by Neil Hetzner
Bett brushed her way between the rows of tall wispy, plants with their yellow firework burst heads of developing seed. She deeply inhaled the anise smell which was so clean it cut through the muggy air. With a small groan let herself down onto one knee so that she might reach the lower stems.
Several times during the weekend, Bett had felt as if she were filming things rather than living them. Thoughts of her biopsy had acted as a lens to reduce, filter and crop the things going on around her. Working her way down the row of tickling fronds, she replayed images to see what she had missed: A frame filled up with Dilly laughing too hard and talking too loud. Dilly must have given a thousand orders in three days to her children, to her nephews, to her sisters, and to her parents, to Queenie. Drink this. Don’t eat that. Wear that. Think this. Set the table this way. Clear the dishes that way. The thermos goes here. The beach umbrella there. Don’t run in the sand. Don’t splash in the water. Don’t. Do. Don’t. Typical Dilly. Except. Something. It took several minutes for Bett to put together a supercharged moment in the laundry room as the two of them slopped sandy swimsuits under the faucets, another moment of confused conversation when she had found Dilly up early on Sunday morning, alone, dangling her feet into the water at the end of the dock with the realization that of Dilly’s thousand orders none had been directed at Bill. Bill hadn’t even arrived until Sunday noon.
Bett’s stomach rose, then, settled softly in a sigh as she realized that Dilly must have wanted to talk to her about Bill. Or their marriage or… If there were trouble between Bill and Dilly it wouldn’t surprise her. Despite a long time commitment not to judge her children’s relationships, Bette often had thought that the Koster-Phelps marriage was as delicately cobbled together as a Balkan alliance. She recalled a conversation that she and Neil had had the previous year after everyone had left late on Labor Day. They had discussed how life would change for Dilly with Kate starting school that week. Dilly would be left at home with no one except for a rabbit. Neither Neil nor she had been able to come up with a good guess as to where Dilly’s energy would be channeled. Now, a year later, it was even harder to figure what was happening inside the Koster-Phelps family.
Bett worried about her oldest daughter. For someone who expended such great amounts of energy, someone who constantly hissed and sputtered, gurgled and steamed, someone who seemed to ventilate every thought and emotion that rose inside her, there was a pent-up, pressurized feeling about Dilly that was very disturbing. Bett regretted that she hadn’t listened harder and looked deeper.
Bett wished that she had gotten more from Dilly and that she had given more to Nita. Soon after she had arrived, Nita had asked her mother if they could talk. They had tried. There had been twenty minutes together walking along Town Beach, but it had been hard to concentrate with thousands of desperate end-of-summer revelers surrounding them. They had found a few more minutes alone while shucking corn. Several other times they had been interrupted within minutes of beginning a conversation. Bett had gotten the some of the details. Nita felt as if she had lost not only the ten long years when the cervical cancer was a threat but also the ten short years after. Fear of cancer had taught Nita to keep her life drawn tightly around herself. When the fear had begun to pass, she had tried to re-start the emotional part of her life. But, even though the threat had passed, she was now realizing, her control remained. She had caught herself in a whipsaw. Although she had drawn many men near to her, she had denied them all intimacy as if she feared more treachery. Lately, it had gotten so that she pushed away anyone who even expressed an interest. She was afraid of intimacy, and she was afraid she was going to pass up and over the last youthful rise of her life and begin the long decline as a bright, polite, successful, obdurate, emotionally inviolable, lonely woman. She didn’t know which fear, of intimacy, or loneliness, was greater.
Bett had listened and hurt. She had tried to share the breathtaking excitement of being unguarded with someone. To give to Nita the roller coaster feeling of being vulnerable—which Bett saw as the keystone of intimacy. To give away her memories of that voluntary uncovering, that un-posed nakedness, that threat-filled thrill of hiding nothing. Of being only as one really was. Of making the pitch black blind leap of faith toward another. Bett had wanted to give her daughter the feeling, that most catalytic of joys, when the viewer took in the other’s nakedness and neither turned away in disgust or disappointment, nor used the new knowledge to harm. These freely offered truths—whether a sinister sign given in the heat thick dark of a spoor-filled bedroom, the half-choked laugh at the protests of a gaseous belly, or the clenching wetness of a sweaty hand as one entered a room of strangers—these sharings, were the rough-edged foundations of intimacy. These tradings of fears and weaknesses were the remittances of love. Bett had wanted to hold her stiff-spined daughter, to shake her, to shout, “Don’t miss this.”
