Warm Wuinter's Garden (13 page)

“I’m better off alone when I’m sick. You know
that. Remember how we used to farm the kids out when I would get
sick? Being sick takes a lot of energy, and getting well takes even
more. If I’m alone, then I can concentrate on what I have to do.
That’s the whole reason for spending the extra money on a private
room. If the kids know that I’m here, I lose the private room.”

“I understand. I’m different. I’d want
everybody here. At least the time would go by. I’ll try. I’ll do my
best. But, you know, if Dilly suspects anything, if she gets going,
I’m bound to crack. Our best spies couldn’t hold out against that
interrogation. She’s the one that should have been a lawyer, or,
maybe, a cop. Her investigative skills are too good to be wasted on
the small crimes of childhood. I’ll try.”

“I know you will, Neil. Anyway, I don’t even
think that it’ll come up. I’ll be home tomorrow, and we’ll give
them all a call and tell them the good news.

“You better leave.”

Neil nodded his head in agreement. He pushed
himself up from the chair in which he was sitting.

“I’ll be back in the morning.”

“I’ll be right here.”

“Our bed’s going to feel pretty empty
tonight.”

“Save my place.”

Neil opened his arms and Bett stepped into
their hug. He bent his back so that he could bring his mouth to her
ear.

“I love you.”

Bett freed one arm from his embrace and used
it to draw his head down so that she could whisper back, “I love
you, too, Neil Koster. Always and ever. My only pash.”

Neil’s eyes moistened when he heard her call
him her passion. It was a word that she used only for special
occasions in the same way someone else might get out the family
silver for a birthday dinner. Each tightened his hold on the other
in reassurance.

“Sleep tight.”

“You, too.”

“Drugged, I expect.”

“I’ll be here in the morning.”

“Bye bye.”

* * *

Bett awoke as if the sound of voices drifting
under the closed doorway had been smoke—instantly and intensely
alert. But, disoriented. She thrashed herself up to a half-sitting
position for a moment of heart-pounding wariness before falling
back. The room was awash in amber as the lights from the parking
lot seeped through the orange curtains. Wisps of sound—muted
voices, the one-note chime of an elevator, the susurration of the
air conditioner, a car engine starting up—wandered aimlessly in
through her ears and out, around the densely shadowed room, into
her ears again, once around her lightly medicated mind, and out
again.

The patient tried to discipline her breathing
so that it pulsed as steadily as the machinery guarding the
temperature of the building. Despite her efforts, Bett’s chest
continued to heave intermittently. Each time it did, the rasp of
the moving sheets resounded in her ears. Bett flexed her feet until
they hurt, then, relaxed them. She did the same with her calves,
her thighs, her biceps, and, lastly, her hands. Several times she
curled her hands into tight fists before opening and splaying her
fingers. She put the fingers of her right hand onto her chest to
feel her heart beat. She began counting the beats. By the time she
reached one hundred, her heart seemed to have slowed. She counted
to one hundred a second time at a pace that was slower than, and
independent of, her heart’s beating. By the end of the second round
her heart had slowed itself to match its beat to the tickings in
her head. Bett moved her hand over to her right breast. Even with
her warm fingertips just barely touching the flushed skin, she
thought that she could feel the outline of the growth. With the
smooth hard edge of her index finger nail, she traced various
incision lines on her flattened breast. It was hard to think of a
knife, she imagined a matte knife, slicing through her skin and
deep enough into her flesh to reach the buried mass. Once the blade
had been drawn through her flesh, what would be found? In the days
since Dr. Maurer first had guided her fingers to the lump, she had
had scores of different images flit through her mind.

A small, smooth gray stone. A mucus slick,
maroon-colored chicken heart. A ball of white roots wrapped around
grains of vermiculite. Miss Muffet’s watchful spider with its legs
tucked up underneath itself. A shiny, dun-colored beetle. The ruby
viscousness of a new scab. A pale pea in a blood red pod. A knot of
bittersweet snarled around a lilac. A horse chestnut with the
spines of its husk holding itself in place in her flesh. A tiny,
pink furless opossum growing in its pouch. A lump of brie ripening
and oozing outward. A wad of bread dough rising, growing softer and
spongier as it grew. A pearl with a map of minute red and blue
vessels winding through the nacre.

