The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  There are two bedrooms, a room for Seth and a room for me. That’s all we need. His door is closed, but I push it open and in the rippled dark see his humped form under a light blanket. I listen, just as I listened when he was a baby, for the sound of his breathing. He has probably been asleep for hours. His tuba sits on the floor on the tiny hooked rug I made for him years ago. (A blue swan swimming on a pale yellow sea.) I move the tuba beside his dresser, tiptoeing, but there is no need to worry about waking him up. He sleeps deeply, easily, and his ability to sleep is one more point of separation between us, another notch for evolutionary progress. I almost always sleep poorly, jerkily, my nights filled either with hollowed-out insomnia or strings of short, ragged kite-tail dreams that flap and jump in the dark and leave me sad-eyed in the morning, like the worndown women in coffee commercials. Seth’s nervous system seems to have been put together by agents other than Watson or me; Watson with his combination of creative energy and lack of talent was predestined to fall apart. And I, suffering from a lack of bravery, must expend all my energies preparing for the next test. And the next. And the next.

  Seth. I adore his blunt normalcy and good health. His unspectacular brain. His average height and weight. His willingness to please. His ability to go along with things, not objecting for instance, to staying with Greta and Doug for a week, even though he knows they will stuff him with peanut and raisin casseroles and counsel him endlessly on attaining personal peace. He just smiled when I told him. Smiled and nodded. Sure, sure, he said. And when I told him that Eugene might be going along with me to Toronto, all he said was, great, great. Ah Seth, I do love you. Sleeping there, breathing. Keep puffing your tuba, keep smiling, keep on, and, who knows, you might get out of this unscathed.

  There’s a whole list of things to be done before I leave for Toronto. First, I must pick up my pay cheque at the university, and this means seeing Doug Savage again after having bid him a final goodbye in front of my apartment last night. Something inside me cringes at the carelessness of this oversight; it is the sort of messy mis arrangement I create instinctively. Tag-ends. Clutter. A lack of cleanliness. An inability to end things neatly. What Brother Adam would classify as non-discipline. But there is no question of my not going to pick up the cheque; I need the money.

  Why in the seven years on the Journal have I never thought of having the cheque mailed to me at home or, better yet, sent directly to the bank? Other people make such easy and sensible arrangements without thinking. But from my first month on the Journal, Doug has handed me my cheque personally, more often than not with his inked signature still wet on the paper. He pushes it my way off-handedly, avoiding my eyes; sometimes it comes floating loosely on top of a pile of proofs. It is as though a more formal payment might rupture our relationship, might make of my job on the Journal something serious and official instead of a part-time piece of noblesse oblige, a pittance for an abandoned woman, a soupçon for the bereft wife of his former friend. Nevertheless the cheque is never late, an acknowledgement that though my position might be undefined, my need for cash is absolute and recurring.

  Not that I don’t work hard. The National Botanical Journal comes out quarterly, and except for selecting the articles which are to appear, I do everything. The Journal is a generally dull and uninspired affair with its buff-and-brown cover and the names of the main articles listed on the front. Our next issue is devoted almost entirely to new disease-proof grains with a short piece on “Unusual Alberta Wildflowers” tacked on as a sort of dessert. It is a periodical (it would be too much to call it a magazine) by academics and for academics.

  Doug is the nominal editor and I am the only employee. First I edit the manuscripts which is a long, picky, and sensitive tightrope of a job; it is essential not to under-edit since clarity and a moderate level of elegance are desirable, but I must not over-edit and thereby obliterate personal style and perhaps injure the feelings of the submitting authors. (Will he object if I pencil out his “however”? Will he fly into a tantrum when I chop his sentences in two or sometimes three or even four? Will he mind if I switch the spellings to Canadian standard or rearrange the tangle of his footnotes?) Sometimes I consult Doug.

