The big wooden door slams shut behind her, the sound echoing through the shadowed emptiness of the hall. It’s only noon, the tea isn’t supposed to start till two, but she can hear by the distant sound of female voices that the owners of the other two vehicles are already at work in the kitchen. She notes that no tables and chairs have been set up yet, but the rush of energy she usually feels at a job to be done doesn’t come.
The wide entrance area is also the cloakroom and Iris sets the wrapped cake, her purse, and her shoe bag containing her beige pumps — her homage to the season, this is the first time she has worn them since the previous summer — on the floor and leans against the imitation-wood wallboard, its ghastly brown surely the colour of no wood on earth, pulls off her muddy boots, shakes the shoes out of the bag and slips her feet into them. How many times has she done just this?
She waits, arrested by the pictures she has unexpectedly conjured as they flip backwards in time like pages on a calendar in an old movie: standing here next to the coat racks with a frozen lemon dessert to serve at a wedding or two pumpkin pies for the Fowl Supper or Santa Claus-shaped sugar cookies for the children’s Christmas party or sandwiches or a pan of iced squares or two dozen buns for a wedding shower, an anniversary tea, a funeral reception, a fund-raising tea like this one. She wonders if in an eternity of other lives she was just as she is now: a wife, a middle-aged member of a big, prosperous family, a leading member of a rural community as her mother was before her, and her grandmother before that. Her head feels thick, the beginning of a headache hovering behind her brow.
Then, still leaning against the wall of the dimly lit cloakroom, her raincoat partly unbuttoned, she lets her arms fall to her sides, her head drift back to rest against the fake wood, and closes her eyes. She hears the voices from the kitchen rise to bright laughter, but she feels no answering desire to join the other women, although she knows in a moment she’ll have to give up this interlude of solitude. An ambience overtakes her, for the barest instant she’s plunged back into last night’s dream: a foreign country, hot, there are palm trees, and low, flat-roofed, rectangular houses. She is seated at a round table on a hill. A woman is seated there too. She is perhaps middle-aged, with a smooth olive-skinned face, not a line or a wrinkle, and very dark eyes. Her flowing white robes and headdress with its black band are a cross between an Arab woman’s and a nun’s. The woman gazes hard at Iris with eyes that show no fear, nor any favour. Eyes that see right through into her heart and her soul, that know everything there is to know about her. Eyes before which she feels reduced to a child again.
She is still troubled by that piercing gaze, as if the woman were real and not merely a figment in a dream. More, she is troubled by her dreams themselves; in the last months they’ve become too vivid and powerful to merely dismiss, but she doesn’t have a clue what they mean, although she suspects they do mean something. She supposes they’ll eventually go away as mysteriously as they’ve come.
She rouses, is about to pull away from the wall, but there’s another burst of laughter from the kitchen. No, she doesn’t want to go there, she wants to — what? Follow that dream woman to some place where — where there are no strawberry teas, no farms needing seeding, no baffling husbands. Resolve deserts her. She slumps back against the wall, again lets her eyes close.
She’d been wakened by a crow. Barely dawn and it had come, calling faintly from a distance, its voice confused in her mind with the early morning twitter of songbirds and the elusive sounds of her fading night’s dreaming, growing louder as it drew closer to where she lay motionless on her side of the bed in the upstairs bedroom she now rarely shared with Barney, her husband of nearly thirty years, his half of the quilt depressingly smooth and untouched. She’d listened, her countrywoman’s senses aroused. It couldn’t be a crow, surely it was too early for crows to be back? But it drew closer and closer, cawing as it came, and then it was against her window, must have lighted on the poplar branch that in the wind would rasp the window frame. From there it cawed peremptorily into her very ear, stentorian, three times: Caw! Caw! Caw!
She couldn’t fail to note — a slightly accelerated heart rate, a stillness that was all listening seizing her — it was as if the bird had been sent to speak directly to her, a messenger from regions she’d not yet been to, and she waited, bewildered, but feeling sure from the sudden uneasy stirring in her gut that there had to be more. But all she could read in the strident finality of its voice was that she should rise and go about the business of the living.
