by David Bergen
One evening, determined to try something new, she lit candles in the bedroom and she wore a chemise that Marcie had given her as a wedding present, and she put herself on the bed and waited for Johan to appear. The chemise was black with lacy edges and it was short and when she lay on top of the quilt her thighs were visible and her arms were bare and her hair, combed out, lay beneath her. When Johan appeared and saw the flickering candles and saw his wife in the new chemise and saw her bare legs, he paused.
“Are you okay, Lily?” he asked.
He sat on the bed. She took his hand and put it up under her chemise, between her legs. She held his hand there. He turned his head away.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”
She began to unbutton his shirt. And then loosened his buckle. She told him to undress. He did so.
When he lay down beside her she touched his penis. She had never done this before but he did not object. She kissed him with an open mouth. This too he allowed. She whispered in his ear, “Put your mouth on me. Down there.”
“Where?”
“Here,” she said, and pushed his hand between her legs. She moved his head down towards her stomach and she shifted upwards. She expected him to revolt, but he didn’t. He went down, and when she shifted his head with her two hands he allowed this, and when she gave him further instructions, he obeyed. She did not know for sure what to expect, but she felt wild and when she pulled him upwards and he was inside her she clawed at his back, and later, when he was finished and he was walking to the bathroom, she saw the red marks on his shoulder blades.
He wanted to pray. He said that he felt a need for forgiveness.
“For what?” she asked.
“It was abnormal,” he said.
“You didn’t like it?” she asked.
“I did. But still.”
And so he prayed, and he asked her to pray as well, but she said that she didn’t want to pray. She had nothing to say. She got up and blew out the candles. She went to the bathroom and removed the chemise. She brushed her hair, facing the mirror. She wondered if Johan wished for bigger breasts. Or if he wanted a rounder body. She was not yet pregnant, and it had been six months since the marriage. He was waiting, this she knew. As was her mother, and Johan’s mother. The whole world was waiting.
She left the bathroom, turned out the light, and crept in darkness towards the bed.
She climbed in, and lay on her back.
Johan was sleeping.
She wanted to help out on the farm and so insisted that she would gather the eggs in the morning and the late afternoon. Her job required that she walk the cement walkways between the cages of chickens and gather the eggs that had rolled down into the metal troughs beneath the cages. She gathered the eggs three at time in each hand, and placed them in the flats that lay on her cart. Sometimes the eggs were still warm, and sometimes they were streaked with blood and shit. At the end of the row, she turned her cart and proceeded down the cement walkway in the opposite direction. When her cart was full, she went to the refrigerator room and stacked the flats, which were full of eggs, and then returned to the barn to gather more eggs.
One afternoon, she said that she wanted to visit her friend Marcie in town, and would she be able to use the Camaro. Just for an hour.
He did not say anything and she wasn’t sure if she’d been heard. Then she said that if he preferred she could use the pickup instead, she didn’t mind. He said that the pickup was fine, but not to wander, for gas was expensive.
It was August, and Lily knew that Marcie was moving to the city to attend university, and she wanted to see her before she left. She rode the number 52 from Kleefeld and she drove fast with her windows down so that the summer air came in and so she could see more clearly the last combines in the field gathering up the harvest. There was dust in the air, and there were dark clouds to the south, and some of the clouds looked like funnels, and Lily imagined a tornado sweeping down and carrying away the chicken barn and the layers and all the eggs and Johan and his family.
They sat in Marcie’s bedroom, as in the old days, and they talked of Marcie’s new apartment, and of Marcie’s breakup with her boyfriend, who hadn’t understood why there was a need to break up, and how Marcie had told him that she was leaving him because she wanted to. “He was very sad,” Marcie said, “but he wouldn’t have understood me otherwise. I had to be mean about it.” Lily saw that Marcie felt for him, but not enough, obviously, for Marcie was mostly happy for herself. Marcie asked how married life was, and Lily knew what she was referring to, but she just said that it was good, it was normal, and they moved back to Marcie and her excitement and her desires. “I won’t come back,” Marcie said, and Lily believed her, and she wondered what that would be like, to not come back.
