The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  “Of course they do,” says Jean. “Mono never goes out of style, like kissing.”

  “I think all the old ailments are coming back into fashion,” I say. “I even know a woman who recently had her appendix taken out.” From the end of the table, Tess makes a face at me.

  “The CDC in Atlanta keeps frozen cells of all sorts of ancient diseases,” Valerie says. “They have bubonic plague. Which makes you wonder what would happen if somebody, like, dropped the jar.”

  “Oh, they could probably knock out the bubonic plaque with penicillin now,” Silvia says. “They just didn’t have anything to fight it with back in the old days.”

  “You think?” Valerie says. “Penicillin?”

  “It’s entirely possible,” Steffi says. “We have so many more weapons now in the war against germs and we—”

  “Hey,” says Becca. “Remember how we set that rule that nobody can interrupt the storyteller? And let’s go back to how Hillary got mono because this story is all about kissing and how somehow I had managed to make it to eleventh grade without ever having been kissed. That’s an awful thing to admit and it makes me sound retarded and save your breath, Mom, I know I shouldn’t say ‘retarded’ like that. I know it’s like ‘fat,’ it’s just a word you’re not supposed to say. But most girls . . . by junior year, anybody even halfway cute has already had sex and that’s just the truth. By the time they were my age they had finished something I hadn’t even started and I would have died if anyone knew the truth. Virgins are . . . unchosen.”

  She stops here and dips a fingertip into a smear of butter on her plate. Takes her time licking it off. It’s as if she’s expecting someone to say something, like she’s waiting for some chorus of protest to rise from the older women. That we will all rush in to say that virgins are not the unchosen, but rather the ones doing the choosing, and that sometimes the best way a woman can take charge of her sexual destiny is by remaining chaste. There’s power in restraint—this is what the girl expects us to tell her. That it’s smart to wait for the right man to come along. Test him, make sure he’s worth it, before you give up the goods.

  So Becca lingers over the next bite of stew, her spoon making a scraping sound against the bottom of the bowl. A bottle of wine—red, as luck would have it—has manifested itself at my elbow and I uncork it and begin pouring, but no one speaks. Each woman in the parliament holds her counsel as to whether or not virginity is a desirable state and, even though Becca has claimed to want a silent stage, I can tell that our refusal to respond has flummoxed her. Ever since we left London she’s been waiting for a simple love story and none of us has been able to give her one. She has walked mile after mile, hour after hour, through the English countryside listening to tales of compromise and reinvention, stories of jealous sisters and royal curses and dementia and pornography because once a woman gets past a certain age—thirty? twenty-five? or, God help us, is it even younger?—she’s forced to accept that when it comes to love, things will never be simple again. Simple love stories are for virgins or, better yet, those who are utterly unconscious. Of course she played Sleeping Beauty. What else could a girl like Becca be?

  “If you’re thinking I’m wrong to gloat because Hillary McAllister got mono, get over it,” Becca says. “Because she was always mean to me. Mean to everybody. So she deserved to get mono. That’s just justice and there’s nothing wrong with wanting justice.”

  Once again, no one steps in to confirm or correct this last observation. There are no debates about justice versus mercy, only the stacked bowls that mark the end of the stew and the gurgles that mark the beginning of the wine. Valerie pushes her chair back and props her knee against the side of the table. Lunch, after all, isn’t just our midday meal but also our chance to rest. We’ve learned to settle in for a while.

  “The thing about getting the lead in Sleeping Beauty,” Becca goes on, when she finally realizes no one intends to take the bait, “is that you’re onstage the whole time, but you don’t have to memorize many lines. You speak during the first part where Beauty pricks her finger . . . there’s that word again, ‘prick.’ Didn’t somebody else prick something, in one of the other stories?”

  Eros, I think, in Angelique’s story. He pricked himself on one of his own arrows just as Sleeping Beauty pricked herself on her spinning wheel. They brought their enchantment upon themselves, seemingly by accident, more likely by destiny. Because that’s the real story, isn’t it? The one none of us can stop telling. That the end is the beginning, and the beginning marks the end. That no matter how far or fast we walk, everyone eventually circles back. Comes face-to-face with whatever they were trying to escape.

