The box garden

The box garden - Carol Shields


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—youhave 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 fun nier 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 skep-tic.
“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 Nescafé. 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 in 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.

There’s a whole list of things to be done before I leave for Toronto. First, I must pick up my pay cheque at the university, and this means seeing Doug Savage again after having bid him a final goodbye in front of my apartment last night. Something inside me cringes at the carelessness of this oversight; it is the sort of messy mis arrangement I create instinctively. Tag-ends. Clutter. A lack of cleanliness. An inability to end things neatly. What Brother Adam would classify as non-discipline. But there is no question of my not going to pick up the cheque; I need the money.
Why in the seven years on the Journal have I never thought of having the cheque mailed to me at home or, better yet, sent directly to the bank? Other people make such easy and sensible arrangements without thinking. But from my first month on the Journal, Doug has handed me my cheque personally, more often than not with his inked signature still wet on the paper. He pushes it my way off-handedly, avoiding my eyes; sometimes it comes floating loosely on top of a pile of proofs. It is as though a more formal payment might rupture our relationship, might make of my job on the Journal something serious and official instead of a part-time piece of noblesse oblige, a pittance for an abandoned woman, a soup?on for the bereft wife of his former friend. Nevertheless the cheque is never late, an acknowledgement that though my position might be undefined, my need for cash is absolute and recurring.
Not that I don’t work hard. The National Botanical Journal comes out quarterly, and except for selecting the articles which are to appear, I do everything. The Journal is a generally dull and uninspired affair with its buff-and-brown cover and the names of the main articles listed on the front. Our next issue is devoted almost entirely to new disease-proof grains with a short piece on “Unusual Alberta Wildflowers” tacked on as a sort of dessert. It is a periodical (it would be too much to call it a magazine) by academics and for academics.
Doug is the nominal editor and I am the only employee. First I edit the manuscripts which is a long, picky, and sensitive tightrope of a job; it is essential not to under-edit since clarity and a moderate level of elegance are desirable, but I must not over-edit and thereby obliterate personal style and perhaps injure the feelings of the submitting authors. (Will he object if I pencil out his “however”? Will he fly into a tantrum when I chop his sentences in two or sometimes three or even four? Will he mind if I switch the spellings to Canadian standard or rearrange the tangle of his footnotes?) Sometimes I consult Doug.
“You worry too much, Char,” is what he usually says, or “Screw the bastard, he’s lucky we’re going to run his lousy article at all.” Doug inherited the editorship of the Journal from Watson who abandoned it along with his other responsibilities, and not surprisingly he regards it as a time-consuming stepchild. He is entirely unwilling to worry about the theoretical sensitivities of contributing botanists. But I do; I rarely make a change in an article without anticipating a blast of indignation. In actuality it hardly ever happens, because, for some reason, these unseen scientists are astonishingly submissive to the slash of my red pencil; they quite willingly accept mutilations to their work, the dictates of Charleen Forrest, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee who knows nothing about botany and who has no training beyond high school unless you count a six-week typing course. Amazing.
After the galley proofs and the layout dummy come the vandykes, these blueprints of the final round, and then another issue is on its way. Time to begin the next. It is relentless but sustaining. Maybe rhythm is all I need to keep me going.
I only work in the mornings since there isn’t enough money to pay a full-time employee, and theoretically my afternoons are saved for the writing of poetry, what Doug Savage calls the practice of my craft. Craft. As though one put poetry together from a boxed kit. Not that it matters much what you call it, for it is a fact that in the last two years I’ve hardly written a line. What once consumed the best of my energies now seems a dull indulgence.
My afternoons just melt away. Sometimes I meet Eugene if he isn’t too busy at the office. I shop for groceries, read, worry. I write letters to anyone I can think of, for chief among my diseases is an unwillingness to let friendships die a natural death. I cling, pursuing old friends, dredging up school mates from Scarborough like Sally Cork and Mary Lou Lester. I write to Mary Lou’s mother, too, and to her sister in Winnipeg whom I scarcely know. I badger the friends Watson and I once had with my insistent, pressing six pages of hectic persevering scrawl. I even write regularly to a woman named Fay Cousins in northern California who once shared a hundred-mile bus ride with me. And for the last fifteen months I’ve been writing to Brother Adam, the only correspondent I’ve ever had who approaches me in scope and endurance.
