The Box Garden (8 page)

I nod. Eugene’s life is chronicled by the different cars he has owned, separated into periods as distinct as the phases of civilization; his stone-age, bronze-age, iron-age. First the Chevvy, a fourth-hand, first love which he restored to humming perfection on lonely, broke, womanless weekends on the street outside his boarding house on west 19th. Then the Volkswagen beetle with only one previous owner; by graduation he had discovered the benefits of good mileage and reliable repair service. With the navy blue Ford Jeri entered his life. The Rambler: Sandy was born and Donnie on the way and what with diaper bags, carbeds, safety seats and economy ... the Plymouth wagon, good for groceries. Then the Chrysler; orthodontics was beginning to be rewarding, and though Jeri didn’t believe in luxury transport (she had a small Sunbeam of her own anyway), the dealer had offered a package Eugene couldn’t turn down. “We used it on weekends,” he says, “but I never really knew it inside out. Not like with the Chevvy.” The Chevvy. He speaks of it tenderly. “She took me back and forth from Estevan to university three times a year and never once let me down.” He smiles, stretched with nostalgia. “She was a good girl. A great old girl.”

“And you never once flew.”

“Christ, no. It was all I could do to buy gas. I never even set foot in a plane until I was twenty-six and Jeri wanted to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”

Now, years later, he flies routinely as though no other form of transportation exists. When he decided to come with me to Toronto he tried for days to persuade me that we should fly. “It would save time,” he pressed, “and you’d have longer with your mother and sister.” (An argument which demonstrates how shallowly he knows me after two years, for what matters to me is to shorten the time in Toronto, not lengthen it.) Besides I went by train the other three times—when I brought Seth as a baby to show him off to his grandparents, then when my father died, and five years ago, when I came home to tell my mother, very belatedly, about my divorce. I had always taken the train; the pattern had been set; and besides, I told Eugene, the train was cheaper.

At the mention of expense, Eugene hesitated, and I knew what he was thinking: that he could easily afford the plane fares for both of us, and since he was planning to attend a dental convention in Toronto, he could write off the whole thing as a business expense. How simple life is for those with professions, savings accounts and good tax lawyers. It was, in fact, this very simplicity that I refused; I’m not ready yet to lay myself open to such soft and easy alternatives.

For days we discussed the matter of plane-versus-train, trading small gently reasoned arguments, each of us having lost the taste for full-scale battle, and, at last, Eugene relented, “But,” he said, “if we go by train let’s at least come home by air. And let’s get ourselves a compartment.”

“I sat up the other three times,” I said, “and it was fine.” Actually it hadn’t been fine, but I had, on those three previous trips, accepted discomfort as a kind of welcome detached suffering.

“A roomette?” he bargained. “At least a roomette.”

In the end we found we had left it too late; by the time we came to an agreement on the roomette, there was nothing left but one Pullman and at that we were lucky to get a lower. I wanted to pay for half the Pullman but backed down when Eugene began to show signs of genuine impatience. But if he had been even a trifle reasonable I would have preferred to pay my way. Just as I’m not ready for comfort (since I’ve done nothing to deserve it), neither am I ready to give up what remains of my shattered independence. First it was dinners Eugene paid for; then Seth’s dental care; last spring a holiday for the two of us in San Francisco; now my Pullman. And when I went shopping for a new dress for Toronto, he had wanted to pay for that too.

I look down at the dress which is really quite comfortable for the train, but like most of my purchases it is proving to be something of a disappointment; a shirt-dress in tangerine knit which, even though it is supposed to be permapress, creases across the lap. It is slightly baggy in the hips and a little snug across the top so that the spaces between the shiny white buttons gap slightly like little orange mouths. And beneath my soft, glossy new hair style of forty-eight hours ago the natural, black, Irish-witch contours are beginning to reassert themselves.

