Larry doesn’t want to move out of his house. He admits it’s no palace, but he’s just finished insulating the basement and he’s thinking about doing the roof. He’s installed a new garbage disposal unit too. He points this out to Dorrie, what he’s invested in terms of money and work.
“You just don’t want to leave your crazy yard,” she charges.
Sighing, shrugging, he acknowledges the truth of what she says.
He’s worked hard on the yard. It’s a small lot, thirty-foot frontage and ninety in depth, that’s all, but there’s nothing else like it in the city of Winnipeg, and probably not even in the province of Manitoba. Every inch of it is filled with hedges, and these hedges are planted in the intricate pattern of a maze. There’s a direct access route for the mailman, of course, but there’s also a sinuous alternate path that winds twice around the house with half a dozen false turning points.
Larry’s maze craze (as Dorrie calls it) started three and a half years ago when they got married and went to England for their honeymoon. The highlight of the trip was a tour through the famous Hampton Court maze outside London, and ever since then Larry’s been reading library books about mazes. And adapting his classic maze design so that it’s tailored to the size of the Lipton Street lot. He’s acquired nursery stock from a cut-rate greenhouse and learned just what shrubs work best in this climate and how to keep them alive during a long winter by burying the young shoots under heaps of leaves. Right now the hedges are thinly distributed and so short they can be easily overstepped; it’ll be another four or five years before the hedge walls get high enough for his liking, but meanwhile he’s nursing them along. The last thing he wants is to move to Linden Woods,where he’d have to start over and where the by-laws probably prohibit eccentric gardening.
Whereas anything goes in this neighborhood. The people around here are a mixed bag. His friend Bill Herschel, who lives two streets over, works full-time for the Manitoba Endangered Species Alert and sometimes gives Larry a hand on the weekend. The Gilshammers across the lane (he’s in cut-rate electronics; she works at a unisex hair salon) have just donated the raked leaves from their property. So have the two guys down the street. (Larry can’t remember their names offhand, but he knows they do stage carpentry for a theatre downtown, which he figures must be a pretty interesting line of work.) Lucy Warkenten, who’s got the upstairs apartment next door, doesn’t have any leaves to offer, but she takes a keen interest in Larry’s maze, and has walked through it half a dozen times, stepping along in her purple leather boots. (She’s a self-employed bookbinder working out of her apartment.) Beneath Lucy live the Lees with their three little kids. Ken Lee delivers pizzas for Bella Vista and gives Larry all his leaves and grass clippings, and plenty of advice on the subject of propagating shrubs, which must be planted in a shallow but wide trench so that the roots can spread out sideways and help anchor the branches against prevailing winds. The Grangers, Gord and Moira, live on the other side of Larry’s house. Moira’s a housewife, a semi-invalid, with an interest in spelling reform (she’d like to see the letter X eliminated), and Gord designs ergonomic work gloves, his most recent breakthrough featuring reduced padding at the finger joints so that the gloved hand can grasp objects more readily in cold weather. The good-hearted Grangers, too, have contributed their fall rakings to the survival of Larry Weller’s baby hedges, and now, with winter about to crash down, Larry’s and Dorrie’s yard looks like a series of Indian burial mounds with their mushroom of a house poking through.
In the dark November evenings people in this neighborhood tend to stay home with their families, enjoying their hamburger suppers and favorite TV shows. Generally speaking, the house lights go out along the street somewhere between ten o’clock and eleven-thirty. There are, Larry assumes, starbursts of sex or of hospitality or late-night comings and goings and probably even acts of violence, but nights in the neighborhood are quiet for the most part, and heavy with sleep. Under a depthless navy-blue sky, beneath a cold bone of a moon, this small segment of the world is renewing itself, restoring its emptied-out substance, getting ready for tomorrow. Ready to go back to work.
