Iris's mountain of discontent

Claudie Johns, Contributor

Of late, Iris Demerris has been feeling restless and closed in. She couldn't quite pinpoint precisely when the feelings began nor could she say exactly what caused it but there it was: Discontent. Looming before her like a mountain: Impossible to climb over, difficult to get around, and hard to penetrate.

All the objective factors were good. She had no real reason to complain. She was 35 years old, with a husband, three children and a dog. Her husband Tim operated a garage off the Washington Boulevard which provided a steady and good income as Tim had had the foresight to secure contracts to take care of the vehicular fleets of several big companies in the city.

They lived in their own three-bedroom house on a tree-lined street in the Palms of Portmore housing scheme. She drove a 1997 deportee Nissan Sunny sedan, and her husband owned a 1998 Mazda double cab pickup van. She wasn't entirely contented in her job as one of two secretaries to a high-strung, loud-mouthed, neurotic lawyer at a bank in downtown Kingston, but it brought in a good income.

They weren't well-off but they weren't poor either. Her salary was far below what Tim made but her responsibilities were not onerous. She was expected to take care of the immediate household bills - utilities and food, mainly - while Tim handled the mortgage, school fees and car payments. Plus, there was always work in the office so she could make a few extra dollars through overtime work. If she made a special effort, sometimes they were even able to take a holiday in Miami or New York.

It was a situation that worked very well. All the bills were taken care of, and really she had no major worry. But, almost without notice, restlessness stealthily crept in. Maybe she needed a break, she thought. But a break from what? Her children? Her husband? But how could she leave them? Her children were her eyeballs. And really, Tim wasn't a terrible person. Well, his manners could use some polishing. For one thing he ate too fast and sloppily - she grimaced for a few seconds - and he belched and eased himself loudly, openly and shamelessly.

But he was a good provider. He came home on time. He rarely drank and he never smoked. He loved his children and she had a feeling that, even after 10 years of togetherness, he still loved her. He gave her no reason to think otherwise.

Concerns

Her three sisters and her women friends didn't share her concerns, instead saying that she was simply "ungrateful" and expecting too much. After all, she had a husband who came home every night, provided handily for the family and if he strayed, he was respectful about it and didn't throw it into her face. Her children, seven, five and three years old, were healthy, handsome, smart and well-mannered. She couldn't explain that she yearned for something exciting. Different. A pick-me-upper of some sort. For nights on end she remained awake for several hours after Tim fell asleep. Thinking of nothing in particular. She checked on her children. She watched American cable TV channels. She searched the corners of her mind for explanations.

She wanted to talk to Tim seriously about what bothered her but she couldn't find the words. She didn't know herself what was her problem so how could she verbalise it to a man who was not a man of words himself? He had a tendency to shrug off anything he couldn't explain and was firmly grounded in the present. He was rarely, if ever, troubled by such things as lack of fulfilment, boredom or restlessness.

Inevitably, she began picking on him - tiny things at first and then it escalated. He was clearly baffled. He wondered aloud whether early menopause had set in and this was one side effect. She suspected that he had already jumped to the conclusion of all men whose womenfolk seemed distant ("she has another man"). But even though he narrowed his eyes and kept his gaze on her longer than usual, he never voiced the notion.

He didn't really feel like asking her what was wrong.

"Mi cyaan badda," he told his friend Allan one evening over a beer, at the back of the garage. "Mi cyaan undastan ooman all the time yah man. Shi wi come outta it soon. Mi just gwine 'low har."

But these nights when he reached for her, the king-sized bed seemed like a vast expanse, an endless plain, like the dry Argentine Pampas he used to read about in his seventh grade geography books in high school. She went through the motions, disconnected and uninterested, making the obligatory moans and grunts, seemingly more for his sake than out of genuine pleasure.

Restless

Tim's indifference vaguely irritated Iris, but she felt that even if he had displayed an interest in her problems it would not have made a difference to how she felt. Increasingly she began to feel that there must be more to life. It wasn't enough simply to be a mother - wonderful though her children were - and a wife.

