Warm Wuinter's Garden (27 page)

“It’s funny to hear you say that. Over
Christmas one of my daughters, my middle one Nita, was trying to
explain the Golden Mean to Kate, Dilly’s younger girl.”

“That’s parental heresy. Did Dilly protest
that Nita was subverting her authority?”

“Dilly wasn’t in the room.”

“Thank God. The Golden Mean is a terrible
thing for a child to learn if you’re that child’s parent. Free
will. Choice. Reason. All anathema to authority.

“Well, this should be sinfully rich by now.
Black or white, my dear?”

“Black, please.”

Ellen passed the small flowered cup and
saucer to Bett.

“Ohhhh, such daring. Now, you’re getting it.
A bold blackguard. I toast you. To our resilient health and
indomitable spirits.”

Bett slightly lifted her cup toward Ellen.
Ellen dipped her head in appreciation then asked, “And, now, having
toasted, perhaps you’ll tell me why you’re so squinched up around
the eyes. Bad news? You came through the door looking like you were
carrying more weight than just your purse.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

“My dear, I plan to be one of those old
ladies who knows everything. Kind of a Miss Marple type. Casing the
neighborhood. Inquisitioning the neighborhood children. Keeping
tabs. Nosing around everybody’s business as my own gets less
interesting. And all the while being old-womanly, snappishly
direct. As now. What’s wrong?”

“Everything is starting over.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just came from the doctor. I had a
terrible check-up. They want me to do more radiation and probably
chemotherapy.”

“I’m so sorry, dear. Here, let me hug
you.”

Ellen stood and walked the two steps to Bett.
Bett remained seated for a moment as she fought the urge to push
away from Ellen’s affection. When she finally did stand Bett kept
her head down and her arms as limp at her sides as a guilty
child.

Ellen tried to look under Bett’s brow to find
her eyes.

“Oh, I can tell that this is going to be
satisfying.”

Ellen dropped her voice an octave and barked,
“C’mon, Koster, get those arms up. If you want to surrender, do it
at the end of the war, not at the beginning of the fight.”

Bett started to murmur something.

“Don’t be sorry. Just hug me.”

Ellen wedged her shoulder and hip against
Bett and squeezed her tight. After a slight hesitation, Bett felt
strength come to her arms and she squeezed Ellen back. In her ear
Bett heard Ellen whisper, “Not too bony?”

“No.”

“Damn bag. All my intimacies have to be
tangential. All right, break free, gentlewomen, and go to your
corners.”

After Ellen sat back down, she stared at Bett
with a warm eyes and a firmly set mouth for a moment before asking,
“Now, what did they say?”

“They’ve found a tumor in my leg.”

“In your leg?”

“In my femur. They say it’s not unusual. A
lot of breast cancers metastasize to the bones. Supposedly the
tumor is not that big so they’re not surprised the bone scan I had
in the fall didn’t pick it up.”

“How bad is it?”

“They never really say, do they? Or maybe
they think they do, but they say it in such a way that you’re not
sure what you’ve been told. Because of the jargon and probably, to
be fair, because it’s so hard to hear what they’re saying. But,
obviously it’s not good. Bone cancer doesn’t sound very good to
me.”

“What do they want to do?”

“Be aggressive. Isn’t that always the
watchword? They want to do more radiation and, maybe, chemotherapy.
They said it’ll probably be harder this time. Because the dosages
will be increased. And because I’m already worn down.”

“But no surgery.”

“No, no surgery.”

“No green Jello.”

Despite her feelings of being overwhelmed,
Bett laughed.

“No, no green Jello.”

“Maybe you could have it at home. I could
bring it to you. As we well know, nothing is a stronger incentive
to get well than green J E Hell-double L No. Do you suppose they
ever take one minute in medical school to discuss the impact of
hospital food on the patient?”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

Ellen picked up a spoon, held it close to her
mouth as if it were a microphone, and lowered her voice. “At
Kill’em hospital today two more patients went into gelatin comas.
Scientists say that the vibrations of the brightly-hued colloid as
it’s wheeled into the patient’s room may be setting off a
concatenated vibration inside the patient’s skull. The evidence to
date seems to suggest that the longer the stay the stronger the
vibratory response. Dr. Dessertthevurst theorizes that the longer
the patient is hospitalized the more his brain is apt to turn to
Jello both from too much television and the large intake of the
synthetic sweetness of the staff. He posits that when gelatinous
food is added to the patient’s desuetude the two variables interact
to turn the poor slob’s brain to gray J E L—well, you know
what.”

