Warm Wuinter's Garden (32 page)

Dilly couldn’t accept what she had been
reading. The study must be wrong. The price was just too high. She
went back to the beginning and made herself read more slowly. Some
of the difference was explained by the greater number of accidents
which occurred to left-handers trying to operate in a right-handed
world. Especially automobiles. She tried to think if being
left-handed had caused her to run over the shopping cart the day of
Lise’s visit. When panic began to outrun Dilly’s thoughts, Dilly
herself tried to outrun her panic by escaping from the house.

As she walked along the narrow path that
circumnavigated the pond, Dilly used her right hand to draw cookies
from the bag. In between bites she practiced drawing her name in
the air while holding the stub of a sugar wafer as if it were a
pencil. She would change. She would make herself right-handed.
Somewhere in the attic was a box with a soft-sided penmanship
primer in it. She would find the book and practice the exercises.
Loops and strokes until her right hand was as adept as her left. It
would be the same as going through a total immersion program to
learn to speak German or French.

Laboring up a rise which formed the northern
boundary of the pond, Dilly intermittently closed her eyes to
visualize doing various tasks right-handed. She was encouraged to
realize she already did some things that way. Shaking hands.
Putting keys in the car ignition. Keys in the locks of the house
doors. Starting the lawnmower. Turning on the television. Brushing
the right side of her hair. She had mastered those important tasks.
She would master others. She stuck the index finger of her right
hand into her mouth and began to brush her teeth. Tucking the bag
of food under her elbow, she used her left hand to drive a fork
into a ham and followed by making slicing motions with her right.
It felt very awkward. Too bad. They would just have to eat hacked
ham for awhile. She switched the handle of a frying pan from right
to left and using a cookie as a spatula tried to slide under and
then flip two fried eggs. That was very hard. She would teach the
kids to like scrambled. With the threat of salmonella they
shouldn’t even be eating fried eggs anyway. Cholesterol, too. She
began vacuuming up the muddy incline before her. That was easy.
Washing dishes. She would put the drainer on the right side and
switch to the left sink for the wash water.

The path curved back from the edge of the
pond and grew steeper. Twice Dilly had to stop her practicing to
use her free hand to grab hold of the early spring, slightly
budding, gray-green shoots growing along the sides of the path. She
took up a pen again. “Now is the time.” Not one of the letters came
easily. She whipped her right hand in a number of circles as if she
were twirling a lariat. She tried again. Dilly watched her right
hand make jagged, erratic shapes in the cool, still air. “Now is
the time. Now is the time. Now. Now. N N N N.” The N began to look
like an N, but the eager student couldn’t figure out how to make
the transition to the O. Her wrist wouldn’t bend the way she
thought it should. She crushed her bag of food tightly to her chest
and began again. “N N N No No…” When her foot slipped Dilly dropped
the bag and threw both hands out to catch herself. Despite her
efforts, she lost her balance, flailed, fell hard onto the muddy
trail, and slipped backward several feet before her shoes found
purchase against a small tuft of winter-sered grass.

Dilly lay on the mud feeling the earth’s
magnet pull the heat from her body. She twisted her cheek against
the cold wet dirt so that the tip of her nose just touched the
ground. She smelled the incongruence of the sterility of winter’s
sleeping earth intermingled with the faintest fecund yeast of early
spring. Dilly lay still on the path until the shivering which had
started as a chattering of her teeth spread throughout her body.
She was left-handed. She would die early. Her mother was
left-handed. Her mother would die early, too. Her mother had
cancer. CANCER. Her mother, Her Mother was riddled with the
unreason of her own cells. The bone of her leg was a nest for that
errancy. Dilly had tried so hard, she had gone so fast, but the
numbers could no longer be ignored. Take nine, a child’s life from
seed to bicycle and baseball, take nine away from her. Take nine
and nine and nine away from Bett. Take nine and nine and nine away
and suddenly, oh so suddenly, the only thing left was a cipher. Her
mother would be gone soon. All her years subtracted from her. Minus
nine, minus nine, minus nine. That leaves zero. An L.E. of 0.
Zero.

