Warm Wuinter's Garden (19 page)

Twisting around on her lab stool, Lise began
making her way through the box of slides. Paget’s disease. She
looked to the open textbook on the counter next to her microscope.
Paget’s only presented on the nipple. She reasoned that if it were
something that had involved the nipple, her father would have said
so. Next slide. Non-infiltrating ductal carcinoma. Under the
microscope it was pretty. It looked like Easter baskets filled with
eggs. The text noted that it was an in situ cancer. If it really
were in situ, then, Lise thought, there would be no need for
follow-up radiation. There were five slides of spreading cancers
that infiltrated the milk ducts. The first, scirrhous, looked like
pieces of worm caught in a whirlpool. The slide seemed to contain
so much pent-up energy that Lise almost expected the worms to begin
squirming in the swirled mass within which they were caught.
Scirrhous carcinoma was the most common breast cancer. It accounted
for almost three quarters of all breast malignancies. Scirrho meant
hard. The tumor was as hard as a rock. Its hardness meant that it
could have been felt. It would be too bad if a scirrhous tumor was
what her mother had had removed. Because if her mother hadn’t
discovered it herself, then she might think that she was
responsible for her condition. Next slide. Papillary. Except for
the color of the stain used to bring out the features, Lise thought
that it resembled an aerial view of swampy islands on a river. The
sides of the milk ducts were the river banks. The islands were made
up of the tumor cells. Next slide. As Lise pulled out a slide
labeled comedo, she wondered why a tumor would be named after a
blackhead. She thought back to the high school joke about a Comedo
of Errors. However, as soon as she adjusted the focus Lise knew the
reason for the name. The milk duct was solidly lined with many
layers of small seed-like cancer cells. They reminded her of the
black seeds of kiwi fruit. In the middle of the duct was an area of
yellow-colored dead cells. The head of the pimple. She stared into
the microscope for a long time before she noticed the areas where
the cancer cells were working their way through the duct walls.
Next slide. Mucinous carcinoma. Under the bright light of the
microscope it reminded her of some of the Shijo prints at the
Museum of Fine Arts. There were small blossom shapes that looked a
little bit like grape hyacinths interspersed with long branches of
cells. The shapes of the flowers and branches were given added
definition from the contrast with their background of pale mucin
cells. Lise turned back to the pathology text to read the
description of a mucinous carcinoma. She flipped past several pages
of monochrome plates of mucinous tumor cells. High and low
magnification. Examples of tumors with greater or lesser amounts of
mucin. She flipped another page, found the mucinous heading on the
top of the left side and began to read. A comparatively rare form.
Found in older women. Translucent. Soft. Gel-like. Something
disturbed her as she quickly read down the page. Some reports of
relatively lower rates of axillary metastes in the early stages.
That was good. Lise tried to twist away from the force tugging at
her. The mucous that the cancer cells floated in was produced by
those very cells. She finished the first column of text. Her eyes
moved to the top of the second column. She couldn’t read the words.
The pull was too strong. Her eyes, despite her brain’s command,
were pulled to the right. In the upper right hand corner of the
opposing page was a photograph of a mucoid carcinoma. It looked
like some nightmarish jelly-filled pastry. Lise slammed the
textbook shut and began to cry. Tears rolled down her face as she
put the slides back into the proper slots of the case.

Biology was biology. It was science. It was
color and forms, chemistry and mystery. It was a little world. It
was vials and scales and bright lights and centrifuges and smooth
counters and heavy books and dyes and sharp smells and worn white
polyester lab coats and, sometimes, many times, roller coaster
excitement. But, it had never before been death. Had she just seen
something which had destroyed her mother’s breast and, maybe,
wanted more? She had known as soon as she had put the phone down,
with her father’s “Goodbye” still echoing down the line, that she
must look, microscopically look, at the strange life that might be
threatening her mother’s. She had thought of it as using her
science to get closer to her mother. If she could see the forms,
the paisley colors and shapes of the growth-loving sickness, if,
after looking and reading, she could deduce which particular
pattern had come to life within her mother’s body, she would own a
knowledge that would, in some mystical sciencey way, shelter both
her mother and herself.

