Warm Wuinter's Garden (17 page)

“Honey, I’m home. I’m fine.”

“You must be the exception. People who get
out of the hospital, those who manage to survive, aren’t fine. They
need at least a week at home to recover from each day in the
hospital. And that has nothing to do with the surgery or the reason
that they went in the first place. That’s just the time it takes to
recover from the lack of nutrition, the lack of fresh air, the
exposure to every kind of germ imaginable and the lack of sleep
from the constant noise and interruptions. It’s got to take two
weeks just to de-tox from the television. Were you in a private or
a double room?”

Bett felt a small knot in her stomach draw
tight as the search light swung back onto her. She quickly
formulated her answer in a way that she thought might divert
Dilly’s attention.

“Both. I started in a private room and then
moved to another room when I got tired of being alone. There were
two of us. A very nice woman. Very nice. With diverticulitis.”

“Oh, my God. She’d probably just had a
colonoscopy. It must have been terrible. How bad was the
smell?”

“Honey, there wasn’t any.”

“Mother, Mother, how could there not be a
smell? They made a hole in her colon. How could she not smell?”

“Dilly, she didn’t smell, she was fitted with
a bag.”

Dilly gave two loud sighs as she shifted her
voice into its patient mode. She began to speak more slowly as if
her mother were from China.

“Mother, Mother, you know how you complain
when Dad brings that terrible limburger cheese home from the
grocery.”

“Yes, dear. It’s not my favorite. The odor
has caught me off-guard several times.”

“That would be the odor of a dirty
diaper?”

Bett laughed. “It’s close.”

“And where does the limburger come from?”
asked Dilly with more than a tinge of smugness.

“From Germany.”

The anticipatory thrill of approaching
victory entered Dilly’s tone. “Yes, Mother, from Germany. The
Germans make limburger. The same people that are credited with both
brilliant business acumen and, even more so, outstanding
engineering and scientific skills. Right, Mother?”

Knowing now what Dilly’s conclusion was going
to be Bett tried to enrich her voice with as much concessionary
defeat as possible. For just the briefest moment she considered
drawing Dilly’s conclusion for her, but her maternal love quelled
her urge to best her fractious daughter in such a small meaningless
skirmish.

“Yes, Dilly, the Germans have always been
highly regarded as scientists and engineers.”

“So, if the brilliant German scientists can’t
figure out a type of packaging to keep a small block of cheese from
smelling like death by diarrhea before it has even been opened, how
can someone, an American, with a hole in her colon not smell? You
see?”

“Yes, dear. I see what you’re saying. You may
be right, you probably are. Perhaps, she did smell, but I just
failed to notice it. Perhaps it was the medications that I was
on.”

Dilly enjoyed her victory for only a moment
before she continued with her mother’s debriefing. By the end of an
hour, all of Dilly’s preconceptions about the what and how of
Bett’s diagnosis and treatment, ideas which she had been
fabricating from the moment of her father’s phone call, ideas
constructed from the extensive collection of newspaper, television,
magazine and anecdotal scraps which Dilly held helter-skelter in
her mind, all of Dilly’s pre-conceptions were proved true despite
what her mother said to the contrary.

After an hour of being grilled, Bett felt as
sapped as she had the second morning after her surgery—after all
the anesthetic had been absorbed by her body, and after her cells
had had a chance to understand the carpet bombing they had been
through. Bett said she was tired and asked Dilly if she would mind
if she took a quick nap.

No one in the Koster family, except for her
father, ever took naps. To hear her mother admit to tiredness in
the middle of a brilliant blue and gold September day, the kind of
perfect day when a million things could be accomplished, was as
shocking to Dilly as the altered sound of Bett’s voice had been.
Dilly started to say something to rally her mother from tiredness,
but, suddenly, she stopped. An unwelcome truth tried to well over
her. Surrounding her mother with talk and, more importantly,
deadening her own fearsome thoughts with non-stop chatter would not
diminish the threat to her mother, nor, and again more importantly,
the threat to herself. Her vulnerability cut Dilly with a
lancination as sharp and precise as a surgeon’s probe. She reached
for her mother’s hand and squeezed it. As she did, Dilly was unsure
for whom the reassuring gesture was meant.