Marcie offered her books, insisted that Lily take them. One in particular was vital because it was about a woman who realizes that men just want her eggs and she herself stops eating eggs. “It’s an important book,” Marcie said.
“I’d just read it and then burn it,” Lily said.
“What are you talking about?”
And so, as if she might be relating the plot of one of the stories she’d read, Lily told Marcie how her uncle had burned a book with her. And then she described how she had continued to borrow Marcie’s books, and some of these she had burned as well, on her own. She said that with each book she read, she was sometimes elevated and she was often disgusted and if she was disgusted she burned the book. Read a book, burn a book. “I’m sorry, Marcie,” she said.
“That’s crazy,” Marcie said.
“Yes. And that’s why you shouldn’t give me any more books. Anyways, I’ve decided that reading is a waste of time. What good is it? Does it make jam? Does it hoe the beets? Does it wash the clothes? Does it make babies? Does it get you to heaven? It just makes you unhappy.”
Marcie laughed. “Oh, Lily. What will I do with you?”
One Sunday afternoon, she and Johan drove up to Sandilands for a wiener roast with Eleanor and Jimmy Krahn, another newlywed couple from the church. Jimmy was a good friend of Johan’s. Lily was acquainted with Eleanor, and they might have gotten along, except right off Eleanor announced that she was pregnant, and so this fact clouded Lily’s day. While the men wandered off into the bush to gather firewood, Lily and Eleanor sat on stumps and slapped mosquitoes and Eleanor talked about the baby. She asked if Lily was pregnant yet, and Lily said that she wasn’t. It would come of course. In good time.
Around the fire later, Eleanor talked of her cousin Irmie, in Kansas, who at twenty-two had left her husband and two young children and moved to California and was living with a movie director and might even be acting. Eleanor said the word acting with much disdain and great force. Lily was curious about Irmie. She was amazed at the audacity and bravery and foolhardiness and insanity of a mother who would leave an infant and a two-year-old and run off to shack up with a movie director and to bare herself before him and to forsake everything to which she had committed. What slippery thinking did that take? She asked Johan later what he thought of Irmie running off like that.
“It’s not something I want to talk about, Lily,” he said. “And not something you should talk about either. There is nothing edifying in it.”
And so she let it go.
But still, when in the barn gathering eggs, or when preparing herself for church, or even sitting in church as the preacher spoke, she found her mind floating sideways to the lives of others, and in particular to the life of Irmie, who certainly couldn’t be happier now with her new existence.
And so Lily began to wonder if she, Lily, had chosen her life, or if that life had simply fallen into her lap, as it had fallen into her mother’s lap, and her father’s lap, and Johan’s lap. She looked at the women in the church, and she studied the men across the aisle, and she watched the children, and she observed the young
mothers with their infants, and in all of them she saw peace and happiness and love and joy and she wondered if she had peace and joy. She thought yes. She loved Johan. She liked being with him when he was around, even when she was sewing and he was in the next room sleeping in his chair like an old man. What wasn’t there to love? Still, when she had heard the little bit of gossip about cousin Irmie, she had jumped sideways. A light had peeked through the heavy foliage of the trees that was Lily’s existence, and the light had landed on her face and on her chest, and it had warmed her.
On a Monday morning, she took the pickup into town and went to the doctor’s office and she sat in the stillness of the small waiting room, and when her name was called, she entered the doctor’s office. There were posters on the wall, images of skeletons and organs, and there was a pamphlet that spoke of the beauty of birth and the life of a child from conception. She was reading this pamphlet when the doctor came in and closed the door. She knew Doctor Giesbrecht. Her mother had taken Lily to see him when Lily had contracted measles. He was a pleasant man, in the manner that an uncle at a family gathering might be pleasant—full of jokes and a wet mouth and perhaps a little too much attention paid. Lily spoke immediately of her concern, that she wasn’t yet pregnant and she wanted to be pregnant.
Doctor Giesbrecht asked if Lily’s husband knew of this visit.
“No, he’s not aware,” Lily said.
