Jo knows. She has gotten explicit Facebook messages from buddy two floors down next to accounting, but not in accounting, never in accounting. And while it was flattering and maybe made her panties damp, she did not respond because he was almost certainly not a nice man.
Because a nice man you barely know would not try to fuck you through your iPad during an information seminar on the building’s new heating system. That is not appropriate correspondence. That is something else Jo said when it happened to her the first time.
Don’t acclimatize. Resist this adaptation of thought.
And don’t say explicit things to anyone you like before you see them naked, for fuck sakes, Iris, Jo had squealed as she tossed a dishtowel in her face.
He will probably blush and throw his phone down on the couch cushions in frustration when you nearly imply something something about eating cheesecake in your underwear while watching The Godfather. Because, goddamn it, he does not know what to do with that. He will have to think it over for days.
Jo thinks deliberation is best kind. It proves he is thinking. It proves thinking men still exist. She imagines them wandering from the forest eating custard cones. Perhaps they’ve fashioned a walking stick from forest floor debris, or picked wild berries now cupped in their free hand. Maybe they are with their dog or best friend.
Both.
Maybe two nice men and a hound emerge together from the thicket, sober and speaking to one another about their shared interests. Perhaps these first-contact men will be engaged in a conversation that they will actually remember later.
Genuine human interaction.
Iris fantasizes about men holding up one side of an honest conversation while she holds up the other and imagines them taking shelter together under this decent communication.
Iris’s table is too busy to order drinks as they discuss with great enthusiasm their theories of place versus non-place.
All of Iris’s places are non-places.
The linen closet. Smoking alley. A fast food franchise in a suburb.
Don’t say he ever takes you anywhere nice because he doesn’t, Jo has said.
Someone might see Iris, crying in a drive-through on her birthday when he says this will have to do because George came home early from her conference.
Iris had worn a summer dress that she thought would flatter her collarbone in a girlish way that made her feel light and appealing, though she was instead boiled down to broth logistics. Weak and unsatisfying. Just enough to tie John over while waiting for the main course. Trying to hold back deep sobs while holding a cheeseburger made Iris feel truly pathetic, and she promised herself she would not eat another birthday meal of any kind with this man who makes her feel less concentrated than a tin of off-brand soup stock you only use up when you’ve cleaned the cupboards before holidays. Something to be eaten on moving day. The last bit of sustenance in the house.
Iris has felt, feels now, today even, not deserving of a dipper. Pour her in a bowl and shove her in the microwave. She is just the quick fix. A pretend something is still nothing. An imitation thing.
Iris feels unreal.
This is why people are chasing their aces all over the poorest bays. Not because they’ve some genuine belief that they will catch the card. They can barely catch a break at all. A century of impoverishment and industry collapse, pillaging and recrimination, has taught them not to hope for much but a bit of fun when the cards are cut. So they pack themselves into their domestic cars and pickup trucks built tough to drive to the town hall two or ten towns away.
And the feeling they bask in feeling is sold to them by organizers as excitement for the draw when the feeling they are actually feeling is unity. They are together, experiencing an experience together. What they are delighting in is shared humanity. This euphoria they seek out in far-flung regions of the country is so they feel less far-flung.
Iris’s people belong to this moment, this movement, this mania regardless of the worth of it.
And later, when there is nothing left to pay the bills or buy a pull ticket, they will once again be united in a feeling. From the wild fray and hysteria of calling cards, they will look up to find everyone struggling and wonder how it came to this again. They will ask people who seem in better positions how they have managed. And these same better-positioned people will turn to face them from their fully restored Victorian homes and ask how they have not managed their affairs more fairly.
Like the crowd at Iris’s four top are casually wondering why all those bay kids flunk out of university. The Mayor is pontificating about rural Newfoundlanders’ lack of ambition.
The Mayor is boasting to Iris that his friend is the head of Heritage NL though she hears how his tidy vowels betray him. Paisley Shirt originated in southern Ontario in some civilized-sized town named for some other civilized place as is the way everywhere in the new world. This attribute he shares with his co-workers. That and a shared preoccupation with community-building communities that were built many decades ago by families who still live in them.
Iris responds that her best friend works with him too. And the Mayor twitches slightly before asking who that might be, and then again when she tells him.
The world keeps getting smaller around The Hazel.
The Heritage diners have been diners here before. Iris has seated them herself, but the lunch crowd rarely recall her face. They’re economical with their time and dollars and for the most part do not want to engage, but today Heritage NL via ON is buoyant. The table is bursting with theories on rural Newfoundland. They are animated while discussing a penchant for dumping old automobiles, cars and trucks, the occasional piece of heavy machinery even, into the pits, down over the beach, off the side of a cliff.
We even found an old cherry-red jeep driven into the forest!
Baymen, the Mayor says, giving them further permission to forge on.
