The Canterbury Sisters (19 page)

The man standing before me is nothing if not confident. He takes my silence for consent. “I’ll get my car,” he says and then, with another little deal-sealing kiss, a drag of his salty tongue across my lower lip, he disappears through the arch of a trellis gate. It’s the sort of thing that in the spring is undoubtedly covered in climbing roses, just that sentimental and sweet. But it isn’t spring now, it’s autumn. This is the season in which things fall off of other things, the time of letting go. The trellis before me is swathed in brambles, their tangled brown thorns barely visible in the watery light.

This is a fine mess. I’m probably about to be raped and killed and I don’t even have a phone to call the constable in Dartford. I step toward the gate, maybe just to look out into the parking lot, to reassure myself that this is all real, that there really is a man going to get a car, and suddenly a bright, hot pain rips through the sole of my foot.

I’ve stepped in glass. Someone’s broken beer bottle. This courtyard is undoubtedly full of nothing but ashes, thorns, and shattered glass, and I stand on one foot and lift up the other, wincing as I move, weaving on my singular drunken leg. I can feel blood seeping through my sock and shards from the bottle are probably embedded in my foot and I’ve really screwed it up this time. For a second I think I might puke or faint, but I stave off both impulses and finally put the ball of my foot down—the worst of the damage is in my heel—and tiptoe back toward the screen door. Back through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the pub, where my rapid return from the smoking garden, solo and half-hopping on one foot no less, brings the entire assembly to silence.

Valerie is there. She is sitting at the bar, sipping a cup of tea. She says, “My God, what happened to you?”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” I say. I climb awkwardly onto the stool beside her and show her my foot. She curses at the sight of the blood. We ease off the sock while one barmaid dips me up a towelful of ice and the other goes to find the pub’s first aid kit.

“What were you doing outside in your socks?” Valerie says, bending low over my foot, flicking away the bits of glass. She doesn’t appear to be squeamish, which is lucky.

“Kissing some local. He’s gone to get his car. He thinks I’m going off in a hops field to have sex with him.”

“Why on earth does he think that?”

“Because I sort of told him that I would.”

“That would be our own Randolph Robbie,” says the barmaid, back with a rusted white box that holds bandages, alcohol, and iodine. From the look of the kit, it’s seen a lot of use. “He likes the ladies.”

“Can you go out back and tell him to just go on home, that I’ve cut my foot?” I say, crazy to the end. Still trying to explain myself, even to a rapist in a smoking garden.

“Oh, not to worry, love,” she assures me. “He’s used to the girls not showing up where they say they’ll be.” She bends down too, holding out a clean napkin in which Valerie can place the pieces of glass. The shards seem to be coming out large and whole, another stroke of undeserved luck. “A thousand birds have given Randy Boy the slip in a thousand ways. He’ll just toddle off home and wank off like he usually does.”

“He said he owns this bar.”

“Did he now?” She produces another towel, this one bearing the faded face of the Princess of Wales, and holds it carefully below while Valerie pours alcohol over the heel of my foot. It stings like the end of the world, and tears come to my eyes, but I struggle to not make a sound. She’s being very nice—they all are, considering it must be closing time and here I am bleeding all over their bar. “Hear that, Lucy? Randy Boy Robbie will be paying our wages from now on. Seems he’s the new boss.”

The other barmaid snorts.
Randy Boy Robbie
, I think.
Perfect. Claire may be the village tart, but I’ve just gotten the kiss of a lifetime from the village idiot.

“How much do I owe you?” I ask. “Since he’s not the bar owner I’m assuming these drinks aren’t on the house?”

“Let’s see. Three pints and two wines comes to . . . twelve pounds.”

“Really? That doesn’t sound like much.”

“We aren’t in London now, are we?”

“Can I charge it to my room? I’m staying here, with the—” but she is already shaking her head. All our meals and lodging are included in the tour price and I guess it gets complicated when we start trying to charge extras willy-nilly. Valerie is already reaching for her purse. It’s slung over the back of her bar stool, a Coach bag. I’ve never seen her with a pocketbook and not a backpack and a Coach bag is approximately the last thing in the world I would’ve imagined she’d carry. She wrinkles her nose.

