The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  But since kindness is a sort of hobby with me, a skill which I feel compelled to perfect, I try to look at Doug kindly. It is not really his fault, I tell myself, that Doug judges Eugene harshly. It is part of his generation, this bias, my generation too, to see people in terms of their professions. It is, after all, a logical outgrowth of the work ethic; vocation forms the spiritual skin by which we are recognized and rewarded. Doug Savage is a botanist, a specialist in certain forms of short ferns. He is defined by his speciality just as his ferns are defined by their physical properties. His wife Greta is saved from genuine ordinariness by the fact that she is a professional weaver. Doug’s curriculum vitae for her would run: Greta Savage, weaver, wife. Her actual weaving is immaterial; it is being a weaver which endows her with worth. In the same way he thinks of me pre-eminently as a poet, a kindly classification, since I am more clerk than poet these days. He is able to ignore the lapse of my talent just as he has been able to ignore the presence of Eugene Redding for the last two years.

  The Savages’ objection to Eugene is, I sometimes suspect, rather lumpily conceived and certainly it is seldom mentioned: silence says it all. For the most part they have chosen to ignore Eugene just as they have ignored my other, briefer liaisons: with Bob the insurance adjuster, with Maynard the dry-cleaning executive, Thomas Brown-Davis the tax lawyer (lawyers are okay but only if they practice labour law or take on prickly civil liberties cases—even then their value may be marked down by a hyphenated name or a preference for handmade shirts.)

  At parties Doug Savage always introduces me by saying, this is Charleen Forrest, you know, the poet. Then he disappears leaving me to explain with enormous awkwardness that my last book came out more than three years ago and that, though I still dabble a little, poetry is part of my past now. What I don’t bother to explain is that having written away the well of myself, there is nowhere to go. The only other alternative would be to join that corps of half-poets, those woozy would-bes who burble away in private obscurities, the band of poets I’ve come to think of, in my private lexicon, as “the pome people.” They are the ones for whom no experience is too small: brushing their teeth in the morning brings them frothing to epiphany. Sex is their private invention, and they fornicate with a purity which cries out for crystallization. They can be charming; they can be seductive, but long ago I decided to stop writing if I found myself becoming one of them.

  Both Doug and Greta fear for the future of Seth, that his straight, white teeth and middle-class amiability may propel him toward the untouchable ranks: public relations, stock brokerage, advertising, or even, given the situation, orthodontics.

  And if Doug Savage had been acquainted with Eugene for twenty-five years instead of twenty-five minutes, he would still think of him as Eugene the Orthodontist. Pseudo-scientific, or so Doug believes, cosmetic-oriented, a man who tinkers with the design of nature. A shill for pearly teeth. A charlatan with carpeted waiting room, expensive machinery and golf-club manners. Doug sees the already-suspect profession of ortho dontia as being coupled with a lack of creativity or discovery; if only he were a real dentist who dealt with the reality of pain and suffering. Eugene, sadly, is in one of the repair professions, a fact which for Doug places the seal on his insignificance. And worse, as far as the Savages are concerned, Eugene is abundantly rewarded for what he does.

  I sigh heavily, suddenly weary, and Doug says, “Don’t give a thought to the manuscripts, Char.” He nods in the direction of my desk. “They can wait.”

  “Fine, fine,” I say absently. I am thinking of all the things I have to do before leaving. Laundry, packing, phone Eugene, make sure Seth has bus fare for school. And there must be something else. Something I’ve forgotten. Laundry, packing, phone, bus fare? Something is missing.

  The wedding present!

  “I never bought a wedding present,” I cry out. “I completely forgot about it.”

  Doug says nothing.

  “How could I forget!” I marvel. And then I add, “Do you think there’s something Freudian about that? Forgetting to buy my own mother a wedding present?”

  He shrugs. Drums his fingers on my desk. He is determinedly nonchalant about my oversight, but I can see by the faint, grey frown on his face that he has stored it carefully away. Something Freudian. Hmmm. Yes.