Still the two of us sitting here could pass for any happily married couple. Eugene, prosperous and healthy in his chocolate, doubleknit sixty dollar pants and lightweight, brown, ribbed pullover, and I, his wife (‘the little wife’ you could almost say if I weren’t so tall) going along for the ride, a little shopping, a little holiday from the kids. That is to say, there is nothing grotesque about us. We are not perhaps a stunning couple; Eugene has a loose fabric-like face and thin, beige, wooly hair cut too short. Without being actually overweight, there is a somewhat loose look around his stomach and hips. And I have my usual rangy, unconfined awkwardness. Nevertheless we are not in any way identifiable as the victims of failed marriages. Nothing gives us away, a fact which seems remarkable to me. Nothing betrays us, nothing sets us apart. And because I never let go of anything if I can help it, I am still wearing the wedding ring, a band of Mexican worked silver, which Watson gave me when I was eighteen.

Eugene, I’m a little relieved to see, seems to be enjoying the train trip after all. Soon we’ll be getting into the prairies, Saskatchewan, the real prairies where he grew up, and he’s looking exceptionally thoughtful. It may be that he’s thinking about his father again.

By habit he sees almost everything he does through the double lens of his dead father’s limitations, and these reflections are necessarily rimmed with regret, for his father, a hard-working farmer on a piece of worthless land, lived a life of unrelieved narrowness. “My father never slept in a Pullman,” Eugene may be thinking. “He never made love behind a hairy green curtain going seventy miles an hour through the mountains.” “My father never slept in a tent,” he had thought when he went camping for the first time at the age of twenty-five. “My father never rode in a Citroen, never had a glass of wine with his dinner, never went to a concert, never rode in a subway, never ate a black olive, never skied down a hill, never read Hemingway. My father never had a hundred dollar bill in his pocket. He never wore a ring on his finger in all his life. He never sat in a sauna and watched the steam rising off his chest. He never tipped a bellhop or smoked a cigar. Or watched a tennis match or slept in a waterbed in a fifty-dollar a day room with colour television. For that matter, he died while people were still wondering if there would ever be such a thing as colour television.”

I am right; Eugene is thinking about his father. After a minute he begins to tell me how his father introduced him to the mystery of sex. Of course, Eugene explains, it was already too late. He was a boy of thirteen at the time, and on a farm there are no such mysteries. “But someone must have told my father that he owed me something more. It might even have been my mother. No, on second thought, I don’t think so. I think he just made up his mind that he should explain everything about sex to his only son.”

“So he had a long chat with you out in the barn?” I suggest.

“Oh, no. Better than that. Or worse than that, it depends on how you look at it. I mean, he was a man who didn’t really know how to have a long talk. They didn’t talk much at home, neither of them, and I was the only kid and fairly quiet too. But he must have figured out in his head that the time had come for sex. It was when we were at the fair. The same fair we had every year in town. More of a carnival really, pretty junky, but there were some farm animals and home preserving and all that too. We always went, it was the big deal, the three of us. There wasn’t all that much else to do.”

“Go on about the sex.”

“Well, this particular day when we were standing in the fairgrounds, he turned to my mother and said that he was going off with me for a while and we would meet her later by the cattle judging yard. So off we went.”

“Where?”

“To a girlie show.”

“No! Really?”

“Really. It was in one of the tents way, way at the end of the grounds. There was a big sign—‘See The Prairie Lovelies—Only Twenty-five Cents.’ ”

“The Prairie Lovelies?”

“And under that was another sign. ‘Twenty-five cents extra for the Whole Show’. Only there was a circle around the W. The Hole Show.”

“And did you know what that meant?”

“Christ, yes, I was thirteen. But I didn’t want to go in, at least not with my old man. And I don’t think he really wanted to either. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. I think he figured he owed it to me or something. God only knows.”

“And how were the Prairie Lovelies?”

“Well, we went in and stood around this platform and out came these three girls in kind of Arabian Nights costumes. And they started dancing around. Over at one side some guy was playing the accordian.”

“Were they any good?”

