Season of Fury and Wonder

by Sharon Butala

  “I hope that wasn’t the turkey,” Vera said.

  “Whose parent are you?” Agnes inquired.

  “Over there.” She pointed with an upward jerk of her chin toward a handsome boy of about thirty, who had taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Agnes noticed that ties were coming off, or maybe nobody had worn one. Some new fashion. “He is Emma’s nephew Nick.” She shifted gears: “Once married – I was, I mean – to Emma’s younger brother, Malcolm.”

  “Oh, my god,” Agnes said. After a pause, she added, “Really, who cares?”

  “You said it,” Vera replied, glancing up at Agnes’s face, and then quickly away again. “I have three daughters. I usually spend all holidays with one of them, but Nick seemed to feel he needed to have his mother for Thanksgiving at least once before she kicks the bucket, so I got on a plane, and here I am. Imagine, all that way and the dinner isn’t even at his house.” She had crossed one slim leg over the other and was clasping her knee with both hands, fingers laced together. Once, when she was a child, Agnes had done that at the kitchen table, but she’d pushed her knee as far from her chest as she could, her hands had slipped, she had fallen forward and banged her face against the table edge so hard her teeth had cut right through her lip. What could anybody do about that? Nothing. She remembered the blood and how frightened she had been.

  Her memory took her now, swiftly, to the time the old bastard had stood reading to the class in his deep voice, the book open on his palms held chest-high and, as he read, he had moved his hips ever so slowly against the edge of her desk – she sat in the front row – back and forth, back and forth, and she knew that the bulge in his trousers – she could say it now – was his lumpy penis pressed against her desk, and her face and chest not a foot away from it. He rocked back a couple of inches, then forward to press the wood again, and she knew that what he was doing wasn’t right. Though she had tried not to, she had stared at the front of his pants, her elbows bent and resting on her desk, chin and mouth covered by her hands. Such a stupid thing, yet for seventy-five or more years she had remembered it; she was still troubled by it. I am still troubled by it.

  Emma was calling Arthur to come and start carving.

  “Turkey’s ready.”

  “Food’s going on the table,” another woman called, her face lost behind a steaming bowl of something-or-other. Much commotion, mothers organizing children, adults beginning to move, still chatting with each other, finishing conversations, lagging, nobody wanting to appear too eager, Geordie and his son Dan at the sideboard opening wine from identical bottles.“Should have been opened a half-hour ago,” Dan was grumbling, while behind his back his father rolled his eyes to the room. Once she and two of her best girlfriends from school had looked up the old bastard’s address in the phone book and on a Sunday after mass had strolled nervously past his house. It was snowing, and the whole town settled deeply into its Sunday quiet, with the snow falling so thickly, big soft flakes that spread on their hair and the shoulders of their coats, that, subdued as they were by the sight of the cottage where their principal lived, they could hear the falling snow whispering around them as it fell. As if to comfort them. What hard little girls we were. But, no, we were not hard at all: We were weakness itself. She was afraid she would weep.

  And the cloakroom – this time her turn in it when the principal was out of the room, as he so often was. A boy kissing her, fumbling at her sweater, the other kids calling, “He’s coming, he’s coming,” and the rush of their footsteps as they tried to get into their seats before the door opened and the old bastard caught them. Who was that boy? She knew she shouldn’t allow that touch on her sweater, was terrified of getting caught, but – but what? Joey Plamondon, that’s who it was. All the girls had crushes on him. I must have been a sex maniac, and then, laughing out loud, at thirteen we were all sex maniacs. Even those of us who didn’t know what sex was. Even as she tried, she could not now make out what to think about that realization. How puzzling it all was. Still.

  Arthur was bending over her again.

  “Take my arm, mother.”

