by Wall, Carol
“Well, I like all of these,” I told him, surveying the load he’d brought in his trunk. “So if you want to plant them here, it’s fine.” By the time my voice broke, Giles had already turned toward me with a look of concern.
I could no longer pretend that everything was all right. “Giles, she fell at the doctor’s office today and it was my fault. I was thinking about the wrong things and she tripped on the curb. She’s okay, but she has a terrible knot on her forehead.”
“I am sorry, Mrs. Wall,” Giles said.
I looked into the distance. “She wanted to use your Kenyan cane, and why didn’t I let her do that? It’s touching how much she loves it. She told me that she was going to take it to a show-and-tell at Heathwood Hearth.”
“I know,” Giles said. “I was there.”
“You were there, Giles?”
“I was making a delivery to Heathwood Hearth for the Garden Shoppe a couple of weeks ago, and I saw your mother. She asked if I would come back the next day to answer questions about the cane. Your mother appreciates fine things. She told the group that learning about other cultures is rather like traveling the world.”
“Really, Giles? I’m glad to hear that. She has seemed so quiet lately. To tell the truth, I have been afraid that she’s depressed. I wonder why she doesn’t mention things like this to me. Perhaps I need to be a better listener, do you think?”
A few days later, I went to the Hearth to have lunch with my parents. Mama’s head was still bandaged, and I told her that I had been wrong to advise her not to use Giles’s cane. She should use it exactly as she saw fit, I said. Then I told her about the roses that Giles was planting for her in my yard—deep red roses, just like the ones back home.
10.
The Perfect Christmas Tree
My growing friendship with Giles was like a river that sometimes split into two separate streams, but always came back together again. We’d get busy with other things in our lives and follow our own paths for a while. With the arrival of winter there wasn’t so much yard work to do, and Giles worked longer shifts at the grocery store, so days or a week might pass without our exchanging even a few words. But then when we saw each other again, we picked up right where we left off, as if we’d been saving up everything we had to say to each other, just waiting for an opportunity to spill.
Our conversations always started with family. I asked after Lok, he asked about my children and my parents. Then, inevitably, something would take us off on a flight of intellectual fancy, and we’d find ourselves immersed in a conversation about space and time and the theory of relativity. Whatever the subject matter, Giles seemed to know something about it. This was amazing and delightful to me. I had no other friend like him, no one else who was so willing and happy to ponder such things along with me. Fate had sent a professor to my door, and my conversations with him were like a dream class—we didn’t talk about anything that didn’t interest us, and there was absolutely no homework.
I’d been a good student in school, but no one had ever accused me of being an intellectual. In truth, no one would have wanted me to be—when I was young, girls weren’t pushed to excel academically. A girl who got a 4.0 average might as well have hung a sign on her chest that said: “Doomed Never to Marry.” There were two career choices that were considered acceptable for girls: teacher or nurse. One day in high school, the boys and girls were divided into groups to talk about our future aspirations. Our guidance counselor, a woman with hair teased so high that it practically scraped the ceiling, asked all of us girls to write on a form what we wanted to be when we grew up. I dutifully wrote “Teacher.” My friend wrote “Doctor.” When the guidance counselor walked around collecting the forms she made my friend erase “Doctor” and change it to “Nurse.”
I considered myself a life-long learner with a curious mind, but I’d been perfectly satisfied to stop my formal education after college. Over the years, as the kids were growing up, I occasionally wondered what might have happened if I had chosen another path—maybe a master’s in English or even a Ph.D., leading to a job as a professor. But those were idle musings—I knew myself well enough to know that graduate school would never have been for me. I was a happy dilettante, and I loved following my own nose, picking up books on topics as they interested me. As soon as someone else told me what I had to study, it sucked the joy right out of it for me. So my conversations with Dr. Giles Owita became my ideal postgraduate education. I even took notes.
I could see that Giles also enjoyed our conversations. As he answered my questions, the cadence in his voice would change. He couldn’t hide the joy he found in teaching, and at times like that I had to stop myself from saying out loud how shortsighted those universities had been in not hiring him. His talent for explaining concepts that could otherwise be dreary or far too difficult always amazed me, so I made it a habit to ask him about anything that flew way over my head. One time, I’d been reading a biography of Einstein, and had been mulling one of his trickier thought experiments.
“Giles, I’m confused. I just finished reading about the passenger riding on the train that’s struck by lightning. I still don’t understand why the person on the train and the person on the platform see two different things, and what exactly that proves.”
Just as I knew he would, Giles warmed to the subject with relish and announced that he was going to look for one of his college texts that would help me better understand the concept. He said he would loan it to me, and I felt honored, as if I had been promoted from beginner to intermediate.
I thought about this as I drove into town a few weeks before Christmas. Giles had given me so much since our friendship had begun a year and a half before. I wondered what I could ever give him in return. As happy as he always was to see me, I couldn’t believe that he got nearly as much as I did from our conversations. Each time I walked away from Giles, I felt either enlightened by his brilliance or unburdened of some of my worries and sadness. I wished I could do the same for him.
