Warm Wuinter's Garden (38 page)

Cancer.

She had dreamed of cancer for almost twenty
years. Other teen girls dreamed of boys while she dreamed of cells.
She had spent so many nights awake, lying still, listening for the
sound of a small explosion as her cells burst their bounds. A wave
of pain would splash through her insides. The pain would rise and
swell and break inside her and when it receded she would see the
cancer’s dirty spume coat the path where the pain had been. For
years she had waited and waited knowing that this wave, this crest,
or if not this, then, certainly the next would be the one that
would wash away her life. The pain would grow and grow inside her
guts and bring death so close she couldn’t scream. The wet weighted
felt of death—smooth, seamless, soft—would wrap round her. Its
oppressive weight would hold her fast. Breathless, voiceless, she
would twist and thrash to avoid suffocation. Night fears of death
had been Nita’s constant implacable companion.

Nita held herself very still. Another
second’s thought and all the fear that had tracked her nights for
years would come roaring back. She tried to curve her thoughts away
from herself and back to Dan Herlick.

How thick-skinned he must be. Rebuff. Rebuff.
He brushed them off. He pushed past her dismissals. Thick-skinned
for himself, but thin for her. That day he had seen the quickest
flick of pain upon her face and helped her to her car. Once, no,
both nights they had spent in bed he had known just when things
went bad. So big. So florid faced. Features sculpted from thick
dough. That belly. Not soft, not hard. Weighty. All this mass of
man. With features so blunted, so fleshy, it was hard to say just
where one stopped and another began. Where were the metes and
bounds of nose or lips? A blunt, soft-edged lump. Fingers as thick
as votive candles. Bringing their flickering fire. Cream-pink
freckled arms whose weight made the bed frame groan when they
wrapped themselves around her. All blunt. So much soft-edged
mass.

Until he had begun to touch her. Then it
seemed his fingers tapered to the most precise of paintbrush
points. The brush of his arm across her breasts had been so light
it was more heat than touch.

An hour in the dark with his fine touch and
she had chiseled him to a Giacometti man.

She had held to that as he rolled on top.
They were the same. A match in mass. He had entered her and she had
ridden that thought. Equals. Equals. E——quals. E——quals. A two-note
song. All percussion. He had slid away on the first note and back
on the second. E——quals. E——quals. Balanced so precisely in the
night. Then one of them, she, had changed the rhythm. More.

She had wanted more from her. She had wanted
to give past the barrier where her giving always stopped. More. He
had felt the change and thought it was meant for him. More. He had
given more.

More. More.

More.

She had felt his steady beat become a
hammering. More she told herself. She had opened herself to his
pulse.

E-quals. E-quals. A match in mass.

She had pushed harder. Hammering became
battering. Despite her holding tight, e-qual e-qual had slipped
away. She had slid down inside herself. To shiny-surfaced oysters
pounded with a club. To okra pods being pummeled. To slick red
cells bursting open. Pinocytotic vesicles bursting open.
Nucleolonema ooozing through. She had tried to twist away. It was
over. It was safe. Sing. Sing. E——quals. Equals. But she couldn’t
get the notes to come. Fear’s black vacuum stopped all sound. Pain
sprang up out of her womb and raced to wrap its wet felt around her
face. She had tried to twist away. To escape. But, Dan Herlick’s
weight had held her. Cancer was coming and she couldn’t move. The
blunted mass of man, squamous man, held her pinioned to her
fear.

She had screamed no, no, no.

Immediately, the pounding stopped. The weight
was gone. The only sounds were her sobs and the slightest sibilance
of his shushing. He hadn’t asked her why. She hadn’t offered. Not
that first time and not the next. Would she on the third? Would
there be a third?

Cancer. Cancer. A wilding of the cells.

The sharp acid smell of her vomit came to
Nita. Would old thoughts ever leave? If the wonder of a two-note
song couldn’t crowd them out, what could? The worst of thoughts
took hold in Nita, burrowed deep and held on tight.

Now, Nita was sure her father was awake
sharing her thoughts. Although it hurt to believe he had the same
kind of thoughts that she had been imagining, she knew it must be
true. He, too, had lain awake nights sickening himself.

