The Box Garden (2 page)

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 soupçon 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.