• • •
It was after dark and flakes of snow swirled as I pulled into a downtown parking lot beside the Farmer’s Market. Dick was supposed to meet me there after work to look at Christmas trees. Stars twinkled from the velvet depths of night. Strands of colored Christmas lights zigzagged up and down the length of Market Street. Pulled into the festive atmosphere, I paused at cheery store windows decorated with familiar scenes of reindeer in the snow or children peering down the stairs to see what Santa brought.
I heard a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Elaine, the biology teacher at school. She held a clutch of pine boughs in her hand. We exchanged greetings, and I told her that I was on a hunt for a tree.
“You should buy one from Giles,” she said. “He’s over there, across the street. Apparently, his son is on a travel soccer team, and they’re doing it as a fund-raiser.”
I held a hand up. “Stop! We’ve been there!” I laughingly explained all the brownies, candy bars, and boxes of flavored popcorn I’d sold from metal folding tables in various commercial parking lots over the years. Not to mention the yard sales. All in the service of one of the kids’ sports teams.
“Say hi to Giles for me,” Elaine said as she ran off with her boughs. She was yet another of Giles’s many fans, ever since I’d passed his name along to her after she’d told me that her yard was suffering from the drought. I wondered anew how Giles managed to do everything he did—hold down multiple jobs, work for more and more private clients, and sell Christmas trees for his son’s soccer team. I spotted the handmade sign across the street where fir trees held their arms out, catching snowflakes.
ROANOKE COMETS
STATE SOCCER CHAMPIONS . . . DIVISION 3-A
. . . HELP US GO TO NATIONALS!
I scanned the soccer booth for any sign of Giles. Then a six-foot pine with perfect symmetry attracted my eye.
There was one person manning th
e booth, his back to me. From the shape of him, I suspected he was one of the soccer players—he was tall enough to seem fully grown, but he had the sinewy build of a teenager. “Excuse me. Could I see this one?”
The tree was loosely tied with string and leaned back toward a support post. Above where it rested, a canvas awning had filled up with snow. I pulled my winter gloves off, fingering the fragrant needles as more falling snow sifted through the leafless branches of the maple trees that lined the street.
The boy who turned around looked familiar, and I realized immediately that he must be Giles’s son. He was indeed in his teens and towered over me. His smile was just as electric as his father’s. “Sure,” he said to me. “I like that one, myself. Let me stand it up for you. The branches fall just right. It’s almost like a Christmas card.”
“Are you Dr. Giles Owita’s son?” I impulsively asked the boy.
He paused, seeming uncomfortable, the way any teenage boy would be when put on the spot.
“Your father is a friend of ours. And he does some landscape work for us as well.”
“Oh, right. He’s pretty good at that. I’m Naam.”
“I’m Carol Wall,” I said. “My husband and I just love your dad’s work.”
We shook hands.
“Is your brother here as well, and your mom?”
“Yes, ma’am. They’re selling wreaths. Across the street, and farther down. You see?”
The falling snow created a temporary scrim, yet soon it slowed to yield a vision of Bienta huddled at a table strewn with greenery and wreaths and velvet bows for sale.
Naam took some pruning shears and snipped the string from the tree. I resisted the temptation to embarrass him further by telling him that I’d been hearing all about him and his siblings for some time. Instead, I focused on the way the pine tree branches quivered as they settled into shape.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” I said. “I’d like to buy it.”
He took my folded bills. Then I saw Giles advancing toward us from about a block away. His footsteps were energetic as he hurried down the sidewalk from the coffee shop. “Here’s Dad,” Naam said.
“Hot chocolate!” Giles announced, balancing several cups in a paper carrier. He handed one to his son, then smiled at me.
“Would you like a hot chocolate, Mrs. Wall?”
“Oh. No thanks. Dick is taking me out for a sandwich soon, and I don’t want to spoil my appetite. Are you taking one over to Bienta? Do you mind if I walk over with you? I’d love to say hello.”
Giles nodded and said of course, but I noticed he stiffened a bit and grew guarded. I’d noticed lately that he often did that when the subject of Bienta arose. I knew that the loss of a child could hit spouses in different ways, sometimes causing a rift. I wondered if their separation from Lok had done the same to them. Giles always went out of his way to praise Bienta and how accomplished she was, but it seemed to me that there was a wistfulness to the way he spoke about Bienta, a sadness mixed with his admiration. He had told me how she’d managed a farm in Kenya, and how in her work as a nurse she had delivered two babies with nothing but a lantern to find the mothers’ huts and a razor blade to cut the umbilical cords. Bienta was an amazing woman, and Giles was a remarkable man. In so many ways they seemed perfectly suited to each other. But life had brought them so many disappointments.
When we reached Bienta, she smiled politely. “How is your mother?”
“My mother is somewhat better, thank you. Her spirits are good.”
Giles extended a cup of hot chocolate toward Bienta after having carefully wrapped a napkin around it to absorb the heat. I watched as she shook her head, her body turned away. He was clearly eager to please her, and I felt uneasy, as if I had stumbled onto a private conversation that wasn’t going well.
