Liz Harmer

Farm Share

At his band’s first performance, Christian finally became aware of Leah, of the existence of Leah, of Leah’s pretty eyes, and of her womanly shape, hips especially, full round hips. She wouldn’t need him to tell her this, later, though he would anyway. She sat in the sparse audience limply shaking a maraca fashioned out of a plastic water bottle filled with beads and beans.

Leah, meanwhile, knew all about Christian: forty-five years old and married to his third wife, father of four, step-father of who knew how many, a man who had no trouble with women. Rather than resisting the sea of gossip, he ran into and soaked himself in it.

            He played ukulele, he smiled, he looked at her. His wife in the audience only a few seats away and he stared at her, at Leah, stared at her and crooned and tapped his foot and smiled. She shook the maraca. Her daughter Annie, next to her, shook two proper wooden instruments with bulbs tapering into handles.

            They sang a song about blueberries, several variations on playing in the dirt while dancing, and a final catchiest song about the beauty of dandelions. How they weren’t weeds. How they had faces like lions, like sunshine, how their greens were delicious, their seeds good for wishes, how you wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t kill them.

#

Days earlier, she’d been talking to Rod on the asphalt lot where they all dropped off their kids, and Christian moved toward them speaking Spanish and barely acknowledging Leah’s existence.

            Spanish sounded to Leah like water burbling over stones, as though joyful, and because she was just half-fluent in French she picked up only a few of their words. Christian was saying something about love. He was pretty in a way that invited staring, pensive staring. Why should beauty have an effect? How stupid that was. Why should the eyes just there, the nose like that, the hair, his build, why should that arrangement matter? And, furthermore, she thought, her itchy wool hat wrapping tight at her forehead, her hands sweating in mittens, was all art an approximation of male beauty? She thought of the Greeks and their nudes. Marble statues throughout history. The Discus player, Michelangelo’s David, Christian in the flesh.

            “Love is everything!” He startled her with an explosion into English. “Yes, that’s what it’s all about.”

            He sauntered away, at which point Rod leaned over to announce that he couldn’t stand him. “You talk about love like that all the time, it’s very suspicious.”

“How so?”
“The more you talk about love, the less you love. It’s quantifiable. An inverse relation.”

            “Is this Engineering psychobabble?”

            “Ha ha,” Rod said, that non-laugh that acknowledged her wit but didn’t pretend to find it charming or even very amusing. “Speaking of which, I’ve got to go to work. See you tomorrow.”

            And so Leah was left alone in the empty lot near the playground, like a child. All the actual children were forced into the boxes of their rooms, and she was free, so she walked slowly on. Christian was many meters away in his heavy coat, his toque. But he was married. And, Rod? Married. All the men she knew were married, fathers, and the women were married, mothers. Everyone was having a love affair or a baby.

#

Leah and Annie had been upstairs at the children’s art gallery inking paper with brushes when Christian walked past in the hallway. A student volunteer told them about the performance, and Leah had wandered down to the performance space as in a dream. The room was only a third full, and it was half-populated by family members. She heard someone say Mireille, the name of the third wife, a person she’d only heard rumblings of but hadn’t seen before. She was a very slender Quebecoise with dark skin and hair, a pretty pointed face. Older than his type, Leah thought, with parenthetical lines around her mouth.

            After the dandelion song, Christian lit upon Annie’s t-shirt. “We should all live in wonder, like children!” His teeth were appealingly white, but not overly straight, and the greyish stubble around his smile was the intentional stubble of the very handsome, of the movie star. “In wonder. Right, young lady?”

            Annie pulled her chin in and her eyes down. “That’s wonder woman. Wonder. Woman.”

            “What’s that?”

            His bassist, a skinny twenty-something girl with noodly arms leaned over and spoke deeply into the mic: “The shirt doesn’t say wonder. It says wonder woman.”

#

First he’d been married to Ilona, with a big face as round and as flat as a plate. She wore one thick blonde braid down her back. She never wore a bra, and her breasts were large and pendulous, as though all those years of freedom had given them heft. Her children’s names were Lune and Poet. She lived in the neighbourhood and took courses to become a librarian after having been his farmhand in high school, then his girlfriend, then his wife.

