“Take your time,” he says. Then he pulls her head to his shoulder. “No rush, eh.” A few minutes later, when he slides back over behind the wheel and starts the truck, Frances is sorry. She wants to stay here, likes the way the truck cab has filled up with anticipation.
He says, “Your mother will be wondering where you’ve got to.”
Her mother. Why did he have to bring her into this? Well, at least Frances can report that the marriage proposal had come before any hanky-panky.
When they pull into the yard and the truck stops, she doesn’t get out right away. She waits, thinking that Joe will kiss her again, wanting him to, but he doesn’t, and so she opens the door.
“Tomorrow I’ll drive you out to my place,” he says. “You’ll want to see it.”
Frances nods and says, “Okay, then.” (Stupid, stupid. “Okay, then”—did she really say that?)
Her parents are still up when she gets inside. Her mother sees something in Frances’s face—damn her—but Frances can’t bring herself to tell them about the proposal.
“His sister is off her rocker, if you ask me” is all she says.
Her father is looking at her too—well, not really looking, since he’s blind, but still, he’s studying her. She can’t read his expression.
She goes to bed but can’t sleep. She closes her eyes and pretends that Joe is in the bed with her, tries to imagine what that would be like—her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. His kiss. His tongue in her mouth. She, Frances Moon, has had a man’s tongue in her mouth!
By morning, she’s decided to say yes.
She tells her parents about the proposal at breakfast. Her mother looks sick, about as close to deathly ill as a healthy person can look.
Frances says, “We’re going out to his farm this afternoon.”
Her mother grabs the dishes off the breakfast table and throws them in the sink so carelessly it’s a wonder they don’t all break.
“He says it’s picturesque where his house is.”
Crash. A dish breaks in the sink. Maybe more than one.
Alice says, “God help us.”
Frances thinks about what she should wear to her wedding.
6. A Marriage Bed
WHERE FRANCES’S PARENTS live, the land is almost all cleared for farming, but north of town there are only pockets of cultivated land mixed with acres of bush.
“Bought the place from an old trapper,” Joe says. “Used to be a log house here. I lived in it for a while, me and the mice. Then I knocked it down and put this up instead.” He’s referring to the square-looking bungalow that sits in a clearing ringed with poplars, their leaves beginning to turn bright yellow.
They get out of the truck and Frances follows Joe to the house. A collie-type dog appears from somewhere and tries to jump on her.
Joe kicks it away and says, “Get, you.”
“It’s okay,” Frances says. “I like dogs. What’s his name?”
“I just call him Dog,” Joe says.
She calls the dog back, holding out her hand. He comes to her and she scratches him behind his ears. He wags his tail so hard it seems as though he’s going to fall over. He’s so excited he piddles on her shoe and she wipes it in the grass before Joe sees and chases the dog away again.
The house smells of woodsmoke. The door opens into the kitchen and Frances looks around and tries to imagine herself cooking and cleaning here. She tries to picture herself scrubbing the kitchen floor, tries to absorb domestic responsibility into the shadowy but gradually sharpening image of herself as a married woman.
The furniture in both the kitchen and the living room is sparse and old—not surprising, Frances thinks, for a bachelor. She’ll get some matching blankets and make covers for the couch and the armchair. There’s a TV on a wooden stand that looks homemade. At least there’s a TV, and it’s newer than the one her parents have.
She pokes around and discovers a small washroom, with a washstand and basin and a stainless steel tub. The tub has a drain and one tap for cold water, but there’s no hot water and no toilet.
“Biffy’s out back,” Joe says. “You have to heat water on the stove. Maybe I should put in proper plumbing. Didn’t really matter when it was just me here.”
When it was just me. He’s talking as though she’s already said yes.
She looks in the bedrooms. There are two of them. The smaller one is being used to store an old motorcycle, which is in parts all over the floor.
“I’m trying to get that thing running,” he says of the motorcycle. “So far, no luck.”
