Warm Wuinter's Garden (41 page)

Coming inside, Bill thought the house smelled
strange. The odor was vaguely familiar but not to be identified.
Dilly heard his step as he entered the kitchen. She turned to show
him the flesh of her full face and a quick arc of smile before
turning back to whatever she was doing at the sink.

“Good day?”

“Busy.”

“Same here. Hungry?”

“Ummmm.”

“Not too long. Running a little late. Got
going again in the yard and lost the time.”

With Dilly’s back to him Bill felt free to
look around the kitchen to try to identify the source of the smell
that continued to tease him.

“Where’re the kids?”

“Where’s Jimmy Hoffa? Spring just doesn’t
turn a young man’s fancy”—she twisted her torso to find his eyes
with her own—”it turns everyone crazy. It’s been a madhouse since
they got home. Oh, the Dodger wants to play baseball.”

“What would it be? T-ball or…”

“It’s T-ball.”

“What do you think?”

Bill was sure that Dilly would say no. If
Roger were to become involved in a T-ball league she would get to
spend even less time with him except for sitting in the stands.
From talk at work, Bill knew that T-ball games were famous for
their interminable length. Bill guessed that Dilly would have
developed the statistics on injuries and broken them into
classes—shoulder, neck, eye, paralysis. The more time Roger spent
in a car the greater the risk of being in a wreck. Disfigurement.
Death. If he were carpooled, he could be exposed to candy, gum, ice
cream, a hot dog, soda. Caries. Diabetes. Cancer. It was obvious to
him that T-ball was much too risky for Dilly to allow their son to
play.

“Might be good. But…”

Bill knew the “but” was the lock on the door
to Roger’s playing.

“But…?”

“Well, he’s got so much energy that he might
get frustrated. Baseball’s pretty sedentary. You think it’d keep
his interest?”

“It might. Baseball’s hooked a billion other
boys.”

“Okay. If you can find him, tell him the
news. He’ll be thrilled. A chance to hit something other than his
sisters. Twenty minutes more here and dinner’ll be ready.”

Bill nodded to Dilly’s back and made his exit
without turning his back to her. Less than an hour later, Bill
learned that the unnamable odor had been the smell of baking egg
white and sugar. Pie. Strawberry meringue pie. Bill had been as
stunned and, immediately afterward, as talkative as any of the
kids. Dilly had offered no more explanation for this unique event
other than to note that egg whites weren’t all that bad and that
life was too short not to be treated once in awhile.

As they got ready for bed Bill worried that
Dilly would try to re-enact the events of the night before. He
readied several layers of excuses and made himself yawn
emphatically three times. As he undid his belt and unzipped his
pants he wondered what would happen the following week when he
would have to explain, as he climbed into bed wearing new
snug-fitting cottons briefs and a bag of ice, that his distrust of
her had caused him to have a vasectomy.

* * *

Each night as she prepared herself for bed,
Dilly would tell herself that the next morning she would know that
her mating had worked. As soon as she awoke, she listened to her
body. She touched her breasts to see if any soreness had begun. She
searched for the smallest lapping wave of nausea against the side
of her stomach. It had taken almost two weeks with the girls, but
she had known within days when she became pregnant with Roger.
Dilly was sure that she must be pregnant, but each morning she
learned that she must be patient for another day for her symptoms
to appear.

