Free The Box Garden by Carol Shields

Judith will already be there. She’ll probably meet us. At least I think so.”
    Silence from Vancouver.
    “Hello, Seth. Can you hear me? Are you there?”
    “I’m still here. I can hear fine.”
    “Good. Well, I’d better go. Just phone me if you need anything, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “You’ve got the number?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I guess I’d better say good-bye.”
    “Good-bye.”

    Two years ago when Seth started the orthodonture treatment he was advised to give up his tuba temporarily; for the year and a half while the bands were on his teeth he played the double bass. He was good at it; everyone remarked about how quickly he picked it up.
    We bought the double bass third-hand through the want ads; we got it cheap because there was no case. It’s a big, waxy, humming buzzard of an instrument, and because its bulk so nearly approximates that of a human being, I soon began to think of it as a sort of half-person, a rather chuckly, middle-aged woman, rather like me in fact.
    One day Seth forgot to take it to school and he phoned me between classes asking if I could drop it off. I took it on the bus, feeling enormously proud of her polished, nut-brown hippiness, her deep-throated good nature, the way the sun struck off gleaming streaks on her lovely sides. Seth waited for me on the steps outside the school, frowning and a little anxious that I might be late. When he saw me getting off the bus he jumped up and ran to meet me, taking the instrument out of my arms, whirling about with it and kissing the air about its bridge. I can never get that picture out of my mind, how extraordinarily and purely happy he looked at that instant.
    But the minute he had the bands off his teeth he went back to playing the tuba. I can’t understand it. A tuba is such an awkward machine with its valves and convolutions; it’s such an ugly brassy armload, and I don’t understand what Seth likes in the choking, grunting noise that comes out of it.
    There seems something rather perverse about his preference. He explains that he likes the tuba better because it’s his voice that makes the sounds; the double bass has a voice of its own—it’s just a question of letting it out, something anyone can do. I don’t think he’s touched the bass since. It stands, serene as ever, in a corner of his bedroom. He keeps a beach towel draped over it to keep off the dust, but no one loves it anymore.
    Sometimes I think there’s something symbolic about it, but symbolism is such an impertinence, the sort of thing the “pome people” might contrive. (God knows how easily it’s manufactured by those who turn themselves into continuously operating sensitivity machines.) Of course, symbols have their uses. But something—my cramped Scarborough girlhood no doubt—ties me to the heaviness of facts. Tubas and double basses are not symbols but facts, facts which can be—which must be—assimilated like any of the other mysterious facts of existence.

    As the train moves closer to Toronto I decide I must warn Eugene a little about my mother. “She’s always been a difficult person,” I say.
    “How do you mean, difficult?”
    “Well, to begin with—you’ll notice this right away—she’s never been what you’d call demonstrative.”
    “But she must have loved you. You and your sister?”
    “It’s hard to explain,” I say. Hard because she had loved us but with an angry, depriving love which, even after all these years, I don’t understand. The lye-bite of her private rancour, her bitter shrivelling scoldings. When she scrubbed our faces it was with a single, hurting swipe. When we fell down and scraped our knees and elbows she said, “that will teach you to watch where you’re going.” Her love, if that’s what you call it, was primitive, scalding, shorn of kindness. I can’t explain it to Eugene; instead, I give him an example.
    “When she brushed our hair in the morning, Judith’s and mine, when she brushed our hair