The Box Garden Part 11

"Didn't want you worrying, that's all. Just thought I'd let you know everything's fine. Good night then, baby."

"Good night," I say. And stupidly, cheerfully, add, "Sleep tight."

Chapter 5

"She never talks to me anymore," Judith is saying of her daughter Meredith. "Not the way she used to when she was a little girl."

Children. Judith and I lie in bed listening to our mother in the kitchen making breakfast and we talk about our children.

"I'm always reading those articles about how parents are supposed to keep the lines of communication open," Judith says. "And now and then out of duty I make a stab at it."

"And what happens?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She-Meredith-just smiles. Mona Lisa. At least sometimes sometimes she smiles. Other times she cringes. As though the thought that we might have something in common was unspeakable. Everyone's always telling me how charming she is, and it's true she's got this non-McNinn effervescence. And a kind of wild originality too, but to me she doesn't say one word." she smiles. Other times she cringes. As though the thought that we might have something in common was unspeakable. Everyone's always telling me how charming she is, and it's true she's got this non-McNinn effervescence. And a kind of wild originality too, but to me she doesn't say one word."

"You don't sound as though you mind all that much," I say.

"Mind? Oh, I suppose I should. After all, I'm her mother, she's my only daughter, why shouldn't she be able to pour out her heart now and then. But the truth is, Charleen, I couldn't bear it if she did. All that anguish."

"You must be curious though."

"In a way. I'm always wondering what she's thinking about. Or what she does when she's not home. After all, she's eighteen. But eighteen is such a ... well ... such a suffering age. Remember? Sometimes I feel I've only just recovered from it myself. To listen to her ups and downs would kill me, and I think she knows it too. She senses it. She's got a kind of rare psychic radar-she always had but now and then she looks so bedeviled that I'm afraid she's going to break down and take me into her confidence. She's come close a couple of times. But then she stops herself. I can almost see her mumbling her vows of silence. And, strangely enough, I'm rather proud of her for it, for going it alone. I admire her for it. And I'm grateful, even though I know I'm failing her somehow, I'm grateful to be left alone."

"What about Richard?" I ask her.

"Richard," she shrugs. "He's always kept things to himself. Of course he's a boy. They're always more secretive. I suppose that's what you call a s.e.xist judgment. Does Seth confide in you?"

I pause for a moment, not really wanting to admit that he doesn't. "No," I say slowly, "but I don't think it means anything."

It's true that most of the time these days Seth and I speak to each other in monosyllables-sure, yeah, okay-but these words are our accepted coinage of familiarity, the sort of shorthand which forms unconsciously between people who are naturally in harmony. It has never occurred to me to think that his lack of explicit communication might be an attempt to hide something from me; his nature has always been exceedingly open, and, if anything, it is this openness that worries me, openness with a suggestion of vacuum, a curious, perhaps dangerous acquiescence.

"I used to think it was strange," Judith is saying, "that we never told Mother anything when we were girls. All my friends used to rush home and tell their mothers everything. But we never did. At least I never did."

"Neither did I," I say firmly. "Never once."

"You know," Judith says thoughtfully, "looking back, I don't think it's all that strange. I think she must have sent out a kind of warning signal, a thought wave, saying 'Don't tell me anything because I've got enough to cope with as it is.' "

"Perhaps," I nod.

"Anyway," Judith continues, "I've come to the place now where I know she and I will never be able to talk. I'm absolutely sure of it."

Her certainty surprises me; it seems rather shocking to be so final, and I am forced to admit to myself that I have by no means surrendered. Somehow-it is only a question of finding the point of entry-I will break through our terrible familial silence. I came close, very close, yesterday drying the eggbeater.

Judith springs out of bed and begins to get dressed, but I lie under the blanket a few minutes longer; I am still sleepy, my mind begins to wander, but I am not thinking about Meredith or Judith or about my mother or even about the girl I once was. For some reason I am thinking about Seth. And the small string of worry that plucks away at me.