While daffodil buds filled and more and more
birds returned to the cover of the leafing bittersweet, Dilly
pushed her thoughts to Christmas and beyond. She would be eight
months huge at Christmas. She had never been pregnant at that time
of year before. Jessie, Kate and Roger all had been summer babies.
Heat rash. Swollen ankles. Slogging more than thirty extra pounds,
mostly fluids, almost a quarter of her weight, through the thick,
still, water-filled, oxygen-emptied air of late July and August. It
had been wonderful. Amidst the throbbing of her lower back and the
crushing of her kidneys, she had sewn new ruffles to the canopy of
an old bassinet. She had wall-papered the nursery using her belly
as a third hand to hold the clean-smelling pasted paper to the
wall. She had reveled in the aches of her knees and ankles as she
had brushed water-based white enamel along the nursery baseboard.
In December there would be so many things vying for her attention.
She would need to get her present shopping done early. If she had
to pay more because she shopped early, Bill would just have to
accept that as one of the necessary accommodations to her
condition, no different than staying close to a bathroom to release
a thimbleful of urine. There could be ice or snow. She would need
to buy shoes with very good traction. If she delivered just three
weeks early, she would be in the hospital while the kids were home
from school for Christmas vacation. Who would babysit them? Lise?
She seemed to call every week.

As Dilly planned her pregnancy, black
thoughts dived at her dreams like crows after robins’ eggs. Bill
could be gone. She could be left raising three kids with a fourth
on the way. A million things could go wrong trying to draw a new
baby from an old egg in an old body. What would she do if the
amniocentesis or sonogram revealed some terrible flaw? Should she
even wait for amnio? Maybe she should have chorionic sampling done.
Bett could be dying, needing her while she herself needed her
mother. Bett could be crippled. Or dead. Or so could she. She would
be thirty-nine before the baby was due. What if something happened
to her? What would happen to the kids?

When ravening thoughts tried to destroy her
hatching plans Dilly’s rage flew up to defend against them.
This
was right
. It was right for her and, soon, soon after she told
him, Bill would know that it was right for them. This baby would
take her until she was forty-five. She would know what to do with
every day. By the time she was forty-five she would know what to do
next. She was sure. But… If she didn’t… At forty-five, Jessie would
be eighteen. Eighteen and a long breath and there would be more
babies around. And if there just were enough babies around, then
being left-handed or cancerous or divorced or strange just wouldn’t
matter.

It was right. She knew it. She was no
different than anyone else. Or anything else. Fear of death begat
life. That, of all things, must be right.

* * *

Bill continued to rehearse his lines. He was
sure the nurse, who kept poking her head in and out of the waiting
room door, was going to begin a conversation which would call for
using the lines that he had been piecing together in spare moments
since he first had made the appointment with Dr. Osterin. Sitting
in the doctor’s office, going over his excuses for why his wife was
not with him, gave him the same feeling of oppressive heat that had
overwhelmed him once in third grade as he had sat in a chair
outside Principal Raymond’s office waiting to explain how Ralph
Tingel’s steel ruler had ended up in his book-bag.

Bill’s rehearsal stopped when, once more
enjoining his attention, his fears demanded that they wanted to
imagine the operation just once more. He could remember that
several other men at work had had it done, but, at the moment, he
couldn’t remember who they were. At the time, standing by the print
machine or on the way to the elevators, it hadn’t been so relevant.
It was no different than hearing someone had bought a new car. He
wouldn’t expect himself to remember the details of that either,
unless he were getting ready to buy one, too.

“Mr. Phelps? This way, please.”

Normally seeing such a round bottom so
tightly encased in a white nylon skirt, set so high upon white
nylon-hosed legs, with all of the nylon making the sound of a short
zipper being opened and closed, would have caused some kind of
stirring in Bill, but not today. Today, the cicada sound of the
nurse’s legs as they led him down a pale brown corridor disoriented
him.

“In here, please. Please remove all of your
clothes and put on the gown that’s on the hook there. The doctor
will be with you in a moment.”

As he slowly undid the knot of his tie and
fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, Bill felt himself drifting
away. He was choosing to lose a part of himself that could never be
regained. For a second he confused the loss. He thought that he was
mourning a certain aspect of his maleness, but, immediately, he
corrected the error. He was losing more than the free flow of his
sperm—which, if he wanted, might be able to be reversed. The real
loss was that he was cutting himself free from the weight of the
last dozen years of his life.

