The box garden

Chapter 2
“There’s nothing about myself that I like,” I say to Eugene as we lie side by side in our lower berth. Contentment, momentary contentment, has lulled me into confession. “The bottoms of my feet are scaly,” I tell him, “and have you ever noticed what big ugly feet I’ve got? Slabs. And two huge corns. One on each foot. I’ve had those same corns since I was thirteen.”
“Luckily no one dies of corns.”
“My big toes are crooked,” I continue. “I’d go to see a chiropodist if I weren’t so ashamed of my feet. And they’re the kind of feet that are always clammy, summer and winter. At least in the winter I can cover them up with shoes. But then as soon as it’s warm enough for sandals, hot like it was today, that’s when I remember how much I hate my feet.”
“Try to sleep, Charleen.”
“It’s too lurchy on this train to sleep.”
There is a pause, and for a moment or two I think Eugene may remind me that it had been my idea to take the train. But he doesn’t. His divorce has made him cautious, fearful of anything resembling marital bickering. Instinctively he shuns that almost unconscious coinage which passes between husbands and wives: I told you it wouldn’t work. Remember, this was your big idea. What will you think of next? Didn’t I tell you? Not again! Are you going to start in on that? Don’t you ever listen when I’m talking to you? Don’t you care anymore? Don’t you love me?
“Try to sleep anyway,” Eugene says gently.
“I keep meaning to buy a pumice stone for my feet,” I tell him. “Do you know something, Eugene—I’ve been meaning to buy a pumice stone since I was fifteen and read in Seventeen that there was such a thing. And now, here I am, thirty-eight. What’s the matter with me, I can’t even organize my life enough to buy a pumice stone.”
“We’ll buy you one in Toronto.” He is only faintly mocking.
“I would love to have beautiful feet.”
“Great.”
“It would be a start.”
Eugene says nothing but yawns hugely.
“It would be a start,” I say again, drifting off. I am wearying of my self-hatred. It’s only a tactical diversion anyway, a pale cousin to the ferocious self-inquiry which ransacks me on nights less peaceful than this. This is more reflex than ritual, stuffing for my poor brain, packing for the wound I prefer not to leave open.
But it opens anyway, freshly perceived, when I’m wakened at three A.M. by the long, pliant, complaining train whistle. Somewhere in all that darkness we are bending around an unseen curve. It’s cold in the Pullman, and my nightgown is wound across my stomach. Reaching over Eugene and jerking the blind up an inch or two, I admit a bar of blue light into our dim shelf. Moonlight.
Sharp as biblical revelation it informs me of the total unreality of this instant: that I am lying in bed with a man who is not my husband, rolling through mountains of darkness to my mother’s marriage. This is not melodrama (though the vocabulary it requires is); this is madness, lunacy, calling into doubt all the surfaces and shadows of my thirty-eight years.
Berth. Birth. My yearning to see things in symbolic form is powerful; it always has been; it is the affliction of the hopelessly, cheerlessly optimistic, this pinning together of facts to find patterns. And it is a compulsion I resist, having long ago discovered it to be a grandiose cheat. The rhythms of life are random and irreducible.
Suddenly I am shivering from head to foot. I would like to wake Eugene for the warmth of his body, but at this moment I can’t bear to include him. And besides, his green-pajamaed back slopes away from me at an angle which suggests an exhaustion even greater than my fear.

Both of us, Eugene and I, are secondary victims of separate modern diseases, mid-century maladies hatched by the heartless new social order: Eugene because his wife abandoned him for the Women’s Movement and I, because I married a man who couldn’t bear to leave his youth behind.
We are the losers. (Misery loves company, my mother always said.) The hapless rejectees, the jilted partners of people stronger than ourselves. Social residue. Silt. Whatever exists between Eugene and me-and Doug Savage is at least partly accurate when he accuses me of bewilderment—is diminished by the fact that each of us has been cast aside, tossed out like some curious archeo logical implement whose usefulness is no longer understood. Even our lovemaking is lit with doubt: are we anything more than two cripples holding each other up? Can our passion be more than second-rate? Can anything come from nothing?
“She was always something of a bitch,” Eugene said about his wife, Jeri, shortly after I met him, “but at least in the early days she confined her bitchiness to outsiders. Like waiters in restaurants. The first time I took her out to dinner—I’d only known her a week or so then and I wanted to take her somewhere, you know, impressive. To show her that country boys don’t necessarily dribble soup out of the corners of their mouths. We went to the Top of the Captain and she sent the rolls back because they were cold.”
“No!” I gasped delightedly. “Really?”
“Really. She said that she thought more people should take that kind of responsibility when the service wasn’t up to standard. Sort of a battlecry with her.”
“And you married her after that! Oh, Eugene, how could you?”
“There’s one born every minute, you know.”
“What else did she do?” I asked greedily.
“Well, then she got into the consumer thing. That must have started after we’d been married a year or so. She started out by returning groceries.”
“Like what?”
“You name it. Once she had a jar of apricot jam with a wasp in it. That was the worst, I guess. She mailed that to Ottawa.”
“And what happened?”
“All she got, I think, was a form letter. It was being looked into or something. She took back all kinds of things to the store. Lettuce that was brown in the middle. Coffee if it tasted a bit off. Fungussy oranges from the bottom of the bag. Smashed eggs, bony meat. Once, as a joke, I accused her of deliberately buying rotten stuff so she’d have something to return.”
“And ...?”
“Jeri never did have much sense of humour.”
“Why did she do it anyway? Did she really care all that much?”
Eugene shrugged. “I could never figure it out. I mean, even then we weren’t all that hard up for cash. She always said it was the principle of the thing. She seemed to be mad at the whole world. And consumerism kind of opened a somewhat legitimate channel to her. God, she could work up a rage. Nothing timid and retiring about Jeri. Funny, at first she had seemed, I don’t know, just discerning. Knowledgeable. Discriminating. How the hell was I supposed to know if rolls should be served warm. I’d never even thought about it. We never had rolls at home. Bread maybe, or biscuits, but never rolls. And here was this dish with long, blonde hair knowing all about rolls.”
