The Waiting Place

by Sharron Arksey

  “Fuck, Susan, you know I didn’t mean that.”

  “What did you mean then?”

  “Well, you know …”

  “No, really I don’t know, Ty.”

  “Susan, I don’t get it. Is this some hormone thing?”

  Talk about setting a match to a smoldering flame. Hormone thing? For five days I had waited for the period to end all sentences, and when it finally arrived, I was suddenly out of commission and my feelings reduced to a hormone thing. We could talk; that would be cool. We could go to a movie, go for a drive. We could kiss. I was no stranger to hand jobs. Sex is more than in and out and penetration during a period was not unheard of, although personally I thought it sounded rather messy. At least it would be safe. Had I suddenly become untouchable because I had my period? No wonder the world was screwed up, if that’s the way people thought.

  There I was believing that we had an excuse to celebrate. Instead Ty figured it was an excuse to stay away. And he did it with such speed that he must have had it planned all along. What if the news had not been good?

  “Forget it,” I said. “Go with the guys.”

  “You sure?”

  Idiot.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Susan? I’m glad you’re out of commission.”

  How’s a person supposed to respond to that?

  “Me too.”

  I ended the call and stuck the phone back in my pocket.

  “Tigger,” I said, scratching the dog behind its ears, “maybe you can tell me. Are all guys assholes?”

  Tigger rolled over onto his back, exposing his belly and begging for a rub. I obliged.

  “Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?” I asked. Tigger closed his eyes. “I thought so, you fickle dog,” I said. “You’d roll over for anyone willing to pat you, wouldn’t you?”

  I walked over to where Duchess was grazing. Duchess was my favourite of that year’s heifer crop. She was a deep red colour with a white blaze on her forehead.

  “Hi, girl,” I said, giving her a pat on the neck. “Sorry, I forgot the brush.”

  Often when I went out to see the cattle, I brought the cattle brush and spent time grooming their hides. They liked it. But I’d had other things on my mind that evening and never thought of it.

  I hoped Duchess wouldn’t have a hard time with her first calf. A farmer did the best he could, breeding her to a small bull with proven genetics to suggest low birth weights for the calves. But nothing was for certain. The calf could be a throwback to some larger animal way back in the gene pool.

  Sometimes even calves less than a year old can get bred in summer pasture. Dad always took the bulls out early, but there was a time one of the younger heifers ended up in calf. The calf was born dead and the heifer died, too.

  I thought about going back home for the brush, but decided against it. Instead I gave Duchess one last pat and started up the ATV.

  The tiger lilies in the ditch were a deep red-orange, their stamens sticky with pollen. I brought one up to smell and rubbed my nose afterwards, certain that there would be pollen residue there. I picked about a dozen of the wild flowers, careful to break the stem rather than pull the plant out by the roots as Dad had taught me.

  I wasn’t really mad at Ty, I realized. I had been, but it had worn off quickly. What was it Mom said? He’s a man; he can’t help it. Maybe it was just that easy. And I wasn’t pregnant, so it didn’t have to be any harder.

  I wasn’t sure how Mom would have reacted if my period had never arrived. I thought that she would have gone quiet and inside herself but Mom could be all over the map sometimes. She might have burst into tears. Eventually, she would have come to me with a plan for how to get through this. I just didn’t know what would have come first, the fire or the ice.

  But Dad? That was a no brainer.

  My very first thought when I woke that morning and saw that my period had started was, “I don’t have to tell Mom and Dad.” My second thought was, “I have to tell Ty.”

  Tyler and I continued dating for several months, but it was nowhere near as hot and heavy as it had been. By the start of my Grade Twelve year, we had pretty much called it quits and by the time I graduated the next June, I was dating someone else.

  I occasionally run into Tyler since we both live in the community. He and his wife have two children with a third on the way. I often wonder if being out of commission also applied to being pregnant. I personally would not like that, but perhaps Ty’s wife learned to appreciate it.

  Since Grandpa died, Dad has voiced the question less and less, but lately he’s been coming out with some of his own malapropisms. We tell him he’s becoming more and more like his dad. Same genes, different pocket.

  Glen and I decided not to tell anyone about my pregnancy for the first few months in case there were problems. A woman we knew had told everyone within telling distance when her pregnancy test came back positive. She miscarried a month later. When I stopped to think about it though, I wondered how it started, this reticence to talk about pregnancy until it is well on its way. Was it a kind of superstition? What would be wrong with letting others share in my initial happiness so that, if there were a miscarriage, they could share in my grief as well?

  Of course, the secret was ours alone only for the time it took for me to see my family doctor. Once the pregnancy was officially confirmed, the clinic staff were also in on the secret.

  I did have a hard time not telling Mom. I wondered whether she would suss it out for herself, see something in my face or in the size of my boobs which had suddenly become much fuller. If she did, she never said anything.

  I spent the rest of the summer and most of the fall puking my guts out. I took time off from my job at the local vet clinic to help with the harvest in late August and chewed on unsalted crackers as I sat in the grain truck and watched the combine go round and round the field. I always took a book along in the hope that I would get to read it.