  When my mother wrote from Toronto early in April to tell me that she was planning to remarry, the first thing I thought of was her left breast. No, not her left breast but the place where her left breast had been before the cancer.

  What I pictured was a petal of torn flesh, something unimaginably vulnerable like the unspeakable place behind a glass eye or the acutely sensitive and secret skin beneath a fingernail. A pin-point of concentrated shrinking pain. A wound almost metaphysical, pink edged, so tender that a breath or even a thought could break it open.

  I haven’t seen her since her operation which was two years ago. In fact, I have not seen her for five years. She lives alone in the Scarborough bungalow where my sister and I grew up. What fills her life I cannot imagine; I have never been able to imagine. Plants. Pots of tea. Her pension cheque. The daily paper with the advertised specials. Taking the subway to Eaton’s. Her appliquéd shopping bag, maroon and moss green, the wooden handles faintly soiled. Her housecoat (a floral cotton, washable), her reading glasses, and toast cut into triangles. Her kitchen curtains, her waxed linoleum. The decaffeinated coffee which she drinks from thick, chipped cups—the rows and rows of bone china cups and saucers, stamped with violets and bordered with gilt, are preserved in the glass-fronted china cabinet for the by-now entirely hypothetical day when guests of inexpressible elegance arrive unexpectedly to sip coffee and sit in judgement on my mother.

  My mother is getting married. I have known for a month now—since her short, awkwardly-phrased letter with its curiously bald declaration, Mr. Berceau has asked me to marry him—but the thought still sucks the breath from the floor of my chest. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it.

  And why not? Why this perplexity? Certainly there is nothing improper about it; she has, after all, been a widow for eleven years, since our father, to whom she was married for thirty years, died in his sleep, a heart attack in his sixtieth year. A massive heart attack, the doctor had called it. Massive. I pictured a tidal wave of pressure, a blind wall—darkness crushing him as he lay sleeping beside my mother in the walnut veneer bed. He never woke up. My mother, always a light nervous sleeper, heard only a small sound like someone suppressing a cough and that was all. By the time she had switched on the pink glass bedside lamp with its pleated paper shade, he was gone.

  And next week she is getting married again. To someone called Louis Berceau, someone I have never seen or even heard of. On a Friday afternoon at the end of May, she is getting married. And why shouldn’t she, a healthy woman of seventy? Why not? Only someone bitterly perverse would object to what the whole world celebrates as a joyous event. But easy abstractions are one thing. It is something else to absorb an event like this into the hurting holes and sockets of real life. I should rejoice. Instead a sucking swamp tugs at me, a hint of Greek tragedy, dark-blooded and massive like the violent seizure of my father’s heart. My timid, nervous, implacable mother with her left breast sheared off and her terrible indifference intact, is getting married. It can’t be happening, it can’t be coming true.

  When I leave the office I run for the bus, waving like a crazy woman at the driver, “Wait, wait!” The sun is blinding and I stumble aboard fumbling for a dollar bill and handing it to him.

  “That all you got? Nothing smaller?”

  “No,” breathlessly, “I’m just going to the bank now.” Never apologize, never explain, Brother Adam wrote.

  “Okay, okay.”

  I sink into a seat only to be struck anew by panic: did I drop my pay cheque in my frantic search for change? I grope; there it is, folded in my wallet.

  I am perspiring heavily. The weather is more like midsummer than spring, and the air is weighed
down with dampness. My blouse clings to me across the back. It is an old blouse, six years old at least, with a collar that sags. There is too much material under the arms suggesting rolls of mottled matronly flesh; I should have thrown it out long ago.

  What I should do, I think, is go and get my hair cut. But that would cost at least fifteen dollars, even if I could get an appointment and there isn’t much hope of that. Like my sister Judith I have heavy, wiry, wavy hair. Crow black hair. Irish hair, my mother always called it with a hint of contempt. Wild. I’ve never been able to formulate a plan for it. I’m tall, too, like Judith, but rangier, craggier, more angled than contoured; she is older by three years and beginning to widen slightly. I probably will too.