After Dilly left the room, Bett stared at the
swirls of motes coursing up and down the shards of bright light
coming in at the edge of the blinds. She tried to think of
something from which she could draw strength. A few minutes later
she noticed the far off whir of the food processor. Before she fell
into a light sleep, Bett smiled and ruefully shook her head at the
thought of her oldest daughter, and in so many ways, her youngest
child, reducing anything and everything vegetative in the kitchen
to a healthful sludge.

Less than an hour later, a full deposition’s
worth of new questions drove Dilly back up the stairs to Lise’s
room. She found her mother sleeping. Bett kept her breathing
regular and her lids still until Dilly turned from the doorway and
made her way back downstairs again.

It wasn’t until after her father had been
offered and meekly eaten a zucchini-laden ersatz gazpacho, until
after the dishes were done and the sun had slid so far down in the
sky that her mother’s face was enshrouded beyond recognition that
Dilly found the courage to ask the questions to which she had no
preconceived answers. In the garnet gloam of her sister’s bedroom,
with much of the heat of the day still lingering in its darkened
corners, Dilly listened to Bett explain the regimen that she would
undergo in the ensuing months. As soon as her wounds had had a
chance to heal, she would begin six weeks of radiologic treatments.
Depending upon the outcome from the radiation, there was a small
chance that a program of chemotherapy might be needed. Although the
doctors were somewhat guarded, as they always were, as nearly as
Bett could tell they were confident that things would be okay. They
acted as if the radiation was primarily cautionary and that there
would be no need for chemotherapy. She herself planned to do what
was suggested. She wasn’t afraid to fight. She had lost a breast.
She might lose her appetite. She might lose sleep or, even, some
hair. But, Bett assured Dilly, she was not going to lose her life.
There was too much to live for. She asked Dilly to tell her sisters
and brother that their mother would need room to fight back against
the cancer. She would need the freedom to fight more than she would
need constant attention. If she needed help, she assured Dilly that
she would ask for it. She promised they would talk on the phone
often, but she asked the visits be kept to a minimum, at least
until the radiation treatment was completed.

As she nodded yes to her mother’s requests,
Dilly was pondering how she would get around them. Her mother
needed her. Maybe not as much as a child, but a lot.

* * *

“She lied to us. I can’t believe it.”

“Dilly, she didn’t.”

“No one knew.”

“That’s her right.”

“We could have helped.”

“We could have hurt.”

“I can’t believe you’re not upset.”

“I can’t believe you are. No, that’s not
true. I can, but, Dilly, it’s her body, her health, and her right
to choose the treatment and the environment. If she didn’t want to
tell us, either because she didn’t want to worry us or because she
didn’t want the confusion of having us around, that
is
her
prerogative.”

“Well, if that’s true, then what’s family
supposed to mean? What
is
the point of being in a family if
not to share these things? Tell me that, Nita.”

“Dilly, she did share it. Just not on the
schedule you would have preferred. By the way, if it’s not too
forward of me, how is she? How’s she feel? How’s she look?”

“She looks terrible, how else would she look?
You should see her, Nita. She looks haggard. She’s lost a
tremendous amount of weight. Her tan’s all gray.”

“A little weight loss shouldn’t hurt her.
How’s she feel?”

“She hurts. I mean they cut her whole breast
off. God, how big a scar is that? I can’t even believe it. No one
has a mastectomy anymore. It’s medieval. Lumpectomy. Everyone gets
a lumpectomy. That surgeon, Falconi, who I certainly never heard of
before today, have you, must hate women.”

“I doubt it. Informed consent holds. Doctors
have to spell out the alternatives. The patient makes the choice. I
had a client last year who had a double mastectomy before they even
found any cancer. Her mother and older sister had both died of
breast cancer. She didn’t want to chance it, so she had both of
them removed. They took her breasts; her husband took a walk; I
took the case. I saw her not too long ago at an aerobics class.
She’s sure that she made the right choice. A new husband’s a lot
easier to get than a new life. She’d watched her sister die.”

“That’s not going to happen here.”

“No one said it was.”

“It’s just so hard to believe. Stupid, too. I
never thought that I’d say that about Mother.”

