Luna (8 page)

Without really noticing what she was doing, Selena reached for her glass of water and took a sip. She forgot the long tables crowded with people, the noise, the heat. She was seeing Tony and Diane at their wedding in the church at Mallard, the one that was boarded up now. She remembered how they had kissed. Something about it had startled and upset her. A surge of envy had swept through her, and something else, something strange, an opening up, so powerful that her knees had almost given way right there by the church in her blue matron-of-honour dress.

She knew it was important. Funny, she thought, remembering the feeling. Once she had flipped on the radio and caught a singer in the middle of a song, and something, some note in his voice had done the same thing to her, had struck a sadness in her that was far beyond tears, that had nothing to do with tears. And once somebody had brought to a meeting a magazine that had one of Sally Macklin’s incomprehensible poems in it, and there was a line in that poem that had done the same thing to her as when Tony and Diane had kissed. And frightening as it was, she recognized it as something that was necessary to know, even though she didn’t understand what it meant. There was a part of her, some part buried deep inside, that knew what it meant, and she was satisfied by this, had never struggled to know more. If she thought about it at all, she thought that full understanding of its meaning would probably come to her one day, as naturally as giving birth to her children had, and until then, she was content just to know it was there.

But, she thought, looking back at Diane, there is some restraint bred into me that is as natural to me as breathing. Diane doesn’t have it. With Diane, anything was possible, she was like a man in that—while for
Selena, she knew it—there were no real choices. Her life had been all set out for her and she accepted it. She suddenly felt closed and tight beside her sister, and it made her angry with Diane.

“You don’t seem very excited,” Diane said, teasing.

“I don’t know what to say,” Selena said slowly, staring down at the food that was growing cold on her plate.

“I talked Tony into selling the farm before we lose all our equity, what little we have.”

“Oh, Diane …” Selena began, her voice filled with the dismay that was rapidly overwhelming her.

“I told you, Selena,” Diane said, “I want more out of life than this.”

“If you could just tell me …” Selena began, aware of the futile repetitiveness of her pleading. “What is it? What is it you want? I mean, really?” Diane lifted her coffee cup, then set it down again. “You’ve got family here,” Selena said, feeling helpless because this was not really what she wanted to say, but unable to find the words that would shape what she was feeling. Diane snorted, and Selena said hotly, “You’ll see if that matters or not. You’ve got friends in this community—people who care what happens to you. They won’t care in the city.” Diane turned her head sharply to Selena, and her cheeks flushed red.

“Oh, sure,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Safe in your mother’s womb forever.” Selena blinked and looked away. “There’s a whole enormous world out there …”

Selena raised her head and looked around the hall at all the chewing, talking people, at their wind and sun reddened faces, at the women’s large, rough hands that gave them away, no matter what they wore or said. She wanted to cry. How many times had she seen them here—their children, their grandparents, their high school sweethearts, their neighbours, their enemies, their secret liaisons—all together in this hall, eating and talking, smiling and laughing, as if this could go on forever just the way it always had, as if there were no hardship, no injustice, no ugliness, no evil.

“There’s things out there neither one of us has dreamt of …” Diane said, her voice reflective.

“Like what?” Selena retorted. Diane’s eyes shifted out beyond the heads of all the people in the hall, beyond, it seemed, the hall itself. What was she seeing? Her eyes so bright, her face smoothing, changing somehow. Suddenly Selena was angry, she wanted to jolt that look off her face.

“You’re wrong,” she said tightly. “If you think life’s any better out there, just because there’s more people and more things to do. They’re just as unhappy out there. Maybe more. You’ll find that out.” Selena’s face felt hot and her throat was quivering.

“So you do admit that not everybody is happy,” Diane teased, laughing.

Later, when they were both in the kitchen doing dishes, Selena tried again to talk to her. But after listening to her for a moment in silence, Diane finally turned to her and give her that same long, searching look, with an expression on her face that was almost tender, as if she were the older sister. It so embarrassed and disconcerted Selena that she fell silent.

