Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (13 page)

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bove the early autumn trees, the sun cast down its slanted rays, causing the sidewalk where Giles stepped to actually sparkle. I appreciated the beauty of the blooming realm outside my window, but it might as well have been a world away from me. I was hopelessly trapped inside, a prisoner of chemo.

Peering out at Giles from my darkened living room, I thought about how long it had been since we’d exchanged more than a hurried word of greeting at the door. He seemed more reserved than usual these days, but I told myself not to take it personally. It wasn’t easy to figure out the right words to say to me lately.

I’d had two treatments so far, and my counts were in the tank. Hence my quarantine. Supposedly I was being kept safe
from germs, but I was slowly going mad with the isolation. I was forbidden even to visit my parents, and I tortured myself imagining them like children at camp with their bags all packed but no one to come get them.

I was helpless to change the situation, so instead I sat at my window, like Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
, spying on my neighbors.

I watched as Sarah caught up with Giles, her face flushed, her glossy hair held back with sunglasses. They lingered, talking to each other in the animated fashion that was second nature to the walking well. It was something I had taken for granted before, but now I longed for it with a hunger I could taste. Fatigue in all its forms flowed through my veins. Even lifting up my arms to Dick’s embrace was an effort, though my weary spirit willed it mightily.

Another neighbor joined the gathering outside. It was Meg, who held her baby in her arms and seemed to have some question that drew all three of them to look back toward her yard.

In the foyer mirror, I inspected my wig. I’d been told it was made of human hair from Europe. It was a tawny color, very thick. With bobby pins to hold some pieces of the bangs back, I imagined it looked vaguely “natural,” although the truth was that my face had narrowed in the last few weeks, and my eyes were underscored by two unhealthy stripes of gray. Perhaps it was just as well that I was banished indoors. I could just imagine how my friends would pretend that I looked well, and offer kind compliments that they’d have to struggle to mean.

Everyone had been so nice—supportive and generous, ecstatic that I had another “good prognosis,” since my type of cancer was not considered particularly aggressive.

I’d received scores of lovely greeting cards, potted plants, and bouquets of cut flowers. My substitute at school sent along a folder of notes from my students. Our freezer brimmed with casseroles, the kitchen countertops with pies and cakes and plates of cookies, and the phone kept ringing with calls from friends offering to bring us anything we needed.

But I let the calls go to voice mail. As the chemo moved along, Dick and I had been good at keeping up appearances, but the truth was that we were both worn out by the burden. What I needed now was difficult to speak about, and harder still for anyone to comprehend. I needed this metastatic cancer, present in that single node, to tumble back in Time, evolving either into something wholly healthy and benign, or something that had never existed at all—a shadow on a mammogram that turned out to be nothing. My first diagnosis might have turned out well enough, but this second one brought me an inescapable message:
I am cancer and I’m sticking around as long as I can. I’ve picked you out. You’ll never get away
.

•   •   •

Bienta calmly brought her hands together, fingertips just touching. It was a few days later and she took her place behind me at my dressing table. I watched her in the mirror as she pulled a length of pale blue fabric from her knitting bag. The sun was
setting, and Dick was at a partners’ meeting, so Bienta and I were alone. Dick hadn’t wanted me to invite her over. He kept reminding me of my suppressed immunities. I made the illogical argument that since Bienta was a nurse, her germs were safe. Besides, I told him, I was going crazy in the house and my peering through the window at happy people chatting in the street had taken a pathological turn. And I needed Bienta’s help. My wig was starting to feel loose and I was afraid of looking truly insane if I tried to walk outdoors with it looking all cockeyed. I wanted Bienta to teach me how to do one of those lovely turbans she sometimes wore to church.

Eyes averted from the mirror, I slid off my wig and settled it on the stiff white Styrofoam. It seemed sort of lordly, or Jeffersonian, resting there. But there was nothing lordly about what I saw in the mirror. I found myself admitting something to Bienta that I couldn’t bear to tell Dick. Since the chemo took my hair, I’d started showering at night, without the bathroom light on.

“Oh?”

“Please don’t tell Dick. He doesn’t know.”

