Garden of Eden (55 page)

“He told me, when I — when we talked about my not having any kids either. He said it didn’t matter to you, because you didn’t want children.” She walks the rest of the way back to the tree stump and sits, her shoulders slumped, the straw stetson falling from her fingers to the ground. She may be crying. Iris is unmoved; she’s thinking, This would explain why he finally stopped bothering me about children.

“He never told me,” Iris says. “I didn’t know. Why didn’t he tell me? When did he have himself tested? Where?”

“I don’t know,” Daisy says. “Ten years or more ago, I think. I don’t know where. Montana, I suppose.” Then she straightens her back slowly, arching it a little, clenches one fist and presses it against her chest, and an expression of such pain crosses her face that Iris looks away.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” she says again, plaintively.

“It isn’t easy to admit that you’re infertile,” Daisy replies sadly. “You don’t feel like a worthwhile person when you can’t have children. A man —” she hesitates, “a man feels like he’s not a man. That’s why he could tell me and he couldn’t tell you. I am famously infertile.” She drawls this last, her voice filled with bitterness.

Iris doesn’t know what she feels: Regret? Anger at herself? Sorrow at the loss of her unborn babies? She rubs her face with both hands, trying to think. Sweat has broken out again all over her body, and she’s furious too at this annoyance, and then at the reminder that it’s too late, it’s too late, it’s too late.
Barney, how could you do this to me?

Daisy has been watching her apprehensively as if she thinks she might need to run from Iris, or maybe to rush to her aid should she faint or go crazy. But Iris is trying to figure out what really matters here, because she can’t handle this confusion.

“Did he love you?” she asks Daisy finally. Daisy looks down at her scuffed boots and turns one ankle as if considering it.

“I don’t think so,” she says lightly. “Nope,” she says. “No, he was going through something. I don’t know what. He talked about you — Iris this, Iris that. Never anything important, just —” She shrugs. “What we had —” She falls silent, then goes on. “We had a good time.” But the way she says it, Iris knows that it wasn’t a good time at all, not for Daisy. Maybe not even for Barney. And knowing him as she does, far better than this woman could know him, she knows too with a frightening sadness that Barney had to have loved Daisy, and in ways Iris would have wanted for herself, but could never arouse in him in all those years together.

Passion, she supposes. Yes, everything about Daisy’s history tells Iris that she’s a passionate woman, and the truth is, as Iris has known since
her affair with James Springer who was passion itself, that she is not a passionate person. She has something else, grace, maybe, or — she doesn’t know what. But passion belongs to other people, not to her.

Then she remembers what happened to her in Lannie’s apartment in Addis Ababa, when she beat her head against the floor, when she cried because she loved Jay and he didn’t love her, and she could never have him. Even though she understands that her anguish was for Barney’s loss and not for Jay’s. During that endless time of Lannie’s near-death she had found that thing in herself that had always been missing — her passion — that she thought she’d been born without and had been glad of. But no, she is just like everyone else after all — as capable of suffering and of joy — has always been like everyone else, only has refused to allow it.

How afraid she has been of suffering. She remembers an hour alone with Ramona in the hospital in Chinook. Ramona had just given birth to her second, or is it her third child. Iris sat in the visitor’s chair beside her, leaning close to her, Ramona tired, her cheeks flushed with colour. “What is it like?” she asked. Or maybe she didn’t ask, but Ramona told her, “It’s pain and work and more pain until you think you can’t endure it — You can’t imagine how bad it is, Iris. It’s like having your bones pulled apart. But then, at that moment when the baby slides at last out of you, what you feel is heat, and the gush of blood, it seems like the whole world is coloured with that blood, this whole ravishing world is made of women’s blood.”

And Iris refusing that female darkness. Not understanding then that it is the darkness that lights the world.

She glances at Daisy and finds she has stopped hating her.

“I could have had children, as far as I know, anyway, but I didn’t want them.” Daisy stares, wide-eyed into Iris’s face as if she’s seeing something there that surprises her. “What I’ve found out since Barney’s death — about being human — that — that is what I tried so hard to escape knowing. I thought that if I had children, I would never again be safe.” She presses her palms together in an unconscious gesture of prayer. “I didn’t want to know that there is no safety, that no one can ever escape the lot that goes with being a human being. Maybe, in the end, I was just a coward.”

