Garden of Eden (12 page)

“I stepped out to get a breath of air,” Iris says, with such firmness she knows the subject won’t come up again.

“Are you okay?” Fay asks, studying her now, just as Iris feared.

“I need some coffee.” She goes to the counter where the coffeemaker sits, but Fay has already made some. Now Iris feels her
full bladder and crosses back again to the half-bath, stepping around Fay who has gone silent to stand with a lost air, looking out the window in the back door. She’s still in her dressing gown, a faded pale green terry-cloth robe with long pulls of thread hanging down here and there and the cuffs bleached to white with washing. Her blonde hair hangs messily to her shoulders and her skin is grainy with a yellowish tint, her eyes puffy and red from crying. She looks ill, but then she usually does, especially in the morning.

“Why don’t you go bathe,” Iris suggests gently. “I want a cup of coffee before I dress, and the kids’ll be up soon and neither one of us will see a bathroom again for hours.”

“I’ll have some coffee first too,” Fay says, rousing herself from the window. “God, I wish I had a cigarette.” Iris goes into the bathroom and relieves herself. When she has rearranged her robe and comes back out, Fay has poured two mugs of coffee and set them on the table along with sugar and cream in blue pottery containers.

“Lannie gave me those, a long time ago,” Iris says, noticing them for the first time in ages. “They look pretty with the yellow walls, don’t they? She should be here, you know.”

“Nobody knows where she is,” Fay replies in her blunt way, meaning, Iris sees, that the family has tried and failed to find her in the days since Barney’s death. “Even Howard doesn’t know. Ten years is a long time.” Iris wants to argue — it hasn’t been ten years — but a voice inside her that she usually keeps muffled tells her that Fay is probably right.

“Are the other kids coming?” she asks. Misty and Dillon, Lannie’s brother and sister.

“He didn’t say, probably doesn’t know where they are either.” There’s a hint of contempt in Fay’s voice. “Barry’ll be here in an hour or so.” There’s no rush, the funeral’s not till two. Soon Iris will have to bathe and dress, put on makeup, compose herself for the biggest ordeal of her life.

She’s no longer worried about it. Instead, she’s remembering the morning of her father’s funeral, sitting here in silent misery at this same kitchen table with her mother, before the onslaught of family and neighbours began. How still her mother had been, her straight posture
more rigid than usual, but her eyes pale and misted over, as if her husband’s death had blinded her to the palpable world around her.

Tears drip silently down Fay’s roughened cheeks and she wipes them away absently. Iris sits peacefully, her mind wandering to the coulee, the shacks, the barn, to the ancient circles of stone.

“I think I hear a vehicle,” Fay says, in her rough smoker’s voice, and stifles a cough to listen. Iris listens too, but hears instead the soft fall of bare feet coming up the basement stairs.

She rises and walks rapidly toward the door, anxious to escape without facing whoever it is about to enter from the basement.

“We’ll take care of any company till you’re ready,” Fay calls to her. Iris doesn’t answer or look back, just moves on steadily, quickly, down the hall and up the stairs.

Now, staring at the dress she’s picked to wear to the funeral as it hangs, freshly sponged and pressed by Ramona, on the closet door, it crosses Iris’s mind that her mother might not approve of her not buying a new dress, then remembers that they’ve agreed not to tell her mother about Barney’s death. She’s so frail, Iris protested to Mary Ann over the phone, and then to Cousin Eunice, and Aunt Mina, and to her minister, Henry Swan, she’s so frail now, I have to be with her when she’s told. She takes the black crêpe dress from the door and throws it on the bed, thinking her mother might not be very upset, she never liked Barney much anyway.

Suddenly tiredness sweeps over her in a wave, irresistible, and she crawls onto her bed, clasps her hands together under her chin, brings her knees up tight against her abdomen, and closes her eyes. She’s sorry now that she didn’t let her mother know. She needs her mother here, with her; without her mother she can’t face another second of this horrible day.

Someone is knocking on her door. Startled, embarrassed to be caught like this, she uncurls herself and pulls herself to her feet so rapidly that for a second she’s dizzy. She tightens the robe’s belt and, turning her back to the door in the pretence of doing something to the dress, calls, “Yes?”