I cannot let go. It is a kind of game I play in which I pretend, to myself at least, that I, with my paper and envelopes, my pen and my stamps, that I am one of those nice people who care about people. A lovely person. A loving person, a giving person. I dream for myself visions of generosity and kindness. I care about Fay Cousin’s drinking problem, about Mrs. Lester’s ulcerated colon, about Sally’s home freezing and Mary Lou’s fat braggart of a husband. I care about them. At least I want to care.
To my mother I write once a month. And that’s hard enough. To my sister Judith perhaps three or four times a year; I would write to Judith more often if I were not so baffled by her lack of neuroses; we had the same childhood, but she somehow survived, and the margin of her survival widens every year so that, though I can talk easily enough to her when I see her, I cannot bear the thought of her reading my letters in the incandescent light of her balanced serenity. Does she understand? Probably not.
And Watson. I never write to Watson. Nor does he write to me; no one hears from him anymore except Greta who, by trading on a belief that she and Watson are partners in emotional calamity, manages to elicit an occasional note from him. Watson is not cruel; it is only that he is missing one or two of the vital components which happy and normal people possess. Nevertheless, I ache to write to him; just thinking about it makes my fingers want to curl around the words, to smooth the paper. I long to write to him. He lives in a commune in Weedham, Ontario, with God only knows who, and all he sends me is child support money. Every month when it comes I examine the handwriting on the cheque, hoping it will contain some kind of declaration, but it is always the same; one hundred and fifty dollars and no cents. Signed, Watson Forrest. That’s all.
Sometimes I go for walks in the afternoons and quite often I go all the way to Walkley Street, past the house where Watson and I used to live. We paid exactly $17,900 for that house, and all but one thousand dollars was mortgaged. It is in much better condition than it used to be. The hedges are shaped into startled spheres, and pink and white petunias tumble out of nicely-painted window boxes. There is a new stone patio by the roses, my roses, where I used to park Seth’s pram. The curtains are generally drawn in the afternoons as though the owners, an English couple in their fifties I’m told, are anxious about their polished antiques and Chinese carpets. A ginger dachshund yelps from a split cedar pen. An electric lawnmower gleams by the garage. I am unfailingly reassured by these improvements—I rejoice in them, in fact—for I can foresee a time when this house will pass out of our possession altogether, piece by piece replaced so that nothing of the original is left.

At the university, which I reach by a twenty-minute bus ride, I work in a cubicle of the Natural Science Building. On my door there is a sign which says: 304 Botanical Journal. I have one desk equipped with a manual typewriter, a gunmetal table and matching wastebasket, a peach-coloured filing cabinet with three drawers, two molded plastic chairs and one comfortable, worn, plushy typing chair in bitter green. There are Swedish-type curtains in a subtle bone stripe, by far the best feature of the room, and the walls are painted a glossy café au lait. From the ceiling a fluorescent tube pours faltering institutional light onto my desk. Oddly enough there is no lock on my door. All the other offices on the third floor have locks, but not mine; the lack of a lock and key seems to underscore the valuelessness of what I do. This might be a broom cupboard. Nothing worth guarding here.
This morning when I arrive, Doug is already in the office, bending over the pile of manuscripts on my desk. “Hiya, Char,” he says, not bothering to turn around. “I’m just seeing what we should stick in the fall issue.”
Though it is only May, we are already beginning to think about the autumn number; we are perpetually leaping across the calendar in six-month strides, so that this job, besides paying only enough to keep me from starving, simultaneously deprives me of a sense of accomplishment. Completion, realization, fulfillment are always half a year away, a point in time which, when finally reached, melts into so much vapour. Now the fall issue is being conceived before the summer has taken shape and before the spring is even back from the printers.
Clearly Doug has been expecting me. Without taking his eyes off the pile of manuscripts, he slides my pay cheque across the desk. I accept it wordlessly, fold it in two lengthwise (I can never remember if it is all right to fold a cheque) and put it in my wallet. The awkward moment passes, and now Doug turns and smiles at me. “Well, are you all set for tomorrow?”
“Almost,” I tell him. “Just a few odds and ends to clear up.”
“Greta and I thought we’d pick up Seth right from school tomorrow. That okay with you?”
“Oh, no, Doug. Really, that’s not necessary at all. He can get a bus.”
“No trouble, Char. We’d like to.”
“No, that’s just too much bother. It’s enough that you’ve offered to have him.” I’m playing my game again, protesting, modest, conciliatory, anxious to please.