A motorcycle! Frances thinks. Will she really get to ride on the back of a motorcycle?
The other bedroom is bigger. It has a double bed and two old dressers. There’s a plaid wool blanket on the bed. Joe sees her looking at it and turns away, as though he’s ashamed by the bed, the fact that he’s shown it to Frances.
He says, “I’ll make us a pot of coffee.” Frances doesn’t much like coffee, but she doesn’t say so. She steps from the bedroom back into the living room. The view of the trees from the window reminds her of a calendar picture. She’d be like Heidi living out here, she thinks, or maybe Laura Ingalls. Laura Ingalls with a motorcycle.
“Joe,” she says. It just slips out, intimate, like skin on skin.
He hears that she’s said something. “What was that?” he asks, coming to stand with her in the window. He kisses the back of her neck and then drapes his arm around her shoulder, and she feels as though she’s going to faint, just drop right out from under his arm the way you could slip though a Styrofoam ring in the water. She’s sure she shuddered and wonders if he felt it.
“Have you got an answer for me?” he asks.
She nods.
“Is that a yes, then?”
“Yes.” Her voice speaking, but it’s as though it has a mind of its own, not her mind.
“We’ll talk to your folks when I drive you home,” Joe says.
He removes his arm from around her shoulder and then turns in such a way that his hand brushes down the front of her sweater, against her breasts. She steps back, thinking it was an awkward accident, like hands touching in a popcorn box, but then . . . of course, he had done it on purpose! She’s just told him that she’s going to be his wife. He wants to touch her, hands under sweaters. The thought makes her knees shake. She’s not afraid, though. Why should she be? She has something that a man wants, a real man, not an awkward boy scrubbed and polished by his mother. Who would have believed it just a few months ago, when she walked up to the stage in the school gym to collect her twenty-five-dollar award? Frances’s future: marriage, looking forward to being felt up. She wants to laugh.
They take their mugs of coffee out to the yard. Joe shows her the spot he thinks would be good for a garden, points beyond the meadow to where his farmland is, tells her how many acres he seeds and how many acres of hay he leases to a neighbour with cattle. He has a trapline that he works in the winter. Sometimes he works in the bush. And at the dealership in the summer, of course, but she already knows that.
“Can’t earn enough money farming this land,” he says. “It’s not like your father’s land, not like south of town.”
Frances doesn’t care about seeded acres and farmland. She asks, because it’s on her mind, “How come you’ve never been married?” She doesn’t actually know that this is the case.
Joe says, “I was just waiting for you to be old enough.”
“You weren’t,” Frances says. “That’s a lie.” Here’s something else new, a side of Joe she has not seen before: he’s teasing her. She feels a confidence growing between them. From now on, people will see them both the way they had seen them in the past, but this thing that’s growing will be apparent just to them. Again, she wants to laugh. She’s in a secret world no one had told her about.
They spend a couple of hours walking around the yard, up the trail through the bush, and by late afternoon, when Joe drives her home again, she’s certain
she’s in love. How did it happen so quickly? she wonders. When Joe asked her to marry him yesterday, she wasn’t sure. Now, when she thinks of him kissing her, she can hardly stand the thrill of it. She wonders about the term “engagement.” Is she officially engaged or do you have to make some kind of announcement? She has no ring. Does that mean anything? She remembers Myrna Samples’s diamond. Obviously, that ring had not meant anything—not even a promise, since the wedding was off a month later. She doesn’t want a ring, she decides, doesn’t need one. Then she thinks, What is engagement anyway? Why don’t they just get married? Right away. They both know what they want.
After Joe drives her home, he stays for supper, at Frances’s insistence. When they’re all seated at the table, he says, “Frances has agreed to marry me.”
Frances’s parents look at Joe, then at Frances.
“I said yes,” Frances says, to break the silence.
