Warm Wuinter's Garden

by Neil Hetzner

  “Hey, Lise, the guy a jerk.ﾁ He knew what the dog’s about. Probably trained him. He’s a skinhead. Probably has a lot of interesting ideas. Jack boots, uniforms and snarling dogs. He understands intimidation. If that dog’s not in my yard, he’ll be fine. You know, he’s not been back. If only students learned their lessons that well.”

  Lise had closed up the distance between Brad and herself. She wrapped a small hand around part of his bicep.

  “It was a nice lesson in that tent.”

  A foot taller than Lise, Brad had to look down to find her eyes hidden under her mop of corn straw hair.

  “We’ve reviewed your progress and you’re up for a merit badge, Scout.”

  “I think I earned it. I know my camp craft.”

  “You did. You do. And I need to earn my assistantship. I’ve got to get some work done on my lectures. I can’t believe classes start in a week. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in that ethics class.”

  Lise stretched her mouth wide as if she had bitten into the alum of a grape seed.

  “What’s the word I told you I never can remember? You know, the laundry soap one.”

  “Oxymoron.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Forget it, Lise. Business ethics isn’t one. Most business people are pretty straight. Academic ethics or professional ethics, like legal ethics, now, those are oxymorons. I’ve got to run. I’ll give you a call later.”

  “Avoiding a discussion?”

  “No, Lise. I’m just busy. If you hear a loud noise and see a chunk of road fly for sub-orbit, then, you can be sure I’m avoiding a discussion.”

  Brad turned toward the door.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Did you talk to your dad?”

  “About the bank stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. He said fine. He said it wasn’t something that he knew a lot about, but he’d be happy to talk.”

  “That’s great. Even if he doesn’t know that much, he’s sure to know some people who can help. This could be some great research. I’m excited. Thanks.”

  Brad noticed Lise’s squint.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What about the mountains?”

  “Either’s fine. You choose. I really gotta get moving.”

  Lise growled at Brad’s back as he left the lab. A few minutes later she was staring into the eyepiece of the electron microscope without attending to any of the kaleidoscopic swirl of organic material caught on the slide. She fidgeted. She pulled her knees up high enough that she could wedge the heels of her sneakers on the top rung of the lab stool. The zebra-striped high top sneakers and black men’s socks looked incongruous with her white lab coat. Where the coat fell open, deeply tanned knees and thighs showed until they were covered by the black and silver spandex of a pair of bicycle pants. Lise pulled the collar tabs of her lab coat up higher so she put them into her mouth to chew. She always thought better when she was chewing on something.

  Brad wanted to go to Rhode Island with her for Labor Day weekend. He wanted to meet her family, and talk to her dad. Lise wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. It might be too soon in the relationship to drop him into a vat of Kosters. Dilly would follow him around all weekend with a pair of scissors trying to trim his hair. Dilly’s husband, Bill, suspecting an inverse relationship between length of hair and intelligence, would ignore him. Nita would just be cool. There would be the kids zooming around. Her father would pass on to Brad, as if they were heirlooms, the family’s collection of strange things that Lise had done. Her mother, as always, would be wonderful. She would know where to seat Brad, what to feed him, and how to make him feel welcome. That he had shoulder length hair, that “Vincit Veritas” was tattooed on the skin over his heart, that he was an avid hunter, that he had drifted around the country and in and out of school and jobs for almost ten years before deciding that he wanted a doctorate in business, all that, all information which would be of the utmost importance to Dilly or Bill, would be less important to her mother than whether Brad made eye contact when he spoke to her.

  If they didn’t go to Clarke’s Cove, they could spend three days hiking. Maybe where the most easterly peaks of the White Mountains tumbled over into Maine north of Lake Sebago. Of course, they could expect that the holiday traffic up and down Route 95 would be overwhelming. Unless they avoided traveling on Friday evening and someway missed Monday afternoon and night. Probably not a prayer for a camp-site this late. The trails would be crowded. As noisy as a shopping mall parking lot. At least, until they got into the higher elevations. But, if they persisted, they would be rewarded with the deafening quiet of rushing air and the awe-filled vertigo of looking down at three thousand feet of gray rock and green leaves falling out from under their feet. Somewhere along the path, sitting on a cool outcropping eating cheese and chocolate or after breaking out of a stand of pines into a bush-pocked lea, they would have one of their discussions.

  Despite how much physical fun they had both in and out of bedrooms, to Lise, the best part of their relationship was their discussions. One would pull out an idea, long stored away from the ridicule of those more commonly wise, to offer to the other. The giver would wait for the other’s response with the same guardedness that a cook has when serving a new dish. A taste. A smile. And the talk would begin. Intoxicating talk. That was the best.

  The previous week, on a drive out of Boston, she had noticed a preternaturally early pumpkin sitting at the base of a shock of still green corn. She had complained of the rampant commercialism of having the trappings of Halloween displayed in August. Wasn’t anything sacred? Brad had told her that that was the scientist part of her talking. For all their talk of freedom, most scientists hated rule breakers. Ruled behavior ruled them. They were really only comfortable with the accumulations of the past. Tradition. In contrast, business people, at least entrepreneurs, were rule breakers. They hated the past. That was what capitalism was all about. Dumping tradition. Dreaming something new. Trusting in the power of a dream.

  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 wi
th 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.

  Chapter 5

  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 surger
y 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.