Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Upmarket. He doesn’t need to look that one up. He hears it all the time these days, and little by little he’s absorbed more or less the sense of what it means. Last year he and Dorrie traded in their old Toyota and “moved upmarket” to a brand-new Toyota. Not a huge move, just a subtle shift upward. (The word subtle he can pronounce, but not spell, but then he doesn’t need to spell it, does he?)

  The florist chain he works for used to be called Flowerfolks, until it went upmarket, becoming Flowercity with a whole new clientele and a different product line: more exotics, more artificials and dried stuff. Ryan, his four-year-old son, has gone “upmarket” too, toddling off to junior-kindergarten in coordinated outfits manufactured by OshKosh and Kids-Can-Grow.

  It’s ironic, Larry thinks, ironic that his wife Dorrie grew up in a pokey little lace-curtainy house over on Borden Road, her mom and dad and six kids packed into four rooms, no basement, a garage full of junk, so that when she and Larry first bought the Lipton Street house, a fixer-upper if there ever was one, she thought they’d arrived at a palace. Well, not now. She’s got her eyes on the Linden Woods subdivision, but she can’t get Larry motivated to move out that way. He’s worked too hard on the hedge maze in the Lipton Street yard, which is just beginning to take shape.

  So who’s going to buy a house, Dorrie says, that’s got a yard choked to the gills with bushes?

  One of these days she’s going to get a bulldozer in there and clear the whole thing out. This bush business is driving her straight up the wall. That’s an expression she’s picked up from Larry’s English mother, and these days just about everything drives her up the wall.

  Or else drives her bananas. Like, for instance, the way her husband, Larry, talks. Those big words he’s spouting. She hadn’t figured him for a show-off when they first met back in 1976, so how come he’s exploding these days with fancy words?

  Is this a fair accusation? Well, yes and no. A lot of Larry’s recently acquired vocabulary is clustered around his preoccupation with mazes. He’s lifted his collection of new words from a series of library books, and they’ve stuck to him like burrs. Dorrie says he’s trying to put her down when he uses these words. She says he always has his nose in a book. He used to be fun, he used to make her laugh, but now all he can talk about are such things as: turf mazes, shepherd’s race, Julian’s bower, knot garden, Jerusalem, Minotaur, jeu-de-lettres, pigs-in-clover, frets and meanders, the Trémaux algorithm, pavimentum tessellatum, fylfot, wilderness, unicursal, topiary, nodes, the Mount of Venus, maisons de Dëdalus, Troy-town, cup-and-ring, ocular or spiral, serpent-through-waist, chevron.

  On and on. He’s astonished himself to think he’s taken in so many words in the last few years, harpoons aimed straight at the brain, and that he actually remembers them.

  One of Larry’s steady customers down at the flower shop is Mrs. Fordwich, who popped in the other morning, ordering flowers for the annual Chamber Music Fund Raiser, and, since it was getting close to Christmas, Larry suggested a basket of mixed poinsettias. “I don’t think so, Larry,” she said slowly. “I mean, poinsettias at this time of the year! It’s a little banal, don’t you think?”

  Banal. It seems to him he’s heard that word before, and now, from Mrs. Fordwich, he detects, along with the word’s lazy, offhand delivery, a shade of dismissal in her voice. He stares at her woundedly. But what exactly does banal mean?

  Later, he reaches under the counter for his dictionary. The definition of banal is: meaningless from overuse; hackneyed; trivial. There are punctures in Larry’s overall perception, he sees, that will exclude him, cripple him unless he smartens up - and what else? He’ll be left all his life with that drifting, stupid, banal crinkle on his puss: Hey, would you mind running that by me one more time. I didn’t quite catch -

  This is no one’s fault exactly; this is what you’d expect, given Larry Weller’s history, his background, his banal take on the world.

  Carnations are probably banal too, he reasons. Asparagus fern sure as hell is banal. Chrysanthemums? Definitely, those poofy pots from Safeway with the bow stuck on the side. And maybe, just probably, he’s a little banal himself.

  A spokeshave is a cutting tool having a blade set between two handles, and it’s used for rounding wood or other materials.

