Warm Wuinter's Garden (2 page)

There wasn’t time to think of everything. The
next few days and the upcoming Labor Day weekend would rush by in a
blur of arrivals and departures, distracted hugs and kisses, soggy
towels and sandy grandchildren, beach baskets of squished
sandwiches and bruised fruit, car loads of shopping, a constantly
running washing machine trying to keep up with the limited clothing
of the visitors, and ripening tomatoes, high up on their staked
vines, demanding to be picked before they burst open and oozed red
pulp and slick seeds. And Peter. Each time she had talked to her
only son since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait she had heard a tightness
in his voice that worried her. It reminded her of canning. The
ominous sound of the pressure cooker. But, stop thinking. Get home
first. Home, then, the eggplant, then, the okra. No, first, the
basil, next, the eggplant and, then, the okra.

Bett looked down at her hands tightly
gripping the steering wheel. Although her nails were cut as short
as a man’s and the skin on the backs of her hands was deeply tan,
and although, by loosening her grip and sliding her palms along the
indentations of the wheel, she could feel the pads of her calluses,
and although the yellow of her wedding rings cut deep into the
flesh of her finger and could no longer be removed, even with
dish-soap, she thought that her hands looked too small and too soft
to be able to accomplish the things that needed doing. As her car
passed under the overhanging branches of a stand of old maples, the
flashing of the shadow and sunlight, as fast as the black and
yellow stripes of sun coming through a window fan, made her hands
appear to be shaking. Her breath caught in the back of her throat a
split second before the trees ended and full sunlight was restored.
The intense light caused the diamonds on her hands to dance with
scintillating energy. More precious than the four large diamonds,
each representing a child, which Neil had given to her on their
twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the small solitaire of her
engagement ring, which had belonged to his mother, was the wire
thin band of her wedding ring. Shoveling snow, raking leaves,
washing dishes, doing laundry, mopping floors, ironing, kneading
dough, hugging, kissing, patting and an encyclopedia of other
house-works had worn much of the ring away. The ring had never left
her finger since the day that she and Neil were married.

Bett looked up from her rings in enough time
to avoid the misshapen carcass of an opossum whose grey fur was
dyed red in death. First things first. In all the rush of the next
days, she must make time to collect the seed pods from the
hollyhocks. The tightness around her eyes loosened at her memory of
the hollyhocks at Opa and Oma’s in-town house. The small strip of
yard which separated the carriage house from the wide board white
fence along the alley had been given over to hollyhocks. In one
album there was a picture of Bett holding cookies in one hand and
Oma’s hand in her other. Oma towered over Bett and the hollyhocks
in the background towered over Oma. Although she could not remember
the occasion of the photograph, Bett could easily recall the wonder
of the pink, red and burgundy blossoms reaching ten feet into the
air.

The first autumn after she and Neil moved
from Indiana to Brownford, an old mill town in the hills of western
Massachusetts, they had received a set of eight Meissen egg cups
from Oma. Each of the egg cups had been individually wrapped.
Inside each cup were several of the peculiarly shaped hollyhock
seed pods that always reminded her of a priest’s biretta. The seeds
of Oma’s seeds had been producing flowers in Bett’s gardens for
almost forty years.

Old-fashioned, single bloom hollyhocks were
Bett’s favorite flower; double bloom hollyhocks were among her
least favorite. She had plenty of both because her son Peter
thought hollyhocks were hollyhocks. Every few years, when he
couldn’t think of what else to give to her on Mother’s Day, he
would buy a trunkful of plants. Invariably, there would be two or
three double hollyhocks. After she had thanked him for his
thoughtfulness, she would have to spend from July into October
collecting the pods from the offending stalks before they had the
chance to scatter their unnatural seeds. As she didn’t have the
heart to uproot a volunteer and as it proved impossible to collect
every double blossom seed pod, Bett had become resigned to having
Oma’s beautiful pink, cerise, red, cream and burgundy blossoms, so
carefully collected and tended over the years, mix with the fecund
sog of the doubles. Bett had never been able to understand what
kind of person, whether scientist or plant lover, would want to
stretch the genetic boundaries of a hollyhock so that it produced a
profusion of flowers that better belonged on a carnation or mum.
The deeper colors of the doubles were so rich that they dyed her
hands and stained her khakis when she collected their pods and
protected their unwelcome stalks by tying them to the fence. Worse,
the double blossoms so quickly turned to pulp. After a shower or a
day or two of muggy weather, the blossoms were like the rain-soaked
aftermath of a tissue flower homecoming float. Soft, soggy, and
bleeding color.

