The Box Garden by Carol Shields Page A

respectable reputation as a biographer. And most important, she has a seeming immunity to the shared, sour river of our girlhood.
    The house is quiet. Our mother with a long, shrunken, remembered sigh has surrendered to us her bedroom. Green moire curtains discoloured in the folds, a forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture. And on the walnut veneer bed, a candlewick bedspread, here and there missing some of its fringe. There is a waterfall bureau, circa 1928, on which rests a precisely-angled amber brush and mirror set which has never, as far as I know, been used. This was our father’s bedroom too; how completely we have put away that silent, hard-working husband and father. His wages met the payments on this bungalow; his bony frame rested for thirty years on half of this bed, and yet it seems he never existed.
    Since there are only three bedrooms in the house, there was really no other way to arrange the sleeping. No one, of course, had counted on Eugene, least of all Eugene himself who would have preferred a downtown hotel room. It is at my perverse last minute insistence that he is staying here in Scarborough.
    Why do I need him here? Perhaps because playing the role of pathetic younger-sister-from-the-west places too great a strain on me. Maybe I am anxious to make a final defiant gesture and give rein to my self-destructive urge which relishes awkward situations—such as how to introduce Eugene to my mother. “This is a friend of mine. Eugene Redding.”
    Friend? But in my mother’s narrow lexicon women don’t have male friends. They have fathers, husbands and brothers. Her face, meeting Eugene at the station, had dissolved into a splash of open pain. Had I intended to cause such pain? Why hadn’t I written ahead to explain about Eugene? But no one voiced these questions. Nevertheless she shook Eugene’s hand slowly as if trying to extract some sort of explanation through his finger tips.
    “I really don’t want to put you out, Mrs. McNinn,” Eugene had insisted. “I told Charleen I would be perfectly happy in a hotel.”
    There followed a small silence which could be measured not by seconds or minutes but by the cold, linear dimension of my mother’s hurt feelings.
    “I’m sure we can find room for everyone,” she said at last, sounding half paralyzed, like someone who had recently suffered a stroke. “Of course,” she trailed off de fensively, “it’s only a small house.”
    There was, naturally, no possibility of Eugene and me sharing a room. Anxious to please, I suggested sleeping with my mother and putting Eugene in the spare room, but she shuddered visibly at this idea. “I’d never sleep a wink,” she said, plainly vexed. “I’m used to sleeping alone.”
    Another silence as we absorbed the irony of this statement; in less than a week she would be sleeping with a stranger called Louis Berceau.
    Finally it was agreed that Martin and Eugene should take the twin beds in our old bedroom off the kitchen. Judith and I would occupy our mother’s double bed, and our mother, perhaps for the first time in her life, would sleep in the old three-quarters bed in the spare room.
    “Couldn’t I sleep on the chesterfield?” Eugene suggested desperately.
    We waited, breathless, for what seemed like the perfect solution. “No,” our mother said with finality. “No one on the chesterfield. That won’t be necessary.”
    What Eugene didn’t know, what he couldn’t possibly guess, was that no one had ever slept on our chesterfield. Never. Years ago our father, exhausted after a day at work, would occasionally stretch out for a minute and close his eyes. She would poke him, gently but relentlessly. “Not here, Bert. Not on the chesterfield.” It was as though she saw something threatening in the way he spread himself, something disturbing and vulgar about the posture of ordinary relaxation.
    “Not on the chesterfield,” she had said, giving us her final terms, and, like children, we accepted her