Lise’s fingers reached out to the textbook.
Some part of her— as before she was unsure whether it was the
scientist or the daughter—wanted to look again at the photograph of
the mucin tumor. Some part of her wanted to re-experience the jolt
of shock at the hideousness of its collective form when a micron’s
thickness of gorgeous paisley was added to another micron of
swirling form, when thousands of delicately drawn Shijo prints were
added together to make a work of horror.

Taken one layer of cells at a time, taken
microscopically, it was science. It was art. Taken all together, it
was medicine. It was life. It was death. Ugly, ugly death. Lise
drew her hand away from the book. She might look later. Nothing in
nature had ever scared her. She didn’t want to be afraid. She
wanted to prove that to herself. She wanted to look again. But, for
now, she could not.

Lise pushed back from the microscope. She
decided to try to find Brad. He might know whether she was looking
at too many little things made big, or too many big things made
small.

It was the Saturday before Halloween. The
first month of autumn had been very warm. There hadn’t yet been a
killing frost. The first day of November would be the following
Thursday. Thanksgiving would follow in three weeks, on the 22nd,
the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. A late frost and an
early Thanksgiving. It felt strange to Neil to see Bett picking
snapdragons and dahlias, tomatoes and eggplant after they had spent
breakfast making plans for the holidays.

The weather was so warm that Neil had no
desire to keep his promise to himself to wash the storm windows.
For the last month he had avoided most of the end-of-the-season
yard work. He had used the warm weather as an excuse to sail the
SureBett. When he wasn’t sailing, the distrait husband had tried to
fill up the weekend with clamming or shore fishing for bluefish.
The freezer was full.

After watching Bett try to make the muscles
of her damaged arm do her will, Neil walked up to the perennial
garden and asked her if she wanted to go sailing with him. She
would stay put. She was happy to be working. Without directly
looking at her, Neil aimed a smile toward Bett and told her that he
wouldn’t be gone long.

Neil tacked the SureBett back and forth along
the edge of a sweet southwesterly wind. The sky was cloudless, the
sharp angle of the October sun painted pointillist dabs of white
light atop the scalloped surface of the deep green water. Even
behind the protection of his sunglasses Neil had to half-squint his
eyes against the intense glare. The boat felt coltish as if she
knew that the summer-like weather couldn’t last. She, too, wanted
some last pleasure before the weather changed.

Through half-drawn lids, Neil tried to see
across the endless water; however, he wasn’t able to see beyond his
own jumbled thoughts. Behind him on a spit of land, which he could
easily see if he chose to turn to look, Bett was kneeling over a
bed of flowers breaking soil or pinching buds as if nothing had
happened.

The previous evening he had driven down the
lane to find her trying to use the short-handled loppers to reclaim
a part of the yard where rose hips had encroached. She was stepping
on several of the thorny stalks to bend them over. Half-crouched,
she braced her damaged right arm against the inside of her knee to
give it strength. With the bad arm braced, she used the muscles in
her good arm to make the cut. Rage had exploded in him at seeing
her struggle. Like an emerging hurricane, a madness had flown
around inside his head unsure of where to focus its force. The
cancer, the crippling effect of the surgery, the debilitation of
the radiation, the insidious rapacity of the rose hips, always
looking to take another, and another, inch of the yard, the
stubbornness of Bett to keep doing things that, he was sure, her
physical therapist had told her to avoid, or, most of all, rage at
himself that he hadn’t made himself chop back the rose hips some
Saturday rather than going sailing. By the time he parked the car,
he had welded a calm caring smile onto his face. His banker’s
smile. A smile he had long practiced. A smile which he recently had
begun to slide toward Bett’s eyes. A smile meant to convey no
doubts. He had wanted to be able to pull the damp repp stripe tie
from his neck, to loosen his collar, to take the loppers from
Bett’s tanned and mottled hands, to finish the job. But he could
not. Once again he had found he was paralyzed to do anything that
brought closer the passing of summer. Instead, he had asked his
sweating, panting wife to join him for a drink out on the dock. She
had smiled and told him she would join him when she finished.