  Larry had never seen or heard the word spokeshave until he and Dorrie and their little boy, Ryan, were invited, along with a few other neighbors, over to Lucy Warkenten’s apartment for a Christmas drink.

  Lucy lives next door to the Wellers on the second floor of an old house, and works as a bookbinder, using a screened-off corner of her living room for “a studio.” Larry has always felt friendly toward Lucy, who is about forty years of age and lives alone. She wears long creased skirts and Mexican sweaters and lots of wooden jewelry. Artsy-fartsy, Dorrie calls her, one of your old-time cactus-cunt virgins.

  The party was held late on a dark Sunday afternoon, and Lucy had candles burning all around the room. Under a white-painted, sparkle-strewn twig of a tree she had placed wrapped toys for the Lee children who lived downstairs and for four-year-old Ryan: tiny windmills to construct, intricate puzzles, Japanese pencils. There was a bowl of spiced wine punch on the coffee table and plates of fruitcake and cookies. After everyone was served, eating, drinking, and chattering away to each other, Lucy Warkenten drew Larry over to the window and showed him how his maze looked when viewed from above.

  His heart jumped to see that, even under a layer of snow, the maze’s pattern stood out clearly. Its looping paths, doubling back and forth on themselves, possessed a tidiness and precision he hadn’t thought to imagine. “Watching that maze take shape,” Lucy told Larry solemnly, touching his sweater cuff with the flat of her hand, “has given me more pleasure than you can know.”

  “I think I do know,” he said, and in saying so surrendered a secret he’d once thought necessary.

  She showed him her own work corner with its range of tools. Vellum tips, marbled endpapers, slips, cords, a lying press, the stack of millboard, silky headbands. Tacked on the wall was a recipe for glair, an egg-white mixture that binds gold leaf to paper. A paged book was called a codex, she explained to Larry - the word comes from the Latin, meaning wood.

  Larry had never heard any of these words before, at least not as they applied to the art of bookbinding, and it made him squint at Lucy through the late afternoon candlelight, seeing her suddenly as someone who lived every day inside the walls of a foreign language, only not really foreign at all. While the other people in the room chatted and snacked on cheese and swallowed glasses of wine, Lucy showed Larry her current project, which was putting between new “boards” an old volume, and covering it with pale gray goatskin. “The trick,” she said, “is to make it look as though the leather has just grown there.” The book was titled Deep Furrows, written some sixty years ago by a Canadian socialist called Hopkins Moorhouse.

  “Is it any good?” Larry asked.

  “What?”

  “The book.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Dead boring. But one of Moorhouse’s descendants wants it rebound.” Then she said, “A good binding can preserve a book for hundreds of years.”

  Hundreds of years! Larry thought of his fragile floral arrangements, how he never holds out hope for more than a week.

  “A work of art!” Lucy pronounced, and he thought at first she was talking about the half-bound book in her hand. In fact, she had put the book down and was looking out her window once again, gesturing toward the sight of his snowy maze, etched in shadow, a strange, many-jointed creature hunkering down beneath the cold moonlight, asking nothing of anybody, not even the favor of being noticed.

  Larry’s first word as a child was pop, and according to family legend he liked to say it over and over, a long sputter of happy pops with a punchy emphasis on the final p. Larry’s folks, his mum, his dad, decided finally it was just a noise and not a real word, but Larry’s mother, Dot, wrote it down anyway in Larry’s baby book on the page title
d “Our Baby Learns To Talk.”

  Larry’s sister Midge, two years older than Larry, was credited with dog as her first word. According to family legend, she pronounced it clearly, cleanly, and then she barked a soft baby bowwow to indicate that she connected language with content. Even at twelve months she was smart as a whip.

  Once, years later, Midge said to Larry, “Maybe you weren’t really saying pop at all. Maybe you were saying poop.”

  “Maybe you were saying God when you said dog,” Larry told her. “Like those kids who get things backwards, what d’ya call that again?”

  “Dyslexia,” she supplied, somewhat sternly.

  “Right,” he said. “Dyslexia, dyslexia, dyslexia.”

  Sometimes Larry sees his future laid out with terrifying clarity. An endless struggle to remember what he already knows.

