I meant it as a joke. An affair? Lynne works full time and spends two hours a day getting to and from work. She has three school-age children and whatever spare time she has is spent chauffeuring those children to hockey and music lessons and maintaining that house and yard. When would she find time for another man? It must be hard enough to find time for the man she has.
Lynne looked like a deer caught in the headlights of my question. There was a silence that lasted a long time. It was as if I had accidentally opened a door to the closet where the man hid and there he was in full frontal view. Neither Lynne nor I could pretend we hadn’t seen him.
“We found each other on the Internet,” she told me. Beats searching for baby names, I supposed.
“It started out just a bit of a lark,” she said. “I wasn’t going to meet him. Then I thought maybe I would meet him. And then I did.”
Turns out they had been seeing each other in the city for the past six months. They spent time together in her hotel room when the accountant’s firm where she worked sent her on training courses or to meetings. This past summer they had been going on a lot of outdoor picnics, and once, when it rained, they made use of his car.
It occurred to me that this man didn’t seem willing to rent his own hotel room or meet her in a town a little closer.
“Well, it’s hard for him,” Lynne said. “He’s married.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, the breeze blows both ways on that one, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t be mean, Susan. He is so good in bed, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Well, yes, I would. I have had an experience or two with men who were really good in bed. They were just really bad out of it. I’ve also had an experience or two with men who failed on both counts. Lynne seemed to have hit the jackpot.
“I don’t know where it’s going,” Lynne told me. “I don’t care where it’s going. It’s wonderful and I’m going to enjoy it as long as it lasts.”
“Be careful,” I said.
“Of course,” she said.
Being careful in the first place might have prevented this scenario, I thought, but didn’t say. Truth is, I didn’t have any kind of moral authority there. Being careful isn’t who I am.
But I have never known Lynne not to be careful. Careful and cautious and constantly correct. Prissy even. If I didn’t know that she and her husband Brian had children, I would never have believed her capable of something as messy as sex and childbirth.
She did have children though—three of them—Alicia, Alleyne and Adam—the Triple A batteries that kept going and going and going. She spat them out one every two years like clockwork. I think they came fully toilet trained.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she asked.
“No, I won’t tell anyone,” I said.
“Not even Glen?”
“Especially not your brother.”
I was still outside in the garden when Glen came home for supper. It was one of those September evenings when everything is suffused with colour and the air is warm against your skin. I was picking tomatoes with plans to make a batch of salsa after work the following day. I had canned tomatoes and tomato juice, I had made chili sauce and spaghetti sauce, and now salsa. I had offered tomatoes to everyone I knew. When the first frost came, I wasn’t sure I would try to save the ones still remaining.
“What did my sister want?” Glen asked, picking a ripe tomato from the plant nearest him and tossing it into the box between the plants.
“The tomatoes I offered her last weekend,” I said.
“Right,” he said, picking up a full box and heading to the house with it.
Later that evening, after Glen had fallen asleep, I sat on the couch with the laptop and searched Internet dating sites. There seemed to be more men than women looking. I confess I had been on some of the sites before. Glen and I had done some looking together, a way to waste time on a night when there was nothing on TV. We laughed at the lines that people used to attract readers to their profile.
“Do you know how to please a woman?” I asked my husband.
“More than he does,” he answered, pointing to Woman Pleaser’s profile on the screen.
“Show me,” I said, standing up and pulling my sweatshirt over my head.
“I think you want it.”
“Then I’ll be that much easier to please, won’t I?”
We had sex on the office floor that night and then again on the bed upstairs. Not what you would call romantic sex. More like rigorous calisthenics, good-for-what-ails-you exercise.
But after Lynne’s revelation, I wasn’t looking for titillation or an excuse to wake up my husband with kinky offers. I was reading the profiles and searching for hidden meanings. There are a lot of lonely people out there. It surprised me that Lynne was one of them.
My parents always said that you never know what goes on within the walls of a home. Taking things at face value can be a mistake. I guess they were right.
I had promised Lynn confidentiality and I intended to keep that promise. Although the thought of knocking her off her pedestal with my friends was tempting, I knew that it would not be wise. The community is too small.
FOUR
A camera lens is approximately four centimetres in diameter. I am a talking camera lens. I have been reduced to my baby-making parts. I have been turned inside out and pulled through the lens of my contractions.
Things that come in fours: Four leaf clovers. The seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Directions: north, south, east, and west. Tires on a car. Legs on a chair. Legs on a cow. Stomachs in a cow. Letters in a four letter word. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. Sides to a square. Four gospels in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Playing card suits: aces, hearts, diamonds, spades.
We weaned the calves at the beginning of October and for several days afterward the noise level outside our windows was ear-splitting. That’s an exaggeration. It was not burst your eardrums loud, but it was constant and painful to hear. I always feel sorry for cows and calves alike at weaning time.
