The Box Garden (19 page)

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 attaché 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, glassy 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 grass 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 God, I can’t stand it, it’s so funny. I didn’t mean you and me. Oh, God.” 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 embarrassment; 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 reassuring 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, al
most 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 space 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 glass talking-machine engineered for human intimacy. Furthermore, in a car the need to watch the road diverts and relieves the passengers, 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 God 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 embarrassing 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 basements. 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.