Rhea is lying on the old sofa in the living room in the comfortable darkness. She is thinking about Diana, feeling pity for her. It is a long time since she has felt pity for any person. It irritates her, she rubs it away. Anyway, it isn’t for me to judge, she thinks, even if I knew what the judgement should be … a single soul struggling in the universe, at least she knows that much. She’s been shown something about life, she may not be strong enough, though, it may end in disaster.
It will end in her death, Rhea thinks, and can’t suppress a quick snort of laughter.
Selena lies upstairs in her big bed beside her husband and thinks about Tamara and Catherine, Diana’s children, not suspecting the terrible turn their world is about to take. But Tony will look after them as well as Diana has, she thinks, so what is this outrage I feel? What it amounts to is that once children are born, someone has to raise them, they can’t raise themselves, so Diana’s action, since she is their mother and the logical one to raise them, makes no sense, except for her, in a personal way. The world can hardly be run that way, can it? With each person caring only for her personal needs.
I remember, she thinks, that the teacher said Hamlet is a tragedy. Is it a tragedy because Hamlet dies? She can’t remember if he died or not, she can only remember that Ophelia died. She sees Ophelia floating down the river, garlanded with flowers—brown-eyed susans, milkweed, wild primroses, bluebells, dandelions—singing. Is this a tragedy I’m living in?
A few miles down the road from her, Diana lies sleepless too. I won’t pretend it’s right, she decides. I feel like I’m above those kinds of rules, but I would never dare to say that aloud. I mustn’t think about my babies, I mustn’t think about them, because I have no choice about this. I have to do it. Men have always done this—neglected or abandoned their wives and children, driven by some vision, some obsession. They went off, over and over again, on some quest that made no sense to anybody else—that photographer at the turn of the century who disappeared for years at a time, taking pictures of the Indians. Nobody even knew where he was. Explorers, gone for years, scientists—buried in their work—might as well be in Antarctica—doctors devoting their lives to other people. Men have always done this, and always been forgiven. Well, I’m an explorer, too.
A free person in the universe? Selena thinks. Freedom? She wonders what freedom is, tries to imagine it. Is it getting up in the morning and not having to cook breakfast for anyone? Is it going to the city? Like Diana? But I hate the city, I hate the smell, it frightens me, everything happens too fast there. What is it, then?
Rhea is thinking about her death. She knows, she has always carried it as a dried and unsprung seed inside her. Tonight it is swelling, and she allows it all the room it wants, all the space it needs to grow and blossom in, so that she can, at last, take its measure.
She rises from the couch where she has been lying awake, opens the curtains and stares out into the motionless, cold, silver-blue night. A long time she’s been waiting. And now, what is left? She sits down again, turning toward the warm comfort of the house, and she leans against the old couch and rests. I don’t want any surprises, she thinks, I don’t want anything left undone.
I wonder what they will say at my funeral: How hard I worked. All those miles of scrubbed floors, acres of washed clothes, mountains of kneaded dough. She sees her clean white sheets flapping in the wind. She sees herself stretching to hang them on the line Jasper built for her that the wind was forever tearing down, dragging the clean clothes in the dirt so that she had to wash them all over again. Her spotless kitchen, the loaves of bread sitting out on the table cooling, all the meals she cooked.
She allows herself to feel a second’s satisfaction. But then thinks, whatever my life has been, it isn’t quite that. Work was only the raw material out of which I fashioned my life, out of which I fashioned my soul.
All those children, they will say. This bothers her, she doesn’t know what to think when it comes to her children. Woman, after all, she reminds herself, was made to give birth. That new life flowed through me, it is true. But that is only the way things are, I have been only an opening, a conduit, for the greater life to express itself.
So what are all those children to me? She lifts her large, once strong, farm woman’s hands from her lap, then drops them helplessly. Still, they were my babies, she thinks, and I would have given my life for any one of them, even though now I can barely remember their names. The names I gave them belong to the babies, not to those gross, loud strangers who come sometimes to see me.
