Warm Wuinter's Garden

by Neil Hetzner

  To his right, but behind Peter, the three-drawered pressure cooker hissed like an enraged cat as it steamed the potatoes that would be served with the night’s special of baccala with the garlic infused mayonnaise, aioli. Peter let the noise surround and then infiltrate into him as he began to use his thumb and middle finger to slip the soggy paper skins from the blanched garlic cloves. When the garlic was all peeled, he would puree it before adding it to his own olive oil and lemon mayonnaise. The insane band of discordant noises distorted but did not silence Peter’s own thoughts.

  His mother had said that he was not to worry. She was fine and was going to be fine. With a chicken you pushed the breast meat down toward the back bone. A ridge of white, wet, pebbly skin-covered bone would rise up. It was hard to think of controlled cutting on a human being. Her voice had been very soft. It hadn’t sounded like a whisper, but more like the muffled sound heard through the line when someone covered the phone with a palm. She had sounded calm and, he thought, sure. With a black spot in a potato or a brown one in an apple, you carved a small cone. If the rot went deeper you wielded the knife in a circle to ream out a deeper cone. How did they save the skin? With a salmon you held the knife at a very acute angle and pulled the skin toward you. You held the knife steady and moved the fish. With a ham you did the opposite. You held the skin steady and then moved the knife in short slashes to free skin from flesh.

  It was just very hard to think of neat cuts in human flesh. Nothing he saw in Viet Nam resembled neat clean cuts. Half-frozen beef or veal could be cut with mathematical precision. Stir-fried beef with broccoli or veal scaloppini. Perfect matchsticks could be cut from a baked ham or roast turkey for a chef’s salad. Eight days was a long time to be in a hospital, although not as long as he had been in. That was a lot of white light, white uniforms, white sheets, and white shoes. She hadn’t said anything at all about the hospital. Peter wondered if there were any other place besides hospitals and jails where people went for long periods but didn’t take cameras. Certainly, not war. Lots of cameras in war. Mostly in the mind. Startling sharp photographs.

  She had not wanted him to come right away. She said that she wanted to be better and a little more comfortable. He was glad that it was put off. With a chicken you pushed down on the meat then drew the knife first along the ridge-bone of the breast and then tight against the ribcage in two or three long slashing strokes. Voila, one blanc devolaille.

  It was hard to imagine the surgery. A starting. A stopping. A thin line actually going someplace. Very hard to imagine. Humans didn’t cut. They exploded into red puddings or great gouges of red meat with jagged edges of hospital white bone protruding. But, maybe, if exploded in Arabs’ sand, the liquids would be quickly absorbed. Sponged up by the land rather than slowly simmered to a noxious sauce by heat trapped under dense jungle green.

  Peter pushed the old pictures away. Visions of Gaby began to filter into the spaces left open when the memories of war left. Even with all the kitchen noise cascading through his brain, there was lots of room left. It was like tide water rilling in between the rocks along the shore. Covering, moving, shaping, but only slowly eroding. After less than a minute, as he did a hundred times a day, bent, blanched, slightly balding Peter Koster pushed away the thoughts of Gaby, the wife who left his side but stayed in his head. When he focused on the ivory-colored amulets of garlic, Gaby did ebb out, but within a minute his mother and the cutting flowed back in. Why couldn’t his brain be full enough from just the clanging of his help? He wondered what unwanted thoughts fought with the noise in his helpers’ heads. What war was going on in Ron the Dishwasher’s confused head? Why did a brain so abhor a vacuum? Why did it hate silence?