“You’re too trusting, Eugene.”
“Later it got so every supermarket manager in the greater Vancouver area knew her. Once she tried to get me to return something for her. A box of broken cookies. Gingersnaps. It was raining like a bastard and she was about eight months pregnant with Donny and she wanted me to get the car out of the garage and go give the store manager hell.”
“And did you?”
“No. Absolutely not. I told her I just couldn’t get that worked up about a few broken cookies. I’ve never seen anyone cry the way she did that Saturday afternoon. She cried so hard she was sick. And she couldn’t stop being sick. She was kind of half kneeling on the bathroom floor with her head on the edge of the toilet. I finally phoned a drugstore for a tranquilizer, and when she heard about that she started all over again. Hadn’t I ever heard of thalidomide? Was I trying to mutilate the baby and maybe kill her?”
“Maybe she really was crazy.”
He paused, thinking. “Sometimes I used to think so. Now I think she was just plain angry. An angry, angry woman. And probably still is. The only decent thing she’s ever done is let me have the two boys for weekends. How they’ve survived I don’t know. You know, sometimes when she was at her worst I would lie awake for hours and make up dialogue. Daydreams, only mine were at night. Just lay there and dreamed up things for her to say, the things I wanted her to say. I’d invent whole scenes just like movies. I’d have her running in the front door all smiling and her hair falling all around her and she would be saying something like, ‘look at these beautiful apples,’ and then she’d bite into one of them. Or she might be bending over me in bed, smiling and telling me how she was the most—” he stopped, smiling, “the most satisfied woman on the Pacific coast and that for once she was contented.”
“She must have been satisfied once in a while,” I said knowingly to Eugene.
“I don’t know. I can’t ever remember her looking really happy until she joined the West Van Consumer Action Group. The night she got elected secretary-treasurer was the horniest night we ever had in eight years of marriage. Of course I was more or less incidental to the whole scene.” He drew a breath. “God, I still think of that night with a kind of glow.”
“Why did you have to say that?”
“What? About feeling a glow?”
“Yes,” I said, for I liked to think Eugene had nothing but the most wretched memories of Jeri. Eugene is the same: he prefers to think of Watson as a pure, black-hearted villain.
“Actually Watson was a psychic disaster,” I volunteered helpfully.
“Like Jeri,” Eugene said. “Selfish, immature.”
“Never should have married anyone.”
“She couldn’t see past her own dumb self-satisfaction.”
“He could be utterly, utterly unfeeling.”
“Blind. And biting. Even with the kids.”
Thus we reassure ourselves, Eugene and I, by contesting the unworthiness of our former partners. Sometimes we grow shrill in our denunciations; they were shallow, insensitive, childish, pathetic. I match Eugene, horror story for horror story, as we conspire to reduce our two partners to ranting maniacs; if they hadn’t walked out on us when they did, they would most assuredly have been committed to an institution, no doubt about it.
In this way we contrive our innocence. We reshape our histories; we have not been abandoned, only misled, and we insist that we now are liberated from the impossible, the unbearable, that we are free. I am happy now, I tell Eugene. He is happy too, he says, happier than he ever was with Jeri.
We cling together. Legs entwined, playing at love, we wake early in the morning (who could sleep with all this racket?) and we lie in our lower berth clinging together like children.

In the dining car we are served breakfast by a serious young man with a raw, new haircut and a glistening red neck. A university student, probably, hired for the summer. Under the eyes of anxious authority his hands tremble slightly as he puts down our glasses of chilled grapefruit juice. His eyes never leave the rims of the glasses and his mouth sags open slightly in concentration. It’s only May; by August he’ll be performing with the gliding familiar detachment of a professional.
Who dreams up breakfast menus on trains? Someone splendidly elevated and detached from the rushed, sour determinate of instant coffee sloshed onto saucers, the whole crumbly-cupboard, soggy cornflake world. Here fresh haddock is offered, haddock in cream, imagine. With a tiny branch of parsley. Poached eggs exquisitely shivering on circles of toast. Or a bacon omelet. Nested in homefries. Marvellous. Served with a broiled tomato half. The pictorial effect alone is dazzling. English muffins on warmed plates. Yes, please. Honey or raspberry jam? Ahh, both please. Butter, carved into chilly balls on a green glass dish. Coffee brewed to dense perfection and poured from a graceful silvery pot. Well, just one more cup. Eugene smiles across at me.
A tenderness seizes us for a middle-aged man sitting all alone at the next table and, half turning, Eugene and I exchange pleasantries with him. Over third and fourth cups of coffee he talks about how he found happiness by selling his car.
“Suddenly it came to me,” he tells us. “I had an ulcer. You know? I’m a worrier, and you know what they say. Finally I said to myself, look, what are you always worrying about? And do you know what it was?”
“What?” I ask. I am always polite, and besides it is part of the burden of my life to pretend that I am a benevolent and caring person. “What were you worrying about?”
“Well,” he continues, “I didn’t realize it then—it was like a kind of subconscious thing with me—but what I was always thinking about was my car. Like any minute the brake linings were going to need replacing. So I’d be driving along and all the time I’d be listening to some little noise in the engine. My wife used to say I’d get a crick in my neck from bending over listening like that. Every time I heard any knocking in there I’d always automatically think the worst. Like the motor was stripped for sure. Or the carburetor was giving out. I used to have nightmares, honest to God nightmares, about needing four new tires all at once.”
“And did it ever happen?” I ask.
“No. That’s the thing, it never happened like that. Maybe there would be a dirty sparkplug or some two-bit wiring job, and when they told me at the garage that was all it was, I’d break into a sweat. A cold sweat. Well, finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Landed in hospital and I was only forty-three years old. An ulcer. I bled twenty-four hours, they couldn’t stop it. I’m telling you, that makes you think, when something like that happens.”
