes the graves are entirely blank except for a cross, because the people who nursed and buried them might never have known their names.”

  She makes one of her professorial gestures, an elegant little motion toward the largest split in the largest wall, evidently the location that had once held the entrance. Through it we can see a small, ill-kept cemetery. None of us ventures out except for Valerie, and even she is back in a minute. Tombstones that tell the person’s life story can be interesting, as are those which offer poems or phrases for contemplation. But each unmarked grave is dispiriting in its own special way, a sign of just one more pilgrim who never told his story.

  After meandering through the hospice, we move on to the café next door for an early lunch. It has three tables inside, two of them occupied, but there is a collection of mismatched chairs on the front sidewalk outside, clustered around a long table. The owner springs into action when she sees Tess, who apparently brings groups here regularly, and they begin to speak so quickly that it’s hard to understand them.

  But she’s gesturing toward the street, so it would appear that the woman is directing our cumbersome party of nine to the outside table. The temperature has mellowed since morning, and the wind has calmed, but just in case, the café owner pulls a stack of quilts from behind the bar, thin and worn but folded neatly. We each take one and walk back out the door to choose a chair.

  “This is strange,” mutters Becca and we all in turn whisper that it’s fine even though of course she’s right. It is strange.

  Tess spreads one of the quilts over her legs and assures us that this café, while small, has the best beef stew in all of County Kent. A bowl will warm us up. We nod, adjust our quilts to imitate her, and stare out at the nonexistent view. Not a single car has driven by since we’ve arrived in town and the only human activity in sight is a little boy on a bicycle, evidently the owner’s child. His mother must have instructed him to keep to the sidewalk, for he is forlornly riding his bike to the absolute end of the concrete, then getting off, pushing it in a U-turn, and riding it as far as possible back to the other end. He probably does this all day long.

  The stew is out within minutes, piping hot and as good as Tess promised.

  “How’s your mother hanging in there today?” Valerie asks quietly as the other women begin to chat and eat.

  “Still dead,” I say.

  “Is that what your story is going to be about?” Valerie persists, handling me a rough loaf of bread to break. It’s all very biblical. “Your mom dying?”

  “If I can’t think of something better. I’m still trying to think of something better.” Which is a bit of a lie. I started practicing the story in my head on the walk from Dover. I think I have a good first line. Deceptively simple, but with real emotional punch. My story begins with the death of my mother . . . That’ll grip them.

  Valerie smiles. “Somehow I get the feeling your mom provided you with plenty of stories to tell.”

  “Oh, she did. When a narcissist dies, it tears a great big hole in the world.”

  “Your mother was a narcissist?”

  “Certifiable.”

  “Damn. Mine too. What are the odds?”

  “Given how the two of us have turned out, I’d say pretty high.”

  “Che, do you want to order the wine?” Tess asks, and I can only assume that she’s joking. A place that doesn’t have a food menu likely won’t have a wine list, and this poor woman, glancing at her son on his bike as she works her way around the table refilling the steaming bowls, appears to be the restaurant’s hostess, cook, waitress, cashier, and dishwasher.

  “Bring us whatever kind of wine you have,” I tell her. “Red, if possible. Or white. Pink’s fine.”

  “And Becca,” Tess says, turning with a smile, “Since we have two stories to tell this afternoon, would you mind starting yours over lunch?” But Becca is checking her phone, or at least trying to, turning it one way and then another in search of bars, and doesn’t answer.

  “She’d be happy to start,” says Jean.

  “Come on, Mom,” Becca says, still shaking the phone. “She asked me, not you.”

  “And you didn’t answer. So I answered on your behalf.”

  Becca smiles back at Tess, all sweetness and cooperation. “Of course I’ll go.”

  “Concentrate on your food for five minutes,” Jean says. “Then you won’t have to talk with your mouth full.” />
  “Maybe I want to talk with my mouth full,” Becca says and thus they are off, a mother and daughter having just one more argument about something neither of them can name. There’s no point in any of us trying to tell them they should stop for a moment and really appreciate each other, for of course they know their time together is limited, that someday the girl will be grown and the mother will be gone. But for now they must fight with every step along the path. It’s a mother’s job to say all the words in the world, just as it’s a daughter’s job not to hear any of them. Each woman must make her own mistakes. To retrace every step of the path her mother walked, and to learn, for the first and millionth time, the untransferable lessons of womanhood.

  The Tale of Becca

  “Last year, my junior year,” Becca says, “I was cast as the lead in my class play. Okay, maybe not. Shit, I guess I’m lying already.” She looks around the table, where most of us are on our second bowls of the stew and are tearing off hunks of the bread, smearing it with that strong yellow butter the pubs bring out with every meal. Real butter, and irresistible. I will miss it when I get back to the States.

  “I wasn’t exactly cast in the role,” Becca amends. “I was the understudy and then the girl who they really wanted got sick and I took her place. Her name was Hillary McAllister. Still is, I guess. And when I said ‘class play’ that wasn’t entirely the truth either. We do two plays each year in drama, one for the student body and one that we take to the local elementary schools and that’s the one I was in, the kiddie play. Sleeping Beauty. And that’s who I was. Sleeping Beauty.” She looks around the table again. “Jesus. This is harder than I would have thought, trying to tell your own story.”

  “Hillary was cast,” her mother says tonelessly, “and then Hillary got sick. Some form of mononucleosis.”

  “I didn’t think kids got mono anymore,” says Silvia.