Neil’s first quick drink had done little to
calm him. When Bett finally came around the corner of the house,
the sun was close to setting. She walked along holding a glass of
cider in her left hand. Her right arm hung slack at her side. Neil
had adjusted his focus, as he had learned to do over the last six
weeks. He looked at her as if he were staring at an unfinished
portrait. Where disease had touched her the brush strokes faded
into blank canvas.

Neil pushed the tiller away. He listened to
the sails luff. It reminded him of the rustle of squirrels in an
attic. The freshening breeze pulled tears from his eyes back along
his deeply etched crows-feet. In forty years of marriage she had
never failed him. When he had been weak, she had always been there
to give strength. Tough times at the bank had brought solicitous
phone calls during the day, special meals in the evening and
physical comfort at night. When a crisis had made his legs feel so
bloodless he was sure they wouldn’t hold him, when his mind had
been so filled with a million scraps of information that no
direction or decision was possible, he would go to her and she
would wrap and warm him with her strength until could regain his
own.

Decades before, it couldn’t have been more
than a couple of years after they were married, they had gone to a
Halloween party. He had dressed as an Indian chief. After nights of
sewing yards of bright yellow material and exhorting him to
patience when he asked her what she was going to be, Bett had come
out of the locked bedroom dressed as a fireplug. At the party
friends had mistaken him—just another Indian among a tribe of them.
But, although everyone had thought that Bett’s costume was
wonderfully clever, nobody had been deceived. Short and solid,
always ready, implacable, Bett always had been, and still was, like
a fire hydrant. That night and for a time afterward friends had
called Bett “Plug.” Bett and he had used the name off and on for
years. Over time it had evolved into a codeword to signal when he
needed help, or when Bett thought that he did.

Sailing through the shimmer of October light,
Neil thought she was a plug. Every kind of plug. She had helped put
out a thousand fires. Kids fighting. Sleepless hot fear from
indecision. She had sparked him, when nearing forty, he had been
brought to a halt by the anemic lassitude of hope-drained dreams.
She had comforted him a million times, she had always been there, a
sure bet, and, now, when she needed him, he went to sea. To clean
air and clear water. Away from red scars knifing through tan skin.
Away from the black blood scratch of stitches. Away from the
twisting worm of white flesh left in an armpit. Away from limpness
and asymmetry and new high-collared nightgowns and the maraca noise
of pill vials being opened. Away from complicated schedules for
radiation and tiptoeing around the future and standing silent and
still afraid to awaken the implacability of death. Sailing
away.

Neil slammed the gunwale with a fist. Of all
the losses of the last weeks, the worst was losing their
comfortableness. During the courtship and for the first several
months of marriage they had had to work hard at becoming fluent
with one another. After a time, however, there had come a
reassuring ease of communication, whether it was with words,
emotions or the physical aspects of their bodies. Now, all that had
changed. They would start a conversation, an innocent
conversation—about Christmas or gardens or the grandchildren—only
to find that anything which dealt with the future was so riddled
with unanswerable questions that they were forced to trail off or
make an abrupt change in topics. A Cole Porter song would come on
the radio and they would take a half-step toward one another to
begin an old familiar dance before realizing that the weakness of
Bett’s arm and the half-nothingness of her chest would alter any
dance beyond a remembered comfort. Bedtime had become theater as
each worked to pretend that her undressing and redressing in her
high collared flannel nightgown, so furtive and fast, was not to
hide both his and her eyes from looking at her amputated body.

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.