“I’ll bet,” I agree emphatically.
“So to hell with this, I said. I want to live my life, not worry it away.”
“So you sold your car?”
“That’s exactly what I did. Just called over a secondhand dealer and said, ‘Take it away, I never want to set eyes on it again.’ And the day I sold it was like a stone was rolled off my shoulders. You know what?” He paused. “I was happier that day than the day when I got my first car.”
“And you’re really happier now?” I ask earnestly. I’m not feigning kindness anymore, for I collect, among other things, recipes for happiness. “You really are?”
“You’re darned right,” he said, draining his coffee cup and setting it thoughtfully on the saucer. “So I spend a buck or two on a taxi now and then. And train fares and all the rest. But I’ve got my health, and what’s more important than that? I’m telling you, I didn’t know what happiness was.”
A prescription for contentment. I think of Greta Savage in Vancouver who, for the moment at least, has found a quiet place to store all her missionary longings. And Brother Adam—what did he write me? The only way to be happy is to have no expectations. How fortunate they are to have found their perfect, definable, tailored-to-fit solutions.
And my mother. My mother who achieved, if not happiness, at least a sort of jealous, truncated satisfaction in perpetually revising and reordering her immediate surroundings. All the time my sister and I were growing up, for at least twenty-five years, the main focus of her life was an eccentric passion for home decoration, an enslavement all the more bizarre because of the humbleness of our suburban bungalow, a brick box on a narrow, sandy lot with a concrete stoop, a green awning, and a clothes line at the back.
Always one of the six small rooms was in the process of being ‘done over’, so that we never at any one time in all those years lived in a state of completion. Decorating magazines formed almost the only reading matter in our house, and from those pages, which my mother turned with anxious, hungering fingers, she fanned her fanatical energy. She could do anything. Velvet curtains, swagged and bordered by hand for the living room, were cut up a year later to make throw cushions. She was nothing if not resourceful, for the throw cushions were later picked apart and upholstered onto the dining room chairs. End tables were cut down and patiently refinished. Often wallpaper samples were propped up along the mantle of the imitation fireplace for months at a time before a decision was reached. Her options were limited, of course, by our father’s modest income (he was a clerk in a screw factory). She saved quarters in a pickle jar for two years in order to buy a fake-crystal ceiling fixture for the hall.
She learned to make the most complicated and sheerest of curtains complete with miles of ruffling. She learned to paint, solder, wallpaper, stain and upholster. Several times she rewebbed and covered the armchairs in the livingroom. Mother. A tall woman with a caved-in, shallow chest; she went about the house wearing an old shirt of my father’s over her print house dresses and on her feet, socks and running shoes; her legs, I remember, were a mottled white with clustered purplish, grape-jelly veins at the backs of the knees. Sometimes we would wake up in the morning to find that she was already at work, the dining-room floor covered with drop-cloths, the step ladder set up, and there she tottered, her bush of hair snugged in an “invisible” net, her Scottish jaw set, painting a stenciled cornice around the ceiling. A sea-shell motif in antique ivory.
Her decorating effects were invariably too heavily baroque. Not that I realized this at the time; what I felt in that house was a curious choking pressure as though the walls were being slowly strangled; we were all smothering in layers and layers of airless drapery and plaster. Over the years she showed a tendency toward progressively darker, richer textures. The pine buffet was transformed to walnut, an effect laboriously achieved with the aid of stain and graining tools. In the tiny front hall under the chandelier hung a great, gilded imitation-Italian mirror bought at an auction. Under it was a ‘gossip bench’ painted gold. She ran to luxurious ornamental fabrics, velvets and brocades bought as remnants, and the sumptious effects of tassles and draping. “You don’t need money,” she used to say, “if you have taste.”
Taste. Taste was what the neighbours didn’t have. Taste and imagination. All they ever did, she scoffed, was open the Eaton’s catalogue and order rooms full of mail-order furniture. And if they were short of cash they put up with faded curtains when all they had to do was buy a packet of dye from the chain store. (She herself frequently went on the rampage with dying. Perhaps my great insecurity springs from nothing more serious than the fear that my pink cotton scatter rug might be snatched from me at any minute to reappear later in vivid, startling, foreign purple.) The neighbours didn’t know what taste meant, she said, or were too lazy to make any improvements. All they needed was to get busy and roll up their shirt sleeves. “Just look,” she often sighed, “look what I’ve managed to make of this house.”
Our bedroom, Judith’s and mine, was a vision of contorted femininity. For us she favoured shirred taffeta or dotted swiss, pale chintz or nylon net. I remember one summer morning, perspiration streaming down her face, dark circles staining the arms of her housedress as she knelt on the floor of our stifling bedroom off the kitchen, her lips grim with zeal and full of pins, attaching an intricately ruffled skirt to our dressing table. Once, for wall hangings, she framed squares of black velvet to which she appliquéd (the discovery of applique opened a whole new Chapter in her life) stylized ballet figures. A McCall’s pattern, twenty-five cents plus postage. She made us a bedroom lamp from an old, pink perfume bottle from Woolworth’s and covered the shade with white tulle; this was one of her least successful ideas, for the tulle began to smoke one evening while Judith was studying, and our father had to carry it outside to the backyard and spray it with the garden hose. Our mother watched its destruction with a minimum of sorrow, for any sign of wear or tear or obsolescence immediately opened a hole in the house which her furious energies conspired to fill.
Our father: what did he think of it all? He was so silent and laconic a man, so shy, so nervously inarticulate that it was impossible to tell, but he seemed to sense that the compulsive forces of her personality were cosmic manifestations which must not be interfered with; to stop her was to invite danger or disaster. All I can remember is his occasional resigned sigh: “You know your mother and her house,” as once again we were plunged into chaos.
