The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  “I was cutting off a piece of beef at noon today,” he told us sadly. “The whole plate slipped suddenly and there I was with a bloody gash.”

  “Oh, Eugene,” Bea crooned kindly, “did you need stitches?”

  “A few,” he said bravely. “The whole thing’s been so damned stupid.”

  I was prepared to dislike him. First for so perfectly fulfilling the role of the inept and picturesque bachelor who couldn’t make a sandwich without sawing through his hand. And second for being a self-pitying poseur, and now monopolizing the conversation with his idiotic stitches.

  “How are you going to be able to work?” Merv asked him conversationally, and, turning to me, he explained that Eugene was an orthodontist and thus required the use of his hands.

  Eugene shrugged and smiled somewhat goofily, “I’ll take a week off. There’s nothing else to do really.”

  “What about all your appointments?” Gordon Stevens asked.

  “I’ll have to get Mrs. Ingalls to cancel everything Monday morning.”

  “What a shame,” Bea mourned, “what a rotten shame. But look, Eugene, let Merv get you something to drink. That hand must be painful.”

  “It is a bit,” he admitted.

  Did I detect a hint of a whine? Was this ridiculous tooth straightener trying to solicit sympathy? If so, I was not prepared to give it. No wonder his wife ditched him, the big baby. I sipped my gin and tonic sullenly.

  “Merv says you’re a poet,” he said to me later, sitting beside me at one of the little tables along with Gord Stevens and Clara Folkstone. I gave him a long look; with enormous difficulty he was eating his stuffed artichoke with his left hand.

  “Yes,” I said knowing that he was about to tell me he never read poetry.

  “I can’t pretend to know much about poetry,” he said. “Except the usual stuff we had at school.”

  “That’s all right,” I said socially. “It’s a sort of minority interest. Like lacrosse.”

  I had dressed for this evening with deliberate declassé nonchalance, aware that Bea expects me to contribute a faint whiff of bohemia to her parties; I wore a badly-cut gypsy skirt and black satin peasant blouse, both bought at an Anglican Church rummage sale. Fortunately Bea’s expectations conform to what I can afford. I had also brought my special party personality, the rough-ribbed humorous persona which I had devised for myself after Watson left me. I earn my invitations and even for an old friend like Bea Freehorn I knew better than to sulk all evening. So I smiled hard at Eugene as Bea brought round the veal fillets.

  Encouraged he asked, “What sort of poet are you? I mean, what kind of things do you write about?”

  “About the minutiae of existence,” I said with mock solemnity.

  He looked baffled and, putting down his fork, he leaned over to whisper in my ear. Now, I thought, now he is going to ask me why poetry doesn’t rhyme anymore.

  But I was wrong; in a very low murmur, so low that I could hardly hear him, he asked if I would mind cutting up his meat for him.

  I almost laughed aloud. But something stopped me; perhaps it was the extraordinary humility of the request or the reserve with which he made it. I leaned over, my elbows grazing his chest and, picking up his knife and fork, I began sawing through the pale, pink veal. My arm sliding back and forth touched the top of his wrist. Clara and Gordon smiled and watched at what seemed a great distance. Three, four, five pieces. I kept cutting, my eyes on Eugene’s plate, until I had finished. Then I sat back breathless.

  For while I was cutting Eugene’s meat, a sudden blood-rush of tenderness had swept over me. A maternal echo? I had once cut Seth’s meat in just this way. Perhaps someone had once cut up mine—I half remembered. Eugene’s helpless right hand wound in beautiful gauze lay on the edge of the table, and it was all I could do to keep from seizing it and holding it to my lips. I wanted to put my arms around him, to cover him with kisses. The brutal knife, the surgical stitches, the vicious wife who had left him and exposed him to all the hurts of the world—I wanted to stroke them away; I wanted to comfort, to sooth, to minister. I wanted—was I crazy?—I wanted to love him.

