Warm Wuinter's Garden (7 page)

The conversation had segued to a discussion
of harvest. He had said that Thanksgiving should be held on the
Friday following the first killing frost at Plymouth Rock. Since
weather determined the harvest, he felt that it should determine
the day of gratitude for the harvest. They reasoned through the
effects of a weather-based Thanksgiving upon families, businesses,
and the marketing of Christmas. They considered the benefits and
costs of early and late frosts. How often might a four day weekend
occur because the first frost was proximate to Veteran’s Day? Lise
had wondered what should be the criterion for defining a killing
frost. Their chemical make-ups caused various plant species to
freeze at different temperatures. Brad opted for a rule based on
the ground level air temperature falling to 0 degrees Centigrade
and staying there for at least one hour. She wanted to use a system
that was based on killing off a plot of Indian white cap flint
corn.

Without coming to any agreement on which was
the better decision rule, they had moved the discussion to pumpkin
carving. Lise thought that carving the top or bottom of a pumpkin
made better sense than carving its sides. By using the top one
could take advantage of the stem for a nose. Brad wondered whether
the curve in most pumpkin stems might not make the result look too
Semitic. She countered that the stems could be cut close to make a
pug nose, or the bottom could be used. Either way, the roundness
would much more resemble the shape of a face. The pumpkins’ bulges
on top and bottom would make better cheeks. The faces wouldn’t look
so squinched up. He wondered about the stability of a pumpkin
resting on its side, especially if candles were going to be used to
light up the face. In addition, he wanted an answer for how the lid
would be lifted on and off if the stem were being used for the
nose. They had spent the next miles working out various
solutions.

Lise knew she was an anomaly. And, she was
coming to learn that she was particularly drawn to other anomalies.
The symmetry of unlike seeking unlike. She disagreed with him that
scientists were most comfortable with the past. Scientists stayed
scientists because of the new, the unusual. It was the unexplained
that drove them. When other six year olds were chasing lightning
bugs, she had been searching for carrion beetles, lunar moths and
praying mantises. In high school when friends went to the record
stores and came home with Donna Summers, she bought Piaf and Robert
Johnson. After she moved to Boston, she had preferred wandering
through the narrow streets of Chinatown looking at bins filled with
a jumble of animal limbs or a bucket of chicken feet rather than
shopping at the Chestnut Hill Mall or walking the Freedom Trail.
She was sure that if she had been born in China, rather than
Massachusetts, she would have wandered Beijing searching out the
novelty of a hotdog or the curious construction of a baseball
mitt.

Lise smiled as she considered how Brad was a
great find. When she had had her first conversation with him along
the paths of the Ten’sching’en garden at the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, she had had the same sense of wonderment as she had felt when
she first saw the twisted skein of protein that was the subject of
her dissertation. Unusual. Unexpected. A part of her did want to
show Brad to her family. She liked him, but she worried that he was
attractive to her only because he was so different. She had
premised too many relationships on differentness and, after the
excitement of uniqueness, the pride of specimen-ship, had worn off,
there had been little left. If she were left to her own devices,
she was unsure whether she would be able to identify those things
in someone else that might be a good lifetime match for her. That
was data that needed to be collected.

If Lise took Brad to Clarke’s Cove, her
mother might be able to see the possibilities. At least, there
would be a good chance of that happening if conditions were
controlled; however, she laughingly admitted to herself, a Labor
Day weekend at the Kosters was not apt to be a scientist’s dream of
a controlled environment.

Lise Koster released the soggy collar tabs
from her teeth and replaced them with the knuckles of her right
hand. After several moments she became aware of herself—elbow
resting on a knee and thoughts pushing far beyond the microcosmic
life on the slide in front of her. She laughed at her haphazard
caricature of Rodin’s statue.

What did she really like? What was hers? What
was the baggage of others? It was hard being the youngest. She
never knew whether what she was doing was something that she really
had chosen or some accretion that she had picked up from an older
sibling. The choice always was whether to take up a ready-made
answer or flounder about on her own. And once the choice was made,
the question always remained whether she should have taken the
other path. Was she doing science because she loved it or because
it was a path that no other Koster had traveled? Was she attracted
to Brad because he was attractive or good or just because he was
different? If they were to go to Clarke’s Cove, she could ask her
mother.