For each of the images of the mass she had
heard a verb describe its removal. Excised. Eradicated. Removed.
Expurgated. Divested. Popped out. Gouged out. Dug out. Chopped out.
Pulled out. Torn out. Cut. Out. That was the important thing. That
it, in any and all of its Hydra headed forms, was going to come
out. But it was hard to hold onto the thought of the growth’s
removal along with the thought of being flat on her back with the
pressure of a knife drawing through her flesh.

Bett rolled onto her left side. She moved her
nail along the deep crease that had formed in her skin along her
sternum by the shifting of her breast’s weight. She could imagine a
cut along that crease. A small cut and a reaching in to remove a
smooth gray stone. She shifted the focus of her fingertips and her
thoughts from the mass itself to her breast. She tried to imagine
what it would feel like to be as she was, rolled onto her left
side, but without the weight of her breast pulling down. She cupped
her right hand under her breast to heft its weight and then held it
to let her body feel free of its weight.

Bett couldn’t have been more than eight. She
was running along the lane that passed through a twelve acre stand
of red pines, then, ran alongside a field of timothy and another
field of corn, to the hay barn that stood across the dirt road from
the main house of The Chimneys. The two tracks of the lane had been
cut deep by the frequent passage of tractor and truck wheels. The
deep, fine, caramel-colored dust in the tracks muffled the sounds
of her feet. The wind from her passage had pulled her thick
sun-bleached hair out behind her. She could feel its lofted weight
trying to tug her head up straight. She pulled against the weight
to look down at the puffs of dust exploding beneath her feet.
Running bare-chested, she saw the shape and number of her ribs as
her chest drew deep the hot summer air. As she came to a turn in
the lane where the short side of the corn field abutted the long
side of the gray-green timothy, she used her arms as wings to bank
into the curve. Rounding the curve, her lower arm hit the half-open
pod of a milkweed plant. The sharp sting to her hand caused her to
look back. A wake of white fluff, iridescent in the fading
sunlight, streamed behind her. She felt herself to be as light as
the fluff-born seed. She was running faster than she ever had run
in her life. She could feel she was on the verge of flight. She
stretched and her stride lengthened. She was running as fast and as
wild as any deer had ever bounded along that path at dusk, startled
from its feeding by an unfamiliar sound. As she ran the final yards
to the worn wooden wagon ramp of the barn, she saw Opa, sitting in
the shadows on an upended crate, shelling the last of the previous
year’s popcorn into a metal pail. With the blade-like sharpness of
her breath cutting through her words she had yelled, “Opa, Opa, I
saw a fox, a big one, and I wasn’t even scared.”

She was scared now. And, if she were to have
a breast removed she knew that the surgery would not half restore
to her the exhilaration that she had felt when, as a young
breast-free girl, she had outraced the fox and chased flight along
a hot dry dusty path.

How she had loved to run. Although one of the
shortest, she had been one of the fastest children in the
neighborhood. She had believed in Opa’s theory of running. He often
had told her that the secret to running was picking them up and
putting them down faster than anyone else. From time to time, she
would experiment. She had tried running with various gaits and
styles. She tried moving her arms in tighter piston strokes. She
had tried running on her toes. She had tried breathing only through
her nose. But in the end she had always gone back to the focused
concentration of picking them up fast and putting them down
faster.

She had loved running. But by the start of
her junior year in high school, she had stopped. Over that summer
between her sophomore and junior year, her breasts had grown so
large that running had felt more like slogging knee deep through
the waters of the mud-thick Eel River than like the nearness of
flight. Holding her heavy breast in the darkened hospital room,
Bett recalled the sense of betrayal she had felt as her breasts had
begun to grow. As her body had changed, irrespective of her wishes,
she had grown bitter. As friends around her began growing up, she
had been growing out. As her two best friends, Susan Weitzel and
Eleanor Schlemmer, had grown from less than five feet to more than
five feet six, she had crossed the five foot mark and stopped.
Where her friends’ hips and breasts had begun to slowly curve and
fill, hers had turned into the round lines of a matron almost
overnight. As she had once told a college roommate who had
commented on the size of Bett’s breasts, she had gone from nubs to
jugs to dugs in less than four years.

