Luna (5 page)

Cathy was asleep in the car seat beside Tammy, her head lolling to one side. Tammy opened the passenger door carefully, got out, and shut it quietly without being told to. Selena could see that Tammy had been crying, too. She put her arm around the little girl and said to Diane, who was still sitting in the driver’s seat, “Why don’t you leave Cathy here till she wakes up.” Diane nodded and got out quietly. The three of them went inside the house and down the hall to the kitchen. Tammy stood in the doorway looking uncertainly toward her mother as if she didn’t quite know what to expect from her, and was a little afraid to ask.

“Tammy,” Selena said gently, “you go up to Phoebe’s room and get that box of toys from her closet. You know where it is?” Tammy broke into a smile, nodded, and ran out of the room. They could hear her awkwardly climbing the stairs.

“Good old Auntie Selena,” Diane said.

“Oh, shut up, Diane,” Selena said, running water into the sink. “I’ll make some more coffee.” She felt better, less concerned now that she had Diane in her own kitchen. She busied herself filling the coffee pot, taking down clean mugs, and looking in the fridge. Suddenly she shut the fridge door and turned to her sister. Diane raised her head and their eyes met.

“Are you pregnant?” Selena asked. Diane flinched, then her face resumed its closed, disinterested expression.

“No.”

“Is Tony running around?”

“No!” This time she sounded angry.

“Well,” Selena defended herself, “something’s sure bothering you, and he was quite a lady’s man before you married him. You can’t blame me …”

“I know, I know,” Diane interrupted. “He isn’t running around as far as I know. Not that I’d care if he did.”

“You don’t mean that!” Selena said, shocked.

“No,” Diane said, sighing. “I don’t mean that,” although she did, in a way. Tammy was coming down the stairs now, dragging the box behind her.

One of them should help her before she fell, Selena thought, but neither of them moved. She reached the bottom of the stairs and began dragging it down the hall toward them. Selena went to the doorway and said, “Good girl, now take it into the front room. You can spread the toys around, there’s nobody home to bother you.” Selena turned, as Tammy dragged the box away, and said to Diane, “She’s so good about playing by herself.” Diane had leaned her head back so that it rested against the wall, and that deep, inward-turning look that Selena found so disquieting had returned to her eyes. It was as if Selena wasn’t even there.

“Is it money?” Selena probed. Diane moved her eyes slowly to her sister. She took a moment to answer.

“We’re no worse off than anybody else. If this drought keeps up there’ll be no crop this year, but …” She shrugged and lowered her eyes. Selena sat down across from her. Studying her, she noticed that Diane’s skin had a sallow, unhealthy tinge to it. She remembered her as a teenager, full of life, daring in a way Selena could never have been. It had been a relief when Diane had married Tony, young as she was.

“Something’s sure wrong,” she said, knowing she must have said this before, perhaps more than once, “you’re grouchy with the kids, you act like you couldn’t care less about Tony, and you were crazy to marry him not even seven years ago. You don’t want to do anything.”

Diane said nothing. She bent her head so that her dark hair fell on each side of it, hiding her expression. Selena realized she was crying. Good, she thought, now we’re getting somewhere, and at the same time, look, her hair doesn’t even shine anymore. Pity swept through her,
but she dampened it at once. She just needs a good talking to, she told herself, and opened her mouth to speak. But before she could get out any words Diane spoke.

“I’m sick of this place. I’m sick of this life.” There was a noise in the hall and Tammy’s small voice came to them in the bright, quiet kitchen.

“Mommy? Cathy’s crying.”

“I’ll get her,” Selena said, and jumped up before Diane could respond.

Diane wants to say, something terrifying is happening to me, Selena. She wants desperately to say to her sister, sometimes I wake in the night and I know I’ve been somewhere, somewhere huge and dark that’s inside me. It’s not a bad place. It’s beautiful, I think, it’s … right … somehow, it’s trying to tell me something and I don’t know what it is and I’m so afraid that I won’t be able to come back. I fight, I struggle back to consciousness and find myself lying awake in our bedroom with Tony, my beautiful, long-boned Tony asleep beside me and I think, no, no, I’ll never leave him. Never. And I know that wherever he is in his sleep, it’s not that dark and rich place, that lies beneath or inside the ordinary world, where I go. And I don’t know what any of this means. Am I losing my mind?

But she says nothing, only watches Selena hurry down the crowded hall and out the front door.

