The main door at the far end of the hall opens, and a plump, young blonde woman in a faded blue winter coat, carrying one child on her hip and herding two little girls ahead of her, pushes her way in. In the second before she moves toward the coat racks and is hidden from Iris’s view, Iris recognizes her: Angela, Lannie’s best friend from school. She excuses herself and, skirting tables, walks the length of the hall to the cloakroom. Angela has set the little boy down and is straightening his bow tie with one hand, her children’s coats over her arm.
“Angela!” Iris says. “It’s been ages!” Angela straightens awkwardly from her task, smiles when she sees it’s Iris and says, “Emma, take Cory to the bathroom. Make sure he washes his hands.” The girl grabs the boy’s hand and leads him away. The second little girl peers at Iris from behind her mother’s skirt.
“Hasn’t it,” Angela replies. “I’m so busy these days I hardly know if I’m coming or going. I’ve got two pre-schoolers now, you know. Orland stayed home to look after the baby.” And Lannie, godmother to Emma who must be ten years old by now, an infant when Lannie left home.
“Are you well?” Iris asks, confused, not sure any more what to say or not say, pushing away the memory of hanging up the phone on Angela to rush upstairs to Lannie’s room, finding her there unconscious on her bed, God knew for how long —
“Oh, sure, although I’m fat as a pig. You’d think with all this running around I’d weigh about four pounds, but no such luck.” She sets the children’s jackets in a pile in the corner, struggles out of her own coat and hangs it up.
In that moment’s pause Iris tries not to, but sees the letters. Not letters, really, just scraps of paper torn from notebooks or stick-it pads she’d found in Lannie’s macramé book bag when, long after Lannie had left and it looked as if it would be a long time before she’d return, Iris decided to do something about her bedroom. From men, they were, boyfriends: “Hi, Lan — meet me at the Sub at eight. Tim.” Iris knows from her year at university that the Sub is the Student Union Building, and she’s met Tim, a nice boy, she’d thought, and clearly in love with Lannie. The others —
“I knew you’d be here today,” Angela says. “I wanted to ask … I was wondering, have you heard from Lannie lately?” Then, not waiting for Iris’s answer, she rushes on. “I’m really sorry to upset you. I mean, if you haven’t heard from her, but, it came into my head this morning when I was vacuuming and it wouldn’t go away — you know how that is?” She means, of course, when an intuition hits you, but Iris hasn’t Angela’s gift.
“I haven’t, no,” she says, trying to sound cheerful. “And you haven’t upset me. Do you know something? Have you had any letters? Any cards?” She laughs, pretending to be amused. “No telegrams? Smoke signals maybe?”
“Not since that postcard maybe three years ago. You know the one, from Iraklion, was it? In Greece — some island. Oh, Crete, I think. She must have been travelling.”
“What I’m thinking,” Iris says, “is that maybe she travelled herself right off the globe. Right into oblivion.” She’s appalled at her flash of anger. “I’m going back,” the card had ended. But back where?
“Don’t think that,” Angela says. “She’s all right. If I felt there was something wrong with her, I’d have told you.” Her voice is steady, clear.
“I really hope we’ll hear something soon,” Iris replies, retreating. Angela’s little girl, who looks to be about eight, is walking the length of a rack of coats, humming and running an arm down them, making the coats sway.
“Don’t Sarah,” Angela cries. “Stop that.”
Iris wants to point out — in a confusion of self-justification and defence of Lannie — that after all Lannie is only her niece, it’s not as if she’s her daughter. In the end, she doesn’t; Angela must understand how much they once meant to each other. Still, she feels a pang of guilt at precisely what she isn’t sure — that Lannie’s failure to write is somehow Iris’s fault? That Iris hasn’t tried very hard to locate her?
Angela has had to ask her twice, “How’s Barney?”
“Oh,” she says, too quickly. “He’s fine. He’s gaining weight, too. I’m going to persuade him to see the doctor as soon as he finishes calving. He looks tired out.” Beside them the door is opening and closing steadily as people enter, stomp their feet to shake off clods of mud, and crowd toward the coat racks.