She looks at her father. No expression gives away what he’s thinking at this moment. He hasn’t said a word about Joe Fletcher since he agreed with Alice that Joe was too old, had simply turned silent, turned a blind eye (or two), and let Alice deal with Frances.
When she looks at her mother, Frances can clearly see what she thinks. Alice says nothing more than “Please pass the salt,” and for a minute Frances wonders if she might throw some over her shoulder to prevent any more bad luck. Why isn’t anyone happy for her? Why isn’t her mother jumping up to hug her, ask her when, find out what colour bouquet she wants to carry?
Finally, after what seems like an eternity of silence, Joe says, “I’ll take good care of her.” Frances wishes he would say a bit more, be a little more convincing.
“See that you do,” Frances’s father says. Then he sighs and gets up from the table, and Frances thinks he’ll go the bedroom and close the door, but he goes to the root cellar and comes up with a bottle of his homemade chokecherry wine. It’s the first time Frances has ever been allowed a glass of wine. Her mother pushes her glass away when Basie puts it on the table in front of her, and she actually says, “I hardly think this is cause for celebration.”
Frances wants to kill her. Kill her, really, for not understanding that this is what she wants. She’d like to scream it: “This is what I want, Mother. Be happy for me. It’s my life!” She’s worried that Joe will leave in the face of all this rudeness from his future in-laws, but there he is, lifting his water glass of chokecherry wine, and now her father is asking him about a tractor part or—no, tires, that’s it, and they pass the serving dishes and eat, and then Frances’s mother is clearing the dishes from the table, stirring up a hurricane in the soapy water in the sink. Frances picks up a tea towel to dry, but her mother says, “Never mind. Go and sit with your fiancé.” The way she spits out the word “fiancé,” she might as well be talking about cow manure.
When Joe leaves an hour later, Frances walks out to the truck with him. Her head is light from the wine and she trips over her own feet and has to grab his arm. Before he gets in the truck, he puts his arms around her and then his hands find her breasts, and this time Frances is sure it’s no accident. She begins to push him away, afraid that her parents will see because she and Joe are standing almost right under the yard light, but she feels that flush again, that tingle, and curiosity gets the better of her, and she lets him slip his hands up under her sweater, lets him fumble with her brassiere. She moves her arms to give him more room and . . . oh my God, this is why girls let their boyfriends do things. Why had no one told her this? She feels his hardness against her and she’s curious about that too.
“Let’s go somewhere in the truck,” she says.
But he backs away from her and says, “The wedding. You and your mother decide.”
After he leaves the yard, she struggles to hook her bra, sure her parents will know what she’s been up to—that is, getting felt up. She straightens her hair and takes a few deep breaths. When she goes back inside, she finds that her father has gone to bed.
Her mother, though, is waiting for her in the living room. She has the brochure from the university on her lap, the one with information for first-year students. Frances had assumed it was long gone, turned to ash in the burning barrel along with the ripped-up letter.
“What should I do with this?” her mother asks.
“I’m not sure why you still have it,” Frances says. Then she adds, “I won’t be needing it, obviously.”
“I was hoping,” her mother says.
“Please stop,” Frances says. “I have a future. I would think you’d be glad.”
“Joe Fletcher? I should be glad that Joe Fletcher is your future? I despair that you’ve chosen marriage to a man like him. For God’s sake, Frances, he’s not even a proper farmer. He’s some kind of jack of all trades.”
Frances bites her tongue, and then says, in place of what she wants to say, “How long does it take to arrange a wedding?”
Her mother leaves the room.
Two weeks later, when Frances’s new blue velvet dress from the catalogue is hanging in the closet, Alice tries once more, one final attempt. “You’re going to regret this choice, Frances,” she says.
“You mean the blue dress? No, I won’t. White is old-fashioned. And I look good in blue. You always say that.”
“That’s not what I meant. You can’t just come running home. It won’t be that simple.”
“You mean you’re kicking me out?” She’s trying to lighten her mother up. Keep her from ruining her happiness.
