The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  After that the four of them went everywhere together. At first it was just to those activities revolving around their mutual grandchildren, but they soon saw that traveling as a unit made everything easier. Steven would pull up and let Silvia out with Carol and Willem and the three of them would sit on a bench while he parked the car. During the event, Silvia and Steven would place their second spouses between them and then, when it was time to go home, the pattern would repeat itself. Silvia would wait with Carol and Willem while Steven went to get the car. After a while Steven suggested they should add what he called playdates, where he would drop Carol off at Silvia’s house and run errands or go to a doctor’s appointment and then, a few days later, he would keep an eye on Willem for her. Silvia would not always use the time productively. She knew she should, but most often she would spend her precious free afternoons simply walking in the park, watching the birds and squirrels. Relishing the sanity, the chance to have a few minutes alone with her thoughts. The fact that at least for the afternoon, she had no one to worry about but herself.

  The three hours of Willem’s playdate would pass as if they were one but still, even the briefest of respites was a relief. A single year of caregiving for Willem had left Silvia so exhausted that she couldn’t imagine how Steven had coped for three times as long all by himself. Having a spouse with Alzheimer’s is like having a child who will never grow up—a child who is going backward, actually, who will in time lose the ability to walk and talk, who will eventually end up in diapers, back in a high-walled crib. But the grief of all this was dulled, just a little, by the presence of Steven and his wordless empathy for her situation.

  “I don’t want to put her away,” he blurted out one afternoon as she and Willem were leaving. “When she first realized she was slipping she . . . she made me promise that I wouldn’t take her to one of those places. You know, the memory centers where everyone sits in rocking chairs holding baby dolls, even the men.”

  Silvia didn’t say anything. She’d made the exact same promise to Willem.

  “I hang on for these afternoons,” Steven said. “You’re the one who’s making this whole thing tolerable.”

  And from there it was hard to say exactly which one of them had the next idea. Whether he said it to her or she said it to him, whether they discussed it in the car, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or at a ball game.

  If we move in together, we can keep them both at home.

  Now they share a house—Carol and Steven and Willem and Silvia. The love of his life and the love of hers. Most days, the loves of their lives cannot remember either love or life, so Silvia and Steven must do all the remembering for everybody. Steven tells her about his years with Carol, the good times and the bad. Mostly good, damn him, she tells us with a laugh. And she describes her life with Willem, her own late-life adventure, blowing in like an autumn storm. They celebrate their successful marriages together, for otherwise, who will? The arrangement may be unorthodox, but it makes certain things possible, like this trip. Silvia would not have considered leaving Willem to take two weeks abroad if she hadn’t known he was safe and happy with Carol and Steven. She does the same thing for Steven, giving him two weeks off to go camping in the fall. They keep each other going. They can’t imagine now how they could survive any other way. They celebrate Christmas at the house, which makes it easier for the grandkids and, as for the twins, this is the first time in more than thirty years that they can offer them a singular home base. There are pictures on the walls: Carol and Steven riding burros down the Grand Canyon, Silvia and Steven on a cruise and then Silvia and Willem on a cruise, even Steven and Willem on a pier with the grandsons, playing at fishing, and it’s all right because it has to be all right.

  Her friends ask her how she can possibly accept the situation. Changing the diapers of the woman her husband preferred to her. Even their daughter had a problem when Steven and Carol first moved in. “Too weird, Mom, just too weird,” she had said, and at times Silvia will admit it’s confusing, living with both husbands, trying to explain it all to lawyers and doctors and the IRS. But the longer Silvia exists inside this broken world, the more she realizes that situations which are simple to describe are often hard to live with, and that some of the things that sound bizarre actually work out quite easily.

  She makes mistakes sometimes. Once she called Steven “Willem” and he had said, “Oh dear God, not you too,” and they had both started laughing. Laughing hysterically right there in the kitchen, the sort of laughter that is part sobbing, until Carol and Willem had both stumbled in from different directions and joined them. They had stood there for a minute, all with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Crying, bellowing, weaving, not one of the four of them quite sure what they were laughing about.

  Now Silvia pauses. Shucks her backpack and rifles through a pocket until she stands with a picture of four old people sitting on a lush, flower-strewn patio. Two of them gently turning the other two in the direction of the camera. “This is my family,” she says simply.

  “I don’t want to interrupt . . .” says Tess.

  “You aren’t interrupting,” says Silvia. “I’m finished. That’s everything.”

  “And your story was lovely,” says Tess. “But I have a bit of a question. How is everyone doing on the stamina front? Because we’re coming to a fork in the road and we have a decision to make. If we’re brisk, we can work in a trip to Dover this afternoon, before we stop for the night. See the cliffs, I mean. But if you’re tiring we can head straight into town and find our inn.”

  We all struggle to understand just what it is she’s asking. My thoughts are still in that kitchen with four people all standing with their arms around each other, and I suppose everyone else is stuck there too, in that moment of great beauty and equally great pain. It’s like walking out of a movie into the clear light of day and forgetting where you parked your car.

  “If we’re this close to Dover . . .” Steffi finally says. She’s still smarting about missing that damn stable.