“I see.” She answered quickly, but her tone held neither shock nor condemnation. Something in the guarded way she managed her facial expression without betraying what she really felt struck me as utterly familiar. I recognized myself in how she pressed on, intent, it seemed, on keeping all the promises she’d ever made.

Through the bedroom window, I saw the moon, a floating
presence in the deeply purple sky. I sighed. “My favorite time of day,” I readily confessed.

“It is?”

“Darkness is my friend,” I offered, heartened by her interest and the cozy wraparound of nighttime in the offing. “It helps in my campaign to minimize my glimpses of the nakedness up here.” I pressed my palm to my scalp. It felt alien, rubbery. “Also, I imagine I see cancer everywhere on my body. I check moles or lumps or bumps. I notice splotches, rashes, blood from any orifice. Also, I check for indentations, any pouching-out or puckering. Wheezy breathing, headaches, indigestion, and various old scars make the imaginary list as well. I can’t turn it off, Bienta. So I turn the lights off instead. At least that switch is something I control.”

I braced myself. I assumed Bienta would tell me that I needed a counselor. I’d already covered that base, though. I had a good therapist, and I saw her every week. But what I also truly needed was friendship from a woman who wasn’t frightened by my veering from the script. I just couldn’t pretend to be a good sport all the time while managed doses of poison were dripped into my body—a body I no longer recognized. I just wasn’t one of those women who embraced wearing pink as a symbol of pride and solidarity, and went around bald with a flower painted on her head.

I didn’t think Bienta would expect that of me, though. And I also instinctively felt that she’d never betray my confidence. I
had dear friends in town, but there was no one I could be absolutely certain wouldn’t share my fears with someone else. And they wouldn’t do it out of spite—it would be out of concern and a desire to help. But I couldn’t bear that. This town was just too small. Once, I remembered passing a young woman on the street and it amazed me that I didn’t remember her name, but I did vividly recall being told that her first baby was born breech. Far be it from me to judge anyone else on that score, but I was determined not to be the subject of conversation.

“Yes. I understand,” Bienta said, after a few moments of careful thought. “We do strange things when we’re in hiding. And in Africa, you would find many people who bathe at night, in lakes or rivers, in the moonlight, seeking privacy. An indoor bathroom is a luxury.”

“But what about the hippos? Aren’t they dangerous?” I recalled Giles saying something about hippos in one of his stories about growing up.

“Oh, they will kill you for the sport of it,” she said mildly. “Quite true. One must be careful.” It struck me how much more comfortable—or perhaps “accustomed” was the better word—Giles and Bienta were with danger and with death.

Bienta’s dark brown eyes met mine. The colors of our eyes were a perfect match. I watched the skill with which Bienta wrapped her pretty fabric to transform my nakedness. In the mirror, I looked flirty, feminine, even mysterious.

“You’re just as gifted as my plastic surgeon,” I said.

“Do you still go back to him?”

“He adds a little sterile water to expand the implants, week by week. As soon as my breasts are as big as I want them to be, he’ll put in the permanent implants. It’s another surgery. Maybe in the spring.” It was strange to be talking this way about such an intimate part of my body, but Bienta’s calm matter-of-factness took away any shame or embarrassment I might have felt.

“And are you happy with the result so far?”

That was a difficult question to answer. Even though I thought they looked very good in a sort of abstract way, they didn’t feel real to me. I’d been warned that I might never regain as much sensitivity as I’d once had, but I wasn’t prepared for the profound lack of sensation. I could have walked down the street with my shirt accidentally unbuttoned and I wouldn’t even have felt a warning breeze. And although I’d been rather small-chested before and now I could size up if I wanted to, I’d always liked my breasts the way they were.

“I’m kind of afraid to look at them,” I admitted to Bienta. “I’m afraid to enjoy them, because I can’t stop worrying that another tumor is going to pop up. I had a scare a few weeks ago, because I thought I felt something, and it turned out to be just a suture. So I sort of feel like I’m wearing two time bombs on my chest. And if they don’t go off, then, well, I guess they look really good.”