Working for Flowercity and married to Dorrie and living on Lipton Street, Larry had no idea that technology was about to bulldoze the job market. In the early eighties, that enchanted, stupid time, almost everyone had a job, or if they didn’t they expected they’d find one any minute. No one dreamed of the redundancies and dehirings and downsizings the end of the century would bring, where in a mean, lean, bottom-line world, a day’s work would become as rare and as exotic as the prized orchids Larry keeps swaddled in insulation at the back of the cool unit.
Larry, himself, was slow to wake up to the idea of work. At twelve he took over another kid’s paper route and lasted a week. During his final year of high school, hungry for money, longing for name-brand jeans and a leather jacket, he worked at a neighborhood McDonald’s, adding up orders, and ringing in cash, hating every minute of it. He didn’t like to think in those days that he’d have to spend the rest of his life working. But then he got lucky. He fell into the right line of work: flowers, plants.
And now, ever since Viv Bondurant’s left Flowercity, Larry’s been in charge down at the store, and that means getting up at six o’clock three mornings a week and driving out to Stems Inc., the wholesalers. They’re open for business at seven, and Larry likes to be in and out in half an hour. He’s got his standard orders, of course, his poms, daisies, roses, carnations, and so on, and then he likes to spend a few minutes looking around at what’s just come in from the flower brokers in Montreal. Stems has about 140 accounts, so it’s not surprising he bumps into some of the other florists around town, Sally Ullrich, Jim Carmody, and catches up on what’s new. Over in the corner there’s coffee going and a basket of donuts - a nice touch, Larry thinks, since he skips breakfast at home these days, and Dorrie’s too busy, anyway, getting Ryan ready for daycare, to stop and make coffee.
He’s got a lot of wedding orders coming up, so today he picks up a good supply of baby’s breath. He prefers the stuff from Peru, which is as pure a product as you can get. The wedding bulge across the North American continent is in June and July, but there’s a major blip in the city of Winnipeg, where winter weddings have come to the fore. That way newly married couples can get away for a tropical honeymoon. Larry does a nice bridal semi-cascade; average price $120. Brides want roses nine times out of ten. You can’t talk them out of it. They think flowers, and, bingo, roses come to mind. Roses are romantic, also generic. Winnipeg roses originate in southern Ontario, where they’ve got acres of them under glass.
The gingers get shipped to Manitoba from South Africa, freesia from Holland, and carnations from California. People think carnations are a cheapy flower, but it’s not true; sometimes, depending on weather fluctuations, they’re more expensive than roses, and they last a hell of a lot longer. Some nationalities hate carnations, that’s something to remember. Tree fern is trucked in from Florida in warmed vehicles. They’re always good for funeral baskets. You don’t see a lot of camellias anymore, that old corsage staple, but then Larry doesn’t do anything like the number of corsages he did when he started in the business back in the late sixties. To tell the truth, corsages were old-fashioned even then, relics from the thirties and forties. How’s a woman supposed to button her coat over a corsage? And what if it doesn’t match her outfit? - actually, there’s an old florist’s law that says a corsage is doomed to be the wrong color, something women have always known, just as they know there’s no way to secure a corsage without at least a small fuss, not to mention permanent damage to their silk blouses. If a customer absolutely insists on going the corsage route, Larry encourages them to think about a small wrist arrangement he’s perfected, which is sturdy, attractive, and comfortable to wear.
He’s happy to give advice about prolonging the life of cut flowers, but warns his customers that they mustn’t have unrealistic expectations. Flowers are fragile, flowers are
needy. There are people who put their flowers in dirty vases. You can actually see the green scum line from the last bunch. Would you drink out of that vase? No way. You want to put your flowers in a disinfected container; that’s all the magic white powder in the little envelope is - a disinfectant. Of course you’ve already cut your flowers with a knife and on an angle before putting them in water. Don’t expect dafs to go more than three days, though, no matter what you do to them and for them.