She turns away from Daisy then, and walks to the water’s edge, crosses, gets in her car, and starts it. As she manoeuvres the car into a turn to drive away, Iris sees Daisy still standing there across the water. She seems very small.

“I’ve come to take you home with me,” Iris says to the figure sitting beside the low window, one arm resting on the sill next to a pink geranium, the legs hidden under an afghan. She hears a laugh, a light, musical sound that confuses her and, with the sunlight coming through the window casting the woman in shadow, she pauses, wondering for an instant if she has come to the wrong room.

She advances, and the shadowy figure sitting in the chaise longue acquires features, the mauve bedjacket with the frill at the neck, the narrow satin bow quivering against the drooping, puckered skin of the throat, the two gaunt, trembling hands resting now on the afghan, and the eyes, so blue, two beams of light in the dim old face surrounded by the thin cloud of white hair.

“Home?” her mother says, her voice quavering. “I’ve been here long enough to call this home.” She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back to rest against the leather couch. Iris stoops to kiss her withered, powder-dry cheek, and sits.

“I should never have left you here,” Iris says. “It was wrong of me. It was so wrong and I’m so terribly sorry. Forgive me, Mom.” Lily opens her eyes. Their unseemly brightness today frightens Iris, it speaks to her of some otherworldliness creeping into this still living person. She is afraid, she finds, of what these old, wise eyes might see.

“Did I ever ask to come back to the farm?” her mother asks. Iris is taken aback. No, her mother had never asked to come home. “Do you think that because I’m old I have no sense of what my life should be?”

“It isn’t that I think that exactly,” she says. “But only that you aren’t strong enough to do things without help, and so I thought maybe you haven’t …”
Known,
she was about to say.

“I have thought it often,” her mother says. “But I have known
what must be given up.” Iris sits back, recognizing that her mother has finally gone somewhere that Iris will not be able to follow.

And her eyes, so large and glittering, so unlike her mother’s eyes. It’s as if with them Lily is swallowing the whole earth and everything that’s on it — all of us, Iris thinks, and our past together, and the barn and the rippling yellow grasses and the swallows and the radishes in her garden and the babies and the blue-checked apron she wore on Easter Sunday, and the tines of the fork she held in her hand when she ate, and the yellow cup her mother gave her to drink out of when she, Lily, was a child and that I, Iris, still have somewhere. She is eating the earth, my mother is, this life, she is going to digest it at last and then leave it behind. And I too am now no more than that yellow cup, so precious and so insignificant, or the tang of the earth in the spring, or the white stones on the prairie.

She would cry out,
Mother, do not leave me.
But the futility of this is clear. It is as if the earth has rumbled and split, opening a chasm between the two of them.

Her mother has always loomed so large in her life, an omnipresent, giant shadow in which Iris has walked. She has not remembered that her mother walked in her mother’s shadow, and that mother in hers, and on and on, backwards into darkness. That her love and reverence for her mother are both necessary and over. That in some new and profound way she can barely imagine, she will have to cast off her daughterhood to achieve herself.

And, of course, she knows her mother will die soon, and that she, Iris, like every other child, will never cease to miss her and to mourn her. For a split second she holds both these worlds in her cupped hand and cannot tell which is the more true or the least true, which matters more and which less. And then she thinks, I will bear my grief in this knowledge; I will stop being the child in order to become the mother.

It is late afternoon, the days are growing shorter, and Iris is leaving the deck to go for a walk wanting to enjoy every moment of every day before the snow comes, the storms and blizzards, the shattering
cold that is life on the Great Plains, that linger in back of the bright shadows of the hottest day. The caragana hedges are losing their leaves, and beyond them the harvested fields lie in shattered strips of brown or thin rows of gold where the crops have been taken. A good harvest, a good profit made. For the last time, she tells herself and feels excitement.