The thinnest of the women wonders aloud if they’ve no pride of place. The other chirps that she is always amused by their inability to see natural beauty. The thin one claims her bay neighbour had not even noticed the flowers growing wild in the yard until she’d pointed them out one day.
The Mayor is astonished and all agree in their tight-lipped way that not knowing the wild flora and fauna’s proper taxonomy suggests that Iris’s people take everything for granted.
And Iris stands broadside pouring lemon waters, all the while simmering because the implication around the table is very simply that the diners are smarter for having learned the correct names.
They were given more words to use, and their daily usage of them means they are obviously of superior intellect.
As if having more is reflective of being more.
And Iris wants to implode and feels she will if faced for the rest of living with this same oversimplified rhetoric, day in and day out and night on and night off.
Perhaps Iris could have had some kind of happiness if she hadn’t read all those books while her mom was at work. All those books opened her up, and now here she stands, opened.
Why is the rural Newfoundlander [insert anything here] ?
The answer is poverty.
Why is the rural Newfoundlander [insert anything here] ?
Still poverty.
Why is the rural Newfoundlander [insert anything here] ?
POVERTY. POVERTY. POVERTY. FUCK!
And Iris will not discuss the shit her people buy. Buying lots of shit is not an argument against the kind of poverty they face but proof positive that they face it.
Her table is wondering if the fish is fresh
.
This is a question Iris must endure because they want to impress on her that they are seafood connoisseurs now they’ve pledged allegiance to the island. One pipes up in a giddy declarative fashion that she knew immediately upon stepping off her flight twenty years ago that she was home. It is the level of boast still alive in this woman that gives away her own heritage as much as her penchant for pronouncing all her consonant sounds. She sees nothing idiotic about inquiring after freshness in the middle of a February snow squall.
Fuck my life, Iris thinks, as the former mainlanders talk incessantly about the merits of flash-freezing and the ideal way to batter cod. She half shakes her head and concludes the world is gone ass up in every way. Just nod and pretend ignorance, baygirl.
Smile. Smile for your money. Or starve.
The conversation turns to winter trawling which Paisley Shirt suggests they should reinstate now the stocks are stabilizing. And Iris says, without warning, that winter fishing causes severe mental illness in fishing communities along all coasts. The table falls silent and stares when Iris utters the word suicide.
Because it is more dangerous than summer fishing, which is fucking dangerous enough.
The fact that she has to even say these words discourages her faith in humanity. These individuals, all likely reasonable people, cannot discern for themselves why other reasonable people would be anxious atop the fierce North Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a January gale.
Worse than a gale even.
A gusting.
It is the gusting that takes you off your path worse than a gale. The persistence of never-ceasing wind is something you can adjust to, plan for and abide. The unpredictable nature of a gusting, though, is not worth living through. This aggressive gusting keeps all off-kilter. It is terrorism after every fashion. The most brutal aspect of it being that for a brief moment there is respite enough to once again manufacture some hope.
Iris is baffled that these people, with their great passionate joy for all things Newfoundland, have such a measly understanding of her stock. And the woman who first inquired after the freshness of this fish peers up at Iris through her purple-rimmed fashion glasses now with the expectant look of someone who often hears what she wants to hear because she can’t handle being told otherwise.
So Iris gives her the recitation on the freshest seafood on hand, skilfully prepared by their very own culinary master whose well-versed paws would (and will) squeeze the last essence of liveliness out of any creature.
And the woman is grateful and says she will order the salmon. She was always going to, she just needed Iris to reaffirm all the preconceived, ill or otherwise, notions she had of this restaurant and the calibre of people working in it. That made her feel at ease which made her feel at home which made her feel that spending all this time was the correct choice and not a waste of her life.
Usually we spend our winters down south, the woman says by way of explanation for having had to request any information from her waitress at all. Iris wishes she could tell Jo. Wishes she could angry text about what she must entertain on the daily.
But she can’t just text Jo anymore.
Not for this or anything. Not even in cases of actual emergencies is Iris meant to text, because Jo claims Iris doesn’t know the difference anymore. Iris has lost her ability to tell a campfire from house fire.
The extended overtime conditions she has been playing under have spaced her benchmarks apart in an inconceivable way and her voice breaks sporadically without warning. She stops speaking in the middle of a conversation and stares off into space as if some invisible hook has slid into her conscience and caught her up. She will stop walking in the street, disappear into a bathroom stall, close her eyes so people cannot see her thinking her thoughts. This: the only way to hide her feelings from invaders. It is worrisome, disheartening. And rude.
It is fucking rude to Jo and Harry the way Iris gets on.
