The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  I wanted to go to a record store, and there wasn’t one in Mallow, the bucolic little village that ran alongside the river in the valley below the ashram. There was one small grocery store, a garage, a restaurant, a few gift shops, and an ice cream shop for tourist season—and of course the police station—but that was it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d left Mallow. That was as good a reason as any to get out.

  A pickup truck with chipped paint the colour of grass pulled over. An older man wearing a John Deere cap was at the wheel.

  “Going to Concord?” he said.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, stepping up into the passenger seat.

  “You’re one of the yoga ladies, then?”

  “Yes, I am. But I used to be a farmer,” I said, as a way to deflect any forthcoming judgment. We made small talk about farming. My knowledge from Sunflower served me well in these moments. But he drove quite fast, and swerved a few times, and I began to clutch the bar above the window.

  When I was thirteen, I had a friend named Darlene, who lived on a farm outside Ottawa. Once, when picking me up at Darlene’s house, Mother came in for a visit while my father stayed in the car smoking. I knew by the way her lips were tight, and by her overbright smile, that my father was in a mood. Darlene’s mother knew it, too, by the way she glanced outside, and her voice went up at the end of sentences and made one-syllable words into two. “Would you like to invite your husband in for coff-ee-ee? We made a fresh po-ot!”

  “Oh, we had so much coffee after church,” my mother said.

  Darlene and I tumbled in from the garden, still giggling, hands full of carrots and fresh with dirt. But when I saw my mother’s face, I quickly washed up and pulled together my overnight bag, saying a quick thank-you to Darlene’s parents. I remember seeing them at the kitchen table in that moment, still finishing the last of their late breakfast, and it occurred to me I’d never seen my own parents look so relaxed.

  On the way back to the city, I told my parents about helping to milk the cows, and gathering the eggs, and a chicken who had a particularly funny way of walking, but I realized no one was going to engage with me. There wasn’t a single word spoken, but my father communicated through his driving. He sped up and swerved around cars, his eyes bulging as he nearly ran a blue van off the road. Cars and trucks honked at us as our car zigzagged around them. At one point, when traffic slowed, he pulled over to the shoulder and raced alongside, as though he were in his cruiser. Why wouldn’t we be stopped? We’d been stopped before, but it never mattered. There was a decal from the Ottawa police department on the front windshield of our muddy-brown Pontiac. It absolved him from any violation. I’d been scared before, but this time I really thought he was going to kill us.

  I was so sick of my mother’s silence in those moments that eventually I yelled, “You’re going to kill us!”

  “Yeah, that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Right then I understood that was what he wanted. I was so nauseated by the time we reached the edge of our neighbourhood that when he stopped at a red light I jumped out and threw up all over the sidewalk. The light changed. My father’s face was still furious.

  “Get back in this car this instant!” he said.

  I shook my head, clutching my stomach.

  My mother implored me with her eyes. Then said urgently, “Get in the car, honey.”

  I shook my head again. The tires squealed as he pulled away, the passenger door still ajar and swinging open as he drove. I’d been in the car plenty of times when Dad was angry, Marie and I huddled together as he’d threatened to drive off a cliff, as my mother whimpered and screamed Not with the girls in the car, not with the girls. She’d even had seat belts installed when she took the car in for a tune-up, although he’d scoffed at the extra expense.

  Eventually, he would calm down. And late that night we’d hear him weeping in the living room, and my mother consoling him. Sometimes he would come into my room and sit on the edge of the bed and apologize. I’d pretend to be asleep.

  But by now I was a teenager, buoyed by a new sense of myself, of confidence and bravado. I went and bought myself a three-speed bike at a rummage sale with my babysitting earnings. From then on, I walked or biked anywhere I needed to go, even on the coldest of winter days. I took it a step further and called the police station from a pay phone. I told them that my dad was a drunk and that he shouldn’t have a licence, spelling out for them his name and address. No one did anything. But I never drove with him again.

