The Box Garden

Table of Contents

 

 

Acclaim for
The Box Garden

“[The Box Garden]
is fun, it is lively, it has intelligence.... What makes [Carol Shields] special, apart from her flashing wit, her generosity and her insight into the extraordinariness of ordinary life, is her formal inventiveness, at once modest and daring, like a Modernist seamstress.”

 

“Mrs. Shields’ novels [are] marked by sophistication and insight.”
-The New York Times

 

“Carol Shields has a remarkable eye for the pockets of time and light held within the most unextraordinary milieu.”

 

“The novel’s protagonist, Charleen Forrest, is an appealing combination of common sense and irrepressible idealism, qualities which her status as a single mother and low-paid wage earner put to frequent test. Shields doesn’t exaggerate or sentimentalize these difficulties, but simply describes them in straightforward, low-key prose that brings us to the vital center of Charleen’s emotional life.”

—
Toronto Star

 

“A shrewd and skillful storyteller.”

—
Chicago Tribune

 

“Carol Shields has a gift for beautiful writing.”

—
Toronto Sun

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BOX GARDEN

Carol Shields’ critically acclaimed novel
The Stone Diaries
won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Stone Diaries
also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General’s Award of Canada as well as being nominated for the Booker Prize. Her other books include
Happenstance, The Republic of Love, Swann, The Orange Fish,
and
Various Miracles.
Her novel
Small Ceremonies
(which won the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Fiction) will also be available from Penguin in 1996. Shields was born in Chicago and now lives in Winnipeg.

The Work of Carol Shields

Poetry
Others
Intersect
Coming to Canada

 

Novels
Small Ceremonies
The Box Garden
Happenstance
A Fairly Conventional Woman
Swann
A Celibate Season (written with Blanche Howard)
The Republic of Love
The Stone Diaries

 

Story Collections
Various Miracles
The Orange Fish

 

Plays
Arrivals and Departures
Thirteen Hands

 

Criticism
Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1977
Published in Penguin Books 1996

Copyright © Carol Shields, 1977

All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Shields, Carol.
The box garden/Carol Shields.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-16173-9

I. Title.
PR9199.3.S514B69 1996
813’.54—dc20 95-30644

 

 

 

 

What was it that Brother Adam wrote me last week? That there are no certainties in life. That we change hourly or even from one minute to the next, our entire cycle of being altered, our whole selves shaken with the violence of change.

Ah, but Brother Adam has never actually laid eyes on me. And could never guess at the single certainty which swamps my life and which can be summed up in the simplest of phrases: I will never be brave. Never. I don’t know what it was—something in my childhood probably—but I was robbed of my courage.

Even dealing with the post-adolescent teller in my branch bank is too much for me some days. She punches in my credits, my tiny salary from the
Journal,
the monthly child support money (I receive no alimony), and the occasional small, minuscule really, cheque from some magazine or other which has agreed to publish one of my poems.

And the debits. I see her faint frown; a hundred and fifty for rent. Perhaps she thinks that’s too much for a woman in my circumstances. So do I, but I do have a child and can‘t, for his sake, live in a slum. Though the street is beginning to look like one. Almost every house on the block is subdivided now, cut up into two or three apartments; sometimes even a half-finished basement room with plywood walls and a concrete floor rented out for an extra sixty-five a month.

Oh, yes, and a cheque for thirty dollars written out to Woodwards. A new dress for me. On sale. I have to have something to wear on the train. If I turn up in Toronto in one of my old falling-apart skirts, my sister Judith will shrink away in pity, try to press money into my hands, force me with terrible, strenuous gaiety on a girlish shopping trip insisting she missed my birthday last year. Or the year before that.

Food. I am frugal. Seth at fifteen undoubtedly knows about the other families, those laughing, coke-swilling, boat-tripping families in bright sports clothes who buy large pieces of beef which they grill to pink tenderness on flagged patios, always plenty for everyone. Second helpings, third helpings. We have day-old bread sometimes. Bruised peaches, dented cans on special. Only the two of us, but food still costs. It’s a good thing Watson insisted we have only one child.

