The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  We drink coffee—my mother allows for exactly two cups each—and eat buttered toast. “Margarine is cheaper,” she reminds us, “but the day hasn’t come when I can’t afford a bit of butter in the morning.”

  There is a great deal of conversation around the table; the six of us are surprisingly comfortable together. Eugene, laughing, tips his chair back slightly and fails to respond to my mother’s sharp, disapproving glance.

  My mother speaks to Seth—this grandson she scarcely knows, this grandson whose arrival has occasioned embarrassment and chaos but whose presence has somehow enlivened and restored the household—“I suppose you’d like some corn flakes for breakfast?”

  “Yes,” he answers, “if you have any.”

  “Well, I don‘t,” she returns. “I refuse to spend good money on rubbish like that.”

  At this Seth laughs uproariously, as though his grandmother has said something exceptionally witty.

  “What you need is a good haircut, that’s what you need,” she continues.

  Seth claps his hands over his ears in mock horror. Or is it mock horror? I refuse to meet his eyes.

  “Maybe you’re right, Grandma,” he says amiably, demonstrating his instinct for the inevitability of things. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “If I were you I’d give it more than thought,” she retorts with spirit.

  “I think there are some hedge clippers in the basement,” Martin says.

  We linger over our coffee with the languor of passengers on a steamship, the last leg of the journey in sight. The wedding looms ahead-three-thirty in my mother’s living room—but even that event is overshadowed by the liberating awareness of our separate departures, the return to our other lives which, like real sea voyagers, we view with a mixture of reluctance and anticipation.

  “Martin,” Judith says after breakfast as she tidies my mother’s kitchen, “did you see that thing in The Globe and Mail about the judge?”

  “No,” Martin answers, “what judge?”

  “You know, that Supreme Court judge, old what’s his-name. Seventy-six years old and getting married.”

  “Oh yes,” Martin says, “I think I did see the headline.”

  “And he’s marrying a woman about the same age. Second marriage for both of them.”

  “Hmmm,” Martin comments.

  “So it’s not so odd really, people getting married in their seventies.”

  “Who ever said it was odd?”

  “Maybe it’s the coming thing.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s logical, when you think of it,” she says thoughtfully. “There’s a nice—you know—economy to the whole thing. In fact, it sort of fits in with the recycling philosophy.”

  “Oh?”

  “After all, here’s Mother getting an escort and chauffeur. And Louis is getting a cook and housekeeper.”

  “Is that all?” Martin looks up amused.

  Judith scours the sink with energy.

  “Is that all?” Martin asks again. Then he starts to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Judith asks turning around.

  But Martin is laughing too hard to answer.

  My mother spent almost all morning at the hairdresser’s.

  It had been Judith’s idea: “Look,” she had reasoned with her, “you don’t even have a hair dryer. And it’s so damp this morning your hair will never dry. It would be a whole lot easier if you just went down to that little beauty place next to the Red and White. Eugene could drive you over, couldn’t you Eugene? And you can have it washed and set and be back by noon.”

  “It’s such a waste ...”

  “I’ll phone right now and see if they can work you in. I’ll explain ...”

  “There’s so much to do here ...”

  “Charleen and I can tidy up the house. You have a nice restful morning under the dryer. I’ll phone ...”

  “I don’t know ...”

  “I’ll ask if they can take you at ten-fifteen.”

  She had gone. Judith had won. It was in every way a sensible plan, but I had been appalled by my mother’s quick surrender, her willingness to be led. This weakness is something new; she is getting old.

  “She’s getting old,” I say later to Judith.

  “Yes,” Judith nods briskly. She is plugging in the old vacuum cleaner, and I watch as she attacks the living room rug. How realistic Judith is, how offhandedly she deals with the externals of life. She knows how to manage our mother, how to persuade her against her will, and she accepts her victories with stunning ease.

  The vacuum cleaner is thirty years old, an upright Hoover with a monstrous black bag, and the sound of its roaring motor fills the house.

  I picture my mother in the hands of a bullying shampoo girl in platform shoes, I think of the painful plastic rollers and the chemical sting, the scorching heat of the hairdryer, the futile aggression of Harper‘s Bazaar, and suddenly I am swept with a desire to rush out and find her and protect her. That is when it strikes me that I must ... love ... her in a way which Judith would never comprehend.

  “It’ll do her good to get out of the house,” Judith yells over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

  Yesterday morning Louis came to put in the shrubs I had bought. He worked slowly but with pleasure.

  “Good healthy roots on this one,” he said, patting the soil around a mock orange.

  “I don’t know why you thought I needed more bushes,” my mother called to me crossly from the back door. “There are already more than I can look after.”

  “I like the smell of a mock orange,” Louis said to me. “When it’s in bloom it’s the most wonderful perfume in the world.”

  After my mother went back into the house, Louis whispered to me, “Remember what we were talking about yesterday?”

  “Yesterday?” I blinked.

  “About that friend of yours. The priest.”

  I stared.

  “You were going to ask him to come to the wedding.”

  “Oh,” I breathed, “oh, yes, I remember.”

