Luna (27 page)

“I hear they’re serving veal cordon bleu for supper this year,” Rena said.

“What on earth is that?” Selena asked.

“Search me,” Selma said. The same waiter had returned and took drink orders from each of them, then left again.

“It’s veal with ham and cheese inside,” Phyllis said. “It’s good, but what a nuisance to make, and none of the men will eat it anyway.” Selena was beginning to relax and enjoy herself. The same waiter returned, served their drinks, and left. It’s so lovely, she thought, to be sitting at a table with real flowers on it, and a tablecloth, no kids arguing and spilling their milk, no grumpy husband, and me not jumping up and down every two minutes to get something. And all my friends around me.

Laverne asked, “Do the men do the cooking too?”

“No,” Lola said. “The women do it first. Get everything planned and ready, and a couple of them stay in the kitchen all night to show the men what to do.” She had to laugh at this.

“Men are such klutzes,” Rena said. “Can you imagine them getting a meal ready for a hundred people?” They all laughed at this.

“John couldn’t boil water if he had to,” Laverne said.

“I keep Martin right out of the kitchen,” Selma said. “I told him, I don’t tell you how to run your ranch, and you can just stay out of my kitchen.”

“There’s Rhoda over there,” Diana said, waving at a far table. “I don’t see Ruth,” Selena said.

“Ruth! Hah!” Rena said angrily. “Buck wouldn’t let her out of the house, much less give her the money for a ticket.”

“I’ll never understand why some men have to be that way,” Selma said, sighing. A hush fell around the table, a chill.

Diana said, matter-of-factly, “She shouldn’t let him treat her like that.” None of them said anything, thinking perhaps of Ruth, at home instead of with them. Rhea looked at each of them, one at a time, her eyes flashing. Selena felt herself blushing under Rhea’s gaze, and didn’t know why. Diana, Lola and Phyllis had their heads together, chattering to each other softly so the older women couldn’t hear them. Selena took the moment to look up and down the long hall slowly, drinking in the atmosphere and the sights. She felt herself lifted somehow, felt lighter, out of herself in some strange way, unable to draw herself back in and down, into her own body. She felt a part of everything in the hall, all the women, and she rather liked the feeling, unfamiliar as it was.

The lights had been turned low so that the candles on the table seemed to glow more brightly, casting rounded, golden shadows, in the light of which all the women’s hair gleamed. It caught their eyes too, and made them shine, and the many colours of their best dresses softened and blended into a muted rainbow of colour. Their jewellery sent flashes of light around the room, and in that soft light, even the plainest, most worn-out woman looked somehow pretty.

Feeling as though she had risen above the crowd, was seeing them all from a height, Selena was overcome by their beauty, by the way her friends and neighbours and relatives, all the women of her community had been transformed, as if by some magic she knew nothing about. As if femininity were a precious treasure that she was seeing in the abstract, for the first time. It took her breath away. She brought her eyes back to the table, to Rhea, sitting at its head. Women flanked Rhea on each side. Behind her, as she sat facing the women at her table, with her back to the rest of the celebrants, sat more Women. She looked large, the largest woman in the room, seated as she was, at the head of their table in the
centre of the hall, which was the centre of community lite. Selena, surprised, studied her, trying to figure out why she looked bigger than all of them. It must be because she has on the only black dress in the room, she told herself.

The waiter was back again, bending, putting his face close to each woman’s cheek as he took orders for drinks again. There was something faintly offensive, wrong, about the way he acted, his—was it fatherliness? No, more like seduction. As he put his face close to Diana’s, Selena saw suddenly that her sister was beautiful. Had she always been beautiful? No, surely she hadn’t been, or Selena would have seen it before. In the company of all these women, Selena thought Diana was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. So tall, so richly-coloured, like a flower herself. Wasn’t there a goddess named Diana? A huntress, wasn’t she? You’d never know to look at her, that she’s the mother of two children, a woman long used to the ways of the marriage bed. She looks like a … virgin.

Embarrassed by her own thoughts, she dropped her eyes. A virgin, she said to herself disdainfully. I must be getting drunk. But in that moment with her head down, a scent she had not smelled before crept into her nostrils. She tried to sniff discreedy and it rose, filling her head, a sweet, heavy smell, rich and beautiful. Puzzled, she turned to Selma, but Selma and Laverne were talking, apparently noticing nothing strange.

