And yet, as she stands here in the bustling hall knifing the stems out of the berries, discarding the occasional one Mavis missed that’s bruised or not ripe enough, she finds that shabby old house appears now in her memory suffused in a soft golden light; how in love she and Barney had been, their tender and joyful nights together in the tiny bedroom with its rough plaster walls and the ice forming on the windowsill, lying under the warm feather quilt her grandmother had made when she was a bride.
“I’d like to stay on the farm,” Joanne says, wistfully, “but Jerry says Daddy’s right. If things on the farm don’t work out — “she pauses, but Iris knows what she’s thinking:
If we lose the farm …
“We couldn’t even sell the house, but a house in town will sell eventually …” The coffee urn is full now, the tap turned off, and the women have finished filling the trays with cutlery. Now the kitchen is peaceful, the voices of the women as they go about their work harmonious, even musical.
“First we moved into an old farmhouse when we got married,” Iris says. “Then we lived in my parents’ basement for two years.”
“What a drag that must have been,” Joanne exclaims.
Then, without any warning to Iris and Barney, the day of his fifty-second birthday, the same age Iris is now, Iris’s father announced that he and Lily were moving to town.
“Not to retire,” he’d said, a touch of grimness breaking through the joviality he’d found for the occasion, “but to leave you two on your own here.” Delight flooding over her —
at last
— Iris had glanced at her mother. Lily didn’t speak, but Iris can’t forget how at that moment she wouldn’t meet her eyes, or even look at her. Her mother never did reproach her or even express any regret. Iris no longer tries to squelch the pang of guilt she feels at the memory. Youth! she thinks wryly, you’d think there could have been a less painful solution, although she doesn’t know what that might have
been. And anyway, isn’t it a given that the younger generation will always try to push out the older?
“Iris! Can you come here?” Mavis’s imperious voice breaks her reverie. She swishes her hands quickly through the chilly water, wipes her fingers on a soggy tea towel, hands her paring knife to Joanne, and hurries away into the hall.
“We thought you and Irma could pour over here. We’ll put the coffee urns over there.” Iris nods comfortably, as if being asked to pour isn’t an honour going only to the women of the community’s first families. She’s used to such tributes; nonetheless, she feels a twinge of pride. The tables are arranged throughout the hall now, the chairs set in place around them, the white tablecloths have been laid, and two of the women are setting small yellow baskets of pink cloth flowers and stacks of pink paper napkins on each table. An elaborate silver tea service has been placed on each of the two tables Mavis is indicating.
“I could have brought my grandmother’s set,” Iris says. “It’s just sitting there in the dining room getting tarnished. I never use it.” She remembers how, when Lannie was a little girl and home from school with a cold or flu, Iris would carry it upstairs to her bedroom, and Lannie would spend the morning carefully cleaning and polishing it, her pale little face solemn as she worked, until the whole set, tray and all, shone so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at it. Mavis says, “We asked a couple of the old ladies to use theirs. They were thrilled.”
The main door at the far end of the hall opens, and a plump, young blonde woman in a faded blue winter coat, carrying one child on her hip and herding two little girls ahead of her, pushes her way in. In the second before she moves toward the coat racks and is hidden from Iris’s view, Iris recognizes her: Angela, Lannie’s best friend from school. She excuses herself and, skirting tables, walks the length of the hall to the cloakroom. Angela has set the little boy down and is straightening his bow tie with one hand, her children’s coats over her arm.
“Angela!” Iris says. “It’s been ages!” Angela straightens awkwardly from her task, smiles when she sees it’s Iris and says, “Emma, take Cory to the bathroom. Make sure he washes his hands.” The girl
grabs the boy’s hand and leads him away. The second little girl peers at Iris from behind her mother’s skirt.
“Hasn’t it,” Angela replies. “I’m so busy these days I hardly know if I’m coming or going. I’ve got two pre-schoolers now, you know. Orland stayed home to look after the baby.” And Lannie, godmother to Emma who must be ten years old by now, an infant when Lannie left home.
“Are you well?” Iris asks, confused, not sure any more what to say or not say, pushing away the memory of hanging up the phone on Angela to rush upstairs to Lannie’s room, finding her there unconscious on her bed, God knew for how long —
“Oh, sure, although I’m fat as a pig. You’d think with all this running around I’d weigh about four pounds, but no such luck.” She sets the children’s jackets in a pile in the corner, struggles out of her own coat and hangs it up.