“Fill me in. Why stupid?’

“You know what? She hadn’t been doing BSE.
Who knows for how long.”

“BSE being?”

“NIIITTTAAAA!”

Nita felt the muscles of her neck tighten as
her sister dragged out the sound of her name as if she were a
vendor at Boston’s Haymarket. It was a sound that Dilly had been
making for more than thirty years. Nita vividly recalled years of
racing around the neighborhood or home from school. Dilly, four
years older, would stop running and turn back toward her to
impatiently shout, NIIITTTAAAA!, to demand that her little sister
run faster. By the time Nita was nine she could run faster than her
overweight sister. As she raced ahead, Nita would hear Dilly
imploring her to slow down by breathlessly yelling,
NIIITTTAAAA!

“BSE. Breast self-examination. Don’t tell me
you don’t do it either.”

“Of course, I do. But, I live in a world of
acronyms. I don’t remember all of them.”

“I can’t believe she wasn’t checking
herself.”

“I guess I can.”

“You can?”

“Sure. Mom’s always taken better care of
everyone else than herself.”

“I can’t get over it. My mother doesn’t check
herself, she gets cancer, she has major surgery, she stays in the
hospital for eight days, and she, and Dad, too, dammit, don’t tell
anyone. What if she’d died? Dad would call, ‘Oh, by the way, your
mother passed away during surgery. Pass it on. I’ve got the lawn to
mow.’”

“She didn’t. When’s the radiation start?”

“They’re not sure. She has to heal some
more…”

While listening to her sister, Nita
remembered the many times when they were young that Dilly had
insisted on nursing her. Being nursed by Dilly was like being a
mouse being played with by a cat. Every time the mouse would start
to escape, the cat would stun it with a controlled blow. If the
mouse remained still too long, the cat would toss it into the air
to perk it up. As a child, if Nita were feverish and fussy and
wanted a story read to her, Dilly would be apt to tuck the too hot
covers around her, command her to shut her eyes, and then turn off
the light. If Nita were to fall asleep, then Dilly would wake her
up to read her a story. In Nita’s opinion, the goal of Dilly’s
ministrations had been less the comfort of the patient and more the
chance to control someone.

As Dilly fumed over the phone, Nita found
herself thinking of what she had felt upon learning that Bett had
had surgery. From the moment she had heard her mother’s voice, Nita
had known that something was wrong. As her mother went through the
chronology of what had happened, Nita had found herself wanting to
stop her, or, at least, to guide the narrative as she might coach a
witness. As Bett proceeded, Nita had found herself freefalling
through her memory. She had had the urge to throw her arms and legs
out wide to increase the resistance, to guide the descent, to brake
the fall.

Nita remembered how, for ten years, she had
lived on the edge of her life knowing that something had been done
to her that could cause her body’s processes to throw off their
law-like behavior, to catapult her over the edge. Although she had
gone on with many aspects of her life and had done so with a spirit
and strength that all around her had admired, a part of Nita, an
intensely aware, energy-consuming aspect of her, had maintained a
constant, vertiginous, fearful vigilance. The years had
passed…slowly… until, finally, at the age of twenty-five she had
been given statistical permission to step back from the edge.

When Bett described the details of what had
happened in the hospital and what was ahead, Nita re-experienced
the sense of being edged toward an abyss. She had wondered if her
mother had wakened yet in the middle of the night with the same
sense that Nita herself had often had that some malign aspect of
her body had taken advantage of her loss of consciousness to begin
its errant growth. Had her mother, too, learned to fear falling
asleep?

As she had listened to her mother that
morning, Nita had heard a second voice, a voice usually too soft to
hear either often or clearly, express satisfaction at the justice
of her mother experiencing what she herself had had to feel for so
long. Nita recoiled from that gloating whisper, but she had heard
it enough times, both as a reader of newspaper tragedies and as a
lawyer, not to try to pretend that it was anything other than her
own surviving victim victor’s voice. She knew that the voice, whose
timbre was no stronger than the rustle of papers in a crowded
courtroom, was a sibling to Dilly’s strident whining. She knew that
its bare audibility made it no less selfish than Dilly’s clarion
call.