I introduced myself to Wath, their younger son. He was shorter than Naam and had a more compact build. His eyelashes were long and his expression held a merry aspect that reminded me of Giles. Yet he seemed more instantly at ease, more outgoing and chatty than either his brother or his father. He exuded the confidence of a well-loved youngest child.
I bought a wreath from Bienta, as well as a red ribbon from Wath. Across the street, Naam had wrapped my lovely pine tree with twine and called to his dad for help in carrying it to my van.
“I may be calling or writing you soon. About my parents,” I said to Bienta in parting, “if you don’t mind me taking advantage of some of your nursing expertise.”
“I would love to be of help,” she said, and I felt she meant it.
A few minutes later, as Giles fit the tree into the van, I asked him, “How have you been?” He produced string to tie the hatch down.
“I’m very well,” he said.
He took off his heavy gloves in order to tie the string. As I watched him work, I glimpsed a scar on the side of his wrist, which in all our time together I had never noticed. The scar was three or four inches long and slightly jagged. “My God, what happened to your wrist, Giles?”
He looked at the scar and his eyes grew narrow, as if he’d forgotten and needed to refresh his memory. Then he blinked, his lids two tranquil-looking crescent shapes. “I had a melanoma. This was several years ago, in Blacksburg. A course of treatment was prescribed.”
“Surgery?”
“Yes. Removal of the mole and some surrounding tissue.”
Giles had cancer? I struggled to fit this new information into the image I had formed of Giles as the picture of health. I took a moment to reimagine him leaping into my birch tree, but this time he missed his mark and fell to the ground. It gave me a chill, and I shrank farther into my wool overcoat.
“I just can’t believe that you had melanoma, Giles.” The words came quickly, and as quickly, I regretted that I’d spoken them. They sounded accusatory, somehow. Just exactly like what a casual acquaintance, Ella, had said to me at church at the time of my cancer diagnosis. She had spoken in a tone of voice more suited to addressing someone who’d been caught stealing money from the collection plate. “You, Carol? Oh no! You’ve always seemed so healthy. I never would have thought it. Your voice is strong and it carries so well from the loft. Are you a vegetarian? You seem to exercise a lot. Were you breast-fed as a baby?”
“No and no,” I’d said, stifling a laugh, which may have been what saved me from killing her.
Now I realized that my own tone of voice betrayed a note of shock that really had as much (or more) to do with fears for myself as it did with Giles. It was scary when a healthy, able man like Giles had cancer. Just like Ella had done with me, I struggled to make sense of it, to come up with something that Giles might have done—or not done—to cause it. I of all people should have known better, and yet here I was doing the same ignorant thing that I’d railed against since my own diagnosis. Cancer was a disease, not a judgment, and we were all at risk—in spite of our healthy habits.
Finally, I ventured another question. “Did you have to have chemo?”
“A course of chemotherapy was recommended. That’s true enough. I did not welcome it. In fact, I stopped before its course had run. After the first chemotherapy treatment, I could see it interfered with working, and I had a family to feed. So I told them I would not be back. This did not stop the scheduler from calling me, every time, and when I answered, she would give me my appointment time and place. And with each and every call, my answer was the same. ‘Thank you very much. I will not be there!’”
He chuckled at the memory, shaking his head with an air of wry amusement. Apparently, he had not elaborated on his answer to that chemo scheduler. He had just offered his polite decline in his usual lilting tone, as if he were simply turning down a second cup of coffee.
The nurse probably thought she was dealing with a prankster or a man with a mental problem. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud along with Giles. “I will not be there!�
�� I said, repeating his words while shaking my own head in amazement. He looked at his cancer treatment as if he’d had a choice about it, as if it were a restaurant menu and no one could force him to eat what he didn’t want. Lord knew that had never occurred to me. My Handsome Oncologist had said that cancer patients are generally exceedingly compliant. They might not like a particular treatment; nonetheless, desperate to be well, they did as told. Apparently, Giles was one of the exceptions.
I gave Giles some extra dollar bills for the boys to use on their trip. Still thinking of his decision about the chemo, I felt giddy as I imagined alarm bells sounding at his doctor’s office, and an APB extending all through Blacksburg and areas surrounding. “Be on the lookout for an educated cancer patient who chose not to pick his poison!”
I let my head fall back, startled by the very notion of laughter flying from my deepest heart. Joy was an emotion I had never associated with cancer. Yet Giles seemed to find a place for joy in all of life’s experiences. He reminded me of a gambler at the table with his last chip. He would enjoy the game until the final deal.
This was a whole new idea for me. The freedom held in just one second of realizing that everybody in this world is going to live until they die brought tears to my eyes. My cancer didn’t put me in a special category, I told myself. Like everyone, I would live until I died (perhaps because of cancer, or perhaps it would be from something else, like a Coca-Cola truck barreling through an intersection).
I took a tissue from my purse to wipe my eyes, giggling to recall how Dick resisted vitamins his doctor ordered for him, explaining that he would have to “read up more.” He scanned all the labels on his food and wrote down his weight from week to week on special index cards. He lived in the illusion of control. It was very understandable but also quite annoying. And how I’d missed that illusion for myself. It seemed a thousand years had passed since I’d last felt bulletproof.