While she was working on a room she was in a state of violent unrest, plagued by insomnia and shocking fits of indigestion. She planned her rooms as carefully as any set designer, bringing into life whole new environments. Finally, as the metamorphosis was nearing completion, she would become almost electrically excited, impatiently dabbing on the last bit of paint, taking the last stitch, and, with breath suspended, unveiling her creation.
Later she would suffer agonies of doubt. Was it in good taste or was there something maybe just a little bit tacky or gawdy about it? That pink vase, was it a little too much accent? Too bright? Too garish a shade? Maybe if she spray-painted it dusty rose, yes. Yes.
No one except a few out-of-town relatives and the occasional neighbour ever witnessed her decorating marvels although she always talked of having something, a tea perhaps—the exact type of entertainment was never decided upon—when she got the whole house organized. Organized! And the telephone on the gilded gossip bench seldom rang; she never used it herself except to phone our father at the screw company to ask him to bring home another half quart of enamel for the kitchen cupboards or to tell him she had a headache from the varnish fumes and could he come straight home after work and get the girls some scrambled eggs for supper, she would just slip off to bed if he didn’t mind.
I never doubted that she loved the house more than she loved us. Our father and Judith and I only impeded her progress as she plunged from one room to the next. Our very presence made the rooms untidy; sitting on the new chintz slipcover we pulled the pattern off-centre, and our school books on the sideboard disturbed the balance of her ornaments. Once I chipped the Chinese blue kitchen cupboards with the broom handle, thus necessitating a frantic search through all the hardware stores in Scarborough for patch-up paint, a search she suddenly abandoned when it was decided that the cupboards should be painted a pale pumpkin to match the striped cafe curtains which she planned to “run up” as soon as she finished gluing on the moulding in the front bedroom.
Suddenly it stopped. Overnight her obsession became a memory, the way she was before she got old. Judith says it was about the time our father died. I think it was a little earlier. It’s been years now since she has made even the slightest alteration to the house. All the upholstery is faded, slightly soiled on the arms, and when I was last there five years ago I actually saw a patch of the old Chinese blue paint in the kitchen showing through the pumpkin. And under that? A scratch of pink? Perhaps.
I don’t know why she stopped. I must ask her when I see her. Casually mention something like, “Remember how interested you used to be in decorating—why is it you don’t do it anymore?”
But of course I won’t actually say anything of the kind. These offhand conversations which I always rehearse in my mind before seeing my mother never materialize because, once in her presence, I freeze back to sullen childhood when all such phenomena were accepted without comment. To question would be to injure the delicate springs of impulse and emotion. For an obsession such as the one which ruled my mother’s life could only have existed to fill a terrible hurting void; it is the void we must not mention, for, who knows, it may still exist just below the uneasy quaking surface. Quicksand. So easy to get sucked under. Better to walk carefully, to say nothing.
She may have lost her nerve and become, in the end, finally doubtful about what she had once taken to be taste. Perhaps she simply became exhausted. Or the cost of paint and paper may have strained her small pension. It may be that she suddenly realized one day that all her energy was being poured into an unworthy vessel. Or perhaps she was struck with the heart-racking futility of altering mere surfaces and never reaching the heart: her world was immutable, she may have decided. What was the point of trying to change it?

Because the Vistadome is packed with people, Eugene and I sit side by side in the day coach, I by the window and he in the aisle seat. We are leaving the mountains behind and for an hour we’ve watched their angles collapse; they are softening and melting into green, elongated hills which, with their hint of cultivation, are mannerly and almost English. Eugene tells me he has never crossed the Rockies by train before.
“Why not?” I ask.
He shrugs; he is a man much given to shrugging, resignation being the principal inheritance of his forty years. “I don’t really know.”
“How did you get out of Estevan in the first place?” I demand.
“Bus,” he says. “I left on a Thursday afternoon and got into Vancouver late on a Friday night. September. It was the first Friday in September, I remember exactly. I’d just turned eighteen.”
“Why didn’t you take the train?” I ask, wanting details.
“The bus was cheaper,” he explains carefully as though I were exceedingly simple. “Probably only a buck or two, but to my folks—” he stops, shrugging again.
“How did you get home for holidays,” I ask, “when you were at university?” These questions are necessary, for though Eugene and I have known each other for two years now, there are miles of unknown territory to recover. Thirty-eight years of his life, thirty-six of mine.
“Hitchhiked,” he says. “Then in my third year I bought that old, tan Chevvy. I told you about that.”
I nod. Eugene’s life is chronicled by the different cars he has owned, separated into periods as distinct as the phases of civilization; his stone-age, bronze-age, iron-age. First the Chevvy, a fourth-hand, first love which he restored to humming perfection on lonely, broke, womanless weekends on the street outside his boarding house on west 19th. Then the Volkswagen beetle with only one previous owner; by graduation he had discovered the benefits of good mileage and reliable repair service. With the navy blue Ford Jeri entered his life. The Rambler: Sandy was born and Donnie on the way and what with diaper bags, carbeds, safety seats and economy ... the Plymouth wagon, good for groceries. Then the Chrysler; orthodontics was beginning to be rewarding, and though Jeri didn’t believe in luxury transport (she had a small Sunbeam of her own anyway), the dealer had offered a package Eugene couldn’t turn down. “We used it on weekends,” he says, “but I never really knew it inside out. Not like with the Chevvy.” The Chevvy. He speaks of it tenderly. “She took me back and forth from Estevan to university three times a year and never once let me down.” He smiles, stretched with nostalgia. “She was a good girl. A great old girl.”
“And you never once flew.”