Bett smiled. Ellen caught her eye.

“Koster, I’m working pretty hard here. Could
you give me a little more positive response?”

As Bett widened her smile and began to nod
her head up and down, tears formed in her eyes.

Ellen reached her liver-spotted fingers out
to hold Bett’s hand.

“Let it go. Cry all you want. I even think
I’ll join you.”

The tea was cold and Ellen’s hand felt
prickly numb and her ring finger ached from being gouged before
Bett’s silent weeping was complete.

“I don’t think I would feel this badly if I
hadn’t felt so good over the holidays. You remember how badly I
felt all through November and into December? Then, it all that went
away. I felt like my old self. It was wonderful. I had energy. I
wasn’t exhausted. The burning went away. I think I used all those
good feelings to convince myself that everything was over. I’d done
my part and I’d won.

“A couple of weeks ago I started to get a lot
of pain in my leg, my right one. I thought it might just be my
varicose veins, or weather or tension from worrying about Neil. I
never even considered that it might be something bad. Well, not
much. I told the doctor. He ordered another bone scan and found the
growth.

“I almost wish that I hadn’t felt so good. I
let my hopes get the best of me.”

Ellen shook her head at Bett’s conclusion,
“Hope’s about the only fuel we can travel on when we’re fighting
something big. Don’t you dare chide yourself for being hopeful.
Hope made those days even better.”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. Not after the news
you’ve gotten today. But, I do know. Hope helps and you’re going to
need help. You’re going to need all the hope that you can muster. I
want you to know that in my heart of hearts I know you’re going to
be all right. I feel that very strongly.”

“I don’t, Ellen. I’m not sure I’ve got much
left with which to fight.”

“You do, Koster. Believe me. You do.”

For the next two hours Ellen and Bett drank
tea. Ellen did almost all of the talking. Most of her stories were
about singing and dancing for the GIs in France and Italy during
World War II. She used those stories because they were old
stories—carefully crafted, oft-told—which freed her mind to think
on Bett. She worried Bett might not make the strongest fight for
her life. She had known many people who had had so much practice at
success they had never had the opportunity to train for
failure.

Lise rang Dilly’s doorbell. No one answered.
She rang several more times. No response. She could hear numerous
sounds coming from inside the house. She tried the door. It was
unlocked and she walked inside. The television was on in the family
room, but there was no one watching it. Except a rabbit which, from
its random, violent hopping, seemed to have been imbued with some
of the same energy that motivated the Saturday morning cartoon
characters flickering on the screen. From the back of the house
came the sound of the dishwasher. As Lise approached the kitchen
doorway she noted the point where the violent spray of water
thrashing around inside its metal box overwhelmed the television’s
noise. The kitchen was unoccupied. She theorized about the physics
of a family expending energy without even being present. In the
second’s lull as the dishwasher switched cycles, she heard a
distant drone. She opened the scarred door and picked her way up
the book and bottle and toy and shoe laden back stairs. The
cataract roar of the dishwasher was overwhelmed by the high-pitched
shriek of a vacuum sweeper. Lise imagined molecules dancing faster
and faster in a heated retort. The sound deepened and hollowed as
the metal sweeper head left a rug and was pushed across bare floor.
Lise could see the head banged against the side of the door frame
several times before being followed through the door by the silver
wand and then by the ward of the wand, Jessie. Lise had to get
right next to her niece and yell before Jessie noticed her.

“Hi, Jessie, how are you? Where is
everybody?”

Jessica mouthed words which seemed to carry
no sound. Lise cocked her ear in question. Jessie’s mouth moved
again. Despite her concentrated effort to hear the sounds and see
their shape as they formed upon Jessie’s mouth, Lise understood
nothing. When Lise shrugged her shoulders, Jessie stood on tiptoe
and shouted, “Czczchhyppnnggg.”

