The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  “Maybe they were only minor operations.”

  “Is he the same age she is?”

  “Two years older. He’s seventy-two.”

  “But he was married before. She wrote that—that he had been married before.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know anything about his first wife, when she died or what.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “He has a furnished room. Not so far from here, just a few minutes. But he’s giving it up and moving in here. After the wedding.”

  “After the wedding,” I repeat the words.

  “Doesn’t it sound crazy? The Wedding.”

  “And he’s retired. What did he do before he was retired?” I reflect suddenly that I’m not so different after all from Doug Savage; what did he do—that was what I had to find out.

  “He taught manual training. In a junior high school.”

  “Manual training?”

  “You know, like woodworking. And metalwork. Like when the girls went for cooking and sewing. Remember?”

  “And that was his job? That’s what he did?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And he lived in Toronto?”

  “I think so. He doesn’t speak a word of French, in spite of the French name; I asked him. But he used to be a Catholic.”

  “A Catholic?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me. When she told me about the manual training and all that.”

  “She would never have told me that. She never tells me anything.”

  “She doesn’t tell me much, either,” Judith says. “She writes every week, but it’s always about the same old thing: the weather and her aches and pains or how much everything costs these days. I had to pump her about Louis.”

  “I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for running away with Watson.”

  “Oh, Charleen, that was ages ago. I’m sure she never thinks about it anymore.”

  “The scandal of it all,” I say bitterly. “Having all the neighbours think I might be pregnant.”

  “Charleen, you exaggerate.”

  “Well, she never tells me anything.”

  “Actually, there’s something she hasn’t told me. And I’m dying to know.”

  I can’t see Judith’s face in the dark. “What?” I ask.

  “If she loves him. If he loves her.”

  “I suppose they must. At least a little.” But I say this doubtfully.

  “I’d give anything to know.”

  “It’s your biographical urge coming through.”

  “It could be. What I want to know is, do they say romantic things like ... well, like, ‘I love you’ and all that.”

  “I can’t imagine her saying it.”

  “I can’t either. But maybe he does. Anyway, I wish I knew.”

  “I don’t suppose you could ask her?”

  “God, no!” Judith says. “She’d have a fit.”

  “What I’d like to know is why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why she’s getting married. It just doesn’t make sense. She’s comfortable enough. Why on earth does she want to go and get married?”

  There is a long pause. Perhaps Judith has fallen asleep, I think. Then I hear her short sigh, and what she says is: “Well, why does anyone get married?”

  “What I’d really like,” I say into the darkness, “is some coffee.”

  “So would I,” Judith says. “I wonder if she’s got any. She mostly drinks tea now.”

  “Let’s look,” I say, slipping out of bed.

  “We’ll wake everyone up.”

  “Not if we’re quiet.”

  We move down the darkened hall. Judith walks ahead of me in an exaggerated clownish prowl, her knees pulling up through her yellow cotton nightgown in a burlesque mime of caution. The door to the kitchen is shut; she turns the knob slowly so that there is no sound, and we close it behind us with the smallest of clicks, snap on the overhead light and breathe with relief. Judith faces me, her upper teeth pulled down over her lower lip, girlish and conspiratorial.

  Here in the kitchen there is a faint smell of roasted meat. Lamb? A fresh breeze blows through the window screen and the mixed scent of dampness and scouring powder rises from the sink. A newspaper, yesterday‘s, is folded neatly under the step-on garbage can beside the back door so that there will be no rust marks left on the squared linoleum; it has always been like this.

  Our room, the bedroom which Judith and I shared as girls, leads off the kitchen; it is the sort of back bedroom which was commonplace in depression bungalows. Eugene and Martin—it excites me a little to think of it—are sleeping there now. Their door, which stands between the refrigerator (a model from the early fifties) and the old cupboard, is shut; Judith and I freeze for a moment in front of it, listening, straining to hear their fused breathing, but all we hear is the stirring of the wind outside the kitchen window. The trees in the back yard are swaying hugely, and I picture their new green buds, not yet fully opened, turning hard and black in the darkness. “It looks like rain,” Judith remarks.