  But this time Jean agrees with her. She’s nodding. “It would be a shame not to see the cliffs. We’re so near, after all.”

  “Quite so,” says Tess. “That’s what I thought. They’re in the National Trust, so it’s a walk through parkland and down a rather steep hill, but then at the bottom . . . well, if we don’t want to walk back up, we can always call Tim to come fetch us in the van and there’s a lovely little tearoom at the top of the cliff. An old lighthouse leftover from the war, and they serve pastries and pie and the lot. Sound good?”

  We agree that it sounds good and Tess looks more closely at me, Silvia, and Jean. “You ladies with the sore feet,” she says. “Holding up?”

  It’s the first time I’ve thought about my heel in hours. We all nod and then, at Tess’s suggestion, we stop and pull our sweaters and hoodies from our backpacks. Because the wind has picked up and become stronger, even in the last few minutes. Steffi’s phone beeps and when she looks down, she says that it just welcomed her to France. Tess says indeed, we’re that close to Calais. We should be able to see the shore of France from Dover Beach if the weather holds fine, that swimmable distance which divides one land from another. France. It sounds romantic. More foreign than England. The idea spurs us to walk a bit faster.

  The spell of Silvia’s story is broken in the bustle. I hope it doesn’t hurt her feelings that we don’t talk about it. She doesn’t seem perturbed and, in fact, she has that same clean-washed quality all the women have assumed the minute their stories are finished. But I suspect that for me Silvia’s story may linger the longest of them all. Because that would have been Ned and me, wouldn’t it, if we’d stayed together? If we’d let ourselves just drift into marriage because it seemed like the logical thing to do? We would have become Silvia and Steven, disgustingly perfect for each other but never really happy, and he would have been nothing more than my first husband. The one who left
me, the one I left—it hardly matters, and it took guts for Ned to pull the trigger before things got to that point. I duck my head down. The wind is brutal, cold and salty. It would make conversation impossible even if one of us had anything to say.

  Twelve

  Tess wasn’t kidding when she said the descent to the bottom of the cliff was steep. We skid uneasily along the gravel road built for cars, which is one switchback after another, until my shins are screaming with the effort of trying to stop each step from picking up momentum. I have images of losing my footing and rolling all the way into the English Channel.

  Tess shouts out bits of history as we descend, saying that Dover endured merciless bombing during the Second World War. If the German pilots had any ammunition left after blitzing London, they didn’t want to land with the explosives still attached and it would have been a waste of firepower to drop them in the sea. So they released all their excess bombs over tiny defenseless Dover, casually destroying the last vestige of British soil they’d pass before heading home.

  “There was horrific damage for a town of this size,” Tess says, pointing vaguely into the fog. I guess the town is that direction, back the way we’ve come. “And a high civilian casualty count.”

  When we finally reach the bottom, the beach is narrow and ugly, a stony gray crescent of sand cupping a flat sea. A school class is there on a field trip, the children paying no attention to their teacher, who is droning on about the difference between sedimentary and igneous rocks. There are tourists with cameras. Baby boomers mostly, possibly the descendants of World War II soldiers, visiting the places where their fathers fought and died. But the cliffs are indeed as white as they’ve been claimed to be, and when the sun momentarily breaks through the clouds and hits the expanse of chalk, we all turn away, blinking, shielding our eyes. Beyond the beach lies a working port, full of oil tankers and cargo ships. The actual town of Dover is perfectly quaint, Tess hastens to assure us, and I’m sure it is. She has misrepresented nothing so far. But this shoreline isn’t anything like the broad sandy American beaches I’m used to, and my mind goes to Cape May and sticks there for a minute.

  “It seems so unfair,” Jean says. “A nice little town bombed to rubble just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A couple of the women pull out their phones and aim them toward the cliffs, but it’s all so big, white, and close that I can’t imagine the pictures will come out.

  If the walk down was slow and painful, the walk back up would likely be worse, so Tess calls Tim and he appears within minutes with the van. It carries us back to the top of the cliff, the tires shrieking in protest with every hairpin turn. The lighthouse perched there is old but whitewashed so that it’s nearly as blinding as the chalk of Dover. We climb out of the van and run through the mist, entering through an arched red door that looks like it could have come from a book of fairy tales. The café inside is small and round, and so overheated that I pull my scarf off immediately.

  The room holds a half dozen tables of elderly women in sweater sets. They all look exactly like Angela Lansbury . . . except, that is, for the ones who look exactly like Maggie Smith. The waitress is well-cast too, blonde and buxom and rosy-cheeked, and without asking what we want, she brings us a three-tiered tray crammed with clever little desserts. Tess goes through the descriptions, quoting names like “syllabub” and “trifle” and “fool.” This is the first time we have stopped for dessert in the afternoon—I suppose this is “tea”?—and everyone seems to like the idea. We eat too much, chat and linger, aware that the van waits to carry us to the next inn. Not one of us is straining to get back on the trail. The time for proving things has passed. “I hope you don’t feel like we blew your story off,” Valerie is saying to Silvia. “It was a good story. Maybe the most hopeful one we’ve had so far.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” Silvia says. “So many people seem to think my situation is sad and that pisses me off. Nothing is worse than being perfectly happy and having people always telling you to hang in there because things are bound to get better. Besides,” she adds, boldly reaching for the last pastry on the tray, “we need to pick up the storytelling pace a bit, don’t we?”

