“Yes,” she answered. “Flowers. Plants.”
“I’m sure he does you credit. A fine young fellow. If you remember, I was one of those who put his name forward for the Epworth Scholarship.”
“I do remember, indeed I do, and—”
“Why not surprise him, then, with the pleasure of a visit? We all need a change of scene now and then, especially after a long hard winter. I could mention it to your husband, if you like — indirectly, of course. I could suggest the healthful benefits of a little holiday.”
“Please,” she’d said. She was thinking of the oval of silence she would enter as soon as she left Dr. Spears’s presence, the smooth pearl gloss of it. “There’s no need of that. I can speak to him myself.”
The Mothers’ Union. A few days in Winnipeg. Only months ago these diversions would have held some attraction. She might actually have spoken to her husband, Magnus, about a week away in the city. The words would have come forward — while she was engaged in some ordinary task, drying the supper dishes or taking the dead leaves off the fuchsia that hung by the window. Her husband was not a man who wasted words, but the two of them had managed over the years the simple, necessary marital commerce required for the rearing of three sons, for the ordering of supplies, the discussions concerning weather, illness, what manner of vegetables should be planted in the garden. And she guessed — though how was she to know such a thing? Who in this world would tell her? — she guessed her husband was no rougher in his ways than other men.
“If you’re willing, Mother,” he says in the darkness of their back bedroom, one hand working up her nightdress. A thousand times, five thousand times—”If you’re willing, Mother.” The words have worn a groove in her consciousness, she hardly hears them. And afterwards there’s silence, like falling down a hole, or a kind of grunt that she takes to be satisfaction.
“Shall we marry then?” These were the words of his marriage proposal delivered some twenty-five years ago, the phrase riding upward in a way she found disarming. At that time he had been less than one year in Canada, eight months working in the old granite quarry at Lac du Bonnet near to where her father farmed; his Orkney accent was pronounced and exceedingly harsh, though she fancied she heard something softer beneath it. He walked her home from a prayer meeting at Milner’s Crossing. It was a warm April night with stars spread thick across the sky. She felt she could gulp the clean air in like a kind of nourishment. This was the third time he had walked her home, and she knew — and he knew — that he was entitled to ask for a kiss. Out of curiosity she assented.
His upper lip, moving quickly, too quickly, grated against her mouth and cheek. And then he spoke: “Shall we marry then?”
His presumptuousness moved her, it was so childlike. She had an urge to laugh, to tease him — she knew how to be merry in those days — but his face was too close.
“What do you say, then?” he pressed her. His features were covered over by darkness, but she felt his warm breath on her neck, and it weakened her terribly. She readied herself for words of tenderness.
“I make a good enough wage,” he said, “and I work regular.”
This was true. She could not contradict what he said. She never did learn to contradict what he said. He had a particular way of putting a thing that disallowed contravention. The new ice box, for instance. He had written away for it, secretly sent an order in to Eaton’s Mail Order, and now it occupied a corner of the kitchen.
Suddenly it was there. Months earlier, for reasons of economy, he had refused to consult Dr. Spears about the lump behind his ear, and then he had to go and waste eleven dollars on an ice box, eleven dollars plus shipping. The neat metal plate attached to the ice box door said “New Improved Labrador Ice Chest.” She had never asked for such a thing. She watched him on that first day run his fingers over the smooth wood and polished hinges, and against her will thought: those same fingers have touched me, my naked body.
Such thoughts are more and more with her. Her brain has been running wild these last months. She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting.
Even now, hanging out the wash, she is faint with longing, but for what? Embrace me, she says to the dripping sheets and pillowslips, hold me. But she says it dully, without hope. Her wash tub is empty now, an old wooden vessel sitting there on a piece of outcropping rock. The sky overhead is wide and blue; it makes her dizzy looking up. She feels a tweaking in her nostrils, and reaches in her apron pocket for her handkerchief. The smell of washing soda affects her, makes her want to sneeze. “I am not willing,” she says inside her head. “I am no longer willing.”
It is three o’clock already, she judges. She will dispense with weeding the garden for today. If anyone asks, her husband or one of her sons, she’ll blame the heat. Why put her health at risk under a strong sun like this? She’ll seek out the coolness of the front room instead, the tapestry chair in the darkened corner. She’s done this before, unable to stand up to this sorrow of hers. Her prized star of Bethlehem sits rooted in its china pot; she likes to study its gray-green leaves for secrets. The wallpaper, too, holds her attention with its rows of flowers, its browns and pinks alternating and repeating. The little beveled mirror in its oak frame sends back her image, her flattened-down hair and her eyes, hot as stones in her head.
“I love you,” she heard young Cuyler Goodwill say to his immense, bloated wife, Mercy. “Oh, how I love you and with all my heart.”
It was an early evening when she heard this declaration, a Monday like today. She had been standing beside the Goodwills’ kitchen door, a basket of early lilacs in her arms, a neighborly offering. (In truth, she finds it hard to stay away; the houses of the newly married, she senses, are under a kind of enchantment, the air more tender than in other households, the voices softer, the makeshift curtains and cheap rugs brave and bright in their accommodation.)
The Goodwills’ kitchen window was wide open to the fresh spring breezes. They were at table (she could see them clearly enough) — Mercy on one side and Cuyler on the other, the white tablecloth and the supper dishes as yet uncleared.
Light from the doorway fell on my mother’s broad face, giving it a look of luster. My father was leaning toward her, his hand covering hers. The two of them, Clarentine Flett thought, might have been the subject of a parlor picture, a watercolor done in tints of soft blues and grays.
My mother, as I have already said, was an extraordinarily obese woman, and, with her jellylike features, she was rather plain, I’m afraid. It’s true her neighbor, Mrs. Flett, glimpses a certain prettiness behind her squeezed eyes and pouched chin, but the one photograph I possess, her wedding portrait, tells me otherwise. My mother was large-bodied, heavy fleshed. My father, in contrast, was short of stature, small-boned and neat, with a look of mild incomprehension flitting across his face. It can perhaps be imagined that among the men of the community coarse jokes were made at his expense.
With all my heart, Mrs. Flett heard him say to my mother. He seemed exhausted by the utterance, leaning back now in his chair.
With all my heart. This was the sort of phrase that lovers in books invent. Love talk, sweetheart talk. The poetry of rapture. Occasionally Clarentine Flett has read cheap novels — hiding them from her husband who would think them time-wasting — in which people speak to each other in soft ways, but she had never suspected that such pronouncements might be uttered in the houses of ordinary quarry workers in a village such as Tyndall, Manitoba. Nor had she imagined the enrichment of voice or tone that could be brought to these offerings. “Oh, how I love you,” Cuyler Goodwill said to his wife Mercy, crying out to her with a pitch of entreaty which Clarentine Flett has been unable to wipe from her remembrance. It’s been with her all spring, raining down on the dry weave of her daily comings and goings. It’s with her now as she stands beside the clothesline, sneezing and blinking in the brilliant sunshine and fighting a temptation to withdraw for the afternoon.