We like to get the weaning done before the weather turns. Newly-weaned calves are more susceptible and cold, wet weather often brings sickness. It is better to get the weaning process over before fall has turned to early winter. Besides, freshly-weaned calves lose weight at first and then begin to gain again once they accustom themselves to their new rations. If you wean your calves too soon before selling them, your profit margin will be smaller. Not that there’s much of a profit margin in cattle. Dad used to say that, but it didn’t sink in until Glen and I started farming on our own.
Glen and I watched a television documentary once about moose in Alaska. The females become mothers from hell once they are due to give birth again. They push their yearling calves away. Goodbye and good luck. Judging by the ferocity of the push, they’re saying good riddance as well.
Left to themselves, cows will wean their calves naturally by refusing to let the calves suck. Eventually the calves get the message, perhaps without the stress associated with the regular weaning process that farmers use. I read somewhere that if you adopt a two-stage weaning process, the calves do better. I mentioned it to Glen, and we’re looking into it. It’s a matter of balancing the calves’ wellbeing with farm sustainability.
We were done by about four o’clock and I made a run uptown to pick up the mail at the postal outlet in the local grocery store, as well as a quart of milk. A quick supper was on the agenda, after which Glen and I planned to take a drive back out to the pastures in case we had missed any calves. It happens.
As I reached the cemetery on my way home, I spotted Joan’s car.
~ Joan ~
The flowers on my parents’ graves are more colourful now than they were in July. The marigolds and petunias have resisted the first frosts, adversity making them stronger, at least in the short term.
I
have come to the cemetery to water the plants one more time. Soon the task will no longer be necessary. This Indian summer weather will be replaced by what I call Halloween weather: bare branches shivering in the wind. No longer a breeze. Breeze is a spring and summer word.
I refuse to pull the plants here and in the flowerbeds at home until they are well and truly frozen, when pulling them is a funeral rite rather than an act of euthanasia. I have brought my ice cream pails of water and I empty them over the plot.
Glen and Susan weaned their calves today, hauling truckload after truckload of young animals back to the yard from their summer pastures. The cows were left behind; they shall remain on pasture until there is no more grass to eat and the threat of snow is real.
I remember other such days from the past; they were long days, full of barked orders, confused activity, and occasional profanity. I was always glad we could cross that job off our list of things to do in preparation for the coming winter.
The signs are there in shortening days, coloured leaves, and the first sight of geese in the sky. And now the noise. I associate the noise with this time of year, just as I associate the smell of suddenly pungent manure with the spring thaw and the smell of freshly cut grass with summer and no smell at all with frozen winter.
The calves are crying for their mothers. I am more than a mile away but I can still hear them. The mother cows are too far away to be heard, but I know that they are as strident in their distress.
The impetus for both mother and child is a physiological one. The calves are hungry. The cows’ udders hurt.
Having breastfed both my children, I can relate. I remember the tightness that graduated to an ache and then to outright pain. It was the only time in my life that I had sizeable breasts. I felt like a two-legged dairy cow with a girth to match her expanded bust line.
For several days, the noise will continue. No soothing lullaby this, more a cacophony of dissonant sounds. Where is my baby? I want my mommy.
But then the swollen, tender udders will shrink. The babies will learn to assuage their hunger with grain, hay, and water. But there is more to mother’s milk than sustenance, and no other food will ever be as comforting.
Sometimes older animals give in to the urge for a forbidden suck long after they have been officially weaned. We tried nose rings to help them stop, but even that remedy wasn’t foolproof. The nose rings make it difficult to get close to a teat—difficult, but not impossible. Few obstacles are proof against determination. Often our only option was to sell the animal, which sometimes seemed a harsh penalty for immaturity.
It could be argued, I suppose, that a young calf won’t get enough to eat if an older animal is stealing all the milk from its mother. Or, if you look at it another way, what kind of mother would a still-sucking heifer make? Too concerned about her own needs to look after another’s.
I am also not sure whether cows recognize other cows in the herd as their own progeny. Certainly there are no family get-togethers as such, no gatherings of the clan to mark special occasions. When eventually we brought the cows home, they paid no special attention to the calves that had been taken from them several months earlier.
Cows are not people, of course. Bovine motherhood is purely biological, whereas human beings complicate things with emotional attachments. I have two children. I cannot imagine forgetting that I gave birth to either one of them. Different as night and day those two, their births impossible to forget.
When Lynne left home, I used to sit in her old room and listen to the silence. It was full of loud echoes. Glen attended university for two years to get his agriculture diploma, but he was home every weekend and all holidays. When he graduated, he returned to stay. So his room became a place I seldom ventured inside, too cautious of invading his territory. It was Joe and I who moved into rooms with no echoes at all. It seemed best after Joe’s stroke to be in town closer to medical care. Best to let Glen and Susan on their own. Not easy, though.
