Warm Wuinter's Garden (3 page)

“Good. That’s the spirit. You didn’t notice
it before?”

Although she knew that it was more her guilt
than his tone, Bett felt that Dr. Maurer was accusing her.

“No. I’m not one for avoiding an issue. If I
had found it, I would have called you immediately.”

“Well, sometimes people don’t. Have you been
doing a breast self-exam?”

Bett wished that Dr. Maurer hadn’t asked that
question. She knew that if he were to look at her at that moment,
she would have a difficult time meeting his gaze.

“When I remember, I do.”

“Do you remember the last time that you
examined yourself?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. I really don’t. I
think it’s been a long time.”

Dr. Maurer heard the self-accusation in her
voice. Without looking up, he said, “Sometimes, these things are
hard to spot. This one’s pretty deep and not that big. Even if
you’d given yourself an exam, you might have missed it.

“Let’s finish up. Then, while you’re
dressing, Jenny can make a call. We’ll find out what their schedule
is. Even though I’m one of the partners over there, it doesn’t
always mean very much until it’s time to pay the taxes or replace
some equipment.”

As he continued with his probing, Dr. Maurer
kept up a monologue rather than the murmuring that he had done
before.

“We doctors aren’t so privileged, you know.
Do you know Dr. Willette? He’s a G.P. Practices in Ashcoheag? His
wife, she’s a Betty, too, is a nurse who became a beautician.
What’s a beautician, now? A stylist. She became a stylist after
nursing wore her out. Now, don’t get any funny ideas, Jenny. He
told me last week that he has to make an appointment with her at
her shop to get his hair cut. If you know this man, it’s only cut,
not styled. His wife told him that she doesn’t like to bring her
scissors home. He told me that he reciprocates. He doesn’t make
house calls, even at his own.”

Holding the first two fingers of each hand
together, the physician made a series of small gestures to indicate
that it was time for Bett to pull her knees up. She preferred Dr.
Maurer’s silent signaling to the method that of Dr. Pearlman, who
had been her obstetrician during the years in Massachusetts when
she and Neil were having their four children. Dr. Pearlman, in his
best Bronx accented version of a western drawl, would say something
along the lines of “C’mon, cowpoke, there’s cattle to drive. Get
them boots back in the stirrups.”

It seemed to Bett that Dr. Maurer was
especially careful about making sure that the speculum was warm;
however she was so tense that it took some time and pain before it
was in place.

As she had done during many previous exams,
as a tired mother would a child, Bett pushed her mind out the door
to wander until the pelvic exam was over.

Licorice black dirt cascaded from the back of
a rusted red dump-truck with the sheeshing sounds of brushes
sliding on cymbals. Clots of mushroom smelling loam made thumps and
mushroom shaped clouds of dust under the May, Monday after Mother’s
Day, cirrus-streaked blue sky. Twelve yards of screened soil, a
gift of three yards from each child, to build up the thin,
taffy-colored earth of their new cove-side home. A hot spring sun
baked deep into cheeks stretched tight in joy. No flowers for
Mother’s Day. But, the means for unending flowers. Draw deep the
fecund yeast that will raise up petals of every shape and hue.
Drive a dull-edged spade, banged too long against meager, ochrous
clay, ten inches deep into dirt as dark and fine and heady, as
exhilarating, as Italian roast coffee. Drive it as deep as a
spade’s blade would reach into Opa’s bottomland. Wave the truck
away impatiently. Fill full the gimp-legged wheelbarrow. Roll it
toward the starving beds. Nurse Bett. Nurse Bett. Here. No, here,
first. Me, first. Dump the swaying load. Lavish it on as thick as
birthday cake icing. No niggardly powdered sugar sprinkling.
Wastrel. Spendthrift. Pile it on. Feed the tangled roots
self-strangling in their search for sustenance. Tug and tug the
coiled rope until blackened sweat slides down your winter white
nape. Pull and choke and choke and pull until life roars in the
roto-tiller. Drive deep the shiny tines into the cemented clay.
Crumble it. Crush it. Ravage it. Raze it. Break down this fortress
trying to protect its pittance of remaining wealth. Break down its
paltry glue. Hold fast with freckled fat arms until new black and
old tan muddle into rich chocolate brown, until soil fills your
boots and nostrils, until the air is blue with oily exhaust, until
a baptism of spring sweat christens your brow and wets your lips,
drips off your face and collects and cools in the glen of your
heaving breasts.