  “I’ve been thinking it over. And on second thought maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I appreciate it, I really do, but you know, a stranger and all,” he paused and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the house, “maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

  Later, when he had finished the planting, he went inside the house. He and my mother sat at the kitchen table talking a little and drinking coffee, Louis stirring in sugar, and my mother primly, awkwardly, perseveringly sipping. Seeing them sitting there like that I had a sudden glimpse of what their life together would be like. It would be exactly like this; there would be nothing mystical about it; it would be made up of scenes like this.

  Not that I understand the complex equation they teeter upon, or the force that brought them together in the first place. It occurs to me that there are some happenings for which the proper response is not comprehension at all, but amazement and acceptance.

  Eugene drove my mother to the hairdresser‘s, and Seth, feeling restless, went along for the ride. While they are gone Judith and I vacuum and scrub, dust and polish. Martin, whistling, helps us wash the windows with vinegar and old newspapers. Then we stand back and regard the living room with its old, slipcovered chesterfield, its bulky armchairs, dark tables, heavy curtains and the rounded archway into the even gloomier dining room. It is scrupulously clean, but for all the crowding of furniture it looks barren, pinched and depressing.

  “We’ll put the lace table cloth on,” Judith decides. “That should help a little.”

  Martin takes the tablecloth down from the top of my mother’s linen cupboard, and throwing it over his arm, begins to tap out a soft cha-cha-cha. “Ta ta tatata, ta ta tatata,” he sings as he whirls and swoops in the narrow space between the china cupboard and the dining room table. The tablecloth swirls and circles, cascading to the floor as he steps deftly and lightly around the c
hairs. “Down, down, down South America way,” he hums to the lacy folds.

  Judith smiles at him lazily. “You’ll tear it, Martin, and then you’ll catch it.”

  “Then I’ll catch, catch, catch, catch it,” Martin sings, dipping gracefully past us.

  Judith takes the cloth from him and opens it on the table. “Well,” she eyes the yellowed edges, “you can’t say it looks exactly festive.”

  But then Eugene comes in the front door carrying armloads of spring flowers.

  “Flowers!” I exclaim.

  “I never thought of flowers,” Judith marvels.

  “Voila!” Martin cries, and, slowing to a cool elbow-spinning, shoulder-dipping softshoe, he shuffles into the kitchen to look for vases. For an instant—it couldn’t have been more than a second really—I wish, feverishly wish, that I could dance away after him. I wish Judith would stop frowning and tugging at the edge of the tablecloth, and most of all I wish Eugene would stop standing there in the doorway, heavy and perplexed, with the tulips slipping sideways out of his arms.

  Then Judith cries, “You’re a genius, Eugene, I love you.”

  Then something happens: I look at Eugene in a frenzy of tenderness and begin to be happy.

  Yesterday afternoon Louis offered to cut the grass.

  “It’s too much work,” my mother told him, “especially after putting in all those useless bushes.”

  “I’ll cut the grass,” Seth volunteered.

  My mother considered, “Might as well keep busy,” she said. “Idle hands ...”

  Seth laughed; he seems to find his grandmother’s sayings shrewd and amusing. He carried the old hand mower up from the basement, oiled it carefully and began cutting back and forth across the tiny back lawn.

  Watching him, I suddenly remembered the box of grass I had left behind in Vancouver, Brother Adam’s grass. I had left it on the window sill, abandoned it without a thought, when I might easily have arranged for a neighbour to come in and water it. By the time I get home it will probably have turned brown; in all this heat it might even have died. How, I demanded of myself, had I been so neglectful?

  The idea came to me that there may have been something willful in my oversight, that I may unconsciously have conceived a deathwish for my lovely grass, hating it while I pretended to love it. (The mind is given to such meaningless mirror tricks.) Had I subconsciously recognized Watson in those lengthy, grassy letters, had something about them touched a vein of familiarity, a flag of memory? Toying with these thoughts, I couldn’t decide, but my aptitude for self-deception pressed me closer and closer toward belief. Poor Brother Adam, his love of grass which I had believed was prompted by an Emersonian vision of oneness, was only one more easy commitment, an allegiance to a non-human form, a blind and speechless deity. And poor Watson, his life hacked to pieces by his endless self-regarding; every decade a ritual pore cleansing, a radical, life-diminishing letting of blood. (After he had disappeared down the fire escape, after the excitement of seeing Seth had died down, I had picked up the book he had been reading; it was titled The Next Life.)

  It is a good thing Eugene kept the rented car because it turns out to be quite useful. At noon he picks up my mother from the hairdresser’s and brings her home. Seth arrives a few minutes later by foot; he has had his hair trimmed and, smiling sheepishly, he allows us to admire him.

  We eat sandwiches standing up in the kitchen, and then Eugene drives Martin and Judith to Union Station to meet their children who arrive on the one o‘clock train.

  I hardly know Meredith and Richard, and Seth has never seen them. Richard is shy, somewhat sulky, and, after three hours on the train, wild with hunger. Meredith at eighteen is beautiful. Judith has told me that her daughter’s beauty has made her own aging bearable. “It’s an odd consolation, isn’t it?” she said. “You’d think I’d be jealous, but I revel in it.”

