The Canterbury Sisters (26 page)

“You’re throwing it away?”

“It has a pull.”

I guess my astonishment shows on my face because she says, quickly, “Unless you’d like it, of course.”

I go over to the wastebasket and pick up the sweater, pull it to my face, and feel the enviable softness of the wool. I don’t have a long history with cashmere but I know enough to know this isn’t the ninety-nine-dollar outlet-sale kind. It’s the real stuff, the sweater equivalent of a fine Bordeaux. A whiff of Claire still clings to the wool, a perfume I have smelled before but cannot quite name. Pulling another woman’s clothing from the trash is not like me; I’ve never shopped in consignment stores or even swapped shoes back and forth with my friends. But the casualness with which Claire has disposed of this sweater is shocking. It feels somehow morally wrong, and it strikes me that Claire is the sort of woman who throws away more in a single year than most of us dispossess in the course of a lifetime. A tiny flaw and she tosses something aside, be it a sweater or an apple or a man, and I cannot decide if this easy disregard is the source of her power or the source of her wounding.

“So you’ve lost your mother,” she says. She is folding other sweaters as she speaks, sweaters identical to the one she threw away.

“I’m trying to. I think today I made some progress.”

“How long ago?”

I have to stop and think. “About a month.”

She murmurs that she is sorry and meanwhile I rub the sweater against my cheek again, wondering if it would be odd if I put it on right here in front of her. And then she asks a question that surprises me.

“What did she teach you? Your mother, I mean. Girls always learn something from their mothers, even when they try not to.”

Funny. Exactly what I wondered back in the lighthouse café, but I didn’t have an answer then and I don’t have one now.
She taught me to despise what is easy and close at hand,
I think.
She taught me to always be on the lookout for something better, something finer just around the next bend.
But that isn’t quite right. It’s unfair to both me and Diana and so I stall, turn the question back to Claire. “What did you learn from your mother?”

The question doesn’t give her pause. She’s obviously thought about this before, but she pops a stack of sweaters into a bureau and checks her reflection in the mirror before answering. The ends of her medium-length white-blonde hair are perfectly tucked under, a remarkable fact considering that we have walked the entire afternoon in rain and the rest of us arrived in Dover either frizzy or limp. But she runs a brush through it anyway and says, “That the most important thing a woman could be was beautiful.”

“Not to be rich?” The question comes out a little rudely, which isn’t how I meant it, but she obviously is rich, this woman who tosses aside cashmere like candy wrappers. She’s traded up with every husband, that much at least is clear, until she got to the level where she was no longer for sale at any price. The level where she could become the shopper. Could afford to pick herself out a shiny young pool boy.

“In my mother’s world, if a woman was beautiful, then being rich would automatically follow,” Claire says, sitting down on the bed so that we are facing each other, sitting almost knee to knee. “A girl’s job was to be pretty and if she did her job well, then she would deserve a man who had done his job well, and his job was making money. So by that logic, any pretty girl would ultimately become rich. It sounds terribly old-fashioned, I know.”

“Do you mind if I put on this sweater?”

“Of course not,” she says, and her mouth is smiling even though her eyes look sad. Through the window I can see Tim going by with my bag.

I pull the turtleneck over my head and take a minute to absorb it all in—the softness, the scent of money. And then it occurs to me, all of a sudden. “My mother taught me that it is never too late.”

“Now that is a truly extraordinary thing for a woman to teach her daughter,” Claire says, in a tone that makes it unclear if she believes my mother’s lesson to be helpful, or even accurate. “And just what is this thing that you’re not too late to do?”

I push to my feet. “That’s the part I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

Thirteen

T
he next morning it is still dark when we set out. It’s no earlier than usual, but the clouds are so low that eight o’clock feels like the middle of the night. We begin walking in a direction that Tess informs us is northwest, retracing our route and heading back away from the sea. I hope this means things will calm down soon, that we will be able to spread farther apart and begin to walk and talk normally. For now we are packed shoulder-to-shoulder, marching almost in lockstep, a single mass against the shards of cold rain. The conditions are hardly ideal for storytelling, but we have three of them to get through today and we have barely begun our descent from Dover when Tess turns to Steffi.

“You have a tale?” she says, and Steffi nods.

She’s ready. Of course she is.

 The Tale of Steffi 

“When I was growing up,” Steffi says, “there was one thing in my family that everyone knew, but that no one was ever permitted to say aloud. At least not in public. It was like my parents believed that if we never talked about it, nobody would notice that my sister was fat.

“For a mother like mine, having a fat daughter was the ultimate shame,” she goes on, turning her head from side to side as she speaks and almost shouting over the wind. “It was nice if you were smart, or kind or talented in some way, or if you had a pretty face, but it wasn’t essential. Skinny was what counted.”

We nod in unison, and wipe the droplets from our faces. It is almost as if the whole group has started crying and merely a few words in, Steffi’s story has already explained so much. Just this morning at breakfast they brought us something called a Scotch egg, which had turned out to be sausage wrapped around a boiled egg and then deep-fried. The hard brown ovals had rolled around on each plate like balls and Steffi had said to the poor innkeeper, “You have brought me a plate of death.”

A plate of death. It had been a strange breakfast, true, and none of us had known quite how to eat it, but that hardly made it a plate of death. Steffi’s food quirks make more sense now.

“My mother had been a model before she married and had us,” Steffi says. “Not like Beverly Johnson, not that high up the food chain, but during the seventies she’d been in her share of ads in magazines like
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
and
Seventeen.
She was the black girl they always included in every group shot of white friends. You know, the one that’s supposed to imply a level of diversity that doesn’t really exist. I’m sure that had something to do with why she cared so much how everything looked. When you’re the only one . . .”