“Christ, no. It was all I could do to buy gas. I never even set foot in a plane until I was twenty-six and Jeri wanted to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”
Now, years later, he flies routinely as though no other form of transportation exists. When he decided to come with me to Toronto he tried for days to persuade me that we should fly. “It would save time,” he pressed, “and you’d have longer with your mother and sister.” (An argument which demonstrates how shallowly he knows me after two years, for what matters to me is to shorten the time in Toronto, not lengthen it.) Besides I went by train the other three times—when I brought Seth as a baby to show him off to his grandparents, then when my father died, and five years ago, when I came home to tell my mother, very belatedly, about my divorce. I had always taken the train; the pattern had been set; and besides, I told Eugene, the train was cheaper.
At the mention of expense, Eugene hesitated, and I knew what he was thinking: that he could easily afford the plane fares for both of us, and since he was planning to attend a dental convention in Toronto, he could write off the whole thing as a business expense. How simple life is for those with professions, savings accounts and good tax lawyers. It was, in fact, this very simplicity that I refused; I’m not ready yet to lay myself open to such soft and easy alternatives.
For days we discussed the matter of plane-versus-train, trading small gently reasoned arguments, each of us having lost the taste for full-scale battle, and, at last, Eugene relented, “But,” he said, “if we go by train let’s at least come home by air. And let’s get ourselves a compartment.”
“I sat up the other three times,” I said, “and it was fine.” Actually it hadn’t been fine, but I had, on those three previous trips, accepted discomfort as a kind of welcome detached suffering.
“A roomette?” he bargained. “At least a roomette.”
In the end we found we had left it too late; by the time we came to an agreement on the roomette, there was nothing left but one Pullman and at that we were lucky to get a lower. I wanted to pay for half the Pullman but backed down when Eugene began to show signs of genuine impatience. But if he had been even a trifle reasonable I would have preferred to pay my way. Just as I’m not ready for comfort (since I’ve done nothing to deserve it), neither am I ready to give up what remains of my shattered independence. First it was dinners Eugene paid for; then Seth’s dental care; last spring a holiday for the two of us in San Francisco; now my Pullman. And when I went shopping for a new dress for Toronto, he had wanted to pay for that too.
I look down at the dress which is really quite comfortable for the train, but like most of my purchases it is proving to be something of a disappointment; a shirt-dress in tangerine knit which, even though it is supposed to be permapress, creases across the lap. It is slightly baggy in the hips and a little snug across the top so that the spaces between the shiny white buttons gap slightly like little orange mouths. And beneath my soft, glossy new hair style of forty-eight hours ago the natural, black, Irish-witch contours are beginning to reassert themselves.
Still the two of us sitting here could pass for any happily married couple. Eugene, prosperous and healthy in his chocolate, doubleknit sixty dollar pants and lightweight, brown, ribbed pullover, and I, his wife (‘the little wife’ you could almost say if I weren’t so tall) going along for the ride, a little shopping, a little holiday from the kids. That is to say, there is nothing grotesque about us. We are not perhaps a stunning couple; Eugene has a loose fabric-like face and thin, beige, wooly hair cut too short. Without being actually overweight, there is a somewhat loose look around his stomach and hips. And I have my usual rangy, unconfined awkwardness. Nevertheless we are not in any way identifiable as the victims of failed marriages. Nothing gives us away, a fact which seems remarkable to me. Nothing betrays us, nothing sets us apart. And because I never let go of anything if I can help it, I am still wearing the wedding ring, a band of Mexican worked silver, which Watson gave me when I was eighteen.
Eugene, I’m a little relieved to see, seems to be enjoying the train trip after all. Soon we’ll be getting into the prairies, Saskatchewan, the real prairies where he grew up, and he’s looking exceptionally thoughtful. It may be that he’s thinking about his father again.
By habit he sees almost everything he does through the double lens of his dead father’s limitations, and these reflections are necessarily rimmed with regret, for his father, a hard-working farmer on a piece of worthless land, lived a life of unrelieved narrowness. “My father never slept in a Pullman,” Eugene may be thinking. “He never made love behind a hairy green curtain going seventy miles an hour through the mountains.” “My father never slept in a tent,” he had thought when he went camping for the first time at the age of twenty-five. “My father never rode in a Citroen, never had a glass of wine with his dinner, never went to a concert, never rode in a subway, never ate a black olive, never skied down a hill, never read Hemingway. My father never had a hundred dollar bill in his pocket. He never wore a ring on his finger in all his life. He never sat in a sauna and watched the steam rising off his chest. He never tipped a bellhop or smoked a cigar. Or watched a tennis match or slept in a waterbed in a fifty-dollar a day room with colour television. For that matter, he died while people were still wondering if there would ever be such a thing as colour television.”
I am right; Eugene is thinking about his father. After a minute he begins to tell me how his father introduced him to the mystery of sex. Of course, Eugene explains, it was already too late. He was a boy of thirteen at the time, and on a farm there are no such mysteries. “But someone must have told my father that he owed me something more. It might even have been my mother. No, on second thought, I don’t think so. I think he just made up his mind that he should explain everything about sex to his only son.”
“So he had a long chat with you out in the barn?” I suggest.
“Oh, no. Better than that. Or worse than that, it depends on how you look at it. I mean, he was a man who didn’t really know how to have a long talk. They didn’t talk much at home, neither of them, and I was the only kid and fairly quiet too. But he must have figured out in his head that the time had come for sex. It was when we were at the fair. The same fair we had every year in town. More of a carnival really, pretty junky, but there were some farm animals and home preserving and all that too. We always went, it was the big deal, the three of us. There wasn’t all that much else to do.”
“Go on about the sex.”
“Well, this particular day when we were standing in the fairgrounds, he turned to my mother and said that he was going off with me for a while and we would meet her later by the cattle judging yard. So off we went.”
“Where?”
“To a girlie show.”
“No! Really?”
“Really. It was in one of the tents way, way at the end of the grounds. There was a big sign—‘See The Prairie Lovelies—Only Twenty-five Cents.’ ”
“The Prairie Lovelies?”