  Spread. Mashing the garlic to join a colloidal suspension of egg yolk, lemon, and olive oil would make a wonderful sauce to be spread on steamed potatoes and poached baccala. Salt cod and potatoes with aioli, served with a vinaigrette-marinated toss of tomato chunks, cucumber, green peppers and Portugese olives. What a spread. To go home in just nine more hours to fall asleep under the king-sized Haitian cotton spread. To go home ten years before, before that colorful coverlet even had been bought, to the sleeping form of Gaby. To touch her knee caps through the sheet and watch the ridgelines of her legs spread. Her knees would rise and open in the moon-glow gloom as if a primordial mountain range were forming under the sheets. In the corner of the walk-in, in the corner of a damp cardboard box, from one tomato to the next, from one peach to the next, from one strawberry to the next, whitish gray filaments of mold would spread into a carpet of rot. Each hour the mold would become a larger, more defined entity. Each hour the individual fruit would devolve more into a non-individuated mass of dying flesh. Her cancer had spread. Cancer. War. Spread. A large ranch with a few trees and fewer people, just open space and closed emptiness. Away from here. Away from the claustrophobia of too many people on too little land surrounded by too much water. Away from all the noise. Away from all the spreading. Of aioli and Gaby’s lost love limbs and the mold of unsold vegetables and bad dreams and bad sales and bad cells. And loneliness and its fast spreading, deeply penetrating complement, hopelessness.

  Peter finished peeling the garlic. He dumped the shiny cloves into the scratched plastic container of the food processor. He kept adding the high whir of the processor to the dissymphony of kitchen noises long past the point where the cloves had been transformed into a smooth ivory spread.

  * * *

  When Lise heard her father’s words come over the phone she had accepted them as information, studied them for hidden content, and monitored her reaction to their meaning. Although shocked, she had not cried. She had to wonder at her ability to keep scientist and daughter separate. Should she be proud of not crying?

  Twisting around on her lab stool, Lise began making her way through the box of slides. Paget’s disease. She looked to the open textbook on the counter next to her microscope. Paget’s only presented on the nipple. She reasoned that if it were something that had involved the nipple, her father would have said so. Next slide. Non-infiltrating ductal carcinoma. Under the microscope it was pretty. It looked like Easter baskets filled with eggs. The text noted that it was an in situ cancer. If it really were in situ, then, Lise thought, there would be no need for follow-up radiation. There were five slides of spreading cancers that infiltrated the milk ducts. The first, scirrhous, looked like pieces of worm caught in a whirlpool. The slide seemed to contain so much pent-up energy that Lise almost expected the worms to begin squirming in the swirled mass within which they were caught. Scirrhous carcinoma was the most common breast cancer. It accounted for almost three quarters of all breast malignancies. Scirrho meant hard. The tumor was as hard as a rock. Its hardness meant that it could have been felt. It would be too bad if a scirrhous tumor was what her mother had had removed. Because if her mother hadn’t discovered it herself, then she might think that she was responsible for her condition. Next slide. Papillary. Except for the color of the stain used to bring out the features, Lise thought that it resembled an aerial view of swampy islands on a river. The sides of the milk ducts were the river banks. The islands were made up of the tumor cells. Next slide. As Lise pulled out a slide labeled comedo, she wondered why a tumor would be named after a blackhead. She thought back to the high school joke about a Comedo of Errors. However, as soon as she adjusted the focus Lise knew the reason for the name. The milk duct was solidly lined with many layers of small seed-like cancer cells. They reminded her of the black seeds of kiwi fruit. In the middle of the duct was an area of yellow-colored dead cells. The head of the pimple. She stared into the microscope for a long time before she noticed the areas where the cancer cells were working their way through the duct walls. Next slide. Mucinous carcinoma. Under the bright light of the microscope it reminded her of some of the Shijo prints at the Museum of Fine Arts. There were small blossom shapes that looked a little bit like grape hyacinths interspersed with long branches of cells. The shapes of the flowers and branches we
re given added definition from the contrast with their background of pale mucin cells. Lise turned back to the pathology text to read the description of a mucinous carcinoma. She flipped past several pages of monochrome plates of mucinous tumor cells. High and low magnification. Examples of tumors with greater or lesser amounts of mucin. She flipped another page, found the mucinous heading on the top of the left side and began to read. A comparatively rare form. Found in older women. Translucent. Soft. Gel-like. Something disturbed her as she quickly read down the page. Some reports of relatively lower rates of axillary metastes in the early stages. That was good. Lise tried to twist away from the force tugging at her. The mucous that the cancer cells floated in was produced by those very cells. She finished the first column of text. Her eyes moved to the top of the second column. She couldn’t read the words. The pull was too strong. Her eyes, despite her brain’s command, were pulled to the right. In the upper right hand corner of the opposing page was a photograph of a mucoid carcinoma. It looked like some nightmarish jelly-filled pastry. Lise slammed the textbook shut and began to cry. Tears rolled down her face as she put the slides back into the proper slots of the case.

