“I’m just trying to tell you how I feel, Ibrahim.” Silvia feels like she’s about to burst into tears. “But you don’t seem to be the best at listening to that sort of thing.”
“I’m just having a hard time picking your feelings apart from all the words that you’re saying, honestly,” he says.
“Okay, fine.”
That night Ibrahim sleeps alone on a folded blanket in his studio, leaving Silvia and Toby to the double-mattressed bed in her room.
LII
CYNTHIA HANGS THE PAINTING of Silvia in the library. About four feet by five, it fills the whole wall. Ibrahim and Silvia are present for the hanging.
“The colours—the colours are simply lovely.” Cynthia looks at it from up close, pleased, then steps back to admire it from afar. She crosses her arms and tilts her head. “Are those wings?”
Though the painting is of Silvia, it’s not obviously of Silvia, so it seems less strange. It’s less of a portrait and more of a feeling. This is what she tells herself.
Nothing has changed between the night that Ibrahim painted it and now. It’s just as raw, just as intimate. Her breasts, nipples bright pink, are right there. However, hanging it on the wall gives the painting a sense of finality—it’s become more than just that moment. It’s now an official “painting.” Especially with the title, which Ibrahim told Silvia only yesterday.
The Other Woman.
Is she the other woman? Or does the title refer to a different woman? He’d told her that he just made up the title on the spot; it was the first thing that came to him when the woman in Crocs asked. He said the title referred to his mother, and while Silvia didn’t really understand, she knew better than to ask. He’d alluded to the fact that his mother had died, and she knew he didn’t want to talk about it; that was fine. She didn’t want to talk about her parents either.
Silvia’s eyes meet the eyes of the painting: they are exactly the same colour and shape as her own—pond-green, oval—though the colour changes so often, she wonders how he picked which one to preserve in paint. But in the painting they take up more space in the face, and one is much larger than the other. It’s not realistic, but it feels real. Silvia looks deeper, and something pulses. Vital. It feels like the painting is looking at her, seeing right through her.
She leaves the room without excusing herself, feeling newly unmasked.
LIII
JULY TURNS TO AUGUST. Time is round, stretched, redolent. A camera out of focus. The pollen from all the flowers is mixed in the late summer, when the bees go everywhere and everything blooms at once.
With this dry heat, the air clinging to their skin and throats, the people on the farm feel a mixture of pity and jealousy for the bees. Jealousy because they probably don’t feel thirst, pity in case they do.
When the September winds come in from the east, they bring a terrible smell with them. The smell gets inside Silvia’s head, makes it feel swollen and misty. It gets inside her stomach, makes her feel nauseated. Her eyes swell and turn cloudy red as though she’s allergic to something. But finally, when she’s convinced that the smell will slice her brain in two, she has to ask what it is.
“Cynthia?” Silvia approaches the curved form of the woman, hunched over some papers on Hartford’s desk.
Cynthia looks up and puts her hand to her chest—a tragic inhalation. “Oh!” she exclaims. “I’m sorry, Silvia. I didn’t see you.”
“Sorry, I’m sorry to bother you—it’s nothing, it’s just—”
“Yes?”
“Just, I was wondering, what’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
“Coming from outside—it smells of sewage or something.”
Cynthia stands and looks where Silvia is pointing. Something clicks.
“Oh! That. That’s the canola.”
“What?”
“Those yellow flowers in the field, canola. Rapeseed. For oil. It also makes delicious honey. I’m so used to the smell I don’t even notice it anymore.”
“Oh.” Silvia looks out at the yellow fields, picture-perfect in the early autumn light. She’d seen canola fields back in Nova Scotia but had never noticed a smell. “Okay.”
“Are you feeling all right?” Cynthia asks. “You look a little off-colour.”
Silvia places her palms below her navel, to where her centre of gravity has shifted. “Fine.” She tries to smile but feels it’s a lie.
“I hope you know you can tell me anything, Silvia,” Cynthia says. “If things aren’t going well, or if Ibrahim, or . . .” She shrugs, trying to make light of it. “You know, I’m here.”