  I find the jar of instant coffee at once; without thinking my hand finds the right shelf, reaches for the place beside the tea canister where I know it must be. A very small jar, the lid screwed tightly on. Judith boils water in the green enamel kettle and finds the everyday cups, and then we sit facing each other across the little brown formica table.

  Suddenly there is nothing to say. We are uneasy; we are guilty invaders in our mother’s clean-mopped kitchen; we have disturbed the symmetry of her lightly stocked shelves, have helped ourselves to sugar from her blue earthenware sugar bowl with its two flat-ear handles and its little flowered lid. “Never leave a sugar bowl uncovered,” she always said. “You never know when a fly might get in.” It is as though she is sitting here with us now, measuring, observing, censoring, as though she is holding us forcibly inside the sudden, unwilled silence we seem to have entered. I try to drink my coffee, but it’s too hot.

  Judith says at last, a little warily, “Eugene seems nice.” It is not a statement; Judith would never make a statement as banal as that; it is a question.

  And I answer conversationally. “I wrote you about him, didn’t I?”

  As always there is a kind of ritual to our dialogue, for of course I know that I have written to Judith about Eugene and she knows it too. I wrote to her long ago telling her I had met Eugene, that he was working on Seth’s teeth, that we had taken a holiday together in San Francisco. I can even recall some of the careful phrases I used in my letters to her. She has not suddenly forgotten, not Judith. It is only that she and I see each other so rarely that we are afraid we might misjudge the permitted area of intimacy. It is necessary to prepare the ground a little before we can speak. There is on Judith’s side a wish not to weigh too heavily what I might have written off-handedly and perhaps now regret. On my side there is a wish to project nonchalance and laxity, to preserve at least a shadow of that fiction she half-believes me to be, a runaway younger sister, a casual libertine who has the edge on her, but only superficially, as far as worldliness goes. West-coast divorcee, free-wheeling poet, and now a sort of semi-mistress. We talk in careful, mutually drawn circles.

  “When exactly did you meet him, Charleen?”

  “Two years ago,” I tell her, “two years now.”

  “And?” Judith asks.

  “Just that. Two years.”

  “What about marriage?” she asks suddenly, recklessly, apparently tiring of fencing with me.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her.

  “He’s divorced too?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s all final and everything?”

  “Yes. It’s not that. Actually he’d like to get married again. I like his two boys and they like me. There’s nothing to stop us really.”

  “But you’re not quite sure of him? Is that it?”

  “I just can’t seem to think straight these days.�
�

  “What about Seth? What does he think of Eugene?”

  “That’s no problem. He likes Eugene. And he gets on great with the two kids. Seth likes everyone.”

  It’s so quiet in the kitchen. The red and white wall clock over the stove says five minutes past two. The refrigerator whines from its muffled electric heart and a very fine rain blows against the screen over the sink. Judith gets up and shuts the window.

  “Seth likes everyone,” I say again. To understate is to risk banality, and these words echoing in the silent kitchen sound both trite and untrue. But they are true; he does like everyone, a fact which makes me feel—and not for the first time—a little frightened at my own child’s open, unquestioning acceptance. Is it natural? Is it perhaps dangerous?

  Judith doesn’t notice. “That’s good,” she says. And waits for me to go on.

  “I’m just waiting until I’m sure,” I tell her. “I’m not rushing this time. I’m going to wait.”

  How can I tell her what it is I’m waiting for; I hardly know myself. But I feel with the force of absolute, brimming certainty that there is something bulky and positive in the future for me, a thing, an event perhaps, which is connected with me in some way, with me, Charleen Forrest. If I were superstitious I might say it was written in the stars, and if I were half as bitter as Judith believes me to be, I might say it is because I deserve something at last. I know it’s there. The numbers tell me: I lived in this brick bungalow for eighteen years. Then I was married to Watson Forrest for eight years. Now I have been divorced for twelve. The shapes, the pattern, the order of those random numbers spell out a kind of logic in my brain; they suggest the approach of another era, another way of being. I’m not a mystic but I know it’s there, whatever it is.