Dilly’s face grew hard.

No. Not zero. Something must be added
back.

She pushed herself to her knees and went
crawling forward toward the plastic bag filled with treats. She
flung the bag away from her toward the pond. Let the damn ducks
figure out how to take care of themselves. Humans had to.

There it was again. Night’s newest ritual.
The empty air after sleep left, quickly, loudly, in a rocket’s
roar. The downy warmth of half drunk dreams gone in a flash. As if
a window had been flung open to a winter’s thieving wind. Cold,
clear, clean, empty, empty, empty air.

Peter switched on the crook neck lamp. A
light that had been fine to read by when he went to bed was, at
four a.m., too weak to push more than a small circle of darkness
from his head. He switched the light off. He didn’t want the
feeling of being exposed while the perimeter of the room remained
in darkness.

Peter lay rigid in his bed trying to find
some scrap of thought to knead. Something to supplant the
emptiness. For years after his return from Vietnam, through the
years of his marriage and its end, he would wake startled.
Instantly alert, his mind would race with horrific images from
jig-sawed dreams. In the last weeks, all that had changed. He would
be awakened by the sound of memories rushing from his mind. The
emptying scared him. He sought to keep image, color, sound from
being hurled away by his night brain’s whirling. He was afraid that
what was lost at night might not be found with the return of
day.

Increasingly, Peter had found himself doing
some task at The Retreat with fingers or eyes that held no memory.
He had filled a bowl a thousand times with flour and egg and milk
to make crepes. He had ladled a hundred thousand crepes into their
pans and set them on the stove. But, lately, he would whisk the
batter and have no sense if it were thick or thin. He would stare
as the ivory puddles of batter bubbled and set in the thin flared
pans. Lately, he would watch the edges turn to golden lace, yet,
not know when to grab the long steel handle, no, how to flick his
wrist so that the crepe would do a slow somersault in the heat
shimmering air before falling back to the pan on its uncooked side.
The memories of how to make a pair of golden crowns from the
slicing of a lemon, or truss a chicken, or strip the fell from a
rack of lamb had spun away. He would look at a picture of himself
and Gaby and the boys kneeling in front of a sand dune and wonder
in what life those strangers had been brought together.

For years, a strand of thought, as wispy but
as sticky as a web, would hold to him throughout a workday. From
making a roux through whisking a sauce to breaking down the steam
table at the end of the night, his mind would play with memory.
Chop it up. Stir it round. Whisk it. Flip it. Slice it. Peel
it.

Hot green light cutting through jungle
canopy. Turning plants to men. And men to plants. The bubble
bursting sound of distant sniper fire. The enrapturing braid of
smells of holy basil, coriander and nuoc mam in a six seat Da Nang
restaurant. The smooth metal skull of an unexploded shell.

Lately, it had been so hard to hold an image.
A snatch of thought would explode in incandescent white, then, as
suddenly, like a burst shell at night, be sucked back into the
empty black. A black too dark to see what destruction had been
done. He would be left with nothing more than a fading thunder
rolling away from him. And bone rattling fear. At the possibility
of there being nothing in the dark.

Peter unwound himself from the twisted
bedclothes. He wandered through the darkened house trying to
recover something familiar. Each hulk of moon shadowed chair, each
pattern-less plane of rug, each mass of black, be it cup or cruet
or the gossamer gray of curtains, was unknown. He walked to the end
of the family room where the full moon’s glow was brightest. For a
long time he stood watch behind the darker edge of the window
frame. In the old yolk yellow light, winter wounded spears of
grass, looking like the bold slashes from a Japanese brush,
frantically dashed ephemeral messages at the behest of the etesian
winds. A skip of wind hit a pool of sand and ripples of grainy
waves wandered outward. In fierce shaking the bare branches of a
rosa rugosa remonstrated against the wind’s insistence. He
continued to watch at the window even as his feet curled in pain.
He watched the glow of the moon grow ever paler as if it, too, was
being emptied of its essence. Peter watched until the work of the
wind was finished, the grasses grew still, and their cryptic
messages ended. The sand froze in the whorls of the last puff’s
fingerprint. He watched until the thin red line of the sun shot its
way through the buffer of the scrub pines.