            Then there was Brittany, whose third pregnancy had broken up both hers and Christian’s first marriages. She always wore a bra, and her breasts were pert. God distributes his blessings so unevenly upon us all. She was at least ten years younger than he was, perhaps even younger than Leah. Now she had four children, two with him, two with David, an accountant who wore black wool coats and applied oil to his hair.

            A year ago, when Leah heard that he and Brittany had separated, she was ashamed at how happy she was to see Brittany in tears one day at the coffeeshop as she recounted the whole story to the other mothers. Leah’s crush on Christian had already, then, lasted too long. It was making her cruel. Leah stood very still at the counter waiting for her cappuccino.

            “Why would he do this?” Brittany said. Her dark hair was so long and glossy, with waves Leah knew to take effort and a skill she’d never herself acquired.

            “Maybe he’s an asshole. Maybe that’s all,” someone replied.

            “But he’s not an asshole. He’s wonderful. He’s the father of my children.”

            “But he”—

            “It’s just that he doesn’t believe in monogamy. He doesn’t believe in possessions. He wants his life to be a river”—

            Leah snorted and tried to seem to be sneezing to cover this up.

            “He wants his life to be a river and for people to come along with him, drifting along with him, swimming, I don’t know. He doesn’t want to be on land.”

#

Even so, Christian was a farmer. He owned the most successful organic farm within a hundred kilometers, distributing his cases of produce far and wide, victimizing subscribers to his farm share with too many carrots. Leah had drawers of them slowly wilting and turning black.

            In the bank of seating at the performance, she noticed Lune and Poet, who had punk haircuts, an mix of flop and buzz, as well as two of Brittany’s kids, with bows, frills, hair in glossy waves. Then Mireille, the third wife, to whom Christian spoke in earnest, halting French.

            Walking to Leah, he said, “I know you. You speak Spanish?”

            “No.”

            “Just English.”

            “A little bit of French.”

            “Un petit peu.”

            “Right.”

            It was his smile that made him so sexy, or it was his eyes, or it was just that river he liked to float in.

            “Excellent,” he said, with French inflection.

            “I’d like to learn Spanish,” she said.

            “Oh! I remember you now. You’re friends with Rodrigo!”

            “Yup.”

            “You should—why don’t you—come to the farm with this—with your daughter?—come to the farm and pick berries. You know my farm? We have so many early berries. Plus sheep and llamas and a pony.”

            People’s eyes sometimes glittered. Maybe he was on the verge of tears: a sensitive man.

            “I should tell you, though, I think. To clear the air,” he said. “That I’m opposed to superheroes on principle.”

            “Okay?”

            “Yes. And your daughter’s shirt? Imagine taking something like wonder and turning it into a cheap name for a superhero. Just bonkers.”

            “Right,” Leah said, though she had much less sanctifying beliefs about words, about the changing meanings of words.

            “Just absolutely bonkers,” he said, eyes aglitter.

#

A man like this would break her heart. But she wanted to break her heart. Her loneliness was blinding as brights. Her life was too boring to bear. She wanted to be steady in her habits so she could be wild in her art, but she had no art. She edited technical documents, dissertations, once in a while a novel and knew the Chicago Style and MLA and APA. She had opinions about split infinitives and the oxford comma. Loneliness was making her hideous.

            “Don’t you want to see a pony?”

            “I guess?” Annie said, shrugging.

            Annie was developing a sardonic tone she was too young for. Annie scribbling in her sketch pad at the small table in the small apartment while Leah flipped pancakes. It was mid-morning, but the day was dark, each window letting in only grey, revealing heavy clouds. “Well, I want to see the llamas,” she said. “He said it would be good to come on a Saturday, and here we are.”

            “Can I bring my book?”

            “Sure.”

            Annie’s long reddish hair was uncombed, and she had a sequined hairband around her forehead, like a flapper or a hippie. “I’m going to wear my galoshes.”

            “That seems wise.”