  I tell Judith about Brother Adam.

  She is, as I might have expected, skeptical. Though she prizes her tolerance, in actual fact the edges of her life are sealed to exclude the sort of human flotsam which I have always been able to embrace. The title Brother is not definitive enough for Judith; it is loosely and embarrassingly sentimental, hinting at imposed familiarity and chummy handshakes.

  “What’s it supposed to mean exactly?” she questions. “Is he a priest? Or what?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “You mean in all these letters you’ve written, you’ve never asked him?”

  I pause; it’s hard to explain; some things do not yield to simplicity. “That’s the sort of question he might consider trivial. Too particularized, if you see what I mean.”

  “But you think he might be a priest?”

  “Well, he lives in a place called the Priory.”

  “Which priory.”

  “Just ‘The Priory’.”

  “And it’s in Toronto?”

  “Yes. In the Beaches area.”

  “Are you going to see him?”

  Another pause. “Maybe,” I mumble this ‘maybe’, chewing the side of my cup, trying to conceal the leap of sensation this ‘maybe’ excites in me.

  “But he is a botanist?” Judith asks.

  “Yes. In a way. Actually, it’s hard to tell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He seems to know all about plants. And he sent an article to the Journal. I more or less -assumed that only a botanist would submit an article to a botanical journal.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Grass.”

  “Grass? Was it any good?”

  “Yes. And no. I liked it. But Doug—you remember Doug Savage, you met him in Vancouver when you were there—he thought it was hilarious.”

  “You mean actually funny?”

  “It wasn’t funny. He wasn’t trying to be funny at all. It was a serious article, passionately serious, in fact. And scientific in a way. It was a sort of sociology of grass, you might say. He has this theory about the importance of grass to human happiness.”

  “Maybe he’s talking about marijuana.”

  “No. Just ordinary grass. Garden grass. He’s trying to prove that where people don’t have any grass, just concrete and asphalt and so on, then the whole human condition begins to deteriorate.”

  “It sounds a little fanciful,” Judith’s old skepticism again.

  “In a way. I don’t understand it all, to tell you the truth. But he writes with the most pressing sort of intensity, something much larger than mere eloquence. Anguished. But reflective too. Not like a scientist at all. More like a poet. Or like a philosopher.”

  “But nevertheless the Journal turned it down?”

  “Naturally. Doug thought it was just plain crazy.”

  “And he gave you the job of returning it.”

  “Yes. I send back all manuscripts we can’t use. And usually I do it fairly heartlessly. But with Brother Adam it was different. I couldn’t bear to have him think we utterly rejected what he’d written, that we sneered at what he believed in. I mean, that would be like saying no to something that was beautiful. And humiliating someone who was, well, beautiful too. Don’t look so exasperated, Judith. I know I sound fatuous.”

  “Go on. You sent the manuscript back to the Priory?”

  “Yes. But instead of the usual rejection card, I enclosed a little note.”

  “Saying . . .?”

  “Oh, just that I’d enjoyed reading the article, at least the parts I understood. I thought I’d better be honest about it. And I said I thought it was a shame we couldn’t use an article like that now and then to break the monotony. Everything we print is so detached. You wouldn’t believe it, Judith. I should send you an issue. It’s inhuman. The prose style sounds factory-made, all glued together with qualifying phrases. And here at last was an article spurting with passion. From someone who really loved grass. To lie on, to walk on, to sit on. Or to smell. Just to touch grass, he feels, has restorative powers.”

  “Why grass? I mean, why not flowers or fruit or something? Or trees, even? Isn’t grass just a little, you know, ordinary? After all, there’s a lot of it around. Even these days.”

