Read an Excerpt
The Box Garden
A Novel
By Carol Shields OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1977 Carol Shields
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-5957-1
CHAPTER 1
What was it that Brother Adam wrote me last week? That there are no certainties in life. That we change hourly or even from one minute to the next, our entire cycle of being altered, our whole selves shaken with the violence of change.
Ah, but Brother Adam has never actually laid eyes on me. And could never guess at the single certainty which swamps my life and which can be summed up in the simplest of phrases: I will never be brave. Never. I don't know what it was – something in my childhood probably – but I was robbed of my courage.
Even dealing with the post-adolescent teller in my branch bank is too much for me some days. She punches in my credits, my tiny salary from the Journal, the monthly child support money (I receive no alimony), and the occasional small, minuscule really, cheque from some magazine or other which has agreed to publish one of my poems.
And the debits. I see her faint frown; a hundred and fifty for rent. Perhaps she thinks that's too much for a woman in my circumstances. So do I, but I do have a child and can't, for his sake, live in a slum. Though the street is beginning to look like one. Almost every house on the block is subdivided now, cut up into two or three apartments; sometimes even a half-finished basement room with plywood walls and a concrete floor rented out for an extra sixty-five a month.
Oh, yes, and a cheque for thirty dollars written out to Woodwards. A new dress for me. On sale. I have to have something to wear on the train. If I turn up in Toronto in one of my old falling-apart skirts, my sister Judith will shrink away in pity, try to press money into my hands, force me with terrible, strenuous gaiety on a girlish shopping trip insisting she missed my birthday last year. Or the year before that.
Food. I am frugal. Seth at fifteen undoubtedly knows about the other families, those laughing, coke-swilling, boat-tripping families in bright sports clothes who buy large pieces of beef which they grill to pink tenderness on flagged patios, always plenty for everyone. Second helpings, third helpings. We have day-old bread sometimes. Bruised peaches, dented cans on special. Only the two of us, but food still costs. It's a good thing Watson insisted we have only one child.
And what's this? A cheque made out to the Book Nook. I had forgotten that. A hardcover book, bought on impulse, a rare layout. Snapped up in a moment of overwhelming self-pity. I'm thirty-eight, don't I have the right to a little luxury now and then? They never have anything new at the library – you have to sign up for requests and then wait half the year to get your hands on it and this way it comes all swaddled in plastic, you just can't get into a library book the same way, why is that? Eight dollars and ninety-five cents. I'll have to be more careful. But I'll have it to read on the train.
It's not only bank tellers. Landladies wither me with snappish requests for references.
"And why did you move from the west side, Mrs. Forrest? You say you're divorced; well, just so you pay regular."
And I do. I am my mother's daughter; cash on the line and cash on time. Her saying. She had hundreds like it, and although it's been twenty years since I left home, her sayings form a perpetual long-playing record on my inner-ear turntable.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. No need to chew your cabbage twice. A penny saved – this last saying never fully quoted, merely suggested. A penny saved: we knew what that meant.
By luck Watson came from a family with a similar respect for cash; thus he has never once defaulted on the small allowance for Seth. The cheque is mailed from The Whole World Retreat in Weedham, Ontario where he lives now. On the fifteenth of every month; no note, nothing to indicate that we once were husband and wife, just the cheque for one hundred and fifty dollars made out to me, Charleen Forrest.
My name, the name Forrest, is the best thing Watson ever gave me. After being Charleen McNinn for eighteen years it seemed a near miracle to be attached to such a name. Forrest. Woodsy, dark, secret, green with pine needles, exotic, far removed from the grim square blocks of Scarborough, the weedy shrubs and the tough brick bungalows. Forrest. After the divorce friends here in Vancouver suggested that I announce my singlehood by reverting to my old name. Give up Forrest? Never. It's mine now. And Seth's of course. I may not be brave but I recognize luck when I see it, and I will not return to the clan McNinn.
McNinn: the first syllable sour, familial; the second half a diminishing clout, a bundle of negative echoes – minimum, minimal, nincompoop, ninny, nothing, nonentity, nobody. Charleen McNinn. No, no, bury her. Deliver her from family, banktellers, ex-husbands, landladies, from bus drivers who tell her to move along, men on the make who want her to lie back and accept (this is what you need, baby), friends who feel sorry for her. Deliver me, deliver me from whatever it was that did this thing to me, robbed me of my courage and brought me here to this point of time, this mark on a nowhere map, this narrow bed.
You made your bed, you can lie in it, my mother always said.
"You really ought to get into meditation," the Savages urge me as we wait for the waiter to bring us our food. "Why?" I ask.
They exchange quick, practiced looks of communion. Doug receives from Greta the miniature nod to proceed.
"For true peace of mind, Char," he says. "For, release."