Poinsettias will start selling in a week’s time; Larry gets his delivered from Carmen, Manitoba, just an hour away. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, then your Easter lilies - they come from Carmen too. Mother’s Day is crazy, the biggest day of the year, and right after that you’re into graduation tributes, retirements, and a spate of summer weddings. It’s a funny business with its ups and downs, but Larry’s grateful for the way the main holidays are strung out over the year. He’s always hearing about photo opportunities, but what about flower opportunities? They come and they go; they keep him buoyed up and alive and working, and he welcomes the noise of daily bustle in his life.
When Viv first left, she phoned the store occasionally to see how business was going. After a while, though, she stopped checking in. Larry’s heard somewhere that she dropped out of the social work program and was selling flowers in a corner of a Safeway in North Kildonan. He’s also heard that she’s pregnant and has quit work altogether. He hasn’t seen her for ages now, but he thinks of her at least once every day, and wonders what she’s doing at that very moment. He didn’t notice it happening at the time, but it must have been that they said goodbye to each other and really meant it, and maybe that’s the way it goes with friends you have from work.
Sometimes down at the store he’ll be holding a stemmed alstroemeria in his hand. More often than not, this will be the flamingo variety, his favorite, a rose color streaked with lavender, a floppy uneven head of fragile petals spread out to reveal a colony of tender stamen threads, their pinks, their golds. This flower, an herb really, started out as a seed way down in South America in Colombia. Some Spanish-speaking guy, as Larry imagines him, harvested the seed of this flower and someone else put it back into the earth, carefully, using his hands probably, to push the soil in place. They earned their daily bread doing that, fed their families, kept themselves alert. It’s South American rain that drenches the Colombian earth and foreign sunshine that falls on the first green shoots, and it all happens, it all works.
And what next? Larry supposes that Spanish-speaking laborers equipped with hoes arrive to beat back the weeds, but are they men or women who do this work? Maybe both, and maybe children, too, in that part of the world. Larry wonders what goes on in their heads when they perform this tedious and backbreaking work, and whether they have any idea when they pack the cut flowers into insulated boxes, laying the heads end to end, that these living things are about to be carried aboard enormous jet aircraft, handled gently, handled like the treasure they are, that they will be transported across international frontiers, sorted, sold, inspected, sold again, and that without noticeable wilting or fading - except to an expert eye - they will come to rest in the hands of a young Canadian male in an ordinary mid-continental florist establishment, bringing with them a spot of organic color in a white and frozen country (where the mercury has fallen overnight to twenty degrees below zero and where the windchill factor has risen steadily all day so that no living matter has any right to exist, but it does and here it is - this astonishing object he holds in his grasp).
Larry thinks how the alstroemeria head he cups in his hand has no memory and no gratitude toward those who delivered it to this moment. It toils not, neither does it spin. It’s sprouted, grown, bloomed, that’s all. But Larry, placing it beside a branch of rosy kangaroo paw from British Columbia and a spray of Dutch leather leaf and a spear or two of local bear grass, feels himself a fortunate man. He’s worried sick at the moment about the distance that’s grown between himself and his wife, about the night terrors that trouble his only child, about money, about broken or neglected friendships, about the pressure of too much silence, about whether his hedges will weather the winter, but he is, nevertheless, plugged into the planet. He’s part of the action, part of the world’s work, a cog in the great turning wheel of desire and intention.
The day will arrive in his life when work - devotion to work, work’s steady pressure and application - will be all that stands between himself and the bankruptcy of his soul. “At least you have your work,” his worried, kind-hearted friends will murmur, and if they don’t, if they forget the availability of this single consolation - well then, he’ll say it to himself: at least I have my work.
