Warm Wuinter's Garden (35 page)

While driving along the nearly lightly
trafficked highway, Nita studied the delicate balance that held
between the seasons. The south sides of the hills were greener than
the north. The tops of hills were brown and barren, but in the low
spots, protected from the winds and able to hold the sun’s nascent
warmth, the ground was green with newly synthesized chlorophyll
and, in several places, splotches of bright color. Against the
white, life-giving mirrors of building walls and bridge abutments,
in Easter bonnet pinks and yellows, forsythia and azaleas were
coming into bloom.

Nita took her eyes from the countryside to
look at the car phone. She had only the faintest desire to call her
office. After Nita had decided just the day before to visit Bett,
her secretary Leann had spent the afternoon shifting appointments
while Nita herself had made the necessary phone calls to opposing
attorneys, court clerks and clients to ask for continuances for the
three court appearances she had been scheduled for during the
remainder of the week. Nita had been pleased at how accommodating
everyone had been, but she had remained wary of reproach from the
person least likely to accept her unexpected change of
plans—Attorney Nita Koster.

So far, more than an hour into her trip, the
charges—irresponsibility, laziness, breach of duty—had not been
forthcoming. Again, Nita thanked that unexpected side of herself
for its tolerance before shifting her thoughts to Bett.

The last months had been so hard. Her phone
calls to her mother had grown ever shorter. Long questions about
Bett’s health had been countered with short, spare answers. When
she had tried to discover the particulars of the tumor in her
mother’s leg, she had heard the same hollowness as when she’d
examine a reluctant witness. Nita had been sure her mother wasn’t
lying to her, but she also knew that Bett wasn’t being forthcoming.
It made Nita angry that her mother was holding back, but each time
it happened, her professional training kept the anger under wraps.
She would move the conversation away from the cancer to the war, or
siblings, or her father, or even to herself. She would try to
reassure the witness with a series of quotidian questions before
circling back to something sharper and, to her, more relevant.

Nita assumed if her mother wasn’t sharing
with her, given their connectedness from the years of watchful
waiting with the DES, then she probably wasn’t opening herself to
anyone in the family. It hurt to think of her mother’s isolation,
but it hurt much more when her father finally confessed that anger
and depression had been holding Bett to her bed.

A staccato honk made Nita aware she had
become so engrossed in her thinking that she had allowed the car’s
speed to drift down to forty miles an hour. She accelerated to
sixty-five, set the cruise control, and returned to her
thoughts.

Isolation. Nita had tried to do that, too.
She had pulled herself back and in. It had seemed to her then that
the more she could retreat within herself, the fewer the surfaces
there would be for the pain to dance upon. Reliving her retreat,
Nita began to understand and, as grudgingly as her mother once had
been with her, accept Bett’s reluctance to discuss her
condition.

The signs of spring became ever more evident
until she drew close to the water. In the final miles to Clarke’s
Cove the land went back to limbo. She remembered how the water
dearly held onto summer but stingily held back spring.

Nita was surprised to find Bett in the small
pantry which long ago had been converted to a nursery for her
mother’s plants. Nita realized she had been picturing her mother
still trapped in bed. Bett was leaning back against a stool. On the
roughened workbench in front of her were a mound of vermiculite, an
opened bag of potting soil, sphagnum moss, pots and a stack of
black and green plastic planting flats.

“Hi, I didn’t knock. Thought you might be
napping.”

“Hi, honey.”

Showing the tips of her fingers to be
blackened with dirt, Bett held her hands up and away from herself,
as a surgeon might after scrubbing, before tilting a cheek to
present to Nita for kissing.

“Mind the wig.”

“Is that a question or statement? Declaration
or interrogation?”

“Be careful of. Declarative.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be very careful.

“You look great in here.”

“Do I? I wonder why?”

