“Glen, this is silly. This has nothing to do with us. Why are you so mad?”
This was getting out of control and far too close for comfort.
Glen threw his hands up in the air and walked out. I heard the truck start and leave the yard.
My husband didn’t come home for supper that night and by eleven p.m., he still hadn’t returned. If I had known he was out with friends, it would have been different. But I didn’t know where he was. And if I started phoning around, everyone would know that I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t want that.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything. When I went to get a 7-Up out of the fridge, I selected a Coke instead and did not recognize the difference in taste till several gulps later. I wandered from room to room, looking out the windows for any sign of approaching headlights. I climbed the stairs to the attic, but could find nothing to hold my attention.
I did not lie to Glen. I am not having an affair. I have no plans to have an affair. I have never had an affair.
What I have had is a one-off. I can’t even call it a one-night stand because there was very little standing involved and only a small fraction of a night.
Glen and his friend Scott were in the same grade. Their friendship was based on a shared interest in Star Wars and video games. I know him just because he comes from the area, but he left Manitoba to go to university and never returned. He was invited to our wedding, but didn’t come. Didn’t send a gift, either.
Almost two years ago, Scott’s job in southern Ontario brought him to Winnipeg and he rented a car to come see his parents who still live here. He dropped in at the farm one evening after supper to see if Glen was around.
Had he called first, he might have saved himself the trip. It was early August, between haying and harvest, and Glen and some of his buddies had gone on a men-only fishing trip.
I remembered Scott as an extremely thin and gawky teenager. He had filled out nicely since then and the frizzy hair in his yearbook photo had been replaced by no hair at all. I did not know if it was early baldness or daily time spent with a shaver, but I approved. He had the skull for it.
I offered him a beer and we sat on the veranda and drank together. One beer became two. Dusk became evening. I lit some candles. When the mosquitoes became unbearable, we went into the house and settled on the couch.
I updated him on the farm. He told me about his job and the woman he had lived with for the past two years.
When we ran out of things to talk about, I let the beer do the talking.
“May I?” I asked, reaching out a hand towards his head.
“Go ahead.”
His skin was smooth; I could find no traces of stubble. I swung one leg over, straddling him, and used both hands to shape the contours of his head. My thumbs found tiny areas of moistness behind his ears. I lowered his head against the modest cleavage that showed above my tank top.
“Come with me,” I said, sliding off the couch and holding out my hand. I led him upstairs, stopping at the master bedroom to take a condom from the bedside table. Scott stood in the doorway, his eyes traveling the length of the room before resting on the bed.
“Not here,” I said.
He followed me down the hall and into the bedroom that had years ago been Lynne’s.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“It’s just sex,” I said. It was a rationale I had been known to use before.
I helped Scott put on the condom, an activity that I had always found to be a turn on. Scott, however, did not seem to appreciate my efforts.
“I can do it myself, you know,” he said and there was something in his voice that could have been embarrassment.
“Never thought you couldn’t,” I said. “Just wanted to help. Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
That was as close as it came to bedroom foreplay, because no sooner was the condom in place, than Scott was on top of me. Up and down, in and out, an open mouth coming at my face like a fish at feeding time. And his ejaculation, while not premature, was a definite race to the finish, leaving me far behind and in the dust.
“That was great,” he said, rolling off and flopping onto the barely disturbed bedspread.
“Un-hmm,” I said.
He slept, mouth still open, for about half an hour while I lay awake wondering what the hell I had just done.
“Tell Glen I was sorry to miss him,” Scott said later as he walked out to his rental.
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“How’s he doing?” Glen asked when I told him about Scott’s unexpected visit.
“He’s bald,” I said.
“Scott’s bald? Really? Naturally or on purpose?”
“I never asked.”
Scott told his parents that he had not been able to see Glen, but had learned from me all the family news. The condom did its job and my period arrived on time.
I told myself it was one of those occurrences that I could pack away in a box called “experience” and never examine again, except when I lifted the lid to put something else inside. But sometimes I was reminded that secrets have a way of seeping through the cracks of whatever is keeping them from the light.
The phone rang shortly after 12:30.
“Susan, do you want to come get Glen? He’s had a lot to drink and he probably shouldn’t be driving.” It was Ben, a bachelor neighbour about four miles away.
“Sure, Ben,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
“Something going on?” Ben asked me when he answered the door. “Never seen Glen get so pissed.”
“Just a bad day, I guess. Where is he?”
“In the living room.”
My husband had reached near catatonic stage, head thrown back against the cushions of the couch. Ben helped me get him up and walked with us to the car. We put Glen in the car and I thanked Ben for calling me.
“We’ll come get the truck in the morning,” I said.
“He’s going to be one sorry lad,” Ben said.
Halfway home, Glen started fumbling with the seat belt.
“Gonna be sick,” he said.
“Hang on.” I stopped the car and reached over him to open the passenger door. At almost the same moment, he managed to unfasten the seat belt and leaned his head out the door. I withdrew my arm quickly.
