Warm Wuinter's Garden (29 page)

Science was simple to think about, but hard
to do. Very bright minds and very hard work led mostly to terrible
theories. If the theory was good—parsimonious, predictive—the
experimentation was bad, or, worse, undoable. If the experiment
could be done, then there were bound to be measurement
problems…

And once a person stepped out of the
controlled chaos of a lab into the uncontrolled chaos of the
natural world, things got harder and harder but curiouser and
curiouser.

Lise sat at her kitchen table making
Anasazi-like pictographs with aerosol cheese on saltines. She
represented Dilly with a question mark enclosed in a pickle shape
which was contained inside a heart. Bill’s cracker was divided by a
diagonal. In the upper half was a dollar sign; the lower half held
an eye with a line through it. Kate’s cracker had a sunburst. For
Roger’s she drew a stick of dynamite. Jessica was represented by a
purse crossed by a baseball bat. As she absent-mindedly stuck the
nozzle of the can of ersatz cheese into her mouth, Lise arranged
and re-arranged the crackers like a spread of solitaire. She had
invited herself to visit her sister’s family. One of her
motivations had been to relieve the guilt Peter had given to her on
Christmas Day. A more important reason for going was to collect
data on the state of Dilly and Bill’s marriage. There had been
something about Bill’s challenge of Dilly over Kate’s spilled
eggnog which she had not been able to get out of her thoughts since
Christmas.

Lise had wakened early that morning with a
sense of unease. She had toyed with calling Dilly and cancelling
because of a lab or health or menstrual problem. She had asked Brad
if she looked peaked. He had swollen himself to his full size,
pointed his finger at the door, and in his lowest voice he had
said, “Go, get thee hence. In shame.”

After Brad’s encouragement had propelled her
to the car, Lise had been fine until she had crossed the line into
Dilly’s town. As she had gotten closer to the house, her car had
gone slower and slower as her memories had raced faster. She and
Dilly had never been soul-mates. Her earliest memories of Dilly
were of being told what to do. Their foundation as siblings had
been Dilly giving orders and Lise obeying them. As they had grown
older their relation had changed in degree but not in kind. As she
had sat in her parked car two blocks from Dilly’s home, Lise had
made up a list of things she thought Dilly would tell her to do
during their day together.

Lise placed Bill’s cracker next to Dilly’s
and shot a caulk bead of orange around the outer edge of both
crackers. She looked at the symbols joined inside the orange frame.
The juxtaposition looked strange. Brought in close proximity to
Dilly, Lise had felt strange. It was not easy to feel a blood
closeness to her sister. Lise considered calling Pete, but she knew
he would be working. She wanted to call her mother, but her mother
had plenty of her own worries and didn’t need more.

Lise laid out a line of crackers and shot
cheese on them. She looked down at the message she had sent
herself. ????!!!! She wished Brad were there even though it was
Brad whom she wanted to talk about. When the can of cheese gave out
its death rattle, Lise ran for her coat and sterility of the
lab.

Neil didn’t know whether he felt worse for
himself or about himself. Less than twelve hours before, Kenyon had
told him that he was being investigated. Neil’s moving his money
out of the bank had not gone unnoticed.

So many entities had been formed to
investigate the causes of the Rhode Island banking crisis that Neil
wasn’t even clear which commission was looking at his transactions.
There was a special fact-finding group reporting to the governor.
The federal attorney’s office, as well as at least one state grand
jury, was looking for indictments. The General Assembly was making
its own investigation. And, as could be expected, the newspaper was
on a witch-hunt.

The moment after he had made his decision to
remove money from South Coastal Neil had felt disloyal, but there
had been no question in his mind whether what he was doing was
legal. It was only in the aftermath, as the discussion of insiders
using restricted information to protect themselves ensued, that he
began to have doubts. He wasn’t sure that when the press or one of
the many arms of the octopus of the law got to him they would
understand the innocence of his actions. He had listened to Brad,
read newspaper accounts, considered Bett’s health and made his
decision.

