The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  “No, it’s true. The whole atmosphere’s being destroyed by spray cans. But just a little. It’s awfully humid out. And I’ve got to pick up the lamb chops. That husband of mine.”

  Husband. Strange word. Medieval. Husbandry, husband your flocks; keep, guard, preserve, watch over.

  “Bitch,” Mr. Mario whispers lazily in my ear as she leaves.

  I say nothing, only smile, obscurely gratified that I have somehow gained his favour. He cups my head with his hands, turning it slightly, then begins cutting again, slowly, slowly, alternating between razor, scissors, clippers; razor, scissors, clippers. Cautious as a surgeon.

  “Hold still now,” he hisses. “The back of the neck is the most important.”

  I begin to feel sick. Could this possibly cost as much as twenty-five dollars? In New York hair cuts cost up to forty dollars—where did I read that? Mr. Kenneth or something. But this is Vancouver. Still with inflation and everything, twenty-five dollars is not impossible. Twenty-five dollars! Stop cutting, I want to cry out. That’s enough. Stop.

  Then he is going all over my head with an electric blower and a little round brush, catching my hair from underneath and drawing it out into rounds of dark fur. Turning, rolling, curving. Stop, stop.

  At last. Flick, flick with the brush. Off with the towel. A puff of spray. I stagger to the kidney desk.

  He follows me, drowsy-eyed.

  Now.

  “How much?” my mouth moves.

  “Fifteen dollars,” he drawls.

  I pull out the bills. Blindly stuff an extra dollar in the pocket of his smock. Run for the door. And in the dancing, white heat I see myself blurred across the window. Or is it me?

  Oh, Mr. Mario, Mr. Mario. Always, always, always I’ve wanted to look like this. Soft, shaped, feathered into a new existence. Me.

  My lips perform the smallest of smiles. My neck turns a fraction of an inch. My legs stretch long and cool and slow. What’s the hurry. Slowly, slowly, I walk home.

  Greta telephones to say good-bye. “Is it true,” she asks, “is it true what Doug says? That Eugene What‘s-his-name is going with you?”

  I picture her holding the phone in an attitude of anxious, frowning disbelief, her crow‘s-feet deepening. (Greta’s crow’s-feet reach all the way to her soul.)

  “Yes,” I tell her briskly. “Yes, Eugene happened to have a convention in Toronto at the same time. Wasn’t that lucky?”

  “A dentists’ convention,” Greta says sadly, dully.

  I want to comfort her. Poor Greta with her Gestalt therapy, her psychodrama, her awareness clinic, her encounter group, her trauma team, her megavitamin treatment and now her obsession with meditation. All she needs is just enough psychic epoxy to keep her from slipping apart. Can’t I summon a few words to reassure her? Is my heart so hard that I can’t give her those few words?

  “Look Greta,” I say, “thanks for phoning, but I’ve got to run. Seth just got in from band practice and I’ve got a million things to do.”

  “Seth,” I turn to him.

  “Yes.”

  “You have the phone number in Toronto? If anything goes wrong?”

  “It’s on top of the list you gave me.”

  “Well, look, Seth, if you lose it, just on the wild chance that you might lose it, you can ask the Savages. I gave it to Doug too. You never know.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’ve got enough money?”

  “Sure.”

  “Positive?”

  “All I need is busfare and milk money.”

  “You might have an emergency.”

  “I’ve got plenty.”

  “Just to make sure, you’d better take this extra five.”

  “You keep it, you’ll need it.”

  “I’ve got lots. Your father’s cheque came yesterday. And I got paid today. I’m rich for once. You take it.”

  He pokes it in his back pocket. “I’ll take it but I won’t need it.”

  “I wish you were coming. I hate leaving you here like this.”

  “It’s okay,” he smiles across at me. “Anyway, there’s band practice every day this week.”

  “At least we’ll be back for the concert. Did you get the tickets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For Eugene too? And his kids?”

  “Yeah. In my wallet. Want me to hang on to them ‘til Saturday night?”