“And under that was another sign. ‘Twenty-five cents extra for the Whole Show’. Only there was a circle around the W. The Hole Show.”
“And did you know what that meant?”
“Christ, yes, I was thirteen. But I didn’t want to go in, at least not with my old man. And I don’t think he really wanted to either. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. I think he figured he owed it to me or something. God only knows.”
“And how were the Prairie Lovelies?”
“Well, we went in and stood around this platform and out came these three girls in kind of Arabian Nights costumes. And they started dancing around. Over at one side some guy was playing the accordian.”
“Were they any good?”
“Terrible. Not that I’d ever seen any dancing girls before, but even I could tell they were no good. The audience, of course, was all men, farmers mostly, standing around in their overalls. One of the girls was so fat we could hear her huffing and puffing the whole time she was dancing.”
“Wasn’t it erotic at all?”
“I suppose, in a way, it was. First the veils came off. Then whatever they were wearing on top. Only this was a few years back and they had flower petals on their nipples. And G-strings under their skirts.”
“What about the Hole Show?”
“That came after. That was when the accordian player stopped and announced that we’d have to pay an extra quarter for the Hole Show. The Hole Show. I can remember how he smacked his lips when he said it. He passed a plate around, and I guess pretty well everyone stayed for that.”
“And . . .?”
“Then two of the girls kind of faded away, and the other one, the fat one, started in with the bumps and grinds and the accordion going faster and faster all the time while she untied the sides of her G-string. It seemed like forever before she got it off. It was so hot in there you wouldn’t believe it, and my father and I standing right in the front. Finally, there she was, peeled right down and sort of squatting and turning so everyone could have a chance to see. There sure wasn’t much to see, just a blur really. Then she started dancing again, grinding away, and suddenly she leaned over and grabbed my father’s hat off his head.”
“His hat?”
“A work hat. A blue cloth hat he had with a peak in front. He never went anywhere without that hat, not that I can remember anyway. You just didn’t see farmers bareheaded in those days.”
“And what did she do with it?”
“First she sort of bent over and started rubbing it up and down her thighs, wiggling away all the while. Everyone was clapping and yelling like mad by then and banging my father on the back. And then she got wilder and wilder and starting rubbing the hat up against her crotch.”
“No!”
“Then everyone went crazy and so did she, just rubbing it and rubbing it.”
“What did your father do?”
“Just stood there. Paralyzed. Stunned. Remember he was over fifty then. He just stood there with his mouth open. And his hands reaching out for his hat. Finally she took it and kind of swept it under his nose—that was the worst part—and then she banged it on top of his head.”
“Oh, Eugene.”
“He grabbed hold of it and ripped it off his head. And threw it on the ground and stomped on it. Then he took hold of my arm, hard, and pushed me on out through the whole damned bunch of them. Right out the doorway. Past the next bunch of suckers lining up outside for the next show. God.”
“And what did he say? Afterwards?”
“Nothing. Not one damn thing. I didn’t either. We just walked fast all the way to the other end of the fairground where my mother was waiting. He walked so fast I had to run to keep up. I wanted to say something, to tell him it was okay, that I didn’t mind all that much about the hat thing, but we never said anything, either of us. Not then or ever.”
“Ah, Eugene. And that was your sex education.”
“I’m almost sure that’s what he intended it to be. Because he sure as hell would never have blown two bits just for the fun of it. He never wasted money. There was never any to waste. I think it was all for me. And she blew it for him, the poor old guy, by grabbing his hat. And so did I by not saying anything.”
Eugene shakes his head and, looking out the window, remarks flatly, “It seems a long time ago.”
We sit quietly. When Eugene talks about his life, it is always with a sorrowing regretful futility as though the thin distances of his childhood could produce nothing better. But for me there is something compelling about his family, a sort of decency which surfaces unconsciously. I see them in prairie gothic terms, stern but devoted, humble but softened by an unquestioned tradition of love. Nevertheless, at the same time, I find myself listening for something more robust and redeeming, a note of valour perhaps; in Eugene’s stories he seems deliberately to choose for himself a lesser role. I yearn for him to demonstrate an aptitude for heroism, and I don’t know why. I must ask Brother Adam about that—why do I require bravery from Eugene when I don’t possess it myself?
I rest my hand in his lap. We are racing past tiny towns raised to significance by brightly painted grain elevators. Beyond them, fields, a sullen sky, a pulsing lip of brightness behind the clouds. Our train, shooting through air, is the slenderest of arrows, a hairline, a jet trail; it cares nothing for the space it splits apart and nothing for us; all we are required to do is sit still and watch it happen.

From Winnipeg I phone Seth. There is only twenty minutes, but luckily the call goes right through. And it’s a good connection.
“Hello. Is that you, Doug?”
“Yes. Charleen! Where are you?”
“Winnipeg. We’ve just got a few minutes, but I thought I’d phone and see how everything was.”
“Everything’s fine here. We’re all getting along fine.”
“Is Seth there?” I ask, and suddenly realize that it is two hours earlier on the coast; Seth might be asleep.
But surprisingly Doug says, “Sure he’s here. Hang on a minute, Char, and I’ll get him.”
I hang on for more than a minute, two minutes, unbelievable! Here I am calling long distance. Long distance—I remember how my mother used to say those two words, her voice stricken, worried and worshipful at the same time.
“Hello.”
“Seth,” I say, “where were you just now?”
“I was just here,” he says maddeningly.
“Well, how are you getting along?”
“Fine.”
“How come you’re up so early on a Saturday?”
“I just woke up now.”
“And you’re getting along fine?” I ask again.
“Yeah, just fine.”
“You sound all out of breath.”
“Oh? I guess I’m just surprised to hear from you.”
“I had a few minutes in Winnipeg and I thought I’d just make sure everything was okay.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, fine. We get in tomorrow night. Aunt Judith will already be there. She’ll probably meet us. At least I think so.”