“For Christ’s sake, Charleen, the poor kid will have his suitcase and tuba and everything. We’ll pick him up.”
“But he’s already planned to come out to your place by bus. He mentioned it this morning.”
“Look, Char,” he sighs, “Greta wants it this way. She wants to pick him up. You know how she gets. I promised her we could do it this way.”
I nod. When Doug and I are alone together without Greta, our relationship undergoes a radical reshaping. We drop all pretense of Greta’s being our friend and equal; instead we conspire to protect her, to smooth her path, to bolster her up, knowing full well that her present tranquility is a fragile growth. If she has made up her mind to pick up Seth from school, it must be done.
“Sure,” I tell Doug, “I’ll tell him. I’ll make sure he understands that you’ll be along.”
“Ah, Char,” he says fondly, “you’re an angel.”
Endearments. That’s another of the ways in which we change when we’re alone. Doug calls me angel, sweet-heart, love, baby—words he would never use if Greta were with us, words which are really quite meaningless but which allow him to toy with certain possibilities of freedom. For he is just slightly in love with me, so slightly that I would never have recognized it, were it not that I find myself responding with sprightly manifestations of girlishness. I grin at him wickedly across the desk. I say “shit” when the printer is late with the proofs. Sometimes I poke a pencil in my hair, give a little cat-stretch at eleven-thirty, put my stockinged feet on the chair, call him “Bossman” in a throaty, southland drawl, and grumble about the work he loads on me.
“I need a week away from here,” I tell him. “I’ve had it with tubers and pollen. And mangled prose structure.”
“I hope you get a chance to relax when you’re away, Char,” he says searchingly. “You need a chance to get away from here and think.”
“Now what exactly do you mean by that?” I demand.
“Nothing, nothing. Just that we all need a break now and then.”
“Now don’t go backing down, Doug. I want to know why you think I need to get away and think. Just exactly what do you believe I should be thinking about?”
“Well,” he hesitates a small, slightly theatrical instant, “to be honest, you might think about where you’re headed. Greta and I have been wondering if you weren‘t, you know, on the wrong track as it were.”
“I suppose you must be talking about Eugene?”
“Not just about Eugene, not only that. But, well, what he represents. The whole bag you might say.”
“You’ve only met him once,” I say waspishly. “And that was just for a few minutes.”
“Now, now, Char, don’t go getting defensive.”
“What am I supposed to do? I happen to be very fond of Eugene. Very fond.”
He waves aside my words. “I can tell you aren’t all that sure of yourself about where you’re going with Eugene.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I asked you.”
“Because you never talk about his job.”
“Aha,” I say triumphantly, “I knew that’s what was bothering you.”
“Be honest, Charleen baby. Doesn’t it bother you a bit?”
“It’s an honest profession,” I declare piously. “My mother, for one, would think it was the height of success.”
“But what do you think?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“An orthodontist. Think about it! A guy who stands around all day putting little wires on little kids’ teeth...”
“Somebody has to do it,” I say. My head aches and I feel a desire to squeeze my eyes shut and weep, but I can’t betray Eugene so easily. “It’s a service,” I sum up.
“Some service. Milking the middle class. God! Dispensing ersatz happiness through the pursuit of perfect middle-class teeth.”
“Well, he did a good job on Seth.”
“Seth! The poor kid. Thrown to the vanity peddlers before he’s old enough to protest.”
“Look, Doug,” I say, shaping the words into hard little rectangles, “it was the bite. Get it? It wasn’t to make him beautiful, it was to correct his bite.”
“And on your salary?” Doug mutters softly in his puzzled surrogate-father voice. “How any guy could take fifty bucks a month out of your salary and not be second cousin to a crook—”
Should I tell him that Eugene would not take any money after the first twenty-five dollar consultation? That he steadfastly refused, once even tearing my cheque into little pieces? Better not risk the suggestion that I was a woman willing to sell her body for dental care, that a pathetically self-sacrificing compulsion had driven me to an absurd martyrdom; it wouldn’t take Doug more than a minute to reach that kind of interpretation. “Let’s just drop the whole subject of Eugene,” I say.
“All I’m saying is that it’s probably a good thing you’re getting away with him for a few days. To sort of see things in context.” His voice softens. “I’m only thinking of what’s best for you, Char.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, stuffing the manuscripts in a drawer and slamming it shut.