  The fall after high school graduation, I went to Oberlin College on a scholarship for the flute. I’d never been to the United States, or kissed a boy. Something about the way I had felt at the pro-choice rally with my mom meant I gravitated toward peace rallies, and consciousness-raising groups, and beautiful men with shaggy haircuts who carried paperback copies of The Communist Manifesto in their pockets. I lost my virginity with the guy I was handcuffed to at a sit-in. I read Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sexual Politics, and in the summer, my family expected me to come back to Ottawa to work, but instead I got in a van with a group of friends. We drove to an intentional community in Virginia called Twin Oaks, where the lifestyle was based on the writings of Thoreau. I volunteered doing gardening and child care, and that’s where I met Bryce, a handsome man who made me wonder if I’d finally found the husband my mother had been nattering on about my entire childhood. I tried to resist his pull, but I failed, and we did get married, in a circle of friends by the sunflower field.

  My mother never forgave me for getting married without telling her, and for never going back to school, which had always been her own dream. Instead, we moved to Vermont, bought a broken-down farm, and started our own intentional community, calling it Sunflower. It was started on principles of egalitarianism and humanism, but the worlds in which we were raised still got through.

  I called my mother right before our first Sunflower Christmas, asking if she’d like to visit. She said she would, but my father had refused and she couldn’t come alone.

  “You don’t understand what it’s been like since you and your sister left,” she whispered into the phone.

  “Leave him,” I said finally. At first very quietly, and then more emphatically.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “You make it sound easy but it isn’t.”

  “I love you, Mom, but you know you need to leave him.”

  They were the last words I ever said to her.

  On New Year’s Day my sister, Marie, called. She was in hysterics. Our phone was a party line, and the other family kept picking up the phone while we were talking. It was a car accident. Dad had been drinking. It was an accident, she said, but we knew it wasn’t.

  Missy was conceived a few months after their deaths, during our first lambing season. I remember that time as a kind of haze of grief, but also youthful elation. My parents had lived a life of routine, despair, and escapism, my father with alcohol and my mother with religion. I was going to live with bliss and community, cooperation, and joy. I was going to feel connected with other people. When we get angry, I’d say, standing on a chair in a community meeting, we are going to work through it. We are going to choose peaceful resolution! We are going to love!

  We had a small flock of sheep that we’d purchased with the farm. They were beautiful, innocent animals. Bryce called them simple, which I knew meant dumb, but I saw in their eyes a graceful, peaceful nature. We had brought in a ram for mating, and soon thereafter some of the ewes were pregnant. We had been eagerly awaiting lambing season. I went to the library in town and read all the agricultural magazines. I visited nearby farms and asked questions. It was a time of beginnings.

  I was in love with our new community and it loved me back. And there was always so much to do. We were run off our feet, every day, with planting and harvesting, fixing and building, cooking and cleaning, organizing and hoping, hoping, hoping we’d make our small world a better place, and then in time, continue to see it grow.
/>   The rolling, green farms in the valleys outside Mallow were dotted with red barns and bore proud family names. As we reached the outskirts of Concord, the houses were closer together, wild fields giving way to manicured yards. The farmer steadied his speed, and I began to calm down. He had been talking the whole drive, mostly about his son who had just moved to California and become very wealthy on the World Wide Web. I kept hearing those three words, but I did not hear much else, my mind elsewhere. He dropped me off right in front of the Pitchfork record store.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I think you’ll get to where you’re going, I see things working out for you,” he said.

  I waved, watching him drive away, and wondered if he was right.

  Inside the record shop, I was disoriented. Other than grocery shops and the local Agway, I hadn’t been in a retail shop for years. I’d written down the name of Missy’s band, the Swearwolves, on the back of an envelope. The store was playing some kind of loud punk music, and the shelves of records were very close together. Several teenagers were crowded around the S bin. I began to wonder if this was a bad idea, but then I saw, right there behind the counter, my daughter’s band on display. That was my sign. I went up to the cash register.