As Bett’s breasts grew full, as girls, then
boys, then, seemingly, everyone, took notice of the change, she had
felt herself being pulled in and channeled. Each change in her body
had shortened and restricted the definition of herself. The weight
of the new flesh massed in front of her mired her. It constrained
her. It redefined her. She lost the broad rights of androgyny, to
asexual action, that her prepubescent flesh had afforded her. She
lost her chance of flight. As her breasts grew, Bett’s dreams first
shrank, then, after a while, changed. It was during those
intervening years that Bett could not fathom the other girls’ envy
of what to her was such a burden. She couldn’t understand why
anyone would want an excess of flesh that demanded attention at
each jiggling step. What fool would want a mass of gelatin bobbling
back and forth, up and down, side to side? Who would want the burn
as bra straps cut deep into the thin skin of shoulders? Who would
want the throb that buried itself under shoulder blades as spine
and back muscles tried to carry the new weight? Who would want the
constant distraction of all that surreptitious attention? A man
would notice her from afar. As he approached, he would force his
eyes to hers, but as they drew closer still, his eyes would be
pulled from her face until, just before they passed, his stare
would lock onto her chest. Once past him, she could feel the
twisted neck and curious eyes as he tried to record what he had
seen. It was as if her breasts were the penultimate sign of a Burma
Shave advertisement along a country road. The one that closed the
rhyme.

Bett’s breasts had been a bane and a burden.
In high school and, more so, in college, she had had to defend them
from the frantic investigations of poor hormone-muddled boys. To do
so made her feel that she was defending territory that she herself
did not want to claim. By nothing more than a biological quirk, she
was made a mercenary, hired by the mores of the times, to guard
foreign territory that she herself did not value. That sense of
unwanted duty had changed with Neil.

When they first began to date, Neil had
ignored her breasts. His focus had been on Bett herself rather than
on her chest. They had talked for hours, walked for miles, and had
seen a half-dozen movies with none of the quick sharp glances that
she was used to. Even after swinging their way through several
dances, and even after the quick, warm, dry kisses they traded
under the protecting canopy of the sycamore trees outside her
sorority turned to longer, warmer, wetter connections in the front
seat of a borrowed pre-war Chevrolet, Neil seemed to take no
notice. As they advanced in their emotional and slowly developing
physical intimacy, Bett began to think that Neil liked everything
about her but her breasts. The growing realization that he felt
about her breasts as she herself did confused her. She found
herself growing angry that he ignored what she herself tried to
forget. It pained her when he seemed to reject what she herself
despised.

Bett used her left hand to pull the flesh of
her right breast as far toward the left as its flaccid skin would
allow. With her right hand she felt the flatness that she had
created. If she were to return home with that unbalanced flatness,
unrelieved except for the bright red welt of her wound, would he
reject her, or would he act as he had acted forty-five years
before? Would he again, kindly and carefully, avoid drawing
attention to what she would… Bett tried to hold onto the ellipsis.
She wished to leave her thought unfinished, but, despite her
efforts the words completed themselves. …would ignore.

Bett’s face hardened. Is that what she would
do? If she were to leave her breast in this building, to be sliced
up into a deck of metabolically chaotic cards, would she return to
Clarke’s Cove ignoring the incompleteness of her body? Would she
walk back into her home and pick up her life where it was before
the exam? She felt anger growing inside of her. She screwed down
her face so tightly that the umbrous air began to pulsate. Why a
breast? Why would something grow there? What was the point? What
was the point of having breasts on a grandmother anyway? Why didn’t
breasts just go away? During menopause? With all the other changes.
The heat. The crawling skin. The erratic chemistry of menopause
molting a new being out of old flesh. Or was it more pulling an old
being out of young flesh? Why couldn’t there be more change? Dugs
to jugs and, then, back to nubs? Why shouldn’t an old woman return
to the flat-chested weightlessness of her youth? Why, under the
weight of old age, be held even more flightless by this sagging,
useless weight? What was the sense of that? Why would old unwanted
flesh be left to hide such horrible things?