Bill’s thoughts caught him up short. If he
really were cutting himself free, shouldn’t he be feeling a
peace-filled lightness rather than the shoulder-rounding heaviness
that he was experiencing? He tried to tell himself that the most
important consequence of the operation would be that he would be
assured of his future. The feeling of lightness that he wanted
would come; it just was still in little in front of him. It was a
gift yet to be experienced.

Bill’s tie went on one hook, his shirt on
another and his pants on a third. Being both private and
fastidious, he was unsure what to do with his black socks, salted
with tiny flecks of dried skin, and his crotch-creased boxer
trunks. Making a pile of them on the plank that served as a seat in
the changing alcove seemed too public. Balling socks and folding
shorts which had been worn seemed weirdly. Stuffing them into the
briefcase that held his new briefs seemed unsanitary. He wished the
staff had thought to provide a drawer where he could hide his
things away.

After he had slipped his arms into the
open-backed hospital gown Bill felt more vulnerable, more naked,
than when he had had no clothes on at all. He half-sat on the edge
of the examining table staring at the whiteness of his tightly
compressed knees.

She had been strength. He had met Dilly while
working as a newly-minted engineer. During the day he had watched
his boss absorb, codify and evaluate data and, then, make decisions
with speed and certainty. Herm Murray could define and solve a
problem while he himself was still floundering with the data trying
to bring enough order to it so that he had some idea of what the
problem might be. At night he had experienced much the same
sensation. His undefined life whirled around him. He had spent so
much energy in college getting good grades that he hadn’t really
considered what would come afterward. He had tried to make some
sense of his new life, but no order would come until he met,
observed, and soon admired how the friend-of-a-friend, Delia
Koster, make decisions with alacrity and sureness. He was drawn to
her strength and assuredness. She had been drawn to him, or, as
Bill ruefully thought as he stared at the almond-shaped space that
was formed when he pressed his knees and ankles together, to his
needs. When he had met Bett, he had understood where Dilly got her
competency. It was only later, during a course on organizational
behavior, that he came to appreciate the difference between control
and competency.

As he sat and waited for Dr. Osterin, Bill
realized had been as foolish as Dilly. He and she both had confused
control with competency. Over the years, as his decision-making
skills at work became better and as marriage, home-owning and
children had left few areas in his life where important decisions
needed to be made, he had found himself becoming resistant to the
same control by Dilly that he once had craved. He came to bridle
against her direction as a horse would to a whimsically jerked
rein. Bridling against arbitrary control was one thing. What he was
doing now was something else. He was making a decision that, at
rare moments, he had guessed could end his marriage. Bill looked
over at his clothes to see if he wanted to put them back on, but
concluded choosing to do that would take as much energy as
remaining half-naked on the table. He wished that Dr. Osterin, who
he imagined to be a bustling type of man, much like Dilly, would
come through the door. He wanted someone in charge in the room with
him; he wanted someone around with enough energy and direction to
carry him through his decision.

The door opened slowly. A low, tentative
voice said, “Mr. Phelp?” Bill nodded. He had expected someone older
and he certainly had expected a man.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Marks. Dr. Osterin’s been
called out on an emergency. How are you feeling?”

Bill drew his legs up tighter.

“Fine.”

“That’s good. You’re aware of the
procedure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s go over it again quickly, just
so we’re sure.”

* * *

As he stepped through the doorway, Bill was
surprised at how far the sun had fallen. He had checked his watch
several times during the first couple of hours after the surgery,
but, then, as the anesthetic wore off and the pain wore on, he had
forgotten to keep track. It was almost five o’clock. His
appointment had been for ten-thirty. It had taken almost five hours
of icing to bring the swelling down. As he had lain in bed after
the procedure watching the swelling and following the discoloration
of the bruise as it spread down toward his thighs and up to his
belly, he had had moments when he himself joined in his body’s
outrage; however those moments of rebellion at his metamorphosis
had passed. He reassured himself that he had made the right
decision. Finally, the yellow-green of the bruise reached its
limits; the cold crystals of ice turned back the edema. He was
given his freedom.