  “Would you like the cassette or CD?” the shopkeeper asked in a listless tone, staring at a spot on the wall behind me. He looked like one of the young men in Missy’s band. Despite the heat, he wore a knitted wool hat pulled over a mess of hair, and a flannel shirt hanging loosely over his bony frame.

  “Cassette, please,” I said.

  “They’re also on the cover of Spin this month,” he said, handing me a large glossy magazine with my Missy’s face on the cover.

  “That’s my daughter,” I said, pressing my finger to her face. I made a greasy print on her forehead with the ketchup residue.

  “No way!” he said, the enthusiasm a bolt through his practised apathy. Then he tried to recover himself. “I mean, that’s cool. Why do you have to buy the cassette, then?”

  “For a present,” I said. “She only sent me one copy.” I was lying! He knew I was lying. But why was I lying? I’d given up lying years ago.

  “We also have T-shirts,” he said, pointing to a rack. I bought one of those as well, pulling it awkwardly over my plain cotton dress. Then I asked him to point me toward the bus station. It occurred to me this record store guy was around the same age Bryce and I had been when we started Sunflower, when we looked at middle-aged people the way he looked at me, which is to say, barely.

  Bryce and I had never seen a birth before, let alone facilitated one. When the first ewe went into labour, both of us were wide-eyed under thick oatmeal-coloured toques, two against one stubborn, scared ewe. It was a deep, cold winter, but that day was unseasonably warm. The birthing ewe did not want us around, but we had the upper hand, with our human fingers, biceps, thoughts of the future. But we didn’t know what we were doing. It was four in the morning. We’d been walking over the hill, coming home from a party at the tavern in town, when Bryce went to check on the flock.

  “She’s coming! Number three is about to pop. The first birth!” he’d yelled across the yard, running and tripping toward me like a little kid. “Should we wake up Chris?”

  Chris had passed out on the living room floor before we’d left for the tavern.

  “We can do this ourselves,” I said, which wasn’t in keeping with Sunflower’s collective principles, but I felt like Bryce and I were a good team, and this had been our dream, and so I wanted us to share this big moment.

  The imminent birth had sobered us both from the mulled wine and generous pours of draft beer. The ewe had a greasy green number three painted on her back. The sun had melted some of the snow the day before, and our rubber boots sank into the mossy pathway, making squishy sounds as we tromped between the farmhouse and the barn. I pulled a giant parka close over my thin dress. Bryce had a look of absolute panic and horror in his face when he saw what we were really dealing with.

  “Why did I think we could do this? We’re not doctors!” he shouted, scaring most of the flock as they moved en masse to the other side of the barn.

  “You mean vets?”

  “Whatever!”

  “It’s okay, let me get the book,” I said, sitting on the edge of the manger, reading out loud from the chapter on problem birthing from Storey’s Guide to Birthing Sheep. By the time the sun was coming up, Bryce had stripped down to just his jeans, with sweat-soaked hair. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, why the birth wasn’t happening the way we’d assumed it would. Eventually Bryce realized that the lamb was breech.

  “Put on the long glove and put your hand inside and turn the lamb around,” I said, reading from the book.

  He looked at me as though he might faint. “Is that the only possibility?”

  I threw him the book, pulled off my coat, rolled up my dress sleeves, and grabbed the gloves. Bryce didn’t object. My hand shook inside the glove, but I knew what I had to do.

  I pushed one arm deeply inside the ewe, a warmth like nothing I had ever felt before, as I gently pulled the lamb out. It was stunned, silent, and then all at once bleating, and the mother quickly tried to stand and attend to it. I cradled the lamb and put it next to the mother’s nose so she wouldn’t have to get up to clean the afterbirth from its tiny, wriggling body.

  There was something so primal about it. The sun was coming up as we lay against the stack of hay bales, watching the ewe clean the baby. I started to laugh, relieving the pressure of the past several hours. We had done it. The ewe and her lamb were still alive. We’d triumphed! I was so proud of us.

