Warm Wuinter's Garden (11 page)

As she snipped stems, Bett murmured
Longfellow’s paean to fennel from the
Goblet of Life
:

Above the lowly plant it towers,

The fennel, with its yellow flowers,

And in an earlier age than ours,

Was gifted with the wondrous powers,

Lost vision to restore.

It gave new strength, and fearless mood;

And gladiators, fierce and rude,

Mingled it in their daily food;

And he who battled and subdued,

A wreath of fennel wore.

As Bett repeated the words that she had
memorized from her grandfather more than fifty years before, she
tried to turn them from a gardening rite, from decades’ old rote,
to something more meaningful for that day. If her growth were not
benign… She had not yet lost her vision, but she would need to be
constantly vigilant that she did not. She would need new strength
and more fearlessness. She must battle and subdue.

Bett cut a stalk of fennel long enough to be
twisted into a wreath. She drew the tasseled top and blanched
bottom toward one another to tie a loose knot. When she lifted the
wreath over her head, something crawled onto her hand. She jerked
her arms down to see a brown shiny earwig skitter across her hand
and start up her arm. Bett shuddered as she shook her hand
violently. Despite more than fifty years of gardening she still was
disgusted by certain bugs. Centipedes. Hairy spiders and,
especially, earwigs. She had hated earwigs ever since grade school
when she had read Poe’s story where an earwig eats into a man’s
brain. Her violent movements caused three other earwigs to make a
hurried exit from the nest that they had made for themselves inside
the curved edge of the fennel stalk. When a second insect touched
her skin, Bett screeched. Shuddering her shoulders as if she were a
horse in the midst of a swarm of horseflies and shaking her hands
as though they had gone to sleep, she ran from the garden leaving
her basket and the kitchen shears in the middle of the row of
gently swaying plants.

* * *

Neil found Bett with her back against a
piling at the end of the dock. Her arms were clasped tight around
her drawn-up knees. Her reddened eyes were staring at some nothing
across the cove.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

Bett unfolded her arms, put a fist to her
chest and covered the fist with her other hand.

“I have a growth. Here.”

She gently pounded her fist against her
breast.

“I have to go for a biopsy. On
Wednesday.”

After she told him the details, Neil asked
only three questions—how do you feel? how can I help? and what’s
involved with the biopsy? She felt fine. She was teary because an
earwig had crawled on her. She wasn’t sure how he could help yet
other than by being his sweet self. She told him about fine needle
aspiration. A local anesthetic was given, a needle was inserted
into the breast and into the growth, cells were sucked up for
microscopic evaluation. She also discussed lumpectomies. She didn’t
say what option she had chosen and Neil didn’t ask. She was glad
that she had not had to deliver all the answers that she had
prepared. She was sure that they would have sounded more lame in
the telling than they had sounded to her in her mental rehearsals.
He held her in his arms for several minutes after she had finished
talking. Bett felt badly that she was deceiving him and doubly bad
that he hadn’t asked her why she hadn’t told him a week ago.

As Bett prepared their dinner, Neil came into
the kitchen four times. Each time he tried to catch her eyes as if
to read the next installment of her feelings. His step and voice
both were softer than usual. It reminded her of how he had acted
when Dilly was colicky. Tiptoeing had been of little practical use.
Not only had the two year old Peter been running around constantly
jabbering, but also she had had no desire to train a baby to sleep
only when the house was quiet. Neil, however, had continued to
tiptoe in sympathy until Dilly’s digestive system had come round.
She was sure that she could expect the same solicitude that Dilly
had been given.

They ate leftover thinly sliced pepper and
garlic-covered grilled sirloin steak, beefsteak tomatoes with basil
in olive oil and sherry vinegar, and the last of the marinated
eggplant on the picnic table down by the water’s edge. As they ate,
they watched the falling sun color the cove’s surface with Monet
hues. A circus of chiaroscuro animals evolved from mounds of
clouds. They watched and traded disjointed sentences. Their efforts
reminded Bett of working a jigsaw puzzle with a child’s help. “This
one, Mommy? How ‘bout this one?” With a child’s constant help, it
could take forever to finish a puzzle.