“I don’t know. Earth mother, I guess. You’re
so enough to pay attention to the seasons. Sometimes I think I must
be adopted. If I’m really your daughter, why am I so stupid as to
miss most of your most valuable lessons? Driving down here, instead
of plotting and planning the next thing and next thing and next
thing I have to do, I actually looked at the countryside. Things
are changing. It’s spring, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s certainly trying to be.”

“Somehow, it seems too early.”

“It is. But, the winter was so warm. I’m not
enough of a garden club Anglophile to keep a garden diary, but, if
my memory serves, it’s the earliest I’ve ever seen the tulips or
hyacinths down here. I’m way behind. As you can see.”

Bett searched for Nita’s eyes.

“I was so foolish. I lost all that time.”

Nita just barely shook her head. She didn’t
want to hear her mother apologize.

“So, now, I’m trying to catch up.”

Bett waved her hands over the bowl of
chocolate potting soil coconutted with pure white vermiculite.

As she drizzled soil through her fingers,
Nita said, “I’ll bet a lot of people are about where you are. I
think the war threw everything off.”

“What do you mean?”

“January and February, unless you’re a skier,
always seem to be full of days that just have to be endured.
Plodded from one to another. But, this year, the war distracted
everyone. From the weather, their bills, the post-holiday letdown,
cabin fever. And probably their seed catalogs.”

Bett considered whether she should accept her
daughter’s explanation. She wanted to tell Nita how overwhelmed she
had been. How she had been so riddled with fear, blanched of faith,
pushed toward a horrible corruption of herself and then, beyond,
into a yawning nothingness. She wanted to apologize for allowing
the cancer its weeks of victory. She wanted to shrive herself. But,
Nita’s face said no. Don’t do that.

“You might be right. You probably are. The
war and the warm weather confused us all.”

“One hundred thousand lives seems a big price
for our distraction.”

“It may save more lives in the end.”

“Like Pete’s?”

Bett’s voice held gratitude.

“Yes. Like Pete’s. Oh, honey, that was such a
terrible day. It was so easy to imagine such terrible things.”

“Because you knew things were bad?”

“No, not really. We had talked several times,
but he had been very closemouthed about everything. Lise had told
me that Gaby had called her because she was so worried about how he
was being affected. After that, when we talked, I broached the war
a couple of times, but he changed the subject to the boys, the
restaurant or…”

“You?”

“Yes, I suppose, me.”

“Let me make a wild guess. Then, you changed
the subject to Dad, the weather, or just about anything else.”

Bett stared hard at Nita for a second before
turning back to the potting soil.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Kind of like two people fighting over a
dial. Like men in a bar arguing over which game to watch. Remember
the Templetons?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You know. When they got a TV that had a
remote how they’d fight for control of it. The, they bought a
second remote and each constantly changed what the other wanted to
watch. Or, fiddled with the volume.”

Bett’s face clouded over with pain.

“I’m just teasing, Mom. When I was driving
down here today I was thinking about how when I was sick I always
felt better when I pushed everybody away. Even you. Remember?”

“Did it feel like I was pushing you
away?”

“Yes, actually, it did, and, if we’re being
honest, it still does. Like a few minutes ago when you agreed it
was the war that has delayed your planting. But it’s okay. I know
it’s not really a push. It’s more the opposite. You’re pulling in.
To conserve yourself.”

Bett turned to say something, but Nita
continued before her mother could begin.

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s your battle. You fight
it the way you have to fight it.”

“It has not been easy figuring out how to do
that.”

Nita remained quiet. She moved next to her
mother and began to fill the holes of a flat with soil. She
recognized a situation she had seen in court several times when a
witness became so entwined in the magnitude of his thoughts he
forgot that he was testifying before an audience.