She stretched one leg toward the edge of the bed. The crow had now retreated some distance, its voice growing fainter, its crowing no longer having rhythm or pattern — or maybe it was a different bird? Or maybe she’d dreamt the whole thing? She pushed the lilac quilt back, and the flowered sheet, kicking to free her legs, and sat on the side of the bed.
The clock, sitting beside the crystal-based lamp and the mauve phone with the imitation gold trim on her bedside table, read six in the morning and by the clarity of the light filtering under the blind Iris was able to tell that it had stopped raining. She groaned softly in response to another morning, another Barneyless day, and straightening, placed one hand under each breast, as if to weigh them, not in pounds, but in womanliness, to reassure herself of her existence. She listened, heard the familiar chatter of small songbirds beginning in the trees, a tiny embroidery of sound on the vast silence of her house. How she hated waking each morning now into its emptiness, the wide oak dresser, the white-painted door, the mauve satin-covered chair that Barney complained of as useless, that he was always stumbling over, looking stranded, homeless, even though they’d always been there.
And the crow’s toll had disturbed her, its harsh cry had torn an opening in the blurred shadow of her most private self which she kept hidden because she who had everything, who had always had everything, had no right to unhappiness, to these puzzling, seemingly objectless yearnings, these unattached dissatisfactions. She kept them all shoved down well out of sight, telling herself, surely everyone has this bundle of wide, nameless desire, surely everyone has to live with this mysterious, powerful undertow?
Realizing she still held each heavy breast cupped in a palm, she dropped her hands, embarrassed. She stood slowly, reaching for her dressing gown. As her fingers touched the cool, bright silk it came flooding through her that Barney had failed once again to come rushing up the stairs to take her in his arms, to bury his face against the white hollow of her neck and then against her warm breasts, his mouth open, breathing to her how mistaken he’s been, how he can’t live without her, Iris, his darling, his woman, his one true love.
The door beside her bangs. Iris is so startled her heart leaps into her throat. She straightens and turns her back to the door, rapidly unbuttoning the rest of her raincoat with fingers that tremble over the stiff, shiny fabric and the plastic buttons.
“Iris! You scared the wits out of me!” It’s Audrey McCormack, her bleached blonde hair elaborately curled and sprayed into precise place, the collar turned up on her neat black raincoat. The sound the door makes divides itself into the rattling clang of the bar handle, the thud of the door against its wooden frame, the dull echo as the noise pushes out through the hundred feet of empty hall to bounce slowly off the walls and stage, dying away to a muffled sigh against its dusty wine velvet curtains. Audrey stamps her feet on the mat to get the mud off her boots, reaches out over Iris’s head — Audrey is quite a bit taller than Iris, but who isn’t, Iris thinks — and flicks on the rest of the lights. “What are you standing in the dark for?” she demands.
“Hi, Audrey,” Iris says weakly, but Audrey is already whipping off her boots, unbuttoning her raincoat to reveal a flowered pink-and-green dress, turning to say hello to Donna and Irene Meadows, thirtyish sisters-in-law, who’ve entered together, each carrying the obligatory fresh-baked angel food cake. Iris has her coat off now, she’s straightening the skirt of her favourite cherry red suit, chosen because the colour
sets off her fair skin and dark hair so well, and fluffing with her fingers her loose-hanging, mid-neck-length hair that, despite her fifty-two years, unaccountably still refuses to show even a trace of grey.
The cloakroom is filling up with women greeting each other, complaining about the weather, fussing over their clothes, whispering to each other about some commotion in one of their families that Iris doesn’t know anything about, and today finds she doesn’t care to know. She rescues her cake and her purse from the floor and makes her noisy, high-heeled way across the hall’s wooden floor, where she has danced away two dozen or more New Year’s Eves and as many or more wedding celebrations, to the kitchen where she sets the cake on the long table with six or so others already there waiting to be cut.
