Warm Wuinter's Garden
Page 15
Comfortableness. In hats and shoes. In chairs. Comfortableness . A glorious thing. To fit. To slide behind a steering wheel to find the perfect indentation. To walk through a door—the church’s, the auto-mechanic’s, the barber’s—to know that you are known. To know the good and competent hands which hold some portion of your life. Comfortableness. With a boat. To trust her in strong winds. To know her peculiarities. To know the water. All the rocks and shoals. To know those currents near a point that try to pull a boat too close to shore. To slide a hand into a work glove and feel the fit of worn leather pad on calluses. To push and pull, cut and stitch, plane and sand, shave and file and polish. To make the adjustments until there is fit. After years of irritation—much of it no more than the irritation of the never-ending newness of children as they metamorphosed from infant to baby to child to adolescent to young adult to spouse to parent— he was now comfortable with the kids, even Lise, even Dilly.
As Neil had aged from forty to fifty to sixty and beyond, there had been physical changes, but, for the most part, they had been slow and subtle. A softer belly, stiffer knees, a little more gas, a little less hair. He needed a longer hotter shower in the morning to limber up from the exercise of sleep; he needed to hold his reading a little farther from his eyes; he needed to avoid cucumbers and radishes and onions. But, there had been a comfortableness about those changes. There had been a slightly rueful humor to the dialogue that went on between his happy, healthy mind and a somewhat crotchety body. He had talked to his body, encouraging it or chiding it, as it had chosen not to do things that he expected it to do. However, in all the talks, there had never been anger. Just a sweet, comfortable disagreement. Like telling Queenie not to roll in rotting seaweed. Not so with Bett. Something ravening. Trying to kill her. Destroying her breast and chest muscles and armpit and arm. Something wildly hungry. The frothing, foaming, slavering of a crazed dog. As when, in the middle of a long, peaceful walk on Sumson’s beach with one hand holding Bett’s thick callused fingers and the other the empty leash, a shepherd had come racing up from the point and, without stopping, without a second’s hesitation, without a sniff, had attacked Queenie, drawn blood from her muzzle, and, then, attacked him as he tried to separate them. He had had to hit the shepherd with the doubled up chain of Queenie’s leash before it ran away.
No warning. Comfortableness. Then, violence. They had tried to finish the walk, but all three of them, especially Queenie with maroon blood congealing on her snout, were too skittish. It had taken weeks of walks before they were comfortable on the beach again.
Now, after sixty-six years, the comfort was gone. His life didn’t fit. The old Bett was gone. There was something, or might be something, in her which was not to be trusted. He was finding there was much in him not to be trusted, too. His anger for one. The sharp spikiness of his anger. Punching holes in the smoothness of his life. He had worked so hard to be smooth. To get along. He had spent a lifetime smiling. His hand gestures, as was true for many Midwest people, were small fillips and scallops of gracious good will, rather than the wide sweeping churning and chopping of the East Coast. He had consciously put a mellifluous tone in his voice. He had wanted to be comfortable with himself and others. For so very long, wishing and working at the wishes had made it so.
Then, for no reason, a few of Bett’s cells, a cadre, had chosen to go their own way. And, a few more. And, then, a few more. As if Bett’s body were the territory for a revolution. Cells threw off rules that had been governing them for sixty-four years. The old ways were threatened. The revolutionaries doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled again. And each time their numbers grew, the old comfortable way shrank. The comfortableness and the fit shrank and shrank. Until the new life of carcinomas and frozen sections and axillary dissections and adjuvant therapy and carved out nodes and the horrific meandering of cat scratch stitches where once a breast had been, where once his handhold into comfortable sex and comfortable sleep had been, until all these new things grew and pushed and stretched against the fabric of the old life, until the fit of the new with the old was so wrong, so improper, that the old life ripped with the shriek of a tearing sail and the new life, a life of doubt and fear and anger, a life of misfitness, of not knowing where a sentence was going nor where to hold his wife, nor where to focus his eyes when the future insinuated itself into the conversation, burst through the jagged hole.
It was hard to know what to do. The doctors seemed to be so little help. They talked in code in a language with half the words filled with double rr’s. Was she getting better? Was she getting worse? What was in store? He asked and they answered every question with a string of words bereft of information to one who didn’t speak the language. Insurance was the same. Claims came back partially paid with cryptic pre-printed phrases marked with an x to explain why certain things had been rejected. Out-of-pocket expenses were mounting. Enough that twice he had had to move money out of savings. If things continued, he would not be able to roll over all of their CD’s.
Neil was not comfortable with his own money decisions nor those at work. Conversations with Brad had sowed seeds of doubt. Poor lending practices had led to catastrophic failures in Ohio and Maryland. Brad saw many parallels between those two situations and Rhode Island. Aggressive lending followed by a weakening economy. Loose regulatory rules and lax oversight. Haphazard audits. Brad was worried that in a state as small as Rhode Island, there wasn’t enough mass or diversity to absorb many mistakes. If something went bad, everything and everybody in the state could be dragged along.
