The Box Garden Part 2

I say nothing, only smile, obscurely gratified that I have somehow gained his favour. He cups my head with his hands, turning it slightly, then begins cutting again, slowly, slowly, alternating between razor, scissors, clippers; razor, scissors, clippers. Cautious as a surgeon.

"Hold still now," he hisses. "The back of the neck is the most important."

I begin to feel sick. Could this possibly cost as much as twenty-five dollars? In New York hair cuts cost up to forty dollars-where did I read that? Mr. Kenneth or something. But this is Vancouver. Still with inflation and everything, twenty-five dollars is not impossible. Twenty-five dollars! Stop cutting, I want to cry out. That's enough. Stop.

Then he is going all over my head with an electric blower and a little round brush, catching my hair from underneath and drawing it out into rounds of dark fur. Turning, rolling, curving. Stop, stop.

At last. Flick, flick with the brush. Off with the towel. A puff of spray. I stagger to the kidney desk.

He follows me, drowsy-eyed.

Now.

"How much?" my mouth moves.

"Fifteen dollars," he drawls.

I pull out the bills. Blindly stuff an extra dollar in the pocket of his smock. Run for the door. And in the dancing, white heat I see myself blurred across the window. Or is it me?

Oh, Mr. Mario, Mr. Mario. Always, always, always I've wanted to look like this. Soft, shaped, feathered into a new existence. Me.

My lips perform the smallest of smiles. My neck turns a fraction of an inch. My legs stretch long and cool and slow. What's the hurry. Slowly, slowly, I walk home.

Greta telephones to say good-bye. "Is it true," she asks, "is it true what Doug says? That Eugene What's-his-name is going with you?"

I picture her holding the phone in an att.i.tude of anxious, frowning disbelief, her crow's-feet deepening. (Greta's crow's-feet reach all the way to her soul.) "Yes," I tell her briskly. "Yes, Eugene happened to have a convention in Toronto at the same time. Wasn't that lucky?"

"A dentists' convention," Greta says sadly, dully.

I want to comfort her. Poor Greta with her Gestalt therapy, her psychodrama, her awareness clinic, her encounter group, her trauma team, her megavitamin treatment and now her obsession with meditation. All she needs is just enough psychic epoxy to keep her from slipping apart. Can't I summon a few words to rea.s.sure her? Is my heart so hard that I can't give her those few words?

"Look Greta," I say, "thanks for phoning, but I've got to run. Seth just got in from band practice and I've got a million things to do."

"Seth," I turn to him.

"Yes."

"You have the phone number in Toronto? If anything goes wrong?"

"It's on top of the list you gave me."

"Well, look, Seth, if you lose it, just on the wild chance that you might lose it, you can ask the Savages. I gave it to Doug too. You never know."

"Okay."

"And you've got enough money?"

"Sure."

"Positive?"

"All I need is busfare and milk money."

"You might have an emergency."

"I've got plenty."

"Just to make sure, you'd better take this extra five."

"You keep it, you'll need it."

"I've got lots. Your father's cheque came yesterday. And I got paid today. I'm rich for once. You take it."

He pokes it in his back pocket. "I'll take it but I won't need it."

"I wish you were coming. I hate leaving you here like this."

"It's okay," he smiles across at me. "Anyway, there's band practice every day this week."

"At least we'll be back for the concert. Did you get the tickets?"

"Yeah."

"For Eugene too? And his kids?"

"Yeah. In my wallet. Want me to hang on to them 'til Sat.u.r.day night?"

"Maybe you'd better, the way I lose things. Anyway, I hope everything goes O.K. here."

"Why wouldn't it?"

"It's just that Doug and Greta can be a little... well ... you know."

"Uhuh."

"A little too much."

"I know."

"Just tune them out, Seth. If they start getting to you."

"Okay."

"You'll be ready after school? When they pick you up?"

"I'll be ready."

"And you won't forget your suitcase?"

"No."

"There are clean socks for every day. And I put in your Lions T-s.h.i.+rt in case it stays hot like this."

"Thanks."

"And your retainer is in a plastic bag under your pajamas."

"Okay."

"Your toothbrush. What about your toothbrush?"

"I'll put it in tomorrow morning."

"Don't forget."

"I won't."

"I sound like a clucking hen. I know I sound like an old hen."

"No, you don't."

"It's just that I'm sort of nervous, I guess. All the rus.h.i.+ng around and the whole idea of Grandma,"-I say the word Grandma with a sliding self-consciousness since Seth cannot even remember seeing his grandmother-"getting married and everything. It's just got me a little more rattled than usual."

"That's okay."

"That's why I'm clucking away at you like this."

"I don't mind," he says smiling.

"You've got a nice smile, you know that?"

"I ought to for eight hundred bucks."

"I don't mean your teeth. I mean you have really got a nice smile."

"Thanks. So do you."

"Really?"

"Yeah, sort of."

"I wish you were coming."

"I'll be okay," he says. And then he adds, "And you'll be okay too."

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 pa.s.ses 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? 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 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." 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 s.h.i.+vering 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.