After breakfast-toast and coffee in the kitchen-we take up yesterday's small routines. Eugene goes downtown for his conference, and Martin carries his newspaper into the back yard. It is rather cool outside; a wooly sun struggling through ma.s.sed clouds, the gra.s.s still wet from yesterday's rain. My mother sets up the ironing board in the kitchen (the smell and sight of its scorched cover pierces me with nostalgia) and she presses, through a clean, damp tea towel, the dress she will wear for her wedding. Cocoa-brown crimpeline with raised ribs, a row of dull, wood-looking b.u.t.tons down the front, long sleeves and no collar.

"It came with a scarf," she says, frowning narrowly, "as if a scarf made up for no collar." Her lips turn inward thinly, visible, measurable emblem of her complaint. "But I'm certainly not going to wear it, all those bright colours, cheap, of course it was in the March sales; nothing is well made anymore, imagine not even a collar. But it will have to do, that's all there is to it."

I am thinking: the wedding is Friday, tomorrow is Thursday and with luck I'll be seeing Brother Adam at last. Today is Wednesday; today I am having lunch with Louis. He is coming for me at eleven. When I asked Judith if she enjoyed her lunch yesterday, she smiled somewhat mysteriously. "It was interesting," she said.

"Did you find out anything about Louis?" I asked.

"A little," she smiled, "and so will you."

For a moment I pondered this, and then I asked, "Where did you go?"

"A little place in the country."

"Where exactly?" I pressed her.

"West of Toronto. Weedham. Just a little spot."

"Weedham? Weedham, Ontario? Are you sure?"

"Yes," she had answered, puzzled. "Weedham. Spelled WEEDHAM. Being literal-minded, I naturally expected it to be full of weeds but it turned out to be a pretty little place. You'll like it."

Weedham. Weedham, Ontario. Watson. I am going to Weedham, Ontario. I am going there today. An arc of antic.i.p.ation, not unlike s.e.xual desire, brightens inside me. I look at the kitchen clock. Nine-thirty. In an hour and a half I will be sitting in Louis Berceau's little green Fiat bouncing along the road to Weedham, Ontario.

I am sick, oh, I am sick with shame, I am in h.e.l.l. I want to die of it, oh G.o.d, such pain, such humiliation, to be so humiliated. Stupid, stupid, I am sick with shame, it won't go away, it's done, nothing will take it away, dear G.o.d.

I am lying on my mother's bed in the middle of the morning, I am rocking from side to side, my fists in my eyes. I want to moan out loud, I want to weep, but no one must hear me, no one must know, oh, the shame of it.

Martin. Martin knows. Will he tell Judith? I cannot bear the thought of Judith knowing. She would think it was-what?-she would think it was amusing, too amusing for words. It would be awful to hear her laughing over it; I couldn't stand that.

Yet, isn't it her fault, isn't she the cause of it's happening ? If I hadn't been thinking about her and her peculiar baffling indifference to Martin, it would never have happened.

She had been so busily occupied after breakfast. She had settled down at the dining room table with her portable typewriter and her reference books and her lovely calf-hide attache case which she snapped open on her lap; inside were bundles of five-by-seven cards, each bundle bound with a rubber band; I thought of the way Mafia men carry their wads of money. Her notes, she explained, and with an air of enormous concentration she had selected one bundle, had whipped off the rubber band with a clean snap, and, one by one, she arranged the cards around her in a large semi-circle, a zombie playing at solitaire. I watched admiringly, such concentration, such independence. Judith explained that she had set herself a deadline for her next book. "It's odd," she said to me, "I seem to be getting compulsive in my old age. Writing used to be just a kind of hobby. Now if a single day goes by without working, I feel as though the day's been lost."

Martin, on his way in from the back yard to get his book, had paused and regarded her affectionately. Judith gave him a level look over her circle of cards; she looked at him, but I could tell she didn't really see him; what she gave him was a wide spatial stare, an empty optic greeting as though he were a smallish portion of the wallpaper; then she broke her gaze abruptly, scratched her head with vigour and, slowly, thoughtfully, inserted a sheet of paper into her typewriter.

