Carol Shields - The box garden

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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.

-Literary Review

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 Boston Sunday Globe

The novels 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 doesnt exaggerate or sentimentalize these difficulties, but simply describes them in straightforward, low-key prose that brings us to the vital center of Charleens 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 Generals 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

For my son John

Chapter 1

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 dont know what it wassomething in my childhood probablybut 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 thats too much for a woman in my circumstances. So do I, but I do have a child and cant, 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. Its a good thing Watson insisted we have only one child.

And whats 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. Im thirty-eight, dont I have the right to a little luxury now and then? They never have anything new at the libraryyouhave 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 cant get into a library book the same way, why is that? Eight dollars and ninety-five cents. Ill have to be more careful. But Ill have it to read on the train.

Its 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 youre divorced; well, just so you pay regular.

And I do. I am my mothers daughter; cash on the line and cash on time. Her saying. She had hundreds like it, and although its 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 savedthis 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. Its mine now. And Seths 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 echoesminimum, 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.

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