  We’re not far from Toronto now. Another hour and we’ll be there. It’s getting darker; the towns are closer together now and the farmland is falling into round derby-shaped hills. Eugene is holding my hand and with his middle finger he is tracing slow circles on the palm of my hand. Around and around. The Vistadome where we sit is a tube of darkness. Now he is moving his thumb back and forth across the inside of my wrist. Slowly, slowly. I relax, put back my head, half-shut my eyes. The soundtrack of Zorba the Greek is washing over us. Lighted towns, squared and tidy, flash by. Eugene has slipped a finger between the buttons of my dress and I can feel it sliding on my nylon slip. Then it retreats; he is carefully, quietly undoing one of the buttons. Now his hand is inside. It is spelling out something on my stomach, a sort of code. I smile to myself.

  We flash by Weedham, Ontario. Watson. I had forgotten he was so close to Toronto. No more than thirty miles. Not much of a place; the train doesn’t even stop.

  Eugene’s hand is slowly, slowly inching up my slip, gathering the folds of material. It slides easily. There. He’s reached the lace hem. Now I can feel his hand on my bare thighs, the inside of my thighs. The music swamps us. I want to say something but nothing comes; my lips move in miniature as though they were preparing tiny, perfect chapel prayers.

  He has reached the edge of my nylon elastic and for an instant we seem balanced on the brink—I think for sure he is stopped. We sit so still.

  Then I feel his fingers slip quickly under the elastic and move toward darkness, moisture, secrecy. We are covered with darkness, but on the horizon the sky is soft with reflections. I sit still, half-drowning in a stirring helium happiness. The music rises like moisture and presses on the dark windows, and in this way we ride into the city.

  Chapter 3

  “Well,” I whisper to Judith when we are finally alone.

  “Well,” she answers back, smiling.

  It’s midnight and we’re standing in our slips in our mother’s bedroom at the front of the old house in Scarborough. White nylon slips; Judith’s is whiter than mine and fits better. Is there something symbolic about that? No, I reject the possibility.

  I love Judith. I had forgotten how much I loved her until I saw her standing with her husband Martin and our mother behind the chaste iron gate at Union Station. She and Martin had come from Kingston on the morning train; we would have a few days together before the wedding.

  Judith looked larger than I had remembered, or perhaps it was the colour and cut of her floppy, red denim dress. She has even less fashion sense than I, but unlike me she’s able to translate her nonchalance into a well-meaning, soft-edged eccentricity which is curiously touching and even rather charming. She’s aged a little. I haven’t seen her since she and Martin were in Vancouver for a conference three years ago, and since then she’s had her fortieth birthday. And her forty-first. Her daughter is eighteen now and her son is almost as old as Seth. I find myself involuntarily listing the areas of erosion: a small but generalized collapse of skin between her nose and mouth, the forked lines like fingers of an upturned hand between her eyes which make her look not querulous, but worried and kindly, a detached dry point madonna. Her eyes are dreamier than I remembered. Our mother used to fret that Judith would ruin her eyes from so much reading as a girl, swallowing Lawrence and Conrad and Dreiser on summer afternoons stretched on a bath towel in our tiny back yard. Her eyes were sharper then, darting and energetic, the sort of eyes you would expect to harden with age, but they now show such softness. Of course, Judith’s life has been embalmed in a stately, enviable, suburban calm. She has a husband who loves her, healthy children, a large, airy house in Kingston, not to mention a respectable reputation as a biographer. And most important, she has a seeming immunity to the shared, sour river of our girlhood.

  The house is quiet. Our mother with a long, shrunken, reme
mbered sigh has surrendered to us her bedroom. Green moire curtains discoloured in the folds, a forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture. And on the walnut veneer bed, a candlewick bedspread, here and there missing some of its fringe. There is a waterfall bureau, circa 1928, on which rests a precisely-angled amber brush and mirror set which has never, as far as I know, been used. This was our father’s bedroom too; how completely we have put away that silent, hard-working husband and father. His wages met the payments on this bungalow; his bony frame rested for thirty years on half of this bed, and yet it seems he never existed.