“I heard about that! What a funny thing for him to do. But there’s no accounting for … whatever,” she finishes, looking away.
“No, there isn’t indeed,” Iris says briskly. She hesitates, then moves close to Angela and plants a kiss on her warm cheek. “Thanks for still caring about Lannie,” she murmurs, although she means to say — she feels — much more than this. How can it be that Angela who’s so much younger, seems to know more than she does about the world? Is it because of her children? “I’ll call you the minute I hear anything.”
Time passes, more people arrive, pay their money at the door, leave their coats and rubbers in the cloakroom, and slowly fill the tables. There are, as always, mostly old people here, Iris notes from her position in the centre where she’s filling cups of tea from the silver teapot that Audrey has to scurry to keep full. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and infidels alike are buried in the town’s one cemetery; every family that has been in Chinook more than twenty years has somebody buried there; thus, most families come to the tea. Iris sits demurely, filling cup after cup to be passed to the members of her community, people she has known her whole life. In an unguarded instant, they feel to her like a huge, extended family. Small plates heaped with cake, strawberries spilling over its sides, and a mound of whipped cream on top of the berries sit in front of each person, and servers place cups of tea and coffee on trays and distribute them efficiently among the tables.
“Come and sit with us, Iris,” a quiet voice says. She glances up to see her mother-in-law standing beside her. She’s short and thickset, wearing that same dark red polyester dress with the rhinestone buttons marching down the front that she has been wearing for years. She’s put on weight, Iris notices, the dress pulls slightly across her bosom and stomach.
“Mary Ann! I didn’t see you come in. I bet the roads out your way were a nightmare. I’m supposed to be pouring —”
“Somebody will take over for you,” Mary Ann insists, with authority born of years of experience at women’s work. Iris catches Mavis’s eye, who comes over at once, eager to take her place. Iris follows Mary Ann to a table near the cloakroom where she sits down kitty-corner to tall, spare Luke Christie, her father-in-law.
“Hi, Luke,” Iris says. He’s eating cake grimly and doesn’t look up.
“Barney showed up yet?”
“Oh, I don’t expect him,” Iris says cheerfully. “He’ll never leave his heifers to come to a tea,” she adds, making her voice sound humorously disparaging. Luke doesn’t answer.
“I’m just waiting for the mud to dry up so I can put some new artificial flowers on Wesley’s grave,” Mary Ann explains. Wesley was Barney’s older brother, born mentally handicapped, dead a couple of years earlier of a heart attack. Iris had forgotten that of course it would be Wesley’s grave that would bring the two of them, fighting mud all the way, from their ranch where Barney was raised, far off the beaten track to the north.
“Deer ate the last ones,” Mary Ann says. “Thought they were real. They got a surprise!” She and Iris laugh. Luke grunts as if he disapproves, but doesn’t look up from his rapidly diminishing mound of dessert. Iris casts about for something to say, thinking glumly how it’s always this way, she and her in-laws never have much to say to each other. And Luke and Barney always at each other’s throats.
“Barney’s been calving a while already, eh,” Luke says gruffly. His plate is now empty and he’s gazing across the room instead of looking at her. Iris nods without speaking, a little game she’s started, to see if she can make him look at her. But he doesn’t bother, just pushes his plate away and slowly
stands to his full six feet, looking around at all the people chatting away to each other. Without speaking, he walks away. Mary Ann appears not to notice his going. Iris knows he has spotted cronies somewhere in the crowd and won’t be back until he’s ready to go home. It isn’t simple rudeness, she knows, it’s just how tough old ranchers, weaned on blizzards and raging thunderstorms and rangy mustangs and hard, hard times behave; it doesn’t mean anything. Farmers, on the other hand, she thinks, aren’t tough any more now that they farm with machinery instead of horses.
“You going to try to go back there yourself tonight?” Mary Ann asks. Startled, Iris can’t think what she means — Oh, Barney’s ranch. She’s never told her in-laws she doesn’t go there with Barney, in fact, she’s only been there once, when he was trying to decide whether to buy it or not. Over my dead body, she’d said, pretending she was joking, but Barney ignored her, as if he’d suddenly gone deaf, couldn’t hear a word she was saying. Fortunately, she doesn’t see that much of her in-laws, it’s easy to keep secrets from them.
