The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  Somewhere along the line my self-education ceased to be a wifely duty. Watson began edging into student politics and laying the groundwork for the Journal, and for me, sitting alone in the apartment, literature became a friend and ally. Surrounded by frayed basket chairs, brick-and-board book shelves, a card table desk, studio couch and bamboo blinds—the furniture, in fact, of the newly married—literature became the real world. And poetry, modern poetry, unlocked in me not so much a talent, but a strange narrow aptitude, a knack, at first, and nothing more.

  My first poems were experiments; I built them on borrowed rhythms; I was a dedicated tinkerer, putting together the shapes and ideas which I shoplifted. And images. Like people who excel at crossword puzzles, I found that I could, with a little jiggling, produce images of quite startling vividness. My first poems (pomes) were lit with a whistling blue clarity (emptiness) and they were accepted by the first magazine I sent them to. Only I knew what paste-up jobs they were, only I silently acknowledged my debt to a good thesaurus, a stimulating dictionary and a daily injection, administered like Vitamin B, of early Eliot. I, who manufactured the giddy dark-edged metaphors, knew the facile secret of their creation. Like piecework I rolled them off. Never, never, never did I soar on the wings of inspiration; the lines I wrote, hunched over the card table in that grubby, poorly ventilated apartment, were painstakingly assembled, an artificial montage of poetic parts. I was a literary con-man, a quack, and the size of my early success was amazing, thrilling and frightening.

  But after Watson left us, after he walked out on Seth and me, poetry became the means by which I saved my life. I stopped assembling; I discovered that I could bury in my writing the greater part of my pain and humiliation. The usefulness of poetry was revealed to me; all those poets had been telling the truth after all; anguish could be scooped up and dealt with. My loneliness could, by my secret gift of alchemy, be shaped into a less frightening form. I was going to survive—I soon saw that—and my survival was hooked into my quirky, accidental ability to put words into agreeable arrangements. I could even remake my childhood, that great void in which nothing had happened but years and years of shrivelling dependence. I wrote constantly and I wrote, as one critic said, “from the floor of a bitter heart.”

  And the irony, the treachery really, was that those who wrote critical articles on my books of poetry never-not one of them-distinguished between those poems I had written earlier and those that came later. (What grist for the Philistines who scoff at literary criticism.) To these critics my work was one arresting—“the arresting Charleen Forrest”—seamless whole. Which goes to show ....

  Louis Berceau takes an enormous amount of sugar in his coffee. Four heaped teaspoons. I watch him—his hands are remarkably steady for a man of his age—dipping into the sugarbowl. The smiling girl of a waitress refills our cups several times, and Louis almost succeeds in emptying the bowl of sugar.

  The mind is easily persuaded, a fact which Brother Adam mentioned in a recent letter, and Louis suddenly appears to me to be an altogether holy man sitting here stirring his sticky coffee. A monk. He inspires, in fact, a torrent of confession. In half an hour I have told him rather a lot about my marriage with Watson. He is an excellent listener, something I noticed yesterday in my mother’s kitchen; he simply nods from time to time and fixes me with his opaque gaze. And out it all spills.

  Watson, I tell him, was a man without a centre; he took on the colour of whichever landscape he happened to stumble across. Watson was a man who went to a Cary Grant movie and for a week after spoke in a light, slight, cocky English accent. He also did a weary, sneery Richard Widmark and—his favourite—a lean, mean, sinewy Dane Clark. Watson was a bit like a snake—the comparison is not really a good one for it suggests malice—but he was like a snake in his ability to continually shed his skin. Louis nods, and I hesitate, remembering that Louis too is a man who has shed his skin.