“Are you all right?” The door opens a crack — it’s Fay — and Iris says over her shoulder, as cheerfully as she can manage, “I’m fine, I’ll be down soon.” Silence. The door clicks shut. Now the doorbell is ringing, and through the open window Iris hears the muffled crunch of tires on the gravel driveway around the corner of the house. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the taps to run her bath. The noise of the rushing water blots out all sound from below, the door between her and all of them, between her and the rest of this nightmarish day, is closed, locked. Barney’s been dead three days, she thinks, and already the world has lost its customary face, begun to reveal parts of itself she has known nothing about, parts that, even though so far benign, scare her.

She lifts a soapy hand to her eyes. It’s the first time she has cried, comforted by the release of tears as they slide soundlessly down her face to flow off her chin and cheeks into the bath.

As she’s coming out of the bathroom there’s a sharp, fast rap on the bedroom door and Ramona enters. She’s wearing jeans and a creased white sweatshirt, her eyes are reddened and puffy behind her glasses, her straight brown hair pulled back in its inevitable ponytail.

“Want me to help you get dressed before I go home to get ready?”

“Please,” Iris says. She needs Ramona’s brusque matter-of-factness, her lack of sentimentality. With Ramona she can just be herself. “Everybody is going to be staring at me,” she says, not liking the hint of a whine she hears in her voice. Ramona’s all business as she picks up Iris’s hairbrush from her vanity.

“We better do something with your hair first. You want to be neat, but not showy, I think. No eyeshadow or blush,” she tells her. “Remember, it doesn’t matter how you act. This is one time no matter what you do, people will forgive you. Anyway, I’ve never seen you be anything else but a lady.” Iris smiles faintly at this, and gives herself over gratefully to Ramona’s ministrations.

Finally, she’s ready. Her thick, wavy hair is pulled smoothly back from her pale face and fastened with a black velvet bow, she’s wearing the smoothly fitting black dress, her feet are clad in neat black pumps.

Just as Ramona clasps on the strand of pearls Barney had given Iris as a wedding present, Eunice, Iris’s cousin on her father’s side, bursts into the room, holds out her arms, and says, “I-ris!” in the very tone Iris dreads most: heavy with false sympathy and false affection. Eunice is married to a man who was once an accountant but now does something with stocks and bonds. He’s rich, nobody from the family ever sees him. She’s still wearing her dark mink coat, she must have just arrived from Regina and come straight upstairs. Iris allows herself to be enfolded in the scented silkiness of the fur, then extracts herself quickly. Before she can speak, Eunice has turned to Ramona. “I’ll take over now, Ramona.” Her voice is brisk, her tone patronizing. “It was good of you to help.” For a second, Iris thinks by the abrupt flush in Ramona’s cheeks that Ramona is going to tell Eunice to bugger off, but after an instant’s hesitation, Ramona gives Iris a rough, quick hug, then leaves, closing the door a little too hard behind her. Eunice sweeps off her coat, drapes it over the satin chair, and smooths her smart navy dress over her gaunt hips with bony fingers that end in long red nails. She turns to Iris with a glance devoid of sympathy or tenderness or pity.

“A little lipstick would help,” she declares.

The rituals of bereavement begin. One by one the female relatives from more distant farms and ranches or the city come up, knocking softly, and are ushered in by Eunice in her queenly manner. They kiss Iris, tears in their eyes, mumble a few words, then, glancing apprehensively at Eunice, exit as quickly as they decently can. Iris replies stiffly the same rote phrases: “Thank you for coming; It was good of you to come; I’m fine; Thank you for coming.”

At last Fay pounds up the stairs and knocks sharply on the door. The funeral parlour’s limousine is waiting. Iris’s stomach goes queasy. Eunice says sharply, “I wish you’d put some earrings on.” Iris shakes her head mutely, no, at the pearl and diamond pair Eunice holds out that she has found in Iris’s jewellery box. A gift from Barney on their tenth anniversary. “Here!” Eunice says, she’ll not take no for an answer, and seeing this, Iris capitulates and puts them on. She takes a quick glance in the full-length mirror and is taken aback at what she sees. It is her face, the fine-grained, pale skin, the prettily bowed
lips, the small, straight nose, the black eyebrows and lashes framing the brown eyes that she’d always wished were blue. But all colour has fled from her cheeks and mouth, emotion has drained from her features, leaving behind a heart-shaped, ghostlike mask. And how can she appear so composed and elegant when on the inside she’s all tremulous chaos? And the earrings — Eunice was right: they’ve taken her from grieving penitence into regal sorrow.

