by Neil Hetzner
Dilly Koster-Phelps measured things from their ends. She didn’t record the weight that she had lost; she concentrated on the pounds that remained between herself and her goal. When she jogged, she started with five miles to go and counted her progress as a launch controller at NASA might. Four and one half. Four. Three and one half. Three. Dilly thought that the system used to keep track of age was inane. A birthday only recorded what life had been lived. What was much more important was how much life was left. To Dilly, it made more sense to use life expectancy as a substitute for birthdays. She was sure that if people knew their Life Expectancy, it would make them much more careful of how they lived their days.
Under Dilly’s system, which she had worked on over the years while doing dishes or laundry, each child would begin its life with an actuarial-based Life Expectancy. A white girl would begin with an L.E. of seventy-eight; a black girl would get a seventy-three. A white boy would start with seventy-one probable years, while a black boy would begin with sixty-four. The child’s L.E. would be adjusted depending upon behavior. A white teenage girl, who had been living a healthy life for fifteen years, could celebrate her fifteenth birthday and sixty-third life expectancy day one year. If, however, she began to smoke in the following year, then, making the assumption that she would continue to smoke, she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday but an L.E of only fifty-five. By using Dilly’s system, a new smoker would not be allowed to ignore the knowledge that each cigarette cost her five and one half-minutes of life. She would be forced to recognize that, on average, smoking would cost her seven years of life. If the same girl chose to drink, or live on French fries and sausage and pepper grinders, then more years would be subtracted. Dilly was absolutely positive that her system would make individuals both more aware and more responsible for their health.
Dilly had spent many a laundry day working through examples of her system. Everything was worked out except the exact mechanism for assigning the L.E.s. She was leaning toward it becoming one of the primary responsibilities of the public health system. It would, of necessity, have to be an intrusive system, but she was sure that the rewards in longevity would be worth the cost in privacy.
Dilly was positive that her father did not have long to live. At age sixty-six, Neil Koster’s L.E. should be sixteen years, but she doubted whether she could, in good conscience, give him more than three or four more years. This woefully short time was the reason for her mission. She was going to spend her Labor Day holiday doing the things necessary to recover the lost years of her father’s life.
After she finished folding and sorting the laundry, Dilly arranged the separate stacks of socks and underwear on the long trestle table in the dining room which she always used as a staging area for trips. She laid out the different-colored backpacks of her three children. She began arranging stacks of clothes on top of each backpack. This was the kind of work that led to her best thinking.
Dilly had spent much of her adult life discovering and working through the complex equations of human life. She avidly scanned newspapers and magazines and spent hours listening to daytime television to keep up with the scientific discoveries that affected life’s equations. Additional linkages of cigarettes to lung cancer and heart disease, stronger correlations between alcohol and stomach and pancreatic cancer, and more findings on the relationship between cholesterol and atherosclerosis were always exciting news. Even more thrilling could be a report that a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, or some other well-respected scientific journal magazine, showed some important variable had been misread. A sudden reversal, from something positive to something negative, was especially satisfying. Something in Dilly’s soul was sated by scientific betrayal. Milk was bad. Eggs were bad. Hard-bristled toothbrushes were bad. She had been ecstatic upon reading a report that detailed the hazards of eating too much spinach. Spinach had high concentrations of oxalic acid, an agent used to clean the insides of automobile radiators and bleach laundry. It was an exquisite shock to find an article delineating the dangerous levels of afflatoxin, a naturally occurring carcinogen, in such a politically righteous food as George Washington Carver’s peanuts. An investigative report of people dying from fiber blockages in their colons from eating too much bran was as heady for Dilly as finding Communists had been for Joe McCarthy. Life’s dangers were everywhere. Food and habits, long trusted, could be traitors. A mother and wife’s constant vigilance were necessary to protect a loved one’s life, even one who thought that work was more important than family.
With each new bit of information that she gathered, Dilly would recalculate the life expectancies of her family members. Wound warm in her ratty robe, drinking double strength coffee, syrupy thick with family-forbidden sugar, filled with a horrible excitement, she would read the latest health dangers in the Boston Globe. While her husband still slept, close to suffocation under the pounds and pounds of covers which had mounded their winter bed since the discovery of the microwave hazards of electric blankets, Dilly would process the new threats and recalculate Bill’s remaining years. Reading the latest betrayal—spinach, for example—she would reduce Bill’s remaining time on earth downward from 41.2 to 40.6 years. She would mourn his earlier death, work through the implications of how her own life would change with widowhood coming six tenths of a year earlier, and brush away any guilt from having fed her family such copious quantities of spinach—a vegetable all of them, except Uppy the rabbit, detested.