Silence from Vancouver.
“Hello, Seth. Can you hear me? Are you there?”
“I’m still here. I can hear fine.”
“Good. Well, I’d better go. Just phone me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got the number?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I guess I’d better say good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”

Two years ago when Seth started the orthodonture treatment he was advised to give up his tuba temporarily; for the year and a half while the bands were on his teeth he played the double bass. He was good at it; everyone remarked about how quickly he picked it up.
We bought the double bass third-hand through the want ads; we got it cheap because there was no case. It’s a big, waxy, humming buzzard of an instrument, and because its bulk so nearly approximates that of a human being, I soon began to think of it as a sort of half-person, a rather chuckly, middle-aged woman, rather like me in fact.
One day Seth forgot to take it to school and he phoned me between classes asking if I could drop it off. I took it on the bus, feeling enormously proud of her polished, nut-brown hippiness, her deep-throated good nature, the way the sun struck off gleaming streaks on her lovely sides. Seth waited for me on the steps outside the school, frowning and a little anxious that I might be late. When he saw me getting off the bus he jumped up and ran to meet me, taking the instrument out of my arms, whirling about with it and kissing the air about its bridge. I can never get that picture out of my mind, how extraordinarily and purely happy he looked at that instant.
But the minute he had the bands off his teeth he went back to playing the tuba. I can’t understand it. A tuba is such an awkward machine with its valves and convolutions; it’s such an ugly brassy armload, and I don’t understand what Seth likes in the choking, grunting noise that comes out of it.
There seems something rather perverse about his preference. He explains that he likes the tuba better because it’s his voice that makes the sounds; the double bass has a voice of its own—it’s just a question of letting it out, something anyone can do. I don’t think he’s touched the bass since. It stands, serene as ever, in a corner of his bedroom. He keeps a beach towel draped over it to keep off the dust, but no one loves it anymore.
Sometimes I think there’s something symbolic about it, but symbolism is such an impertinence, the sort of thing the “pome people” might contrive. (God knows how easily it’s manufactured by those who turn themselves into continuously operating sensitivity machines.) Of course, symbols have their uses. But something—my cramped Scarborough girlhood no doubt—ties me to the heaviness of facts. Tubas and double basses are not symbols but facts, facts which can be—which must be—assimilated like any of the other mysterious facts of existence.

As the train moves closer to Toronto I decide I must warn Eugene a little about my mother. “She’s always been a difficult person,” I say.
“How do you mean, difficult?”
“Well, to begin with—you’ll notice this right away—she’s never been what you’d call demonstrative.”
“But she must have loved you. You and your sister?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I say. Hard because she had loved us but with an angry, depriving love which, even after all these years, I don’t understand. The lye-bite of her private rancour, her bitter shrivelling scoldings. When she scrubbed our faces it was with a single, hurting swipe. When we fell down and scraped our knees and elbows she said, “that will teach you to watch where you’re going.” Her love, if that’s what you call it, was primitive, scalding, shorn of kindness. I can’t explain it to Eugene; instead, I give him an example.
“When she brushed our hair in the morning, Judith’s and mine, when she brushed our hair ...”
“Yes?”
“She yanked it. Hard. It really hurt. She’d catch us in our bedroom, just before we left for school. She’d be holding the brush in her hand. When I think about it I can still feel her yanking my head back.”
Eugene listens without comment.
I shrug, afraid I’ve betrayed a streak of self-pity. “That’s just the way she is, and don’t ask me why. I don’t understand it. So how could you.”

I had forgotten about the thousand miles of bush between Winnipeg and Toronto. But here it is. Eugene and I are sitting high up in the Vistadome with nothing but curved glass separating us from turquoise lakes, whorled trees, the torn, reddened sky and, here and there, clumps of Indian cabins. We’re sitting close to the front and so high up that we can overlook our whole train from end to end. We seem to vibrate to a different rhythm up here; the side-to-side swaying is gone; from this position we glide on cables of pure ozone. And music pours sweetly out of the chromium walls: Some Enchanted Evening. The hills are alive with the Sound of Music. Dancing in the Dark. Temptation—a tango—You came, I was alone, I should have known you were temptation. Eugene reaches over and takes my hand.
We met two years ago through mutual friends, the Freehorns, at a small dinner party in late May. It had been an utterly respectable occasion, in every way the reverse of my meeting with Watson which had occurred in a run-down neighbourhood drugstore, a meeting which was described in those days as a pick-up. Watson was someone who picked up people. I was someone who had allowed myself to be picked up; was that what doomed us?
But the meeting between Eugene and me was impeccably prearranged, although Bea Freehorn assured me before the party that even though she was inviting a single man, I was not to suspect her of matchmaking. “There’s nothing that burns me up more than being accused of fixing someone up,” she told me over the phone. “But Eugene’s a pet, you’ll like him. Merv thinks he’s terrific.”
Merv and Bea are old friends, so old that they date from the days when I was still married to Watson; the four of us, in times which now seem impossibly idyllic, used to take Sunday picnics up to the mountain; I would bring potato salad and a cake and Bea always brought salami and corned beef and sometimes cold chicken. Now they give dinner parties; I’ve tried to fix the year when they stopped inviting me to dinner and started inviting me to dinner parties. Sometime when Merv was between assistant and associate in the Law School. Or maybe after they moved into the new house, yes, I think that was it. They have a patio overlooking the ocean where Bea likes to serve dinner on tiny lantern-lit tables. She is an accomplished cook, and I would never turn down one of her dinner invitations with or without a suspicion of matchmaking.
“Actually,” Bea had confided, “you and Eugene have something in common.”
“What?” I asked cautiously.
“You were both married for exactly eight years.”
It’s hard sometimes to tell when Bea is being serious. I waited for the rough curl of her laughter but heard only earnest confidence. “He’s really had a rough time of it. His wife got screwed up with Women’s Lib and just took the two kids one day and moved out. He has the boys on weekends, nice kids, but she won’t take a penny from him, so in a way he’s lucky. Anyway, he’s a nice guy.”
