on that day he took every wrong turning. He was, in fact, the last of the tour group to come stumbling out of the maze’s exit.
Dorrie in her perky blue raincoat was standing, waiting. “We were worried,” she said to him crossly. Then, “You look dizzy.”
It was true. The interior of the maze had made him dizzy. It was very early in the morning, a frosty day, so cold he could see his breath as it left his mouth and widened out in the air. It seemed a wonder that the tender needlelike leaves could withstand such cold. The green walls rose about him, too high to see over. Who would have expected such height and density? And he hadn’t anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was, nevertheless, repairable. Without thinking, he had slowed his pace, falling behind the others, willing himself to be lost, to be alone. He could see Mrs. Edwards ahead of him on the narrow path, walking side by side with Dorrie, their heads together, talking, and Mr. Edwards following close behind. Larry watched the three of them take a right-hand turn and disappear behind a bank of foliage.
He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.
“You look lost in thought,” Vivian had said to him on his last day at Flowerfolks, the day before he and Dorrie were married. He had been in the back of the store, staring into a blaze of dyed blue carnations. “I was just thinking,” he told her, and she had floated him a lazy smile. “Communing with the merchandise?” she said, touching the sleeve of his jacket. “I do it all the time.”
He had been reflecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.
And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.
In the distance he could hear a larky Australian accented voice – one of their own group – calling “This way, this way.” He shrank from the sound, its pulsating jollity, wanting to push deeper and deeper into the thicket and surrender himself to the maze’s cunning, this closed, expansive contrivance. He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn’t. It sat out in the open like anything else.
Forty-five minutes, Arthur had given them. But Larry Weller had lingered inside the green walls for a full hour.
“We were worried,” Dorrie said. Scolding.
He followed her into the coach for the ride back to London. “How could you get yourself so lost?” she kept asking. The next day they boarded a plane that carried them across a wide ocean, then over the immense empty stretches of Labrador and the sunlit cities and villages of Ontario, an endless afternoon of flight. Frozen lakes and woodlands spread beneath them, thinning finally, flattening out to a corridor of snow-covered fields and then the dark knowable labyrinth of tangled roadways and rooftops and clouds of cold air rising up to greet them.
A sweet soprano bell dinged for attention. Seat belts buckled, tables up, the landing gear grinding down, a small suite of engineering miracles carefully sequenced. Dorrie gave Larry’s hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they’d chosen or which had chosen them.
Departures and arrivals: he didn’t know it then, but these two forces would form the twin bolts of his existence – as would the brief moments of clarity that rose up in between, offering stillness. A suspension of breath. His life held in his own hands.
CHAPTER THREE Larry’s Folks 1980
Shortly before Larry’s thirtieth birthday he managed to get enough money together for a down payment on a small house over on Lipton Street, a handyman special, just five rooms and a glassed-in front porch, and now he spends most evenings and weekends working on it. He and his wife, Dorrie, moved in two months ago, and ever since then she’s been after him to lay new tiles in the kitchen, and after that there’s the bathroom fixtures to replace, and maybe some ceiling insulation before winter comes along. A list as long as your arm. But this summer Larry’s been using every spare minute to work on the yard, sometimes with the help of his friend Bill Herschel, but more often alone. Might as well do it while the weather’s still good, Larry says. And he wants the whole yard closed in so Ryan can play out there next spring, unsupervised.
He’d be working at it today, only his folks have invited him and Dorrie and the baby over for the birthday festivities. Sunday dinner, opening his presents from the family, blowing out the candles, the usual. It’s 1980; he’s about to enter the decade of decadence, only he doesn’t know that yet, no one does; he only knows he feels the good hum of almost continuous anticipation in his chest, even though Dorrie griped all the way over to his folks’ place about how they were probably going to have a hot dinner, gravy and everything, when here it was, the bitch end of a sizzling day. Her own idea of hot weather fare is a big bowl of ice-cream and a glass of iced tea.
A brutal bored silence had fallen between them these last weeks.
A mere three years ago he was a young buck walking down a Winnipeg street in his shirt-sleeves. He remembers how that felt, no wife, no kid, no house, no yard. Now the whole picture’s changed, but that’s okay, especially his kid, Ryan. Another thing: he’s supposed to be sunk in gloom at the thought of turning thirty, but he isn’t. He’s unique and mortal, he knows that, and he’s got this sweet little babe of a house, and a yard that’s slowly taking shape, all its corners filling up with transplanted shrubs from the wholesaler down in Carmen. There’re some flowers too, and a few sweet peppers, but it’s mainly the shrubs he loves. Dorrie keeps calling them bushes, and he keeps having to correct her. “You’ve got shrub mania,” she says, but her lips smile when she’s saying it. “You want to be the shrub king of the universe.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe he wants to make his yard a real shrub showplace. Somewhere Larry’s heard that almost everyone in the world is allowed one minute of fame in their lives, or maybe that’s one hour.
Stu Weller, Larry’s dad, got written up once in the weekend section of the Winnipeg Tribune on the subject of his corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which included 600 items at the time of the interview, and has almost doubled since. Larry’s older sister, Midge, won a thousand dollars last year in the art gallery raffle – enough for a trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend – and she actually appeared on Channel 13 talking about how surprised she was, and how she didn’t usually waste money on raffle tickets unless it was for a good cause like expanding the gallery’s exhibition space or something.
Larry’s own moment of fame is still some years in the future, and that’s fine with him. He’s got enough on his mind these days, his young family – Dorrie, little Ryan – and his job at Flowerfolks, and his current