“I always thought I might have made a good nurse,” Selma was saying. “I always liked looking after sick people, doing things for them. Mother said I was good at it.” She sighed.

“Why didn’t you go into nursing?” Laverne asked.

“You know how it is. I got married right after high school. Mother couldn’t talk me out of it. First thing I knew, I had a baby, and then another one.” She looked down at her place, touching the ends of her knife and fork, straightening them. Laverne sighed, too.

“I was raised in a time when you just got married, you didn’t think about it. Just got your MRS and that was it. I used to play school when I was a kid, pretending I was a teacher.” She laughed. “Yes,” she said, sighing, “I wanted to be a teacher.”

“Are you sorry?” Selma asked, watching Laverne with sympathetic eyes.

“Not really,” Laverne said, after a minute during which she stared at the flame of the candle in front of her, her eyes having turned soft with sadness. “I raised my family. They all turned out okay, and now …” She shrugged. “John and I are ready to retire … And we had it a lot better than our grandmothers,” she pointed out, her voice becoming brisker.

“Still, it seems a shame,” Selma said, sounding as if she were speaking to herself. “There’s a lot of thwarted hopes in this room,” Selma said, glancing around.

Soft music had begun to play over the public address system.

“I don’t suppose it’s any easier for the men,” Laverne said.

“It isn’t the same for the men,” Phyllis broke in. “They get to run things—the ranches and the farms and the businesses—none of us do.” She sounded angry, and raised her drink to her mouth, holding it there for a second without drinking.

Rena said, “Look at Carmen Harris. She’s been running that ranch of hers since her husband died, must be forty years ago.”

“Yeah,” Lola said, setting down her glass. “You’d think she was a man if it wasn’t for her front. She dresses like one, cuts her hair like one.” Selena laughed.

“She even talks like one. I heard her talking with Joe Ewan in the service station one day when I was buying camper fuel. I had to laugh she sounded so much like Kent.”

“She’s nothing!” Phyllis said. “I heard about that woman in Montana—my aunt knows her—she isn’t even five feet tall, and the men came over one day and found her with a horse stretched out in the corral, cutting him.”

“No kidding!” They were all surprised, and a little disapproving.

“That’s not a word of a lie,” Phyllis said. “She was all by herself and she had this stallion stretched out, ready to cut him.”

“Is she married?” Rena asked.

“Yes, but he lets her do whatever she wants. She was raised on the place, rides, breaks the horses, everything. She told my aunt how when she was young on the big ranch next to theirs, they used to hire convicts from the state prison to work the place. One time she was out riding a
long way from home and she saw this convict coming on horseback straight for her, just as fast as that horse would take him. And she saw right away that she was in big trouble, so she spurred her horse and rode maybe five miles as fast as her horse would go, with him right behind her. But she was better on a horse, and finally, he gave up and turned back. She told my aunt she still got scared, thinking about it.”

“That reminds me of a story about my mother’s cousin,” Lola said. “They settled out here in the homesteading days, used to raise horses, blood horses, you probably heard about them. Anyway, Cousin Emma wasn’t afraid of anything and she used to ride all over the place, even after she got married, even after she had kids. Sort of a wildness in her, I guess. Anyway, one time there was a horse sale maybe ten miles from where their place was and she rode over with her husband. But after a few hours, she decided to go home, so she started out by herself on her horse. Just as she was riding out from that sale, she looked back, and she saw this Indian, he’d been at the sale with some of his people, a young, good-looking guy, I guess; she saw him mounting his horse. It made her a little nervous, so she started out trotting, and when she looked back, he was trotting too. So she picked up speed, and when she looked back, he’d picked up speed too—well, they rode like that, him following her, most of the way home. When she got close to home, she just rode full out that last mile or two, and that Indian was right behind her. She said she rode into that yard so fast, she could hardly get the horse to stop, and when she looked back, that Indian was gone. Just disappeared.”

“The things that happen to people,” Laverne said, shaking her head.