            How could you mother a daughter when you hadn’t yet figured out how to be a woman? Was it better to make sure you were presentable or to reject presentability as a sexist construct? Leah had no principles by which to govern herself. She’d wanted to have the baby with Mitchell, but he hadn’t wanted it, and he hadn’t told her until the child was three months old. She’d been cheerful, just getting the hang of swaddling, of breastfeeding. “Just not for me,” he’d said. Just not for me? “Parenting isn’t for everybody.” Claims about personal destiny always enraged her. “What do you propose we do,” Leah said icily, though she wanted to scream. They were the two smartest people she knew. He was going to be a journalist, and now he was one: his name appeared on bylines in her internet searches, and sometimes he sent her cheques. Surely he’d have opinions about Annie’s personal destiny, but Leah couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything. She slipped the spatula under each disc and piled them on a plate.

            “Can I have more syrup?” Annie said.

They buckled into the car and talked about llamas while she thought about how Christian was a silly man, and she had never liked a silly person before.

            The wipers on the car flashed wildly, the day was gloom, cold rain heavy as hail without hail’s thrill. Next time she would leave Annie with a sitter. She would find out if the French woman really was his wife, and she would ask him what he wanted, and he would lay her down saying love, love, love, love. Perhaps the wife would be standing there smiling at her because who was Leah kidding? She was no threat to anyone’s marriage, to anyone’s home going rapidly down the river, to anyone’s floating belongings. She was as unthreatening as a proselytizer coming door to door.

#

Christian led them through the living room, which was homey and warm with instruments everywhere, bookcases so packed that books were piled in front of them, walls full of paintings he’d done himself, or that Ilona and the kids had done, mostly depicting vegetables and trees.

              He was no longer embarrassed by his kitchen, he told her. Ilona had hated it—hated it still—but she only visited every other week. Brittany—my ex, he called her—had added the expensive white cupboards, the heavy granite countertops, the butcher block, the fridge he thought of as le frigo caché. Brittany had convinced him that it was appropriate, however much of a hippie he’d like to pretend to be, to have a kitchen ready for entertaining, a kitchen befitting a farmer of his class.

            Leah watched his face assess hers. Maybe he could see that Leah thought it was extravagant. Maybe he thought her daughter’s get-up was a testament to the type of person Leah was; children proved something about their mothers, and you couldn’t hide it.

He crouched down to speak to Annie. “You’d like to see the animals?”
            “Okay,” the child said.

            It wasn’t that he believed in auras, he’d tell her later, it was only that people did give off fields of energy and he was attentive to them. Nothing was a matter of belief; it only was or it was not.

Leah did find it all extravagant, and also cozy, and she badly wanted it for herself. I covet this neighbour’s house, this neighbour’s spouse, she thought. There was a series of loud scrambling noises, then banging, thudding, and Christian smiled widely. “That’s only the kids,” he said. “Hey guys!” He shouted up the stairs. “Come down and meet a friend!”

            Christian introduced them, and Annie allowed herself to be taken by the hands. Leah thought of offering some counsel—be good! Behave yourself!—but instead she watched her baby being led away upstairs. Christian had a cookbook open on the kitchen island, and it had been splashed with red sauce several times. “I would like to make you some food, if you want,” he said. “I’m an excellent cook. We could pick berries and make a compote.”

            “It’s pouring.”

            “Pouring?”
            “It’s pouring rain.”

            “Rain can’t hurt us, though, can it?” he said. “It’s only water. And you came all this way.”

            “I guess we could pick berries.”

            “No, no, you’re probably right,” he said. He went into the living room and picked up his guitar. He flashed that beautiful smile at her and she, on the other side of the cold island surface, flooded with lust. He began strumming the guitar and started singing about rain, which can’t hurt us, only nourishes, makes us flourish, greens our leaves and feeds our roots, and then he paused. “I’m going to write that one down,” he said. “I’ll work on the melody a bit.”

            “You just wrote that now?”

            “Yes. I find that when you have passion for anything it comes easily, quickly. What are you passionate about? For me, I’m passionate about growing things, music, love.”

            At the word love she cringed. “Is your wife here?” she said.

            His smile faded. “What’s that?”

            “Where is your wife?”