As she was taking the wet dishes from the draining rack and drying them, Selena found herself thinking again of that feeling she had had when Tony and Diane kissed outside the church after their wedding. Had Diane had such a moment somewhere, sometime herself? Was that what impelled Diane? If it was, did that mean that Diane understood it and that it had something to do with her leaving? But if your world seems complete to you where you are, she wondered, why do you need to go someplace else? Especially a woman, when we carry all our possibilities around inside ourselves, in our wombs.

Helen came hurrying into the kitchen.

“Hurry up, everybody, it’s time to start the program.” Everyone left the kitchen then, filed out into the hall and found places to sit.

First Phoebe played two pieces on the piano, losing her place only once and having to start a passage again. The three of the younger girls, eleven and twelve-year-olds, sang a song. At last it was time for the part of the program everybody had been waiting for. Selena, Diane, Helen, Ella, Ruth and Rhoda made their way through the crowd to the stage and arranged themselves in a group. Helen nodded to Phoebe, she began to play “Clementine,” and the women began to sing the song that Selena and Rhoda had composed.

“In a ranchhouse, in a valley,

Baking apple pies,

Lived the daughter of a rancher,

Louise Olnyk was her name.”

Then the chorus, which had been the easy part to write:

Selena had produced the next verse by herself:

Then back to the chorus. The song went on to tell about their courtship and marriage, their four children. The audience laughed or chuckled now and then, and Louise and Barclay, sitting at the centre of the head table, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, turned in their chairs to see the singers better. Barclay laughed, but everybody could see the tears shining in Louise’s eyes. Louise, famous for her wonderful pies, a rancher’s daughter who had deserted her family’s way of life to marry a grain farmer, her oldest son killed in a car accident when he was seventeen, drunk, driving too fast.

When their song was finished, the singers went back to their chairs amidst furious applause and laughter. There was a long break in the program while the people in the skit disappeared out of the chattering crowds, and the children began to move around again, a few of them running, sliding on the freshly polished floor. Then the skit was announced, the audience grew quiet, people hushed the children and took them on their
laps, and the actors filed onstage, holding papers with their lines written on them. Everybody tried to guess who each of them was.

Helen always organized these things, but Diane had written most of the skit, she was acknowledged to be the best at it, and everybody laughed especially hard when they realized she was playing Barclay. They had persuaded one of the teenage boys to play Louise; he was quite a bit shorter than Diane, who seemed even taller because of the straw hat she was wearing. It was immediately recognized as Barclay’s work hat. He was famous for it. It was so beaten up, dusty and stained, that there was a bet on to see when he would get a new one. One of their kids must have smuggled it out of the house, Selena thought, laughing.

Diane read her lines with gusto, making everybody laugh. The skit was a mock wedding between a ranch family and a farm family, with each side so mad at the other they were barely willing to go along with the wedding. It ended with a brawl, and Barclay and Louise escaping out a mock window.

Everybody in the audience knew it hadn’t happened that way, but they all knew, too, that it might have, that there was no love lost, when it came right down to it, between farmers and cattlemen and never had been, but that only made them laugh harder. As they wiped their eyes and grinned at each other, they said, “It’s a wonder it don’t” and “Isn’t that the truth!”

Helen’s husband, Harry, rose to make the presentation of the gift of money collected at the door. Then Louise and Barclay begun to unwrap gifts which Phoebe and several of the other girls carried to the head table. The men began to stand up, to move about the hall and to collect in groups here and there. Cathy crawled up onto the stage and began to bang on the piano until Lana, Lola’s oldest, came and pulled her away. Tammy wandered over to where Selena was sitting and leaned against her legs. Selena leaned forward and smoothed her fine hair and replaced her barrette. Soon she’ll be gone, she thought, and already she missed her.

She looked around the crowd for her own boys. Jason was just going out the door with a group of boys his own age. They would probably play scrub on the ball diamond until dark. She couldn’t see Mark anywhere. Probably he had gone somewhere for the hour or so before the dance
started. To Simca’s with Jerry, most likely. Kent and Tony were standing talking together, their heads close. They were almost the same height.