  No, not like a snake, I correct myself, but like an actor who plays a number of roles one after the other, roles which he takes up energetically but later, with a kind of willful amnesia, shakes off and denies. Louis looks puzzled, and I try to explain. Watson’s first incarnation I can only theorize about: he must have been a sort of child prodigy hatched into an otherwise undistinguished Scarborough family, bringing home to his bus-driver father and seamstress mother miraculous report cards and brimming with a kind of juicy, pedantic, junior-sized zeal. But by the time I met him, he had left that scrubbed good-son image behind and transformed himself into a studied, lazy dreamer of a student, tenderly anarchic, determinedly bumbling and odd. Oh, very, very odd. A structured oddity, though, which both thrilled and terrified him; he needed someone, me, to bring reality to the role. Later, as a married graduate student in Vancouver he had stunned me with a whole new set of mannerisms and attitudes; he literally fought his way into all-roundedness—he boxed, he ran for elec tions, he wrote articles on alfalfa, he signed petitions, he played softball, he even forced himself to attend chamber music recitals and read up on the history of ballet. And I had adored his earnestness, his determination, his rabid certainty which completed, it had seemed to me, some need of my own. I had not quite loved his Young Professor Self, his two year retreat—it seemed longer—into piped and bearded tolerant middle-class academe, his almost British equanimity, the completely unforeseen manner in which he began to utter whole networks of archaisms, words like vouchsafe and gainsay, words strung together with a troubling catgut of hitherto‘s, wheretofor’s and whilst’s; once, completely unabashed, he began a sentence with a burbling I dare-say. It had been during that period that we actually bought a house with a garden. And actually conceived, with brooding deliberation, a child. House, wife, child, all he needed was the ivy. But already he was on his way to his next creation: rebellious young intellectual. For a while he did a balancing act between the two roles: one Sunday afternoon, sulky and depressed, the three of us had taken a walk around the neighbourhood. Seth, who must have been two years old at the time, walked between us, holding on to our hands. He was a little slow and unsteady, and Watson yanked him now and then angrily. But then we happened to pass by a house where an elderly couple were taking the afternoon sun. Seeing them, Watson had smiled gaily; he had swung Seth merrily to his shoulders in gruff fatherly fashion, crooning nonsense into his startled ears; this extraordinary display of affection had lasted until we were out of sight of the couple. Watching him, I had been sickened; that was when I knew he was a man without a centre.

  As he careened toward thirty, he seemed to dissolve and reform with greater frequency, and each reincarnation introduced a new, more difficult strain of madness. Watson seemed unable, psychologically unable, physiologically unable, to resist any new current of thought. He was the consummate bandwagon man. Yet, I had loved him through most of his phases. Riding off to Vancouver on the back of his motorcycle, my face pressed for thousands of jolting miles into the icy smooth leather of his shoulders, hadn’t I thought that I would be safe forever? And for most of the eight years we were together I tried to be tolerant, sometimes even enthusiastic. But what I could never accept was the way in which he coldly shut the door on his past lives. The fact that he so seldom wrote to his parents was a troubling warning; I could sympathize, but still it seemed heartless not to acknowledge the birthday gifts of knitted gloves and homemade fruitcake. Friends, abandoned along the way, wrote imploring letters—what is the matter with Watson, why doesn’t he write or phone? The Journal which he founded in a burst of professional ardour became another dead end. He and Doug Savage quarrelled irrevocably over the definition and degree of scientific responsibility. And he refused to have anything to do with the Freehorns after they once teased him about his intermittent vegetarianism. Seth he regarded as a kind of recrimination, a remnant of a former, now shameful, life which he wanted to forget. Of course I saw that eventually I too would have to go.

  “So it wasn’t such a shock,” Louis says, “when he ... when you separated.”
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br />   “It was still a shock,” I tell him. “I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t believe it when it actually happened.”

  When I look at snapshots of myself taken during that period I am amazed that I am not deformed by unhappiness, that I am not visibly disfigured, bent over and shredded with grief. In fact, except for my bitter, lime-section mouth, I look astonishingly healthy. In the first months I was so weighted with sorrow and relief that I slept twelve hours every night. I was so emptied out that I ate greedily and constantly, buying for myself baskets of fruit as though I were an invalid. My eyes in those photographs gleam like radium; perhaps I was crazed by the cessation of love, still disbelieving, always certain that Watson would return in another guise.