Eunice gives a quick brush to the bosom of her own silk dress, her diamond rings flashing, pats her rigidly coiffed, silver-blonde hair, picks up her coat, and leads the way into the deserted hall and down the stairs. Iris follows, her body feeling heavy, weighted down, moving carefully so as not to fall.

Downstairs Eunice opens the closet by the front door and takes out Iris’s spring coat. They stand staring at it — bright red, it’s out of the question — while a few feet away in the doorway to the living room Fay brushes lint off Barry’s shoulders and assembles their family: two young adults, two bickering teenagers, and in the kitchen the phone rings mutedly, insistently, nobody answering it, cars start up in the driveway, and the back door slams: the noises swell, a cacophonous din.

“Your fur coat,” Eunice decides.

“No, wait — I —” Iris puts out her arm to support herself against the open closet door.

The house levels, her heart slides back down into her chest, the humming dissolves into the spaces between the too-bright molecules of air. Slowly, she feels something she imagines as a fragile, translucent shell descend around her, seizing her in its softly gleaming tranquillity. The noises in the house dim and retreat. In the carapace’s shelter she is light, weightless, and her dread, her terror, like baying dogs that have been quelled, move back to settle watchfully in the distance.

“Mother’s good black coat is in the closet in the guest room.” Eunice rushes back upstairs, leaving Iris standing alone in the hall, virtually unnoticed, while Fay and Barry and their children file past her out the door. Quinn is last. At twenty-two, he’s a smaller version of his uncle Howard, as heavyset but much darker. He shoots a black-eyed glance at her as he passes, some message in it she can’t
begin to read. He looks Indian, she thinks, and an unresolved suspicion she’s held back for years takes firm shape. Is Barry not his father? That would explain — But here is Eunice holding up Iris’s mother’s coat for Iris to slip into. It’s too long, but fits well enough otherwise.

“Perfect,” Eunice pronounces. She holds open the front door and stands back while Iris goes slowly out onto the deck. At the bottom of the steps the gleaming black limousine sits, its young driver in his black overcoat waiting by the open door, faint anxiety in his glance up at her. She shivers, and raises a hand to lift the coat’s collar up around her chin. Wafting from it is a delicate trace of scent; she recognizes it, lilies of the valley, her mother’s cologne. Her mother has come to comfort her after all.

Now she can’t stop herself from a quick glimpse around the driveway. Fay, Barry, and their children are in a second black car behind the limousine that waits for Iris, and behind them, all the rest of the aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews from both sides of the two families follow in trucks and cars. Ramona and Vance, their five children and their children’s spouses and children are back there too, she knows, since she has asked them to sit with the family in the church. Only Lannie is missing.

She will not think at all. She will not cry. She bends and lowers herself carefully into the limousine.

Eunice, Luke, Mary Ann, Howard, and her own family’s senior representatives, doddering Uncle Raymond and Aunt Mina who no longer go out except to funerals, arrange themselves circumspectly in the seats around her, Aunt Mina on one side of her and Uncle Raymond on the other. Eunice sits across from Iris, her beringed, clawlike hands with their too-red nails resting on her lap.

Mina takes Iris’s bare hand in her small, minutely trembling, white-gloved one and holds it gently. Iris stares straight ahead.

Tears would be appropriate, but since her quiet cry in the bath, no sensation of them remains, and none returns now to her chest or throat or eyes. Through the windshield she catches a glimpse of the river cliffs hovering in the cloudy sky on the far side of the valley, and she remembers her early morning walk, the clean air, the pale, damp grass folded over on itself, the stone circles. No one speaks or moves,
the only sound is the whisper of the car’s motor, Mary Ann’s suppressed sniffles, and the rustle of her tissue. Perhaps Iris should say something? Nothing comes to mind though, and anyway, she doesn’t want to talk; her head is full of the rough, blue-shadowed coulee, the scarred white dolomite rocks, the lichen-covered granite stones, the way the coulee serpentines, dropping, out toward the wide, glacier-torn channel that was once a rushing sea.

“I don’t know how you women do it,” the minister, Henry Swan, says to Iris. He’s a stocky man only a couple of inches taller than she is, and as he peers at her, his face close to hers, the light glints off his thick glasses with their narrow gold frames, so that she can’t see his eyes. “Everybody swears nobody coordinates them and yet at these potluck suppers there’s always enough food, and in all the years I’ve been here we’ve never wound up with twenty-five jellied salads and nothing else.”