  Biology was biology. It was science. It was color and forms, chemistry and mystery. It was a little world. It was vials and scales and bright lights and centrifuges and smooth counters and heavy books and dyes and sharp smells and worn white polyester lab coats and, sometimes, many times, roller coaster excitement. But, it had never before been death. Had she just seen something which had destroyed her mother’s breast and, maybe, wanted more? She had known as soon as she had put the phone down, with her father’s “Goodbye” still echoing down the line, that she must look, microscopically look, at the strange life that might be threatening her mother’s. She had thought of it as using her science to get closer to her mother. If she could see the forms, the paisley colors and shapes of the growth-loving sickness, if, after looking and reading, she could deduce which particular pattern had come to life within her mother’s body, she would own a knowledge that would, in some mystical sciencey way, shelter both her mother and herself.

  Lise’s fingers reached out to the textbook. Some part of her— as before she was unsure whether it was the scientist or the daughter—wanted to look again at the photograph of the mucin tumor. Some part of her wanted to re-experience the jolt of shock at the hideousness of its collective form when a micron’s thickness of gorgeous paisley was added to another micron of swirling form, when thousands of delicately drawn Shijo prints were added together to make a work of horror.

  Taken one layer of cells at a time, taken microscopically, it was science. It was art. Taken all together, it was medicine. It was life. It was death. Ugly, ugly death. Lise drew her hand away from the book. She might look later. Nothing in nature had ever scared her. She didn’t want to be afraid. She wanted to prove that to herself. She wanted to look again. But, for now, she could not.

  Lise pushed back from the microscope. She decided to try to find Brad. He might know whether she was looking at too many little things made big, or too many big things made small.

  Chapter 11

  It was the Saturday before Halloween. The first month of autumn had been very warm. There hadn’t yet been a killing frost. The first day of November would be the following Thursday. Thanksgiving would follow in three weeks, on the 22nd, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. A late frost and an early Thanksgiving. It felt strange to Neil to see Bett picking snapdragons and dahlias, tomatoes and eggplant after they had spent breakfast making plans for the holidays.

  The weather was so warm that Neil had no desire to keep his promise to himself to wash the storm windows. For the last month he had avoided most of the end-of-the-season yard work. He had used the warm weather as an excuse to sail the SureBett. When he wasn’t sailing, the distrait husband had tried to fill up the weekend with clamming or shore fishing for bluefish. The freezer was full.

  After watching Bett try to make the muscles of her damaged arm do her will, Neil walked up to the perennial garden and asked her if she wanted to go sailing with him. She would stay put. She was happy to be working. Without directly looking at her, Neil aimed a smile toward Bett and told her that he wouldn’t be gone long.

  Neil tacked the SureBett back and forth along the edge of a sweet southwesterly wind. The sky was cloudless, the sharp angle of the October sun painted pointillist dabs of white light atop the scalloped surface of the deep green water. Even behind the protection of his sunglasses Neil had to half-squint his eyes against the intense glare. The boat felt coltish as if she knew that the summer-like weather couldn’t last. She, too, wanted some last pleasure before the weather changed.

  Through half-drawn lids, Neil tried to see across the endless water; however, he wasn’t able to see beyond his own jumbled thoughts. Behind him on a spit of land, which he could easily see if he chose to turn to look, Bett was kneeling over a bed of flowers breaking soil or pinching buds as if nothing had happened.