Lise pointed downstairs. Jessica raised her
eyebrows, smiled a beatific smile and went back to work vacuuming
up the radon and lead-laden dust and making sure she got all of the
chips of paint and splinters she was banging loose from the
baseboards and door frames.

As Lise walked back downstairs, she analyzed
the sound Jessica had made. Changing the accents and substituting
vowels, she was back in the room with the hyperactive rabbit before
she decided that “shopping” was the most likely translation.

As she waited for Dilly, Lise experimented
with the relationship between the audio and visual aspects of the
television and the rabbit’s behavior. She raised and lowered the
volume and changed the brightness and tint. The rabbit continued
its frantic bouncing. After several minutes of experimentation she
concluded that the rabbit’s manic hopping was independent of the
specific output from the television. She thought that the rabbit’s
apparently random expending of energy just might be an imitative
behavior the rabbit had adopted to feel at home with the
Koster-Phelps family. When she heard the roar of a car grow loud,
then, louder, then, impossibly loud, then stop abruptly, she bent
down to the now paralyzed rabbit and whispered, “God help you,
little buddy.”

“Lise, Lise. you’re here. I knew it. I told
the man.

“Roger, Roger, jail that rabbit.”

“Mom, Mom, it’s too cold downstairs.”

“Roger, that rabbit’s warmer down cellar than
wrapped in a newspaper and buried in a shoebox.”

“Mom, Mom!”

“Roger! C’mon! Hurry up! Or he’ll be making
bunny beans all over the floor.”

“I’ll hold him, Mom.”

“If you want, but it’s going to be a tight
squeeze with both of you in that cage. Go.”

Lise watched Roger hop after the erratically
bouncing rabbit.

“Here boy, here Uppy. C’mon boy. C’mon Uppy.
Updike! Come here.”

“Been here long?”

“No, just got here.”

“I thought we had plenty of time, but I
didn’t count on backing over a shopping cart and amputating my
muffler.”

“I heard.”

“Someone must have already hit it ‘cause it
had to be on its side otherwise I would’ve seen it. Perfect, huh?
This old man was there. Had that eager volunteer spirit of the
newly retired. You know? He wanted to do this and that. Did I have
a screwdriver? He could go over there and get a thing and probably…
And I’m saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind’—which was
the God’s truth—’Please, just give me my pipes. I have to go.’ He’s
got the pieces and he’s kind of tentatively touching them together
like the slow kids in day care do with Lincoln Logs. You know, you
know?”

Dilly opened her eyes wide, cocked her head
to one side, and sighting along the length of one arm slowly
brought her two fists together.

Lise laughed. She was feeling better with the
real Dilly than with the projection of her sister which she had
been conjuring up during the three days since inviting herself out
for a visit.

“What’d you do?”

“I said you, well not you specifically, but
someone, a visitor, was arriving at my house and that I had to get
home. He kept doing Playskool. Finally, I had to kind of tear the
pipes out of his hands. ‘Please, give me my parts.’ God, if he
wanted to be helpful he should’ve tried to restore the shopping
cart back to three dimensions. The way I left it looked more like a
folded wheel chair. Might have held a frozen pizza box sideways,
but not much more. What a trip. On the way home, the noise was sooo
bad I kept looking ahead to see if anyone I know, which is only
about half the town, was coming my way. Three times I saw someone
and had to throw it into neutral and coast by giving a little toot
and a big smile and a big wave.

“Want coffee? Jessica, did you finish?”

Lise and Jessica both answered
simultaneously—Jessica in the affirmative and Lise in the
negative.

Dilly charged out of the family room.

“Well, keep going, honey. Here, Lise, it’s
already made. In the kitchen.”

Lise decided not to protest. She hoped that,
with Dilly’s health concerns, the coffee might be decaffeinated
since she knew it wouldn’t be wise to fill up on caffeine at the
beginning of a day with her sister.

“Where’s Bill?”

“Where else? Work.”

“Oh.”

“He’ll be home later.”

“How’s his work been?”

“Intense. As things get slower at the
company, it gets busier for him.”