Dilly adjusted the lives and habits of her family as a good captain would trim his sails with a shifting wind. When the news broke that lead in the soil could be brought indoors on the soles of shoes and build up in the carpeting to dangerous concentrations, the captain enjoined her crew and all passengers to remove their shoes at the door. As her shoeless hyper-energetic children slid on the uncarpeted floors concussing heads, contusing bones and bruising major muscle groups, and as they tore fingernails making desperate lunges for a doorframe after coming around a corner too quickly, Dilly reveled in the knowledge that by preventing lead poisoning, she not only was giving her children additional L.E. but also, because of the known cumulative effects of lead on the brain, higher grades in school. Better grades led to higher lifetime earnings. Studies had shown that fewer money problems meant a lower probability of divorce. Since divorce and a shorter life were highly correlated, Dilly added even more L.E. to her kids totals. When the reports began on the deadly killer, radon gas, emanating upward through the basement floors in the homes of unsuspecting New Englanders, Dilly bought each member of the family a pair of the cheapest sneakers. These shoes were to be used exclusively for walking inside the house. The shoes’ wafer-thin soles were supposed to protect the wearer from the radiation given off as the earth’s radium disintegrated. A side effect of the radon cure, that was of some importance to Dilly’s children, was that their athletic careers improved as the number of practice days lost to house fall injuries dropped significantly. The sneakers stayed a part of the family L.E. regimen until a small study, one that Dilly almost missed, showed a strong link between the early use of poorly constructed sneakers and serious long term posture problems. When she brought that information to the dinner table, her children suggested that the solution be that they be given expensive sneakers, but when Dilly fed the information of purchasing sixty dollar sneakers for three children with growing feet into the L.E. equation, the answer that came out was that outdoor shoes again could be worn in the house. The family would make up the L.E. loss from lead in other ways. The kids’ chore list was changed to include more frequent, more thorough vacuuming of the house’s few rugs until some research indicated that vacuuming actually had the possibility of spreading lead dust.
With the same sense of safety that knowledge brings to the smoking cardiologist and the obese school nutritionist, Dilly fine-tuned her family’s lives without being overly involved herself in the various regimens. As she replaced beloved childhood cereals with brownish-gray extrusions of bran, as she banned
butter and bacon and issued ukases on safflower margarine and red and white-dyed soybean ersatz bacon strips, as she added prodigious amounts of such carotene-rich foods as carrots and cantaloupe and squash, and cancer-killing cruciferous vegetables such as mustard greens, kale and broccoli, and as she restricted red meat to such an extent that it seemed to her family that cattle must be an endangered species, Dilly herself, with her children safely away at school, smashed chunks of baking chocolate into bite size pieces for her lunch. After scooting her children out the door for more fresh air, having fed them a worm-scarred, alaric-free organic apple as dessert, she would concoct herself a post-prandial paste of milk, vanilla and powdered sugar into which she crumbled hunks of a frozen graham cracker crust. The crust was one which was kept in the freezer for special occasions, which never came, except for Dilly. Although she wore her street shoes in the house, and although her appetite for high cruciferous, carotene and fiber rich meals was small because of all the white foods that she secretly wolfed down on the short ride home from the grocery or while hiding in the gloom of the laundry room, or, occasionally, even ate in the sanctuary of the bathroom, and although her four times a week five mile jog rarely covered more than two and was apt to be more a contemplative stroll, and even though she was more than thirty pounds overweight on a five foot two inch frame, and even though her cholesterol level stayed above three hundred despite all the thinking that she did about it and even though her blood pressure was 145/110, Dilly knew that her L.E. was excellent. She could transcend her own theories because she, like her mother, had good genes. Dilly never doubted that she and her mother would outlive their husbands. The only question was how long they would be a widowed. In order to rescue her mother from a long widowhood, it was Dilly’s intention to sacrifice her well-deserved vacation by using the Labor Day family reunion to fix her father’s life.
Dilly collected health disasters with the same dedication others brought to baseball cards or Hummel figurines. As she packed, she reviewed her collection with the object of finding those with the most potential impact upon her father…the carcinogens being created at the barbeque grill he insisted on using for almost every summer meal. It would be a nice retirement for him to be sitting in a hospital with drains gurgling from where his tumor-ridden stomach had been removed…round worm eggs hanging from the tips of every blade of grass, just waiting for the precise moment that his lymphatic systems weakened enough to invade the body and settle in their favorite places—the eyes and brain. Stupid, blind and drooling. Was that the husband he wished to be? …Shellfish toxins, capable of paralyzing or passing on hepatitis that were sure to be carried in the quahogs and mussels that he gathered in the cove. His muscles locking up as he was driving along the traffic-congested lanes of Route One with God only knew how many grandchildren in the car. No one ate shellfish anymore. No one. Especially not raw.
This time, Dilly promised herself, she would be as adamant as Christ had meant Peter to be. She would be a rock. The gates of hell would not prevail. The killing must stop. As she accessorized the kids’ piles of clothing with flip-flops, learning-enhancing books, and politically-correct toys, she mentally listed the foods that would not be allowed this time. Hot-dogs. Hamburgers, if grilled. Sausages, whether kielbasa, Italian, linguica or chorizo, unless made from turkey. Potato chips. Potato salad , unless made with yogurt. Baked beans if made with the Koster family recipe using big chunks of nitrosamine and cholesterol-laden bacon.