  But I don’t say anything. No one does. It seems the longer we stay silent, the more powerful the silence grows.

  Becca shrugs and fluffs the hair around her face. Normally it’s slicked back but today, perhaps in concession to the morning rain, she’s wearing it differently. It’s brushed forward into bangs and as she peers out from beneath the orangey-red fringe, she looks even younger than usual. “The prince,” she says, “was played by Josh Travis, and he’s the best-looking guy in my whole school. I forgot to tell you that part, but it matters, that I got a good prince and not a crappy prince. Because in drama class, they don’t have many guys so you just never know.” Someone has poured wine in her glass and she pauses again, looking down at this unexpected gift with surprise. On previous meals the bottle has never stopped at her, but rather has been passed across her plate, the alcohol flowing from woman to woman but never from woman to girl. It’s a moment. She lifts the glass and takes a small sip, taking care not to make eye contact with her mother. Becca is what, seventeen now? Eighteen at most? Too young to drink in an American restaurant, but this is England, where those rules don’t apply, and besides, her mother doesn’t seem inclined to stop her. She’s not even looking at her daughter, merely gazing at the child in the street. It’s another unspoken rule of the Canterbury Trail, I suppose, that the storyteller is allowed to drink.

  Becca puts the glass down, a thoughtful frown on her face. “So here’s where we are. Hillary gets sick and stays sick and I get my chance. Each afternoon in rehearsals I lie there on the bed pretending to be in a coma while the action goes on all around me. And I know that it’s building up to the big kiss, even though we never rehearse that part. Our teacher, Mr. Grayson—I think he’s gay, Gayson Grayson, that’s what all the kids say—he says we’ll save the kiss for the first performance because that way it will be fresh. The only note he gives me is that I shouldn’t respond too soon. That when Josh bends down and kisses me, I have to remember that I’ve been asleep for a long time, and that I’m slowly coming out from under the spell that’s been cast. ‘Emerge in layers,’ he would say. ‘Like a butterfly leaving its cocoon.’ So maybe he was gay, because that’s a gay thing to say. But the point is that for most of the play, all I have to do is lie there on the plywood bed the shop class built and wait to be kissed.”

  Becca runs a fingertip around the rim of her wineglass. “You’re all thinking I’m not right to play Sleeping Beauty,” she says, with her normal defensiveness, but I for one am thinking nothing of the sort. Behind the bright hair and dark glasses, the oversize ear holes and floppy clothes, Becca truly is a beauty. As lovely as her mother probably was in her own youth, with the same porcelain princess prettiness, the sort that no degree of rebellion can totally eradicate. “But they gave me a long blonde wig and a long blue dress and I think—” She stops. “I can’t say for sure if Josh wanted to kiss me. He expected he’d be kissing Hillary and she was the right sort of girl for a boy like him to kiss. They were already going out. They had probably already done it. Done everything. I don’t know.”

  She hesitates again. We’re making her nervous, I think, just sitting and staring. She’s been put at a disadvantage, having to tell her story at a café instead of on the trail. Apparently it’s easier to talk when you’re s
houlder-to-shoulder than when you’re face-to-face. So I shift my weight toward the street and, like Jean, begin to watch the little boy riding his bike. Give Becca a few minutes to finish the wine and pull herself together.

  The child is no more than six or seven and he seems to be new to the fine art of balance. It’s as if his training wheels were taken off recently and he struggles over the cracks in the sidewalk, weaving first one way and then the other. At times the whole bike tilts and his foot flies down from the pedals, catching his weight at the last possible minute before he goes toppling over. The sidewalk is not only cracked but sloped, with stray tufts of grass poking up in random locations. Hardly optimal for a beginner learning how to ride. He stops for a moment and looks toward the door. It’s closed. His mother is inside, at least for the moment.

  I finish my first glass of wine, then pour another.