Then she hears a motor and lifts her head to see the Swans’ red car putt-putting up the access road to the driveway where she stands. It halts a few feet from her, the driver’s door opens and Jay Anselm emerges. For an instant her knees go weak before she steadies herself. He comes toward her slowly not quite frowning, his mouth wavering, his eyes troubled, glances off to the fields and then back to her as he reaches her. They stand facing each other, neither speaking for a long moment. He clears his throat, she moves her feet, they both speak at once, laugh, and Iris says, “You first,” and when he seems to be having trouble finding something to say now she has given her permission, she says, “It’s nice to see you, what are you doing here?”

“I’ve decided to stay in Chinook, at least for a while. The novel —” He shrugs, smiles at her, but when he bends his face close to kiss her, she turns her head so that his kiss lands on her cheek. “You’re angry,” he says. Now she’s searching quickly through herself to find that centre so newly discovered, out of which truth flows. She steps back, away from him.

“I was about to go for a walk,” she says. “Would you like to come?” They set out walking, squeezing through the hedge, rounding the yard, then moving side by side down the machinery trail that leads to the coulee where months ago he kissed her for the first time, where Barney came to help her on the day of his funeral, where her grandparents first settled when they came from the Old World to make a home in the new one. They don’t speak as they walk; it is as if he can divine her need to be silent.

At the patch of prairie he goes immediately to the edge of the coulee and stands staring out over the immense view beyond the small curving river glinting softly in the fading golden light, toward the purple river cliffs and above them to the brilliant, deep blue of the late fall sky. She walks past the stone circles, past the depression
that is all that’s left of her grandparents’ lives, past the hapless, decaying old barn. The grass is stiff and yellow and smells of dust.

“How beautiful it is here,” he says, but she is looking at the earth.

“It’s dry, there’s been no rain, pray for snow this winter.” And yet, there is such beauty in the brilliance of winter. And after it, comes spring.

“You’re angry because I left you. I had to go, I had things to do —”

“I’m not angry,” she says quietly. “I was hurt, I admit that, but if I’m angry with anyone, it’s with myself. My fascination with you was very foolish. I thought you were something you were not —”

He turns back to her quickly. “What did you think I was?” The quickness of his question startles her.

“I thought you were my youth, I guess. For one crazy moment I thought I could have it back, as if all those years of Barney — all those years of
living
could be scrubbed away and I could start all over again.” He’s still staring at her, wants her to say something more, or something different. It makes her pause in surprise at what she sees now is his desperation. “It isn’t your fault it’s over, or at least not in any way you seem to be able to do anything about. I met this handsome, interesting young man and I went sailing off into never-never land. You’re a figment of my imagination, Jay.” She says this last softly, laughing a little at herself, then lifting her head to gaze around her at the prairie, at the fields of her farm, and back toward the house she has lived in nearly all her life. “I was lost,” she says to him. “But now I’m found.” He’s moving toward her, she sees he wants to hold her and kiss her, to will her back into his spell, and she puts up her hand to stop him.

For when she looks at him she sees him clearly even though the sun is low on the horizon and all the shadows are growing long and crickets are lilting in the narrow slough below them. He is a handsome man, although not as beautiful as she once thought. Gazing at him she can see what a lot of trouble he is. At her age she hasn’t the energy for a man like this. “You’d be better off with a woman your own age.” He’s silent, gazing at her.

Looking down at the circle of stones they’ve inadvertently stopped inside, he says, “Our lovemaking was no imaginary event. It was good —”

“Jay. I thought I was in love with you. It was foolish of me; it was wrong. Sometimes I can hardly believe what a fool I’ve been —” She tries again. “I was desperate — I couldn’t see a future so I grabbed at a chance to go backwards, to be a girl again. As if anyone ever could. Life is a stream and it only runs in one direction.”

“Iris,” he says, moving toward her again. “I —”

“It runs to the sea, Jay,” she tells him. “That’s where it’s going — to the sea.”

Iris wakes suddenly as if someone has been calling her. It’s four in the morning, but she’s wholly awake and alert, knows she won’t sleep again. She has only partly drawn the curtains and the moon is shining in across her bed, flooding the carpet and the mirrored wall with its white light. She listens. Is someone in the room with her? In the silvery shadows at the end of the bed a figure is taking shape, a dark robe or a cape, a head covered with a nun’s veil or a
shamma,
a woman’s face, the round cheek, the dark eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Then it’s gone, melts slowly away into the shadows.