  But because I had to keep up with two combines, there wasn’t always much time to read between loads. And once dusk fell, my job in the fields would be over for the day. I would cook the evening meal and Glen and I would eat later. Normally I loved the harvest, straw dust, late hours, and all. This year I dragged myself to bed each night, supper dishes sometimes still on the table.

  Whenever I did get a chance to read in the truck, my choice was an old book of baby names that I found in one of the upstairs bedrooms in our house. We inherited the house from Glen’s parents who inherited it from my father-in-law’s parents. The house was originally owned by a family named Larsen who retired to the West Coast in the late 1940s.

  It’s one of those square brick houses with large rooms, high ceilings, and a veranda facing the front. Originally, there was a veranda on each floor, but the one at the higher level was dismantled when it became unsafe. All that remains to indicate its former existence is an upper storey door that remains locked for safety.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Larsen moved away, they left an attic full of belongings they had no interest in paying haulage for to British Columbia. Glen’s grandparents added to the hoard and no one ever got around to cleaning it out. I like to spend time up there, digging through old trunks. I once found a National Geographic dated June 1945 with stories on China and the liberation of Europe. I also found a copy of the 1976 Eaton’s catalogue, the last ever mail-order catalogue offered by the company.

  “We have history in our attic,” I told Glen and he laughed at me.

  “Old houses and young animals, that’s my Sus,” he said.

  I felt like a cliché when he said that, thoughts and feelings reduced to a rehash of things thought and felt too many times before. I would prefer to be an original.

  If I were an eBay person, I could perhaps make my fortune offering vintage items from our attic for sale. A
n intriguing thought. Still, if I ever did clean out the attic, how would I spend my spare time? And if I ever did find anything valuable up there, there would be the ethical question of which family member should reap the rewards. My in-laws might well want it for themselves and claim prior rights. Besides, I am not likely to ever get beyond the stage of thinking about an eBay enterprise. I have grand ideas, but not always the discipline to carry them through. I do love those afternoon searches, however. Each box is the promise of new treasure.

  This baby book was vintage, although in far from pristine condition. Some of the pages were ripped and a young child drew pictures in red crayon in the girls’ names starting with the “S” section. Doesn’t matter. I learned a great deal from the book despite its condition.

  “Susan,” I discovered, comes from the Hebrew word for lily. Now that I hadn’t known. My very prosaic name is a flower. Imagine that. I might have thought of brown-eyed Susans, I suppose, except that my eyes are blue.

  “Glen” is of Irish and Gaelic origin, meaning a narrow valley between hills.

  Susan and Glen together make a lily of the valley. I found that quite appealing especially considering that lilies of the valley are commonly found in bridal bouquets, but when I told Glen, he laughed. Then he reminded me that all parts of the lily of the valley plant are highly poisonous.

  The book was so old that many of the baby names I had become accustomed to were not included. The names I did find were from my parents’ generation: Cheryl, Donna, Karen, Linda, Patricia, and Sandra for girls; Dennis, Gary, Larry, Roger, and Mark for boys. For more modern names, I had to go to the Internet or find a newer book. When I eventually surfed the Internet, however, I discovered that my old name book had become fashionable again. Favourite girls’ names in the book were Emma, Emily, Ava and Olivia. Popular boys’ names included Ethan and Carter. According to the Internet, those names were once again popular.

  “If it’s a girl, we could name her after one of the cats,” Glen said one evening as we sat eating supper.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  We have two indoor cats, my choice, not Glen’s. One is a gray tabby and the other is orange. I named them Samantha and Tabitha after an old TV program that my parents watch on cable. Samantha is a witch who married a mortal; their daughter, who would also prove to have magical powers, is named Tabitha. But the feline Tabitha turned out to be a male and so we shortened its name to Tab. Samantha eventually became plain Sam, same as my younger brother, although having a brother and a female cat with the same name was nothing more than a coincidence.

  The indoor cats are a continuous source of irritation for my mother-in-law who did not allow such a thing when this house was hers. I suspect she was as fond of the barn cats as I am, but she never welcomed them past the front step.

  My mother-in-law and her in-laws lived together in this house for many years. I think that must have been difficult. Living together began as a temporary measure for them, but when Glen’s grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the arrangement became permanent. Glen’s grandmother passed away when he was eight and his grandfather when he was nineteen.

  Perhaps it explains, at least partly, why Joan and Joe moved to town before we got married. There was never any suggestion that we would all live together, temporarily or otherwise.

  In the case of Joan and me, the yard became our major battleground, although battleground is an exaggeration. Our skirmishes are the passive-aggressive kind, shots fired via a third person, criticism cloaked in courtesy. In Joan’s tenure, the yard was a place of landscaped perfection: weeded flower beds, manicured lawns, a park outside the bedroom windows. But I am not a gardener, or at least not a very good one. I let our two dogs roll around in the flower beds. I care more about the dogs than I do the flower beds, I guess.

  There are so many other things I would rather be doing than weeding flower beds. I would rather have a plot rioting with the colours of prairie wildflowers and, to Joan’s dismay, I have started one.

