The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  When my mother wakes up she goes into the kitchen and begins browning a small pot roast on the back of the stove. “Nothing fancy,” she explains. “I’m not going to fuss even for company, not at today’s prices, not that there’s anything wrong with a good honest pot roast and they don’t give those away nowadays. Maybe it takes a few hours, you have to brown it really well, each side and the ends too, most people don’t want to bother, they’d just as soon take a steak out of the freezer, never mind the cost, and call that a meal.”

  Because I make my mother nervous in the kitchen I go into the living room and stand beside Martin. He glances at his watch and says, “They should be home soon.”

  Is it a question or a statement? “You mean Judith?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “It’s quite a distance,” I remind him. “Remember? Out in the country somewhere.”

  “He’s over seventy,” Martin says grimly.

  “Seventy-two,” I nod.

  “These old coots really shouldn’t be on the road,” Martin says with surprising ferocity.

  The word “coots” shocks me; it seems a remarkably uncivilized word for Martin to use. What is the matter with him?

  I spring to Louis’s defence. “He seems alert enough for a man of his age. I’m sure he wouldn’t drive if he felt he wasn’t capable.”

  Martin looks again at his watch, and I can see by the involuntary snap of his wrist that he’s seriously worried.

  “I’m sure he’s a careful driver,” I insist again.

  “But how do you know?”

  I shrug. “He certainly didn’t strike me as the reckless type.”

  “Didn’t strike you,” he says sourly, mockingly. But then he asks seriously, “How did he strike you, Charleen?”

  “Why are you so worried, Martin?”

  “Because,” Martin says, “have you considered that we don’t know a damn thing about this man? Absolutely nothing.”

  “He used to be a Catholic,” I say, as though that fact were exceptionally revealing, “and he used to teach carpentry or something like that. In a junior high. In the east end I think.”

  “Yes, yes,” Martin says wearily, “but what do we really know about him?”

  “His health, you mean?”

  He sighs, faintly exasperated. “No, not his health. What I mean is, we don’t know anything. Christ, maybe he’s queer. Or maybe he molests children. Or sets fire to buildings or passes bum cheques. How would we know?”

  I feel my mouth pulling into the shape of protest.

  Martin continues, “He’s an odd enough looking bird, you can see that. For your mother’s sake we should have looked into him a bit more. And now here he goes off with Judith to God only knows where. We never even asked exactly where they were headed. And now a storm’s coming up.” He sighs again. “I don’t know.”

  How odd Martin is becoming. I point out to him the obvious facts: that it is not even quite three o‘clock yet, that it was after eleven when Judith and Louis left the house; that Louis distinctly said it was an hour’s drive. True, we know next to nothing about him, but we couldn’t very well call in a detective three days before the wedding; we would have to go by instinct, and my instinct—but would Martin believe it?—my instinct is to trust him. An odd-looking man, yes, and a strange marriage, perhaps—I nod in the direction of the kitchen— but I feel certain, a certainty which I can in no way justify, that there is nothing to be afraid of.

  Martin shakes his head, not entirely convinced but obviously wishing to be. He regards the empty street and the pulsing sky; the rain is holding back, squeezing laboured tears out of the scrambled grey clouds. Clearly Martin will not be happy until Judith is safely home; his devotion touches me, especially when I think of Judith’s careless departure, how she went off without a thought about how Martin would pass the day, making a swift grab for her bag, yanking a cardigan over her shoulders; she took Louis’s arm with huge, loping cheerfulness and sailed past the lilac tree; she drove away in his little Fiat without so much as a good-bye wave. And what else? Oh, yes, she hadn’t told me about Martin’s promotion; she hadn‘t, in fact, mentioned Martin at all; it is rather as though he were no more than a distant acquaintance.

  I want to reassure Martin about Louis’s reliability. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I tell him, “but I know Louis’s okay. And I’m usually right about things like this.” (Am I?)

  He smiles a twisted, academic smile. “Intuition, I suppose.”

  I smile back. We will be friends. “Look,” I say, “it’s a rather odd marriage, but they may surprise us by being happy.”

  “Happy?” He looks amused at the idea.

