Warm Wuinter's Garden (37 page)

“Nita, do you think I’m doing that?”

“You? Dad? Me? Dilly? The doctors? All of us?
Who knows? Where does hope end and delusion begin? You touched on
it yesterday. When does trying to maintain normal living habits in
a tough time go from being a good discipline to folly? I don’t
know. I’m not sure anyone does. Especially, with cancer. Lise told
me that no one understands remission.

“Please, Mom, talk to Dad. Let him know what
you would want him to do. If anything were to happen, it would make
it easier on him.”

Bett drew the form toward her. She stared at
the paper for a long time.

“Nita, I don’t want your father to be my
agent.”

Only years of training controlled Nita’s
response. She spoke softly.

“No?”

Bett was silent for a long moment. Her
fingers picked stitches from a garment that could not be seen.

“I sicken your father.”

Nita grabbed her mother’s forearm.

“No, Mom, no.”

“I think so. I’m almost certain.”

“How can you say that? Dad loves you more
than anything.”

Her mother’s face dissolved into shimmering
patches of pinks and beiges. Nita squeezed her eyes trying to
focus, but the image remained as impressionistic as one seen
through an acid-etched door. She felt the same kind of distance she
used to experience standing in some near stranger’s shower staring
through the curtain at the moving abstract painting that was his
robe. His voice near, reverberating inside the steamy isolation
booth of the shower stall, but all else, of necessity, so far
away.

“Your father has a very rare lack of capacity
for duplicity. He’s the most obvious man in the world. I was in
stitches watching him before my sixtieth birthday. No one could
have been more sheepish before a surprise party. Remember how many
times at Christmas one of you, usually Dilly, of course, would pry
from him what your big present was going to be? Now, he’s pulling
away from me.”

“But…”

“No, Nita, please listen. When I came home
from the hospital in September, and for several weeks afterward, we
were distanced. But it was different. It was just like what you
said earlier. Neither of us knew how for me to be sick. In a
strange way it reminded me of the first time I was pregnant. He
drew back then for awhile, but it was because he didn’t know what
else to do. He didn’t know how fragile I might be, and he didn’t
know who I was becoming. I think it’s hard for a man. The wife
becomes a parent nine months before the husband. He can help set up
a nursery and rub ankles, but it’s just not the same. The wife’s
already jumped to the other side of the biggest change in any
marriage, except maybe death. When I was carrying Peter, it took
awhile, but, then, we were fine. It was the same thing after the
hospital. He was tentative. He was… He was… Just like a cat. A part
of him wanted to come close, but he just wasn’t sure. Of me. So he
walked back and forth in front of me, but kept just out of reach.
But in a couple of weeks, we drew close again. And we stayed close.
My breast being gone seemed to be okay. The scar didn’t frighten
him or appall him. That much. It seemed to be no different than my
weight or wrinkles or varicose veins. Just part and parcel of a
less-than-perfect, but perfectly fine, mate. When I started going
bald he never stepped back. He was more accepting of that than I
was. He even told me that he saw it as a sign of health. My hair’s
dying meant the cancer was being killed, too.

“But, now. Now, Nita, it’s very different.
Partly, obviously, because of how cruel I’ve been to him. But, I
think, mostly because of this.”

Bett pushed herself back from the kitchen
table. She extended her legs.

“This.”

She pointed to her right leg.

This
sickens him. There is something
about what’s going on inside this leg that disgusts him. He can’t
look at me. He’d sleep in a separate bed every night if he had the
courage. He sleeps as far away from me as he can, except that a lot
of that time is not sleeping. We both pretend. I think the thought
of touching me, or this,” Bett tapped her leg, “in the night is
absolutely abhorrent to him. He’s been getting up in the middle of
the night. I think it’s just to get away. To give himself a little
relief.”

“I can’t believe it, Mom. It just doesn’t
sound like Dad. Maybe you’re misreading things.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. You watch.”