In that moment’s pause Iris tries not to, but sees the letters. Not letters, really, just scraps of paper torn from notebooks or stick-it pads she’d found in Lannie’s macramé book bag when, long after Lannie had left and it looked as if it would be a long time before she’d return, Iris decided to do something about her bedroom. From men, they were, boyfriends:
“Hi, Lan — meet me at the Sub at eight. Tim
.” Iris knows from her year at university that the Sub is the Student Union Building, and she’s met Tim, a nice boy, she’d thought, and clearly in love with Lannie. The others —
“I knew you’d be here today,” Angela says. “I wanted to ask … I was wondering, have you heard from Lannie lately?” Then, not waiting for Iris’s answer, she rushes on. “I’m really sorry to upset you. I mean, if you haven’t heard from her, but, it came into my head this morning when I was vacuuming and it wouldn’t go away — you know how that is?” She means, of course, when an intuition hits you, but Iris hasn’t Angela’s gift.
“I haven’t, no,” she says, trying to sound cheerful. “And you haven’t upset me. Do you know something? Have you had any letters? Any cards?” She laughs, pretending to be amused. “No telegrams? Smoke signals maybe?”
“Not since that postcard maybe three years ago. You know the
one, from Iraklion, was it? In Greece — some island. Oh, Crete, I think. She must have been travelling.”
“What I’m thinking,” Iris says, “is that maybe she travelled herself right off the globe. Right into oblivion.” She’s appalled at her flash of anger.
“I’m going back
,” the card had ended. But back where?
“Don’t think that,” Angela says. “She’s all right. If I felt there was something wrong with her, I’d have told you.” Her voice is steady, clear.
“I really hope we’ll hear something soon,” Iris replies, retreating. Angela’s little girl, who looks to be about eight, is walking the length of a rack of coats, humming and running an arm down them, making the coats sway.
“Don’t Sarah,” Angela cries. “Stop that.”
Iris wants to point out — in a confusion of self-justification and defence of Lannie — that after all Lannie is only her niece, it’s not as if she’s her daughter. In the end, she doesn’t; Angela must understand how much they once meant to each other. Still, she feels a pang of guilt at precisely what she isn’t sure — that Lannie’s failure to write is somehow Iris’s fault? That Iris hasn’t tried very hard to locate her?
Angela has had to ask her twice, “How’s Barney?”
“Oh,” she says, too quickly. “He’s fine. He’s gaining weight, too. I’m going to persuade him to see the doctor as soon as he finishes calving. He looks tired out.” Beside them the door is opening and closing steadily as people enter, stomp their feet to shake off clods of mud, and crowd toward the coat racks.
“I heard about that! What a funny thing for him to do. But there’s no accounting for … whatever,” she finishes, looking away.
“No, there isn’t indeed,” Iris says briskly. She hesitates, then moves close to Angela and plants a kiss on her warm cheek. “Thanks for still caring about Lannie,” she murmurs, although she means to say — she feels — much more than this. How can it be that Angela who’s so much younger, seems to know more than she does about the world? Is it because of her children? “I’ll call you the minute I hear anything.”
Time passes, more people arrive, pay their money at the door, leave their coats and rubbers in the cloakroom, and slowly fill the tables. There are, as always, mostly old people here, Iris notes from her position
in the centre where she’s filling cups of tea from the silver teapot that Audrey has to scurry to keep full. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and infidels alike are buried in the town’s one cemetery; every family that has been in Chinook more than twenty years has somebody buried there; thus, most families come to the tea. Iris sits demurely, filling cup after cup to be passed to the members of her community, people she has known her whole life. In an unguarded instant, they feel to her like a huge, extended family. Small plates heaped with cake, strawberries spilling over its sides, and a mound of whipped cream on top of the berries sit in front of each person, and servers place cups of tea and coffee on trays and distribute them efficiently among the tables.
“Come and sit with us, Iris,” a quiet voice says. She glances up to see her mother-in-law standing beside her. She’s short and thickset, wearing that same dark red polyester dress with the rhinestone buttons marching down the front that she has been wearing for years. She’s put on weight, Iris notices, the dress pulls slightly across her bosom and stomach.