“It’s hard to know what to do. It’s hard to
know how hard to fight. I gave up a breast. That was easy, really.
I knew I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t
vital
.
ﾁ
It wasn’t
exactly superfluous. But, somehow, it wasn’t vital. It was a price,
a reasonable price, to have to pay for my health. A leg is
vital
. Losing a leg changes me. Changes what I can do.
Changes who I am. Losing a leg
cripples
me. I’ve thought
about it so much. A leg must be about twenty percent of me. Of my
weight. My…my… My displacement. My displacement will be less. My
space would be smaller. But, it’s a price that I can think about.
And actually think about easily if I can make myself believe that
my leg would be the full price. But, if it’s not… If there’s more
to pay… If my leg is just a down payment for a few more months and,
then, another payment is due… It’s very hard to figure out. I can’t
even figure out how to think about it. I’ve always felt that I’ve
known how to think about things. Things have always kind of
arranged themselves in my mind. But, not now. However I look at it,
it seems like I leave something out. Neil, money, pain, hope. That
strange word that I keep hearing myself think—dignity. Something. I
look around here and see all the thoughtless shaping that I’ve
done. Everywhere I look, I see something I’ve trimmed or shaped or
pruned to
my
notion of what its life should be. The
grapefruit trees used to be seven feet tall, now they’re four feet.
They used to be scraggly. Now, they’re nicely pollarded. Is that
how God works? He looks at me. ‘She’s ungainly. Snip this. Lop
that. That’s better. Now she better suits my purpose.
Now
,
she’s more pleasing to my eye.’ Is that what’s going on? It’s hard
to know. Does God want me to prune myself? Am I to fight and fight
and fight for life? Or, am I supposed to stop fighting and go on to
whatever is next? Am I supposed to be a victim to this horrid
disease or am I supposed to be a victim of foolishness, self-will
and determination and science as I try to fight it? Or, am I to
become a victim to anger and bitterness? That certainly would be
ironic. I get to keep my leg or my life, but the price is that I
become filled with bitterness.”

Bett decided she would take up Nita’s
challenge.

“Nita, lying in that bed was a black
pleasure. The blackest of pleasures. There was something so
frighteningly seductive about staying in that room and filling it
with the meanest of thoughts. Some of the things that I said to
your father. I savored them both before and after I said them and
the only regret I had was that I had no film of the hurt on his
face to look at over and over. I don’t know what would have
happened if Peter’s disappearance hadn’t jolted me out of it. I
never knew that much about sin or evil. I don’t know why, but it
just never had much attraction for me. I’d see people do
mean-spirited things and I could never fathom the reward or
pleasure they got from it. Now, I know. And, now, I have some
understanding of the effort some, maybe many, people have to make
to be good.

“I’ve learned about evil. But I’m not sure
what else. I still don’t know what I should do. It’s very hard to
know. The only thing that has become clear from all of this is that
I, and probably everyone who has been in a situation like mine,
must begin to think like a Buddhist. All life is sacred. Yet, even
when I think that, there is a part of me that’s trying to figure
out what to do with those black pines that are sick out there.”

Bett pointed through the window and took a
big breath. Through her tears Nita watched her mother’s fingers
tremble so that vermiculite was shaking free from the gobs of soil
that she was shoving into pots. Nita chose to remain quiet. After
several false starts of half-sentences and ellipsistic thoughts,
Bett grew quiet, too. Mother and daughter worked next to one
another until all the flats had all of their holes filled.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

Nita didn’t turn to watch her mother hobble
from the room. She tried to avoid hearing the scraping sound of the
footfall of the favored leg. It hurt her chest to breathe, but she
didn’t feel like she was going to cry. Even though neither had
acknowledged what just had occurred, the daughter knew that the
fear, confusion and honesty her mother had just shown to her
betokened a great trust. Nita shut her eyes to hold onto the
immensity of the gift her mother had given her. She hoped she could
respond in kind.

Bett returned with a large box in her hands.
She smiled at Nita.

“Your mother’s treasure.”

“What is it?”

After opening the lid, Bett held up three
small jars. Inside each was a teaspoon’s worth of fine black seed
and a small piece of lined index card.

“Cleome.” Bett held a jar sideways and
rotated it until she could read the piece of paper.

“Pink… Here’s the white. And this one’s my
favorite—deep purple.”

“I don’t remember. What’s it look like?”