“It could be he’s distracted by work. You
said yesterday how crazy things have been. An honorable man with
his honor in question. Or he could feel guilty because he’s so
divided between work and you. Or he could be back in the cat
phase—not knowing if it’s okay to approach you, yet. You just said
how mean you’d been. Wounds take time to heal. Christ, look at me.
Look at Peter. Maybe it’s just that knowing you are sick or in pain
terrifies him and he withdraws. It could be a thousand other
things.”

“Yes, it could, and I’ve thought of those
things, but I don’t think that it’s anything other than revulsion.
Honey, in forty years, I haven’t been wrong about your father very
many times. My knowing him so well is something that makes it
harder for him. He knows I know that I disgust him. That’s what’s
so sad. He can’t get away from it. It’s very hard seeing him this
way.”

“Sad, not mad?’

“At your father? No, Nita. After how I hurt
him, how could I be mad at him? There are plenty of times when I
think of what’s going on inside of me and
I’m
disgusted.
I’m
revulsed.
I
find it abhorrent.”

As she said “abhorrent” Bett slapped her leg
in emphasis.

“C’mon, Mom. Don’t do that to yourself. Fight
the disease. Don’t fight yourself. Let’s forget this stuff for
now.”

Nita stretched forward to pull the health
care form away from its place in front of Bett.

“Let’s get out of here. Let’s drive over to
Narragansett, to the Pier or the lighthouse to watch some waves.
C’mon, I’ll buy us some lunch. I’ll…”

Nita caught her mother’s look.

“Don’t worry, we don’t have to get out of the
car, and you don’t have to eat anything. Let’s just get out of here
for awhile. Let’s go fill up on water and big waves.”

Bett nodded. She looked at her leg and
whispered “stupid” before she used her hands to push herself up
from the kitchen chair.

* * *

That night Nita closely watched her father
during dinner and, afterward, as they sat through the
MacNeil-Lehrer report and a National Geographic special on
endangered species. It soon became obvious to Nita that her father
was very agitated. His eyes would not fix. They jumped from face to
furniture to fantasy without finding anyplace to safely light. His
body was pulled in as if he feared a sudden punch to the stomach.
Although he sat on the same couch with Bett, he didn’t sit close
nor stay in place long. Nita counted seven trips—to the bathroom,
to the kitchen for a glass of water, back for a handful of raisins,
to start tea water, and again to make the tea, to let Queenie out
for a run and ten minutes later to let her in again—during two
hours of television.

Nita purposefully had chosen the leather
armchair because it would allow her to watch the TV screen while
still being able to study her father; however she found that almost
every time she shifted her gaze to him, he noticed her attention
immediately. She guessed he must be anticipating her querying, if
not accusatory, looks.

In bed, unable to sleep, restless from two
days of not working, Nita reviewed her mother’s conversation and
her own observations of her father’s behavior. After careful
analysis led her to the decision that her own observations upheld
her mother’s conclusions, Nita threw out that conclusion on the
technicality that her mother’s conversation had prejudiced her own
ability to observe and judge impartially. In the hour of agitation
which followed, the daughter wondered if her father were awake two
doors down the hall. She strained to hear a door opening and the
creak the stairs seemed to make only at night. She tried to feel
what her father was feeling. When she pared it down to just her
father with her mother, it was hard to imagine anything other than
a casual intertwining, a nocturnal sharing of sheets and heat and
air. It was easy to imagine an unconscious sharing within their
sleeps. The thought of the goodness that must go on between them in
sleep was so strong it made her clench her teeth. She had never
slept with anyone long enough, or with enough trust and assurance,
that some part of her did not maintain a night-long vigil against
betrayal from within the small confines of their redoubt.

Would she ever have a simple intertwining?
She had come close to talking to her mother about Dan Herlick. She
shook her head in the dark. Even though they had been in bed
together, she did not think of him as Dan. It was always Dan
Herlick. She wasn’t even sure that she liked him. In fact, there
was much about him that she should dislike. He made a liquid noise
as he ate as his asthma forced him to breathe through his mouth. He
pushed his pants down below a growing stomach. He was… not exactly
ill-prepared…but chronically disorganized. He was pompous during
business. She wasn’t sure she trusted someone who changed from day
to night.