Although Bett normally planted hollyhock
seeds in the fall, she thought this year she should collect the
seeds and put them into labeled jars. Just in case. That way there
would be no need for arguing. There would be plenty of seed to go
around for her children.

Bett thought that children were like
hollyhocks. Their colors mutated over time. They became what they
became. The outside world hit the inside. No one could guess the
result. Less than a year in Vietnam had changed Peter more than all
the years he had lived with them. The DES had altered Nita in so
many ways. It seemed so random. Engrossed in the capriciousness of
parenting, Bett was forced to hit the brake pedal hard at the
sharply curved merge of Dana Road and Route 1. The tires squealed
against the hot asphalt. First things first. The cleome seeds had
to be gathered by color. The light green feathers of the fennel
would have to be snipped so that it could be made into the pesto
that was so good with scallops and shrimp. There should be time to
collect the seed heads, which resembled a burst of fireworks, and
harvest the seeds that she used in tomato sauces and Christmas
cookies. At season’s end, she could pull up the plants, lop the
stalks into eighteen inch lengths, then, bundle them. Few things
tasted better than just-caught bluefish grilled over sweet smoking,
water-soaked fennel stalks. The rosemary, sage and lemon balm
needed to be dug up from the herb garden, potted and brought inside
if they were to survive the winter. The glads needed to be dug, the
bulbs dried, and the old corms picked off before they were stored.
As soon as there was a hard frost, the dahlia roots would need to
come in to be stored in the root cellar in cantaloupe crates lined
with newspaper. Neither Neil nor the kids would know, so she should
label the crates by color. Then, she needed…

Without checking her rear view mirror, Bett
braked abruptly before swerving into the breakdown lane. She pulled
the car half off onto the verge while being careful to avoid a
patch of blooming fireweed, its hot pink flowers somewhat muted by
a thin covering of dust, and a large clump of gone-by lazy susans
whose burry heads were crooked over as if in hung in shame.

First things first.

First things and second things and third
things had rarely been a problem for Bett Koster. A million things
could need doing and, invariably, she would know which should come
first and next and last. When she was no more than a child of five
she had been praised for her common sense by Oma. Often during
their marriage, Neil had thrown up his hands in surrender at some
project, such as assembling a gas grill or baby crib or repacking
boxes of Christmas ornaments. He would step back, shrug his
shoulders, then, nod his head in encouragement as he said, “C’mon,
help me, you’re the expert.” Bett could almost believe that it was
true. She instinctively knew how to hold a baby or a bazaar for the
church. She knew how to graciously seat a dinner party of ten and,
just as graciously, unseat a short-sighted PTA committee member.
Without knowing how she knew, she could to adjust the brake on a
bicycle and the choke setting on a lawnmower. The many details of
her daughter Dilly’s wedding had settled into her head in their
natural order. The timing of a Christmas dinner would come to her
without any prompting. It was easy to believe that she had been
born competent. And, it was that long natural familiarity with
competence which made the scattered, topsy-turvy feelings that she
had been having as she drove through the rippling mirages of a
heated highway so disquieting.

Bett rubbed her calluses against the ridge of
the steering wheel. This was too quick. Falling in love with Neil
had taken many months. There had been no sudden infatuation, but
rather a comfortable friendship that had gradually transformed
itself into a different kind of intimacy. The birth of each of her
children had taken three seasons. Oma and Opa had had years of
declining health before they died within four months apart. Only
her parents’ deaths, when their month-old Buick collided with a
truck loaded with hay on the curve of a graveled road, had been
quick, but she, just turned three, had been just as quick to
recover. With the exception of her parents’ deaths, all of the
momentous events in her life had taken much longer than a moment to
occur.