Martin picked up his book and went outside, and out of a kind of pity-I think that's what it was-I followed him.

For a few minutes we sat together on the back steps, letting the frail, gla.s.sy sunlight fall on our backs. The little lawn looked exceptionally fine. Louis had put some fertilizer on it, my mother had explained with her mixture of shyness and sarcasm, and two pounds of gra.s.s seed. Martin seemed rather lonely, rather bored, a little restless, he seemed glad enough of my company. I even dared to tease him a little about how he'd worried about Judith's outing with Louis; he had laughed at himself in an altogether pleasant way, and then we talked for a few minutes about modern criticism. Yes, we were starting to be friends. We were comfortable sitting there together; the sun was growing stronger; it might be a nice day after all, and I was just about to say so when Martin leaned over and whispered into my ear.

"Look, Charleen, just between us, what do you think of the archaic sleeping arrangements here?"

"Pardon?" I said. Our mother had always taught us to say pardon.

"The sleeping arrangements," he repeated. "You know, the boys' dorm and the girls' dorm."

"Well-" I started to say.

He leaned closer, he put his arm around my shoulder, he whispered in my ear, "How about switching around tonight?"

"Martin!" I breathed, completely shaken.

"We could switch back later," he leered. "No one would ever know."

"Martin," I said again in a dazed whisper, "I couldn't. I couldn't possibly."

There was a short chilly silence. A dead hole of a silence.

Then Martin asked, "Why not?"

I stood up abruptly, choking back rage, "Because Judith happens to be my sister. My own sister. What kind of person do you think I am?"

"My good Christ, Charleen; don't go all moral on me."

"And what makes you think I would want to sleep with you anyway?"

Then, then Martin's expression underwent a profound shocking, nightmarish change. Then suddenly he began to laugh, very softly so that my mother, still ironing in the kitchen, wouldn't hear. Manic tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes, he rocked back and forth on the step hugging himself, "Oh, Charleen, oh, my G.o.d, I can't stand it, it's so funny. I didn't mean you and me. Oh, G.o.d." He broke into another obscene spasm of laughter.

I stared. What was he laughing about? Had he gone crazy?

Then quite suddenly I understood. Then I knew.

"I meant you and Eugene," Martin gasped. "And Judith and me. After all," he continued, making an effort at control, "we are joined in holy wedlock and all that."

I hardly heard him. I dashed away, up the steps and through the back door. I ran past my mother and here I am in the bedroom, rocking and moaning in a suffering parody of Martin rocking and moaning on the back steps. How he laughed. I could die, I could die, I wish I could die.

Louis will be here any minute. I roll over in bed and look at the clock. I must get changed. I must try to look cheerful and eager and grateful to be taken on an outing.

I put on my stockings and slip into my new orange dress. Then I brush my hair, trying to turn it under smoothly the way Mr. Mario had done. It doesn't look too bad. And the dress looks surprisingly becoming. I even hum to myself a jerky little comforting tune while I clean my shoes with a Kleenex. They're still a little damp from yesterday.

Too bad about Martin, I say to myself in mock dismissal, peering into the mirror. Just when we were starting to be friends. If only I'd laughed I might have carried it off. Ah well, with my typical faulty reflex I blow it every time, a fatal quarter-step behind the rest of the world. Martin, without a doubt, will have been repelled by my embarra.s.sment; not only that, but I with my gross misinterpretation have left myself vulnerable to a host of other questions: exactly what kind of a woman was I anyway? Just answer that.

Then I hear the little car pulling up in front, I hear Louis and Martin in the back yard talking about lawn care. One last rea.s.suring grimace in the mirror and I emerge.

Louis does not embrace me, but he gives me a smile and a cherishing handshake over the kitchen table. My mother, sighing as she puts away the ironing board, says sharply, "Don't be too late. I'm making my tunafish bake for supper."

We walk to the car; Louis is cheerful and nimble and I shorten my steps to match his. The sun is blazing merrily overhead, and Martin and Judith walk with us to the street; Judith's writing is going well this morning and she seems immoderately happy. "Have a good afternoon," she sings.