Why is it I inspire such storms of preaching? It’s not only Doug Savage; my most casual acquaintances press me with advice. Doug, though, has become a full-time catechizer; great gushes of his energy are channeled into the sorting out of my life. In an obscure way he seems to feel responsible for Watson’s defection, as do all the friends Watson and I once had, as if they shared a guilty belief that their presence in our lives may have proved the fatal splinter. Which is nonsense, of course. But Doug seems to feel he must look after me. He invented this job for me as a therapeutic and practical rescue mission, and at the time I was grateful. I still am. But isn’t it time he got back to his plants, I want to tell him. Or concentrated a little more on Greta who rocks continuously between birdlike vagary and thorny obsession, between her wish to reconcile and her appetite for separation. Does Doug realize that Greta, after all these years, still smothers Watson with letters? That she is perhaps outdoing herself as Seth’s fairy godmother, wishing him well but not knowing how to make an acceptable present of her particular caring magic? She is—why doesn’t Doug see it?—she is possibly slipping into darker and wilder delusions than he realizes.
But since kindness is a sort of hobby with me, a skill which I feel compelled to perfect, I try to look at Doug kindly. It is not really his fault, I tell myself, that Doug judges Eugene harshly. It is part of his generation, this bias, my generation too, to see people in terms of their professions. It is, after all, a logical outgrowth of the work ethic; vocation forms the spiritual skin by which we are recognized and rewarded. Doug Savage is a botanist, a specialist in certain forms of short ferns. He is defined by his speciality just as his ferns are defined by their physical properties. His wife Greta is saved from genuine ordinariness by the fact that she is a professional weaver. Doug’s curriculum vitae for her would run: Greta Savage, weaver, wife. Her actual weaving is immaterial; it is being a weaver which endows her with worth. In the same way he thinks of me pre-eminently as a poet, a kindly classification, since I am more clerk than poet these days. He is able to ignore the lapse of my talent just as he has been able to ignore the presence of Eugene Redding for the last two years.
The Savages’ objection to Eugene is, I sometimes suspect, rather lumpily conceived and certainly it is seldom mentioned: silence says it all. For the most part they have chosen to ignore Eugene just as they have ignored my other, briefer liaisons: with Bob the insurance adjuster, with Maynard the dry-cleaning executive, Thomas Brown-Davis the tax lawyer (lawyers are okay but only if they practice labour law or take on prickly civil liberties cases—even then their value may be marked down by a hyphenated name or a preference for handmade shirts.)
At parties Doug Savage always introduces me by saying, this is Charleen Forrest, you know, the poet. Then he disappears leaving me to explain with enormous awkwardness that my last book came out more than three years ago and that, though I still dabble a little, poetry is part of my past now. What I don’t bother to explain is that having written away the well of myself, there is nowhere to go. The only other alternative would be to join that corps of half-poets, those woozy would-bes who burble away in private obscurities, the band of poets I’ve come to think of, in my private lexicon, as “the pome people.” They are the ones for whom no experience is too small: brushing their teeth in the morning brings them frothing to epiphany. Sex is their private invention, and they fornicate with a purity which cries out for crystallization. They can be charming; they can be seductive, but long ago I decided to stop writing if I found myself becoming one of them.
Both Doug and Greta fear for the future of Seth, that his straight, white teeth and middle-class amiability may propel him toward the untouchable ranks: public relations, stock brokerage, advertising, or even, given the situation, orthodontics.
And if Doug Savage had been acquainted with Eugene for twenty-five years instead of twenty-five minutes, he would still think of him as Eugene the Orthodontist. Pseudo-scientific, or so Doug believes, cosmetic-oriented, a man who tinkers with the design of nature. A shill for pearly teeth. A charlatan with carpeted waiting room, expensive machinery and golf-club manners. Doug sees the already-suspect profession of ortho dontia as being coupled with a lack of creativity or discovery; if only he were a real dentist who dealt with the reality of pain and suffering. Eugene, sadly, is in one of the repair professions, a fact which for Doug places the seal on his insignificance. And worse, as far as the Savages are concerned, Eugene is abundantly rewarded for what he does.
I sigh heavily, suddenly weary, and Doug says, “Don’t give a thought to the manuscripts, Char.” He nods in the direction of my desk. “They can wait.”