  “But they’re weeds,” she said when she saw the Indian paint brush and brown-eyed Susans I transplanted that summer.

  “A weed is only a weed when you find it where you don’t want it to be. They’re prairie flowers,” I said.

  Soon after we were married, I dug up some yellow lady slippers I found growing along a roadside and replanted them on the north side of the house. They bloomed for me this spring. I call them wild orchids. Why not? That’s what they are. Lady slippers are related to orchids, as they are also to snapdragons.

  “You do realize you’re doing something illegal?” Glen asked when I moved the plants from their natural habitat to our yard.

  “Shhh,” I said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  We have found pink lady slippers in this part of the province, but they are rare and I would never attempt to transplant them anywhere else. It’s one thing to dig up a few plants out of twenty found blooming in a ditch; it’s another to dig up the only plant you’ve seen all spring. That’s the point at which it becomes a crime in my books.

  I can still remember the first time I ever saw a pink lady slipper because it had such a strong and unusual effect on me. My thoughts were a cross between erotic and carnal. The flower’s shape reminded me of the wet and secret places in a woman’s body and its pink was the bruised colour of passion.

  Crocuses, on the other hand, are not sexy, but I would like to plant them in the yard if I could. So far I have never succeeded. Crocuses like sandy soil; they thrive on challenge. The soil in this yard is too heavy; it drags them down.

  I suppose that if I had my own crocus patch in the yard, there would be no need for our annual forays down gravel roads and into thawing pastures to seek them out. And Glen would no longer bring me tiny purple bouquets each spring. Am I willing to forego this little pleasure every year? Well, a few hours ago I was, come to think of it. But that had nothing to do with gardening. Nothing to do with crocuses either. A lot to do with pain though.

  Focus, Susan. Gardens. Garden flowers. Prairie flowers. Weeds.

  I would also like to have a few milkweeds to attract monarch butterflies to our yard, but that’s a battle I have no chance of winning. Milkweed is a noxious weed and Glen, ever the farmer, said no way. Even Dad thought it was a bad idea. The milky white sap is toxic to almost all farm animals: cattle, sheep, horses, and poultry.

  Poor maligned milkweed, positioned by nature to thwart agrarian pursuits. But manna for the monarchs which feed on nothing else. They lay their eggs on the plant and the emerging caterpillars feed on it.

  So, no milkweed and maybe no monarchs. But I could have my prairie flowers and if I had them, the butterflies would come.

  Herbs also draw butterflies and so I introduced sage, oregano, dill, and basil to the vegetable garden. My vegetable garden tends to be as riotous as my flower gardens and, despite my best efforts, the rows are never quite as straight as they should be.

  Although, come to think of it, how straight are a garden’s rows supposed to be? I suspect the straightness of the rows says more about the gardener than it does about garden productivity.

  “Don’t hide one behind the other,” Mom said when I once confessed my feelings about Joan and the yard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you want wild flowers and prairie grasses because you love them, great. If you’re filling your yard with them only because they’re a change from what Joan had, don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  My mother Sandra is big on this “be true to yourself” stuff and I understood her logic. I thought about what she said. I didn’t want straight corners and manicures. I wanted less structure and more nature. Wildflowers would always be my first choice. Any effect on my mother-in-law would be a bonus.

  Glen’s sister Lynne once suggested that I retain the flowerbeds and garden as a kind of tribute to the work that her mother
put into them. “Change them after she’s gone,” Lynne said. “You’re disrespecting her hard work.”

  If I’d been thinking fast enough, I would have told Lynne that she was welcome to spend all the time she wanted at my place keeping her mother’s yard immaculate.

  THREE

  Now I am three centimetres dilated and I am still waiting for Glen to return from his shopping expedition. The thought crosses my mind that perhaps we could use some of those new staple nails to close me up and put an end to this. Silly thought, I know. This baby is on its way out. Three centimetres is the length of an olive, they say. Just over an inch, like the giant martini olives I had on the table at Christmas, the kind soaked in gin. Glen said they were potent. I never sampled one. No martinis, no olives. The cats seemed to like them, though. Our cats were tipsy last Christmas.

  Things that come in threes. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The Three Bears. Three French hens. Three Blind Mice. Three Little Pigs. Three sheets to the wind. Three feet in a yard. Three ring circus. Three ring binders. Wheels on a tricycle. Three Wise Men. Three strikes and you’re out. 3-D. Three trimesters in a pregnancy. Three men in a tub. Three’s a crowd. Leaves of three, let it be.

  In September Glen’s sister Lynne told me she was having an affair.

  That’s not quite the way it happened, of course. My sister-in-law and I are not close. We don’t tell each other secrets.

  Lynne drove over late one afternoon to get some of the excess tomatoes I had offered over the weekend. She looked different. I think she had lost a little weight, although there was more to it than that. She looked freer somehow, casual and yet confident. Her edges had become soft curves. Her blonde hair had grown out a little; the new length flattered the contours of her face. I said the first thing that came into my head. I do that a lot. It usually gets me into trouble.

  “You’re a new woman these days. Is there a man hiding in your closet?”