Warm Wuinter's Garden (16 page)

Ellen paused to devote all of her attention
to withdrawing an arm from under the covers. In slow motion she
spread her fingers and tipped her hand toward the empty bed.

“Welcome. Pajama party. Popcorn. Elvis.
Dance.”

Bett stared hard at Ellen’s small yellow face
to see if a sense of gallows humor or the dreams of drugs were
responsible for the fractured invitation.

When Ellen closed the fingers of her upraised
hand, the IV that was taped to her wrist writhed itself into a
large coil. Bett watched intently as Ellen rubbed her middle finger
against her thumb. It took her a long moment to realize that Ellen
was trying to snap her fingers but with the same soggy, soundless
ineffectuality of a fog-softened match against a damp striker.

Bett snapped fingers on both her hands twice.
Ellen nodded and smiled a slow-growing crooked smile. After that
exchange, Bett walked in and put her purse and the radiation
handout on the night stand next to her bed. She wondered about the
protocol of the pajama-striped room divider. Would pulling the
curtain be interpreted as respect for Ellen’s privacy or rejection
of her? Would leaving it undrawn be read as friendliness or
nosiness? She half-turned to Ellen.

“Should I draw this?”

“Forget Frost. No fences. Just
neighbors.”

“I hope very good neighbors,” Bett said
quietly.

Ellen slowly nodded her head in
affirmation.

* * *

When Bett left the hospital four days later
it was hard for her to decide who had been the better neighbor.
Each had succored the other’s wounds. Each had nursed the other,
with most of the ministrations going to the heart. They had laughed
at the absurdity of immortality. They had laughed harder at the
absurdity of mortality. Although each was acidic in her humor, each
worked to keep the other from saying anything too bilious to
swallow. There had been no growing friendship. They had been good
friends from the first moments. As early as the evening of the
second day, Bett and Ellen had talked of how each had felt a
comfort from the other from the first moments. Several times in
those days, they wondered whether the closeness came from being
kindred souls or because they were in kindred circumstances.

Despite the attention that was paid to them
by others, Ellen and Bett drew a special sustenance from the other.
Neil would come to visit Bett. He would be warm, concerned, caring,
and, unknown to himself, obviously fearful. He would try to be
useful, offering Bett juice or town news or his arm for a walk.
Ellen’s husband, Barry, or her sons, Marty and Phil, or her
daughters-in-law, Lauren and Liz would come for a visit. They would
bring flowers, laughter, messages of good will from neighbors. The
visitors would come and give of themselves and, then, finally,
leave, and the patients would be left exhausted. After everyone had
gone, Ellen and Bett would pass their friendship back and forth
like a canteen until they had refilled the strength which their
well-meaning guests had depleted.

The two patients talked several times about
the energy it took to be a good patient-host. It had reminded both
of them of coming home from the hospital with a newborn to a house
full of neighbors and family. They talked of the rhythms of their
healing. Ellen’s adventure with death had begun as a temporary
colostomy as a partial treatment for diverticulitis. When the
surgeon botched the colostomy, she had come in close to dying from
peritonitis. The surgery to repair the first surgery had taken
forever. There had been complications. There had been more
infection. The infection had led to all the IV lines and
feverishness. The feverishness had led to nightmares. The
nightmares had led to… She was going to make it. She knew it.

They talked about the ironies. Ellen had to
get well so that she would be strong enough that they could make
her sick again when they operated to reverse the colostomy. Bett
had to be made sick with radiation so that she might be well.

They talked of guilt. Ellen felt guilty that
she had put her body and her family through so much for so little
reason. Doctors, nurses, family members and friends had come out of
the woodwork to tell her that the addition of a little bran to her
diet would have prevented her condition. An occasional muffin, a
sprinkling on cereal could have prevented a fast dance with death,
two surgeries, thousands of dollars and all the fear and worry that
she had to feel and, worse, watch. She felt herself a fool.