“Fine, fine,” I say absently. I am thinking of all the things I have to do before leaving. Laundry, packing, phone Eugene, make sure Seth has bus fare for school. And there must be something else. Something I’ve forgotten. Laundry, packing, phone, bus fare? Something is missing.
The wedding present!
“I never bought a wedding present,” I cry out. “I completely forgot about it.”
Doug says nothing.
“How could I forget!” I marvel. And then I add, “Do you think there’s something Freudian about that? Forgetting to buy my own mother a wedding present?”
He shrugs. Drums his fingers on my desk. He is determinedly nonchalant about my oversight, but I can see by the faint, grey frown on his face that he has stored it carefully away. Something Freudian. Hmmm. Yes.

When my mother wrote from Toronto early in April to tell me that she was planning to remarry, the first thing I thought of was her left breast. No, not her left breast but the place where her left breast had been before the cancer.
What I pictured was a petal of torn flesh, something unimaginably vulnerable like the unspeakable place behind a glass eye or the acutely sensitive and secret skin beneath a fingernail. A pin-point of concentrated shrinking pain. A wound almost metaphysical, pink edged, so tender that a breath or even a thought could break it open.
I haven’t seen her since her operation which was two years ago. In fact, I have not seen her for five years. She lives alone in the Scarborough bungalow where my sister and I grew up. What fills her life I cannot imagine; I have never been able to imagine. Plants. Pots of tea. Her pension cheque. The daily paper with the advertised specials. Taking the subway to Eaton’s. Her appliquéd shopping bag, maroon and moss green, the wooden handles faintly soiled. Her housecoat (a floral cotton, washable), her reading glasses, and toast cut into triangles. Her kitchen curtains, her waxed linoleum. The decaffeinated coffee which she drinks from thick, chipped cups—the rows and rows of bone china cups and saucers, stamped with violets and bordered with gilt, are preserved in the glass-fronted china cabinet for the by-now entirely hypothetical day when guests of inexpressible elegance arrive unexpectedly to sip coffee and sit in judgement on my mother.
My mother is getting married. I have known for a month now—since her short, awkwardly-phrased letter with its curiously bald declaration, Mr. Berceau has asked me to marry him—but the thought still sucks the breath from the floor of my chest. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it.
And why not? Why this perplexity? Certainly there is nothing improper about it; she has, after all, been a widow for eleven years, since our father, to whom she was married for thirty years, died in his sleep, a heart attack in his sixtieth year. A massive heart attack, the doctor had called it. Massive. I pictured a tidal wave of pressure, a blind wall—darkness crushing him as he lay sleeping beside my mother in the walnut veneer bed. He never woke up. My mother, always a light nervous sleeper, heard only a small sound like someone suppressing a cough and that was all. By the time she had switched on the pink glass bedside lamp with its pleated paper shade, he was gone.
And next week she is getting married again. To someone called Louis Berceau, someone I have never seen or even heard of. On a Friday afternoon at the end of May, she is getting married. And why shouldn’t she, a healthy woman of seventy? Why not? Only someone bitterly perverse would object to what the whole world celebrates as a joyous event. But easy abstractions are one thing. It is something else to absorb an event like this into the hurting holes and sockets of real life. I should rejoice. Instead a sucking swamp tugs at me, a hint of Greek tragedy, dark-blooded and massive like the violent seizure of my father’s heart. My timid, nervous, implacable mother with her left breast sheared off and her terrible indifference intact, is getting married. It can’t be happening, it can’t be coming true.

When I leave the office I run for the bus, waving like a crazy woman at the driver, “Wait, wait!” The sun is blinding and I stumble aboard fumbling for a dollar bill and handing it to him.
“That all you got? Nothing smaller?”
“No,” breathlessly, “I’m just going to the bank now.” Never apologize, never explain, Brother Adam wrote.
“Okay, okay.”
I sink into a seat only to be struck anew by panic: did I drop my pay cheque in my frantic search for change? I grope; there it is, folded in my wallet.
I am perspiring heavily. The weather is more like midsummer than spring, and the air is weighed down with dampness. My blouse clings to me across the back. It is an old blouse, six years old at least, with a collar that sags. There is too much material under the arms suggesting rolls of mottled matronly flesh; I should have thrown it out long ago.