Somehow, Bett had known from the time she was big enough to work with Opa that love was built upon acceptance. Infatuation was built upon the mirage of perfection; love’s foundation was the acceptance of the imperfections of truth. She had experienced that acceptance a thousand thousand times with Neil. She knew about intimacy. She had wanted to talk about it. But she found herself as tongue-tied as a stutterer facing a long row of b’s and p’s. She knew that it was the thing inside her flesh, the thing that was making her vulnerable in a way she had never been before, that was responsible for her muteness. She had wanted to reach across her own new fear to the pain and fear of Nita, but she had found that she could not. The discovery of this new fear-raised inability to share the truth gave Bett an understanding of Nita and of how the DES had affected her, an understanding which went far deeper than it ever had before. The fear, the covering up, the moat around her emotions, all the distancing that just the merest possibility of death was bringing to her, made her feel closer to her daughter than she had in twenty years.
The weekend had ended before their communication had really begun. Bett had hugged Nita tightly as she stood by the door of her car. She had promised Nita that they would have a long, uninterrupted talk soon. As she gathered the fennel, Bett remade the vow. For Nita. And for Lise. She felt shame that she had praised Brad for sharing at the same moment that she was hiding herself from Lise. She wondered what Lise would think when she found out how hypocritical her mother had been. She needed to re-find her strength.
As she snipped stems, Bett murmured Longfellow’s paean to fennel from the Goblet of Life:
Above the lowly plant it towers,
The fennel, with its yellow flowers,
And in an earlier age than ours,
Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
Lost vision to restore.
It gave new strength, and fearless mood;
And gladiators, fierce and rude,
Mingled it in their daily food;
And he who battled and subdued,
A wreath of fennel wore.
As Bett repeated the words that she had memorized from her grandfather more than fifty years before, she tried to turn them from a gardening rite, from decades’ old rote, to something more meaningful for that day. If her growth were not benign… She had not yet lost her vision, but she would need to be constantly vigilant that she did not. She would need new strength and more fearlessness. She must battle and subdue.
Bett cut a stalk of fennel long enough to be twisted into a wreath. She drew the tasseled top and blanched bottom toward one another to tie a loose knot. When she lifted the wreath over her head, something crawled onto her hand. She jerked her arms down to see a brown shiny earwig skitter across her hand and start up her arm. Bett shuddered as she shook her hand violently. Despite more than fifty years of gardening she still was disgusted by certain bugs. Centipedes. Hairy spiders and, especially, earwigs. She had hated earwigs ever since grade school when she had read Poe’s story where an earwig eats into a man’s brain. Her violent movements caused three other earwigs to make a hurried exit from the nest that
they had made for themselves inside the curved edge of the fennel stalk. When a second insect touched her skin, Bett screeched. Shuddering her shoulders as if she were a horse in the midst of a swarm of horseflies and shaking her hands as though they had gone to sleep, she ran from the garden leaving her basket and the kitchen shears in the middle of the row of gently swaying plants.
* * *
Neil found Bett with her back against a piling at the end of the dock. Her arms were clasped tight around her drawn-up knees. Her reddened eyes were staring at some nothing across the cove.
“Honey, what’s the matter?”
Bett unfolded her arms, put a fist to her chest and covered the fist with her other hand.
“I have a growth. Here.”
She gently pounded her fist against her breast.
“I have to go for a biopsy. On Wednesday.”