Brad had asked Neil what he thought about the large percentage of loans that had been made for commercial real estate development. Coastal had been very careful with that. As chief loan officer he had seen to that. Brad had suggested that he might not want to think that way. The whole purpose of insurance was to pool risk. If Coastal were careful and no one else was, what good was their caution? Rhode Island was a pretty small pool.
After thinking about it, Neil had brought up the question of the bank’s vulnerability with Kenyon Hall. Should they apply for federal insurance? They certainly would qualify. Kenyon had listened, but, in the end, he had brushed Neil off. Kenyon had said that one advantage of a small state was that everybody knew everybody. If problems occurred, everybody would pull together. Besides, he knew everybody on RISDIC’s board of directors. If anything was going to go wrong, he would hear about it. He told Neil that, with Bett, Neil had enough things to worry about without making up new ones.
Neil wasn’t sure what to think. He wasn’t comfortable with Brad’s fears and he wasn’t comfortable with Kenyon’s reassurances. He just wasn’t comfortable.
Neil hauled in his sheet and reset the tiller until the SureBett heeled over. He wanted to feel the tension among the contradictory forces of sail, helm, and centerboard trying to move his boat in three different directions. He wished that the wind were stronger so that he could feel the boat taken to her limits.
Neil stayed on the water for more than five hours tacking back and forth, with his thoughts making the same abrupt changes in direction, before he concluded that the best thing that he could do was to make the decision that Bett was still Bett. And he should do what he could do to keep that true. As he headed for the dock Neil knew that the turmoil of making the decision was nothing compared to what was ahead. He knew his doubts wouldn’t disappear, nor his anger diminish. But Bett was still Bett. A comforting thought.
Chapter 12
Finally, a hard frost had come. Bett sat on the window ledge in the cold den. She drank tea and watched the clear light of early morning sun melt the silvery crystals that had flocked the grass. Where the sun’s rays struck, the bright green grass was glistening with dew. In the shade, the leaves of less hardy weeds and flowers hung curled, black and limp. Bett felt relief that the harvest was finally over. The heat was finally gone. The cold, clear killing air had finally come. The growing, finally, was over. At last, the dahlia roots could be dug.
Heat had been a constant presence inside Bett’s body since the surgery two month before. She hated its intrusiveness. She wanted her flesh to be so cold that it shivered. She’d borne the pain as her body tried to knit itself back together from the damage of the scalpel. It made sense to her to have that much pain, if not even more, from the huge wound that had been made on her. She had even taught herself not to hunker down from its sharp fingers, but rather to open herself up to it, to welcome it as part of the path back to a normal life. But, the ever-present heat that cooked inside her with unrelenting insistence, a constant bright dry heat as if a light bulb were being held too close, frightened and discouraged her. The doctors said that the heat, too, was a sign of healing, but, for her, the hot spot that never went away, that something that was such a different temperature than its surroundings, was a feeling to be feared. She wanted something cold to cool and shrink the spot inside her. She wanted winter.
Now, for Bett, any difference in her body was not to be trusted. Every cough was subject to suspicion. Each ache engendered doubts. Each time she used the toilet she stared at what she had done to look for signs of betrayal. The day was filled with a thousand aches and ten times that many worries. Each worry made her want to pick up the phone to call any one of the audience of doctors that had been watching her performance over the last two months.
The radiation was working hard to kill the cancer cells, but as it streamed into her body looking for those rampant mutants, it also killed normal cells. She found it hard not to confuse the side effects of the cure with the disease itself. It was hard to equilibrate nausea, weakness, pain and the ever-present heat with getting better. As, day after day, October had stayed warm, Bett had found herself recoiling at the fecundity of the earth. She had been a gardener for too many years. Heat meant growth. Growth scared her. Columbus Day passed and the eggplant put forth dozens of new lavender blossoms. In the cutting garden, mature cosmos had dropped seed and those seeds had already sprouted into a carpet of six-inch tall plants, as delicate as Spanish lace, growing up and flowering among the woody stalks of their parents. One afternoon near the end of October, with insects whirring as loudly as in July, as Bett had walked down the lane to get the mail, she had been horrified to see that the clumps of violets, which spent each summer struggling for life among the lane’s thin crushed stone, had re-blossomed.