  “People think Sleeping Beauty is a silly story,” Becca finally goes on. “Simple and stupid, even by fairy-tale standards. The girl goes to sleep, the boy wakes her up. Boom. The end. But I was happy to have the part and happy to know I was going to get a chance to kiss Josh. On the day of the first performance, they packed us up with the props in a bus and we went to the elementary school. One of them. There are seven in our county and we were going to play them all, but this was the first. Hillary came with us. I didn’t count on that. She couldn’t be Beauty, she wasn’t strong enough to be onstage, and of course she couldn’t kiss Josh, but she was in the third week of mono by that time and she was well enough that they let her ride the bus and come along to watch. She gave me the evil eye the whole way.”

  The boy pushes the bike from the sidewalk into the edge of the forbidden street and looks back at us with a guilty grimace. Bites his lip as if he’s trying to decide something. Trying to evaluate the significance of our presence in his life. Who are these ladies drinking wine on the patio—allies or betrayers, friends or foe? Will one of us tell his mother that he’s broken her only rule?

  “Back at the high school we’d only practiced the play in pieces,” Becca says. “We’d never run it through even once, start to finish. And so when we set up our props—the spinning wheel and the bed and all the fairies were in costume, and the evil witch . . . it was good. That’s the thing. It all came together better than I’d ever thought it would. But then halfway into the play I’m already lying flat on my back with my eyes closed, just listening to the story going on around me and I start thinking, Oh God, this is it. Josh is going to kiss me. I’m going to get my first kiss right here and now and it’s with the cutest boy in school. And I started trembling. I couldn’t control it. I was lying on my bed in my blonde wig and I was trembling so hard that I was sure the kids in the audience could see it and would think, She’s not asleep, she’s having some sort of fit. I tried to think about anything else. I said the alphabet backward in my head. But it just got worse and finally one of the fairies leaned over, I think it was Merryweather, and whispered, ‘Are you all right?’ I think she thought maybe I was coming down with mono too because I know I was red and it must have looked like I was running a fever. But it wasn’t mono. It was the fever of waiting for Josh Travis to kiss me. It was the fever of love.”

  Valerie and Claire smile at this and Jean turns from the boy in the street to face her daughter, also amused. Is this what a simple love story sounds like? I hate to keep grousing—in fact, I sound like Becca when I do—but nothing about this tale seems simple to me. She was playing Sleeping Beauty while the boy’s true girlfriend watched from the wings. And her first kiss, normally a private, even furtive, event was to be played out in front of two hundred squirming children on a well-lit stage. No wonder the girl’s notions of romance are so overblown. It hasn’t yet occurred to her that a stage kiss is not the real thing.

  The little boy is coping better now that he’s on the flat street. He’s up on two wheels, pedaling straight back and forth in front of us. His view never changes. He sees nothing except the vistas he has created in his own mind. But the wobbles have almost ceased and the only time he falters at all is when he passes the door to the café and looks to the side. He knows that any moment his mother will come out to fill our water glasses and catch him. Then he will be humiliated, grounded. Maybe even stripped of his bicycle and the freedom two wheels can buy.

  “The big moment comes,” Becca says. “And Josh bends down over me and I feel his breath and his lips were so soft. It was like the ground opened up beneath us and I knew, before he even touched me, that nothing afterward would ever be the same. My life has only two chapters—before Josh kissed me and after Josh kissed me.” She laughs. For just a moment it’s a woman’s laugh and not a girl’s. “Mr. Grayson got pissed. Because I didn’t wake up slowly like he told me to, I woke up all at once. I think I even put my hand behind Josh’s head and held him there for a second and of course the real Sleeping Beauty would have never done that. A real princess never would have grabbed her prince around the neck and practically pulled him down on top of her. But I couldn’t stop myself. And Josh . . . Here’s the weird part. The part you might not believe. He felt it too.”

  “Why wouldn’t we believe that?” says Angelique. “Do you think we think that men can’t feel things?”