  The previous evening he had driven down the lane to find her trying to use the short-handled loppers to reclaim a part of the yard where rose hips had encroached. She was stepping on several of the thorny stalks to bend them over. Half-crouched, she braced her damaged right arm against the inside of her knee to give it strength. With the bad arm braced, she used the muscles in her good arm to make the cut. Rage had exploded in him at seeing her struggle. Like an emerging hurricane, a madness had flown around inside his head unsure of where to focus its force. The cancer, the crippling effect of the surgery, the debilitation of the radiation, the insidious rapacity of the rose hips, always looking to take another, and another, inch of the yard, the stubbornness of Bett to keep doing things that, he was sure, her physical therapist had told her to avoid, or, most of all, rage at himself that he hadn’t made himself chop back the rose hips some Saturday rather than going sailing. By the time he parked the car, he had welded a calm caring smile onto his face. His banker’s smile. A smile he had long practiced. A smile which he recently had begun to slide toward Bett’s eyes. A smile meant to convey no doubts. He had wanted to be able to pull the damp repp stripe tie from his neck, to loosen his collar, to take the loppers from Bett’s tanned and mottled hands, to finish the job. But he could not. Once again he had found he was paralyzed to do anything that brought closer the passing of summer. Instead, he had asked his sweating, panting wife to join him for a drink out on the dock. She had smiled and told him she would join him when she finished.

  Neil’s first quick drink had done little to calm him. When Bett finally came around the corner of the house, the sun was close to setting. She walked along holding a glass of cider in her left hand. Her right arm hung slack at her side. Neil had adjusted his focus, as he had learned to do over the last six weeks. He looked at her as if he were staring at an unfinished portrait. Where disease had touched her the brush strokes faded into blank canvas.

  Neil pushed the tiller away. He listened to the sails luff. It reminded him of the rustle of squirrels in an attic. The freshening breeze pulled tears from his eyes back along his deeply etched crows-feet. In forty years of marriage she had never failed him. When he had been weak, she had always been there to give strength. Tough times at the bank had brought solicitous phone calls during the day, special meals in the evening and physical comfort at night. When a crisis had made his legs feel so bloodless he was sure they wouldn’t hold him, when his mind had been so filled with a million scraps of information that no direction or decision was possible, he would go to her and she would wrap and warm him with her strength until could regain his own.

  Decades before, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of years after they were married, they had gone to a Halloween party. He had dressed as an Indian chief. After nights of sewing yards of bright yellow material and exhorting him to patience when he asked her what she was going to be, Bett had come out of the locked bedroom dressed as a fireplug. At the party friends had mistaken him—just another Indian
among a tribe of them. But, although everyone had thought that Bett’s costume was wonderfully clever, nobody had been deceived. Short and solid, always ready, implacable, Bett always had been, and still was, like a fire hydrant. That night and for a time afterward friends had called Bett “Plug.” Bett and he had used the name off and on for years. Over time it had evolved into a codeword to signal when he needed help, or when Bett thought that he did.

  Sailing through the shimmer of October light, Neil thought she was a plug. Every kind of plug. She had helped put out a thousand fires. Kids fighting. Sleepless hot fear from indecision. She had sparked him, when nearing forty, he had been brought to a halt by the anemic lassitude of hope-drained dreams. She had comforted him a million times, she had always been there, a sure bet, and, now, when she needed him, he went to sea. To clean air and clear water. Away from red scars knifing through tan skin. Away from the black blood scratch of stitches. Away from the twisting worm of white flesh left in an armpit. Away from limpness and asymmetry and new high-collared nightgowns and the maraca noise of pill vials being opened. Away from complicated schedules for radiation and tiptoeing around the future and standing silent and still afraid to awaken the implacability of death. Sailing away.

  Neil slammed the gunwale with a fist. Of all the losses of the last weeks, the worst was losing their comfortableness. During the courtship and for the first several months of marriage they had had to work hard at becoming fluent with one another. After a time, however, there had come a reassuring ease of communication, whether it was with words, emotions or the physical aspects of their bodies. Now, all that had changed. They would start a conversation, an innocent conversation—about Christmas or gardens or the grandchildren—only to find that anything which dealt with the future was so riddled with unanswerable questions that they were forced to trail off or make an abrupt change in topics. A Cole Porter song would come on the radio and they would take a half-step toward one another to begin an old familiar dance before realizing that the weakness of Bett’s arm and the half-nothingness of her chest would alter any dance beyond a remembered comfort. Bedtime had become theater as each worked to pretend that her undressing and redressing in her high collared flannel nightgown, so furtive and fast, was not to hide both his and her eyes from looking at her amputated body.