The Box Garden (6 page)

“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?”