Kent, his fair hair glinting in the overhead light … tonight when they went to bed together, he would want her. She had felt it all day, when he had come to help with the old square baler because it was balking and wouldn’t knot the string right, and in the way he had carefully not looked at her whenever she had passed him and the kids were in the room. Tonight she felt herself wanting him, it was the one thing that was sure still, in the midst of so much that was changing. In a few years they would celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. Or would they? The question jolted her. It had never occurred to her that they might not.

The women were rising, going back to the kitchen to finish the cleaning up, crumbling the long paper tablecloths, soiled now with gravy stains, bits of spilled food and coffee rings, while behind them the men had begun to stack the chairs and move them, to collapse the tables and store away the ones that wouldn’t be needed for the dance. Reluctantly, Selena got up and began to help remove the tablecloths, to crush them and throw them away.

The musicians moved onto the stage and started up their sound system. Out of the corner of her eye Selena saw Brian come in from outside and stand alone in the doorway. Phoebe saw him, had probably been waiting for him to arrive, and walked over to him. They stood together talking, not touching. The hall was clearing fast as the tables were rearranged or removed to make a dance floor. As Selena finished and went toward the bathroom she saw Kent arranging the tables along the far wall, then draping his jacket over a chair at one end of the tables near the middle of the room.

When she came out again, her feet and legs aching, but with fresh makeup on and her hair combed, she sat beside him. He had brought her a rye and Coke from the bar and she took a sip, relaxing at last. She had been at the hall since four, had hardly sat down in all that time.

The tempo in the hall had slowed down, the air had changed, the mood was less filled with humour. The musicians were tuning their instruments now, the tables were filling, and through the open outer door
the summer night hung, vast and friendly. Phoebe came up to them with Brian following her.

“Is it okay if I go to Chinook with Brian? There’s a dance there, too, for his mom and dad’s friends.”

Kent said, although Phoebe had spoken to Selena, “I want you back here by one in time to go home with us.”

“Oh, Daddy …” she began, but Kent was looking past her to Brian, who stood back deferentially. He came forward now and leaned toward Kent to hear what he was saying.

“Okay,” Brian said, and he took Phoebe’s hand and led her away, Phoebe smiling up at him.

Mark had returned and was lounging in the doorway with Jerry and a few other boys. Jason, his shirt-tail untucked, came blinking into the light with his friends and went into the kitchen, probably to get a drink of water. The band began to play “The Anniversary Waltz” and everyone at the tables stood and watched Louise and Barclay circle the floor a few times, an embarrassed, solitary pair on the wide dance floor. After everyone had clapped, they all began to dance too. Soon the floor was full of waltzing couples.

Selena felt the hard muscle of Kent’s back under her hand, remembering how, when she had been only Phoebe’s age, they had gone out to his truck and spent half the night necking, and later, making love. How her body had been then, like Phoebe’s, soft, yet tough, and how Kent had buried himself in her, as if she were everything.

She could feel the heat of his body radiating into her palm. She wished they could go home, go to bed. A wave of tenderness for him rose up in her and she lifted her hand and rested it on the back of his neck. He gave her a warning glance and twirled her fast around a corner.

Then it was almost midnight, the band had stopped playing and gone outside for a smoke. On one side of the dance floor, four or five little boys were stacking white plastic cups into pyramids. They had apparently gone all around the hall and gathered the empty cups. They had so many that there were three separate piles of them, and a couple of little boys concentrating over each pile. Adults at nearby tables watched them, calling out good-natured advice.

“Want another drink?” Kent asked. Selena shook her head no, watching the children. “Careful,” Kent called, laughing, to the nearest boy, who was trying to set just one more glass onto his pyramid, which now reached above his head. He was too little and, stretching to reach, he swayed a little, lost his balance, the pyramid wavered, and then all the cups came tumbling down. All around the hall the people who hadn’t noticed the children turned to see what was going on, while those who had, laughed and made a collective “Ohhh,” of regret.