The sky grew darker yet. Bienta quietly took in everything I said, and there was something soothing about the way she wrapped my head with her lengths of lovely cloth. My breasts didn’t feel like quite my own, but at least now I wasn’t wearing some stranger’s hair. “I used to feel a certain freedom in
existing,” I said, while studying the way Bienta’s able fingers pressed and tucked the fabric. “Is it so wrong to search for that again? Do you think I’m crazy? Please tell the truth.”

“Hardly, Mrs. Wall. Have I ever told you how I met my husband?” she abruptly asked.

“You haven’t. No.”

“It was at Egerton College. Owita sat on a low wall as I arrived with luggage, and he asked a friend to introduce us. I was from the city, Nairobi. He had arrived, the bright, successful son of the community of proud Rusinga and a member of our Luo tribe.”

“So, then, he helped you with your luggage . . .”

“Yes.”

“And was it love at first sight?”

“There was an interest on both sides,” she admitted, with a sly look. I laughed out loud. “My father was devout, and Giles was baptized just before we married.”

“I converted shortly after my marriage,” I said. “The town of Radford thought we’d lost our minds! We were so young, and they had never heard of such a thing. He was nineteen, and I was twenty—still in college.”

“But your parents gave their blessing?”

“Yes. We couldn’t bear to be apart, and they took pity on us. Or . . . they saw . . .” I hesitated. “They saw,” I started to say again. “I think they must have somehow seen our happy future. In their wisdom. I’ll just leave it there.” I plucked a tissue to wipe the dampness in my eyes.

“We’ve been arguing a lot, these days, Bienta.” I snatched another tissue from its plastic holder and took a moment to compose myself before continuing. “I even told him I hated him. How could I say a thing like that? Dick has stood by me, through all these trials, yet a person has his limits. Don’t you think? What if my husband, being human, might seek out consolation with another woman who is more appealing, even younger, perhaps? He could have more children with this newer, fresher, younger wife. Life could start over for him.”

Bienta turned her head slightly but held her gaze on me. “Are these your ideas or his?”

“Last night I dreamed I was waiting for a train. I felt such joy as the train approached my station, and I watched in horror as it passed me by without even slowing down.”

“That sounds more like a nightmare,” Bienta said.

I fought back tears as I told the rest. “Now and then, through the window of the speeding train, I caught a glimpse of Dick in the dining car, with a person I couldn’t see. I imagined the twilight consuming him, and I wondered if he’d miss me half as much as I’d miss him.”

“So, would she have to be perfect?” Bienta said.

“Yes.”

“How do you define perfect?” she asked.

I answered without hesitation. “Someone who could provide a normal mammogram certified by the Mayo Clinic and could pack the perfect suitcase, striding off on ballet-dancer legs to meet him at the airport for the perfect getaway!”

“The perfect suitcase? What does it contain?” I was surprised to see the mischief in her smile.

“Several negligees and one good suit from Talbots,” I impulsively replied. Then we both collapsed in laughter. It was a delicious feeling, being able to admit my darkest fears out loud—and knowing that losing Dick, my lover and best friend, was far more terrible to me than having cancer. Maybe there was some power in realizing that cancer wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to me.

•   •   •

An hour later, Dick arrived home. He complimented me on the head wrap.

“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?” he ventured casually, while leafing through the mail.

“Yes. I think I am.”

I didn’t tell him that when Bienta left a short time earlier I stood before the bathroom mirror for a good long time, studying the angles of my face, and applying makeup with a heavy hand, as if it were prom night or my wedding day. I wasn’t sure which.

Just then, Giles rang our doorbell, handing Dick a potted plant for me and saying he couldn’t come in because the boys were waiting in the car. Rushing to Dick’s side to greet Giles, I quickly scanned the get-well card. Looking at the handwriting, I realized that Giles had signed Bienta’s name beside his own. Something in this minor detail captured my attention. He ad
mired my head wrap, and was surprised to know it was Bienta who had assisted me.

“You mean she didn’t tell you she was coming here today?” I said.

Giles answered no, while stepping back onto the porch. “I’ve had a cold,” he said, by way of awkward explanation.