“Oh, I can’t handle the roads in there right now,” she says. “And Barney’s got the four-wheel drive. I’m staying at the farm for now.”
When she’d made it clear to him that she would never, never move there of her own free will, all Barney said was, “I have to do this, Iris. I never asked nothing of you, but I’m asking this.” When she asked him, over and over again, “But, why?” he would only turn away, and she couldn’t tell if it was because he knew she wouldn’t understand his reasons, or if it was because he didn’t understand them himself. Mary Ann is giving her a sidelong, speculative glance, but she decides it’s safer not to add anything to what she’s already said. Mary Ann would say, A wife belongs with her husband. And what would her own mother say? She finds she can’t guess.
A plate of cake heaped with strawberries, the whipped cream spilling over the edge, appears with a thump on the tablecloth in front of her and she looks up in surprise to see Ramona Norman grinning down at her. Ramona is her lifelong neighbour, they played together as children, in high school they’d been best friends.
“Gotta keep your strength up,” Ramona says, licking whipped cream from her fingers and pushing her glasses back up her nose with the other hand.
“Sit, Ramona,” Mary Ann says, indicating Luke’s chair.
“Can’t. I’m with Mom and Dad and we have to get Dad home. He’s played out already. Only been here fifteen minutes. And we’re calving, gotta get back. See ya.” She’s gone as abruptly as she arrived, turning sideways to make her way between the crowded tables.
“Thanks for the cake,” Iris calls to her retreating back.
“We should be going soon, too,” Mary Ann says. She looks around the hall as if she’s going to find Luke and tell him it’s time to go, but of course she doesn’t move. “Your mother okay?” Iris’s mother is in a nursing home.
“I’m going on to see her as soon as I can get away from here. It was raining so hard on Sunday, and Barney was ho …” — she corrects her remark quickly — “was too tired to drive all that way to Swift Current and back. So I’m going by myself right away.”
“Luke and me are going up on Thursday,” Mary Ann says. “We’ll have supper at Fay’s, haven’t seen the grandkids in quite a while.” Fay is Barney’s younger sister. Iris doesn’t think she can endure much more of this halting, boring conversation. “Funny thing,” Mary Ann continues, resting one elbow on the table, rubbing the tablecloth with swollen, arthritic fingers, “but all I can think about with all this rain is them drought years.” Iris’s mouth is full of the cake Ramona has brought her. “The dust years,” Mary Ann goes on. “There was a book in them days — no, maybe when the worst was over. About the Okies?” She looks up at Iris. Iris nods. “In the States. How they lost everything in the dust bowl and went away, left everything behind,tried to get to California, I think it was. Funny,” she says. “That book got passed around from house to house all through the countryside till most everybody read it, even them that didn’t read books much.” She sighs and straightens her back as if it’s aching.
Iris thinks, oh brother, am I going to have to listen again to how people were happier when they were poor in the Depression? How people stuck together then like they don’t now? This makes no sense to her, never has, even though all the old people swear it’s true. She would like to ask Mary Ann, were they happy when they had only potatoes to eat? When their kids couldn’t go to school because they didn’t have shoes? When their cows got too thin to give milk and their horses weakened and died of starvation?
But Mary Ann is staring around the room as if she’s not seeing a thing there. “Too much of a good life — too much things — it kills something in people.”
Her words arrest Iris’s movement as she brings the cake and strawberry-laden fork to her lips. She sets it down, then, keeping her voice mild, trying to erase any hint of complacency, says, “They say the drought in the eighties was worse than the one during the Depression, but our improved farming methods and our new genetically engineered seeds and our technology all made it so we still got crops.”
“Lotta people lost their places during the eighties,” Mary Ann points out. Iris shrugs.
“Bad management, places too small, you know.” She lifts her fork again and takes another mouthful — delicious.
Mary Ann says sharply, “You wouldn’t shrug if it was your place.” Iris stops chewing, surprised. Her place? It’s the biggest, most prosperous farm in the district. She and Barney, and her parents before them, are rich from that farm. Lose it? Never! She glances at Mary Ann, sees the set to her jaw. Remembers the poverty Barney grew up in.