When we got home, he refused my help. It was a slow and unsteady trip, but he made it to the kitchen and then slumped down on the floor. I could get him no further. I brought some blankets and a pillow; put the pillow under his head and the blankets over his body. Sam sniffed him and backed off. Tab jumped on Glen’s stomach, did a couple of three hundred and sixty degree turns and eased into nap position. Glen didn’t move.
“You may be sorry,” I told the cat. Sam came with me to the bedroom.
“Girls against the guys tonight, I see,” I said as she cuddled against me.
Glen had little to say for himself the next morning. I wanted to ask him about the drinking binge, but hesitated to bring up the fight. So I said nothing. We pretended nothing had happened. Neither one of us knew how to cross the distance between us. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. Maybe he thought I was someone he didn’t know, but I wasn’t sure around him either.
I think Lynne was avoiding me. I didn’t care. I felt relieved that the burden of sharing secrets was no longer on me. I wished I had never opened my mouth that evening in September and that I was just one of many to whom the current gossip was fodder for entertainment. It was easier when she was the daughter who could do no wrong. I knew how I felt about her then.
I felt used, as if I were a can she could empty her garbage into every once in a while and then walk away without a second thought. Or a sister confessor figure, although I had no power to grant forgiveness and had never offered any.
And yet at the same time I felt I had failed her somehow, as if somewhere in our coffee conversations there had been an opportunity for a connection that I had turned away from. Not a friendship. I can’t see us ever being close friends. But a connection based on things we shared. It was complicated.
When Mom came home that weekend, I told her the news. Not the part about Glen spending the night on the kitchen floor; the part about Lynne telling Brian she had had an affair.
“I’m not surprised,” Mom said.
If she was, she hid it well.
“Really?” I asked.
“It doesn’t surprise me when anyone has an affair,” she said. “Your dad would remind you that few animals are monogamous and that monogamy is a man-made rule, not a biological necessity.”
That’s true. I’ve heard him say it. Someday we’ll ask our children, “Do you know what your grandfather would say?”
“Would you ever consider an affair?” I asked.
“I’m no different than anyone else,” Mom said.
“I get the picture,” I said. I didn’t, not really, but I was afraid of what I might see if Mom decided to draw it for me.
~ Sandra ~
I once asked my husband if he would ever leave me. Dave’s answer, slow and thoughtful like most of what he says, was “Don’t think so.” When it was his turn to ask, I said no.
I wasn’t lying. After all these years, I can’t imagine a life that isn’t here with him. And marriage can be such hard work that I don’t want to start over again with anyone else. I don’t have that much energy.
I was young when we got married, not in years perhaps—I was twenty-six—but in what my grandparents always called “good old common sense”. In those early months, I wrote incredibly bad poetry about my husband’s hands:
He has an artist’s fingers
in calloused disguise.
His fingers feel the music of the soil.
He does have nice hands. The fingers are long and tapered, not meaty like his father’s. His dad’s hands are broad with sausage-like fingers. I call them farmer’s hands. My dad has them, too. But Dave doesn’t. It has nothing to do with art though. He’s just a farmer with slender fingers.
The question we have never asked each other is whether either one of us would ever take a lover.
We have just arrived at the fairgrounds of a country fair competition. We set up our trailer, settle our heifer in the cattle barn, and after supper a group of us gather outside our trailers, drinking beer and coolers in the summer solstice twilight. I ask for a beer, and Greg Wright, a cattle breeder from another part of the province, brings one over. But instead of handing it directly to me, he slides the bottle lightly up the length of my left forearm. The bottle is cold and wet and it leaves a spider thin trail of liquid on my skin. Some men can make an invitation out of almost anything.
Then later that night I am restless and cannot sleep, so decide to walk over to the cattle barns to check on our heifer one last time. It is dark outside and the lights are on in the barn. Most of the animals are lying down in their stalls, although the occasional one still stands, tail swishing to ward off the flies. Fans are set up at the north and south entrances of the building.
Greg comes up to me at the stall where our heifer has settled for the night. We exchange cattlemen’s pleasantries.
“Nice heifer you have there.”
“What kind of feed ration do you have her on?”
“Is she a Goldsire daughter?”
“I’m gonna have one more beer before bed,” he says. “Want to share?”
“Sure.”
At the barn’s centre an informal lounge has been arranged, hay bales serving as makeshift seating. Greg sits on one bale and I sit on another adjacent to his. We are within an arm’s length of each other. I lift the beer bottle, and take a long, rather too quick, slug. Comes of being nervous, I suppose. I cough and he moves closer, an arm around me.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I croak. “It went down the wrong way.”
“It happens,” he says. He does not move away.
I take another drink and he takes the bottle from my hand, setting it down on the concrete floor. He traces my lips with fingers wet from the sweating glass and then leans over to lick the moisture away.