  “It was the perfect first kiss,” says Becca. Her face has taken on a wistful quality and it’s amazing that even a girl as young as Becca can already be nostalgic. “It saved me from being unchosen and it saved him from being a man slut. Because before that kiss Josh had been one of those guys who’s so cute they can sleep with anybody and so they do sleep with everybody but that moment . . . The miracle is that the kiss changed Josh as much as it changed me.”

  “So this is your story?” Jean says quietly. “You’re telling them that Josh is now your boyfriend—is that the long and short of it?”

  “Well, he is,” says Becca, her voice sharp. “He comes over to the house all the time. You’ve met him.”

  “Yes,” says Jean. “He comes over to the house. I’ve met him.”

  “And he was my first in every other way too,” Becca says, and here her voice cracks just a little. This is the real loss of innocence in women, I think. Not the first time you sleep with a man, but the first time you doubt whatever story you’ve told yourself about why you slept with that man. She’s waking up, all right, but she doesn’t always like it. “What’s wrong with that, Mom? Why is it okay for you to have had your one big love and not me?”

  “I just don’t want you to overromanticize your relationship with Josh,” her mother says. She is fiddling with her wedding ring, as she always seems to do when she gets nervous. “I don’t want you to make something out of it that isn’t there.” Jean reaches for her daughter’s arm, but Becca pulls back. Squares her shoulders and sits up taller in her chair.

  “Right,” she says. “Like you don’t overromanticize Dad.”

  The child on the bike is growing in confidence right before our eyes. He still rides in a neat, straight line, but now he no longer bothers to get off the bike in order to turn it. He makes a circle right there on the edge of the street, his face split open with joy and pride, before heading back the other way. And the next time he passes, he does not look nervously toward the café door.

  Good for you, I think. Pedal hard, and when you get to the end of the sidewalk, keep going.

  “Your father,” Jean says coldly, “was nothing like Josh.”

  “Wake up, Mom,” says Becca. “I’m not a child. I know everything. I’ve known it ever since Dave went into rehab.” She looks around the table. “Dave’s my baby brother, the youngest, and he’s already tried to clean up twice. Has she told you that part of our family story? Any of you? I didn’t think so.”

  Jean is flushed. Again. How many times has her face turned this color? I always assumed it was exertion, a woman not used to so much walking, but now, for the first time, I wonder if there is something really wrong with her. �
�Becca, please. You have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. The file? The one with the family medical history? You left it right on the kitchen table. Maybe part of you wanted me to read it.”

  “Becca, I’m serious. This has to stop. Right now and right here. You may have read something, but you can’t possibly know what it means.”

  “’Cause Dave wasn’t the first addict in the family, was he, Mom?” Becca says, her voice strident and harsh. “There was a genetic predisposition toward drug abuse, isn’t that what the file said? Passed from father to son in this case, but I think part of me knew that before I read it.”

  “You don’t understand what you read.”

  “No,” says Becca. “No, Mom, I think the problem is that I understand just fine, which is why you can’t say anything else about my relationship with Josh. Not now or ever. Daddy wasn’t working that night in Guatemala. And they didn’t shoot him because he was trying to protect us.” Becca looks from her mother’s splotchy face to the rest of us. “The first story we all heard, did you get it? Did any of you figure it out at the time? That the perfect man’s ultimate sacrifice was really nothing more than a drug deal gone bad? Isn’t that hysterical? The biggest possible joke? Mom built our whole lives around that night. She taught us we should worship Daddy, she turned the date of his death into this . . . this anniversary of mourning when she knew all along that it was nothing but a—”

  Jean screams. Despite the fact tension has been building around the table for the last few minutes, despite the fact we all knew something was coming, I startle with the sound, and then Valerie screams too. It is this second scream—louder, sharper, and even more unexpected—that shocks us all out of our reverie. A door opens, then slams, and now the mother is out on the sidewalk too, her face frozen, and in the same instant—one scream, the next scream, and the slam of the door—it all leads up to a squeal of tires, the loudest noise of all. The long shrill shriek of motion interrupted, of a driver frantically trying to stop a car. Trying to rein in the inevitable while it is still in the realm of the merely possible.