There’ll be a minister at my funeral. Someone who never set eyes on me when I was alive. He’ll say I was a pioneer, and he’ll talk about the courage of the pioneers, about my courage. Courage! We did what we had to do, that’s all. He’ll talk about the hardship: the work, the doing-without, the loneliness.
All those years of loneliness. Never seeing another woman for weeks at a time, in the early days. Jasper up and out working before sunrise, not coming back till well after dark. Nobody to talk to but the kids and the animals and the air itself.
What it does to you, always being alone. People don’t know how much they rely on other people to keep them from knowing what they are, to keep them from knowing about that other, that interior life everybody has. They’re afraid of it, afraid it’s nothing but a black hole into which their everyday selves will fall. People are afraid they will fall into that other world, into madness, and never be able to climb out again.
And they’re right. It is a kind of madness into which I fell. I fell inside myself. Alone, day after day, with the wind and sky, the grass and the wild things.
They’ll tell how someone came across me walking out on the prairie late at night, as they were riding home from a dance or from playing cards with the neighbours. How I frightened them, seeming to rise from the darkness up against the night sky, my hair wild, my feet and legs bare, how their horses reared or shied and wheeled. Or standing in the sun, my dress blowing around me, my arms raised to the sky, shouting something they couldn’t understand. A crazy woman, a witch, they’ll say.
Someone sleeping upstairs coughs once. She raises her eyes to the ceiling, sees only dark, bounded shadows. Sees them all lying in their beds. One of the boys, Jason. The house falls back into silence.
How it was when I was mad. How I wandered over the prairie, neglected my work, how Jasper, despairing, would send my children out to find me and bring me home again, how I could see nothing in those days but the insects scurrying over the earth, or the clouds in the sky. How they would lead me by the hand.
What a long time it was before I could see the grass as only grass again, the rocks as only rocks, the hills as hills. When at last I did return to the world as plain landscape again, I could never again see anything in the same way. I’d forgotten how everyone else sees this world. I’d forgotten what it is they think about. I’d forgotten how things seem to be to them.
Rhea yearns to feel that opening sweep through her again, that emptying of the little things, the erasing of memory, that left her with nothing but the clench and release of her heart, the hot rush of her blood. The gut knowledge that she belonged to the earth, was a part of it, an animal like the other animals. And that where she had carried her life, she had also always carried her death.
Death, too.
She moves her feet a little and they make small, sliding noises on the old carpet. Will the house seem emptier once I’m gone? Will I be missed? Oh, yes, she tells herself with certainty, because I’m a thread in the fabric of this community. They’ll feel my passing. In those moments when they look out a window of their houses, over the long, undulating prairie, some deep part of them will whisper, the woman is gone from among us, but they won’t hear the words. Only a piercing sadness, an edge of despair will overcome them, that they can’t allow themselves to feel. No, no despair in this community.
It seems to Selena that she should ask someone what freedom is, but who? Diana says that men know what
freedom is, but Selena doubts this. She turns her head to look at Kent, sleeping beside her. No, Kent doesn’t know what freedom is any more than Selena does. She thinks of Phoebe and the child she is carrying. Once you have chilren, you never know what freedom is again.
The people I loved, Rhea thinks. Jasper. She tries to call to mind, the width of his shoulders under his faded blue denim workshirts, the smell of his breath, peppery and warm, and the way he walked across the yard to the barn, or handled a horse. Her children. She sees their faces, one by one, even the faces of the ones that died. How their blood and her blood mingled.
Serena thinks of Phoebe, the new life swelling, the child soon to burst out into the world. Selena sees the child taking its first steps, Phoebe hovering in the background, a blur, out of focus and only present from her mid-calves to her breasts, her hands out, palms forward, ready to catch the child if it should fall. Perhaps Selena is asleep now, she can’t tell. It seems to her that this is important, this view of Phoebe. It is trying to tell her something. Out of focus, her head missing, and her feet. Selena begins to cry in her sleep.