“Terrible. Not that I’d ever seen any dancing girls before, but even I could tell they were no good. The audience, of course, was all men, farmers mostly, standing around in their overalls. One of the girls was so fat we could hear her huffing and puffing the whole time she was dancing.”

“Wasn’t it erotic at all?”

“I suppose, in a way, it was. First the veils came off. Then whatever they were wearing on top. Only this was a few years back and they had flower petals on their nipples. And G-strings under their skirts.”

“What about the Hole Show?”

“That came after. That was when the accordian player stopped and announced that we’d have to pay an extra quarter for the Hole Show. The Hole Show. I can remember how he smacked his lips when he said it. He passed a plate around, and I guess pretty well everyone stayed for that.”

“And . . .?”

“Then two of the girls kind of faded away, and the other one, the fat one, started in with the bumps and grinds and the accordion going faster and faster all the time while she untied the sides of her G-string. It seemed like forever before she got it off. It was so hot in there you wouldn’t believe it, and my father and I standing right in the front. Finally, there she was, peeled right down and sort of squatting and turning so everyone could have a chance to see. There sure wasn’t much to see, just a blur really. Then she started dancing again, grinding away, and suddenly she leaned over and grabbed my father’s hat off his head.”

“His hat?”

“A work hat. A blue cloth hat he had with a peak in front. He never went anywhere without that hat, not that I can remember anyway. You just didn’t see farmers bareheaded in those days.”

“And what did she do with it?”

“First she sort of bent over and started rubbing it up and down her thighs, wiggling away all the while. Everyone was clapping and yelling like mad by then and banging my father on the back. And then she got wilder and wilder and starting rubbing the hat up against her crotch.”

“No!”

“Then everyone went crazy and so did she, just rubbing it and rubbing it.”

“What did your father do?”

“Just stood there. Paralyzed. Stunned. Remember he was over fifty then. He just stood there with his mouth open. And his hands reaching out for his hat. Finally she took it and kind of swept it under his nose—that was the worst part—and then she banged it on top of his head.”

“Oh, Eugene.”

“He grabbed hold of it and ripped it off his head. And threw it on the ground and stomped on it. Then he took hold of my arm, hard, and pushed me on out through the whole damned bunch of them. Right out the doorway. Past the next bunch of suckers lining up outside for the next show. God.”

“And what did he say? Afterwards?”

“Nothing. Not one damn thing. I didn’t either. We just walked fast all the way to the other end of the fairground where my mother was waiting. He walked so fast I had to run to keep up. I wanted to say something, to tell him it was okay, that I didn’t mind all that much about the hat thing, but we never said anything, either of us. Not then or ever.”

“Ah, Eugene. And that was your sex education.”

“I’m almost sure that’s what he intended it to be. Because he sure as hell would never have blown two bits just for the fun of it. He never wasted money. There was never any to waste. I think it was all for me. And she blew it for him, the poor old guy, by grabbing his hat. And so did I by not saying anything.”

Eugene shakes his head and, looking out the window, remarks flatly, “It seems a long time ago.”

We sit quietly. When Eugene talks about his life, it is always with a sorrowing regretful futility as though the thin distances of his childhood could produce nothing better. But for me there is something compelling about his family, a sort of decency which surfaces unconsciously. I see them in prairie gothic terms, stern but devoted, humble but softened by an unquestioned tradition of love. Nevertheless, at the same time, I find myself listening for something more robust and redeeming, a note of valour perhaps; in Eugene’s stories he seems deliberately to choose for himself a lesser role. I yearn for him to demonstrate an aptitude for heroism, and I don’t know why. I must ask Brother Adam about that—why do I require bravery from Eugene when I don’t possess it myself?

I rest my hand in his lap. We are racing past tiny towns raised to significance by brightly painted grain elevators. Beyond them, fields, a sullen sky, a pulsing lip of brightness behind the clouds. Our train, shooting through air, is the slenderest of arrows, a hairline, a jet trail; it cares nothing for the space it splits apart and nothing for us; all we are required to do is sit still and watch it happen.