Warm Wuinter's Garden (21 page)

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.

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 ridding 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.

The conspiracies of kindness had been offset
by those of cruelty. Many of the more cruel plots were hatched
within her body. Monday’s strength would disappear on Tuesday,
return on Wednesday, then be gone for several days. Her body’s need
for sustenance was often undermined by her mind’s inability to
conjure up an appetizing sight, or, more commonly, smell. There had
been several occasions when Bett’s stomach, like a stray at the
door, had growled loudly, but her mind had refused entry to any
kind of food. Sudden swellings, muscle aches deeper than any
bruise, diarrhea, and rogue waves of nausea were but a few of the
traitorous plots that her body had hatched against her.

The unexpected, unsought kindnesses of the
people around her conspired with the cruelties of the cells within
her to make Bett different. She could feel herself being divorced.
People, even in the midst of their reaching out, were severing
themselves from her. It was not so much a separation of distance as
it was one of expectations. She was no longer expected to be the
familiar Bett. And, if she was herself, people were shocked and,
sometimes it even seemed, disappointed. As others pulled themselves
back from her, Bett found herself experiencing a desire to become
divorced from whom she had always been. Enough of competence and
caring. Enough of forgiveness and understanding. Enough of faith
and fealty. Enough of fortitude. Enough.

Try as she might to keep her customary level
of interest in her husband, children, grandchildren, people in the
surrounding community and in the world beyond, Bett found it hard
to ignore the disease’s insistence on her attention. The cancer
cells, whether in fact or from fear, demanded that she ignore those
outside. Those ghostly cells, which might be drifting through her
lymph system or, maybe, setting up shop on the edge of an organ,
were more tyrannical than any colicky baby had ever been.

As she looked inward, as she focused her
attention on the errant forces at work inside her skin, Bett could
feel herself grow smaller. Fear grew, she shrank. Her arms became
too short to reach those around her. Her eyes became too small to
see across a room. Her brain became too tiny to think beyond
itself. She was shrinking and so was her life. The centripetal
force of her disease pulled her into herself as a centrifugal force
spun the world away. Each day friends became a little more distant.
With each phone call, each covered dish, each proffered book, the
giver stepped back another pace. Bett was going someplace where
they were not prepared to follow. As Bett went where her disease
demanded; her friends followed the paths of their lives, and the
gulf between grew greater.

Already with some longtime friends the
distance had grown so great that it seemed unbridgeable. They were
left to brief wavings from afar. With others, the chasm wasn’t
quite so wide. It might be leapt. One would look across to the
other to steel his courage before the leap. Occasionally, it was
Bett herself, who made a leap back to the living world’s side,
where there were interests and concerns beyond the metabolic. Other
times, it was the friend who jumped over to Bett’s anarchical
world. The friend would hold Bett’s hands and Bett’s gaze and her
own tongue and experience the giddy fear of standing close to the
antinomy of neoplasmic fission and the heady thoughts of the
consequences of the body’s self-destruction. They would bear an
awe-filled witness to a destruction as inexplicable as schools of
pilot whales beaching themselves on Cape Cod’s sands or lemmings
racing over a cliff. Other times—this had happened most often with
Neil—each would gather strength for the leap. The courage would
come, the leap would be made. She would land on his side prepared
to talk of life while he would be stranded just where Bett had
been, ready to talk of disease, and death and fear. In their desire
for courtesy and kindness and communication, they kept missing each
other.

After a silent dinner, they took to sitting
in separate chairs rather than, as had long been their habit,
sitting together on the sofa. For most of the frantic burning of a
log, its flames dancing a dervish dance from the downdraft of a
warm southerly wind, she and Neil had watched in silence. Without
looking away from the fire, Neil finally said, “Crazy weather.
Warmest fall I can remember.”

“Did you see the article on the jet stream?
It’s shifted south, so it’s not pulling any cold air down from
Canada.”

“We’ve really only had that one frost. Even
that wasn’t really a killing frost. I noticed the azaleas have come
into bloom at the library. Your fennel’s as green as I’ve ever seen
it. I didn’t know it was so hardy. It’s so wispy, you’d think any
cold would kill it.”

Bett stared harder at the glowing coals. She
didn’t want to hear about the tenacity of plants. She didn’t want
to think about the unexpected survivors of a meager frost. She
didn’t want to consider the life of things beyond their season.
Without turning her head from the maddened yellow flames lashing up
from the red coals, Bett said, “I wish it would get cold. I want
winter.”

“It’s hard to believe that Christmas is just
over two weeks away and violets are blooming along the lane. What
do you want to do?”

“About?”

“Christmas.”

“Oh, Neil.”

“Honey.”

“I don’t know.”