Flats of red strawberries, so bright they light up the entire room, march down the length of one counter, scenting the air with their tangy sweetness. Mavis Miller stands at them, looking smart in her pale blue fake-linen dress. She’s past fifty too, but she dyes her short, crisp hair a pale, elegant blonde. Her small diamond earrings flash light as she bends over the radiant berries, picking them up one by one and turning them over, dropping an occasional one that has a spot on it or isn’t ripe enough into a plastic basin she’s balancing with her left hand against the table edge. The ones she hasn’t touched are still resting, smoothly tucked into the individual baskets that make up the flat, but those she has picked over are heaped up in the flat, spilling over the sides and across the table, a few have even fallen off to lie as gay crimson splotches on the floor.
“Really,” Mavis remarks officiously, without glancing up from her work, her fingers stained ruby red from them. “Half of them aren’t ripe.”
“What’s the flavour like?” Iris, approaching, asks.
“The usual.” It’s Audrey who has come up behind Iris again and speaks into her ear. “Like strawberry-flavoured cardboard. They pick them too soon. California’s too far away,” she scolds, taking an apron out of her purse, shaking it, tying it on over her dress, and joining Mavis at the berries. Nobody pays any attention to her; she has always been this way.
The scent of the fruit increases in a wave, like heat from an opened oven door, filling Iris’s head with its fragrance. The hint of headache retreats and disappears. She opens the door of the commercial-size fridge that sits along the back wall. Quarts of farm cream the colour and density of mayonnaise fill an entire shelf.
“I hope there’s enough here,” she says dubiously.
“If there isn’t, somebody will have to run over to the co-op and buy a few more pints of that thin stuff they call cream,” Audrey tells her.
More women have arrived — Shirley Austin, Margaret Wolf, Janet McPherson — and before they begin to work they pause to chat with each other, laugh a bit, ask a quick question about family members, how an afghan somebody is crocheting is coming along, did John find his stolen truck? The long table in the centre of the room is covered with cakes now, and their sweet scent rises to mingle with the piquant aroma of the berries. Ardath Richards, with whom Iris went to public school, begins to set the cakes on aluminum carts to take them into the hall where later they’ll be sliced and set on plates to be served. And the cream still has to be whipped, Iris thinks. It’s tricky though, such thick cream will turn to butter in an instant’s inattention.
“Guess what?” Her young second cousin — or is it third? — Joanne, is speaking from the sink where she’s washing berries. “Jerry and I are building a new house as soon as the ground dries enough to dig a basement.” She turns back to her work, her long brown ponytail bouncing against her back, but not before Iris sees the delight in her eyes.
“That’s wonderful!” Iris says, remembering how young couples yearn for a new house of their own, even though she never did. She lives in a house built by her parents when she was six or seven years old. “Are you building out on the farm or in town?”
“In town,” Joanne tells her.
At the next sink two of the women have opened a tap to fill one of the massive coffee urns and the water gushes noisily out; farther over somebody is emptying the cutlery drawers and clattering forks and spoons onto metal trays to carry out to the hall. Iris has to raise her voice to be heard.
“When Barney and I got married Mom wanted Dad to build us a new house in their houseyard, but he wouldn’t hear of it either.” She doesn’t explain that Jack hadn’t wanted to use up good farmland. He liked to seed every acre: road allowances, deserted homesteads, slough — waste not, want not, and all that. Her mother Lily who, as she often said, liked grass, was perpetually annoyed with him over that obsession of his. Leave a little for the animals, she’d scold, and he’d smile at her sardonically.