He left the house before six o’clock. There
was no traffic on the roads. Commercial Street, the heart of
Provincetown, which, in season, was usually so crowded with
visitors that it could take a car fifteen minutes to drive three
blocks, was empty. As Peter drove slowly toward The Retreat, he
looked at the windows of the shops of the town, which had been his
home for almost twenty years, as if he were a tourist. Windows were
either crammed with tee shirts and sunglasses and souvenirs or
empty except for a minimalist’s handful of artfully arranged
Italian shirts, New York paintings, New Mexico jewelry, or Texas
boots. Peter stopped the car alongside the window of a bookstore. A
staircase of black painted wood ran across the front of the window.
On the highest step was displayed a hardbound copy of John Updike’s
Rabbit, Run. On the lowest step was a copy of the recently
published last book in the Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest. In
between were Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich.

Staring at the display, Peter was pleased to
find a memory. He had read Rabbit, Run in college. He had admired
the orotund writing, but he had been upset at the story. He had
fought against Updike’s portrayal of Rabbit’s irresponsibility and
selfishness. He had not been able to understand the story’s opening
where Rabbit is so frustrated by his life that he gets in his car
and drives through the night, map-less, relying on instinct, to get
him to a better place. In the middle of the night Rabbit had lost
his courage, turned around and returned, not to his house and
family, but to his hometown, to his coach, to his memories of being
a high school basketball star. Rabbit had had an old man’s memories
and an old man’s overwhelming sense of irrecoverable loss and
time’s thievery when he was just twenty-three. Peter thought of how
Rabbit had lost his future to memories of his past, a fading glory
binding him and how if he were to reread the beginning of the story
now he would understand Rabbit’s run.

Peter parked the car behind The Retreat. In
one corner of the lot, driven by the winds was a collection of sun
bleached scraps of papers. Next to one of the railroad ties that
defined the parking places were three empty beer bottles standing
at attention in their cardboard container. Someone had sat in the
dark and drunk the beers. Why someone? Peter asked himself why he
thought it was someone? Why one? Why not more? Why not a couple,
man and man, woman and woman, even woman and man? Walking through
that windy night. Holding onto one another. Sharing a night. Making
a memory. When was the last time that he had done that? Could he
remember? What memories were left? How empty could a person become?
What harsh winds had blown that had so cleansed his mind of
memory?

Peter got out of the car. He started for the
restaurant door, but after a few steps, he changed his mind and
walked toward the container of empty bottles. Holding the litter in
one hand, he bounced his keys looking for the one that fit the back
door. One second, two, then, three. On that particular morning, the
search took too long. On the third try, when the key didn’t
surface, Peter turned, walked quickly to the car, threw the empty
bottles on the floor of the back seat, drove to the bank, and
removed two hundred dollars from the teller machine.

He was past the dirty white cinder block
garage where Gaby worked before he saw a school bus. Despite all
the roadside warnings of death and destruction, he drove Route 6’s
straight shot across the lower Cape, at seventy. He was over the
Bourne Bridge before he thought to look at the canal traffic far
below. Two hours after making his decision, if it was a decision
rather than a response to an undeniable stimulus, he slowed for the
Route 95 exit that would take him to Clarke’s Cove.

He should see Bett. He should call. He should
call Raoul. He should turn around and return to The Retreat and its
responsibilities. The shoulds plucked and picked at him with the
persistence of a neurotic’s fingers at unseen lint, but at the very
last moment he veered away from the exit and continued down the
highway.

Not having any memories left to push away the
nagging fingers, Peter concentrated his thoughts on holding his
breath. After drawing the deepest breath and holding it, he
listened to his pulse as it pounded just behind his ears. The
exercise made him feel warm and very tired. I was during the twenty
third inhalation that Peter crossed into Connecticut and began to
feel safer.