And what’s this? A cheque made out to the Book Nook. I had forgotten that. A hardcover book, bought on impulse, a rare layout. Snapped up in a moment of overwhelming self-pity.
I’m thirty-eight, don’t I have the right to a little luxury now and then? They never have anything new at the library
—
youhave to sign up for requests and then wait half the year to get your hands on it and this way it comes all swaddled in plastic, you just can’t get into a library book the same way, why is that?
Eight dollars and ninety-five cents. I’ll have to be more careful. But I’ll have it to read on the train.

It’s not only bank tellers. Landladies wither me with snappish requests for references.

“And why did you move from the west side, Mrs. Forrest? You say you’re divorced; well, just so you pay regular.”

And I do. I am my mother’s daughter; cash on the line and cash on time. Her saying. She had hundreds like it, and although it’s been twenty years since I left home, her sayings form a perpetual long-playing record on my inner-ear turntable.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. No need to chew your cabbage twice. A penny saved—this last saying never fully quoted, merely suggested. A penny saved: we knew what that meant.

By luck Watson came from a family with a similar respect for cash; thus he has never once defaulted on the small allowance for Seth. The cheque is mailed from The Whole World Retreat in Weedham, Ontario where he lives now. On the fifteenth of every month; no note, nothing to indicate that we once were husband and wife, just the cheque for one hundred and fifty dollars made out to me, Charleen Forrest.

My name, the name Forrest, is the best thing Watson ever gave me. After being Charleen McNinn for eighteen years it seemed a near miracle to be attached to such a name. Forrest. Woodsy, dark, secret, green with pine needles, exotic, far removed from the grim square blocks of Scarborough, the weedy shrubs and the tough brick bungalows. Forrest. After the divorce friends here in Vancouver suggested that I announce my singlehood by reverting to my old name. Give up Forrest? Never. It’s mine now. And Seth’s of course. I may not be brave but I recognize luck when I see it, and I will not return to the clan McNinn.

McNinn: the first syllable sour, familial; the second half a diminishing clout, a bundle of negative echoes—minimum, minimal, nincompoop, ninny, nothing, nonentity, nobody. Charleen McNinn. No, no, bury her. Deliver her from family, banktellers, ex-husbands, landladies, from bus drivers who tell her to move along, men on the make who want her to lie back and accept (this is what you need, baby), friends who feel sorry for her. Deliver me, deliver me from whatever it was that did this thing to me, robbed me of my courage and brought me here to this point of time, this mark on a nowhere map, this narrow bed.

You made your bed, you can lie in it, my mother always said.

“You really ought to get into meditation,” the Savages urge me as we wait for the waiter to bring us our food.

“Why?” I ask.

They exchange quick, practiced looks of communion. Doug receives from Greta the miniature nod to proceed.

“For true peace of mind, Char,” he says. “For release.”

“Look,” I say in what I think of as my Tillie the Toiler voice, flip bravery mingled with touchiness, “who says I need peace of mind? Or release. I’m not ready to die yet.”

“We’re talking about serenity,” Greta leans over the hurricane lamp so that her tiny, earnest creases are transformed by shadow into grey, lapped folds; a seared, oddly attractive gargoyle of a face. Her pouched eyes plead with me.

“It’s really far more than serenity,” she urges softly. “It’s an answer, a partial answer anyway, to—you know—fragmentation. Isn’t it, Doug? I mean, it gives you a sense of your own personhood.”

“What Greta means is that it frees you from trivia,” Doug explains. “And who, I ask you, needs trivia? You want to trim it off. Like fat off a chop. Cut it out.” He sits back, pleased with himself.

Doug and Greta Savage are in their mid-forties. Where do butterflies go when it rains? Where do hippies go when they get old? They get frowsier, coarser, more earnest or more ridiculous like the Savages; they look fun nier in their beads and long hair, they become desperately reverent about their causes, they become almost stridently tolerant and fair-minded, but they do, at least, become more well-meaning. And more possessive of friends.