Silvia feels dizzy as a drift of the sickening smell comes through the open window. “Right,” she says. “Thanks.”
When she leaves, she goes down to the fields to see for herself and finds it’s true: the disgusting smell does come from those yellow flowers. The wind, when it’s strong, carries the stench all the way up to the house, but close up it’s absolutely intolerable. The smell of rotten milk, dead animals, and human shit.
LIV
IT’S A MONDAY. Silvia’s decided to go into town. Actually the decision was made partly by her and partly by others: everyone’s letters home had been sitting in their envelopes for days, and Hartford asked her to drop them off at the post office and pick up some things from the store.
Silvia’s never actually left the property other than to go to the lakes. This realisation smacks her in the tight V between her eyes: Why not? She has everything she needs here, and there is always something to do, and the town is far, and . . . Being on the farm, she feels like a child: taken care of.
In her tatty Trident tote bag she’s got a long letter for her parents. She hasn’t called them since that first time. In a letter, she doesn’t have to answer any questions. In a letter, she doesn’t have to feel their sadness at her having strayed from the straight and narrow path to heaven.
It’s bright, no interruption of clouds. She should have worn sunglasses.
Heat. Headache. Seasickness, but no sea.
Though there’s a bus, she’d rather walk. But she finds there’s no sidewalk along the whole stretch of road, only a gravel gutter that feeds to small shrubs, then descends into large, latticed evergreens. All of a sudden she has to pee. So badly. The sudden weight of it burns in her bladder. She looks around in a panic: she’s far from any bathroom, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around, so she hurries into the shrubs that line the path and pulls her jeans down below her knees, carefully places her feet parallel, as if for takeoff, and squats, directing her stream into the Queen Anne’s lace. The relief is ecstatic.
SILVIA SEES THE WATER TOWER before she sees the town. It’s the only man-made thing on the horizon—nearly all the houses around are bungalows with slapdash siding, built quickly as if for a passing fair. OOTH RO / ALLS. The letters wrap around the tank. The tower looks like a chess piece, a rook; it doesn’t look like it can hold very much water. She wonders how much is left inside, if any, and if they (whoever they are) are hoarding it greedily, not sharing it with the thirsty masses.
When the town finally appears, the highway forks into Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Streets.
WELCOME—BIENVENUE
TO/À SMOOTH ROCK FALLS!
She takes Fifth. The post office is at the corner of Fifth and Hollywood Avenue. There’s a small cement church, St. Gertrude’s Catholic. It looks uninhabited, but she knows that it will be open: it’s the church’s rule that sanctuaries be accessible at all times. Right now, though, she doesn’t feel like going in. There are eight squat houses placed equidistantly along the block, and at the end of Hollywood is the trailer park. There are two gas stations, one post office, and three shops: the LCBO (she imagines the liquor store must get the most business, considering); the Sears depot (but she wonders if that counts as a real store); and Blanchette Freshmart + Pharmacy, which sells groceries, tools, and prescription drugs. The only restaurant, Smoothy’s, is at the entrance to the trailer park.
>
Ibrahim talked about the exciting feeling of possibility in the “real world” when he went to the market a few towns over, but if this is the real world, here at Hollywood and Fifth, she doesn’t feel any excitement or possibility at all.
Next door to the post office is a white clapboard bungalow where a woman named Valerie has set up a beauty salon. valerie’s nice beauty. Funny, Silvia thinks—she’s finally found it! “Beauty lives with kindness,” that numinous place in Shakespeare’s poem! And, ironically, it lives here, in the abandoned flatlands between rocks and hard places.
“Allo!” a cheerful teenager greets her as she walks into the post office. His hair is striped from Goth to Smurf to marshmallow. It’s captivating.
She pulls the letters out of her bag and puts them on the counter, thus setting off his chain of small, industrious tasks: he weighs each letter, taps on his computer, fixes things in drawers. This, mailing letters, is the kind of basic chore that she’s been doing her whole life, but today she finds it confusing and pointless.