As I expect, he is a kickass kisser. His tongue is doing things that I never knew a tongue was capable of, but I sure like it. His hands begin to move and I like that, too. As we move closer, I drink in his smell, a potent mixture of barnyard and sweat with a very faint hint of aftershave that I don’t recognize. I trace the shape of his upper body with my hands, coming to rest on the leather of his belt. In a few more seconds, I will head for the buckle.
But then a heifer in a stall at the south end of the barn moos and I open my eyes. I am sitting on a hay bale in the middle of a barn, surrounded on all sides by cattle. Call it an epiphany.
“This is just too biblical for my liking,” I say.
“Huh?”
“The cattle are lowing,” I say and move away from temptation.
Hours later, the kids and I are watching Dave compete in a purebred yearling heifer class. Greg is competing, too, although I always have a hard time thinking of him by his first name. Everyone calls him Mr. Wright. It’s an old joke. He is, as our daughter Susan would say, a “hunk” and he has always known it.
We spend a lot of time throughout the year at fairs and competitions like these. Cattle are my husband’s passion. The years have taken their toll, mind you—droughts, floods, bad prices, mad cow disease, and animal rightists. I’m not sure it’s politically correct to be a farmer any longer. I think that’s sad.
Dave loves his cows and so do the rest of us, although to a lesser degree. In our family the cattle come first, which is appropriate because they are, after all, our livelihood, but it has occasionally played havoc with family schedules. Just once it would be nice if a cow calved after the kids’ hockey game, instead of just before or during it. It helps now that Jon, our seventeen-year-old son, has his drivers’ license and can help with some of the chauffeuring duties.
And there Dave is, leading the red heifer around the show ring, wearing blue jeans, a western shirt, and a peaked farmer’s cap with Twilight Simmentals stitched across the front. Some of the entrants in this competition are wearing cowboy hats. My husband has never owned a cowboy hat. Cowboy hats have always turned me on but the boys and men who wear them are not, in my experience, good husband material. If you want steadiness without the thrills and spills, go for the farmer’s cap.
We have spent hours and hours preparing our heifer for this show. We have shampooed her not once but several times; we have trimmed her hair and applied products to make the remaining hair shine and lie in the proper direction. We want to accentuate all her good points and camouflage the bad.
Judges look for signs that a female animal will be able to bear quality calves. They want a female that has pleasing dimensions. They want her to look feminine. She needs to have a well-developed and fault-free udder to feed her young efficiently. She needs a set of strong, sturdy hips for easy birthing. She needs well-formed legs, narrow front shoulders, and a straight back.
So simple really. Cows exist to make baby cows. Judging them on any other merits makes no sense. Which is not to say that people won’t have their own preferences. Red cows. Brown cows. Black cows. White cows.
Personally I don’t see what difference colour makes, but some people think it matters. There’s a story about a producer who actually tried to dye his brown and white animals black before a big show. Cow colours go in and out of fashion like skirt lengths in another world. At that particular time, black was the colour of choice. Unfortunately for him it rained overnight, the barn roof leaked, and he woke the morning of the show to very streaky brown, black, and white cattle. The family got a
five-year suspension from the show circuit. Quite the scandal. And like all scandals, there were those of us who enjoyed spreading the word.
Our animal is well-behaved and Dave has no trouble getting it to do whatever he asks. When the judge asks participants to stop, the young cow assumes the required pose with no prodding from my husband—legs positioned properly, back straight, head firmly forward.
“Atta girl,” Jon says. He has taken an active role in working with Heidi, the name we have given the heifer. A maiden of the Alps. Her blood lines can be traced back to Switzerland, the birthplace of her breed.
What if women were put in a show ring, led around with a halter, and posed for the camera while a man judged us on our ability to make babies? Beauty pageants play the same role, of course, but they stop short of leading the contestants around on a leash.
I am basically boobless, although Dave, bless his heart, has never complained. In an udder competition, I would score embarrassingly low. I’d probably place fairly high on sturdiness and my hips would make me a good prospect. Legs? I hide mine in jeans. And the pretty face? Well, what’s ordinary to one person is beautiful to another. Good thing, too.
I would not like to be placed at the bottom of the class. Imagine the humiliation. Like being the wallflower at a high-school dance without the option of hiding your shame in the girls’ washroom.
The judge has started to line up the heifers. He first selects the animals at the bottom of the class and works his way up to the top placements. We watch as one by one the owners bring their animals into line. It looks as if our animal will be in the top five.
It makes it to third place, directly behind Greg’s animal. I can tell Dave is pleased by the glance he gives us.
I smile back at him, but I’m lost in a private daydream. Prize bull gets prize cow. It’s a very straightforward story with no romantic complications. No pickup lines or flowers. Just sex.
And here’s the other thing: once the act is done, the bull is removed from the story. The cow quite possibly will never again experience the pleasures of the flesh with this particular male. She is compliant and submissive that one time, but she doesn’t have to live with him.
The Waiting Place Page 11