Bett, too. She was such a dedicated gardener.
She culled out the smallest stones. She sorted through and tossed
shriveled corms and spongy roots. She weeded. She pinched back
buds. She watered and fed, pruned and trimmed. She trimmed and,
occasionally, even buffed her nails. She shaved her legs, brushed
and flossed her teeth. She rubbed creams onto her hands and cheeks.
She had her hair cut and colored. Unlike Ellen, she even ate oat
bran and made a point of getting enough iron and calcium. She took
care of gardens, and others and herself in so many ways. But she
did not regularly examine her breasts. Ellen did.

They talked of health and hope, children and
husbands, new movies and old dances. During lunches they teased
each other with made-up menus of what they would have served in
lieu of what was on their trays. They talked of the less troubled
joy of blood relations a generation removed—their grandparents and
grandchildren. They talked of faith, of forgiveness and acceptance
and courage. Twice they skirted near but didn’t talk of death.

In the hour before it was time for Bett to be
checked out, they talked of continuing their friendship. Each
promised to stay in touch, but neither knew if they could.

Dilly Koster-Phelps churned across her
parents’ lawn, up the steps and across the porch with the ungainly
forthrightness of an M-1 tank through a stand of bamboo. Before her
hand could reach the handle of the screen, her voice began its
assault.

“Mother, Mother? Where are you? How are you?
How could you? I can’t believe this. How could this have happened
to us? Why didn’t you tell us? Mother? Mother?”

As Dilly pounded through the house the pitch
of her voice bounced back and forth a full octave as it tried to
find the right key for her concerns and complaints. Rushing through
the downstairs rooms, she looked out the windows to see if her
mother were down on the dock or out in one of the gardens. The
treads thundered as she raced upstairs.

“Mother, Mother? Where are you?”

In the small interlude of silence as her
lungs gulped for air, Dilly heard Bett’s voice, calm as always but,
somehow, softer and flatter say, “Honey, I’m in Nita’s room. Come
in.”

The sound of her mother’s voice, the same,
yet changed, caused Dilly to stop moving. Since her father’s call
that morning to tell her that her mother had had a breast removed
and had been in the hospital for a week, Dilly had been in such
turmoil that, despite her typically over-active imagination, she
had not filled in all of the details of what her father’s
information meant. In one sense she knew that everything had
changed, or would change. She knew that some carefree assumptions
must change. Holidays would be different. There would be an even
greater value put upon having the family together. Her mother’s
body would be changed. Dilly, the frantic daughter, had imagined
that the scars of the surgery might look like the puckered seams of
a doll made from stuffing batting into a nylon stocking. As she had
driven south through the glaring sun of a perfect September day,
Dilly had thought about insurance coverage, sleeveless dresses,
bathing suits and prosthetics. But, now, as she stood perfectly
still except for the heaving of her chest and the unconscious
rubbing of her sweat-dampened fingers, Dilly realized that there
were a million changes that she had not considered.

She certainly had not considered that her
mother’s voice might be different.

Although Dilly frequently changed the
actuarial data of the rest of her family’s lives, she usually
thought of both her mother’s and her own LEs as constants. While
she scrutinized her father’s face for premonitions of a stroke,
studied Nita’s hair for gray and attended to Lise’s breasts for
signs of sagging, Dilly perceived her mother through a filter of
memory which mitigated change. If Dilly had been asked to pick from
an album the most representative photograph of her mother, the
choice would have been one taken when Dilly was in her late teens
and her mother in her early forties. It would have shown Bett’s
short solid body. Bett’s broad face, prominent German wurst of a
nose and jowly chin would have been quite tan. The beginnings of
age would have been obvious—some gray in the hair, a network of
lines around the eyes, faint crease marks dropping perpendiculars
from the corners of her lips down across her first chin. That photo
was the image that Dilly carried in her mind of her no longer aging
mother.

At some deep level Dilly knew that her image
of her mother was unreal. She knew age had acted as the confident
sculptor, gouging ever deeper marks into the clay. She knew her
deception, yet from an unspeakable fear, she submerged it. To see
her mother as she really was would threaten Dilly’s carefully
nurtured capacity to see herself as she would wish to be.