  “Maybe you’d better, the way I lose things. Anyway, I hope everything goes O.K. here.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s just that Doug and Greta can be a little... well ... you know.”

  “Uhuh.”

  “A little too much.”

  “I know.”

  “Just tune them out, Seth. If they start getting to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll be ready after school? When they pick you up?”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “And you won’t forget your suitcase?”

  “No.”

  “There are clean socks for every day. And I put in your Lions T-shirt in case it stays hot like this.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And your retainer is in a plastic bag under your pajamas.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your toothbrush. What about your toothbrush?”

  “I’ll put it in tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I sound like a clucking hen. I know I sound like an old hen.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “It’s just that I’m sort of nervous, I guess. All the rushing around and the whole idea of Grandma,”—I say the word Grandma with a sliding self-consciousness since Seth cannot even remember seeing his grandmother—“getting married and everything. It’s just got me a little more rattled than usual.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “That’s why I’m clucking away at you like this.”

  “I don’t mind,” he says smiling.

  “You’ve got a nice smile, you know that?”

  “I ought to for eight hundred bucks.”

  “I don’t mean your teeth. I mean you have really got a nice smile.”

  “Thanks. So do you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “I wish you were coming.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he says. And then he adds, “And you’ll be okay too.”

  Chapter 2

  “There’s nothing about myself that I like,” I say to Eugene as we lie side by side in our lower berth. Contentment, momentary contentment, has lulled me into confession. “The bottoms of my feet are scaly,” I tell him, “and have you ever noticed what big ugly feet I’ve got? Slabs. And two huge corns. One on each foot. I’ve had those same corns since I was thirteen.”

  “Luckily no one dies of corns.”

  “My big toes are crooked,” I continue. “I’d go to see a chiropodist if I weren’t so ashamed of my feet. And they’re the kind of feet that are always clammy, summer and winter. At least in the winter I can cover them up with shoes. But then as soon as it’s warm enough for sandals, hot like it was today, that’s when I remember how much I hate my feet.”

  “Try to sleep, Charleen.”

  “It’s too lurchy on this train to sleep.”

  There is a pause, and for a moment or two I think Eugene may remind me that it had been my idea to take the train. But he doesn’t. His divorce has made him cautious, fearful of anything resembling marital bickering. Instinctively he shuns that almost unconscious coinage which passes between husbands and wives: I told you it wouldn’t work. Remember, this was your big idea. What will you think of next? Didn’t I tell you? Not again! Are you going to start in on that? Don’t you ever listen when I’m talking to you? Don’t you care anymore? Don’t you love me?

  “Try to sleep anyway,” Eugene says gently.

  “I keep meaning to buy a pumice stone for my feet,” I tell him. “Do you know something, Eugene
—I’ve been meaning to buy a pumice stone since I was fifteen and read in Seventeen that there was such a thing. And now, here I am, thirty-eight. What’s the matter with me, I can’t even organize my life enough to buy a pumice stone.”

  “We’ll buy you one in Toronto.” He is only faintly mocking.

  “I would love to have beautiful feet.”

  “Great.”

  “It would be a start.”

  Eugene says nothing but yawns hugely.

  “It would be a start,” I say again, drifting off. I am wearying of my self-hatred. It’s only a tactical diversion anyway, a pale cousin to the ferocious self-inquiry which ransacks me on nights less peaceful than this. This is more reflex than ritual, stuffing for my poor brain, packing for the wound I prefer not to leave open.

  But it opens anyway, freshly perceived, when I’m wakened at three A.M. by the long, pliant, complaining train whistle. Somewhere in all that darkness we are bending around an unseen curve. It’s cold in the Pullman, and my nightgown is wound across my stomach. Reaching over Eugene and jerking the blind up an inch or two, I admit a bar of blue light into our dim shelf. Moonlight.