Within seconds of finishing the meal, which
had acted as a partial camouflage to their mismatched
communications, Neil began to stir.

“Dessert? Tea? Melon?”

“No. What about you?” Bett asked with a
discomfort that matched her husband’s.

“Is there any of the ice cream left?”

“There was mutiny while you slept, Captain.
No bowls. Just dueling iced tea spoons flailing around in the tub.
I took some pictures. They should be cute.”

“Was Dilly there?”

“Of course, and joyous in her righteous
disapproval.”

“We’re going to ruin her kids.”

“Just like we ruined ours.”

Neil nodded vigorously as he grabbed for her
hand. He nursed a moment’s desire to ask her how she planned to
handle her situation with their children before he pushed aside the
unbidden and unwelcome follow-up question of what would happen to
children, grandchildren and himself if she became seriously ill, or
worse.

“Watermelon.”

“How big a piece do you want?”

“I’ll come up with you.”

As her husband walked alongside her whistling
softly to fill the empty air, Bett fought an urge to tell him to
save his solicitude until after the biopsy, but she knew that it
was her ruminant fear rather than his attempted kindnesses which
angered her.

Bett put a kettle of tea water on the stove
before cutting a large piece of watermelon for Neil. He half sat on
the porch railing and spat seeds into the peonies below. As the tea
water warmed, she stepped into the mud room to find her shrug. She
roughly pulled the old worn comforting cotton around her shoulders.
Rather than walking out the kitchen door and going past where Neil
was eating watermelon, she walked through the house to use the
front door. If Neil saw her down on the dock, he would understand
that she wanted to be alone.

Bett sat back against her piling, the same
satin-skinned, deeply cracked wood where Neil had found her crying
two hours before. It felt good to have the solidity of the post,
with its residual warmth, press against her spine. She was
exhausted. Utterly exhausted. Her thoughts, which always jumped in
logical progression with the surefootedness of a child
hop-scotching her way across the rocks of a well-known stream,
continued to flit with the same aimlessness of the darning needle
she was watching fly over the water’s edge. She had anticipated,
obviously wrongly she ruefully told herself, that telling Neil
would be the catalyst which would cause her long familiar feelings
of competency to return. She let the heat from the mug of tea warm
her hands as she stared at the pink images of last light coating
the black sheen of the still water. She drew the cooling, dry
September air deep into her lungs, then, surprised herself at how
loud her sigh sounded to her ears. She took a second draught that
she meant to exhale silently, but stopped halfway through as the
air filling her lungs displaced her breasts enough that earwig
infested fennel came to mind.

If it was nothing…. It was nothing. A
slit, a nick, a stitch. A day, or two, of churning. A phone call.
Benign. A sigh. A great whoosh of relief. A great gratitude
to…to…something…God
.

Despite all the noisy static inside her head,
Bett could anticipate what it would feel like to have her muscles
unclench themselves, to have her mind stop darting as the darning
needle which continued its haphazard flight up and down the shore.
The right word would bring a honey-thick sense of well-being to
fill up her hollowness. A word would warm and fill her up— through
her toes and ankles, her calves and thighs, her shivery stomach,
her balsa wood light arms, her scattered head as flighty as a
balloon on a string. BENIGN would fill her with a heavy sweetness.
A kind of post-prandial, post-sexual, logy well-being. Tomorrow was
Tuesday. Wednesday evening she would be prepped. Thursday morning
was the biopsy. It was no more difficult than waiting out the last
days of a pregnancy.

There always had been worried questions.
Would it be a normal delivery? Would it be perfectly formed? Would
it be a boy or girl? This was the same thing. She needed to be
patient.