Nita willed her father to leave his bed. She
wanted to look into eyes, flat-gazed but wide-open, dry and bitter
as her own, to find some forgiveness in them that she could absorb
and filter and return in kind.

Almost an hour later, Nita heard a stirring.
She lay still for a moment before switching on the bedside lamp.
Blinded, she shuffled herself into her robe. She started to use the
wastebasket as her visa to join her father, but she set it down
quietly by the door before entering the darkened hall.

Nita had just arranged the comforter around
her on the couch when she heard a weight on the stairs.

“Hi, Dad.”

“No rest for the wicked?”

“Is that it?”

“I think maybe it was just too much dessert.
I sometimes have these waves of doubt. Dilly may be right.”

“About?”

“Our sins of the flesh. I’d be better off
finishing dinner with a big bowl of broccoli.”

“With caramel sauce?”

“Without.”

Nita had felt her skin galvanize when her
father said “wicked,” “waves of doubt,” and “flesh.” After several
minutes of dull banter as Neil set up the space heater, poured
himself a drink and, after a glance, received a nod from Nita to do
the same for her, they stared listlessly at one another.

Each in his bed had wanted to be with the
other, but, now, both felt the strain. Being together in the middle
of the night predicated an intimacy, but the strain of
sleeplessness forestalled the connection by hampering thought and
speech. The words they spoke were flat and when not flat were
mis-emphasized. Nita thought that it was as if they were reading
through a play for the first time. Words were correctly pronounced,
but the knowledge of the emotions underlying the words was missing.
Each wanted to be warm and understanding, to share a sad but
intimate moment, but the weight of their betrayal of Bett and their
best selves kept each feeling separate and alone, unworthy of
warmth or understanding.

The silence between father and daughter
lengthened until it grew into accusation and that indictment
compelled Nita to do what she had wanted to do as she lay in bed
thinking.

“Mom says you’ve had a hard time sleeping
lately.”

“Did she? Once in awhile I find myself down
here keeping the watch.”

“Know why?”

Neil smiled a tight smile at his
daughter.

“Fifth amendment. Self-incrimination.”

“Am I doing a Dilly?”

“Maybe a pale one. I’m not sleeping because
I’m wide awake. Is that too pat? Is there always an answer for why
we do something?”

“The law demands it.”

“I don’t. I’m up because I’m up. Dilly would
look at my diet and guess gas. Lise might guess the phase of the
moon or a change in my circadian rhythms. A plumber might hazard a
gurgle in the pipes is doing it. An allergist might guess that it’s
Queenie or too many wool blankets or winter’s closed windows.
Kenyon might guess that he’s the cause. And most of the people of
this glorious state might guess that it’s guilt from my crime that
keeps me sleepless.”

The last was said bitterly and, for Nita, it
was a strange tone to hear coming from her father.

“How is work?”

“It’s good to be open again, but there are a
lot of bad loans out there. Because we have always been so
conservative, we’ve got a lot less than almost any other bank, but
we still have more than we want. I just started the foreclosure
papers on a fellow I’ve known since we moved to Rhode Island. We
have helped him to grow two good businesses. He came to us for a
big loan on a house. We didn’t know it then, but it looks now as
though the house was supposed to be the glue to hold together his
marriage. It’s a huge house. A new Victorian. Porches and turrets
and twelve foot tin ceilings. Sometime in the middle of
construction his marriage blew up. Both businesses went soft. Not
bad. Just soft. He’s carrying so much debt on the house that in a
month he won’t have any equity left in it. We’re going to end up
owning it and it’s not even finished. There is four hundred
thousand in it and it will take another hundred to finish it. We’ll
have to eat part of the loan. What’s worse is that when times turn
around, he won’t come back to us to expand his business. Too much
pride. We swallow a bad house loan and then lose a good commercial
client.”

“Is there anything you can do for him?”

“We’ve already done it. We actually have
given him more time to sell it than we should have. I figure
housing prices are dropping at least a percent a month. Most owners
can’t believe that so they price themselves too high and then
follow the curve down, but they’re always just higher than what the
market price is. They get the pain of the loss, the expense of the
carrying costs and the depression of the no sale. We’ve allowed him
almost a year more than we probably should have. Twelve percent of
a half million is sixty thousand. That’s a lot of good will.”

Without looking at her father, Nita asked
again, “How’s work? With you? The money thing?”