“It’s not funny. This is not something you can just change your mind about. You sign the papers and it’s legal. You’re married.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Frances says.
Her mother looks as if she is about to tell her something she doesn’t know, but she hesitates.
“What?” Frances presses.
“Since I can’t seem to do anything about this, I have a piece of advice,” her mother says. “I hope you and Joe will use . . . precautions, at least for a while.”
“Well, that’s a good piece of advice,” Frances says. “I was wondering.”
“There’s a pill now. Do you know about the pill? I think we should go to the doctor and get you a prescription.”
She thinks about Myrna Samples and the stitches and the crying baby, and agrees with her mother that she should get a prescription.
It’s the first thing they’ve agreed on since Joe Fletcher came calling.
Maybe long before that.
A WEEKNIGHT. WEDNESDAY. Late. Joe drives into the yard unexpectedly, and it’s kind of exciting, the way he drops in as though he can’t live without seeing her, stands at the door waiting. Frances’s father is already in bed. Her mother puts on her most disapproving look as Frances grabs her favourite grey kangaroo sweatshirt to wear against the cool night air. Frances and her mother have been arguing all day about the wedding, which is just a few weeks off. Her mother pulls her into the living room.
“I think I smelled liquor on his breath,” she whispers.
“You did not,” Frances says.
“If he’s been drinking, do not leave this yard with him.”
“Like I would,” she says, deciding right then that she’s going somewhere with Joe, no matter what state he’s in.
“My mother thinks you’ve been drinking,” she says when they’re in the truck.
He doesn’t deny it. “We don’t have to go far,” he says.
Go far for what? Frances slides over to sit close to him as they leave the yard.
Just a few miles from the farm, Joe pulls off the road onto an approach. It’s not a romantic spot. There’s a falling-down old farmhouse in front of them, and a line of dark trees that hides the sky and the stars. He turns the truck off but doesn’t say anything. He’s distracted. His arm is around her, but it feels like a dead weight, not a comfort. She begins to worry that he’s changed his mind, or that he wants to wait. She can smell the alcohol on his breath. She’s afraid of drinking, has
never really been around drunk people, and is beginning to wish Joe hadn’t come for her.
Then he says, “Martha thinks we should call off the wedding.”
“What?” Frances says. “Call it off?”
“If you don’t want to marry me, you can say so. I’ll understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I won’t blame you if you want to change your mind,” Joe says. “Martha thinks I might have pushed you into this.”
Pushed her into it? He’s barely spoken ten words about the wedding. She wonders if he’s telling the truth about Martha, or if her father has taken him aside and said his piece.
She doesn’t know how to respond, so she says, “Why would I call it off? I love you.”
And the minute she says “I love you”—which she has never said before—she thinks it might not be true. How would she know? What does she know about love? Nothing. She’s utterly confused by what she’s done, what she is about to do, what she wants, why he is telling her to reconsider . . . and she starts to cry. She hates crying. She hated all those weepy girls at school crying over boyfriends and complications that were about as difficult as deciding what colour lipstick to wear, and she can’t stand whatever is making her feel this way.
She can tell that Joe doesn’t know what to say to her. “Don’t do that,” he says, squeezing her shoulder awkwardly.
She tries to shove him away, but that isn’t really what she wants. What she wants is for him to squeeze harder, swallow her up, and she finds his mouth with hers, asks for his kiss—craves it—even though she can smell the alcohol, and then his hands are all over her, under her sweatshirt, the zipper in her jeans down, his hand between her legs, and she parts her legs for him and is willing to go on, all the way, as she has heard the girls at school say, to hell with that grade nine public health nurse, keep your knees together, but she’s sobbing now, sobbing like a child, and Joe pushes her away, saying, “Stop. Stop that.” She doesn’t know if he means the crying or the other, the way she wants him. “No,” she says, her hand searching for his belt buckle, but he pushes it away, roughly, and says again, “Stop that.”
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