The vacuum as Dr. Maurer withdrew his finger
from her rectum pulled Bett back into her examination. She heard a
galoshes sound as he removed the latex gloves. She lay still as her
examiner pulled the extension out from the end of the table. After
Bett removed her heels from the stirrups, Dr. Maurer felt her knees
and rotated her ankles before pulling on each of her toes. When he
asked her if any of her many varicose veins ached more than usual,
Bett replied that she had not noticed any difference. As soon as
she said it, however, she wished she hadn’t. She thought that it
sounded as though she were chiding him for questioning her about
the breast self-exam.

“We’re done. Everything seems fine. We’ll be
back in a minute. Go ahead and get dressed.”

Dr. Maurer went through the door at a rapid
pace. Jenny smiled at Bett before following him out. As soon as the
door closed, Bett touched her fingers to her breast to feel the
thickening. She felt a queer need to talk to the lump as she would
to a baby or to any obstreperous life—a whining child, Queenie
tugging on her leash at the beach, a cormorant shrieking that it
should have the highest point of a small rock to dry its wings, a
morning glory pushing through the palisade to open its blossoms on
the far side of the fence. Bett whispered as she dressed
herself.

“You want a life. Of course, you do. We all
do. But you didn’t pick a very good spot for a home. You should
think about a move. A nice move. How’s that sound? Sssshhhh. Stay
sleepy. Don’t waken. Be good. Stay sleepy.”

In the many minutes between the time she
finished dressing and when Dr. Maurer returned, Bett listened
intently to the muffled sounds from the rest of the building in
order to crowd out the silence of the examination room. A toilet
flushed; a faucet ran; two women’s voices resonated back and forth
in imitation of cicadas’ drone. As the minutes passed, Bett began
to feel better. She was sure that if Dr. Maurer thought the mass
were cancerous, he would have been too solicitous to have kept her
waiting. After more waiting the thought began to form that the wait
was occurring because Dr. Maurer was insisting to someone that her
condition dictated she be seen immediately.

Bett started when the door burst open.

“Jenny got you in. You can go over now and
they’ll squeeze you into their schedule. You’ll have to wait
awhile, but they promised to take care of you. After you’re done
over there, come back here and we’ll take a look. Okay? Any
questions?”

“Will the mammogram tell you definitely
what’s going on?”

“No technique gives us all the information
that we’d like. But everything helps.”

“Do I carry the film back with me?”

“That’s the easiest way. I’ll see you in a
little bit.”

Touching Bett’s shoulder, Dr. Maurer said,
“I’m glad that we can get this taken care of today.” With the
lightest of touches, he propelled her toward the door. As he opened
the door for her, he handed her a small piece of paper.

“Here’s the order. I’ll see you later. Be
patient. The wheels of medicine tend to grind a little slowly.”

Outside the door, Jenny smiled unwaveringly
when Bett thanked her for her help.

She reached for the ignition key. She needed
to get home. There were a million things to do. First things first.
After looking at the film, Dr. Maurer had suggested that, given the
holiday, there might be a good chance to schedule a biopsy for
later in the week. She had told him she didn’t have a free moment
until Labor Day was past. Children and grandchildren would begin
descending in a few days.

Although Bett had not known it when he first
guided her fingers to the lump, nor had she quite known it when Dr.
Maurer pointed out its ghostly outlines on the mammogram, now she
was sure, in the reassuring storm of passing cars, in the steady
warmth of the drifting sun, in the unchanging smell of her car, in
the steadiness of her brown sausage fingers that the mass meant her
no harm. Bett was sure that if the mass were trying to hurt her,
some aspect of her world would have changed.

From the time she was a tiny girl riding a
tricycle up and down the elm-lined sidewalks around her
grandparents’ home, Bett had known which barking dogs were
threatening and which were not. She always knew which cats could be
held and which could not. She had never been bitten or scratched.
Nothing had changed. The mass was benign. She was fine. She was
sure. The eggplant needed to be picked. Bett started her car. First
things first.