She stops, pulls a wayward strand of hair from where it has stuck to her heavily balmed lips. “The thing is, nobody had any real idea how much my sister was eating, because she ate alone most of the time. She would carry food into her room, and once I think I even heard her talking to it. Like a friend. Which sounds utterly crazy, if you didn’t grow up in my house and never saw how fast a dining room table could turn into a battlefield. My mother would watch everyone while they ate, calculating the calories they were consuming in her head. The damage, that’s what she called it. A doughnut had a damage of four hundred and fifty calories. An orange just had a damage of fifty-five. It’s funny after all these years how many of her calorie counts I still remember.”

“What’s your sister’s name?” Valerie asks.

“Tina,” says Steffi, rather slowly. “Named after my mom, who’s Christina, and that made it even worse. You have to understand that my mother would have preferred almost anything else over the stigma of having a fat daughter. A child who was stupid, a husband who beat her, bankruptcy, drugs, affairs . . . any of that would have been better, because any of that could have been hidden. But you can’t hide fat. All Tina had to do was walk into a room and the jig was up. She was immediate proof that we weren’t some perfectly photogenic black family, like the Huxtables were then or like the Obamas are now, and that we’d never be perfect, no matter how much Mom tried to pretend.”

She waits for us to nod before continuing. We oblige. We nod. Nothing sucks quite like being fat sucks, so there’s no point in pretending we don’t understand.

“Tina’s humiliations were endless,” Steffi says. “The regular gym uniforms at school didn’t fit her. One had to be special ordered. When we went to Disneyland, she had to ride in her Dumbo by herself. Dumbo. She was supposed to be a little girl, but she was too heavy to ride with the rest of us in an elephant. Can you imagine the kind of jokes people made? And if a fat girl walks down the street eating an ice cream cone . . .” Steffi shudders. “Strangers stop and stare and some of them even say things to you. I remember one time the man selling ice cream wouldn’t give her a cone, because that was her favorite thing, you see, ice cream, and Mom knew it and wouldn’t keep it in the house. So the minute we were on our own, which was rare because my mother watched us like a hawk, we’d head straight for the park. This man . . . he sold ice cream for a living, that’s the whole point. He owned the cart. It was his job to sell ice cream, but he wouldn’t sell any to her. He held up a cone of strawberry—that was her very favorite—and he said, ‘You don’t need this,’ and he handed the cone to me.”

“Did you take it?” says Becca.

“I’m ashamed to say I did,” says Steffi. “He was an adult and I was a kid and I didn’t know what else to do. I offered it back to her the second we were out of his sight, but by then I had licked it and it had sort of melted. She must have hated me. Felt I was the favored one and thought that it all wasn’t fair. And she was right. When you’re the fat girl, nothing is fair.”

We walk a bit in silence, except for the wind.

“She had one date during all four years of high school,” says Steffi. “It was the son of a friend of my father’s and a total fix-up. The four parents got together and made him do it. Or paid him, I don’t know. He went to a different school, so I guess he figured it would never get back to any of his friends that he’d gone out with someone who looked like Tina, but still, just to be on the safe side, he took her to a restaurant out of town. Some seafood place way down by the beach and he said it was because the fish was fresher there, but she saw through it. Of course she did. So she ate just a little bit, like she knew girls on dates were supposed to do, and he took her straight home afterward.

“When she walked in the kitchen, she was starving. It wasn’t just the fact she hadn’t eaten that night. She’d hardly had a real meal in weeks, because she’d been getting ready for her big date. My mother had insisted she could knock a few pounds off in time if she tried and she locked the kitchen—wait a minute. Have I told you that part? Mama didn’t believe in snacking. She always said that when the kitchen was closed, it was closed, and she would literally padlock everything before she went to bed.” Steffi laughs, a hollow sound. “I was in college before I realized that this wasn’t normal, that other people’s mothers didn’t put padlocks on the cupboards and refrigerators.”

“Tina came in, about nine, and she was upset. It had been an awful night and she was hungry, but there wasn’t anything anywhere. We weren’t the kind of family who even kept a bowl of fruit on the counter. She couldn’t find anything in the whole kitchen except for dog food.”

Steffi pauses, a pause that feels like forever. There’s tension within the group. I doubt there’s anyone among us who hasn’t already figured out that Steffi doesn’t have a sister, at least not a fat one named Tina. Steffi’s the one who went on the bad date with the boy who was ashamed of her, the one who couldn’t buy an ice cream cone, who had to fly solo in Dumbo. She’s been talking about herself all along, and the only suspense in the story is how long it will take her to admit that she is both the teller and the tale.

“She’d done it before,” Steffi said. “Reached in the big bag of dog food and snatched a handful of kibble whenever things weren’t going so good. The Alpo was the one edible thing in the house that our mother had never thought to lock up. But this night was an especially bad one, and she felt like she had to eat. Really eat. You have to understand that whenever she got like this, she was driven by pure compulsion, an addict needing her fix, and when she looked down at the dog’s bowl she saw there were the remains of pork chops in it. Which meant that we had celebrated while she was gone, because that’s another thing she loved, pork chops. Another food with which she couldn’t be trusted to restrain herself. So my mother never served them, except on those rare times when she knew Tina wasn’t going to be there. It was just one more additional slap in the face, that the whole family had been eating pork chops while she was off on her awful date, that even the dog was getting pork chops . . .”