What I should do, I think, is go and get my hair cut. But that would cost at least fifteen dollars, even if I could get an appointment and there isn’t much hope of that. Like my sister Judith I have heavy, wiry, wavy hair. Crow black hair. Irish hair, my mother always called it with a hint of contempt. Wild. I’ve never been able to formulate a plan for it. I’m tall, too, like Judith, but rangier, craggier, more angled than contoured; she is older by three years and beginning to widen slightly. I probably will too.
Yes, I decide, I must get my hair cut. Definitely. Right after I finish at the bank. I pat my purse with the cheque folded inside.
In addition to the cheque I have something else in my purse; a three-by-five card with Brother Adam’s address written on it. It is really less a piece of information than a personal note to myself, for Brother Adam’s address is firmly engraved on my brain: The Priory, 615 Beach-wood, Toronto. Nevertheless, leaving the office, I scribbled it down on impulse and tucked it in the zippered middle section of my purse. Impulse? Of course not, I admit to the leafing-out trees; and hedges outside the bus window. I shake my head, a smile fanning out across my face; I have planned this from the very day I decided to go to Toronto for my mother’s wedding. Not actually planned it; no, nothing so definite as that. The idea formed itself like a clot in the back of my head, gradually knitting itself into a possibility: I could, if I had time, that is, visit Brother Adam.
Perhaps not an actual visit. Just a phone call, just to say hello. This is Charleen Forrest. Remember? From the Botany Journal. Yes, it is a surprise, well, I just happened to be in Toronto for a few days, sort of a family reunion, and well, I just couldn’t come this close and not give you a call when your letters have meant such a lot to me and, and, then what?
Maybe I could drop in. Why not? That would be better, nothing like a direct face-to-face after all. Then I could see just what sort of place the Priory is. I’d wear something decorous, my new dress probably, pants wouldn’t do, and I could wear a little kerchief on my head; no, that would be ridiculous. I would ring the bell. Or lift the knocker. A heavy old knocker, probably wrought iron, rusted slightly, ornately carved with religious symbols. A tiny, frocked figure would eventually appear at the door, and I would state my purpose. My name is Charleen Forrest and I am anxious to see Brother Adam for a few minutes. If he can be spared, that is. No, I’m not actually a friend of his, but we correspond. Through letters, you know. For over a year now. And I thought since I was in Toronto anyway on family business that....
Perhaps I should send a little note first. Plain white note paper. Nice small envelope, very maidenly, expressly plain. If I mailed it today it would be there in a day or two. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about taking him by surprise. Really much more polite and, well, thoughtful. The sort of thing that lovely, caring people do, the sort of thing he might do: Dear Brother Adam, I know how busy you are with your grass research and spiritual studies and so on, but I wondered if you could spare a few minutes to see me. I’m going to be in Toronto for a few days visiting my family, and there are so many things I’d like to talk to you about, and some things are hard for me to write about. Your letters have meant so much to me—much more than I can tell you—as I have no one I can really talk to, Brother Adam, no one in the world.

At Mr. Mario’s Beauty Box the eyes of the receptionist transfix me. Green-hooded, beetle bright, too close together, riding above a sharp little nose like glued-on ornaments from a souvenir shop.
“I don’t know if we can fit you in today,” her voice clinks away uncaringly. “What about tomorrow at three?”
“I have to go out of town,” I stutter. Am I pleading? Am I giving way to my tendency to be obsequious? I firm up my voice, “It has to be today.”
“Well,” she says tapping a pencil on the appointment book—and already I can see she is going to work me in—“Mr. Mario himself is free in twenty minutes. If you only need a cut, that is,”
“That’s all I need,” I chant gratefully, “just a cut, just a simple cut.”
She stands up suddenly, reaches across the kidney-shaped desk and tugs a hank of my hair. “About three inches?” she demands.
Three inches off? Three inches left on? What?
“Three inches?” she asks again, more sharply this time.
“Yes, yes, three inches, that would be fine.”
I have never been to Mr. Mario’s before. In fact, I avoid beauty salons almost entirely except for the occasional cut and one or two disastrous hair-straightening sessions in the days when Watson was trying to transform me into a flower child. Mr. Mario’s place shimmers with pinkish light. Light spills in through the shirred Austrian curtains and twinkles off the plastic chandeliers. Little bulbs blaze around the mirrors reminding me of movie stars’ dressing rooms. Pink hair dryers buzz and the air conditioners chum. The wet, white sunlight of the street is miles away. I wait for Mr. Mario in a slippery vinyl chair, suddenly struck with the fear that this rosy elegance might hint at undreamt of prices. Much more than fifteen dollars, maybe even eighteen. Or as much as twenty. Twenty dollars for a hair cut, am I crazy? I turn to the kidney desk in panic, but the receptionist eyes me coldly, leanly. “Now,” she says.