On those afternoons when she was tired, which were many, Bett had sat with her back against the piling at the end of the dock awaiting air, as cold as ice, to end the feracious life around her. Winds had come and blown strong and steady, but they had held the warmth of summer. There had been a period of four days in mid-October when a southwesterly wind had been unrelenting. It had blown white caps across the cove and into the heaving groaning dock. It had whistled around the frames of windows which were still too bloated by summer’s heat and moisture to be closed tightly. It had rattled the screen door until she had had to wedge a wet sponge between door and frame before hooking it. It had beaten down the hollyhocks so low that at a first glance at the large leaves and trumpet blossoms trailing on the ground one might have mistaken them for some exotic variety of squash. Branches of trees being pounded by the wind had caused wildly careening shadows to run around the rooms of the house. By the third day she had screamed at the wind, in a voice as loud as its own, to stop its brutal pounding. She had been battered enough. Later, after she had calmed herself down, she prayed that the wind would shift around to the north. She wished the wind would pull the coldest Canadian air down across the land. She wanted it to blow fiercely cold air, unrelentingly, until every blossom head hung down, every plant leaf was curled, and every maple and oak branch was stripped to its brown skeleton. It continued to blow for another day, but, the wind ignored Bett’s wish and continued to stream from the same southerly quarter.
Fall failed to come. Plants continued to grow, blossom and fruit. The heat in her chest continued unabated. As each day stayed warm, Bett’s strength shriveled and the tentacles of hopelessness lengthened and twisted around her.
Finally, this morning, the cold had come. It was cold enough to make Bett shiver when she carefully rolled herself out of bed. She had carried her slippers into the bathroom and, then, downstairs just to prolong the relief of feeling icy hardwood floors on her bare feet. Now, looking out the window at the destruction the frost had brought, Bett felt more hopeful than she had since that hot noon in August when Dr. Maurer had stopped murmuring to himself.
All the life around her, which had gone on and on as if it would never end, had been stopped in a night. Bett got up from her chair and walked to the window. She put both palms on the glass. After a minute she pressed them to her chest. A moment later she left the room.
The rime under her naked heels felt delicious. The cold made her ankles ache as if she were entering the frigid waters of Narragansett Bay in the Koster’s annual Memorial Day summer baptism. Along the shadow of the house, the heat from her feet burned green holes in the white frost. She walked out to the cutting garden. The tops of the dahlias hung down in shame or, maybe, sorrow. The red, white and pink tops of the snapdragons were soggy. The gossamer of cosmos leaves hung straight down against their stalks. Finally, it was finally over.
Bett took off her robe and hung it on top of a stake that helped to hold the rabbit fence in place. She stiffly bent herself at the waist and with difficulty, because of the damage to the muscles in her arm, she dragged her nightgown up and over her head. Bett stood naked in the garden. After several moments she reached down for a pink granite cobble which she used in the spring to hold down string when she was marking rows. She picked it up and held its smooth weight against the mutilated flesh of her chest.
The burning cold of the rock met and, after a time, passed through the heat in her chest. She cupped the rock as if it could replace her breast. She stood still, her toes digging into the chilled soil for balance, repeating scraps of prayer. As she prayed, Bett drew such deep draughts of the cold healing air into her lungs that the line where the sutures had rejoined her flesh began to ache.
Chapter 13
Bett despised being at the center of some many conspiracies. Too many times doctors and nurses, technicians and aides, friends and family had stepped back into a huddle to whisper about her. Too often she had startled Neil when he was on the phone. Each time that he started, or blushed in shame, or stumbled over words in too eagerly offered explanations, she knew he was relaying some detail of her sickness to one of the children. During the Thanksgiving weekend there had been several conversations where it had been obvious to her that her children had scripted and rehearsed their lines before performing them before her. There was the casserole conspiracy. Once or twice a week, a neighbor, a member of Grace Church, the wife of a bank officer, or a teller would inadvertently make too much food. It would be a kindness to the cook if Bett and Neil could help out with the excess. There were the conspiracies of kindness and kindnesses. Although there had not been a family decision to either broadcast or hide her situation, as was true with all bad news, the details of her diagnosis and treatment had rapidly traveled through the community by the same unknown metastatic process as that of cancer itself. With some acquaintances, hearty hellos were under-toned with the slightly resonant hum of sympathy; while with others, questioning eyes vacillated between locking onto or averting themselves from her own. Others, those more active in their concerns, manipulated conversations such that they built unfinished paragraphs which would only make sense if Bett were to provide the complement by ri
dding herself of some particularly heavy, anguished burden. These friends, in ways both subtle and overt, let her know that they were strong and caring enough to carry away any burden that she might wish to pass on to them.
There was kindness everywhere. At Grace Church, parishioners, before being asked, slid down any pew that she and Neil might choose to enter. At the grocery store, in the produce section, she chanced upon a woman she barely knew from the Historical Society. As soon as Jill Daughtery recognized her and recalled the relevant news, and after the quickest flick of her eyes to Bett’s chest as if seeking visual confirmation of the accuracy of her memory, she searched through scores of shiny green bell peppers to pick out the best ones for Bett. After she had done her small part in the war against cancer, Jill wheeled her cart around and retreated back down the aisle in the direction from which the vegetables in her cart suggested she had just come. By reversing course, Jill would not have to shop alongside the victim. Several times as she continued her shopping, Bett had caught a peripheral image of Jill racing her cart down an aisle or across an intersection to avoid further contact. It reminded Bett of some absurd version of the Keystone Cops.