            He stiffened. He looked as dismayed as a coach watching his star player fall down on the field. “I’ll tell you something even a child knows.” His tone was gentle, but she felt afraid. “When you are waiting for a chipmunk to come to you, you put your hand down and the seeds sit in your palm and you silence yourself and you wait.”

            “I don’t know what”— She felt so overwhelmed that she would cry. “I thought you were married.”

            “Let’s skip the berries and the animals this time,” he said. “As it’s pouring rain.”

#

That night she dreamed that Christian put his hands all over her. He put his fingers into her pussy, her ass, her mouth and pulled out rubies shaped like raspberries. And then his wives appeared, Mireille and then Brittany and then Ilona, shaking their bare breasts at her. All Sunday she moved through the apartment, feverishly cleaning, scrubbing corners, unscrewing vents from ducts so she could dust them. She needed to talk to someone who could explain this to her. To Ilona, to Brittany, or to motherfucking Mireille. She needed to talk to Rod. The girlfriends she might discuss this with would tell her to forget it, not be stupid. But where had smarts ever got her? What good would more talk be? By three o’clock she’d made up her mind.

            “Mom’s been crying and cleaning all day,” Annie said when her grandmother arrived at the door.

            “Leah, is that true? Leah?”

            “I’m fine, Mom,” she called from the bathroom, where she was indeed trying to eradicate the proof of tears. “Just allergies I think. From all the dusting.”

            “You could hire someone to clean this place,” her mother called back.

The walls were too thin. She looked at her face, which was rubbed pretty raw, and she pulled a little mascara on. Maybe there was something attractive and earthy in it: who could know?

            She drove faster than was comfortable, because that was what you did when you were racing to your real, your true, your new life. The road squealed under her force. She put on peppy and then angry songs and blared them, windows wide, though the air was biting cold. Human history was all energy, and she too could coil up, could explode. She could blast open like a star. When she arrived at his long driveway, though, she started to shake. A person was only a tuning fork.

            He opened the door, and she said nothing. The house was quieter than it had been the day before, but the living room was still golden with lamplight. It smelled warm and buttery, like fresh bread. He seemed to be alone. She said nothing at all for a long time, and then a smile filled his face. “Yes, good,” he said, and he pulled her toward him into a hug. “I’ve been working on a new song,” he said. “Do you want to hear what I have?”  

            She nodded and sat down. He started to strum and pick the guitar, a sweet and lilting tune. He sang about mothers and daughters and chipmunks waiting to be fed and about allowing mystery to live, about not picking at mystery. It was a bit like E.E. Cummings, maybe, it was a romantic point of view. Sure, she thought. I like this. Then he put the guitar down and gave her a meaningful look, so that she blushed. “I’m glad you came back,” he said.

            She smiled too, and her lips caught on her teeth.

            “There’s something very attractive about your spirit, your energy,” he said.

            At the back of her mind the thoughts were blooming: these were his plays. He was an egomaniac and he was attracted to her because he could see that she was obsessed with him. But she only smiled. “I find your energy also very attractive,” she said.

            He came over and sat next to her on the couch, which was piled with blankets of many colors: magenta, cyan, violet. All the colors with the prettiest names.

            “Our lives are so short,” he said. He was close to her, now, his knees were against her knees, both of them protected from the other’s body only by thin cloth. “We become composted, we become earth, and we give nutrients to the trees, homes to the birds, life to the insects. Souls are all around us.”

            Leah passionately disagreed with this. She felt her face clenching with an expression of skepticism.

            “I love chipmunks,” she said.

            Where were the children? The women?

            He moved closer, even closer, hand on her thigh, with a shrugging expression that asked her if it were okay? It was okay. All lovers were liars. So what?: the question her high school teachers told her every conclusion should answer. So what if this was foolish? I have no art, she thought, but how could she think with the buttery smell, the fingers moving toward her waist? Couldn’t she turn her desire into silence, her silence into sex, her sex into love? Couldn’t she just fall into his river, letting the waves go over her, becoming one of many? Problems were just things that floated off and out of reach. What she wanted was for his tongue to enter her mouth, just there, oh, the waters to flood her until she herself was only a problem to float away from, just a poorly fashioned wooden box whose nails were gently coming loose.