Nice. Yes, I could see that right away when I met him. Nice, meaning polite, presentable, moderate, inquiring and almost sloshily good-natured. He arrived a little late with his right hand freshly bandaged and was apologetically unable to shake hands with the Freehorns, the Stevens, the Folkstones, or with me.
“I was cutting off a piece of beef at noon today,” he told us sadly. “The whole plate slipped suddenly and there I was with a bloody gash.”
“Oh, Eugene,” Bea crooned kindly, “did you need stitches?”
“A few,” he said bravely. “The whole thing’s been so damned stupid.”
I was prepared to dislike him. First for so perfectly fulfilling the role of the inept and picturesque bachelor who couldn’t make a sandwich without sawing through his hand. And second for being a self-pitying poseur, and now monopolizing the conversation with his idiotic stitches.
“How are you going to be able to work?” Merv asked him conversationally, and, turning to me, he explained that Eugene was an orthodontist and thus required the use of his hands.
Eugene shrugged and smiled somewhat goofily, “I’ll take a week off. There’s nothing else to do really.”
“What about all your appointments?” Gordon Stevens asked.
“I’ll have to get Mrs. Ingalls to cancel everything Monday morning.”
“What a shame,” Bea mourned, “what a rotten shame. But look, Eugene, let Merv get you something to drink. That hand must be painful.”
“It is a bit,” he admitted.
Did I detect a hint of a whine? Was this ridiculous tooth straightener trying to solicit sympathy? If so, I was not prepared to give it. No wonder his wife ditched him, the big baby. I sipped my gin and tonic sullenly.
“Merv says you’re a poet,” he said to me later, sitting beside me at one of the little tables along with Gord Stevens and Clara Folkstone. I gave him a long look; with enormous difficulty he was eating his stuffed artichoke with his left hand.
“Yes,” I said knowing that he was about to tell me he never read poetry.
“I can’t pretend to know much about poetry,” he said. “Except the usual stuff we had at school.”
“That’s all right,” I said socially. “It’s a sort of minority interest. Like lacrosse.”
I had dressed for this evening with deliberate declassé nonchalance, aware that Bea expects me to contribute a faint whiff of bohemia to her parties; I wore a badly-cut gypsy skirt and black satin peasant blouse, both bought at an Anglican Church rummage sale. Fortunately Bea’s expectations conform to what I can afford. I had also brought my special party personality, the rough-ribbed humorous persona which I had devised for myself after Watson left me. I earn my invitations and even for an old friend like Bea Freehorn I knew better than to sulk all evening. So I smiled hard at Eugene as Bea brought round the veal fillets.
Encouraged he asked, “What sort of poet are you? I mean, what kind of things do you write about?”
“About the minutiae of existence,” I said with mock solemnity.
He looked baffled and, putting down his fork, he leaned over to whisper in my ear. Now, I thought, now he is going to ask me why poetry doesn’t rhyme anymore.
But I was wrong; in a very low murmur, so low that I could hardly hear him, he asked if I would mind cutting up his meat for him.
I almost laughed aloud. But something stopped me; perhaps it was the extraordinary humility of the request or the reserve with which he made it. I leaned over, my elbows grazing his chest and, picking up his knife and fork, I began sawing through the pale, pink veal. My arm sliding back and forth touched the top of his wrist. Clara and Gordon smiled and watched at what seemed a great distance. Three, four, five pieces. I kept cutting, my eyes on Eugene’s plate, until I had finished. Then I sat back breathless.
For while I was cutting Eugene’s meat, a sudden blood-rush of tenderness had swept over me. A maternal echo? I had once cut Seth’s meat in just this way. Perhaps someone had once cut up mine—I half remembered. Eugene’s helpless right hand wound in beautiful gauze lay on the edge of the table, and it was all I could do to keep from seizing it and holding it to my lips. I wanted to put my arms around him, to cover him with kisses. The brutal knife, the surgical stitches, the vicious wife who had left him and exposed him to all the hurts of the world—I wanted to stroke them away; I wanted to comfort, to sooth, to minister. I wanted—was I crazy?—I wanted to love him.
We’re not far from Toronto now. Another hour and we’ll be there. It’s getting darker; the towns are closer together now and the farmland is falling into round derby-shaped hills. Eugene is holding my hand and with his middle finger he is tracing slow circles on the palm of my hand. Around and around. The Vistadome where we sit is a tube of darkness. Now he is moving his thumb back and forth across the inside of my wrist. Slowly, slowly. I relax, put back my head, half-shut my eyes. The soundtrack of Zorba the Greek is washing over us. Lighted towns, squared and tidy, flash by. Eugene has slipped a finger between the buttons of my dress and I can feel it sliding on my nylon slip. Then it retreats; he is carefully, quietly undoing one of the buttons. Now his hand is inside. It is spelling out something on my stomach, a sort of code. I smile to myself.
We flash by Weedham, Ontario. Watson. I had forgotten he was so close to Toronto. No more than thirty miles. Not much of a place; the train doesn’t even stop.
Eugene’s hand is slowly, slowly inching up my slip, gathering the folds of material. It slides easily. There. He’s reached the lace hem. Now I can feel his hand on my bare thighs, the inside of my thighs. The music swamps us. I want to say something but nothing comes; my lips move in miniature as though they were preparing tiny, perfect chapel prayers.
He has reached the edge of my nylon elastic and for an instant we seem balanced on the brink—I think for sure he is stopped. We sit so still.
Then I feel his fingers slip quickly under the elastic and move toward darkness, moisture, secrecy. We are covered with darkness, but on the horizon the sky is soft with reflections. I sit still, half-drowning in a stirring helium happiness. The music rises like moisture and presses on the dark windows, and in this way we ride into the city.