  Meredith kisses her grandmother with surprising force. “Well, how does it feel to be a bride again?” she bursts out.

  “I was just going to lie down for my rest,” my mother says in a wavy-toned way she has.

  “Right now?” Meredith’s eyes open wide.

  “Just for an hour. I always have a rest after lunch, you know that.”

  “Hold it for five minutes, Grandma. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “A surprise?”

  “You wait here. I’ll set it up in the kitchen.”

  Meredith, shopping bag in hand, races into the kitchen, opens her blue umbrella on the kitchen table, balancing it carefully on two spokes. Underneath it she arranges a dozen small parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with pale pink ribbon.

  “Okay now, Grandma. You can come in.”

  “What in the world ...”

  “It’s a shower, Grandma, a kitchen shower.”

  “But I’ve got everything I need ...”

  “I know, Grandma,” Meredith dances around the table, “but you’re a bride, you’ve got to feel like a bride.”

  There is a new set of measuring cups in copper-tinted aluminum.

  “But I have some measuring cups ...”

  “But they’re all dented and ancient. I noticed last time we were here.”

  There is a new ironing-board cover.

  “Now you can throw that old rag away.” Meredith chortles.

  There is a little needle-like device to prick the bottoms of eggs with.

  “So they won’t break when you boil them,” Meredith explains.

  “But all you have to do is add some salt ...”

  There is a wooden spoon. A new spatula. A twisted spring for taking lumps out of gravy. Two tiny soufflé dishes in white china.

  “For you and Mr. Berceau,” Meredith tells her joyfully, “and you can put them right in the oven.”

  There is a miniature ladle for melted butter. A painted recipe box made in Finland. And a beautiful, new streamlined egg beater with a turquoise plastic handle and whirling, purring, silvery gears.

  “Lovely,” everyone agrees.

  “Just what you needed.”

  “Meringues, cakes ...”

  “—a beauty—”

  “But I have an egg beater ...”

  “Grandma, smile. This is your wedding day, you’re a bride.”

  While my mother rests we set up the presents on the buffet. There aren’t many. Judith and Martin are giving bedspreads.

  “Two bedspreads?” I ask.

  “Well ... yes. One seemed sort of, you know, suggestive. I mean, that’s the way she might see it. Two sort of cancels out the whole thing. One for the guest room and one for her room, more like a general refurbishing. God, I hate all this delicacy, but you know how she is, and the fact is, we couldn’t think of anything else.”

  Eugene has bought them a kitchen radio which we think was rather an inspiration, a trim little model in white plastic with excellent tone and a year’s guarantee. And since my shrubs hadn’t been very successful, I decided yesterday to buy something else, something small but personal: I decided to give them my complete works, my four books of poetry.

  Curiously enough my mother has never read anything I’ve written. She has, in fact, never expressed the slightest desire to do so, and a species of shyness has prevented me from ever sending her a copy. Furthermore, though she is not an astute reader, it has always worried me that she might comprehend something of the darkness in my poetry. It might wound her; it might remind her of something she would rather forget.

  But now seemed like a good time to make a presentation. Like Judith, I had begun to know that I might never be able to talk to her. Who knows? Perhaps this was a way.

  I had to buy the books retail by going to a bookstore and paying the regular price instead of getting them directly from the publisher as I normally do in Vancouver. Eugene and I went downtown yesterday to a very large bookstore, and there, in the poetry section, I found all four of my books. (They have recently been re-issued as a rather attractive set.) My picture in rainbow hues smi
led happily at me from the back covers.

  It was an altogether surreal experience to be buying my own books; I felt as though I were participating in a piece of cinema vérité. I felt, in fact, extraordinarily foolish placing those books in the hands of the cashier at the front of the store.

  She checked the titles and then she turned the books over to check the price. Now, I thought, now she’s going to suffer a brief instant of confusion; then her mouth will fall open in astonished recognition.

  But none of this happened. Instead she took my twenty dollar bill, slapped it down on the cash register, sighed sharply, and snapped at me, “I suppose this is the smallest you’ve got.”

  “Yes,” I said weakly, faintly, “I’m afraid that’s all I have.”

  Meredith and Judith and I make three bouquets, one for the dining-room table, one for the mantle of the artificial fireplace and a tiny one to set on the telephone table by the front door.

  “Shouldn’t we save some for Grandma’s bouquet?” Meredith asks. “Or is Mr. Berceau bringing that?”

  Judith and I stare at each other; neither of us had thought of a bridal bouquet. “Damn it,” Judith bursts out, “I should have ordered something.”

  “Maybe Louis will bring one,” I say, not very convincingly.

  “Hmmmm,” Judith says, “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t suppose she could carry some of these tulips?” Meredith asks.

  “Not really,” Judith says, “tulips aren’t quite the thing for a bridal bouquet.”

  “Maybe if we phoned a florist right away ...” I begin.

  “Lilacs!” Meredith says. “They’d be perfect.”

  “I don’t know,” Judith says doubtfully.

  “They’d make a perfect bouquet,” Meredith assures us, “and there are tons of them in the backyard. And they’re at their best right now.”