  Sharp as biblical revelation it informs me of the total unreality of this instant: that I am lying in bed with a man who is not my husband, rolling through mountains of darkness to my mother’s marriage. This is not melodrama (though the vocabulary it requires is); this is madness, lunacy, calling into doubt all the surfaces and shadows of my thirty-eight years.

  Berth. Birth. My yearning to see things in symbolic form is powerful; it always has been; it is the affliction of the hopelessly, cheerlessly optimistic, this pinning together of facts to find patterns. And it is a compulsion I resist, having long ago discovered it to be a grandiose cheat. The rhythms of life are random and irreducible.

  Suddenly I am shivering from head to foot. I would like to wake Eugene for the warmth of his body, but at this moment I can’t bear to include him. And besides, his green-pajamaed back slopes away from me at an angle which suggests an exhaustion even greater than my fear.

  Both of us, Eugene and I, are secondary victims of separate modern diseases, mid-century maladies hatched by the heartless new social order: Eugene because his wife abandoned him for the Women’s Movement and I, because I married a man who couldn’t bear to leave his youth behind.

  We are the losers. (Misery loves company, my mother always said.) The hapless rejectees, the jilted partners of people stronger than ourselves. Social residue. Silt. Whatever exists between Eugene and me-and Doug Savage is at least partly accurate when he accuses me of bewilderment—is diminished by the fact that each of us has been cast aside, tossed out like some curious archeo logical implement whose usefulness is no longer understood. Even our lovemaking is lit with doubt: are we anything more than two cripples holding each other up? Can our passion be more than second-rate? Can anything come from nothing?

  “She was always something of a bitch,” Eugene said about his wife, Jeri, shortly after I met him, “but at least in the early days she confined her bitchiness to outsiders. Like waiters in restaurants. The first time I took her out to dinner—I’d only known her a week or so then and I wanted to take her somewhere, you know, impressive. To show her that country boys don’t necessarily dribble soup out of the corners of their mouths. We went to the Top of the Captain and she sent the rolls back because they were cold.”

  “No!” I gasped delightedly. “Really?”

  “Really. She said that she thought more people should take that kind of responsibility when the service wasn’t up to standard. Sort of a battlecry with her.”

  “And you married her after that! Oh, Eugene, how could you?”

  “There’s one born every minute, you know.”

  “What else did she do?” I asked greedily.

  “Well, then she got into the consumer thing. That must have started after we’d been married a year or so. She started out by returning groceries.”

  “Like what?”

  “You name it. Once she had a jar of apricot jam with a wasp in it. That was the worst, I guess. She mailed that to Ottawa.”

  “And what happened?”

  “All she got, I think, was a form letter. It was being looked into or something. She took back all kinds of things to the store. Lettuce that was brown in the middle. Coffee if it tasted a bit off. Fungussy oranges from the bottom of the bag. Smashed eggs, bony meat. Once, as a joke, I accused her of deliberately buying rotten stuff so she’d have something to return.”

  “And ...?”

  “Jeri never did have much sense of humour.”

  “Why did she do it anyway? Did she really care all that much?”

  Eugene shrugged. “I could never figure it out. I mean, even then we weren’t all that hard up for cash. She always said it was the principle of the thing. She seemed to be mad at the whole world. And consumerism kind of opened a somewhat legitimate channel to her. God, she could work up a rage. Nothing timid and retiring about Jeri. Funny, at first she had seemed, I don’t know, just discerning. Knowledgeable. Discriminating. How the hell was I supposed to know if rolls should be served warm. I’d never even thought about it. We never had rolls at home. Bread maybe, or biscuits, but never rolls. And here was this dish with long, blonde hair knowing all about rolls.”

  “You’re too trusting, Eugene.”

  “Later it got so every supermarket manager in the greater Vancouver area knew her. Once she tried to get me to return something for her. A box of broken cookies. Gingersnaps. It was raining like a bastard and she was about eight months pregnant with Donny and she wanted me to get the car out of the garage and go give the store manager hell.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. Absolutely not. I told her I just couldn’t get that worked up about a few broken cookies. I’ve never seen anyone cry the way she did that Saturday afternoon. She cried so hard she was sick. And she couldn’t stop being sick. She was kind of half kneeling on the bathroom floor with her head on the edge of the toilet. I finally phoned a drugstore for a tranquilizer, and when she heard about that she started all over again. Hadn’t I ever heard of thalidomide? Was I trying to mutilate the baby and maybe kill her?”