Diana falls asleep and dreams. She dreams of walking alone over the world. She dreams of wisdom, she dreams of knowing. In countries hot or cold, far away or not so far, she watches women as they go about their lives: cooking, sewing, carrying wood and water, planting, tending the earth, bearing children, nursing them. She hears their cries—of love, of joy, of fear. She walks the earth with long strides, bending her head to them, her lucent eyes gaze upon them, the radiant curve of her smooth brow sends blessings on them, her tears baptize them. Diana walks among the women of the earth and where she passes the women slow, grow silent, and an arrow of loss for something valued, half-remembered, pierces their hearts with sorrow.
Diana moves restlessly in her sleep, turns over, moans, flings one arm up so that it rests on her thick hair spread out over her pillows. She turns again and dreams some more.
She is seated in a garden in Arabia. It is very hot and the garden is on the top of a hill. All around below the hill the green fronds of palms spread themselves offering shade. Cool fountains run thin, clear streams of fresh water over glazed tile decorated in shades of blue and white. A woman sits across from her at the table, and other figures, too, but in the manner of dreams, she can’t quite make them out, nor can she tell if they are men or women. The other woman is dressed in long, flowing white robes of some opaque material and she wears a white headdress of the same material, rather like the headdress of an Arab woman or a nun. Diana sees that she herself is wearing the same garment and headdress and this does not seem strange. The woman is olive-skinned, that much Diana knows, but whether she is pretty or plain, young or old, Diana cannot tell. She is a woman.
The table they are seated at is round and in the centre there is a round bowl filled with fruit. Seeing it, Diana reaches out, takes an orange, and without peeling it, bites into it and swallows. The woman across from her speaks then. In a voice devoid of fear or pleasure, distaste or anger, or even censure, she says that Diana should not have bitten into the fruit without washing it first. She points then, to small, rectangular buildings which Diana sees for the first time scattered below, beside the fountains, among the palm trees. There, she tells Diana, those are the washing houses. The fruit you ate without first washing will kill you. And Diana knows she will die.
Selena dreams she is walking in a garden. She recognizes the special warmth of a spring day when the sun is still gentle and life-giving, yet strong enough to warm her. She feels its glow, which seems to come from all around her at once, seeping through the skin between her fingers, probing its way between the strands of her hair to warm her scalp, spreading in a slow flood over her neck, shoulders, back, and legs. She feels it on her thighs and as it reaches her stomach, it spreads without resistance, through her very skin, inside her, warming and lightening her woman’s organs.
There are green plants all around her, some taller than she is, some rustling about her shoulders and her knees or caressing her ankles as she passes. The tall ones bend and whisper to her, moving their curving leaves aside to let her pass. Sunlight is thrown like handsful of yellow topazes over the leaves and stems of the plants. The air is filled with the green, growing scent of the plants, of the olive pale leaves of the green and yellow beans, the tangy scent of the crisp, wine-dark leaves of the beets, the thicker, darker scent of the fernlike fronds of the carrots, and the honey-sharp scent of the tomato bushes. Plants she doesn’t recognize, too, grow all around her as she walks. They bear fruit that hang in heavy, ripening clusters from their stems; speckled fruit the shape of lemons, or round, full fruit like plums. Their colours of rose and gold glow from within, and glistening drops of dew, like blue diamonds, drip from their variegated green leaves.
She kneels in the soil which is black and moist and newly tilled. She lifts a handful of it to her nostrils, it crumbles richly in her palms, its scent brings pictures of caverns and deep green valleys into her head. She is filled with the peace and content that radiate from the plants, from the earth itself.
All their faces vanish, evaporate like dew in the wind, and all that is left for Rhea is the wind sweeping across the prairie grass, the great round sky, the low curves of the hills. The beautiful earth, a pang of terrible loss sweeps through her, to lose the earth.