  Since there are only three bedrooms in the house, there was really no other way to arrange the sleeping. No one, of course, had counted on Eugene, least of all Eugene himself who would have preferred a downtown hotel room. It is at my perverse last minute insistence that he is staying here in Scarborough.

  Why do I need him here? Perhaps because playing the role of pathetic younger-sister-from-the-west places too great a strain on me. Maybe I am anxious to make a final defiant gesture and give rein to my self-destructive urge which relishes awkward situations—such as how to introduce Eugene to my mother. “This is a friend of mine. Eugene Redding.”

  Friend? But in my mother’s narrow lexicon women don’t have male friends. They have fathers, husbands and brothers. Her face, meeting Eugene at the station, had dissolved into a splash of open pain. Had I intended to cause such pain? Why hadn’t I written ahead to explain about Eugene? But no one voiced these questions. Nevertheless she shook Eugene’s hand slowly as if trying to extract some sort of explanation through his finger tips.

  “I really don’t want to put you out, Mrs. McNinn,” Eugene had insisted. “I told Charleen I would be perfectly happy in a hotel.”

  There followed a small silence which could be measured not by seconds or minutes but by the cold, linear dimension of my mother’s hurt feelings.

  “I’m sure we can find room for everyone,” she said at last, sounding half paralyzed, like someone who had recently suffered a stroke. “Of course,” she trailed off de fensively, “it’s only a small house.”

  There was, naturally, no possibility of Eugene and me sharing a room. Anxious to please, I suggested sleeping with my mother and putting Eugene in the spare room, but she shuddered visibly at this idea. “I’d never sleep a wink,” she said, plainly vexed. “I’m used to sleeping alone.”

  Another silence as we absorbed the irony of this statement; in less than a week she would be sleeping with a stranger called Louis Berceau.

  Finally it was agreed that Martin and Eugene should take the twin beds in our old bedroom off the kitchen. Judith and I would occupy our mother’s double bed, and our mother, perhaps for the first time in her life, would sleep in the old three-quarters bed in the spare room.

  “Couldn’t I sleep on the chesterfield?” Eugene suggested desperately.

  We waited, breathless, for what seemed like the perfect solution. “No,” our mother said with finality. “No one on the chesterfield. That won’t be necessary.”

  What Eugene didn’t know, what he couldn’t possibly guess, was that no one had ever slept on our chesterfield. Never. Years ago our father, exhausted after a day at work, would occasionally stretch out for a minute and close his eyes. She would poke him, gently but relentlessly. “Not here, Bert. Not on the chesterfield.” It was as though she saw something threatening in the way he spread himself, something disturbing and vulgar about the posture of ordinary relaxation.

  “Not on the chesterfield,” she had said, giving us her final terms, and, like children, we accepted her decree. But inwardly I bled for Martin and Eugene in their forced awkward fraternity. I could imagine their inevitable stiff conversation—All right with you to open the window? Whichever you prefer. Maybe you’d rather have the bed by the closet? You don’t mind if I read for a while? Not at all, not at all.—Strangers, two men in their early forties, shut up from their women in a tiny back bedroom with no more than a foot or two between their beds, and nothing in common in all this world but a bizarre attachment to the McNinn sisters, Charleen and Judith; they might, for that matter and with good reason, be silently questioning that attachment at this very moment. Martin, an easy man, though somewhat remote, would accept the situation, but he could not help minding the separation from Judith. He had even pleaded for the spare room himself. He and Judith wouldn’t object to the three-quarters bed, he had said. But our mother, who seemed to feel that her hospitality was being challenged, had insisted on taking the spare room herself.

  “Well?” Judith says again from across the room.

  “How do you think she looks?” I ask.

  That is always our first question when we’re together, how is she, how does she look. Our voices dip and swim with the novel rhythm of concern, childrens’ concern for a parent.