She looked down the years and was frightened to see herself, 10 years down the road, still working as a secretary, still married to Tim who would still be running his garage, and with her three children who would still be at home. Everybody would still be making demands on her time, her person. She shuddered and kissed her teeth.

She was tired of this house, this neighbourhood, Tim, her lifestyle. She was tired of fighting. She fought traffic, she fought with the cussid miserable lawyer for whom she worked, she fought long lines at the bank, supermarket, tax office.

"Every flipping place weh mi guh, mi haffi jine a line," she thought. "Mi cyaan deal wid it no more yah man. Me need a break fram dis."

But how? One night she tiptoed into the children's bedroom. Tino, at seven was mature for his age and fancied that he was in charge of the house when his daddy was away. In sleep he looked like the little boy he truly was, mouth half open, his little chest going up and down with each breath.

Sandrine at five behaved like a baby both awake and asleep. She was clutching her dolly tightly as her face twitched in deep sleep. Then Iris's eyes settled on Ernie. Her baby. He was sprawled out flat on his back, arms and legs splayed out, night-clothes in disarray, in contrast to the serenity of his features.

Iris felt a lump in her throat. She loved her children with an unspeakable passion. She moved toward them and then stopped. As she paused she smiled weakly, no point in going to hug them, huh? After all, she would have to spend the next two hours or more soothing them back to sleep.

For a second or two, in the manner that full blown ideas and thoughts have of flashing through one's mind in an instant, she remembered with absolute clarity, the labour process she endured while giving birth to each child. And she knew, without delving into deep analysis or silent conversation with herself, that she would go nowhere. She would either tolerate the boredom and the nascent wanderlust or she'd have to find solutions that included them, but she would go nowhere without her children.

Tim sensed that whatever Iris was going through was not going away and, despite his himself, began to feel uncomfortable. He saw himself as a simple man. As long as he could provide for his family and make his wife happy, he saw no need to worry. What was the point of worrying about the state of the world, losing sleep over flimsy things over which he had little control? If everybody was like him and saw to it that their own little corner was taken care of then why shouldn't everything turn out fine.

Confusion

He found it hard to comprehend Iris's problems - she had a roof over her head; she had the three children she had always wanted; except for the lickle food weh shi buy a month-end time, her money was mostly hers to spend the way she wanted; and shi can go a Miami anytime she wanted to. He made no way-out demands on her, so what was her problem?

He was ashamed to let anybody know it, but he had felt for a while that she was seeing another man and had paid a man to follow her around for a month, monitoring her movement and phone calls. Praise God, he was satisfied that he was wrong.

Well into the sixth month of Iris's discontent, Tim thought of his life without his wife and he didn't like what he imagined. He thought of his children living away from him, perhaps with another man raising them and his heart rate quickened. He thought of another man's hands roaming over Iris's body and he closed his eyes tightly and shook his head as if to rid himself of the images. Her breasts may not be as firm as before and her tummy could do with a little tightening up but boy, wasn't she wonderful?

His face softened and a tiny smile creased the sides of his mouth as he remembered her peculiar smell, the warmth of her body as she fit herself into his body as they lay close together - spoon-shaped, she called it.

He particularly liked it, looked forward to it when it rained and they locked the bedroom door and turned down the lights. They didn't speak during those nights when it rained. They were so attuned to each other that there was no need for conversation. After 10 years together he knew what she liked, he knew every inch of her body and exactly what to do and when.

The image of another man holding his wife and doing all these things that he so enjoyed doing to and with her, snaked into his mind and Tim snapped back to reality. The images were too painful to entertain. His torment worsened when he imagined that Iris would probably actually enjoy that other man's attentions. He felt he had to do something. Already he didn't like her half-hearted efforts at sex. Nor did he like how she picked at her food, and she seemed far away these days when she answered his comments with uncharacteristic monosyllables. She was never short of words, never without an opinion and this 'new' Iris was a complete and unwelcome stranger. He wasn't sure what he could do but he knew he had to do something before he lost his wife. "An me pickney dem," he added aloud.

