Warm Wuinter's Garden (10 page)

“Lise, I haven’t spent much time with
him.”

“C’mon, Mom, first impressions. You’re
usually right.”

“If I am, honey, it’s because I try to avoid
first impressions.”

“Please, jump off the cliff. I have. As
usual. Let me know my fate.”

“Lise, your fate is
your
fate. You’ve
always attracted attractive men. And, I mean much more than looks.
You’re very lucky that way. Peter’s had such trouble finding anyone
since Gaby. The same is kind of true for Nita, too.”

“I know. I was thinking about that the other
day. I keep ditching nice guys. It’s me. I get bored.”

“Or, maybe you think that you might get
bored.”

“You’ve never gotten bored? With Dad?”

“A friend, I won’t say who, once told me that
the thing that had sustained her in her marriage was that she had
always found her husband amusing. When I heard that I didn’t know
how to think about it. The same was true when someone else told me
that the foundation of his marriage was that, even after many
years, much of what his wife thought and felt remained a mystery to
him. Mystery. Amusement. Not being bored. Are these different
things or the same thing? I had a hard time thinking about whether
I used your father for amusement.”

“Mom, have you been bored with Dad?”

“Of course. I’ve had periods where I was
bored with him and with you kids and, most often, with myself. The
important thing to me isn’t that I’ve had periods of boredom, but,
rather, that those periods haven’t lasted. It’s not even your
father, really. The thing that I try to remember to pay attention
to is not he or I, but, rather, us. Our intertwining is always
unfolding. That has not been boring.”

“But, don’t you think that that’s rare? Don’t
you think that Gaby got bored with how the intertwining was
unfolding, or maybe not unfolding, but strangling? Do you think
that Dilly and Bill feel that they’re in the middle of a wonderful
mystery?”

“Lise, in my opinion, good relationships are
founded upon three things. Respect. Trust. Understanding. If those
things are in place, then I don’t think that a couple could get
bored with one another for very long.”

“Respect, trust, and understanding?”

“Yes.”

“Understanding doesn’t work very well with
your friend’s support for mystery and amusement.”

“Don’t you scientists understand how some
things work without knowing all the details?”

“Yes, Mom, point made. I really miss you. I
mean I love being in Boston doing the things I’m doing, but there
are times when I wish that you were right there. I get so excited
that I forget why I’m doing something. You’d be a good reagent to
have nearby. To help in the synthesis.”

“Honey, I miss you every day. You’re such a
joy.”

Bett wanted to go on, but she was afraid that
the thing that she was feeling in her right breast might slide over
and confuse those feelings that were filling up her heart. She
feared that she might lose control over her tenses. I am going to
miss you every day. You have been such a joy.

“So, Mom, what do you like best about Brad?
Not the tattoo, right?”

“No, Lise. In the short time that he’s been
here, what I like best is that when something amuses him he looks
to find your eyes. He wants to share those little joys. That’s what
I like best.”

Despite not being able to see through the
glare of the late afternoon sun reflecting off Dilly’s rear window,
Bett waved until the car turned from the lane. Her smile faded with
the fading sound of tires scrunching on the gravel that had been
dragged out onto Brume Lane. Her hand came down slowly. She crossed
her arms and held onto her elbows as if the air had grown colder.
She heard herself sigh in the encroaching silence, but she couldn’t
decide whether it was a sigh of relief that the children and
grandchildren were gone, or a sigh to gather strength for what now
must be done.

It had been a week since she had driven along
South County’s country roads thinking of gardens. In those seven
days she had put up eggplant and okra, she had served more than one
hundred plates of food, including making dough for campfire stick
bread for Peter’s boys. She had set up daily encampments on the
beach, helped dig moats to fortify sand castles, and, once, around
her sleeping husband. She had patted and hugged and kissed and
ssshhhed her kin, and she had chopped and shredded and broiled and
baked. She had nurtured all those around her in the many ways that
they had come to expect from her over the long and short years of
their lives. She had accomplished everything that had needed doing
except for one task with Neil that she had promised herself a week
before she would undertake as soon as the guests were gone. She
drew a second sigh before turning forthrightly toward the
house.