  “Indeed, for I’m afraid we must tell all three of the remaining stories tomorrow,” Tess says, wiping a bit of clotted cream from her lower lip. “Steffi, Becca, and Che. I’m sorry if that makes you feel mashed together but I want to keep the very last morning free for our walk into Canterbury. There are quite a few tidbits about Chaucer and the Cathedral that I always share with groups as we enter the city, and of course Saturday night we shall have our grand meal at my favorite restaurant in town. It’s called Deeson’s, and it’s quite posh. No more pub grub for the likes of us, as I suspect a few of you will be happy to hear.”

  By this she probably means Steffi, who bemoans the lack of fresh produce at every stop, who is appalled by the pub menus that so cheerfully announce they are about to serve us “tinned tomatoes” and “mushy peas.” Steffi, who makes a great show of taking her multivitamin every morning, holding it up and saying, “Usually this is a precaution, but on this trip, it’s a necessity.” As if six days off her usual regime of broccoli and quinoa might cause a woman to succumb to scurvy. Steffi, who has fretted her way through every meal since we became companions, always interrogating the poor waitress on how everything is prepared. The answer is always baked, boiled, or fried, so I don’t know why she bothers asking. And she never fails to point out the irony that for a land so green, in fact the greenest place she’s ever been, the British never seem to manage to get anything green on their dinner plates.

  But, on the other hand, Tess could just as easily be talking of me and my own affectations, my stupid insistence that we should let each wine breathe before tasting it, even those that are clearly dead on arrival. Or she might be talking about Becca, who is chafing after so much time spent in the company of her elders, who bolts from the table the minute she swallows her last bite, disappearing God knows where, and never deigning to take pudding or chamomile with the rest of us. We three people who have yet to tell our stories . . . we are all of us pains in the ass, each in her own way. The cards have chosen us to go last, and it’s rather fitting, but I wonder if the other women dread tomorrow, when we’ll come charging at them like the three storytellers of the apocalypse.

  And here’s the kicker: I still don’t know what I’m going to say. I could tell one of the stories of my mother, I suppose. I know the other women are wondering about her. Today when I dropped the ashes on the trail and panicked, enough of the truth came out that everyone now knows why I’ve come to Canterbury. It was just enough information to intrigue them, I could tell, but yet . . . Shoot. I should have sprinkled her on Dover too. She would have liked it, its defiant ugliness, that poor put-upon little beach with the smell of oil and tar. Maybe there’s still time for me to slip away from the others and toss a bit of her over the cliff.

  But anyway, now that they know why I joined the group at the last minute, they’re clearly curious about the woman causing such bother and it’s not like there aren’t a hundred good stories starring Diana de Milan. She was a storied creature—she once danced with Elvis Presley, back in college, when he was making a tour of campuses to promote one of his musicals. She hitchhiked the length of Route 66, burned her bra in front of the White House, wrote a book with an entire chapter on how a woman might find her own clitoris, took an immersion course and claimed to have learned serviceable Russian in a single weekend. Grew pears in bottle trees and played the drums and could hold her breath underwater for two straight minutes and being her daughter was exhausting. More exhausting than navigating the cliffs of Dover, and, come to think of it, my mom got bombed on a regular basis too. She was a master of rebuilding after trouble, pulling herself from the dust and reinventing her life time and time again. I should have paid more attention to how she did it. But it never once occurred to me that I could have learned somethi
ng from Diana, not until after she was dead. And now it’s too late to ask her anything.

  TESS SAYS the lighthouse café has one bathroom with a single toilet, which we know from past experience means a twenty-minute departure ceremony. So I decide to take advantage of the fact that women pee slowly to slip into the little gift shop. It’s an alcove, really, in what must have once been the lighthouse keeper’s pantry. They have pretty bits of pottery, which cards inform me is made by a local artisan. I pick up a small curved dish, shaped like a slender leaf but light blue in color, hefting it in my hand. It’s the sort of thing Ned would like. Understated, solid, well-crafted. We could use it for soap in the guest bath at the beach cottage or for olive oil in the kitchen.

  We were both judicious in stores, slow to spend our money, and Ned had once laughed and said that nothing made us so proud as to shop all day and then return home empty-handed. Yet he would have found beauty in this little bowl, I’m sure of it. If he were still my boyfriend, I would take it home to him as a souvenir. I picture it in his hand, his long, slim fingers curled around its delicate oval shape . . . and it’s strange, isn’t it, that I have automatically wondered if Ned would like the bowl but I haven’t wondered if I like it? I think I do. And even though he’s gone and I’m alone, the world still has soap and olive oil, does it not? I might need places to put them. I hand a wispy ten-pound note to the girl behind the register, wave away the mysterious British change, and look over at the bathroom. We are moving even more slowly than I predicted. Jean, Becca, and Steffi are still waiting outside the door.