Cathy was screaming, flailing with her fists at the chair that confined her. Selena, angry with herself for forgetting her, hastily lifted her out and carried her into the house. By the time she got to the kitchen, Cathy had stopped shrieking and was hiccoughing into Selena’s blouse. Diane was at the stove, wiping it where the coffee had boiled over.

“She’s okay, she’s just scared,” Selena said. “Did you think we forgot you?” she asked the baby, kissing her damp cheeks. Diane reached out to take her, but Selena said, “No, let me hold her for a bit.” So Diane filled their coffee mugs and admired the way Tammy had dressed Phoebe’s old doll, while Selena rocked Cathy in her arms.

Diane sits down and watches Selena cradling her daughter, rocking her as she sits across the table from her. My baby, she thinks. My little girl. She looks around the kitchen, at the taps above the sink glinting in the
morning sun, at the shiny toaster, at the dish towel hanging on the stove door. My life, she thinks—this is what it is to be a woman—and the clarity of this understanding, which both repels and appeals to her, is new. Her emotion crystallizes in the baby Selena is holding, the child she both wants to take and press to her breasts and at the same time to refuse to ever hold again. This confusion of desire is almost too much to bear.

“The cat’s brought her kittens to sun on the back step,” Selena told Tammy. Tammy set the doll on the table and ran out the back door. Diane and Selena could see her bend down and between gusts of wind, could hear her high, light voice crooning to the kittens. Cathy had grown quiet so Selena set her on the floor and put a cracker into her plump fingers.

“Are you tired of being a wife?” Selena asked. “Of being a mother?” Diane was leaning back in her chair again, her head resting against the wall. Selena noticed that her cheeks were wet.

“I love my kids,” Diane said.

“I know that,” Selena said, chastened. Yelling at your kids, having no patience with them didn’t mean you didn’t love them. Sometimes kids were too much, that was all, every mother knew that. Even the kids knew it. “What about Tony?” she asked, a little timidly now. Diane moved her head, blinked, and finally spoke.

“He’s so much more than this life lets him be.”

“What do you mean?” Selena asked, not sure whether to be angry or not. What is ‘this life?’ What is ‘more?’”

“Life on the farm,” Diane said, bitterness creeping into her voice, although she didn’t mean it to. “You can’t imagine anything else, can you?” Selena was silenced. It was true. She tried, but city life—how could you live it, except running, running all the time, in the traffic and the bad smells, never feeling safe …

“Tony’s a bookkeeper, you know. He did two years at university. I’d like to see him without that filthy cap on his head and grease under his fingernails.”

“Tony’s a good-looking man, all right,” Selena said. Out on the steps Tammy gave a little scream and Selena half-rose from her seat to peer out the screen. “Be careful, dear,” she called.

“I’m not talking about his good looks,” Diane said, annoyed. “I mean, he could get a job. He doesn’t have to stay here beating his brains out for nothing.”

“But,” Selena said, hesitating. “He’s a country man,” then, translating this into something more manageable, “he wants to farm.”

“He’s been at it long enough to see the writing on the wall.”

“What writing?” Selena retorted, even though she knew perfectly well what Diane meant.

Diane didn’t even look at her and there was no answering rise of anger in her voice. She recited, “Costs are going up all the time, prices are dropping, all over the world competition is getting stiffer and stiffer. You don’t have to be too bright to see there’s no future out here on the farm. And this damn drought is the finishing touch.”

This much Diane can say. This much Selena can understand. How can I tell her the rest, she wonders, when I don’t know myself what it is, or what it means? Selena doesn’t know that I’m hanging onto my sanity by the tips of my fingers, that I know if I stay here I’ll go crazy, I really will, because in this tiny, smug little world no woman can ever matter, she can never be taken seriously, and I can’t stand it. I’ve got to get away from here—even though I am terrified that for me there may be no escape anywhere.

Selena was thinking, if this is all that’s wrong with her … and she had to remind Diane, “You know Tony quit university so he could come back and live this good life here on the land.”

“What good life?” Diane asked, her voice suddenly fierce, light appearing in her dark eyes for the first time since she had arrived in Selena’s kitchen. “What good life?” Tammy rose and pressed her face against the screen, trying to see into the kitchen. After a moment, she stepped away again. Cathy toddled into the hall and the women let her go.

“What do you mean?” Selena’s voice was low, she had never expected to hear a member of her own family question the creed that all of them lived by.