  “Better than I expected,” Judith says.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “A couple of months ago. I came down on the train with the kids for the weekend.”

  “She’s still getting treatment?”

  “She goes every month now. But next year it will probably be less. Down to every three months.”

  “You talked to the doctor?”

  “Yes. A couple of times. He thinks she’s made a fantastic recovery.”

  “What about a recurrence?”

  “It could happen. That’s why they want her to keep coming to the clinic.”

  “She looks so thin.”

  “She was always thin, Charleen. You’ve forgotten.”

  “Well, then, she looks old.”

  “She is old. She’s seventy.”

  “She’s so pale though.”

  “Not compared to what she was after the operation.”

  “How soon after did you see her?”

  “A month. She never told me she was even having an operation. Which was odd when you think how she always used to complain about her aches and pains. She never told anyone. She just went.”

  “I didn’t know until you wrote.”

  “When I heard—the doctor finally phoned and told me—I came down and spent a week with her. She was feeling fairly strong by then and there was a nurse who came round every day to check up. She never talked about it. It. The breast. Just about the hospital and how rude the nurses had been and how thin the blankets were and how they hadn’t given her tea with her breakfast. You know how she goes on. But the breast—she never mentioned it.”

  “Does it hurt do you think?”

  “I don’t know. She never says.”

  “What does she wear? I mean, does she have one of those false things?”

  “It looks like it to me. What do you think?”

  “She looks just the same there. With her dress on anyway.”

  “Did you ever see her breasts, Charleen? I mean when we were little.”

  “Never. You remember how she used to dress in the closet all the time. That was why it was so odd when you wrote me about the operation.”

  “How do you mean, odd?”

  “That she had a breast removed. It never seemed real to me. I just never thought of her as someone who had breasts.”

  “What did she call them?”

  “Breasts? I don’t know. She must have called them something.”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  We sit on the bed thinking. The house is still and through the window screen we can hear a warm wind lapping at the edge of the awning.

  “Developed,” Judith says at last, “I think she just used the verb form. Like how so-and-so was developing. Or someone else was very, very developed or maybe not developed.”

  Remembering, I smile. “She always thought Aunt Liddy was too developed. Poor Liddy, she used to say, she’s too developed to buy ready-made.”

  Judith and I laugh together, quietly so no one will hear. This is the way it used to be. Lying in bed at night, laughing.

  “Can’t you just hear her telling the doctor that she has a lump in on
e of her developments,” I say.

  “And he says, sorry to hear that, Mrs. McNinn, but we’ll just have to remove half your development.”

  We laugh again, harder this time, so hard that the bed rocks. Crazy Judith. I put my hand over my mouth but Judith lets out a yelp of the old girlish cackle. Now we are both shaking with laughter, but there is something manic about all this mirth; it occurs to me that we are perilously close to weeping, and for that reason I reach over and switch off the light.

  In the dark Judith asks, “Were you absolutely stunned to hear about Louis?”

  “Stunned!” I say. “I’m still trying to get used to it. Is that the way you pronounce his name? Looey?”

  “Yes. Like Louis the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Last time I was down. But just for a minute. He’s coming over tomorrow though. To get acquainted with all of us.”

  “Where on earth did she meet him? I mean, she never goes anywhere.”

  “At the cancer clinic,” Judith says.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly?”

  “You mean what kind of cancer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure. That is, she didn’t go into details. But he’s had three operations.”

  “Three operations?”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Judith. Do you realize—that means he’s missing three parts.”

  “Possibly.”

  “What,” I speak slowly, “do you think they could be?”

  “I don’t know. But he doesn’t look all that sick. At least not the quick look I had at him.”

  “What does he look like, Judith?”

  “Thin. Naturally. And I’m not sure but I think he may be a couple of inches shorter than she is.”

  “Three operations! I can’t get over it. What I mean is ... don’t you think . . . I mean, imagine embarking on marriage when you’re in that state.”