Dr. Maurer had called it a mass. He had
lifted her right breast and made her feel its spheric presence deep
inside her flesh. She had gone in for an eleven o’ clock
appointment to have her yearly check-up. It was past eleven thirty
before Dr. Maurer and the nurse who had weighed her and taken her
blood pressure had come into the examination room. As Dr. Maurer
looked through her file, he had teased her about whether eighteen
months between visits qualified as a yearly exam. She had teased
back that whenever she was free, his dance card seemed to be full.
They had conducted the polished question and answer routine of a
busy doctor and a healthy patient. No. No, no, yes, no. Yes. Yes.
Each answer was barely out of her mouth before the doctor’s next
question began. As the physical exam began, Dr. Maurer made small
murmurs of approval which reminded Bett of the noises Queenie made
when she was sleeping. She pushed away the thought, which made her
want to snort, by concentrating on the warm dry fingers of Dr.
Maurer.

The doctor looked into her eyes and ears.
Mmmmm. He touched a mole on her deeply tanned cheek. Yes, she knew
that so much sun wasn’t good. Mmmmm. He depressed her tongue.
Mmmmm. He rolled his fingers against the nodes of her neck. Mmmmm.
He asked her to lie back. In the process of kneading the flesh of
her right breast, his sounds of contentment stopped. His fingers
pushed harder into her as he worked the same area over and over.
With his head bent down close to her breast as if he were trying to
see through the skin to what he was feeling, with his head bent
down so far that Bett could not see his eyes, Dr. Maurer said, in a
voice so soft that it took her a moment to realize what it was that
she had heard,

“You have a mass. Did you know you have a
lump? We’ll need to have that checked out. It’s not a big one. Most
lumps are nothing to be worried about, but we need to be sure.”

Bett wondered why Dr. Maurer chose to use the
first person plural pronoun. Why did he think that
he
also
needed to have this “mass” checked out? How would it affect
his
life? When he stood back up, she tried to read what was
in Dr. Maurer’s eyes, but she could see nothing more than a direct
gaze of calm good will. He reached down for her hands which had
knotted themselves to the sides of the examination table.

“Here, let me show you.”

Bett unclenched her fingers and allowed her
hands to be drawn to her breast. Even before she touched herself,
she thought she could distinguish the foreignness of the thing
inside her. It seemed so separate from who she was that she was
surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. It felt as though there was
a gap between it and the flesh around it, as if her normal cells
were trying to make way for the stranger. When Bett’s fingers found
the resistance it did not feel as she thought it would. She had
expected it to feel more like a crocus bulb. She thought “mass” was
a good name for the amorphous otherness she was feeling. She could
envision a bunch of fibers all clotted together. She could imagine
it looking like the kind of thing she had often pulled from a
clogged drain, except that it would be red. Her fingers massaged
the resistance for a long while with the same inquisitiveness that
a tongue has for the rough edge of a crumbling filling.

“Feel it?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we see if we can get you in for a
picture today? Jenny can call Rhode Island Radiology, just down the
road, to see if they can squeeze you in.”

As she stared at Jenny, who was smiling and
nodding her head in agreement, Bett wondered whether Dr. Maurer had
intended the pun. As he felt her other breast, Dr. Maurer kept up a
conversation as if he needed to keep himself busy.

“You don’t strike me as a worrier, but even
non-worriers have been known to worry about a lump. Sometimes if
they find the lump themselves, they worry so much that they put off
doing anything about it. Do you have some time today?”

Flipping through magazines in the waiting
room Bett had been peeved that her appointment had not started on
time. There were very few days in Bett Koster’s life that were not
filled with things to do; however she could accept that things
didn’t always go according to plan.

“Some of my tomatoes expected to be canned
today. I guess they’ll just have to understand.”