“Mary Ann! I didn’t see you come in. I bet the roads out your way were a nightmare. I’m supposed to be pouring —”
“Somebody will take over for you,” Mary Ann insists, with authority born of years of experience at women’s work. Iris catches Mavis’s eye, who comes over at once, eager to take her place. Iris follows Mary Ann to a table near the cloakroom where she sits down kitty-corner to tall, spare Luke Christie, her father-in-law.
“Hi, Luke,” Iris says. He’s eating cake grimly and doesn’t look up.
“Barney showed up yet?”
“Oh, I don’t expect him,” Iris says cheerfully. “He’ll never leave his heifers to come to a tea,” she adds, making her voice sound humorously disparaging. Luke doesn’t answer.
“I’m just waiting for the mud to dry up so I can put some new artificial flowers on Wesley’s grave,” Mary Ann explains. Wesley was Barney’s older brother, born mentally handicapped, dead a couple of years earlier of a heart attack. Iris had forgotten that of course it would be Wesley’s grave that would bring the two of them, fighting mud all the way, from their ranch where Barney was raised, far off the beaten track to the north.
“Deer ate the last ones,” Mary Ann says. “Thought they were real. They got a surprise!” She and Iris laugh. Luke grunts as if he disapproves, but doesn’t look up from his rapidly diminishing mound of dessert. Iris casts about for something to say, thinking glumly how it’s always this way, she and her in-laws never have much to say to each other. And Luke and Barney always at each other’s throats.
“Barney’s been calving a while already, eh,” Luke says gruffly. His plate is now empty and he’s gazing across the room instead of looking at her. Iris nods without speaking, a little game she’s started, to see if she can make him look at her. But he doesn’t bother, just pushes his plate away and slowly stands to his full six feet, looking around at all the people chatting away to each other. Without speaking, he walks away. Mary Ann appears not to notice his going. Iris knows he has spotted cronies somewhere in the crowd and won’t be back until he’s ready to go home. It isn’t simple rudeness, she knows, it’s just how tough old ranchers, weaned on blizzards and raging thunderstorms and rangy mustangs and hard, hard times behave; it doesn’t mean anything. Farmers, on the other hand, she thinks, aren’t tough any more now that they farm with machinery instead of horses.
“You going to try to go back there yourself tonight?” Mary Ann asks. Startled, Iris can’t think what she means — Oh, Barney’s ranch. She’s never told her in-laws she doesn’t go there with Barney, in fact, she’s only been there once, when he was trying to decide whether to buy it or not.
Over my dead body,
she’d said, pretending she was joking, but Barney ignored her, as if he’d suddenly gone deaf, couldn’t hear a word she was saying. Fortunately, she doesn’t see that much of her in-laws, it’s easy to keep secrets from them.
“Oh, I can’t handle the roads in there right now,” she says. “And Barney’s got the four-wheel drive. I’m staying at the farm for now.”
When she’d made it clear to him that she would never, never move there of her own free will, all Barney said was, “I have to do this, Iris. I never asked nothing of you, but I’m asking this.” When she asked him, over and over again, “But, why?” he would only turn away, and she couldn’t tell if it was because he knew she wouldn’t understand his reasons, or if it was because he didn’t understand them himself. Mary Ann is giving her a sidelong, speculative glance, but she decides
it’s safer not to add anything to what she’s already said. Mary Ann would say, A wife belongs with her husband. And what would her own mother say? She finds she can’t guess.
A plate of cake heaped with strawberries, the whipped cream spilling over the edge, appears with a thump on the tablecloth in front of her and she looks up in surprise to see Ramona Norman grinning down at her. Ramona is her lifelong neighbour, they played together as children, in high school they’d been best friends.
“Gotta keep your strength up,” Ramona says, licking whipped cream from her fingers and pushing her glasses back up her nose with the other hand.
“Sit, Ramona,” Mary Ann says, indicating Luke’s chair.
“Can’t. I’m with Mom and Dad and we have to get Dad home. He’s played out already. Only been here fifteen minutes. And we’re calving, gotta get back. See ya.” She’s gone as abruptly as she arrived, turning sideways to make her way between the crowded tables.
“Thanks for the cake,” Iris calls to her retreating back.
“We should be going soon, too,” Mary Ann says. She looks around the hall as if she’s going to find Luke and tell him it’s time to go, but of course she doesn’t move. “Your mother okay?” Iris’s mother is in a nursing home.