I wander through the graveyard, the autumn sunshine touching my skin with pleasant warmth. Here my grandfather’s grave, beside it my grandmother’s. Over there another set of grandparents. When we were young, a visit to this cemetery was part of our Father’s Day ritual. After supper, we would drive my grandmother here to visit her husband’s grave. And then we would spend time wandering, as I am doing now, before going home for coffee and cake at my grandmother’s house.
“How many dead people are there in this cemetery?” my dad would ask. And when we said we didn’t know, he came out with the punch line.
“All of them.”
I think he kept that joke in his shirt pocket where it polished itself against the fabric and emerged shining and new again every year. Even when we were older and the joke no longer new, we still responded with laughter. It was a magic trick that, even when its secret was revealed, continued to amaze.
In the far reaches of the cemetery there are graves with headstones so weathered and worn that it is impossible to read the words engraved there. I do not know if anyone comes to visit these graves, or if those seeking family history walk past them unknowing.
There are tiny headstones, Baby This and Baby That—human beings who spent such a short time here on earth they were never named. One family has three of these in a row. Imagine the heartbreak.
And in another row, the graves of four young children who died in a house fire from which only the mother and a fifth child escaped. Where was the dad? He worked for the railroad, I think. I have forgotten the story my grandmother told us, or at least I have forgotten that one detail.
I should be going; I am going to stop at the farm to see how the day went. I imagine they will be heading back out to the pastures after supper, checking to make sure that no calves were left behind and that no cows have broken fences in their attempts to follow their calves to the farmyard.
Mother cows have the advantage of experience; they know their way home. The calves, on the other hand, are lost.
I have returned to my mom and dad’s graves, but instead of picking up the empty pails and going back to the car, I sit down on the grass and reach one arm out to trace the letters of my mom’s name on the headstone with my fingers.
My mother died of pancreatic cancer. We could be thankful, I suppose, that the disease claimed her quickly although the idea of giving thanks for any of that experience seems laughable. My dad’s death almost 20 years earlier was a different kind of sorrow, mixed as it was with the shock of the unforeseen. Going to town for repairs, Dad failed to notice an oncoming freight train as he crossed railway tracks he had crossed almost every day for thirty years.
“Now you are orphans,” a neighbor said to me following my mom’s funeral service.
“I guess so,” I said and told my sisters about his comment. Adults cannot be orphans, we decided. Such an easy dismissal, I think now.
I used to dream of my mom often. Once I dreamed that she was dying and, in the way that waking thoughts often intrude, I said to myself, “Why am I dreaming this? She’s already dead.”
Other times I dreamed that we were young again and Mom had left the family for another life somewhere. She went with another man, our dad said. She came back to visit and I angrily asked her why she left.
“I needed to,” she said. “You don’t know what a hard man your dad was to live with.”
Another time I dreamed that I was picking my children up from school, a school that they never in real life attended. I was sitting in the hallway waiting for classes to end and there at the other end of the hall was my mother.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“I want to see my grandchildren,” she answered.
“But you went away years ago. Why do you want to see them now?”
I have never told anyone, not even Joe, about the dreams. We must learn to walk around the holes left in our lives when our parents die.
But they are like shadows that trace the contours of our bodies with the movement of the sun and not always easy to avoid.
The sound of an approaching vehicle alerts me and I look up. Susan. I reach for the pails and move to greet her.
When I was young, my mother used to sing me a bedtime lullaby. Lullaby and goodnight, Mr. Sandman is calling. She would sing the song three times. Three times was her limit; she had other children to attend to and housework to finish.
When the song was over she would sit quietly for a minute or two before leaving my bedroom. I was seldom asleep, but I never opened my eyes. To this day I do not know whether she realized that I was faking sleep. I never told her and she never asked.
I would listen then for the sounds of her washing dishes, talking to Dad, feeding my sisters. Most of the time I was content to listen to her presence in the house and know that she was near. But sometimes I was upset that she had left me awake and alone. Shouldn’t a mom know when you’re pretending?
~ Susan ~
The cows got to stay in the pasture a while longer and after a few days, both young and old animals had quieted and seemed if not content, then at least resigned.
One morning the phone rang; a neighbour told us that they would be bringing their animals out of pasture and herding them down our road.
“Could someone stand in the driveway to prevent the animals from entering your yard?”
“That someone would be me,” I said. “Do you know what time?”
“We’ll stop at the house and let you know.”
So two hours later there I was standing out at the end of our driveway, brandishing a long stick for waving around in the air, not for striking. Our own cattle knew the route so well that my presence would be unnecessary. They would go past the driveway without even glancing toward sthe house. But other cattle, unfamiliar with the terrain, might see an open driveway as an invitation.
Oftentimes just the fact that there is a human being standing there is good enough. The cattle see a stranger and veer away. Sometimes the person with the stick needs to wave her arms around and yell. Other times an animal will break from the string and get past her and then she has to run and head it off at the pass, so to speak.
The Waiting Place Page 3