“Funny, isn’t it,” Rena said. “Remember when you were young. Horses bucking all the time. You never thought anything of it. Just got on and did what had to be done, but now, if you knew a horse was going to buck, you’d sure think twice before you got on him.”

“Getting old,” Selma said. “It’s sure no fun.”

Lola said, “I leave all the cutting—calves, horses—up to Doug. I ride with him, but I sure don’t cut things.” She shuddered.

“It goes to show what you can do if you want to,” Diana said.

“Who wants to?” Phyllis asked, her voice filled with loathing, so that everybody laughed, looked at each other, then laughed some more.

It occurred to Selena to think how different the evening would be if their men were with them. They wouldn’t talk so loudly, they’d speak only to each other, not to the men, and the men would monopolize the conversation. And they would make jokes about the flowers on the table, and how they couldn’t see without the lights on, and imply how silly the whole thing was. No, she was glad for once the men weren’t with them.

Shrieks of laughter came from the table behind Diana and they all craned their necks to see what the cause of the commotion was. Diana leaned over to a young woman sitting directly behind her.

“What’s so funny, Darlene?” she asked. The woman beside Darlene was laughing so hard tears were trickling down her cheeks. Darlene pointed to their waiter, who was walking away, his face red.

“It’s that crazy Sheila,” Darlene said. “She pinched him!”

“What did she say?” the others asked, unable to hear over the music and the laughter.

“My mascara’s going to run if I don’t stop laughing,” Darlene said, wiping her eyes carefully with the edge of her hand. She was quite drunk. In fact, here and there around the hall, a number of women had had too much to drink.

While Diana explained about the cause of the laughter, the kitchen doors were propped open, the smell of cooking food rushed out into the hall, and the waiters began to carry out plates of food and to serve them.

Selena said, “It feels funny to be served by men.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” Rena agreed.

“I’m just going to enjoy it,” Phyllis said, but she giggled nervously.

The noise in the hall was lessening now, dropping to a steady, low buzz, as everyone was served and began to eat. The waiter came again, carrying wine, and filled each glass. Selena’s head was light, she could feel a warmth in her cheeks, it felt good, and she sighed happily. But someone at the next table was in tears. Too surprised to even point this out to anyone, she watched. It was Nadine Tomas, a woman a little older than she was, a farmer’s wife, someone she hardly knew, although she had
known of her all her life. The women on each side of her were comforting her, and gradually, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, and sniffing, she got control of herself.

Somehow Selena wasn’t surprised to see someone in tears. It was all too beautiful, it was all too different from the way things usually were for them, she could almost cry herself.

When dessert came, they all oohed and aahed over it, the first strawberries of the season to arrive in town. They rested on sponge cake and were smothered in whipped cream.

“The cake’s a little dry,” Laverne remarked, poking at it with her fork.

“Coarse, too,” Rena said. “They must have bought it.”

“Farm cream, though,” Phyllis pointed out, and popped a forkful into her mouth.

“Yummy,” they all said, and cleaned their plates, even the best cooks, who were disdainful of the efforts of others, ate everything, if only because someone else had cooked it.

One of the waiters had rolled down his sleeves and put on a sports-coat. He stood at the front now, tapping at his microphone to make sure it was working.

“It’s time for a little entertainment, ladies,” he said, standing too close to his microphone so that his t’s popped and slurred.

Selena looked around the hall at all the faces turned toward him: at her sister in her scarlet dress, at Rhea, big and powerful-looking, the roses on her shoulder glowing and casting their scent down the table, at Phyllis and Lola, so young, and Laverne, stout and growing old, and at Selma and Rena, a few years older than her, and into the first stages of menopause.

Thinking that without meaning to, she was startled. Of course, that was what was coming next. She thought back to her first menstruation. She wasn’t sure how old she had been, but she remembered the occasion of it, the sensation, the shock and awe as she stared at the blood staining her panties, followed by a surging sense of well-being, of things being right. And now it was almost over. All those years passed like so much breath, come and gone. One day she had been a shy virgin, and then she was a woman, one whose life was rich and full, and all that blood, years
and years of monthly bleeding, had brought her her children, her husband, a house full of things that spoke of the moments of her life.