  Yes, I decide, I must get my hair cut. Definitely. Right after I finish at the bank. I pat my purse with the cheque folded inside.

  In addition to the cheque I have something else in my purse; a three-by-five card with Brother Adam’s address written on it. It is really less a piece of information than a personal note to myself, for Brother Adam’s address is firmly engraved on my brain: The Priory, 615 Beach-wood, Toronto. Nevertheless, leaving the office, I scribbled it down on impulse and tucked it in the zippered middle section of my purse. Impulse? Of course not, I admit to the leafing-out trees; and hedges outside the bus window. I shake my head, a smile fanning out across my face; I have planned this from the very day I decided to go to Toronto for my mother’s wedding. Not actually planned it; no, nothing so definite as that. The idea formed itself like a clot in the back of my head, gradually knitting itself into a possibility: I could, if I had time, that is, visit Brother Adam.

  Perhaps not an actual visit. Just a phone call, just to say hello. This is Charleen Forrest. Remember? From the Botany Journal. Yes, it is a surprise, well, I just happened to be in Toronto for a few days, sort of a family reunion, and well, I just couldn’t come this close and not give you a call when your letters have meant such a lot to me and, and, then what?

  Maybe I could drop in. Why not? That would be better, nothing like a direct face-to-face after all. Then I could see just what sort of place the Priory is. I’d wear something decorous, my new dress probably, pants wouldn’t do, and I could wear a little kerchief on my head; no, that would be ridiculous. I would ring the bell. Or lift the knocker. A heavy old knocker, probably wrought iron, rusted slightly, ornately carved with religious symbols. A tiny, frocked figure would eventually appear at the door, and I would state my purpose. My name is Charleen Forrest and I am anxious to see Brother Adam for a few minutes. If he can be spared, that is. No, I’m not actually a friend of his, but we correspond. Through letters, you know. For over a year now. And I thought since I was in Toronto anyway on family business that....

  Perhaps I should send a little note first. Plain white note paper. Nice small envelope, very maidenly, expressly plain. If I mailed it today it would be there in a day or two. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about taking him by surprise. Really much more polite and, well, thoughtful. The sort of thing that lovely, caring people do, the sort of thing he might do: Dear Brother Adam, I know how busy you are with your grass research and spiritual studies and so on, but I wondered if you could spare a few minutes to see me. I’m going to be in Toronto for a few days visiting my family, and there are so many things I’d like to talk to you about, and some things are hard for me to write about. Your letters have meant so much to me—much more than I can tell you—as I have no one I can really talk to, Brother Adam, no one in the world.

  At Mr. Mario’s Beauty Box the eyes of the receptionist transfix me. Green-hooded, beetle bright, too close together, riding above a sharp little nose like glued-on ornaments from a souvenir shop.

  “I don’t know if we can fit you in today,” her voice clinks away uncaringly. “What about tomorrow at three?”

  “I have to go out of town,” I stutter. Am I pleading? Am I giving way to my tendency to be obsequious? I firm up my voice, “It has to be today.”

  “Well,” she says tapping a pencil on the appointment book—and already I can see she is going to work me in—“Mr. Mario himself is free in twenty minutes. If you only need a cut, that is,”

  “That’s all I need,” I chant gratefully, “just a cut, just a simple cut.”

  She stands up suddenly, reaches across the kidney-shaped desk and tugs a hank of my hair. “About three inches?” she demands.

  Three inches off? Three inches left on? What?

  “Three inches?” she asks again, more sharply this time.

  “Yes, yes, three inches, that would be fine.”