It would be sweet to crawl alongside the
patches of marigolds and petunias that lined the flagstone walks,
pinching off dead blooms and wandering through confusing territory
in the steadfast company of her mother. She wanted to hear what her
mother would say about Brad.

Lise tore her knuckles from her mouth, closed
her hands into fists and hammered a brisk tattoo on her golden
knees. The vibrations picked up tone as they left her flesh and
traveled down the gray steel legs of the lab stool. She finished up
her solo by raising her fists higher, before letting them drop back
to her taut flesh. The final beats were accompanied with a soft,
Pa, Pa, Pa Pa, Pow from her broadly smiling mouth. She brought the
music to a resolution and her thoughts to a decision about the
weekend.

They’d go. It’d be a hoot. To hell with Dilly
and Bill and all the uncertainties. After Lise had finished her
solo, the lab was quiet, her body was calm and the energy in her
brain was tamed enough to focus on the complex strands of life
smeared on the slide.

The restaurant was almost quiet. It had been
a long afternoon. Peter Koster’s face grew and shrank in the
spattered bathroom mirror as he rocked back and forth on his aching
feet. He stared at the purple sacs under his eyes, the deeply
etched lines at the ends of his mouth, the question mark curve of
his neck and head. How he had changed. Persistent pain in his feet
had caused his body to curl up. The weight that he had dragged home
from Viet Nam, less bulky but far heavier than his duffel, the
weight of the years of bending over stoves and cutting boards, the
weight of unending seventy-hour weeks, the weight of responsibility
for the food and his employees and his family, the weight of the
pain in his heart and in his feet had worn him down.

The Provincetown, Massachusetts restaurateur
tried to shrug off the heaviness. He stretched. He took a deep
breath and let it whistle out through his coffee-stained teeth. It
didn’t help.

Five years before, on his thirty-fifth
birthday, he had stopped smoking. After eighteen years of smoking
and an equal number of years of being hounded by his sister Dilly,
and, later, his wife Gabriella, and, under her able tutelage, his
two boys Chris and Miguel, he had decided that the biggest present
that he could give himself would be to stop smoking. To celebrate
his decision and to cement the commitment, Gaby insisted they make
a symbolic run along the beach. They rode their bikes along the
dunes the two miles out to Race Point Lighthouse where the tip of
Cape Cod curls back like a bass clef. With the boys pacing him,
they ran barefoot along the gravelly sanded beach until his lungs
grew too hot to breath. He coughed and spat phlegm so thick that it
sat upon the damp sand like a jellyfish. He and Gaby watched a
whale watch boat grow big while they waited for his chest to stop
heaving. The boys wrestled until brown bodies, the color of roast
turkey, were so coated in sand that they looked like gingerbread
men. Later, they had jogged slowly back to their bikes and taken
their time riding back into town.

The next morning Peter could barely hobble to
the bathroom; however after fifteen minutes of moving about the
pain disappeared. The following morning the same pain recurred and,
then, disappeared. It became a pattern for Peter to drag himself
around in the morning by holding on from door jamb to sink to
banister to chair to kitchen counter. But, by the time that he had
showered, drunk his coffee, and dropped himself in and out of the
susurrations of the Today show, the pain would leave.

At the restaurant his feet would feel fine as
long as he kept moving; however if he sat at his desk to make up
orders, pay bills, or work up staff schedules, the pain would
return. The throbbing that came during the day always seemed worse
than what he woke to in the morning. If he hobbled from his office
and was seen by the maitre d’, who was born Robert but had
transmuted to Raoul, he would be chided and wheedled.

“Darling, please, do something. For my sake.
This is just too painful to watch. Pain is fine, in its proper
place. Nipple piercing, certain scarf and whip hobbies, par
exemple. But not hobbling. Hobbling’s so declasse’. Fine for
hospitals and refugee camps and Roumanian train stations. But, not
for that bastion of nou- and entre-nous and oldvelle Cape Cod
cuisine, Pete’s Retreat. Please! Do something, or you’ll end up
like poor Porgy. Wheeling your way down Cat Fish Row. Lumpkin,
please, do you really want your mouth so low to the ground in this
Eden of iniquity? Be a good lamb. Listen to Raoul. Have
surgery.”