  And in an entirely hopeless way I know I am still half-expecting him to turn up, remorseful, shriven, redeemed. Why else am I keeping Eugene waiting if not for my poor bone of expectation? Waiting has become my daily religion. Tomorrow I must remember to ask Brother Adam why, after all these years, I am still wearing my four-dollar wedding band.

  When Louis speaks again, he asks with phlegm-plugged caution the perfect question. “Where is your Watson Forrest living now?”

  One lives for moments like this. “Here,” I pronounce solemnly, feeling my tongue cooling in delicious irony. “Watson lives right here. Isn’t that amazing, Louis? Can you believe it? He lives here in this very town.”

  Louis shows perhaps a lesser degree of astonishment than I would like, but nevertheless he shakes his head in slow, grinning wonder.

  And both of us, sitting in silence over our coffee cups are stewing in the rarified, blood-racing excitement of knowing exactly what will happen next.

  The Whole World Retreat is two and a half miles south-east of Weedham, reached by a neglected section of secondary road. The young-brown-eyed waitress at the Wayfarers’ Inn is pleased to give us directions. “We buy all our lettuce and onions from them,” she dimples, “and I don’t care what anyone says about them, they make the best whole-wheat bread you ever tasted. Sort of nutty like, you know what I mean. Crunchy. All our customers ask where we get it.”

  We take the road slowly, swerving here and there to avoid potholes still glittering with yesterday’s downpour. The countryside is green and rolling like calendar country; and the farms, though small, seem prosperous with good straight fences, herds of healthy cows and cheerful country mail boxes: The Mertins, Russell K. Anderson and Son, Bill and Hazel Rodman, Dwayne Harshberger, and, at last, a mail box that announces in blocky, green letters, The Whole World Retreat. Louis pulls the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

  Back at the restaurant we agreed that we would simply drive past the place. It would be fun—I had emphasized the word fun, while despising the sound of it—it would be fun, out of curiosity, to drive by and see what the place looked like. I had proposed this to Louis in my lightest, most floating accents, as though this were no more than a crazy whim, a mad impulse, as though I were one of those programmed eccentrics who love to do mad, mad, mad things on the spur of the moment. Like Greta Savage who spends her life crouched on the contrived lip of unreason with her: who else does crazy things like eat sardines for breakfast, who else is mad enough to take a holiday in Repulse Bay, who else is demented enough to tune in everyday to the Archers. I have long suspected that her insanity is partly an affectation ; now I adopt her shrill cry—“I know it sounds silly, Louis, but let‘s, just for the fun of it, drive by.”

  An act of adolescence, for don’t high school girls in love with their math teachers furtively seek out their houses so they can cycle by, half-drowning in the illicit thrill of proximity. I hate Louis to see this undeveloped, irrational side of my personality which hungers for cheap drama, but not enough to pass up the opportunity of seeing the Whole World Retreat. And besides, hasn’t something more than chance brought me this close? Isn’t there at least a suggestion of predestination in this afternoon’s events, and hasn’t Louis with his surprise revelation introduced a note of compelling, almost mystical significance? This day clearly has not been designed for rationality. Even though it is almost four o‘clock, it does not seem right to turn back toward Scarborough where the tunafish casserole awaits, no doubt about it, already browning in my mother’s oven, and where my mother herself waits with her contained, wordless questioning. Something entirely unforeseen has been set into action; I can feel the piping tattoo of my pulse in my throat, and, looking sideways at Louis’s suddenly brightened eyes, I can see that he shares at least a measure of my excitement.

  Beside the mail box a sign in heavy lettering announces : Green onions, Rhubarb, Homemade Bread, Fresh Eggs, Nursery Plants. And at the bottom in larger letters: Absolutely No Chemical Fertilizers. Louis and I sit, thoughtful for a moment, reading the sign and thinking our thoughts.

  The house itself is set well back from the road. It is a top-heavy house, late Victorian in old-girlish brick, and its porch skirt of turned, white spindles gives it a blithe knees-up-Mother-Brown gaiety. Red and yellow tulips, not quite open, stand cheerful in a curved bed. The sloping front lawn is exceptionally beautiful with its twilled, gabardine richness and its fine finish of new growth.