Ever since mid-afternoon, when Kenyon had
told him of the questions he was being asked about Neil’s accounts,
Neil had been fighting off rounds of nausea and anger. He knew he
was going to be pilloried; he could feel it. He kept telling
himself he had done nothing wrong, but he found he was having a
harder time believing it.

It was just. He should be pilloried. He was
despicable. He wished there was a way that he himself could be the
punisher. Do it. Get it over with. Be done with it…if it would ever
be done. He tried to turn a rage onto his smallness, but, instead,
he began to weep. He feared his choked-off sobs would awaken Bett.
He eased himself from the warmth of the covers into the cold. The
darkness of the room was given a silvery gloss by his tears. His
feet, scuffling along the edge of the bed like dogs snuffling for a
lost bone, finally found his slippers. There was a sharp scraping
sound as a foot tried to orient the slipper. Managing to get both
slippers on his feet, he stealthily shuffled the short distance
between bed and closet door. He found his robe, but waited until he
was out in the hall before wrapping himself in the warmth of the
thick camel hair. The cold air, which had settled in the black
tunnel of the hall, brushed against his ankles like wet weeds. He
thought to wait out his tears in the bathroom. It would be warm,
but in there it could only be pitch black or too bright. Leaning
heavily on the banister to keep the stair treads from creaking, he
slowly made his way downstairs.

During the two hours that he had lain in bed
listening to Bett’s raspy breathing and avoiding her twitching
sleep, Neil’s every joint, nerve and muscle had felt
over-stimulated. Yet, now, making his way down the steps, he felt
exhausted. He considered turning around and going back to bed, but
he feared that if he did his feverish thoughts would return.

After walking through the cinereous shadows
of the living room, Neil squinted his eyes nearly shut before
turning on a table lamp just inside the den. The low-wattage bulb
cleared a space in the thick night just large enough for him to be
able to sit and think. He got the ceramic heater from the closet,
plugged it in, and pointed it toward his chair. As his refuge was
warming, he went to the dining room for a glass and the bottle of
brandy from the walnut server. Back in the den the warmth of the
heater felt good upon his ankles and the warmth of the brandy,
expanding from his throat down and into his stomach as if it were
some strange upside down hot air balloon, felt better.

To have and to hold. In sickness and in
health. In sickness. He felt tears well up again. They had begun
their life together as smooth-skinned youths. As children had come,
as gravity had done its work, as the sun had embossed their living
leather, as work and play had taken their mite by precious mite
toll, he thought he had learned the meaning of the few words he had
spoken to Bett in front of an audience of friends and family and
some ill-defined God. There had been times—during pregnancies,
later times after her never-thin body had thickened, times of early
morning when he had looked at her in sleep with a prune’s wrinkles
of skin pushed up around her eyes—when he had felt a moment’s
loathing for the aging of his wife. He had taught himself to
replace those feelings with a sense of well-being and gratitude
that each of them was using up the capital of his life in the
presence and service of the other. He had taught himself that
wrinkles weren’t failings. They were the signposts of their life’s
sharing—badges, emblems, symbols, the trail blazes of their
marriage. And although there had been the same transitory moments
of repugnance when Bett had come home from the hospital, her breast
gone and her skin scarred and, later, other quick, unbidden moments
of abhorrence they had been just that, moments.

Now, those moments were gone. In the last
days those moments had grown and twisted until they were as
infiltrative as the cancer itself. Those brief moments of weakness
had been transmuted into hours and, then, days of repugnance and,
added to those days of horror at what was occurring to Bett, was an
equal time of self-revulsion for a betrayal of his vows echoing
down from forty years before. He dreaded going to bed with Bett and
it.
It
was a leg that held a bone that was maggoty with a
too-virile life. Each night his stomach revolted against the
thought that he and Bett must share their bed with that corrupt
limb. Even as he brushed his teeth and dressed in his pajamas, Neil
would tense himself against the touch of that diseased leg against
his own. He despised himself for his disgust of that estranged
stick of now foreign flesh.