As if this asshole was her family, even though Jo and Harry have been her family this whole time. They have been eating pasta together and going to the playground and wrapping presents on the living room floor. That’s what family does. A family overcooks the turkey and blows up balloons and uses napkins as band-aids because what kind of woman has fucking band-aids in her pockets anyway? A family naps all over the house on a rainy Sunday and spit washes the floor before company arrives on a Saturday night. Not for each other, for company. Jo and Iris don’t even get dressed when they are together. They spend whole days and nights bra-less in soft clothing.
Harry yelling from the other side of the locked bathroom door for Iris to let him in because he needs to tell her something while she is in the bath.
No, it cannot wait, his feeble yet insistent voice echoes through the hollow door as he kicks at it.
The wobble wobble against the frame was annoying and funny. Iris would sink herself under the water with just her face above the surface as she tried to negotiate with the tiny terrorist attempting to trespass on her private time. She had crossed her legs and covered her breasts on the off chance the cheap latch reinstalled poorly by the neighbourhood handyman gave way.
The neighbourhood handyman is not actually very handy. He is just a man that will fix things on the real cheap for single women around town. They all have him in their contacts under Mr. Fixit. They call him to turn off the water when a pipe bursts or relight the pilot light on the propane fireplace.
Why doesn’t Santa come in the front door? Harry had yelled urgently.
Iris was a wiper of Harry’s bum and is therefore a member of this particular slung together flock. So she is, was, patient when the boy child needed to tell her something while soaking in the tub because he doesn’t understand when she says he’s not allowed in because she’s naked.
But you see me naked!
He does not understand the wrongness in seeing Iris naked because she sleeps over at his house and that’s family. So when Iris had said she is nothing and has no one because this raging asshole is unkind to her, Jo wanted to scream that it is like saying her and Harry are nothing and no one. And they all know that is not what Iris meant, not now anyway, now that Jo has a boyfriend. It’s changed now but not for the better.
Things keep changing for the worse, Iris says aloud disbelievingly.
In these moments, Iris surveys all the broken hearts laid in front of her. Those she breaks herself and those broken by someone else. It is a horrifying vantage point yet she cannot look away or find an alternate route. Just this one way forward, where she slips and falls face first into the carnage.
Iris can’t manage to keep her feelings inside.
She stuffs them down with her fists, tucks her hand in, tries to edge these drawers closed. But they just won’t latch. In the process, she harms herself. Closes it tight on her own thin wrists. She bumps herself against doorways and windowsills. You can always tell when Iris is getting over another something. There are the little bruises and minor marks.
John says, Jesus, Iris, watch where you’re going.
Iris envisions herself swollen large, gigantic with his vicious treatment, each bruise present on the top layer surface. Underneath, the one before. Under that, further scar tissue, until each hard-healed layer stretches fully over the one belonging to her parents.
Iris’s mother would cook dinner when she had a boyfriend.
There would be clean hair, curled and pulled back in a loose elastic at the nape of her neck, V-neck sweaters in sweet colours like rose or plum, and a tidy bathroom sink clear of toothpaste globs recounting each parental brushing. There were never wine glas
s rings on the nightstand or a lack of tea bags in the tea jar. Iris’s mother would make elaborate meals like roast chicken and steamed vegetables for a man. She would peel sweet potatoes and slice carrots and jesus if she didn’t marinate meat in orange juice and soy sauce which was the ultimate gesture of devotion. There would be lots of pork for whatever new fellow was holding the television remote while he fell asleep on the sofa.
Napping on the sofa being highly indicative of the status of their relationship and thus calming. Sleeping men couldn’t walk away from you. Or, at least, not quickly.
Best to let them sleep on. Iris’s mother had disturbed many naps in her first marriage and was taught her lessons accordingly. Never wake a sleeping man. Or he’ll leave. And so Cynthia was the very best woman human version of herself for any Reg or Steve, but even this was not near enough or too much for the Regs and Steves so they would move on elsewhere to someone less needy. Iris then went back to eating pea soup from a can because it was the only thing in the cupboard.
Iris wanted a different kind of family than the kind of family she had. For a time, she had fastened an approximation together. Jo’s ingenuity and Harry’s lovability made it easy enough. Though she always knew that clock was ticking down. She could every day see how great they were and knew eventually some fellow would take her makeshift family from her.
And she was right. Chris did. But she could hardly hate on Chris for loving the same people she loved. If anything, he was a right smart dude. And it hurt a bunch that Jo was her person but she was no one’s person, so she yelled at Jo to not say she meant nothing to John. Saying she means nothing gives her nowhere to go.
The Mayor orders a round of pints while they wait for Big George, who is never in a hurry to meet anyone on time as a general rule of ruling importance. Iris orders the round off of Ben, who is trying to engage her in conversation. She whispers, don’t waste your time, and he infers the diners are thirsty for their pints. Ben hurries on to make some little thing easier on her because she looks so like she has been beat. Iris imagines crying into the checked tea towel, she would like to hide her face in fabric, but instead she throws it over her shoulder in resignation.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 18
