The Box Garden by Carol Shields Read Free Book Online Page A

maniacs; if they hadn’t walked out on us when they did, they would most assuredly have been committed to an institution, no doubt about it.
    In this way we contrive our innocence. We reshape our histories; we have not been abandoned, only misled, and we insist that we now are liberated from the impossible, the unbearable, that we are free. I am happy now, I tell Eugene. He is happy too, he says, happier than he ever was with Jeri.
    We cling together. Legs entwined, playing at love, we wake early in the morning (who could sleep with all this racket?) and we lie in our lower berth clinging together like children.

    In the dining car we are served breakfast by a serious young man with a raw, new haircut and a glistening red neck. A university student, probably, hired for the summer. Under the eyes of anxious authority his hands tremble slightly as he puts down our glasses of chilled grapefruit juice. His eyes never leave the rims of the glasses and his mouth sags open slightly in concentration. It’s only May; by August he’ll be performing with the gliding familiar detachment of a professional.
    Who dreams up breakfast menus on trains? Someone splendidly elevated and detached from the rushed, sour determinate of instant coffee sloshed onto saucers, the whole crumbly-cupboard, soggy cornflake world. Here fresh haddock is offered, haddock in cream, imagine. With a tiny branch of parsley. Poached eggs exquisitely shivering on circles of toast. Or a bacon omelet. Nested in homefries. Marvellous. Served with a broiled tomato half. The pictorial effect alone is dazzling. English muffins on warmed plates. Yes, please. Honey or raspberry jam? Ahh, both please. Butter, carved into chilly balls on a green glass dish. Coffee brewed to dense perfection and poured from a graceful silvery pot. Well, just one more cup. Eugene smiles across at me.
    A tenderness seizes us for a middle-aged man sitting all alone at the next table and, half turning, Eugene and I exchange pleasantries with him. Over third and fourth cups of coffee he talks about how he found happiness by selling his car.
    “Suddenly it came to me,” he tells us. “I had an ulcer. You know? I’m a worrier, and you know what they say. Finally I said to myself, look, what are you always worrying about? And do you know what it was?”
    “What?” I ask. I am always polite, and besides it is part of the burden of my life to pretend that I am a benevolent and caring person. “What were you worrying about?”
    “Well,” he continues, “I didn’t realize it then—it was like a kind of subconscious thing with me—but what I was always thinking about was my car. Like any minute the brake linings were going to need replacing. So I’d be driving along and all the time I’d be listening to some little noise in the engine. My wife used to say I’d get a crick in my neck from bending over listening like that. Every time I heard any knocking in there I’d always automatically think the worst. Like the motor was stripped for sure. Or the carburetor was giving out. I used to have nightmares, honest to God nightmares, about needing four new tires all at once.”
    “And did it ever happen?” I ask.
    “No. That’s the thing, it never happened like that. Maybe there would be a dirty sparkplug or some two-bit wiring job, and when they told me at the garage that was all it was, I’d break into a sweat. A cold sweat. Well, finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Landed in hospital and I was only forty-three years old. An ulcer. I bled twenty-four hours, they couldn’t stop it. I’m telling you, that makes you think, when something like that happens.”
    “I’ll bet,” I agree emphatically.
    “So to hell with this, I said. I want to live my life, not worry it away.”
    “So you sold your car?”
    “That’s exactly what I did. Just called over a secondhand dealer and said, ‘Take it away, I never want to set eyes on it again.’ And the day I sold it was like a stone was