  “Well, a kind of happiness.”

  Happiness. Such a word, such a crude balloon of a word, such a flapping, stretched, unsightly female bladder of a word, how worn, how slack, how almost empty.

  “Happiness,” Martin repeats dully.

  And before I can say anything more, the telephone rings. It’s Eugene.

  “Charleen.”

  “Yes. Eugene? How’s it going? The conference?”

  “Not bad. A bit draggy.” (I rejoice at his detachment. If he had greeted me with ecstasy my heart would have sickened; I am queasy about misplaced enthusiasm.)

  “What time are you coming?” I ask him.

  “That’s why I’m phoning. What I’d really like is if you could come downtown.”

  “Tonight?”

  “We could have dinner.” His voice slants with pleading. “Just the two of us.”

  “I don’t know, Eugene. My mother. She’s already making dinner. I don’t know what she’d say.”

  “Couldn’t you say I had to stay downtown later than I’d thought? Because of the conference?”

  “I don’t know, Eugene,” I say doubtfully, thinking, poor Eugene, this morning must have been too much for him, and last night too, stuck in the back bedroom. Then I think of the pot roast my mother is cooking, reflecting that it is really rather small to feed all of us; wouldn’t it, in fact, be a kindness to go out for dinner?

  “Okay, Eugene. What time?”

  “Any time. We’re through for the day.”

  “I don’t think I can make it before five,” I tell him.

  “Five then. Get a taxi and I’ll wait for you at Bloor and Avenue Road.”

  “I’ll come by subway. No need to take a taxi all the way from here.”

  “Charleen. Please.”

  “Eugene. I can‘t,” I hiss into the phone. “My mother.”

  “It’ll take you hours.”

  “No, it won’t. Remember, I used to live here. I know the subway.”

  “You’re crazy, you know. I’ll be waiting. Bloor and Avenue Road, all right? By the museum.”

  “Okay,” I promise. I think of my mother fretfully turning her pot roast in the kitchen, of Martin sighing by the window; suddenly I can’t wait to get out of this house. “See you soon,” I tell Eugene.

  Of course my mother minds. Or, perhaps more accurately, she goes through the motions of minding; the pot roast has shrunk alarmingly.

  “You might have said something about it this morning,” she says with a short, injured sniff. “I could have done chops if I’d known there would be only three of us. I’m surprised your Dr. Redding, him a doctor and all, didn’t have the courtesy to tell me this morning. It isn’t like this was a hotel, whatever you may think. But go ahead, go ahead if you’ve made up your mind. All I say is it’s a waste of money eating in fancy restaurants and you never know what you’re getting, food poisoning, germs and I don’t know what. I’d just as soon have a good honest pot roast if you asked me, not all that foreign food. You don’t know what it is. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of a pot roast if I thought you were going to take it into your head to go eat in a restaurant. I suppose you won’t be too late?”

  I listen; I bear with it; in a few minutes, I tell myself, she will have exhausted herself and I will be free to go. No, I tell her,
we won’t be too late. I speak calmly, lightly, remembering to be kind, reminding myself that her nerves are poor, that her health is shaky, that she has never, no never, eaten in a downtown restaurant, that she has been little rewarded in her life for her efforts: her scrambled eggs and careful housekeeping have not won her the regard she might have liked. I remind myself, above all, that she is weak.

  And from her weakness flows not gentleness but a tidal wave of judgment. No wonder she has no friends. Over the years those few people who have approached her in friendship have been swept aside as prying and nosey, their gestures of help construed as malicious arrogance. Underpinning all her beliefs is the idea that people “should keep to themselves.” They should stand on their own feet, they should mind their own business, they should look after their own, they should steer their own ship, they should tend their own gardens. Judgment colours her every encounter: “Mrs. Mallory said she admired my new slipcovers. Imagine that, she admired them. She couldn’t just say she liked them, no, she admired them. I don’t know what gives her the right to be so high and mighty. I’ve seen her slipcovers.”