CHAPTER FIVE
Larry’s Words 1983
The word labyrinth has only recently come into the vocabulary of Larry Weller, aged thirty-two, a heterosexual male (married, one child) living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He doesn’t bother himself with the etymology of the word labyrinth; in fact, at this time in his life he has zero interest in word derivations, but he can tell you plain and simple what a labyrinth is. A labyrinth is a complex path. That’s it. It’s not necessarily something complicated or classical, as you might think. The overpass out on Highway 2 is a kind of labyrinth, as Larry will be happy to tell you. So is the fox-and-geese tracery he stamped into the backyard snow as a child in Winnipeg’s West End. He sees that now. So’s a modern golf course. Take St. George’s Country Club out in the St. James area of the city, for instance, the way it nudges you along gently from hole to hole, each step plotted in a forward direction so that you wouldn’t dream of attacking the whole thing backwards or bucking in any way the ongoing, numerically predetermined scheme. And an airport is a labyrinth too, or a commercial building or, say, a city subway system. It seems those who live in the twentieth century have a liking for putting ourselves on a predetermined conveyor track and letting it carry us along.
A maze, though, is different from a labyrinth, at least in the opinion of some. A maze is more likely to baffle and mislead those who tread its paths. A maze is a puzzle. A maze is designed to deceive the travelers who seek a promised goal. It’s possible that a labyrinth can be a maze, and that a maze can be a labyrinth, but strictly speaking the two words call up different ideas. (Larry read these definitions, and their relationship to each other, three years ago, in a library book called Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development.)
If he had not married Dorrie Shaw, if he had never visited Hampton Court, his life would have swerved on an alternate course, and the word labyrinth would have floated by him like one of those specks in the fluid of his eye.
He finds it paradoxical that while his life is shrinking before his very eyes, his vocabulary should be expanding. It’s weird. It’s far-out. It’s paradoxical - that’s the bouncy new word he’s been saying out loud lately, not to show off, but because it “pops” on his tongue. It’s a word he’s only recently taken into his brain, last week in fact. “Isn’t it paradoxical,” his sister Midge said to him over the phone, “that I kicked my husband out because he was just plain queer, and now I’ve moved in with him because he’s queer and he’s sick and maybe dying?”
“It’s what?” Larry asked her, ashamed of his begging tone, his needy need to know what words mean. “What did you call it?”
“A paradox. You know, like ironic.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
He went the next day and bought himself a pocket dictionary and he keeps it down at Flowercity. It’s on a shelf under the counter, handy. There are people, he’s noticed, whose vocabularies stand a step or two higher on the evolutionary staircase, and he’s had this idea lately that words can help him in the future or maybe even with his present difficulties. The empty white echo he sometimes hears can be calmed by words. It might be the solution: that all he needs are some new words, big or little it doesn’t matter, as long as their compacted significance registers, in his head, on his tongue. He could increase his overall word pow
er, add a new word every day. Who knows what’s likely to happen if he sharpens up: the way he talks, the way he thinks. There are men and women who live by cunning and silence, but he doesn’t want to be one of them, grunting, pointing, holding back. He wants to be ready when the time comes to open his mouth and let the words run out like streaming lava.
There are people out there who imagine they want to pass straight through language to clarity, but Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Canada, wants, all of a sudden, at age thirty-two, to hang on to words, even separate words that sit all on their own, each with a little brain and a wreath of steam around its breathed-out sound: cantankerous, irrepressible, magnanimous. And, yes, ironic. You can discuss this idea of words, but you’ll need more words just to get started: hypothesis, axiomatic, closure.
He was a dreamy kid growing up, and after that a dreamy adolescent, just letting his life happen to him. It took him years to get himself wide awake, and lately he’s been feeling that he’s dozing off again, collapsing inward like the shrink-wrapped merchandise on the rack at the front of the store, the little plastic bottles of Vita-Grow and Root-Start and Mite-Bomb. The music that pours out of the radio all day at the store has flattened his brain with its wailing. He’s reached a dead end in his job - branch manager of a so-so flower shop - where he’s been for fourteen years. An impasse. (That’s another of his new words; he got that one from TV.) Besides his job stalemate, he’s got a wife who won’t sleep in the same bed with him anymore, at least not until he promises to sell their house and move upmarket.
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