Mr. Mario marches me to a basin, thoroughly, roughly, drenches my hair and neck, and then he seats me in front of his mirror. For a moment I am reassured by his relative maturity; he has a mid-life shadow of fat under his chin, and his fingers are competently plump and strong. Taking hold of my hair at both sides he pulls it straight out and regards my image in the mirror. Together we stare in disbelief: such Irish coarseness, such obscene length, such unspeakable heaviness.
“What did you have in mind?” he inquires sleepily.
“I don’t know,” I gasp. “Something different. Just go ahead and cut.”
“Okay,” he yawns and stepping back he examines me from another angle. “Okay.”
The sight of the razor raises new fears—where did I hear that razor cuts are more haute than scissor cuts? This might even cost—I feel faint at the thought—as much as twenty-three dollars. And then I’ll have to tip him. Another dollar. God, god.
My hair begins to fall to the floor, and without a hint of delicacy he kicks it to one side where it is almost immediately swept up by a girl in a green uniform. Too late now.
He combs, sections, and clips silently and steadily, his lips curled inward with concentration. “Coarse,” he says finally, breaking the silence.
“Yes,” I confess, “it runs in the family.”
“Italian?” he asks with a flicker of interest.
“No. Half Irish, half Scottish.”
“Yeah?” His interest evaporates.
To my right a small shrunken woman of enormous old age sits swathed in a plastic cape; her wisps of hair are briskly sectioned for a permanent, and the pink scalp shows through like intersecting streets. One by one I watch the tight plastic rollers being wound and pinned to the bony scalp. I imagine the ammonia burning through her thin, pink skin, aching. Why does she do this to herself? Her chin wobbles like a walnut as though a scream is gathering there. Her lips move, but she says nothing.
On the other side of me a vigorous woman of about fifty bends forward and lights a cigarette while her rollers are removed by the slimmest of boys in striped purple jeans. “Yesterday,” she says, blowing out puffed clouds of smoke, “I went all the way to the fish market for some red snapper.”
“For what?” the boy asks, leaning toward her.
“Red snapper. It’s a fish. And ex-pen-sive! But I was in the mood for a splurge. Well, I cooked it in a little butter. Then you cover it, you know, and leave it just on simmer. Not too long, say about ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” he murmurs, back-combing her gunmetal shrub.
“Ten minutes. Then just a little lemon, you know, cut in a wedge to squeeze. And my husband said to me, you know, you could serve this to the P.M. if he happened to drop by.”
“He liked it, eh?”
“So he said, so he said, and he’s a hard man to please. Tonight I’m going to do lamb chops. You like lamb?”
“Not too much.”
“It’s all in how you do it. Most people don’t get all the fat out, and with lamb you’ve got to get all the fat out. But do you know what really makes it?”
“What?” he listens. I listen. Even Mr. Mario seems to listen.
“After you brown it really well, you add just a sniff of white wine.”
“White wine?” The striped-pants boy seems a little disappointed.
“You don’t have to use the expensive stuff. Why waste good booze in cooking. Just the ordinary poison will do you.”
“Do you want to have a little hairspray?”
“Just a little. My husband says it’s bad for the lungs. Did you know that?”
“Maybe.”
“No, it’s true. The whole atmosphere’s being destroyed by spray cans. But just a little. It’s awfully humid out. And I’ve got to pick up the lamb chops. That husband of mine.”
Husband. Strange word. Medieval. Husbandry, husband your flocks; keep, guard, preserve, watch over.
“Bitch,” Mr. Mario whispers lazily in my ear as she leaves.
I say nothing, only smile, obscurely gratified that I have somehow gained his favour. He cups my head with his hands, turning it slightly, then begins cutting again, slowly, slowly, alternating between razor, scissors, clippers; razor, scissors, clippers. Cautious as a surgeon.
“Hold still now,” he hisses. “The back of the neck is the most important.”
I begin to feel sick. Could this possibly cost as much as twenty-five dollars? In New York hair cuts cost up to forty dollars—where did I read that? Mr. Kenneth or something. But this is Vancouver. Still with inflation and everything, twenty-five dollars is not impossible. Twenty-five dollars! Stop cutting, I want to cry out. That’s enough. Stop.