I don't dare look at Martin. But after Louis has turned the ignition and we start to slide away from the curb, I turn back and find my eyes looking directly into his. His eyes look funny as though he is squinting into the sun. No, he isn't, no he isn't. He is-yes-he is winking at me.

Without thinking, without reflecting, I wink back, and then we move down the street, Louis and I, slowly, almost elegantly.

Louis's car is a Fiat 600, a 1968 model, recently repainted, the interior worn but exceedingly clean. This is the car that takes my mother back and forth to the cancer clinic, this is the car that carries her out for Sunday drives, this is the car which in two days will become their car, used for their minor errands, for their weekly trips to the Dominion Store, for their little jaunts into the country.

Louis, as I had predicted, is a cautious driver. He sits tightly in the driver's seat, moving the steering wheel and gearshift with intense little jerks, with careful, choppy, concentrated deliberation. The car moves down the suburban streets, delicately shuddering, and Louis, leaning forward, appears rather gnomelike with his wreaths of wrinkles, his puckered, colourless mouth, his contained and benign ugliness. Taking the 401 he heads west across the city.

On the way to Weedham Louis talks about the wedding. And I think how strange that it is so easy for people to talk in cars. It must have something to do with the enforced temporary proximity or with the proportion of s.p.a.ce or perhaps the sealed, cushioned interior silence which must resemble, in some way, the insulated room where Greta Savage meets each week with her encounter group. It is as though the automobile were a specially designed gla.s.s talking-machine engineered for human intimacy. Furthermore, in a car the need to watch the road diverts and relieves the pa.s.sengers, giving to their conversation an unexpected flowing disinterestedness.

Louis clears his throat and explains that both he and my mother were anxious to avoid fuss and expense; that was why they decided to be married in my mother's living room in the middle of the afternoon. Afterwards there would be tea in the dining room. And a small cake which Louis has ordered from a bakery; a United Church minister, a local man, has been asked to perform the ceremony.

This last piece of information surprises me. The McNinns have always been vaguely Protestant; at least Protestant is the word Judith and I supplied when we were asked our religious denomination. But we had never been a church-going family. The reason: I am not entirely sure, but it stemmed, I think, from my mother's belief that people only go to church in order to show off their hats and fur coats and to sneer at those less elegantly dressed. Certainly it had nothing to do with those larger issues such as the existence of G.o.d or the requirement of worship.

"Is anyone else going to be at the wedding?" I ask Louis. No, he answers, only the family. He himself has no family, none at all anymore.

The neighbours. I wonder if the neighbours have any inkling that my mother is to be remarried on Friday. Has she told anyone or has she kept her secret? The leitmotif of her anxiety, for as long as I can remember, has been her fear of being judged by the neighbours; what would the neighbours think? When twenty years ago I ran away with Watson to Vancouver, she had been struck almost incoherent with shame: what would the neighbours think? All the other girls in the neighbourhood were going on to secretarial school or studying to be hairdressers, but her daughter-the shame of it-had eloped with a student, had left a note on her pillow and ridden off to Vancouver on the back of a motorcycle.

Later I learned from Judith exactly how shattered she had been, how for months she'd hardly left the house, how for years she'd been unable to look the neighbours in the face. The fact that I had not been pregnant as she had supposed, the fact that Watson and I had been quite legally if rather sloppily married before we set off for the west, and the fact that Watson, three years later, received his Ph.D. (with honours)-none of these things seemed to ease the terrible shame of my extraordinary departure And then the divorce, the embarra.s.sing blow of the divorce which for years I tried to conceal from her. No one else in the neighbourhood had a daughter who was divorced. The neighbours had daughters who were buying property in Don Mills and producing families of children who came visiting on Sundays. Our mother alone had been cursed by strange daughters: Judith with her boisterous disturbing honesty, bookish and careless, and I with my now fatherless child, my unprecedented divorce, my books of poetry. The neighbours' children hadn't dismayed and defeated and failed their mothers.