  “You worry too much, Char,” is what he usually says, or “Screw the bastard, he’s lucky we’re going to run his lousy article at all.” Doug inherited the editorship of the Journal from Watson who abandoned it along with his other responsibilities, and not surprisingly he regards it as a time-consuming stepchild. He is entirely unwilling to worry about the theoretical sensitivities of contributing botanists. But I do; I rarely make a change in an article without anticipating a blast of indignation. In actuality it hardly ever happens, because, for some reason, these unseen scientists are astonishingly submissive to the slash of my red pencil; they quite willingly accept mutilations to their work, the dictates of Charleen Forrest, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee who knows nothing about botany and who has no training beyond high school unless you count a six-week typing course. Amazing.

  After the galley proofs and the layout dummy come the vandykes, these blueprints of the final round, and then another issue is on its way. Time to begin the next. It is relentless but sustaining. Maybe rhythm is all I need to keep me going.

  I only work in the mornings since there isn’t enough money to pay a full-time employee, and theoretically my afternoons are saved for the writing of poetry, what Doug Savage calls the practice of my craft. Craft. As though one put poetry together from a boxed kit. Not that it matters much what you call it, for it is a fact that in the last two years I’ve hardly written a line. What once consumed the best of my energies now seems a dull indulgence.

  My afternoons just melt away. Sometimes I meet Eugene if he isn’t too busy at the office. I shop for groceries, read, worry. I write letters to anyone I can think of, for chief among my diseases is an unwillingness to let friendships die a natural death. I cling, pursuing old friends, dredging up school mates from Scarborough like Sally Cork and Mary Lou Lester. I write to Mary Lou’s mother, too, and to her sister in Winnipeg whom I scarcely know. I badger the friends Watson and I once had with my insistent, pressing six pages of hectic persevering scrawl. I even write regularly to a woman named Fay Cousins in northern California who once shared a hundred-mile bus ride with me. And for the last fifteen months I’ve been writing to Brother Adam, the only correspondent I’ve ever had who approaches me in scope and endurance.

  I cannot let go. It is a kind of game I play in which I pretend, to myself at least, that I, with my paper and envelopes, my pen and my stamps, that I am one of those nice people who care about people. A lovely person. A loving person, a giving person. I dream for myself visions of generosity and kindness. I care about Fay Cousin’s drinking problem, about Mrs. Lester’s ulcerated colon, about Sally’s home freezing and Mary Lou’s fat braggart of a husband. I care about them. At least I want to care.

  To my mother I write once a month. And that’s hard enough. To my sister Judith perhaps three or four times a year; I would write to Judith more often if I were not so baffled by her lack of neuroses; we had the same childhood, but she somehow survived, and the margin of her survival widens every year so that, though I can talk easily enough to her when I see her, I cannot bear the thought of her reading my letters in the incandescent light of her balanced serenity. Does she understand? Probably not.

  And Watson. I never write to Watson. Nor does he write to me; no one hears from him anymore except Greta who, by trading on a belief that she and Watson are partners in emotional calamity, manages to elicit an occasional note from him. Watson is not cruel; it is only that he is missing one or two of the vital components which happy and normal people possess. Nevertheless, I ache to write to him; just thinking about it makes my fingers want to curl around the words, to smooth the paper. I long to write to him. He lives in a commune in Weedham, Ontario, with God only knows who, and all he sends me is child support money. Every month when it comes I examine the handwriting on the cheque,
hoping it will contain some kind of declaration, but it is always the same; one hundred and fifty dollars and no cents. Signed, Watson Forrest. That’s all.

  Sometimes I go for walks in the afternoons and quite often I go all the way to Walkley Street, past the house where Watson and I used to live. We paid exactly $17,900 for that house, and all but one thousand dollars was mortgaged. It is in much better condition than it used to be. The hedges are shaped into startled spheres, and pink and white petunias tumble out of nicely-painted window boxes. There is a new stone patio by the roses, my roses, where I used to park Seth’s pram. The curtains are generally drawn in the afternoons as though the owners, an English couple in their fifties I’m told, are anxious about their polished antiques and Chinese carpets. A ginger dachshund yelps from a split cedar pen. An electric lawnmower gleams by the garage. I am unfailingly reassured by these improvements—I rejoice in them, in fact—for I can foresee a time when this house will pass out of our possession altogether, piece by piece replaced so that nothing of the original is left.

