The Canterbury Sisters by Kim Wright Read Free Book Online

find it interesting that she’s not elected to sit beside her mother, not even at this first meal. Of course she’s much younger than anyone else at the table, save Tess, and most likely has been dragged on this trip against her will, just as I was swept up in so many of my own mother’s madcap adventures through the years.
    I feel a surge of sympathy for the girl, who, now that I look closely at her, has the same sort of all-American prettiness as her mother. Or at least the potential of it. But where I let my resemblance to Diana slowly erode throughout years of neglect, Becca seems to be trying to consciously obliterate any similarity between her and Jean. She has dyed her short, spiky hair a cartoonish shade of orangey-red, has bitten her nails to tiny turquoise-painted dots, and is wearing glasses so heavy and dark that I wonder if she really needs them. They seem like an affectation, a prop, like Sir Walter Raleigh’s red cape, a way for you to know what game our young Becca is playing the minute you meet her. The glasses and the hair all but scream I am not my mother. You make that mistake on point of death.
    Jean smiles and flaps a well-manicured hand in the direction of her daughter. “Yes, Becca and I have been planning this trip for years,” she says. “My younger two are boys, both athletes with all the practices and schedules and tournaments that come with that sort of life. It’s hard to get some real mother-daughter time, so when her fall break rolled around . . .”
    Her voice trails off. Becca says nothing, so Tess smoothly weaves back in. “And we have a pair of friends from Texas,” she says. “Claire and Silvia . . .”
    Now these two are an even odder duo than the mother and daughter. Because you expect daughters to boomerang off their mothers, to assert themselves by trying to be wildly different. But friends are often similar, and these women seem to share nothing. It’s hard to tell if they are even close in age, although somehow I suspect they might be, that their friendship is one of long standing. If they were in an ad, Claire would be the one who’d been wise enough to purchase the two-hundred-dollar skin cream and Silvia would be the one who had not. Claire is blonde like Jean, but icily so, silver instead of gold, almost Nordic, and her face is so flawless that she’s probably had work done, but done so well that you can’t quite be sure. While Jean comes off as a woman who has graciously accepted the mantle of her fifties—your most serene highness of some minor kingdom—Claire is edgier, almost hip. I want her earrings. I want her scarf. When I get to know her better, I suspect there’s a good chance I might want her life.
    Silvia, in utter contrast, is worn and weathered, like a woman who spends her days training dogs or maybe even breaking horses. Something outdoors in the brutal elements of Texas. Age spots dot her forehead and temples, the splotches undimmed by makeup, and she seems to be locked in a permanent squint. It’s difficult, keeping track of three women who are so close in age or at least far enough north of me that the actual number hardly matters. And yet they are all different and I need to stop for a moment and figure out how. Okay. If Jean is warm and golden and Claire is cool and silvery, then Silvia could be called bronze. Solid and matte, less pricey than the other two but more durable, a woman who has been tested by time, who has a sheen rather than a shine. I look at their hands for confirmation of my theories, for hands are the purest indication of a woman’s way of life, the one part of the female anatomy that cannot be frozen, dyed, lifted, sucked, or tucked, although I’m sure they’re working on a way to remedy even that. Jean’s hands are plump and soft, with oval pink tips and a wedding band cutting into the flesh. Claire has the square, dark nails of a city manicure, a single oversize amber ring. Silvia’s hands are utterly unadorned