"Look," I say in what I think of as my Tillie the Toiler voice, flip bravery mingled with touchiness, "who says I need peace of mind? Or release. I'm not ready to die yet."
"We're talking about serenity," Greta leans over the hurricane lamp so that her tiny, earnest creases are transformed by shadow into grey; lapped folds; a seared, oddly attractive gargoyle of a face. Her pouched eyes plead with me.
"It's really far more than serenity," she urges softly. "It's an answer, a partial answer anyway, to – you know – fragmentation. Isn't it, Doug? I mean, it gives you a sense of your own personhood."
"What Greta means is that it frees you from trivia," Doug explains. "And who, I ask you, needs trivia? You want to trim it off. Like fat off a chop. Cut it out." He sits back, pleased with himself.
Doug and Greta Savage are in their mid-forties. Where do butterflies go when it rains? Where do hippies go when they get old? They get frowsier, coarser, more earnest or more ridiculous like the Savages; they look funnier in their beads and long hair, they become desperately reverent about their causes, they become almost stridently tolerant and fair-minded, but they do, at least, become more well-meaning. And more possessive of friends.
The Savages, of course, were never more than weekend hippies. Doug is a scientist, a botanist; in fact, he is a scientist with an enviable reputation, employed by a reputable university. They live comfortably, if a trifle unconventionally, on two acres of woodland at the edge of the city. Their kindness is exquisite, a work of art.
In fact, they fuss in an almost parental way about their younger friends, of whom I am one. Childless (who would bring children into a world like this?) they adopt their friends. I am perhaps their favourite child. They take me out to the Swiss Chalet for dinner – very campy, Doug says, but at least it's pure camp – and they invite me around to their house on Friday nights for red wine and crêpes; they confer enthusiastically about my mental outlook, and lately they have been hinting hugely that Eugene is not nearly good enough for me.
They have even offered to look after Seth while I am in Toronto next week. They are unbelievably fond of him and worry about the lack of a male influence in his life. (Eugene doesn't count; they see him as a negative influence.) Greta is concerned about Seth's natural ease with people and his ability to form indiscriminate friendships, and even Doug maintains that there's such a thing as being too well-adjusted.
"You don't want him falling into the middle-class-mentality trap with nothing but straight teeth to recommend him. Some of these high school teachers have never been out of British Columbia and the only reason they're teaching school anyway is for the tenure."
"Well, you have tenure too," I remind him cheerfully.
"Ah, but university tenure has a place," he cries. "It exists for a reason."
"That's right," Greta says.
"Why is it different?" I ask. They are buying me this meal, this succulent chicken. They are paying for the bottle of good French wine. I shouldn't argue with them, but watching Doug squirm out of his bourgeois lapses is one of the few entertainments I can afford. "What's different about university tenure?"
"Simply that at university level it's necessary to project views which are independent, which are not a part of the university philosophy, the provincial philosophy, or any other damn philosophy. Tenure guarantees livelihood while permitting positive deviation in thought."
"Hear, hear," Greta says, and Doug scowls in her direction. (What would Brother Adam think of that speech? What would he think of that scowl?)
Slyly I ask, "Don't school teachers need protection too?"
Doug spreads his hands. Charmingly. Paternally. "Perhaps," he admits. "In the abstract. But look at the reality. All they really want is money enough to hustle themselves into split levels with their bowling, curling wives and Pablum-dribbling babies...."
"Pablum," Greta murmurs. "What was that we were reading about Pablum, Doug? Just the other day? In Adelle Davis." Greta tends to forget exact references. Information sleeps beneath her pores, for she is an intelligent woman, but it is always disjointed, disassociated; she's never been the same since she underwent shock therapy. "Remember, Doug, Pablum is a really remarkable food. Or something like that."
"Vitamin B," he pronounces, nodding in her direction. "But getting back to meditation, Char; it's not a gimmick. It's a positive power. By forcing the brain to concentrate on an absurdity ..."
Greta's tiny mouth puffs into a circle of protest, but he hurries on.
"... by forcing the brain to concentrate on an absurdity, you let the mind go free."
"What exactly do you mean by 'free'?" I ask. My question is not frivolous, nor am I stalling for time. Free might apply, for instance, to any of Greta's passions over the years – free love, free bird houses to the citizens of New Westminster, free thought, free food stamps, free university, free rest cures for the mothers of battered babies, free toilets in airports (she picketed outside one for two weeks in support of that cause), free lunch-time concerts for office workers, free tickets home for runaway teenagers. The word "free" ranges wildly and giddily in Greta's consciousness, and often – a special irony – it means something like its opposite since she will go to extraordinary lengths to enforce her concept of freedom.