  At the university, which I reach by a twenty-minute bus ride, I work in a cubicle of the Natural Science Building. On my door there is a sign which says: 304 Botanical Journal. I have one desk equipped with a manual typewriter, a gunmetal table and matching wastebasket, a peach-coloured filing cabinet with three drawers, two molded plastic chairs and one comfortable, worn, plushy typing chair in bitter green. There are Swedish-type curtains in a subtle bone stripe, by far the best feature of the room, and the walls are painted a glossy café au lait. From the ceiling a fluorescent tube pours faltering institutional light onto my desk. Oddly enough there is no lock on my door. All the other offices on the third floor have locks, but not mine; the lack of a lock and key seems to underscore the valuelessness of what I do. This might be a broom cupboard. Nothing worth guarding here.

  This morning when I arrive, Doug is already in the office, bending over the pile of manuscripts on my desk. “Hiya, Char,” he says, not bothering to turn around. “I’m just seeing what we should stick in the fall issue.”

  Though it is only May, we are already beginning to think about the autumn number; we are perpetually leaping across the calendar in six-month strides, so that this job, besides paying only enough to keep me from starving, simultaneously deprives me of a sense of accomplishment. Completion, realization, fulfillment are always half a year away, a point in time which, when finally reached, melts into so much vapour. Now the fall issue is being conceived before the summer has taken shape and before the spring is even back from the printers.

  Clearly Doug has been expecting me. Without taking his eyes off the pile of manuscripts, he slides my pay cheque across the desk. I accept it wordlessly, fold it in two lengthwise (I can never remember if it is all right to fold a cheque) and put it in my wallet. The awkward moment passes, and now Doug turns and smiles at me. “Well, are you all set for tomorrow?”

  “Almost,” I tell him. “Just a few odds and ends to clear up.”

  “Greta and I thought we’d pick up Seth right from school tomorrow. That okay with you?”

  “Oh, no, Doug. Really, that’s not necessary at all. He can get a bus.”

  “No trouble, Char. We’d like to.”

  “No, that’s just too much bother. It’s enough that you’ve offered to have him.” I’m playing my game again, protesting, modest, conciliatory, anxious to please.

  “For Christ’s sake, Charleen, the poor kid will have his suitcase and tuba and everything. We’ll pick him up.”

  “But he’s already planned to come out to your place by bus. He mentioned it this morning.”

  “Look, Char,” he sighs, “Greta wants it this way. She wants to pick him up. You know how she gets. I promised her we could do it this way.”

  I nod. When Doug and I are alone together without Greta, our relationship undergoes a radical reshaping. We drop all pretense of Greta’s being our friend and equal; instead we conspire to protect her, to smooth her path, to bolster her up, knowing full well that her present tranquility is a fragile growth. If she has made up her mind to pick up Seth from school, it must be done.

  “Sure,” I tell Doug, “I’ll tell him. I’ll make sure he understands that you’ll be along.”

  “Ah, Char,” he says fondly, “you’re an angel.”

  Endearments. That’s another of the ways in which we change when we’re alone. Doug calls me angel, sweet-heart, love, baby—words he would never use if Greta were with us, words which are really quite meaningless but which allow him to toy with certain possibilities of freedom. For he is just slightly in love with me, so slightly that I would never have recognized it, were it not that I find myself responding with sprightly manifestations of girlishness. I grin at him wickedly across the desk. I say “shit” when the printer is late with the proofs. Sometimes I poke a pencil in my hair, give a little cat-stretch at eleven-thirty, put my stockinged feet on the chair, call him “Bossman” in a throaty, southland drawl, and grumble about the work he loads on me.