Nita stopped herself. How did she know that
the father she saw at home was the same person who worked at the
bank? Didn’t she pretend to a competency that she didn’t always
feel? Maybe part of her problem was that she didn’t separate day
from night enough. How much did she unnecessarily burden herself by
expecting that competency, forthrightness, orderliness and
rationality should be as rewarded by love as they were by the law?
How did she thwart her desire for love by bringing her cold skills
of analysis to her bed?

There was no rational reason to like Dan
Herlick. He was not as bright as she. Nor as attractive. Nor
hardworking. Nor as professional.

Nita forced herself to pause again.

This was not new thinking. This was a rut
well-worn. She had counted and compared their qualities scores of
times. It was stupid. It was unfair. She wasn’t looking for a law
partner.

Or was she? She seemed to be. She seemed to
assume that a good lawyer would make a good mate. She tried to push
the old thinking, as slick and supple as old silk, from her
mind.

Start over. Again.

Dan Herlick.

She had dissected him to find weaknesses and
had found many. More than enough to have cause to push him from her
life. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t pushed him away, but neither had
she let him in. Like a true lawyer, she had made him wait. She’d
kept him on the stoop. Sat him in the foyer. Put him on hold.
Continuance after continuance while she researched and analyzed,
considered and came to no conclusion.

There was little obvious to like about Dan
Herlick. Yet, he remained in her brain. There was something of him
which had insinuated itself into her. Something that couldn’t be
easily dismissed, or ignored. He didn’t hide his heart. From what
she herself did and from what she saw of others, especially those
alone who had passed into their thirties and beyond, that was an
irrational, but amazingly ingratiating, thing to do. It was one of
the things that had made her parents’ marriage so attractive to
Nita. They had always been open with one another. Had that really
changed? Was her mother right?

Nita rolled over and enshrouded herself in
her sheets. She wished her thoughts would stop pushing their jagged
edges through her head. She tried to focus her attention onto her
breathing. She worked to find a rhythm to her lungs which would
allow a flow of calm to arms and legs and brain.

Within minutes Nita had stopped thinking of
her lungs.

There couldn’t be anything wrong. How, after
more than forty years of marriage, could something go wrong? What
enormity could make a change in such constancy?

Nita made herself think of her mother as just
her mother, as nothing less and, more importantly, as nothing more.
Her mother’s fears must be wrong. Two doors down her father must be
asleep, brought to that rest by his own temporary, nocturnal
contentment and the unconscious comfort that her mother gave. Nita
tried to hold onto those thoughts, but they wriggled from her
grasp. She thought of Bett and, following her mother’s pronoun
lead,
that
so the bed two doors down had three occupants
rather than two. She found herself clenching her teeth again, but
this time it was against the roiling in her stomach. She let
herself go. She let herself think like her mother suggested her
father was thinking.

She imagined the cancer in bed with her. She
conjured up a pulsing knot of moon-green glowworms inside her
thigh. After placing the knot midway between her knee and hip she
drove it down into her bone. It wouldn’t stay. Her imagination
couldn’t quite get it inside the cold white calcium corridor of her
bone. She brought it out and wrapped it around her femur so that it
resembled maggots on a chicken leg. With the lightest of touches
she brought her fingertips to the blanket-warmed skin of her thigh.
Tentatively, she pressed against her skin. She saw the slithery
knot respond to the intrusion of her fingers by shifting to an
ovoid shape which stretched itself out along a greater length of
bone. She lifted her leg against the weight of the covers. Using
both hands she encircled her thigh above the writhing knot and slid
the noose of her fingers down her leg. The snarl of squirming life
exploded into flight and escaped into her flesh like roaches into
counter cracks.

Nita struggled against the grasp of the
twisted sheets to vomit into the wastebasket she desperately pulled
from underneath the nightstand. She was revolted. By her vomit. By
the nest of worms she had put inside her skin. By her legal tricks
and games to gain the truth. And also, as her father, by that which
was growing in her mother’s leg.