The doctor nodded. He took her blood pressure. He asked her to lie on the bed and to remove her underwear. She did so, and closed her eyes. She heard the snap of a glove going on. He said that she might feel a touch of coolness. He told her to raise her knees. She obeyed. When he put his fingers inside her she imagined that this was Johan standing above her, and this helped. The doctor stepped back and told her that she should stand and remove her dress. He was now leaning against the far wall and he was waiting. She stood and removed her dress. He said that she should also take off her bra. She did so. She did not look at him. She was staring at the poster that named the organs of the body. He asked her to raise her arms above her head. She did so. He asked her to turn around and face the opposite wall. She did so. It was quiet and she didn’t know what to do and she was aware that he was three steps away from her and that only Johan and Marcie had ever seen her naked, but she reasoned that he was a doctor and that this was necessary. Finally, he told her to get dressed. He left the room and was gone for a long time, and when he finally returned, Lily was sitting on the chair, dressed and waiting. He stood before her and consulted a chart and he did not look her in the eye. He said that everything seemed normal. She was young, and she was healthy. He asked her how often she had relations. She lied and said twice a week. He asked if any protection was used. She didn’t understand. Birth control, he said. “Does your husband use a condom? Are you on the pill?”
She laughed and said, “Oh no, oh no.”
He said that time would tell. She was young and beautiful and her body was ripe.
She didn’t understand why he used the word ripe. It brought to mind a banana aging on the kitchen counter. She asked that he not tell anyone about this visit. She didn’t want Johan or her mother-in-law to know.
He said that everything about the visit was private. There was no one to tell. It was her body. He said again that she was very beautiful, and to this she had no answer.
That evening, while lying with Johan, she saw herself in the doctor’s office, facing the opposite wall, her back and buttocks bare, and she was horrified that Johan would find out what she had done. She prayed that no one would discover her trespass.
A year passed. The seasons spun around like the Lazy Susan on Johan’s mother’s dining-room table. Fall, winter, spring, and then the heat of summer. She was still barren, and because of this a great disappointment settled over the house and space she shared with Johan. They had love less often. Johan was not interested, or if he was interested he did not show it. She sometimes forced herself on him, as if this might assuage the guilt she felt, but the act was dutiful and desultory. She took to feeding him large and special meals, and it was as if these meals had now replaced the lack of a child. He ate mightily and then lay down on the couch and slept while she did the dishes, and then he woke and climbed the stairs to the bedroom, and later in the evening, when she joined him, he was again fast asleep. She thought that they had, already at such a young age, become old and tired.
Marcie invited Lily for a visit and so on a Friday afternoon, Lily took the pickup and went to visit her cousin in the city. She had always loved the movement towards the city by vehicle, the strip of highway, the initial sighting of the tall buildings of Winnipeg, the confluence of ever more traffic so that she nearly panicked, the shopping malls, the people on the streets, the smell of exhaust from the buses, the sense that she was insignificant. Marcie lived on Kennedy, in a one-bedroom apartment, and immediately, upon entering the apartment, Lily felt herself relax. Marcie played music and she burned incense and she smoked Du Maurier cigarettes and she wore clothes that were modern and of the fashion. Marcie drank red wine and Lily drank tea. Marcie talked about her life, and she talked about the courses she was taking. She told Lily that she was a feminist and she said that women had to take back the space that men had stolen from them. She talked about her body. She talked about ownership. She said that she was proud of her period, and Lily thought that this was the oddest thing to be proud of. She herself wasn’t ashamed of it, but she hadn’t ever thought it worth discussing. Lily realized that Marcie was like an alien who now came from a completely different world. It was very late when Lily said that she had to drive home, and Marcie said that she should stay the night.
“Oh but Johan,” Lily said. “I have to make him breakfast.”
“He won’t die if you stay,” Marcie said.
And so she phoned Johan and told him that she would drive home early in the morning. He sounded sleepy, and he didn’t argue with her. He asked if she was behaving herself.
“Of course,” Lily said. “I’m with Marcie.”
“She’s of the world,” he said.
Lily ignored this, said that she loved him, and she said goodbye.