  “I need a week away from here,” I tell him. “I’ve had it with tubers and pollen. And mangled prose structure.”

  “I hope you get a chance to relax when you’re away, Char,” he says searchingly. “You need a chance to get away from here and think.”

  “Now what exactly do you mean by that?” I demand.

  “Nothing, nothing. Just that we all need a break now and then.”

  “Now don’t go backing down, Doug. I want to know why you think I need to get away and think. Just exactly what do you believe I should be thinking about?”

  “Well,” he hesitates a small, slightly theatrical instant, “to be honest, you might think about where you’re headed. Greta and I have been wondering if you weren‘t, you know, on the wrong track as it were.”

  “I suppose you must be talking about Eugene?”

  “Not just about Eugene, not only that. But, well, what he represents. The whole bag you might say.”

  “You’ve only met him once,” I say waspishly. “And that was just for a few minutes.”

  “Now, now, Char, don’t go getting defensive.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I happen to be very fond of Eugene. Very fond.”

  He waves aside my words. “I can tell you aren’t all that sure of yourself about where you’re going with Eugene.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I asked you.”

  “Because you never talk about his job.”

  “Aha,” I say triumphantly, “I knew that’s what was bothering you.”

  “Be honest, Charleen baby. Doesn’t it bother you a bit?”

  “It’s an honest profession,” I declare piously. “My mother, for one, would think it was the height of success.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “An orthodontist. Think about it! A guy who stands around all day putting little wires on little kids’ teeth...”

  “Somebody has to do it,” I say. My head aches and I feel a desire to squeeze my eyes shut and weep, but I can’t betray Eugene so easily. “It’s a service,” I sum up.

  “Some service. Milking the middle class. God! Dispensing ersatz happiness through the pursuit of perfect middle-class teeth.”

  “Well, he did a good job on Seth.”

  “Seth! The poor kid. Thrown to the vanity peddlers before he’s old enough to protest.”

  “Look, Doug,” I say, shaping the words into hard little rectangles, “it was the bite. Get it? It wasn’t to make him beautiful, it was to correct his bite.”

  “And on your salary?” Doug mutters softly in his puzzled surrogate-father voice. “How any guy could take fifty bucks a month out of your salary and not be second cousin to a crook—”

  Should I tell him that Eugene would not take any money after the first twenty-five dollar consultation? That he steadfastly refused, once even tearing my cheque into little
pieces? Better not risk the suggestion that I was a woman willing to sell her body for dental care, that a pathetically self-sacrificing compulsion had driven me to an absurd martyrdom; it wouldn’t take Doug more than a minute to reach that kind of interpretation. “Let’s just drop the whole subject of Eugene,” I say.

  “All I’m saying is that it’s probably a good thing you’re getting away with him for a few days. To sort of see things in context.” His voice softens. “I’m only thinking of what’s best for you, Char.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, stuffing the manuscripts in a drawer and slamming it shut.

  Why is it I inspire such storms of preaching? It’s not only Doug Savage; my most casual acquaintances press me with advice. Doug, though, has become a full-time catechizer; great gushes of his energy are channeled into the sorting out of my life. In an obscure way he seems to feel responsible for Watson’s defection, as do all the friends Watson and I once had, as if they shared a guilty belief that their presence in our lives may have proved the fatal splinter. Which is nonsense, of course. But Doug seems to feel he must look after me. He invented this job for me as a therapeutic and practical rescue mission, and at the time I was grateful. I still am. But isn’t it time he got back to his plants, I want to tell him. Or concentrated a little more on Greta who rocks continuously between birdlike vagary and thorny obsession, between her wish to reconcile and her appetite for separation. Does Doug realize that Greta, after all these years, still smothers Watson with letters? That she is perhaps outdoing herself as Seth’s fairy godmother, wishing him well but not knowing how to make an acceptable present of her particular caring magic? She is—why doesn’t Doug see it?—she is possibly slipping into darker and wilder delusions than he realizes.