Neil didn’t answer.

“Dad, it might help to talk.”

Neil shook his head.

“Not now.”

“Okay. That’s okay. I can understand. I just
want you to know I love you and admire you and know you didn’t do
anything wrong.

“Thanks, Nita. There are times I have my
doubts.”

“Don’t. Just remember it can be tough being a
good banker and a good person.”

“Tougher than being a good lawyer and a good
person?”

Nita’s laugh was forced, “That’s not always
easy.”

“I know. Just being a good person can be a
brutal job.”

“Lots of doubts and indecisions.”

Neil caught Nita’s eyes and held his stare.
In a soft tired voice he said, “And sleepless nights.”

Each knew they had reached the point which
had drawn them from their beds. Each waited for the other to begin.
After a moment of silence broken only by the hum of the space
heater and the distant rattle of Queenie’s tags as she turned in
her sleep, Nita lifted her glass and waggled it. She yawned
loudly.

“Not so sleepless now.”

Neil added his yawn to hers.

They waited quietly for another minute before
Neil reached down to turn off the heater.

“It’s late.”

Back in their respective beds both father and
daughter lay awake for a considerable time reworking their
conversation to obtain a more satisfactory ending. In the morning
neither alluded to their meeting.

* * *

Most of the rest of her visit Nita spent
alone with Bett. Neil had to go in to work for several hours on
both Saturday and Sunday. Mother and daughter puttered around the
house, worked in the plant room, took a long drive each day and
spent time at the beach, either walking very slowly along the
hard-packed sand at the water’s edge, or else just staring at the
froth line of the never-ending waves while being warmed by the dry
heat of the car. The talking between the two of them was as careful
to skirt danger as the brightly-suited winter surfers they watched.
Each night news of the progress of the civil uprisings in the north
and south of Iraq was a welcome respite. The war’s aftermath helped
to fill in the empty spots between those conversations built on
memories and the others built on speculation about other family
members. It was only in the plant room that their talk seemed to
have any merit in and of itself rather than as a substitute for
more painful issues. In that room the talk was of plants, of
flowers and vegetables, display and cutting gardens.

Nita found herself using thoughts of the
orderly miracles taking place in the nursery as an antidote for the
feelings of fear and disgust which brushed against her like an
insistent cat throughout the day and bound up her thinking like a
winding cloth during the unending hours of the night. The relief
the plants brought encouraged her to bring the conversation back
and back again to gardening. Talk of gardening felt safe.

“Mom, what’s the best part of gardening for
you?”

Bett pushed three more snapdragon seeds into
their homes before she spoke.

“I think the best part is that I’m not very
good at it.”

“What a strange thing to say. What do you
mean?”

“Just that.”

“You’ve always had wonderful gardens. I can’t
think of you without thinking of bushels of vegetables and baskets
of flowers. You’ve always grown beautiful things.”

“That has been more the plants’ choice than
anything I’ve done. I kind of bumble along. I try to help a little.
I spread a little manure and pinch and prune, but I’m really not
much of a gardener. Opa, now he was a gardener. He could look at a
piece of ground, a meadow or a corner of a yard, and see what it
could be. I can remember walking The Chimneys with him and he would
describe what was there and why and what he would plant and why if
he were to choose to cultivate it. Most people know something about
planting. They know impatiens like shade and sunflowers like sun.
They know grass likes sweet soil so each spring they spread a
couple of bags of lime. If they’re more interested, they learn the
differences among the varieties of a flower, dahlias, glads or,
especially, roses. If they want more than that they learn to
consider the relationships among color and height and timing and
sunlight and water and type of soil. Your grandfather could do all
that, but somehow he could do much more. He could envision a garden
two years from where it was. He could see that the comfrey was
going to crowd the bee balm. He knew the gray of the comfrey leaf
looked wonderful with its purple flower, but later, when it had
gone by and there was nothing but big gray, fuzzy leaves, he knew
that that was going to clash with the delicate wisps of the bee
balm blossoms. Me, I learn after the fact and have to move the bee
balm. He would know what things were going to look like before
anything was even planted. He could take a glance and understand
the flow of the spring rains on a piece of land. He’d look at the
weeds and be able to say that this spot was loamy and that spot
over there sandy. Sweet here. Sour there.