  There is no one in sight.

  “They sell nursery plants,” I remark to Louis.

  “Yes,” he says, “they do.”

  “I wonder what kind of things they have at this time of year.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Actually,” I take a deep breath, “actually I’d thought of buying some nursery plants.”

  No response from Louis.

  I try again. “For you, Louis, the two of you. Something for the backyard. I thought it might make a good wedding gift.”

  More silence, and then Louis says cheerfully, “The perfect thing.”

  “We could just see what they have in stock.”

  “Are you ... that is ... are you sure?”

  I pause. Then lunge. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  We leave the car—Louis checks both doors to make sure they are locked—and walks up the loose-gravelled drive toward the house. He stumbles slightly, then catches himself, but I don’t even turn my head. I can feel excitement leaking in through my skin and for an instant I feel I might faint.

  Up close the house looks slightly less picturesque. There is an old wringer washing machine on the porch, a pair of men’s work gloves hanging on a nail (Watson’s gloves?), two rain-sodden cartons of empty pop bottles. The screen door, rather rusty, has been inexpertly patched.

  I knock.

  “Hang on a minute,” a woman’s low voice calls from the shadows behind the screen, “I’m coming.”

  From inside the house we hear a young baby wailing. Baby! It takes my brain an instant to decode the message: a baby, oh God. Then plunging grief—Watson’s baby. And in another instant I will be seeing Watson. He will come striding through that screen door and see me standing here with my old, grotesque vulnerability hanging around me like a hand-me-down raincoat. What am I doing here?

  A young woman, plumply tranquil, wearing granny glasses, pushes open the door. She wears a dirty, pink shirt over her jeans and on her hip rides a screaming, naked baby of about fifteen months. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she says in a flat but friendly southern Ontario voice. “I had the baby on the pot.”

  “That’s all right,” Louis says wheezing.

  “What a lovely baby,” I half moan. “Is it—” I peer closely, “Oh, it’s a little girl.”

  “Faith,” the woman says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Faith. That’s her name.”

  Louis receives this information silently. He is searching his pockets for a handkerchief. Automatically, never missing a beat, my kindness act uncoils itself. “What an interesting name.”

  “My husband calls her Mustard Seed.”

  “Oh!” The word husband pierces me. “Oh?”

  “Just a joke. Faith of a mustard seed. From the Bible.”

  “Oh, yes,” my head bo
bs.

  “Well,” she says smiling and shifting the still wailing baby to her other hip, “is there anything I can help you with?”

  “We saw your sign,” Louis says indistinctly. His asthma is threatening; he is alarmingly tired. I should never have dragged him here; we should never have come.

  “Nursery plants,” I say, clearing my throat. “We were interested in nursery plants.”

  “Terrific,” the young mother beams. (Young! she can’t be older than twenty-five. I am shaken by a shower of dizzy shame for Watson, this is too much.)

  “I wanted to buy something for a wedding gift,” I say. “A shrub, I thought, something like that.”

  “Just a sec,” the woman says. She peers over her shoulder into the kitchen. “My husband can show you what we’ve got. Of course, it’s early, there’s not much, but he can at least show you what we’ve got.”

  “Look,” I say, taking a step backwards, “we’ll come back another time. When you’ve got more in.”

  She won’t stop smiling at me; her yeasty good cheer glints off her glasses, making creamy Orphan Annie coins of her eyes. “You might as well have a look,” she says. “He’s right here. He’ll be glad to show you what we’ve got.”

  Footsteps across the kitchen floor, a man’s footsteps, a man’s muffled pleasant voice saying, “I’m coming.” Watson.

  But the face which appears in the doorway isn’t Watson ; it is younger, leaner; it has blue eyes. And this man is taller. Not only that but he has straight, straw-coloured hair hanging to his shoulders and a muscular chest moving under his T-shirt. “How do you do,” he says, stepping onto the porch.