For weeks, if Peter could just bear with it
and keep moving, the pain would finally go. However, there came a
point where the pain never left. Any pressure on his heels was
excruciating. After a number of nights where the sweat from the
kitchen’s heat had mixed with tears drawn by the stabbing in his
heels, he had gone to a podiatrist. The doctor had diagnosed a
calcaneal exotosis of the plantar fascia. After prodding, and with
some asperity, the doctor had translated his diagnosis as bone
spurs. The spurs were calcium deposits caused by the body trying to
repair the tendons he had torn while making his celebratory
non-smoking run. The doctor suggested a progression of cures from
inserts and exercises to cortisone shots in the heels to surgery to
remove the calcification and to re-attach the ligament. If one
treatment didn’t work, they would move on to the next. When Peter
pressed him, the doctor had admitted that the aftermath of both the
cortisone and surgery would be painful. Neither procedure always
worked.

Peter looked up from washing his hands to the
restroom’s water-speckled mirror. The puffy shadows under his eyes,
the dull stare, the limp oily thin brown hair, the sallow cheeks,
the thin white arms, and the soft shrunken belly, forced over his
belt by the curvature of his spine, made him think that he looked,
as was true of many restaurant owners, like a prisoner of war. By
some strange process he had chosen a life where he remained locked
inside a building for most of the hours of most of the days of the
year. While half of eastern Canada and all of Massachusetts waited
fifty weeks of the year for the pleasure of fighting their way onto
Cape Cod for its beaches and beauty, he missed the beauty and
beaches because he kept himself chained to a building filled with
chipped cups, greasy floor mats, blackened pots, a wheezing
walk-in, disappearing help, disappearing inventory, particularly
shrimp and beer, and a disappearing clientele.

Peter had tried the recommended exercises,
but they’d made the pain worse. He had added rubber mats by the
stoves. He had begun a self-diagnosed regimen of three aspirin
every two hours. He had filled his shoes with arch supports and
cushioned liners. The pills and orthotics and mats had helped just
enough that he could keep working; however there had been several
nights that first cigarette-free summer, usually on the weekend,
when he had had to crawl from the car across the sandy yard to the
weathered porch of his home at two in the morning.

It was fool’s luck he found the Avia sneakers
with the recessed heels. He was at a shoe store looking for more
orthotic things to put into his shoes when he noticed a display
describing the sneaker’s shock-dispersing design. He bought a pair.
Within days he felt some relief. Within four weeks the pain had
diminished to the endurable throb that he was feeling at that
moment. The shoes worked so well that he had insured himself
against the vagaries of shoe fashion and competition by spending
just over one thousand dollars to buy twenty pairs of them. His
horde was stored in the chicken wire cage storage area along with
the flour, liquid shortening, linguini, cans of tomato paste and a
dozen bags of samp.

Before leaving the staff restroom, Peter
looked down at his shoes. They were as mindlessly speckled with
drips and drabs as a Pollock canvas. Except for the slight noise of
Raoul shuffling dollars and counting coins for the afternoon
deposit and the croupy whir of the walk-in refrigerator, the
Retreat was quiet. He thought that the peace at the end of a shift
from the clanging of spoons and spatulas against sauce pans, the
incensed sputtering of the espresso machine, the cooks screaming
“Pick up” or “Eight-six the amandine”, the unending rings and
chimes as busboys sorted silver hot from the dishwasher was as
satisfying as the noises themselves had once been.

Since his first days of restaurant work,
Peter had believed that the only people who could survive in the
business were those who had the business in their blood. A love of
money, even if the love were as deep as Silas Marner’s, was not
enough to keep one going. There had to be a love for the craziness,
the crises, the constant hysteria, the chance to create, the
opportunity to serve. Restaurant work was a calling, like for the
priesthood. Noble work for true believers. For nearly twenty years
Peter had had no doubt that the business was in his blood. Lately,
he had begun to have some doubts.