He files all the papers and then smiles. “Thank you, merci!”
Silvia doesn’t know which language to reply in, so she frowns. “I’m also wondering, do you have any mail here for me? My name is Silvia, I’m staying on the Honey Farm, my parents . . .”
“With Cynthia? Ah, yes. Family name?” he asks.
“Richardson.”
“A moment.” He disappears behind a shelf, then returns promptly with a stack of envelopes. “Voilà! Lots of mail!”
A stone in her belly. There are at least twenty letters. She takes them and stuffs them into her tote bag, where she plans to let them fester, and thanks the teenager with the tricolour hair as she leaves this hot cramped space for the hot open space outdoors.
Outside, the queasy, stomach-twisting feeling is starting to spread, like dandelion seeds in the wind, through her whole body. The sun is so bright it contrasts everything into light and dark. She feels lightheaded. Blanchette Freshmart + Pharmacy is at the corner; she goes in to get something to drink.
“Lemonade, please,” she says, leaving a loonie on the counter. A dour-looking woman, probably around fifty, takes the coin slowly and throws it, clanging, into the old-fashioned metal cash register.
Before drinking the lemonade, Silvia brings the bottle to her forehead and holds it there. The cold shocks her body; she feels it shiver down her back, making an eel of her spine.
“Are you working up on the honey farm?” the woman asks. “For Cynthia?”
“Yeah.” Silvia opens the bottle and drinks most of it in one go.
The woman gives a laugh that means the opposite of what a laugh usually means; Silvia senses she doesn’t think anything is funny at all. “I saw an ad in the Barrie paper when I was visiting my aunt.”
Silvia nods, not interested, and starts making tracks. “Well, thanks.”
“Did you know Hilary?”
“No, I just arrived.”
“You could be her sister. Or even her daughter.”
“Hilary?”
“You look just like her.”
“So I’ve been told,” Silvia says. The clenching in her stomach is coming back. She grips it, trying to be subtle, and bends over, but nothing stops the pain.
The woman puts her thumb into her mouth and bites her nail. “You okay?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Getting nauseous on the regular?”
“Just sometimes lately. I think it’s the season.” Silvia gestures with the hand not gripping her stomach, pointing vaguely to the outdoors as though to suggest responsibility lies outside her. “Allergies or something.”
“Are your breasts tender?”
“Excuse me?”
The woman ducks down, gets something from a shelf behind her, then slides the flat cardboard package she retrieved across the countertop. It says Clear Blue and is wrapped with both blue and pink stripes. It’s a pregnancy test.
“What? Oh no, I don’t—”
“You may as well check,” the woman says. “Better safe than sorry.”
Silvia takes the test without even thinking she needs to pay for it, and the lady doesn’t stop her. She walks out of the store wondering which of the two outcomes is the safe one and whether it’s a little too late for that.
Outside, the heat of the sun is poisonous. Silvia feels stricken with sunstroke, heat exhaustion, dehydration. As if she’s out of her element. She thinks about the word element. Elementary, basic. Fundamental, essential. Component, community. If a fish isn’t in its element, it dies. She thinks of that joke, or maybe it’s an allegory, where two fish are swimming downstream and one says to the other, “Hey, how’s the water?” and the other one’s like, “What the hell is water?”
There’s a gas station on the corner and she walks briskly through the aisles of jerky and chips to the wheelchair-accessible, single-stall bathroom. She rips open the packaging, doesn’t read the instructions, and assembles the device with a canny intuition, wondering whether all girls just magically know how to do this.
She pees on the tricky stick and then waits for her entire life to pass before her eyes until the results come up.
Two thin blue lines.
The reality of this thunderbolts her; she feels it in her whole body to be true. She accepts it instantly. She vomits into the toilet, buries the stick under heaps of toilet paper in the garbage bin, and walks blindly to the bus stop.