That night he asked her if she'd like to go out to dinner. She was taken aback at this uncharacteristic move but he was pleased that she accepted the invitation. At dinner they talked continually, but never about what was bothering her. Maybe, she felt, it was because she didn't know how to broach the subject because she could not put words to her feelings. And he didn't know what to ask because he couldn't understand what she was going through.

Aunt Neena

The worst part of Iris's problem was that she was not upset with Tim. She felt no resentment toward him. She knew that she wasn't happy but she couldn't point to any one single reason as the cause for her unhappiness. Tim was tied up in there somewhere but really it wasn't all about him.

It was a frustrated Iris who finally went to see her grandmother. Aunt Neena was a sensible woman. A very practical, no-nonsense, to-the-point personality who didn't pretty up things unnecessarily. To Iris and her sisters, their grandmother was a far more approachable person than their own mother who took her role as a mother a little too seriously, always dispensing Bible-laced advice and exhorting her daughters to turn the other cheek, and to "take it to God in prayer" when things became overwhelming.

Aunt Neena was the one they usually turned to for practical advice on cheating boyfriends, disloyal friends, moral issues - real life material. Iris, feeling like a teenager again, outlined her feelings, frankly and without fear of censure, to Aunt Neena. And, once more, Aunt Neena didn't fail. She summed up Iris's problems right away.

"You get married too early. You should have travelled a bit, have another boyfriend and fool around a bit before you settled down," she told her stunned grand-daughter bluntly.

"Mammy!" Iris gasped. "A cyaan believe that you sey a thing like dat!" She was more shocked and amused than outraged, and a little bit embarrassed that she half-agreed with what Aunt Neena was saying.

They talked for hours. The sharp, lively old woman whose false teeth clattered slightly as she spoke and whose 75-year-old eyes and ears had filtered and honed survival skills to last a lifetime, understood her grand-daughter. She shared her own stories of being an economically dependent woman, bearing 11 children, and trapped in a loveless union with a man who could neither read nor write, in a world without television, birth control devices or real choices.

Of Iris's grandfather she said: "Him wuz a man who jus go a grung, come home, eat him dinna, wash him foot dem and go a him bed. Lawd missis, cho. Poverty is a wicked thing. If mi neva poor mi wouldn't did badda wid the likes of him, but almost every year me have a baby and me neva have much choice. It wasn't like nowadays."

So she developed her strategies for survival. She told of the shared confidences with the women in the district - the ones who delivered each other's children and kept each other's secrets. She spoke of the need to carve out a little space for oneself - it didn't have to be a physical place, she said. It could be right there in her head, where nobody could reach her. That would be her "secret garden" to which she could escape the demands of man, pickney, work, and household. Where she could lock out everybody and find - even in the midst of chaos - some peace and quiet.

Iris spent five full days with her grandmother. She called her house twice a day to speak with her helper, to check on her husband and children. She knew they missed her and that she was needed there but she also knew that this had to be done. She drank in Aunt Neena's words the way the Burnt Savannah ground sucked in the water when it rained, leaving the land as dry and as hard as if there had only been a light drizzle.

She drank in the smell of the logwood trees and the 'pangola' grass; she enjoyed the sound of the crickets at night and the goats in the backyard; and she loved the sound of Aunt Neena's voice putting words and meaning to Iris's discontent. By the end of the fourth day, Iris knew what she wanted to do. She returned to Portmore with a brisk walk and a sense of purpose. Tim was puzzled but pleased at the positive change. He felt comfortable and sighed in peace.

"Things nice again," he breathed silently, as Iris booked a flight for two to Miami and made arrangements to take an eight-day cruise through the islands of the Caribbean. "Who yuh goin wid?" he asked.

"Aunt Neena," she said. "The two of us need a break and this is a nice way to take it."

Iris smiled. She knew that this was the beginning of a fantastic relationship with her travelling companion - a learning experience and a bond based on shared confidences, secret smiles, and deliciously illicit actions.

Iris had begun to carve out her own little space.

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