“Yes, you’re right,” she says meekly. “Of course, you’re right.” She mustn’t quarrel with Mary Ann too, she’s Barney’s mother, she has to get along with her. Besides, she likes Mary Ann, her stubborn, down-to-earth good sense, her courage at living what has been a hard life, driven almost wholly by men’s desires and needs.
She pushes her half-eaten plate of cake away and takes her leave of her mother-in-law quickly, promising to drop in whenever Barney can make the time to drive up, knowing that it’ll surely be summer before that happens, and with Barney as good as gone — but she won’t think that; it isn’t as if he’s declared their marriage to be over, or that he’s died on her. Still, what she wouldn’t give to have him forget his ranch and come back and be her husband again.
Without saying goodbye to anybody — if she did, it would be another hour before she gets away — she leaves the tea, pushing back coats jammed into the overfull coat rack to locate her own and then scrabbling among the rows of muddy boots for hers, putting them on, then sliding out the door between a family of newcomers entering the hall. She has told the others she can’t stay to clean up. Knowing there’s always plenty of help, no one will mind.
As she’s driving out of the parking lot an unaccustomed relief floods over her. She has never minded these events before, even enjoyed them, nor has she ever questioned their necessity knowing, as she does, that they are what make the community. Still caught up in surprise at her reaction to leaving the hall full of her relatives, friends, and neighbours, she momentarily catches a glimpse of Barney moving slowly on horseback through the lodgepole pines that surround his cabin in the wilderness and she understands a little about why he’s gone. Abruptly, she’s gripped by the desire to reverse herself, to throw everything up too, run to him, and throw her arms around him: I give up, you’re right, she’d say.
Somehow she’s turned the wheel left when she meant to go right, and there it is on the corner: the house where James or Jake Springer used to live, newly painted a pale blue with white trim, its big yard still framed by the ancient sixty-foot poplars the pioneers planted. The memory of their lovemaking, so long ago now, hits her low in her abdomen with an immediacy that stuns her — his mouth on her breasts, his gentle, insistent hands on her body, his … She catches her breath. The one person who loved her wholly, w
ithout equivocation, dead now, gone forever. And she can hardly believe she could ever have done such a thing — her, a respectable married woman, a woman in love with her husband, and him a good man who didn’t drink or abuse her or even look at other women. Even more puzzling is her lack of shame at her adultery, as if the pure, desperate love she and James shared is its own justification.
And what about the pain? she asks herself. The need to sneak around, lying to Barney that she was cleaning his house and seeing to it that he ate the occasional decent meal, when in fact her cleaning was perfunctory and she rarely did more than make a pot of tea. What about the constant terror of being caught, her life ruined by her own unaccountable, driven need for an old man? Not for the first time, and not without perplexity, and something else less easily nameable, she thinks there was something in their relationship that felt like father and daughter. Maybe that was part of why it was so good. Her own father so distant. She pulls back in distaste from this line of thinking. It was love, she tells herself, that was all, and we were a perfect match sexually.
Sex with Barney has become a disaster. When he comes home for a night every week or so she is so ardent, so tender, eager to woo him back, trying to please him with all the things she knows he likes best: touching him just so, her kisses studied, expert, filled with desire, and him apologizing afterward — “I dunno what’s — the thing is —” She can feel the effort it takes him to respond at all. Then lying silently beside her, awake but pretending not to be, while she does the same, hurt and angry, desperate to speak to him about this nameless thing that’s spoiling their love, but afraid to say a word for fear of hurting him, or of having him say something she couldn’t bear to hear — or even worse — of scaring him away so he stops coming home at all. She holds back tears and grips the steering wheel more securely. She has decided he’s having an affair with his ranch, and until he tires of it, or begins to remember all the bad things about ranching that he once couldn’t wait to get away from, she’ll have to settle for being second best, even if she hates it with every fibre of her being. Patience, her father would say. Wait it out. You got time. That’s how he did business, she remembers grimly, it always worked for him.
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