Then he is going all over my head with an electric blower and a little round brush, catching my hair from underneath and drawing it out into rounds of dark fur. Turning, rolling, curving. Stop, stop.
At last. Flick, flick with the brush. Off with the towel. A puff of spray. I stagger to the kidney desk.
He follows me, drowsy-eyed.
Now.
“How much?” my mouth moves.
“Fifteen dollars,” he drawls.
I pull out the bills. Blindly stuff an extra dollar in the pocket of his smock. Run for the door. And in the dancing, white heat I see myself blurred across the window. Or is it me?
Oh, Mr. Mario, Mr. Mario. Always, always, always I’ve wanted to look like this. Soft, shaped, feathered into a new existence. Me.
My lips perform the smallest of smiles. My neck turns a fraction of an inch. My legs stretch long and cool and slow. What’s the hurry. Slowly, slowly, I walk home.

Greta telephones to say good-bye. “Is it true,” she asks, “is it true what Doug says? That Eugene What‘s-his-name is going with you?”
I picture her holding the phone in an attitude of anxious, frowning disbelief, her crow‘s-feet deepening. (Greta’s crow’s-feet reach all the way to her soul.)
“Yes,” I tell her briskly. “Yes, Eugene happened to have a convention in Toronto at the same time. Wasn’t that lucky?”
“A dentists’ convention,” Greta says sadly, dully.
I want to comfort her. Poor Greta with her Gestalt therapy, her psychodrama, her awareness clinic, her encounter group, her trauma team, her megavitamin treatment and now her obsession with meditation. All she needs is just enough psychic epoxy to keep her from slipping apart. Can’t I summon a few words to reassure her? Is my heart so hard that I can’t give her those few words?
“Look Greta,” I say, “thanks for phoning, but I’ve got to run. Seth just got in from band practice and I’ve got a million things to do.”

“Seth,” I turn to him.
“Yes.”
“You have the phone number in Toronto? If anything goes wrong?”
“It’s on top of the list you gave me.”
“Well, look, Seth, if you lose it, just on the wild chance that you might lose it, you can ask the Savages. I gave it to Doug too. You never know.”
“Okay.”
“And you’ve got enough money?”
“Sure.”
“Positive?”
“All I need is busfare and milk money.”
“You might have an emergency.”
“I’ve got plenty.”
“Just to make sure, you’d better take this extra five.”
“You keep it, you’ll need it.”
“I’ve got lots. Your father’s cheque came yesterday. And I got paid today. I’m rich for once. You take it.”
He pokes it in his back pocket. “I’ll take it but I won’t need it.”
“I wish you were coming. I hate leaving you here like this.”
“It’s okay,” he smiles across at me. “Anyway, there’s band practice every day this week.”
“At least we’ll be back for the concert. Did you get the tickets?”
“Yeah.”
“For Eugene too? And his kids?”
“Yeah. In my wallet. Want me to hang on to them ‘til Saturday night?”
“Maybe you’d better, the way I lose things. Anyway, I hope everything goes O.K. here.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“It’s just that Doug and Greta can be a little... well ... you know.”
“Uhuh.”
“A little too much.”
“I know.”
“Just tune them out, Seth. If they start getting to you.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll be ready after school? When they pick you up?”
“I’ll be ready.”
“And you won’t forget your suitcase?”
“No.”
“There are clean socks for every day. And I put in your Lions T-shirt in case it stays hot like this.”
“Thanks.”
“And your retainer is in a plastic bag under your pajamas.”
“Okay.”
“Your toothbrush. What about your toothbrush?”
“I’ll put it in tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“I sound like a clucking hen. I know I sound like an old hen.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It’s just that I’m sort of nervous, I guess. All the rushing around and the whole idea of Grandma,”—I say the word Grandma with a sliding self-consciousness since Seth cannot even remember seeing his grandmother—“getting married and everything. It’s just got me a little more rattled than usual.”
“That’s okay.”
“That’s why I’m clucking away at you like this.”
“I don’t mind,” he says smiling.
“You’ve got a nice smile, you know that?”
“I ought to for eight hundred bucks.”
“I don’t mean your teeth. I mean you have really got a nice smile.”
“Thanks. So do you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“I wish you were coming.”
“I’ll be okay,” he says. And then he adds, “And you’ll be okay too.”