"Into peace," Greta says, leaning toward me again. "Into a larger peace than I ever knew. And I should know-if anyone does." She is referring, Doug and I know, to the breakdown she suffered in her middle thirties and which she mentions at least once on every occasion we are together.
"But you've only been in the meditation thing for a month," I remind her, playing my role of visiting skeptic.
"You're right," she whispers, and the bones of her small face gleam with alabaster zeal through her unbelievably fragile skin. Such a tiny woman, she is far too small to hold all that latent forcefulness. But her voice is full, chalky with mysticism, rich with caring. "I thought I knew myself before, but I was wrong. I didn't know what real peace was."
"Really?" I ask.
"Charleen, Charleen," Doug says fondly but disapprovingly. "You are the ultimate disbeliever."
"Me? A disbeliever?"
"You. Don't you believe in anything?"
I chew my chicken and think hard. They watch me and wait patiently for an answer. Their concern touches me; I want to please them.
"Friends," I say. "People. I believe in people."
They relax. Smile. Sit back. We sip the last of the wine slowly and fold our red linen napkins with bemused inattention. Doug pays the bill and we rise together.
Arms linked, the three of us stroll down Granby. I walk in the middle as befits my position of erstwhile child. The street is full of people leaving restaurants, buying newspapers, walking dogs. Drunks and lovers lounge in the greyed shadows of buildings, and, though it is eleven o'clock at night, there is a Chinese family, a father, mother and a string of smiling children strolling along ahead of us. We are all melting together in this soft and buzzing electric blaze.
Greta and Doug walk me all the way home. I know they would like me to invite them up for coffee. They are pleased with me tonight, cheered by my declaration of faith and by the warmth of our friendship. They don't want to let me go. I sense their yearning for my straw-matted living room and my blue and white striped coffee mugs, my steaming Nescafe. Their faces turn to me.
But I shake my head. Hold out my hand. "Thank you both for a good evening," I stretch out that little word good to make it mean more than it does "I'll see you when I get back from Toronto."
Doug embraces me; Greta kisses my cheek, a crepe paper grazing. I get out my key and don't turn around again.
My apartment consists of three rooms on the second floor of a narrow, old house. I don't count the kitchen which is no more than a strip of cupboards and a miniature stove in a shuttered off end of the green and white living room. The living room has a serenity which does not in any way reflect my personality; perhaps I am attempting, with these white walls and this cheap, chaste furniture, to impose order and bravery on my life; it takes courage to live with wicker; it takes purity, a false purity my case, to resist posters, beaded curtains and one more piece of handthrown pottery. There is a small, blue Indian rug on the wall which Watson and I bought for our first apartment. There is a painted plywood cube for a coffee table; Seth made it in grade eight woodworking class. A few books, some greenery on the window sill, a glowing jewel of a cushion which Greta Savage made for me years ago. My friends believe this to be a totally unremarkable room. This is not a room for a poet, they perhaps think, for it lacks even a suggestion of eccentricity or excitement; instead of verve there is a deep-breathing dreaminess, especially in the evening when the one good lamp throws soft-edged shadows halfway up the wall.
There are two bedrooms, a room for Seth and a room for me. That's all we need. His door is closed, but I push it open and in the rippled dark see his humped form under a light blanket. I listen, just as I listened when he was a baby, for the sound of his breathing. He has probably been asleep for hours. His tuba sits on the floor on the tiny hooked rug I made for him years ago. (A blue swan swimming on a pale yellow sea.) I move the tuba beside his dresser, tiptoeing, but there is no need to worry about waking him up. He sleeps deeply, easily, and his ability to sleep is one more point of separation between us, another notch for evolutionary progress. I almost always sleep poorly, jerkily, my nights filled either with hollowed-out insomnia or strings of short, ragged kite-tail dreams that flap and jump in the dark and leave me sad-eyed in the morning, like the worndown women in coffee commercials. Seth's nervous system seems to have been put together by agents other than Watson or me; Watson with his combination of creative energy and lack of talent was predestined to fall apart. And I, suffering from a lack of bravery, must expend all my energies preparing for the next test. And the next. And the next.
Seth. I adore his blunt normalcy and good health. His unspectacular brain. His average height and weight. His willingness to please. His ability to go along with things, not objecting for instance, to staying with Greta and Doug for a week, even though he knows they will stuff him with peanut and raisin casseroles and counsel him endlessly on attaining personal peace. He just smiled when I told him. Smiled and nodded. Sure, sure, he said. And when I told him that Eugene might be going along with me to Toronto, all he said was, great, great. Ah Seth, I do love you. Sleeping there, breathing. Keep puffing your tuba, keep smiling, keep on, and, who knows, you might get out of this unscathed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Box Garden by Carol Shields. Copyright © 1977 Carol Shields. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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