Change and stasis. One of the linchpins of
constancy for Dilly was her mother’s voice. In many people the
voice never changes. As all else rots and erodes, the vocal cords
stay young. Walking into a fiftieth high school reunion one might
hear much of the same ringing laughter of one’s youth and expect to
see the same person responsible for that long ago sound. One turns
and is surprised by a shrunken, mottled, wrinkled, cruelly
caricatured visage. The voice is the body’s only enduring vestige
of youth. It carries the bright sound of youth long past youth’s
brief time, like an echoing cymbal at the end of a song.

In her time in the car, between the surges of
panic and anger, Dilly had prepared herself to accept that her
mother would not resemble her carefully kept image. She would find
someone somewhat new, but of all the changes she had considered,
she had never imagined that a different voice would greet her.
Dilly shook her hands to evaporate the sweat and took two deep
breaths before walking toward Lise’s room.

Entering the closed-blind shadows of the
room, Dilly widened her focus to instantly absorb all of the
details of the room and its occupant. She saw the glass of clear
flat soda with a few straggling bubbles clinging to the side. The
glass held a bent straw, a primary signal in the semiotics of
sickness in the Koster family. A box of tissues and a bottle of
skin lotion, an opened book tossed down on the bed sheets, a slowly
rotating fan. Heavy arms looking dark in the umbrageous light. Hair
flattened from perspiration and sleep. Flaccid skin over
cheekbones. A smiling mouth. An unbalanced emptiness under the
ancient shrug. Dilly saw everything but her mother’s eyes.

As she bent her lips to her mother’s cheek,
she whispered, “Mother, Mother. Oh, my God, how are you?”

“Honey, I’m fine. Just tired. I’m in here
because it’s cooler.”

“I almost died when Dad called. I can’t
believe it.”

“I’m that way, too, sometimes. I’ll be myself
for a minute, then, suddenly realize that not all of me is here.
It’s an astounding feeling to realize that a part of your body is
gone.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Actually it does, quite a lot. It’s a funny
feeling. It can feel very hot and sharp and dull and throbbing all
at the same time.”

“I couldn’t believe it when Dad said that
you’d had a mastectomy. A modified radical. My God, aren’t they
extinct? I couldn’t believe that you didn’t have a lumpectomy. Why
not? They say they’re the same. Aren’t the results the same?”

“I guess with certain kinds of tumors they’re
starting to think that’s true. I decided to make everything as
simple as possible. To get it over with at once. It worked out
okay. It was invasive. It was the kind of tumor that spreads
easily. When they take your whole breast and the nodes, there’s a
better chance of catching any cells that have begun to spread.”

Dilly looked away from Bett’s face. Her
father hadn’t told her that. The next obvious question would be to
ask about her mother’s prognosis, but she couldn’t bring herself to
ask the obvious. Instead she asked, “How was the food?” with the
same inflection of concern that she had used in her first
questions.

As was frequently the case in a conversation
with Dilly, it took Bett a moment to follow in the direction that
her daughter had chosen to go. She had been expecting an
interrogation regarding her prognosis, and she had her answers to
that topic carefully rehearsed.

“Honey, what?”

“The food. How was it? Was it good? Was it
healthy at all? I doubt it. You’re in a hospital. You’re fighting
for your health. Your body needs all the help it can get. You need
help, but you can expect
ﾁ
Salisbury steak, iceberg lettuce and orange dressing and a
double-sized brownie. Great. Brownies—the building blocks of good
health. Did they try to build you back up with brownies?”

Bett was glad that Dilly’s attention had
turned from Bett herself to the hospital. She decided to give her
daughter grist, or she thought as Bett smiled to herself, in this
particular instance, lack of grist for her mill.

“You know, Dilly, I think they work hard at
the desserts because they know it perks up the patients. More so
than barley or bulgur or beets.”

“So, a happy patient is a healthy patient?
Keep smiling as you die from malnutrition and they find you stone
cold and stiff with a frozen smile and a trail of chocolate drool
down across your chin.”