Neil was still sleeping in the rattan chaise
in the screened-in porch. He had lain down after returning from
filling the Point Jude day sailer, the SureBett, with grandchildren
for a final summer sail. They had left as early in the morning as a
boatload of Brother Jonathans, which Neil had informed them was an
old British term for Americans, looking to free their colonial
homeland from the tyranny of the redcoats. They had sailed down the
cove and out to Spinner’s Island, a half-acre knoll. Under Captain
Neil’s enthusiastic command, the grandchildren had assaulted the
island, scrambled up the gravelly hillside to dispatch the
entrenched redcoats, planted a scraggly flag made by the light of
the campfire the night before, and then sailed triumphantly for
home and hotdogs, albeit turkey hotdogs. After lunch their captain
had retired to quarters while his troops broke camp.

Peter’s tent had been folded and refolded
under Dilly’s persistent supervision until it fit back inside its
bag. At Bett’s suggestion the ashes from the campfire had been
scattered on the roses. Toothbrushes had been accounted for, damp
bathing suits had been stripped from the line, and leftovers had
been distributed. Hugs and kisses had been given and received. Car
seats had been argued over. Engines had been started, and, in the
midst of the activity, as war had ended and his loyal soldiers and
sailors had been mustered out, the captain had slept soundly
through it all.

Neil had napped through so many holiday
afternoons, it had become such a tradition, that there was no
thought to wake him. Rather, at some odd moment during their
preparations for departure, each of his children and grandchildren
had looked in on him and smiled. Several of the most loyal had
saluted him with the precision which he had carefully taught
them.

Bett was the first person to look in on her
husband and not smile. She wandered the downstairs rooms of the
house looking at the artifacts of her family’s life. She went to
the laundry room to get a large wicker basket. Although she did not
have enough hard cheese or walnuts on hand to make fennel pesto,
she decided to harvest some of the fennel’s pale green feathery
fronds. She could clean and grind the fennel that night, then,
after a quick shopping trip, she could finish the project in the
morning. Fennel pesto, either alone, or with grilled sweet Italian
sausage, or with sautéed sea scallops or with bacon had been one of
the quick winter meals for the Kosters for most of the years that
they had lived in Rhode Island.

Bett brushed her way between the rows of tall
wispy, plants with their yellow firework burst heads of developing
seed. She deeply inhaled the anise smell which was so clean it cut
through the muggy air. With a small groan let herself down onto one
knee so that she might reach the lower stems.

Several times during the weekend, Bett had
felt as if she were filming things rather than living them.
Thoughts of her biopsy had acted as a lens to reduce, filter and
crop the things going on around her. Working her way down the row
of tickling fronds, she replayed images to see what she had missed:
A frame filled up with Dilly laughing too hard and talking too
loud. Dilly must have given a thousand orders in three days to her
children, to her nephews, to her sisters, and to her parents, to
Queenie. Drink this. Don’t eat that. Wear that. Think this. Set the
table this way. Clear the dishes that way. The thermos goes here.
The beach umbrella there. Don’t run in the sand. Don’t splash in
the water. Don’t. Do. Don’t. Typical Dilly. Except. Something. It
took several minutes for Bett to put together a supercharged moment
in the laundry room as the two of them slopped sandy swimsuits
under the faucets, another moment of confused conversation when she
had found Dilly up early on Sunday morning, alone, dangling her
feet into the water at the end of the dock with the realization
that of Dilly’s thousand orders none had been directed at Bill.
Bill hadn’t even arrived until Sunday noon.

Bett’s stomach rose, then, settled softly in
a sigh as she realized that Dilly must have wanted to talk to her
about Bill. Or their marriage or… If there were trouble between
Bill and Dilly it wouldn’t surprise her. Despite a long time
commitment not to judge her children’s relationships, Bette often
had thought that the Koster-Phelps marriage was as delicately
cobbled together as a Balkan alliance. She recalled a conversation
that she and Neil had had the previous year after everyone had left
late on Labor Day. They had discussed how life would change for
Dilly with Kate starting school that week. Dilly would be left at
home with no one except for a rabbit. Neither Neil nor she had been
able to come up with a good guess as to where Dilly’s energy would
be channeled. Now, a year later, it was even harder to figure what
was happening inside the Koster-Phelps family.