“It was a gift,” she says.

“A nice gift,” I say.

“Yeah?” She lifts the bag to the bar and studies it. “I suppose you’re right. But my mother . . . she’s always giving me these pricey, elegant things that I don’t want. She doesn’t understand me.”

“Nobody’s mother understands them. I owe you about fourteen dollars. Or fifteen. Maybe sixteen. All things considered, I think I need to leave a pretty big tip.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Valerie says. “We can settle up later.” She doesn’t say anything about my willingness to take off with Randy Boy, or about today’s confession that I’d been with thirty men. Funny thing is, before that very moment, I’d never thought of thirty as a lot. In fact, you could argue that thirty men over the course of thirty years adds up to a pretty sexless life, but from the expressions on everyone’s faces it had been clear that they were adjusting their opinions of me on the spot. Good thing I left it at thirty and claimed to have lost count there, because I actually think the total may be closer to forty.

“The thing is, I can’t even remember the last time I felt this drunk,” I say, babbling a bit, as if Valerie is judging me, even though I know she’s probably the last one of the group who truly would.

“Seriously. If I’m at one of the big festivals, I can do wine tastings from nine in the morning to midnight without getting the slightest bit buzzed. But you’re being a good girl, I see. Having tea.”

She makes another slight grimace, just like she did with the Coach bag. “It’s peppermint. They say it helps with nausea.”

“You don’t feel well?”

“Maybe I’m just not used to good wine.” She stretches. “Maybe drinking anything over ten dollars a bottle makes me feel kind of sick, just like carrying a Coach bag. But I do think I can sleep now. What about you? Do you need help up the stairs?”

“I’m okay,” I say. “The cut sobered me up.” And then I realize she’s talking about my foot. The wound didn’t seem to be too broad, just deep. A puncture, a stab, a single stigmata-like circle of blood, but the barmaid has cushioned my heel with a square of gauze and crisscrossed the gauze with Band-Aids. She’s done a damn fine job, actually. I should be able to walk on it tomorrow.

The stairwell sways like a hammock, but I make it up and to my room
.
Flip the dead bolt and sit down on the bed. Ball up the ruined socks and toss them toward the wastebasket, missing. And I stare at the door.
There’s such a thin panel between me and the world,
I think.
Plywood. Parcel board. Any stranger could break it down at any minute.
And I wonder why we feel safe at some times—like speeding down the highway, for example—when we’re actually probably in a fair amount of danger and why at other times when we’re actually very safe, our hearts begin to pound and the world feels sharp-edged and treacherous. It took a broken beer bottle to save me from myself tonight, and all of this is so unlike me, so—

A noise. It’s coming from outside, just beneath my window.

I hop over and look down. It’s Randy Boy, of course, and how the hell did he know which room was mine? He’s yelling up, like a drunken, slack-jawed Romeo, or no, maybe he’s more of a Stanley screaming for his Stella, because he’s calling out my name, over and over. He’s going to wake everyone up. All the other women in the group. Everybody in town.

When he sees my face at the window, he stops. Tilts his chin to one side and says, “Did you forget me, love?”

I probably never will. “I’m not coming down,” I hiss.

“Then I’ll come up. Don’t you know I’ve scrambled up this chimney a dozen times before.”

Somehow I don’t doubt that in the least. “I’ve hurt myself,” I say.

“And I know how to make you better,” he says. He spreads his arms out and begins to twirl in slow motion with his head thrown back. He looks like a child trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue.

“No,” I say. “I’m not coming down and you’re not coming up. I cut my foot. It’s over. They told me you’d just go home and wonk off.” Or was it wank off? Something like that. Either way, he needs to go home.

“What?” he says, stopping midtwirl, brow furrowed. “They told you what?”

Wrong. Wrong thing to say. I don’t want to make him mad. Don’t want to set off another round of him yelling my name into the darkness. I try a new tactic.

“You’ve played me for a fool, you have,” I say. “Leading me to think you owned this pub and now the barmaid tells me that’s a lie.”

He shakes his head. “She’s a bitter one, that Lorrie. Or was it Lucy? Doesn’t matter, they’re both of them dead bitter.”