“Tell me what you did last night,” Diane said. Caught by surprise, Selena tried to remember.

“Hemmed Phoebe’s grad dress, helped Mark study history, watched a little tv.”

“And the night before? And the night before that? What do you do to pass the time around here? What do you
do
with your life?” She was sitting up straight now, staring angrily at Selena.

“Raise your kids,” Selena said, angry too now. “Raise them where you don’t have to be scared every minute for their lives—that they’ll get beaten up, or that your daughter will get raped. Where there aren’t so many things going on that you can’t even be a family …”

“Oh, yeah,” Diane said, looking away, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Family.” She was silent a moment, looking restlessly around the room, her eyes bright and hard now. “Family. Twenty-four hours a day, year after year.” She rose and went to the screen door, then turned back to Selena, who watched her, knowing her shock was showing on her face, but unable to conceal it. “I’ve got two daughters, Diane said. “Two little girls. They’re
people
, not just future baby-havers and housekeepers and dress-hemmers! I can see already that if we stay around here they’re going to wind up in exactly the same fix I’m in.” Selena could feel the colour rising up her neck and flushing her cheeks.

“You’re not thinking of leaving Tony!” Diane didn’t reply. She walked to the sink, then went back to her chair and sat down. Selena kept talking, as though it were normal for Diane to be so agitated. “Where would you go? How would you support the kids?”

“I’d go to Calgary, or Winnipeg, maybe. Maybe even … Vancouver?”

“Are you crazy?” Selena was appalled. “Don’t you realize what it would be like? They’d both have to go into daycare, you’d have some kind of awful job that wouldn’t pay anything—you’d never see the kids, you wouldn’t know who was looking after them, or what was happening to them. You’d have nobody to come home to. You wouldn’t even have a house to live in. You’d have to live in an apartment, and they’re awful.”

“How would you know?” Diane asked. “You’ve never been off this stupid farm.”

“It’s not a farm, it’s a ranch,” Selena pointed out, and was immediately annoyed with herself. “Anyway, everybody knows what the city’s like.”

Diane hates herself for getting into what feels to her like a stupid argument, but she hears the words falling out of her mouth, some part of her spinning them and spitting them out, while the rest of her sits in silence, listening and wondering and crying no, no, no—this isn’t it, this isn’t what it’s about. But what’s true is that I’m dying here, and Selena, isn’t that enough? I don’t know what it is that’s driving me, I don’t understand it and I don’t know what will satisfy this thing that’s tearing at me, but you don’t either, it’s laughable that you should be advising me, reciting your homely truths to me. Oh God to escape, if only from the platitudes that are piled up around here like barriers everywhere I turn.

“Selena,” she said, sighing. “Look at me. I’m young. I’m only twenty-five.” But Selena saw instead the fine lines at the corners of her sister’s eyes, and the rigid tendons in her long neck, and that bright, deep light in her eyes that so dismayed her that she dropped her eyes from Diane’s. This was too much. She had never seen such intensity, she didn’t know how to deal with it.

But Diane, looking at Selena, remembers instead the story Rhea had told her about how, when she was reaching middle age at her home on the ranch, she had cried for days and days at a time. How Rhea had said, not looking at Diane, but out across the distant prairie, there was some tragedy going on inside me, some loss so deep there were no words for it. I must have known what it was at night. I must have known it in my sleep, in my dreams, because that was always when the crying would start.

Diane, filled with awe and sorrow at this picture, had ventured, what about Uncle Jasper? What did he say? What did he do?

Rhea had replied, Jasper would turn away from me, angry and afraid. He’d go out and work twice as hard, hitch the team and wagon and go twice as far for a load of feed, be away twice as long, because to work harder was the only answer he knew in life, and it had to suffice for every problem.

No, Diane thinks sadly, I won’t turn to Tony for help with this.

Somewhere a cow was bellowing. Had it lost its calf? Selena remembered she was supposed to check on the cattle. She thought of the plants growing in her garden, could feel them brushing against her legs as she walked
among them, she thought of her own dress for Phoebe’s graduation lying upstairs on the sewing machine, unfinished, its tiny, cream-coloured flowers slipping by under her fingers as she guided the silky fabric under the needle. In the hallway Cathy had pulled down one of the coats hanging on the wall and had fallen asleep on it, and on the back lawn Tammy was chasing a magpie that had been tormenting the mother cat.