  When Larry was a kid his mother was forever listening to the radio - while she cooked or ironed or did her housework - and sometimes, out of curiosity, she stopped the dial at a place where foreign languages came curling out of the radio’s plastic grillwork: Italian or Portuguese or Polish, they were all the same to Larry, full of squawks and spit and kicking sounds.

  “Jibber jabber,” Larry’s father called this talk, shaking his head, apparently convinced, despite all reason, that these “noises” meant nothing, that they were no more than a form of elaborate nonsense. Everything ran together; and there weren’t any real words the way there were in English. These foreigners were just pretending to talk, trying to fool everyone.

  Larry knows better. Everyone in the world walks around with a supply of meaningful words inside their heads, bundled there like kindling or like the long-fibered nerve bundles he remembers from his high school general science class. At the very least these words possess the transparent clarities that point to such objects as floor, window, chair, ball. The more dangerous and toxic words came later and with difficulty, but everyone eventually got themselves equipped with a few. Bus route. Property tax. Paycheck. Pedestrian. Words were everywhere; you couldn’t escape them, and along with the shape of the words came comprehension, like a gulped capsule. The world itself seemed to hold a word in its mouth, a single-syllable hum, heavy and vowel-laden and ready as a storm warning to announce itself.

  As for himself, he doesn’t have enough words yet, he knows that. Not nearly enough.

  Larry’s mum and dad came to Canada from England back in 1950, but after all this time they still say railway, for example, instead of railroad. Larry’s mother calls her kitchen stove a cooker, and Larry’s dad says petrol instead of gasoline. Larry wouldn’t dream of saying railway or cooker or petrol himself, but the words coming out of his parents’ mouths feel delicately edged and full, and give his heart, every time he hears them, a twist of happiness, as though his fumbling, stumbling mother and father have, if nothing else, improvised for themselves a crude shelter in an alien land. They can hide there. Be themselves, whatever that means.

  “Mazel tov,” says Larry’s friend Bill Herschel, at weddings, birthdays, football games, at any festive occasion.

  Larry, growing up next door to the Herschel family, has learned to say it too. The phrase sits on his tongue like a wad of soft caramel. Mazel tov. It pushes right past what he’s capable of thinking or feeling, so that he opens his mouth and becomes an eloquent maker of fine sounds and of brilliant music. A celebrant, a happy boy; later, a happy man.

  The word sex? What did it mean? “Well,” Larry’s mother said, plainly embarrassed (this was a long time ago), “it has to do with hugging and kissing and lying in bed.” Then she said, “It’s mostly for men.”

  Years later, when he was a man himself, in his mid-forties, his body softening, but his brain ticking along one more skeptical track, Larry Weller lay in a woman’s warm embrace and heard himself instructed in what she termed the tantric mysteries. Tantric? Sex, she explained in her pebbly voice, could be deeper and more frightening than he knew. You could climb inside the word sex and grow yourself a new skin: rough, hairy, primal, unrecognizable. You could go right to the edge of that word and forget your own name, you could bury yourself in your body and find your way out to another existence.

  What? Larry asked himself in his plodding, stubborn, and possibly imperious way, what does any of this mean?

  Damn, hell, Jesus, God, piss, shit, screw, fart, fuck, prick, cunt, balls, asshole, motherfucker.

  Larry Weller knows all these words. How could he live in the world if he didn’t? They’re like coins, for carrying around in your pocket and spending when you feel like it. No one’s going to put you in jail for what you open up your mouth and say. (Well, not around here anyway.) Larry’s wife, Dorrie, says fucking this, fucking that all the time. It helps to keep her from going bananas, she says. Larry sometimes refers to something or other as being fucked up, but he’s careful not to say it around his young son. One fuck-talking parent is enough for a kid to handle.

  Sometimes people don’t even know what they’re saying. Words can slip loose from their meanings. There’s a young, slender, and beautiful Vietnamese woman who comes into Larry’s flower shop every Friday afternoon to take advantage of the weekly happy hour: all cut flowers at half-price between four and five p.m. She points shyly to what she wants, three tulips, say, some sprays of foliage or whatever - then she counts out her money carefully on the counter, picks up the wrapped flowers and says, bowing politely, sweetly, “Okay, I bugger off now.”