“Maybe so, but are they liars?”

There is silence from the darkness below. He has no comeback to that.

“I only went with you because I thought you were a man of property,” I tell him. “I thought you had some standing in the community, could give me a home and a proper future. But you lied and now it’s over between us.”

He nods slowly. It’s the sort of rejection he can understand and accept.

“On your way then, Che de Milan,” he says softly. “On your way then to Canterbury with your gaggle of pilgrims.”

“Goodbye,” I say, closing the window, surprised to note that I feel a small but sharp pang of regret. For this all meant something, this strange confluence of events tonight, even if I don’t know what it is yet. Tonight I may have felt crazy, but at least I felt something, and that part was nice. Besides, what am I to make of all these men, each sending me on my way in turn? “I wish you the best,” one says. “Fare thee well,” says another, or “So it’s off with you, I take it?” or “On your way then, Che de Milan.” There are so many ways a man can tell a woman goodbye, and it seems like in the past week I’ve heard them all.

“How did you used to handle it, Mom?” I say out loud to my backpack in the corner, to the bag of ashes tucked inside. “How did you run so many men without it ever getting out of hand?”

But she keeps her counsel on the matter, just as she did when she was alive.

I crawl back into bed for the second time tonight. Maybe I’m having some sort of psychological breakdown, some delayed PTSD from Ned’s letter. Because I had been minutes away from getting into a car with a man I didn’t know. Driving into the darkness, down an empty road. Letting him unfold me across his seat, taking his body into mine, throwing back my head and baying up at the milky moon. Put it that way and it sounds like madness, but then again, Claire had been married and still found herself sleeping with a man she didn’t know. Maybe they’re all just different levels of the same madness. The only thing I know for sure is that I must fall asleep soon or tomorrow will be a nightmare. I cut off the light and roll over. Try to make a comfortable nest out of the stiff quilts and thin pillows. Exhale loudly and slowly, just like the meditation tapes say to do.

Renee. It comes to me unbidden, but that’s her name. That’s the girl Ned left me for. Well, God bless her, she has him now. Actually I guess she has her own personal Ned, but she doesn’t have my Ned, because just like I thought at the bar, that’s impossible. It’s like that saying “No man can step into the same river twice.” Who said that? Confucius? No, I think it was someone else, someone Greek. But it’s true, so I guess it’s also true that no two women can step into the same Ned twice, and Jesus, I think, I’m either still drunker than I thought I was, or I’m getting really deep. Because I am suddenly consumed with the notion that it’s impossible to lose anything, at least at the core. That whatever we think is lost or dead has really just moved on and taken another shape.

Ned is a new person now,
I think.
And you know something? At least for this moment, that is absolutely fucking fine with me.

I roll over in bed. The mattress sags in the middle, sinks me into a soft groove, and my heel throbs like a heartbeat and I’m tired, very tired. The sounds from below are more muted now. The thud of a car door beneath my window—one of the last men standing is finally leaving the pub. God bless you, stranger from the bar. Safe travels home. God bless Renee and Randy Boy and Valerie and Lorrie and Lucy, the bitter barmaids, and Allen in the Guatemalan water—or was it Honduras where he went off the bridge? It hardly matters. God bless all the men who fell into all the water, wherever they were, and Nico in prison and Tess, who must have seen and heard so much on these walks but who tucks it all inside her shirt pocket, who bends her head and folds her hands just like a nun, and bless the charms of hummingbirds with their small wings fluttering across the world and God bless Diana above me in heaven and in her baggie down below, and God bless me. I think I might need the blessing of God. I think I might need it more than anyone. Because something else has occurred to me tonight, out in the smoking garden, in that world of ashes and beer and thorns and glass. Another thing that you’re probably way ahead of me on, another obvious sign that the ever-so-discriminating Che de Milan has somehow managed to miss. Another illustration of Tess’s point that while it’s easy to analyze the stories of others, it’s nearly impossible to grasp the meaning of our own.

When my mother told me that it’s never too late for healing, she hadn’t been talking about herself.

Nine

I
can’t believe none of you heard him,” I’m saying to the others the next morning, as we walk down the country road leading to the trailhead for the day. “He was right under my window, yelling my name.”