They’d been using condoms, and she’d thought they’d been careful, but well, perhaps, thinking about it now . . . maybe they hadn’t been as careful as they could have been. She knows she shouldn’t have let this happen, but she also doesn’t feel regret. It’s as though some primal survival instinct has kicked in and she’s not able to see beyond the next step. All she can think of is getting back to the farm. Whatever’s after that will come on its own.
As she sits there in the direct sun, her head feels like it’ll either explode or float away. She feels like she’ll vomit again, so she directs all her energy towards quelling the seas inside her. She bows her head until it’s between her knees.
LV
THE BUS DROPS Silvia at the end of the dusty road to the farm. Walking up the path she can see that all the lights are on, every window yellow-gold against the dusking September sky. Even from outside she can tell something is off.
She walks in the front door, which is unlocked and swinging open. Footsteps, banging. MJ and Dan run down the stairs holding tangled bundles of sheets; Ben follows them with the linen curtains from the bedrooms. JB throws some forgotten pillowslips down the staircase and they fall like daisy petals.
He loves me, he loves me not.
Nobody notices her arrival.
“Hello?” she says. Someone says hi back, but she can’t see who, as they’re all rushing around; nobody stops, nobody greets her. “Where’s Ibrahim?”
“Dunno,” Ben says, appearing from the kitchen carrying an empty plastic laundry basket.
“Haven’t seen him in a while,” says Dan, plopping a bundle of sheets into the basket.
MJ dumps her sheets on top of Dan’s, then goes back upstairs for more.
Silvia notices that all of them have unusually shiny hair: in the light it looks shellacked, with ridges of grease slicking it back to their scalps.
“What’s going on?” she asks, still standing in the open door, letting the yellow light from inside fall onto the dusky grass.
“Lice,” MJ says without breaking her rhythm. “First it was frogs, today it is lice. We came only for bees.”
At first everyone assumed it was dandruff. They weren’t washing their hair often, what with the water rations. Reasonable deductions, reasonable explanations. But when the itch came that made each of them feel like a mad person, such an itch that it penetrated their skulls and couldn’t be satisfied with a simple scratch, they could no longer bear it in silence. The subject was raised while Silvia was in town.
“Lice?” Silvia looks from MJ
to Dan. “But what’s on your head?”
“Oil,” says Dan. “It’s supposed to kill the bloody buggers.”
Silvia is standing there, itch-free, with her news swelling inside her. “When did this happen?”
“Today,” MJ says. “We just found them today.”
“But do you know the date when the lice arrived?” For some reason she feels sure that the lice arrived when she murdered the baby queen bees. The frogs came after she’d slept with Ibrahim, the red water immediately after she confessed, out loud for the first time, to maybe not believing in God.
“No,” Dan says, “but it probably takes at least a week for hatching or whatever. Why?”
“Let me search you.” MJ pulls a fine-toothed comb from her pocket and stands next to Silvia, pushing her shoulders down so as to see better.
“I haven’t felt any—”
“Better safe than sorry, don’t they say that?” She turns Silvia’s head with her fingertips, inspecting. MJ flips over one strip of Silvia’s hair, thin as a Venetian blind, and starts combing the next strip from root to tip.
Silvia, panic constricting her throat, can’t bring herself to say anything.
“So how was town?” MJ asks.
“Not really a town.” Her mind is elsewhere.
MJ drops the clump of hair she’d been holding and selects a fresh strip. “Looks like you’re clear. Lucky. The itch is making me crazy.”
“I don’t have them? Why not?”
Dan calls over to her as he shuttles another load of laundry between JB and his brother: “If you want some, I’ll give ’em to you.”
“I’m going to bed,” Silvia says. “If you see Ibrahim, can you tell him to come find me?”
“Don’t you want anything?” MJ asks. “Water? Dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.” She floats up the stairs to her bedroom, Toby following two steps behind.
She feels entirely, corporally different with the knowledge of what’s growing within her, and the image of this is equal parts terrifying/thrilling/maddening/exhilarating/enlivening. She lies in bed, falling in and out of dreams, trying not to think through all these feelings, trying to keep them all balanced above her, not allowing any one of them to inhabit her yet.
The Honey Farm Page 17