Bett worried about her oldest daughter. For
someone who expended such great amounts of energy, someone who
constantly hissed and sputtered, gurgled and steamed, someone who
seemed to ventilate every thought and emotion that rose inside her,
there was a pent-up, pressurized feeling about Dilly that was very
disturbing. Bett regretted that she hadn’t listened harder and
looked deeper.

Bett wished that she had gotten more from
Dilly and that she had given more to Nita. Soon after she had
arrived, Nita had asked her mother if they could talk. They had
tried. There had been twenty minutes together walking along Town
Beach, but it had been hard to concentrate with thousands of
desperate end-of-summer revelers surrounding them. They had found a
few more minutes alone while shucking corn. Several other times
they had been interrupted within minutes of beginning a
conversation. Bett had gotten the some of the details. Nita felt as
if she had lost not only the ten long years when the cervical
cancer was a threat but also the ten short years after. Fear of
cancer had taught Nita to keep her life drawn tightly around
herself. When the fear had begun to pass, she had tried to re-start
the emotional part of her life. But, even though the threat had
passed, she was now realizing, her control remained. She had caught
herself in a whipsaw. Although she had drawn many men near to her,
she had denied them all intimacy as if she feared more treachery.
Lately, it had gotten so that she pushed away anyone who even
expressed an interest. She was afraid of intimacy, and she was
afraid she was going to pass up and over the last youthful rise of
her life and begin the long decline as a bright, polite,
successful, obdurate, emotionally inviolable, lonely woman. She
didn’t know which fear, of intimacy, or loneliness, was
greater.

Bett had listened and hurt. She had tried to
share the breathtaking excitement of being unguarded with someone.
To give to Nita the roller coaster feeling of being
vulnerable—which Bett saw as the keystone of intimacy. To give away
her memories of that voluntary uncovering, that un-posed nakedness,
that threat-filled thrill of hiding nothing. Of being only as one
really was. Of making the pitch black blind leap of faith toward
another. Bett had wanted to give her daughter the feeling, that
most catalytic of joys, when the viewer took in the other’s
nakedness and neither turned away in disgust or disappointment, nor
used the new knowledge to harm. These freely offered truths—whether
a sinister sign given in the heat thick dark of a spoor-filled
bedroom, the half-choked laugh at the protests of a gaseous belly,
or the clenching wetness of a sweaty hand as one entered a room of
strangers—these sharings, were the rough-edged foundations of
intimacy. These tradings of fears and weaknesses were the
remittances of love. Bett had wanted to hold her stiff-spined
daughter, to shake her, to shout, “Don’t miss this.”

Somehow, Bett had known from the time she was
big enough to work with Opa that love was built upon acceptance.
Infatuation was built upon the mirage of perfection; love’s
foundation was the acceptance of the imperfections of truth. She
had experienced that acceptance a thousand thousand times with
Neil. She knew about intimacy. She had wanted to talk about it. But
she found herself as tongue-tied as a stutterer facing a long row
of b’s and p’s. She knew that it was the thing inside her flesh,
the thing that was making her vulnerable in a way she had never
been before, that was responsible for her muteness. She had wanted
to reach across her own new fear to the pain and fear of Nita, but
she had found that she could not. The discovery of this new
fear-raised inability to share the truth gave Bett an understanding
of Nita and of how the DES had affected her, an understanding which
went far deeper than it ever had before. The fear, the covering up,
the moat around her emotions, all the distancing that just the
merest possibility of death was bringing to her, made her feel
closer to her daughter than she had in twenty years.

The weekend had ended before their
communication had really begun. Bett had hugged Nita tightly as she
stood by the door of her car. She had promised Nita that they would
have a long, uninterrupted talk soon. As she gathered the fennel,
Bett remade the vow. For Nita. And for Lise. She felt shame that
she had praised Brad for sharing at the same moment that she was
hiding herself from Lise. She wondered what Lise would think when
she found out how hypocritical her mother had been. She needed to
re-find her strength.