The Box Garden by Carol Shields Page B

decree. But inwardly I bled for Martin and Eugene in their forced awkward fraternity. I could imagine their inevitable stiff conversation— All right with you to open the window? Whichever you prefer. Maybe you’d rather have the bed by the closet? You don’t mind if I read for a while? Not at all, not at all .—Strangers, two men in their early forties, shut up from their women in a tiny back bedroom with no more than a foot or two between their beds, and nothing in common in all this world but a bizarre attachment to the McNinn sisters, Charleen and Judith; they might, for that matter and with good reason, be silently questioning that attachment at this very moment. Martin, an easy man, though somewhat remote, would accept the situation, but he could not help minding the separation from Judith. He had even pleaded for the spare room himself. He and Judith wouldn’t object to the three-quarters bed, he had said. But our mother, who seemed to feel that her hospitality was being challenged, had insisted on taking the spare room herself.
    “Well?” Judith says again from across the room.
    “How do you think she looks?” I ask.
    That is always our first question when we’re together, how is she, how does she look. Our voices dip and swim with the novel rhythm of concern, childrens’ concern for a parent.
    “Better than I expected,” Judith says.
    “When did you see her last?”
    “A couple of months ago. I came down on the train with the kids for the weekend.”
    “She’s still getting treatment?”
    “She goes every month now. But next year it will probably be less. Down to every three months.”
    “You talked to the doctor?”
    “Yes. A couple of times. He thinks she’s made a fantastic recovery.”
    “What about a recurrence?”
    “It could happen. That’s why they want her to keep coming to the clinic.”
    “She looks so thin.”
    “She was always thin, Charleen. You’ve forgotten.”
    “Well, then, she looks old.”
    “She is old. She’s seventy.”
    “She’s so pale though.”
    “Not compared to what she was after the operation.”
    “How soon after did you see her?”
    “A month. She never told me she was even having an operation. Which was odd when you think how she always used to complain about her aches and pains. She never told anyone. She just went.”
    “I didn’t know until you wrote.”
    “When I heard—the doctor finally phoned and told me—I came down and spent a week with her. She was feeling fairly strong by then and there was a nurse who came round every day to check up. She never talked about it. It. The breast. Just about the hospital and how rude the nurses had been and how thin the blankets were and how they hadn’t given her tea with her breakfast. You know how she goes on. But the breast—she never mentioned it.”
    “Does it hurt do you think?”
    “I don’t know. She never says.”
    “What does she wear? I mean, does she have one of those false things?”
    “It looks like it to me. What do you think?”
    “She looks just the same there. With her dress on anyway.”
    “Did you ever see her breasts, Charleen? I mean when we were little.”
    “Never. You remember how she used to dress in the closet all the time. That was why it was so odd when you wrote me about the operation.”
    “How do you mean, odd?”
    “That she had a breast removed. It never seemed real to me. I just never thought of her as someone who had breasts.”
    “What did she call them?”
    “Breasts? I don’t know. She must have called them something.”
    “Not that I can remember.”
    We sit on the bed thinking. The house is still and through the window screen we can hear a warm wind lapping at the edge of the awning.
    “Developed,” Judith says at last, “I think she just used the verb form. Like how so-and-so was developing. Or someone else was very, very developed or maybe not developed.”
    Remembering, I smile. “She always thought Aunt Liddy was too developed. Poor Liddy,