  “Maybe she really was crazy.”

  He paused, thinking. “Sometimes I used to think so. Now I think she was just plain angry. An angry, angry woman. And probably still is. The only decent thing she’s ever done is let me have the two boys for weekends. How they’ve survived I don’t know. You know, sometimes when she was at her worst I would lie awake for hours and make up dialogue. Daydreams, only mine were at night. Just lay there and dreamed up things for her to say, the things I wanted her to say. I’d invent whole scenes just like movies. I’d have her running in the front door all smiling and her hair falling all around her and she would be saying something like, ‘look at these beautiful apples,’ and then she’d bite into one of them. Or she might be bending over me in bed, smiling and telling me how she was the most—” he stopped, smiling, “the most satisfied woman on the Pacific coast and that for once she was contented.”

  “She must have been satisfied once in a while,” I said knowingly to Eugene.

  “I don’t know. I can’t ever remember her looking really happy until she joined the West Van Consumer Action Group. The night she got elected secretary-treasurer was the horniest night we ever had in eight years of marriage. Of course I was more or less incidental to the whole scene.” He drew a breath. “God, I still think of that night with a kind of glow.”

  “Why did you have to say that?”

  “What? About feeling a glow?”

  “Yes,” I said, for I liked to think Eugene had nothing but the most wretched memories of Jeri. Eugene is the same: he prefers to think of Watson as a pure, black-hearted villain.

  “Actually Watson was a psychic disaster,” I volunteered helpfully.

  “Like Jeri,” Eugene said. “Selfish, immature.”

  “Never should have married anyone.”
>
  “She couldn’t see past her own dumb self-satisfaction.”

  “He could be utterly, utterly unfeeling.”

  “Blind. And biting. Even with the kids.”

  Thus we reassure ourselves, Eugene and I, by contesting the unworthiness of our former partners. Sometimes we grow shrill in our denunciations; they were shallow, insensitive, childish, pathetic. I match Eugene, horror story for horror story, as we conspire to reduce our two partners to ranting maniacs; if they hadn’t walked out on us when they did, they would most assuredly have been committed to an institution, no doubt about it.

  In this way we contrive our innocence. We reshape our histories; we have not been abandoned, only misled, and we insist that we now are liberated from the impossible, the unbearable, that we are free. I am happy now, I tell Eugene. He is happy too, he says, happier than he ever was with Jeri.

  We cling together. Legs entwined, playing at love, we wake early in the morning (who could sleep with all this racket?) and we lie in our lower berth clinging together like children.

  In the dining car we are served breakfast by a serious young man with a raw, new haircut and a glistening red neck. A university student, probably, hired for the summer. Under the eyes of anxious authority his hands tremble slightly as he puts down our glasses of chilled grapefruit juice. His eyes never leave the rims of the glasses and his mouth sags open slightly in concentration. It’s only May; by August he’ll be performing with the gliding familiar detachment of a professional.

  Who dreams up breakfast menus on trains? Someone splendidly elevated and detached from the rushed, sour determinate of instant coffee sloshed onto saucers, the whole crumbly-cupboard, soggy cornflake world. Here fresh haddock is offered, haddock in cream, imagine. With a tiny branch of parsley. Poached eggs exquisitely shivering on circles of toast. Or a bacon omelet. Nested in homefries. Marvellous. Served with a broiled tomato half. The pictorial effect alone is dazzling. English muffins on warmed plates. Yes, please. Honey or raspberry jam? Ahh, both please. Butter, carved into chilly balls on a green glass dish. Coffee brewed to dense perfection and poured from a graceful silvery pot. Well, just one more cup. Eugene smiles across at me.