  And looking at Bryce, exhausted and still shirtless, sweating, I felt more attracted to him than ever before. We’d had so many failures: fences that didn’t hold back the animals, failed plumbing, not understanding how to manage the crops. I’d lost count of how many times we’d had to go to the neighbouring farm to ask very basic questions about how to do something, which I understood to be a source of great amusement for the Hendersons on their dairy farm.

  When Chris and Tegan opened the door to do the morning chores, they caught us up against the manger, while the sheep around us did their sheep things. They chuckled and closed the door, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes outside while we finished. We shared a look right after the interruption, one that said Just this once, just keep going, and I clutched my legs around him even harder. Bryce had wanted to try, in an official way. This was the first time we weren’t careful about it, and it took. I was young. One time was all it took.

  Later, after falling back asleep for a few hours in the morning light, I felt like I was sobering up from what had felt like a mystical dream. I looked over at Bryce, who’d begun to snore gently and then emphatically. Who was he? I traced the patchy blond beard, the tan line across his forehead from the hat he wore on the tractor. He looked like an utter stranger. What was I doing with him? But here we were. I’d canned all the vegetables and learned to grow herbs. We’d built several outbuildings, learned to raise chickens and now sheep. I’d put up fences and dug trenches, and learned how and when to plant seeds, till the soil. My favourite thing to do was drive the tractor. Next year we were going to keep bees. Having a baby felt like the next logical step of this constant, generative labour. This experiment was working, however many failures we’d weathered. We had a farm with a group of friends, making all of our decisions as a collective, and for the most part, it was thrilling. So then why did our marriage feel like a game show I’d been tricked into being on?

  I crept across the hall to the bathroom. The toilet seat was covered in pee from one of the men who kept forgetting to lift the seat. I’d left several passive-aggressive notes about it, then realized it must be Bryce. Was he really so lazy? The old white sink we’d hauled in from the dump and fixed up was leaking again, a deep rusty stain in the basin. I’d put hooks up for everyone’s individual towel, but I suspected both Chris and Bryce grabbed whichever one was clo
sest—always mine. Why was I living with so many men, who didn’t know how to make soup stock or wash a dish, and who left an endless trail of dirty coffee cups all over the house? Men who already jokingly called me “Mama” with affection, which was cute at first and now deeply irritating.

  I put my head in my hands and sat on the toilet until my feet began to feel numb. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling until I heard the sheep outside, the bleating of the baby lamb. Then I felt something click inside me.

  I felt a purity of regret I’d never known.

  I bore down, trying to force any remaining sperm out of me. Even though I knew the likelihood of being pregnant on the first try was remote, I felt invaded anyway. Something inside me must have known it had taken. I bunched up the skin on my stomach and grabbed it uselessly. How could I have been so stupid? I got in the bathtub, filling it with hot water. The water heater only allowed for one hot bath per day, so we often filled it and bathed one after the other, or just hosed off outside with the cold water in the summer. It was wasteful, but I had to be submerged. I grabbed Bryce’s disposable razor from the sink and I shaved my legs for the first time since I’d left my parents’ house, then under my arms and my pubic area. The water was hot and now a swamp of blond hair. I ran my fingernail through a white cake of soap, cracked with threaded estuaries of dirt, soaping each toe, every crevice. I stood up, a bit dizzy from the heat, slick and new.

  I made a cup of coffee and sat on the steps of our front porch in the white cotton nightgown my mother got me to take to college. It was chaste and white, with lace trim, now frayed at the knee-length hem. I’d defiantly ripped off the puffed sleeves in my dorm at Oberlin, after a girl had made fun of it. I was watching the sun rise, pulling at the stringy lace, breathing in the intoxicating smells of new, wet earth, spring unveiling itself all around me in the flattened grass the colour of aged yellow hay, the rivers of runoff from the melting snow. From the porch, I could see clear across to the rest of our little valley, the forest edged around the farm like a painting, the outbuildings closest to us looking like toys on the horizon. We were so isolated there, fenced lines down the driveways, fields of hay and clover, dead trees felled over the tiny, mostly underground river in the middle. You could wander for hours and never see another human being.