  The world which she has constructed for herself is fiercely, cruelly, minutely competitive, a world in which each minimal victory requires careful registration. “Well,” she would say, “I had my washing out first again today; first in the neighbourhood.” Or, “At least we don’t eat our dinner at five o‘clock like the Hannas, only country people eat at five o’clock. I told Mrs. Hanna how we always sat down at six o‘clock when my husband got home from the office, from the office I said, and that ended that.”

  My poor, self-tormented mother with her meaningless rage, her hollow vindictiveness, her shrinking fear—how had it happened? Heredity suggested a partial answer. My mother’s mother, Elsie Gordon, had been one of two sisters born in a village in the Scottish lowlands; she had married a farmer named Angus Dunn, and the two of them had immigrated to Ontario where they rented and finally bought a thirty-acre farm and produced two daughters, Liddy (poor witless Aunt Liddy) and, three years later, Florence, our mother. And Florence, as though responding to a cry for symmetry, had also produced two daughters, Judith and me. So here we are, three generations of paired sisters; had we been shaped by a tradition of kindness and had our sensibility been monitored by learning, we might even have resembled Jane Austen’s loving, clinging, nuance-addicted chains of sisters with their epistles and their fainting spells and their nervous agitation and their endless, garrulous, wonderful concern for one another. As it was, we were stamped out of rougher materials: dullness and drudgery, ignorance and self-preservation. Our father too had been a man without ancestors: to go back three generations was to find nothing but darkness; as the “Pome People” might say, our family tree was no more than a blackened stump. I don’t even know the name of the Scottish village my grandparents came from. There have been no pilgrimages, there are no family legends, no family Bible with records of births and deaths, no brown-edged letters, no pressed flowers, few photographs and even those few stiffly obligatory; there are no family heirlooms and, of course, no family pride. Each generation has, it seems, effectively sealed itself off from its lowly forebears. My mother had not wanted to remember the muddy thirty acres where she grew up, the roofless barn, the doorless outhouse, the greasy kitchen table where the family took meals, the chickens which wandered in and out the back door, the thick-ankled mother who could neither read nor write and who had little capacity for affection or cleanliness. Hadn’t my mother, in spite of all this, finished grade nine and hadn’t she gone to Toronto to work in a hat factory? (Ah, but that was another sealed-off area.) Hadn’t she married a city boy, someone who worked in an office, and hadn’t they, after a few years, bought a house of their own, paid for it too, a real house in Scarborough with a back yard and plumbing, hadn’t she kept it spotless and proved to everyone that she was just as good as the next person, hadn’t she shown them? Yes.

  Yes, yes, I understand it; why can’t I put that understanding into motion? Why am I running down the sidewalk like this? The rain is pouring in sheets off the sides of my borrowed umbrella. My feet in my only good shoes are soaked already.

  I’m on my way downtown, running to the subway station. How unfair to blame my mother for the fact that I am taking the subway—I clutch my scratched vinyl purse and admit the truth—I am the one who lacks the largesse to phone a taxi. Meagreness. I am Florence McNinn’s daughter, the genes are there, nothing I’ve done has scratched them out.

  My ankles are wet and rimmed with mud. Oh, God, one more block and at least I’ll be out of the rain.

  As I run splashing along, a sort of song thrums in my crazy head: Seth, Seth, where are you? Oh, Watson, why did you leave me? Brother Adam, why can’t you save me? Eugene, Eugene, Eugene.

  Actually I love the subway. Not its denatured surfaces, not its weatherless tunnels, but its mad, anonymous, hyperactive, scrambling and sorting: the doors sliding open in the station, the rush of people, their faces declaring serious and purposeful journeys they are undertaking. Then another stop—they push their way out and are instantly replaced with equally serious, equally intent others. Their namelessness pleases me, their contained and dignified singularity comforts me. And it amazes me to think of the intricate, possibly secret connections between them, perhaps even connections of love. I like to think that at the end of each of these rushed, wordless, singular journeys, there is someone waiting, someone who is loved. How extraordinary—of course there are all sorts of chemical explanations—but still, how extraordinary is the chancy cement of love; a special dispensation which no one ever really deserves but which almost everyone gets a little of. Even my unloving mother has found someone finally to love. Even Louis Berceau with his scraped-out lungs and his screwed-up, druid face has found someone to love.