  There is in the English language a rollcall of noble words. Nation. Honor. Achievement. Majesty. Integrity. Righteousness. Learning. Glory.

  Larry knows these words - who doesn’t? - but almost never uses them. These are the words of those anointed beings who take the long view. Whereas he lives in the short view, his close-up, textured, parochial world, the little valley of intimacy he was born into, always thinking, without knowing he’s thinking. Living next door to the great words, but not with them. His share of the truth - what truth? —is going to come (when it comes) modestly packaged and tied with string, he knows that.

  In the future, though, he’ll learn to bring his words to conclusion, but then, sliding into a shrugging second gear, arrive at an abrupt half-embarrassed stop, as if to say: these words aren’t really me, they’re just the clothes I wear.

  Like almost all men, Larry will be called upon in his life for a moment or two of genuine eloquence, and these instances will coalesce around that ceremony known as the marriage proposal. “Will you marry me?” he said to Dorrie Shaw back in 1978, his mouth full of sharp minerals. To a second wife, whom he has not yet met, he will say, simply, “I want to live with you forever.”

  He actually made these pronouncements, full of doubt and also hope. Full of amazement that he knows the words and that such simple words will suffice.

  “I’m married to a maze nut,” Dorrie used to say in the old days when she and Larry were newly married. She said it fondly, as wives do, shaking their heads over their husbands’ indulgences, the way Larry’s mother exclaims over her husband’s corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which has now reached 2000 specimens, and which she is obliged to dust and number and keep in reasonable order, a collection whose point she has never questioned, nor felt qualified to question.

  Dorrie gave her husband, Larry, a paperback book called Celtic Mazes and Labyrinths on their first wedding anniversary, and inscribed it: “Happy memories of Hampton Court,” calling to mind their honeymoon in England where Larry saw his first maze.

  It’s maze madness, she says now, that’s what he’s got. It’s a form of insanity. It drives her crazy, sitting in the middle of a writhing forest. Mazes remind her of a bunch of snakes, and she hates snakes.

  It’s a passion, an obsession.

  The word obsession feels too boxy and broad for the round cavity of Larry’s mouth, so he simply says to friends or family or anyone who asks, that he’s “into” mazes. A hobby kind of thing. He plays it down. He doesn’t know why, but he’d rather not let peopl
e know how “into it” he really is, that it’s like a ripe crystal growing in his brain and taking up more and more space.

  It’s not only mazes themselves he thinks of, but the idea of mazes, and the idea is a soft steady incandescent light bulb at the edge of his vision; it’s always there, it’s always switched on. He can turn his gaze at will and watch it, casting its glow on the supple sleeping aisles of shrubbery around his house, their serpentine (ser-pen-tine) allure, their teasing treachery and promise of reward.

  The hedge maze in Larry’s yard employs three varieties of plants. The hearty cotoneaster (Cotoneaster horizontalis) - which turns red in the fall and which lends itself nicely to pruning tools - makes up the outer ring of the maze. Common caragana (Caragana arborescens), feathery green and not quite so prunable - not at all, in fact - forms the walls of the middle ring. And alpine currant (Ribes alpinum) leads into the heart of the maze, where Larry plans to install a small stone fountain one day. (He’s already sent off to a supply house in Florida for a design catalogue.)

  He’s put in his hedge stock bare root in the spring, which adds up to half the cost of waiting till summer and buying the individual plants in pots. Naturally he shops around and uses his florist’s connections in order to get a good price. (After all, he’s got a mortgage, he’s got a little kid who’s starting swimming and gymnastics lessons.)

  There’s a paradox - that useful word again - built into the shrubs he’s chosen. He wants the plants to grow fast so that his overall design will be realized, but, at the same time, you can’t have really fast-growing shrubs in a maze or you’ll spend your whole life shaping and cutting back new growth. He’s had to come to terms with that dilemma, he’s had to accommodate that fact. (There’s pain involved in these new words, the way they hint at so much time lost, time wasted, all those years of unknowing.)