  “I can get up myself,” she said, suddenly angry, although not at him. As he bent toward her, his eyes fixed on her shoulder rather than her face, she caught a glimpse of something there – her little boy, gone so long ago from her. She touched his face. He moved his gaze to her eyes then, and she saw such – although momentarily only and a shock to both of them – undisguised tenderness in his. For that instant, her breath stopped, she couldn’t catch it, getting out of the chair was harder than she thought.

  “All these people,” she said into his ear, “I’m not sure who half of them are.”

  “It is confusing,” he agreed. She was on her feet now, straightening her dress while he waited.

  “Not confusing,” she said. “It’s just that who they are doesn’t matter anymore. Who they are is not relevant to whatever matters now.”

  He was frowning, thinking, as she knew he often did, that she was batty, or getting there. Roland Frank came back into her mind and then the old bastard and the tricks he got up to. Yet hadn’t he also brought her forward into life? Hadn’t he also brought her here today? Such a mess life was, such a glorious, ridiculous mess.

  They stood in the doorway now, he was leading her to the chair at the head of the table where they usually put her, although they then ignored her, passing food around her, filling other glasses while she would sit in silence amidst the noise, eating little, slowly, and thinking of the foolish, precious past.

  DOWNSIZING

  Inspired by John Cheevers’s “The Swimmer”, 1964

  David and Richard had died, and Lucinda decided to think of her second two – or numbers three and four – Cody Mitchell and Walter Toews, as mistakes. They had been, in the current parlance, nerds when they were all in high school together, so lost in some puzzling self-satisfaction that they had been oblivious to the actual fact of their nerdiness, and, although she had hoped for improvement, they had turned out to be, still, nerds. She had begun with them because they were easy to find, having never moved more than twenty miles from their high school in rural southern Saskatchewan, and because she hadn’t thought of them as presenting much of a challenge.

  Cody and Walter were quickly crossed off the list she had sat up most of one night compiling, first off the top of her head, and then by consulting her high school yearbooks, then her university yearbooks – she had graduated long ago, in the years when her university still had yearbooks – and then what she could find of her husband Sylvestre’s yearbooks from his college in Quebec. After his death two years earlier, she hadn’t gotten around to donating them to his alumni society, a lapse in her otherwise efficient organization of the dreaded, but inevitable downsizing project. Maybe she should think of aged Cody and Walter as practice.

  She hadn’t made a second trip to see Jimmy Sheehan, but went straight from the café where she had met Walter for a thoroughly dismal lunch – I mean, how dull and self-obsessed is it possible to be? – to Jimmy’s law office just down the street in the town of Empire where they had all attended high school sixty years earlier. Her best friend from those years, Marnie Massie, who had married a farmer down the road the day after graduation, kept Lucinda up on the latest news about their old classmates, which was how she knew that Jimmy’s wife was now completely gaga and in a care home. She knew also that Jimmy had re-opened his law office and that it was said he was working mostly for oil companies in the area. She hoped that he would not be like the first two – or numbers three and four – and reminded herself that the few times all those years ago they had gone out together had been reasonably pleasant.

  Jimmy invited her into his inner sanctum and sat her across his desk from him as if she were a client, in a wooden chair of the type that law offices hadn’t seen since the nineteenth century. He then leaned back and placed his hands across what would have been on anybody else a belly but that on him was closer to a basin, and
waited with an apparently disinterested patience. She would have recognized him anywhere, but alas, this was not a good thing: still pale, slight and not tall, still bespectacled and prim. What was it she had once liked about him enough to put his name on the list? His calm, she decided. Having herself come from a home always chaotic with parental disagreement and anger, she had liked his composure and evident patience.

  “What can I help you with?”

  “Jimmy, I just came to visit you, I’m not here on business.” She gave him her best smile, turning its full brightness on him, widening her eyes and willing them to gleam and hold his.“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t take regular clients anymore anyway – divorces, wills, property sales, neighbours suing neighbours, that kind of thing.” They made desultory conversation for another few moments during which, in response to his refusal to engage beyond the most superficial level, she grew irritated and decided to get to the point.