As Iris cuts neatly, rapidly at each berry with Joanne chattering on beside her about rug colours and whether they should have a bay window or not, she thinks of the first home she and Barney shared: a shabby farmhouse on a small farm her father bought when its owner went under. She remembers how for the first year she hadn’t really noticed its many shortcomings, knowing the big, two-storey, brown-frame farmhouse with its smart cream trim was waiting for her, dreaming of the day when she would be its mistress as her mother was, its chatelaine, and Barney would take over her parents’ and her grandparents’ farm, as soon as — her father said — he knew the place: the names and soil characteristics of each field, the weather patterns over each one, the places first and last to dry in the spring, and the business side of things. Ranch-raised, her father said sceptically, when Iris declared her intention to marry him. Doesn’t know much about farming … And her mother, shocked and frankly disdainful, A cowboy from up in the hills!
A year and a half they’d lived in the old Daniels farmhouse, until Iris began to chafe at facing another winter in it with its freezing floors despite the thick new rugs her father had installed, all the hot air from the ugly propane heaters rising straight to the ceiling or out the apparently unfixable, rattling window frames. She’d grown tired of its uncertain water supply, its inadequate electrical wiring, its crampedness. She’d balked then, demanded a better place to live, but although she was waiting with less and less patience for her parents to retire so she and Barney could have the big house, she knew better than to say so directly. Hadn’t been above planting a few hints, though, she remembers, which her parents studiously ignored.
And yet, as she stands here in the bustling hall knifing the stems out of the berries, discarding the occasional one Mavis missed that’s bruised or not ripe enough, she finds that shabby old house appears now in her memory suffused in a soft golden light; how in love she and Barney had been, their tender and joyful nights together in the tiny bedroom with its rough plaster walls and the ice forming on the windowsill, lying under the warm feather quilt her grandmother had made when she was a bride.
“I’d like to stay on the farm,” Joanne says, wistfully, “but Jerry says Daddy’s right. If things on the farm don’t work out — “she pauses, but Iris knows what she’s thinking: If we lose the farm … “We couldn’t even sell the house, but a house in town will sell eventually …” The coffee urn is full now, the tap turned off, and the women have finished filling the trays with cutlery. Now the kitchen is peaceful, the voices of the women as they go about their work harmonious, even musical.
“First we moved into an old farmhouse when we got married,” Iris says. “Then we lived in my parents’ basement for two years.”
“What a drag that must have been,” Joanne exclaims.
Then, without any warning to Iris and Barney, the day of his fifty-second birthday, the same age Iris is now, Iris’s father announced that he and Lily were moving to town.
“Not to retire,” he’d said, a touch of grimness breaking through the joviality he’d found for the occasion, “but to leave you two on your own here.” Delight flooding over her — at last — Iris had glanced at her mother. Lily didn’t speak, but Iris can’t forget how at that moment she wouldn’t meet her eyes, or even look
at her. Her mother never did reproach her or even express any regret. Iris no longer tries to squelch the pang of guilt she feels at the memory. Youth! she thinks wryly, you’d think there could have been a less painful solution, although she doesn’t know what that might have been. And anyway, isn’t it a given that the younger generation will always try to push out the older?
“Iris! Can you come here?” Mavis’s imperious voice breaks her reverie. She swishes her hands quickly through the chilly water, wipes her fingers on a soggy tea towel, hands her paring knife to Joanne, and hurries away into the hall.
“We thought you and Irma could pour over here. We’ll put the coffee urns over there.” Iris nods comfortably, as if being asked to pour isn’t an honour going only to the women of the community’s first families. She’s used to such tributes; nonetheless, she feels a twinge of pride. The tables are arranged throughout the hall now, the chairs set in place around them, the white tablecloths have been laid, and two of the women are setting small yellow baskets of pink cloth flowers and stacks of pink paper napkins on each table. An elaborate silver tea service has been placed on each of the two tables Mavis is indicating.
“I could have brought my grandmother’s set,” Iris says. “It’s just sitting there in the dining room getting tarnished. I never use it.” She remembers how, when Lannie was a little girl and home from school with a cold or flu, Iris would carry it upstairs to her bedroom, and Lannie would spend the morning carefully cleaning and polishing it, her pale little face solemn as she worked, until the whole set, tray and all, shone so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at it. Mavis says, “We asked a couple of the old ladies to use theirs. They were thrilled.”
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