Dr. Maurer had said that most lumps in the
breast were cysts, abscesses or a thickening of the milk glands. If
it were none of those things, if it were a tumor, he had said that
the chances were that it was benign. Bett put her cup of cooled tea
down on the smooth gray paint of the dock. She unbuttoned her
blouse to reach inside. She insinuated her fingers inside her bra
to pinch and knead her breast as if she were making bread. Deep
inside the warm soft dough she could just barely discern the
difference in resilience that defined the lump. It didn’t feel
hard; it only felt more solid than that which surrounded it. After
a week, it no longer felt foreign, like a splinter of wood or a
piece of thorn caught beneath the skin. It had come to feel no more
foreign than the knotted flesh of a charley horse. As Bett’s
fingers probed the character of what was growing inside her flesh,
she felt no pain. There was no soreness at all. She removed her
hand and re-buttoned her blouse against the coolness brought by the
slight breeze coming off the cove. She dropped her hands down to
her waist. She pushed and probed her womb as she had done so many
times during the many months and many times she had spent
pregnant.

She had been used for growth before.
Something had attached itself to her. It had used her for blood and
oxygen. It had grown warm from her warmth. She had never thought
that she had given a child life. Conception was far too mysterious
and miraculous to claim that. But, once life had begun, she had
sustained it. For four times nine months and four shorter times
more, she had shared her body. She was sharing it now. Something
mysterious wanted life. It had chosen her as the means. It was too
warm, too formless, and too painless to be feared.

Bett wanted to keep her maternal feelings.
She wanted to keep her understanding of the will for life, but as
she worked to keep more than a moment’s peace while she sat on the
slightly swaying dock, her mind started to fill with the disgust
that she had felt when the earwigs scattered from their nest inside
the shelter of the fennel stems.

If it were cancer. If it were CANCER. If
something unwanted, something not her, had chosen her to make its
infestation, she would have to fight to eradicate it. As any good
gardener would a pest. Earwigs and Japanese beetles, tomato worms
and slugs, the gray excrescences of corn smut. They were life, they
had a right, but they had to go. They had a right to be alive, but
not in the garden.

Trying to grow still within herself, Bett
realized that the calm she always felt on the dock in the dark
actually had been there despite the surroundings. Listening, she
realized that there was noise all around her. The gentle
undulations from the rising tide struck soft bass notes, so low and
resonant that she could feel them move up her spine as they
vibrated along the length of the pilings. There was the unceasing
buzz of the cicadas—a sound which recalled the sounds of Opa’s
creaking rocker, and the squeak of she herself in the red canvas
hammock watching the Indiana sky grow dark and, in the background,
the noise of dishes and silverware sliding about in soapy water.
The chirping of crickets, the creak of a boat at its mooring, the
slight rustle of a pennant on another boat, the persistent pings of
a halyard against a mast. Bett listened hard. There were at least
three more levels of insect sound. Each species seemed to broadcast
on a different frequency so as not to interfere with the others’
transmissions. Despite all the variety in the insects’ sounds, they
all sounded shrill to her as if the passage of Labor Day, the end
of summer, had brought a new insistence to each voice. As she
listened she heard the various voices come together to sing
GGGGEEEEETTTTTTTTT IIIIITTTTT DDDDOOOOOONE.

When Bett finally rose from her reverie, she
realized how cold the night had grown. She rubbed her cheeks
against the warmth of the shrug as she walked up the dew slick
grass toward the lights of the house.

As they lay next to one another in the dark
Bett and Neil both regulated their breathing so that the other
would be encouraged to fall asleep. After many minutes of unmoving
alertness, Neil reached across the expanse of cool cotton sheet to
take the tips of Bett’s fingers in his own. She wiggled her fingers
in thanks as she whispered, “It’ll be fine.”

Neil squeezed her hand.

“It always is.”

Simultaneously, without speaking, Neil and
Bett rolled onto their sides. As she had done for four decades,
Bett wormed her way backward across the bed until her back touched
his chest and her buttocks fit into the warm saddle of her
partner’s pelvis.

* * *

Neil started to reach his arm over Bett, as
he had done a million times, to hold a breast in his hand. His hand
hovered in mid-air as he realized that she might think that he was
examining her. His breath caught as he realized that he couldn’t
remember which breast she had touched as she had told him that
something was growing inside of her. He settled his hand on Bett’s
upper arm and concentrated on breathing in the warm smell of the
woman he had lived with for forty-two years.