Rhea has stretched out on the couch again, pulled the quilt up to her chin and is lying with her arms across her belly, her hands flat, one above the other, on its rounded warmth. She closes her eyes. I have tried to understand my own nature, that’s what I’ve tried to do. I have tried to find my self in myself.
One last spring, she says to herself. One last spring. And then she, too, sleeps.
FEBRUARY
I’ve changed jobs again. I’m writing copy at a radio station. They let me work from four to midnight and that way I’m free to take some half-classes during the day. I’m taking one in drama and one in art appreciation. It appalls me to see how ignorant I am, how I thought I was doing fine, and yet I knew nothing, nothing.
I take the classes with young kids. I think about my girls growing up to be like them: spoiled silly, selfish. But I know they won’t be like that if only because I left them, made them different. Does that sound terribly cruel to you, Selena? Of course it does. I’m a monster. Your sister, the monster. Can I tell you how much I miss them? Or will you only say, it serves you right. What kind of woman abandons her children? What kind indeed? I wonder myself.
I wake up sometimes in the morning with a jerk, and the room looks strange, wrong, like I don’t know where I am and I suddenly realize that my children are gone, that they won’t come running to jump into bed with me, all warm and sticky and smelly, full of hugs and kisses. Can you imagine how I feel when I remember that? The temptation to come back to them and to Tony is so strong that sometimes I even get my suitcase half-packed before I can make myself stop.
It seems to me that none of us understands about motherhood. You think there’s only one kind, and that kind is your kind, Selena. You have your children, then stay with them and worry over them, over every breath they take, until one day they up and leave you—they wrench themselves away from you and your motherhood.
So I’m trying a different kind of motherhood. Instead of trying to protect them, I’m trying to turn them loose in the world.
But I’m terrified, all the time, that I’m wrong, that I’m not doing it for them at all, but only for myself, that I am a selfish monster, an unnatural woman, like Lady Macbeth, because I want to live, and to heck with everybody else.
But I do know this: motherhood kills the life of a woman. It kills the woman’s separate life, and I cannot, I will not believe that that is right. That any woman who becomes a mother has to die herself. Because if that is true, if that is the only way a woman can live, no better than a coyote out on the prairie, if women really are born to be slaves, then I will kill myself. I mean that, Selena. Because you have to see that life is big
ger than mother-and-child. Woman’s life is bigger. We betray our humanity if we think that our highest purpose is to carry and deliver a child.
Now do you see why Phoebe has been so silent?
Diana
Dear Diana,
I received your letter on Tuesday. They are closing the post office at Mallard so Kent has to drive to Chinook for the mail and he goes only every other day.
Mitchums have sold out. Their auction sale is next Saturday. Kent is going, and I will be selling lunch with the club. They didn’t go broke, just got out ahead of the bank takeover. I can’t imagine anybody being fool enough to buy the place. There’s no way it can pay for itself, so I suppose the house will just sit empty. It seems to me that more and more houses are sitting empty around here. We just hope things will get better.
I know I don’t have to tell you, but maybe it will help to relieve your mind a little to know that your girls look well and happy. Tony brought them over for supper Sunday night and I really don’t see much change in them. A little maybe in Tammy, because she’s older, but Tony takes the best care of them, even seems happy doing it.
Well, you know we don’t see eye to eye on being a mother, and I don’t want to fight with you, but when you get right inside motherhood, let it take over, it really is wonderful. It really does seem worth the sacrifices. At least, it always has to me. Although, I have to say that my boys have grown away from me. I feel them holding me away from them, and there’s nothing I can do about it, but accept it, and it hurts. And it’s true, too, that I’m afraid of the time that’s coming soon, when all three of them will be gone and I will have to find a new way to live. It’s hard for all the women around here, I guess, from what I hear.
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