  Joy seizes me fiercely, sweetly. I am one of the lucky ones after all with my hard-as-a-kernel nut of indestruc tibility. My hereditary disease, the McNinn syndrome, has riddled me with cowardice, no question about it, but happiness will always return from time to time—as on this train blindly tunnelling beneath Bay and Bloor.

  At the end of the trip, above ground, Eugene is waiting, his gull-grey raincoat flapping in the wind and his face fixed with its own peculiar flat uncertainty. I am ridiculously happy to see him.

  Eugene steers me into a taxi and down the street toward a big, new hotel; through the chrome-framed doors into a warm, bronze-sheeted lobby, strenuously contemporary with revolving lucite chandeliers and motorized waterfalls. The elevator is a cube of perfect creature comfort: softly lit and carpeted, ventilated, soundless and swift.

  In a darkened cocktail lounge high over the city, Eugene and I sit on strangely shaped, grotesquely padded chairs and sip long, cold drinks and nibble on tiny smoked, salty, crackling things. And we talk in the strange, curiously-shy fashion of reunited lovers. I tell Eugene about Louis Berceau, and he tells me about an old dental school friend he ran into today who asked him how “his charming wife was.” When Eugene told him he was now divorced, the friend backed off and, in a blind flurry of honesty, said, “Actually I never could stand Jeri.” Or was it honesty, Eugene wonders now, drumming his fingers on the table. Maybe the friend was, belatedly and pointlessly, scrambling for sides. Maybe he was trying in an unfocussed way to comfort Eugene or to congratulate him for having rid himself of an unpleasant wife. “Strange,” Eugene murmurs, looking into his gin and tonic. “Strange how people react to divorce. Not knowing whether sympathy is in order or not.”

  I agree with him. Death is so much simpler; the rituals are firmer, shapelier; social custom will never be able to alter or diminish the effect of death; one need never be confused about the proper response.

  Later, in the restaurant, we eat marvellous little things from a wagon of hors d‘oeuvres. Tiny fishes, oily and frilled with lemon; sculptured vegetables lapped with mayonnaise, glazed and healthy under parsley coverlets, sharp little sausages and miniature onions, gherkins and lovel
y, lovely olives, black, green, some of them an astonishing pink. After that we have tornedos in cream (the speciality of the house, the beaming, gleaming waiter tells us.) I eat less guiltily knowing Eugene will be able to write off almost every penny this meal is costing; at the same time I feel our feast is meanly diminished by that very fact. A paradox. Eugene says he feels the same way. Why?

  He says it is a question of puritan ethic: you can only enjoy what you have laboriously worked for. Pleasure must be paid for by sacrifice, at least for those like us. It must not come too easily or too soon. He shakes his head sadly over the fact, but accepts it, admitting that most middle class rewards will no doubt continue to elude him.

  “It might be better for the kids though,” he says, speaking of his two boys, Sandy and Donny, who live with Jeri and stay with him in his apartment most weekends. He is always impressed with their unalloyed enjoyment of the presents he gives them. “They don’t think they have to do a damn thing in return,” he says. “I mean, God, they’re little primitives. They just open their arms to whatever rains down on them. Damned ungrateful too, but maybe that’s better than being screwed up with the debt-to-the-devil complex.” “Maybe,” I say. And yet I’m glad Eugene is not entirely guilt-free about tax deductions; I’m grateful for his company here on the ethical edge, in the no-man‘s-land between youth and age, between puritan guilt and affluent hedonism; what a pair we are, half-educated, half-old, half-married, half-happy. I should marry him and relieve a little of the guilt he suffers. He would like that: living alone in an apartment is frightening for a man like Eugene; he feels his ordinariness more than ever. Maybe I will marry him. What a nice man he is. I don’t even mind his being an orthodontist. What if his proportions are less than heroic? Isn’t goodwill a kind of prehensile heroism in this century? Does it really matter that Doug Savage thinks he is miserably average, even slightly substandard, and that Greta fears his mediocrity will place a ruinous stain on Seth’s character? I cannot, after all, choose a husband just to please my friends.