  “I understand that you’ve – to all intents – lost your wife. I too, have lost my husband. You and I were good friends many years ago. Do you think we could revive that friendship – I mean, now that both of us are alone?” Look at the expression on his face, she told herself: baffled, an urge to laugh quickly suppressed – no, he didn’t suppress it, it died a natural death – and now, he was beginning to look…she wasn’t sure exactly what. “Oh, come on, Jimmy,” she said, no longer hiding her exasperation. It had been a long morning, a long lunch, and now this. “I am not suggesting we sell your firstborn, or burn down your office and run for the tropics.” He had stiffened and pushed his chair back from his desk.

  “Well, gosh, Lucy,” he said. “You always were the unconventional one, weren’t you?”

  She was staring hard at him, trying to find the tiniest spark of interest, which she might be able to blow into a flame. “No,” he said. He thrust his chair back the rest of the way and stood. “I cannot imagine what goes on in that head of yours. You always did have nutty ideas about what constituted fun. Always did have to go too far.” He had come around his desk to stand pointedly by her chair, so that she rose slowly, and as he kept on walking to his door, opening it and standing there, she felt she had no choice but to follow him.

  At the doorway, she resisted the urge to caress his cheek in the faint hope of causing him a stroke. “You have become a narrow man,” she told him, still smiling. “I had hoped you had grown more open-minded as you aged, but you have grown more closed.”

  “You know nothing about me.” He put his face close to hers, and his eyes radiated pure malice. “I…never…liked…you,” he hissed. “And I like you less now.”

  “Now Jimmy,” she answered gently, as if she were his mother, when in fact she was not and never had been someone to toy with: “You know that first part is not true.”

  It dawned on her as she was climbing back into her car rental that her old rejection of him still rankled and had, over the years, burned into hate. She hardly knew what to make of his tenacity, and for a minute recognized that perhaps, as a young woman, she had been a bit too casual with the affection of boys like Jimmy. In any case, strike him off the list too. That meant three down. No, five.

  When she had told her daughter what she was planning, Julianne was full of disapproval, despite approaching middle-age and being divorced, with no man on the horizon.

  “Honestly, Mother,” she had said, “What crazy thing are you up to now.” It wasn’t a question.

  “If you don’t take some kind of action,” Lucinda told her in as reasonable a tone as she could muster, “you will wind up alone, Julianne, and, believe me, when you’re old and a woman, that is no fun at all.” But Julianne only saw her mother as demeaning herself, and also, Lucinda noticed for the first time, harbouring some sadly delusional ideas about her own attractiveness.

  “He will not fall from the sky into your arms. I know this. Just look at the statistics.” This, Lucinda had done and the male-female ratio itself, never mind the unattached male-to-female ratio, not to mention the plethora of fifty-year-old divorcées perfectly willing to marry old men, were more than merely disheartening. But Julianne was lost in her complacency, and Lucinda’s warning wasted.

  “I’m not a bad person,” Lucinda had said afterward to her neighbour, Alicia, whose husband had left her as soon as the kids hit university. “My goal isn’t to entrap some unwilling male – I’m a reasonable person – it’s just to offer them what I want for myself and which is usually what they want, too. Most men don’t even know what they want, besides the impossible, and, failing that, to have their dead wives back again. I think I’m doing the only thing that makes any practical sense. In the end, we would both win.”

  Alicia had shrugged her shoulders and said, “Lord knows I wish I had a partner. If you can pull it off…” She sighed and, switching gears, said, “I’ll die of envy.” Lucinda had pointed out that there was no reason she couldn’t do this herself, but it was pretty clear that Alicia just wasn’t into such a thing. It puzzled Lucinda as to why not, but then she had always found people puzzling, now that she thought of it. They seemed to hanker after some mysterious spiritual thing that Lucinda couldn’t identify and, as far as she could tell, neither could they. While she knew what would make her happy and was going after it in a forthright and honest way. And, also, at least she knew these men. It’s not as if they were on a dating site and total strangers, and one of them might be a psychopath. But Alicia clearly thought her friend’s plan was pretty suspect, although when asked, she was unable to tell Lucinda why, any more than Julianne had been able to. Finally, she confessed.