And now my mother is getting married and she doesn't, it seems, worry at all about what the neighbours will think. She doesn't care a fig; she doesn't care a straw. For after all these years she has, in a sense, triumphed over the neighbours. Or, more accurately, the neighbours no longer exist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Maddison with their wailing cats and shredded curtains have died. The MacArthurs-lazy Mrs. MacArthur, always hanging out the clothes in her dressing gown, and Mr. MacArthur with his gravel truck sitting by the side of the house-have moved to a duplex in Riverdale to be near their married daughter. The Whiteheads-he drank, she used filthy language-have gone to California. Mrs. Lilly and her crippled sister, so sinfully proud of their dahlias, have disappeared without a trace, and the Jacksons, whom my mother believed to be very common, have become rich and live in south Rosedale. All the houses in our neighbourhood are filled with Jamaicans now, with Pakistanis, with multi- generation, unidentifiable southern Europeans who grow cabbages and kohlrabi in their backyards and rent out their bas.e.m.e.nts. My mother is not in the least afraid of their judgment on her. She has, after all, lived for forty years in her little house, she has lived on the block longer than anyone else, she is widowed old Mrs. McNinn, the woman who keeps a clean house, the woman who minds her own business; she is respectable old Mrs. McNinn.

"We're almost there," Louis says, steering carefully. "Another mile or so."

"What a pretty little town," I exclaim. For Weedham, Ontario, in the blond, spring sunlight has a tidy green rural face. A sign announces its population: 2,500. Another sign welcomes visiting Rotarians. Still another, a billboard of restrained proportions, urges visitors to stop at the Wayfarers' Inn.

"That's where we're going," Louis says.

The Wayfarers' Inn at the edge of town is relatively new, built in the last thirty years or so, but in the style of more ancient inns it has a stone courtyard, a raftered ceiling, here and there curls of wrought iron, and rows of polished wooden tables ranged round the walls. Light filters glowingly through stained gla.s.s windows which, Louis explains, are the real thing; they were taken from an old house in the area which was being demolished.

"It's charming," I say politely.

Shyly he tells me, "I brought your mother here for lunch. When I asked her to marry me."

I am taken by surprise. In fact, I am dumbfounded, for I cannot imagine my mother submitting to the luxury of lunch at the Wayfarers' Inn. And it is even more difficult to imagine her absorbing-in this room at one of these little tables peopled with local businessmen and white-gloved club women-a declaration of love.

"Was it ... sudden?" I dare to ask.

His face crinkles over his r hroom soup, engulfed in pleasant nostalgia. "Yes," he nods, choking a little. "Only three months after we'd met at the clinic."

His openness touches me, but at the same time I am unbelievably embarra.s.sed. Much as I would like to pursue it, to ask him, "and do you really love each other?" I cannot; Judith might have, in fact she probably did. I am certain he told her too, just as I am certain he would tell me if I asked; why else has he brought me out for lunch if not to make me feel easy about him. But I draw back, I can't ask, not now at least. To pursue the subject beyond Louis's first eager revelation might diminish it, might bury it. Why shouldn't he love my mother? If there is such a thing as justice, then surely even the unloving deserve love. She's like everyone else, I suddenly see; inside her head are the same turning, gathering spindles of necessity; why shouldn't he love her?

Louis smiles at me with almost boyish gaiety, his teeth, dark ivory with flashes of gold at the sides, his wrinkles breaking like waves around the hub of his happiness-a happiness so accidental, so improbable and so finely suspended-hadn't Brother Adam written that happiness arrives when least expected and that it tends to dissolve under scrutiny. Better to change the subject.

I glance around the room, taking in the polished wood and coloured gla.s.s; a square of ruby-red light falls on Louis's soft old hair. "How did you find this place?" I ask him. "Had you been here before ... before the day ... you brought her out here?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes," he is pleased with my question. "When I was teaching school-I used to be the woodwork teacher, your mother must have told you. Always was good with my hands." He spreads them for my inspection.