She and Marcie shared a bed and during the night Lily woke and felt the beating of her own heart and she heard, through the open window of the apartment, people passing by and talking late at night, and the voices were male and female, out at night, and no one seemed shrill or anxious, and there was laughter and then loud discussion, and the voices passed on and Lily wondered how it was that one person was this way, and another person was that. It was not her first moment of doubt. She had suffered misgivings before, but she had always pushed those doubts aside. They were of the devil. They were sinful. They were thorns. But now, in the darkness of the room, lying beside Marcie, she felt the thorns quite deeply and she sensed that these thorns might be speaking to her. She wiped her eyes and cheeks. Her heart ached, but she did not know why.
In the morning she arrived home to find Johan in the barn. She found him and kissed him on the cheek and then she put on coveralls and she gathered eggs. She made him a lunch of egg salad and she thawed a loaf of whole wheat bread that she had made the week previous. She put out butter and fresh jam and pickles. They ate silently. She tried to tell him of Marcie’s life, but he was not interested. She tried to use the word feminism, but he would not hear of it.
At one point he asked, “Do you want her life?”
She turned red and shook her head, but even the question itself, coming from his mouth, indicated a betrayal on her part.
To change, to decide to shift away from the beliefs of one’s upbringing, is never a sudden decision. Most change is gradual, and so it was with Lily. She felt hollow, and the hollowness was like when one has fasted and gone without food for a long time, and the hunger one feels becomes deep and acute, and then, after a time, the pangs disappear and they remain as a dull memory and the body gets used to it.
But also, as with someone who starves, the skin becomes thinner and the bones are visible, and if the light falls on the hand at a certain angle, the translucence of the body is shocking, and the flesh becomes nothing, and it is as if you are invisible. Sometimes, on a winter morning, after Johan had left the house, she stood by her bedroom window and looked out onto the snow that covered the yard and that had swept up against the windbreak of trees beyond the chicken barn. The land was flat and she could see forever, and the light was blue and sharp and it reflected off the miles of snow that covered the fields, which resembled a desert, though she didn’t truly know what a desert looked like. She had only seen pictures. Within six months, she was no longer going to church. She spent Sunday mornings reading novels that she had picked up at the town public library. She had gone there one day and asked how to borrow books and she had been given a library card and the first time she had only taken one book, a novel chosen at random, and when she learned that she could check out as many books as she liked, she signed out ten and took them home and stacked them by her bed. She was more brazen now with her books. She left them on the night table, or in the living room, and when Johan picked one up and turned it around in his hands, he did so as if it was an offending and mysterious object. He did not understand the allure. Or he understood it very well.
Every weekday morning at ten, always at ten, Johan’s mother Elmira entered the house without knocking or calling out. She looked like a root vegetable, a parsnip that had been uprooted during an early harvest and left abandoned to the heat of the day and the cold of the night, and had shrivelled. She suffered back problems, and this being so she shuffled around Lily’s kitchen and the dining room with her head curled towards the ground, as if looking for some object that might have dropped, a pickle perhaps, or a fork that might have slid off the table. The effect was such that Lily inevitably also bent her head towards the ground to seek out that pickle or that fork. Finding nothing, Elmira moved through the rooms, now seeking dust, or a chair out of place, or a plant that might be dry, or a dirty tablecloth. When she found fault, she corrected it. She did not speak, she would just look sour and tssk, and then she would water the dry plant, or she would get out the dusting supplies and spray Lemon Pledge and scrub at the coffee table, or she would remove the offending tablecloth and replace it with a clean one, taking home the dirty laundry to wash it herself. Rumour was that Lily was not a good housekeeper. She was sloppy. She did not have a passion for spotlessness. The fault of this might have fallen onto Lily’s mother, who had not trained Lily well, but in this case the fault for all the disorder was blamed on books. One day, Mrs. Gerbrandt said, just before stepping out of the door to return to her own gleaming house, “All these books are making your home dirty.” Mrs. Gerbrandt was breathless, and her hands were shaking, and her mouth moved but no more words came out. For a brief moment Lily felt for her. The word that came to mind was apoplexy, which could mean stroke or extreme anger. It wasn’t clear which one Mrs. Gerbrandt might be suffering. In order to help, or perhaps to be free of her, Lily walked her across the yard to her own house and by the time they had reached the door, Mrs. Gerbrandt had recovered and she was saying to Lily, “Come back. Come back. I see all sorts of tribulation.”