  “I called an old, very serious boyfriend about a year after Jack abandoned me. I’d been in love with him, I heard he was divorced, and I just…but I had to drink two glasses of wine first to get up the courage to call him.”

  “What happened?” Lucinda prompted. Alicia made a face, looking away from Lucy.

  “He couldn’t scramble away from me fast enough. Told me all about his wonderful new wife, how he had found the woman of his dreams, was the luckiest man on earth, and all that baloney. I could never face the humiliation a second time. It was just too awful.”

  Adolph, called by his besotted older sisters “Addie” when they were all young, number four on her list – or number six, depending on whether she counted the two who were dead – was waiting at the airport for her when she arrived in Regina, telling her there was no point in her taking the bus or renting a car when he had to be there anyway to pick up some machinery parts. When she had said she would be stranded with him then without a car, he laughed and said he’d make sure she got back to the airport just fine.

  They started out by shaking hands, but then she set down her carry-on bag, and, to his evident surprise, put her arms around him, tilting her face upward to kiss the cheek he finally proffered, although she had been aiming for his lips. When she stepped back, still touching his arms above his elbows, she noted that his weather-and-wind-darkened cheeks were flushed, and she wanted to laugh out loud, but also to chide him.

  “Didn’t we love each other once?” she said, seizing his eyes with her, she hoped, dancing ones. She could see that he still didn’t know how to deal with her; his response involved mouth movements but no sound until he muttered, “Yeah, I guess so.” She picked up her carry-on, linked his arm – he still didn’t seem to know that he should crook his and pull her a little closer to him – as he walked her out of the airport and across the parking lot through a thin snowfall to his truck. Oh, those farm boys she’d grown up with. What a sorry lot, she thought affectionately, although the best of them steady and strong.

  “It’ll warm up in a minute,” he said, once they were both in the truck. “I just made it on time; had some trouble with a yearling. Finally got him back in.”

  “Are you still ranching full time?” she said, her tone somewhere between surprise and disapproval. Whoops.

  “Didn’t I tell you that?” They had exchanged a few short letters before she infor
med him she was coming to see him.

  “You said you were thinking of selling and moving into town, so I thought you had given up ranching. I thought that was why you had time to come and pick me up.”

  They approached the exit now, and he was reaching through the window to put his parking ticket into the machine. Watching him, she saw the power was still there in his broad shoulders, and the sureness of his movement. Lucinda smiled to herself and relaxed, slipping her hands into her opposite sleeves in what she recognized, with a slight caution to herself, as a satisfied way. She hadn’t meant to be calculating, that is, beyond the making of the list, but had to accept that she was being calculating – no, deliberate – in the words she chose to say and the way she said them. But how else to do this? These men were a wary lot who never seemed to know what was good for them.

  “We got a long drive ahead of us to Empire,” he reminded her.

  “The better to get reacquainted,” she told him, giving him her twinkling smile, and in the way he smiled back, she knew he was truly glad she had come.

  “I got Maisie from the next place to get the guest bedroom ready for you. I gotta admit that since I lost Alice I haven’t been the best housekeeper in the world. Maisie cleaned up a little for you, too.”

  “Is Maisie your girlfriend?” Might as well get to the point. He laughed.

  “Don’t you remember Maisie Weens? She married Bill Wenzel. Bill’s as alive as you and me. She just works out a bit like that to bring in a little cash. Bill rules the roost and, just between you and me, he’s a little on the stingy side.” They were approaching the edge of the city, and now drove out in the countryside where skiffs of crusted snow rested under shrubs and against rocks.