  I have never been to Mr. Mario’s before. In fact, I avoid beauty salons almost entirely except for the occasional cut and one or two disastrous hair-straightening sessions in the days when Watson was trying to transform me into a flower child. Mr. Mario’s place shimmers with pinkish light. Light spills in through the shirred Austrian curtains and twinkles off the plastic chandeliers. Little bulbs blaze around the mirrors reminding me of movie stars’ dressing rooms. Pink hair dryers buzz and the air conditioners chum. The wet, white sunlight of the street is miles away. I wait for Mr. Mario in a slippery vinyl chair, suddenly struck with the fear that this rosy elegance might hint at undreamt of prices. Much more than fifteen dollars, maybe even eighteen. Or as much as twenty. Twenty dollars for a hair cut, am I crazy? I turn to the kidney desk in panic, but the receptionist eyes me coldly, leanly. “Now,” she says.

  Mr. Mario marches me to a basin, thoroughly, roughly, drenches my hair and neck, and then he seats me in front of his mirror. For a moment I am reassured by his relative maturity; he has a mid-life shadow of fat under his chin, and his fingers are competently plump and strong. Taking hold of my hair at both sides he pulls it straight out and regards my image in the mirror. Together we stare in disbelief: such Irish coarseness, such obscene length, such unspeakable heaviness.

  “What did you have in mind?” he inquires sleepily.

  “I don’t know,” I gasp. “Something different. Just go ahead and cut.”

  “Okay,” he yawns and stepping back he examines me from another angle. “Okay.”

  The sight of the razor raises new fears—where did I hear that razor cuts are more haute than scissor cuts? This might even cost—I feel faint at the thought—as much as twenty-three dollars. And then I’ll have to tip him. Another dollar. God, god.

  My hair begins to fall to the floor, and without a hint of delicacy he kicks it to one side where it is almost immediately swept up by a girl in a green uniform. Too late now.

  He combs, sections, and clips silently and steadily, his lips curled inward with concentration. “Coarse,” he says finally, breaking the silence.

  “Yes,” I confess, “it runs in the family.”

  “Italian?” he asks with a flicker of interest.

  “No. Half Irish, half Scottish.”

  “Yeah?” His interest evaporates.

  To my right a small shrunken woman of enormous old age sits swathed in a plastic cape; her wisps of hair are briskly sectioned for a permanent, and the pink scalp shows through like intersecting streets. One by one I watch the tight plastic rollers being wound and pinned to the bony scalp. I imagine the ammonia burning through her thin, pink skin, aching. Why does she do this to herself? Her chin wobbles like a walnut as though a scream is gathering there. Her lips move, but she says nothing.

  On the other side of me a vigorous woman of about fifty bends forward and lights a cigarette while her rollers are removed by the slimmest of boys in striped purple jeans. “Yesterday,” she says, blowing out puffed clouds of smoke, “I went all the way to the fish market for some red snapper.”

  “For what?” the boy asks, leaning toward her.

  “Red snapper. It’s a fish. And ex-pen-sive! But I was in the mood for a splurge. Well, I cooked it in a little butter. Then you cover it, you know, and leave it just on simmer. Not too long, say about ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes,” he murmurs, back-combing her gunmetal
shrub.

  “Ten minutes. Then just a little lemon, you know, cut in a wedge to squeeze. And my husband said to me, you know, you could serve this to the P.M. if he happened to drop by.”

  “He liked it, eh?”

  “So he said, so he said, and he’s a hard man to please. Tonight I’m going to do lamb chops. You like lamb?”

  “Not too much.”

  “It’s all in how you do it. Most people don’t get all the fat out, and with lamb you’ve got to get all the fat out. But do you know what really makes it?”

  “What?” he listens. I listen. Even Mr. Mario seems to listen.

  “After you brown it really well, you add just a sniff of white wine.”

  “White wine?” The striped-pants boy seems a little disappointed.

  “You don’t have to use the expensive stuff. Why waste good booze in cooking. Just the ordinary poison will do you.”

  “Do you want to have a little hairspray?”

  “Just a little. My husband says it’s bad for the lungs. Did you know that?”

  “Maybe.”