Other than for a slight reddening, the
slightest swelling and a small patch of flaking skin—all side
effects familiar to him from her earlier radiation—her cancerous
leg, the right one, looked exactly like the left. Flaccid flesh and
mottled skin, mosaiced by varicose veins, it was the same aged leg
that had been a part of Bett for many years. It was the same solid
structure that had walked children from cries to coos, that had
crawled along the narrow paths of decades of gardens, that had
canted out under an outthrust hip at the end of a mamba. He had
told himself over and over again that it was the same familiar leg.
He rebuked himself for thinking it was something separate from Bett
herself. It wasn’t some strange third party alienator of his
affection. It was Bett. It was Bett. He had repeated his
incantations over and over again, but the black magic of the cancer
was stronger than what he could conjure up. In the end, it had won.
Despite his best efforts, it sickened him to have that leg in bed
next to his own. After almost an hour of sitting within the small
sphere of warmth and calming noise from the heater, Neil was
suffused with the apathy of the half-drunk and too-tired. The waves
of spousal repulsion and self-revulsion had ebbed to a distant
shore.

Being overly careful to make no noise, Neil
put away the heater and turned out the light. Holding as tightly to
his small island of alcohol-created unconcern as he did to the
banister, he climbed the stairs. Back in bed, he insinuated his
fingers under the sleep-formed shield of Bett’s hand to trace the
welt of tissue across her chest. He rubbed his leg against her
flannel-covered thigh. He prayed a slurred prayer that his moment
of grace would last long enough to fall asleep.

As Neil slowly tried to drift along a dark
comfort he imagined being free from all that he had been feeling;
however, instead, his thoughts conjured an image of himself, in
bed, at night, using cat’s eyes, to stare across the pitch black
room to a stump of flesh-toned plastic and diamond bright surgical
steel screws.

To have. But less to hold. To have. To be
held. In love? Or contempt?

As night slid toward morning Bett and Neil
both stirred, twisted, turned, sighed and moaned with the plaints
of cows in a small stall.

Bett knew that if the mood she had been in
did not lift soon the pressure would squeeze her into hard black
stone. The feelings had already gone on so long that it was an
increasingly rare moment that she even thought to separate herself
from what she felt.

The thin gray light of late winter lacked the
strength to make its way much past the drawn lace curtains in
Nita’s old room. In the midday twilight it was hard to distinguish
between the loose folds of Bett’s jowls and wattles and the rumpled
mounds of covers she had drawn tight around her sagging flesh. The
narrow bed and the small stand next to it were filled with a sick
person’s things—a box of tissues, pill vials, tablet, pens, an
uneaten breakfast, unread books, unopened magazines, nearly full
glasses of juice and water and soda. The ringer switch on the
telephone had been turned to off. The air in the room was clean and
cold from the half-open window.

Bett stirred and a smell, not unlike that of
grated cheese, drifted out from under the covers. She would have to
bathe, but later. She removed a flannel-swathed arm from the
bedding’s oven. She rubbed her hand on her itching scalp. She
couldn’t tell whether it was the skin of her palm or that of her
bald head that was sticky from old sweat.

Before he left for work, Neil had offered to
sponge bathe her scalp and face and neck and hands, but Bett had
told him to leave her alone. She would do it if and when she was
ready.

She spoke aloud the words she had said to him
that morning. It was almost as satisfying to hear them a second
time as it had been the first. There was something almost sensual
in pushing him away. Each time she ventured down the unfamiliar
path of cruelty, Bett’s nerve endings tingled at the enormity of
what she was doing. Somehow, it was exhilarating to strike out at
her husband, her mate, her pash of forty years. He would try to
bring light and love into the small darkness that she had made of
Nita’s old room and she would repel those efforts. He would come
with flowers and she would immediately banish them. Their perfume
made her sick. He would come with books. She was ever so sorry but
they bored her. He would try to close the windows afraid that she
might catch cold and she would forbid him to touch it. Cold was the
only healthy thing around her. He came with foods to entice her
appetite and she would cackle at his stupidity. Couldn’t he see.
How long would it take him to realize that she couldn’t eat. He
came in one evening with an end table. What was he doing? He was
going to bring a TV in for her. She didn’t want a television. The
stories were insipid. The commercials irritating. She had her own
insipid irritating life to live out.