Why was it that, each day, a child’s growing
competence caused a loss in a mother’s freedom? Each day her child
grew and each day a mother’s freedom to hold, to hug, to kiss, to
clean, to feed, to cool or warm, to bed or wake shrank. The freedom
to teach, to inform, to shape, to pad and prod grew smaller. Each
day, ties going, gone. A child learned to loop a shoestring, to
make a little knot, and a mother’s life unraveled. Why?

As Dilly Koster-Phelps flipped clean
underwear onto five piles with the precision of a blackjack dealer,
she tried to push away her maternal fears. She and the kids would
leave for her parents’ waterfront home early Friday morning. The
children would need an extra pair of underwear on Friday, two pairs
each for Saturday and Sunday and Labor Day, and one additional pair
in case they went swimming more than once on one of those days. Her
husband Bill wouldn’t leave Massachusetts for the Rhode Island
shore until Saturday or, possibly, even Sunday. For Bill, work was
more important than family. Three pairs for him. Dilly wasn’t
really sure how many pairs to take for herself, but it really
didn’t matter. If she ran out, she’d do as she’d always done and
borrow a pair from her mother.

Dilly and Bett were the same size—short, and
the same shape—zaftig. They had the same golden brown eyes, smudged
nose, heavy jaw and wattled neck. Dilly’s hair was cut in the same
short, curly, no-bother style that Bett had worn for decades.
Although they shared many physical characteristics, their mouths
were different. Bett’s was mostly welcoming; Dilly’s was mostly
determined. As her hands flew back and forth from the laundry
basket to the piles on the bed, sorting underwear and balling
socks, Dilly planned her campaign.

Her father was overweight and overworked. His
blood pressure must be too high and his fiber intake too low. The
blood pressure could give him a stroke or heart attack in seconds.
Without the fiber he could develop diverticulosis, have it flare up
into diverticulitis, perforate his intestinal wall and be dead from
peritonitis in hours. Dilly could almost see the triglycerides
floating through his body looking for a natural narrowing of an
artery to begin a blockage. He ate eggs and cheese and red meat and
butter as if he had not read a newspaper or watched television in
twenty years. She knew that if she were to show up unannounced on a
winter evening she would catch her parents eating plates of pork
hocks and kraut, or boiled ham and cabbage, or beef tongue and
spaetzle in cream, or roast pork or veal with kartoffelkuchen—a
pudding made up of potatoes, cream, butter, ham, ground sausage,
embolism, infarction and death. Eating a serving of kartoffelkuchen
was the same as ripping a month from the calendar of life.

Dilly Koster-Phelps measured things from
their ends. She didn’t record the weight that she had lost; she
concentrated on the pounds that remained between herself and her
goal. When she jogged, she started with five miles to go and
counted her progress as a launch controller at NASA might. Four and
one half. Four. Three and one half. Three. Dilly thought that the
system used to keep track of age was inane. A birthday only
recorded what life had been lived. What was much more important was
how much life was left. To Dilly, it made more sense to use life
expectancy as a substitute for birthdays. She was sure that if
people knew their Life Expectancy, it would make them much more
careful of how they lived their days.

Under Dilly’s system, which she had worked on
over the years while doing dishes or laundry, each child would
begin its life with an actuarial-based Life Expectancy. A white
girl would begin with an L.E. of seventy-eight; a black girl would
get a seventy-three. A white boy would start with seventy-one
probable years, while a black boy would begin with sixty-four. The
child’s L.E. would be adjusted depending upon behavior. A white
teenage girl, who had been living a healthy life for fifteen years,
could celebrate her fifteenth birthday and sixty-third life
expectancy day one year. If, however, she began to smoke in the
following year, then, making the assumption that she would continue
to smoke, she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday but an L.E of
only fifty-five. By using Dilly’s system, a new smoker would not be
allowed to ignore the knowledge that each cigarette cost her five
and one half-minutes of life. She would be forced to recognize
that, on average, smoking would cost her seven years of life. If
the same girl chose to drink, or live on French fries and sausage
and pepper grinders, then more years would be subtracted. Dilly was
absolutely positive that her system would make individuals both
more aware and more responsible for their health.