  “That’s partly why he loves it, I think. The fact that grass is so humble. And no one’s ever celebrated grass before.”

  “Walt Whitman?”

  “That was different. That was more of a symbolic passion.”

  “What happened after you wrote to him?”

  “Nothing at first. A month at least, maybe even longer. Then I got a parcel. Delivered to the Journal office.”

  “From Brother Adam.”

  “Yes. But you’d never guess what was in it.”

  “Grass.”

  “Yes.”

  We both laugh. “It wasn’t really grass, of course.” I explain. “It was only the stuff to grow it with. There was a sprouting tray. And some earth in a little cloth bag. Lovely earth really, very fine, a kind of sandy-brown colour. It was clean, clean earth. As though he’d dug it up especially and sieved it and prayed over it. And then there was the packet of seeds. Not the commercial kind. His own. He does his own seed culture.”

  “And a letter?”

  “No. No letter. Not even instructions for planting the seeds. Just the return address. Brother Adam, The Priory, 256 Beachview, Toronto.”

  “How odd not to send a note.”

  “That’s what made it perfect. A gift without words. As though the grass was the letter. As though it had a power purer than words.”

  Judith laughs. “You always were a bit of a mystic, Charleen.”

  “But what really touched me, I think, was the parcel itself. The way it was wrapped.”

  “How was it wrapped?”

  “Beautifully. I don’t mean aesthetically. After all, there’s a limit to the power of brown paper and string. But it was so neatly, so handsomely done up.” With such touching precision. The paper, two layers, that crisp, waxy paper, every corner perfect, and the knots were tight and trimmed and symmetrical like the knots in diagrams. And the address was printed in black ink in lovely blocky letters. “I hated to open it,
in a way,” I risk telling her.

  Opening it I had had the sensation of being touched by another human being; I had felt the impulse behind the wrapping—and the strength of his wish, his inexplicable wish to please me. Me!

  Judith smiles and says nothing, but from her amused gaze I see she thinks I am absurd. Nevertheless she’s waiting to hear more. My account of Brother Adam cannot really interest her much—though she is currently writing a biography of a nineteenth-century naturalist and is somewhat curious about the scientific impulse—but she listens to me with the alert probing attention which she has perfected.

  “At first I thought of planting the grass at the office, but I was worried it would go dry over the weekend. Besides I didn’t want to answer any questions about it. Doug Savage has a way of taking things over.” And besides it would have given his imagination something to feed on; he and Greta cherish my eccentricities as though they were rare collectables.

  “Go on.”

  “So I took the whole thing home on the bus. Seth thought it was a wonderful present, not at all peculiar, just wonderful. And we put in the seeds that same day. There’s quite a lot of sun in the living room. At least for Vancouver. Anyway you don’t need strong sunlight for grass. One of the things Brother Adam likes about grass is the way it adapts to any condition. It has an almost human resilience. He hates anything rigid and temperamental like those awful rubber plants everyone sticks in corners these days.”

  “I like rubber plants.”

  “Anyway grass can put up with almost anything. I have it in a box by the window and it does well there.”

  I have to hold my tongue to keep from telling Judith more: the way, for instance, I felt about those first little seeds. That they might be supernatural, seeds sprouted from a fairy tale, empowered with magical properties, that they might produce overnight or even within an hour a species of life-giving, life-preserving grass. How that night I fell asleep thinking of the tiny, brown seeds lying sideways against the clean, pressing earth, swelling from the force of moisture, obeying the intricate commands of their locked-in chromosomes. Better not tell Judith too much; she might, and with reason, accuse me of overreacting to a trifling gift. She, who has never doubted herself, couldn’t possibly understand how I could attach such importance to a gift of grass seed or the fact that it placed a burden on me, a responsibility to make the seeds sprout; their failure to germinate would spell betrayal or, worse, it would summarize my fatal inability to sustain any sort of action.