As a just reward for finishing the children’s packing more than seventy-two hours before embarkation, Dilly climbed up on the kitchen stool to dig out the marshmallows. She prized loose four of the units which were as hard and white as the rubber ends of doorstoppers. Two she frosted with lavish dollops of peanut butter. Over the years, the threat of being caught had taught Dilly Koster how to bolt her treats with the same acumen as a dog would a scrap of steak fat; however given the inherent unchewability of the hardened marshmallow and with the addition of a huge glob of viscid peanut butter, these treats could only be savored. Dilly’s eyes rolled back as she rolled the adamantine confection around in her mouth seeking some slight fissure or weakness where her teeth could gain purchase. As a snake, after swallowing a large prey, seeks safety, Dilly lifted the phone receiver off its base during her minutes of incapacitation. The muscles at the back of her jaw ached from working hard to muster up enough fluid to dissolve or digest what was nearly indigestible. The second two marshmallows were easier to eat after she hacked them into halves with a ten inch chef’s knife and lubricated them with a thick coating of Karo syrup. Ever the analyst, Dilly noted that while the syrup-coated variety could be eaten much faster than the peanut butter version, they took longer to clean up. Her syrup-coated tongue, quickly becoming as thick and flaccid as a drunk’s as the sugar raced to her brain, traced her lips several times with no discernible removal of the stickiness. Finally, she wiped her mouth hard with her hand and licked the last of the sweetness from her palm.
With the pleasure of her small sin over, Dilly looked at the kitchen clock to see how much longer it would be before her neighbor Laura brought her two and Dilly’s three children home from the day program at Camp Gustavus.
From the moment that her youngest, Kate, had started school the previous fall, Dilly had pined for summer and the return of little ones to do for. Unlike her mother, Dilly took little satisfaction from being useful with things. Her deepest pleasures came from being useful to those around her, even when those chosen few would have willingly foregone some of Dilly’s helpfulness.
When eleven year old Jessie, a mash of tomboy and princess, had deigned to begin school six years before, Dilly had had Roger, the Artful Dodger, then three, and newborn Kate left at home. When the Dodger flew out the door to bring his pulsating personality to an unsuspecting and unprepared room of classmates, she still had the recalcitrant Kate to shape and mold. But, the previous fall, when Kate had gone, tearless, with a waggly wave as she pulled herself up the bus steps, Dilly found her satisfaction in the day and her life to be greatly shrunk.
Dilly had kept herself as busy as before. She did because she should, but she no longer knew the basis of the shoulds. Dilly discovered that good works—laundry, vacuuming, dishes, dusting, or ironing—without an audience was just drudgery. Doing household chores without children around was like being a straw boss without a crew.
Throughout the year Dilly had discussed having another child with Bill. She argued that, at thirty-eight, she wasn’t too old. The statistics on Down’s syndrome babies and other age-related pregnancy complications didn’t become really bad until after the mother was forty. He argued that they needed time to prepare for their retirement. If they had another child, they would be over sixty before that child graduated from college. When would they ever save? What would they do when they were old? When was it their turn? Bill couldn’t comprehend why she would want to take a step backward. Why would she want to refill the house with daytime noise just after it had become quiet for the first time in eleven years?
Too many discussions had turned their words bitter. Bill wanted his future secure; Dilly wanted her present insured. Dilly knew that she needed to make a decision. She didn’t know what to do with all the fear and anger. A year of holding in. There were days when it felt as if the pressure of what she contained would rip her skin loose from her muscles. She could imagine hearing the wheesh of the escaping emotions.
Dilly Koster had had built her life upon righteousness and being right. She had spent her life’s energy convincing others that she knew what was right for them. In Dilly’s thinking Bill had been lost when she first met him. She had given him purpose and direction. When her children were young and had come to her for answers, she had provided them. When they had slowed in their requests, she had sought them out and answered things not asked. She needed to help. She knew what was right. She had always known. Until now.
In the last months, she had found that a lifetime of having all the answers
had made it difficult to ask questions. She was finding that being so adept at solving others problems, even those that they failed to recognize, did little to help her solve her own.
Leave? Give in? Accept? Change? Push Bill out? Pull him in? Push desire out? Change it? Adopt? Finish the degree? Teach? Day care? Nurse? Divorce?
Dilly had been mothering something ever since she was a tiny child. It had made no difference whether it was her progeny or not, whether of her species or not, whether it had porcelain body, snag-looped terrycloth stuffed with batting, a coat of fur and burrs, or the pinkest sweetest smelling skin. Dilly Koster had mothered so much that she had forgotten how to be a child. She had become so enamored of the heart-pounding rush of relieving an infant’s hunger, of healing hurt, of answering questions that she had forgotten how to tend her own wounds or feed herself beyond stale marshmallows and pie crust. Being ever the parent and never the child, questions came hard for Dilly and answers weren’t heard.
A car pulled up and stopped. Doors slammed and excited voices carried in and swept away Dilly’s thoughts of loss. She hurried to the front of the house. She spread her feet wide and opened her arms in anticipation. Waiting eagerly, she ran through her orders of the day.
Sun-flushed daughters and son came through the doorway in the order of their ages. Each held a limp sausage of damp towel rolled around a wet bathing suit. All three grabbed a quick hug from Dilly before veering off in all directions as if they were planes in an aerial show.
“Put those wet towels in the laundry room. Hang those suits on the line.