“I know it’s hard.”

“I don’t know what I want to do. It’s hard to
imagine not having Christmas. It’s always been my favorite time of
year. But, it’s equally hard to imagine the house filled with
people in two weeks. I keep thinking about what I want to do, but
it changes by the minute. I know that I don’t want to repeat
Thanksgiving. All the sighs and moping and tiptoeing. All the
offered nursing. Dilly just wore me out. I felt terrible, looked
terrible and acted worse.”

“Bett, you were exhausted.”

“And angry.”

“Angry is fine. You’ve got lots to be angry
about. The kids were angry, too, at what’s been happening to you.
You’ve always been so healthy that the weight you’ve lost and the
weakness scared them. I think we were all scared and angry.”

“Scared and angry doesn’t sound like a good
recipe for Christmas.”

“True, but we don’t have to duplicate
Thanksgiving. You seem to be stronger lately. Is that my
imagination? Are you feeling better?”

“It’s funny hearing you ask that. You know, I
don’t know. I don’t know how to gauge that anymore. You, I—those
pronouns denote some kind of unity, a oneness. My body just doesn’t
feel that integrated anymore. If I have more patches of raw skin,
but they don’t feel as hot, if my nausea is less often but more
intense severe, am I feeling better? I don’t know, Neil. I’m
feeling different. Just different.”

Bett had tried to keep a hard edge from her
voice, but, even to herself, the last sentences sounded bitter. She
swallowed to relax her facial muscles before she tried again.

“I just feel very different.”

The bitterness sounded as if it had been
replaced by an awful loneliness. Bett thought to try again so that
the sentence conveyed nothing more than the factual information
that she was unlike she had been before. But, before she could
figure out how to do that fine filtering, Neil began, “Bett, we can
do whatever you want. Something little, something big, or nothing.
Whatever you want to do, the kids will understand. You know
that.”

“It’s hard when it’s this warm. Even if I
weren’t sick, I don’t think I’d be as enthusiastic as usual. I’ve
never been able to imagine the smell of cinnamon and allspice and
clove filling a kitchen in a Florida bungalow. Wrapping presents in
red and green and gold paper, with palm fronds waving and oranges
dropping on the emerald green grass, just doesn’t seem like the
right staging. It’s just been too warm for Christmas.

“If I knew it would be cold, if the wind
would blow, if it would snow, if it would be cold and white, then,
I think it would be wonderful to have everyone here. But if it’s
warm and brown, or gray, or feels like April, I don’t think I could
find the strength. Is that too silly, Neil? Too strange? Too
selfish?”

“Of course, it isn’t.”

The words came too easily from his mouth.
Bett thought he must have rehearsed them. Another conspiracy. After
the awful scene that she had made with Dilly, she could imagine him
working on a set of words that would indicate his gracious
acceptance that there wouldn’t be, didn’t need to be a family
Christmas celebration at Clarke’s Cove. From the moment during
Thanksgiving dinner when she had cried out in rage after Dilly’s
tenth or twentieth or fortieth suggestion in twenty-four hours at
what she should do and how she should eat to triumph over the
cancer, Neil would have known that Christmas was in jeopardy. She
had never been that angry, nor so lost at what to do.

A time of crisis was a time for family.
Nita’s periods and pain, Peter’s problems after Viet Nam and later
when Gaby left, the ups and downs of Dilly’s life, and the twists
at the bank had been played out with family as the supporting cast.
Bett understood that it would be hard for Neil to imagine her
progress to either better or worse times without the aid of family.
It would be hard for him to imagine being under the hot glow of
this threat’s unforgiving light with no one on the stage but him
and her. But, if she wanted to be alone at Christmas, she knew that
he would defer to her choice. Although he might wish with all his
heart that she would choose to be with family, he wouldn’t try to
change her mind. He wouldn’t want to think about it for fear that
in some black magical way thinking about it might cause it to
happen, but if this were to be their last Christmas together, he
wouldn’t want to spend it alone with her. He would want there to be
memories, good memories, which everyone could share. Bett
understood Neil’s desires, but she wasn’t sure that she had the
strength to make more memories.

* * *

She looked too small. Had she always been so
small? How could the unending energy that had shaped his life and
those of their children have come from someone so small? Neil
wanted to stare at Bett until he understood the diminution of her
presence.

So much skin sagged from her ears down to her
neck. How much weight had she lost? What cruelty that her skin
would remain the same size while more vital aspects of her grew
smaller. Neil grabbed the skin of his hand. What a strange thing to
have happen. To separate from one’s skin. To sag inside a bag that
once had been seamless with oneself. Like a winter coat which
slipped from its hanger and slumped inside its plastic bag on the
drive home from the dry cleaner.