After she told him the details, Neil asked only three questions—how do you feel? how can I help? and what’s involved with the biopsy? She felt fine. She was teary because an earwig had crawled on her. She wasn’t sure how he could help yet other than by being his sweet self. She told him about fine needle aspiration. A local anesthetic was given, a needle was inserted into the breast and into the growth, cells were sucked up for microscopic evaluation. She also discussed lumpectomies. She didn’t say what option she had chosen and Neil didn’t ask. She was glad that she had not had to deliver all the answers that she had prepared. She was sure that they would have sounded more lame in the telling than they had sounded to her in her mental rehearsals. He held her in his arms for several minutes after she had finished talking. Bett felt badly that she was deceiving him and doubly bad that he hadn’t asked her why she hadn’t told him a week ago.
As Bett prepared their dinner, Neil came into the kitchen four times. Each time he tried to catch her eyes as if to read the next installment of her feelings. His step and voice both were softer than usual. It reminded her of how he had acted when Dilly was colicky. Tiptoeing had been of little practical use. Not only had the two year old Peter been running around constantly jabbering, but also she had had no desire to train a baby to sleep only when the house was quiet. Neil, however, had continued to tiptoe in sympathy until Dilly’s digestive system had come round. She was sure that she could expect the same solicitude that Dilly had been given.
They ate leftover thinly sliced pepper and garlic-covered grilled sirloin steak, beefsteak tomatoes with basil in olive oil and sherry vinegar, and the last of the marinated eggplant on the picnic table down by the water’s edge. As they ate, they watched the falling sun color the cove’s surface with Monet hues. A circus of chiaroscuro animals evolved from mounds of clouds. They watched and traded disjointed sentences. Their efforts reminded Bett of working a jigsaw puzzle with a child’s help. “This one, Mommy? How ‘bout this one?” With a child’s constant help, it could take forever to finish a puzzle.
Within seconds of finishing the meal, which had acted as a partial camouflage to their mismatched communications, Neil began to stir.
“Dessert? Tea? Melon?”
“No. What about you?” Bett asked with a discomfort that matched her husband’s.
“Is there any of the ice cream left?”
“There was mutiny while you slept, Captain. No bowls. Just dueling iced tea spoons flailing around in the tub. I took some pictures. They should be cute.”
“Was Dilly there?”
“Of course, and joyous in her righteous disapproval.”
“We’re going to ruin her kids.”
“Just like we ruined ours.”
Neil nodded vigorously as he grabbed for her hand. He nursed a moment’s desire to ask her how she planned to handle her situation with their children before he pushed aside the unbidden and unwelcome follow-up question of what would happen to children, grandchildren and himself if she became seriously ill, or worse.
“Watermelon.”
“How big a piece do you want?”
“I’ll come up with you.”
As her husband walked alongside her whistling softly to fill the empty air, Bett fought an urge to tell him to save his solicitude until after the biopsy, but she knew that it was her ruminant fear rather than his attempted kindnesses which angered her.
Bett put a kettle of tea water on the stove before cutting a large piece of watermelon for Neil. He half sat on the porch railing and spat seeds into the peonies below. As the tea water warmed, she stepped into the mud room to find her shrug. She roughly pulled the old worn comforting cotton around her shoulders. Rather than walking out the kitchen door and going past where Neil was eating watermelon, she walked through the house to use the front door. If Neil saw her down on the dock, he would understand that she wanted to be alone.
Bett sat back against her piling, the same satin-skinned, deeply cracked wood where Neil had found her crying two hours before. It felt good to have the solidity of the post, with its residual warmth, press against her spine. She was exhausted. Utterly exhausted. Her thoughts, which always jumped in logical progression with the surefootedness of a child hop-scotching her way across the rocks of a well-known stream, continued to flit with the same aimlessness of the darning needle she was watching fly over the water’s edge. She had anticipated, obviously wrongly she ruefully told herself, that telling Neil would be the catalyst which would cause her long familiar feelings of competency to return. She let the heat from the mug of tea warm her hands as she stared at the pink images of last light coating the black sheen of the still water. She drew the cooling, dry September air deep into her lungs, then, surprised herself at how loud her sigh sounded to her ears. She took a second draught that she meant to exhale silently, but stopped halfway through as the air filling her lungs displaced her breasts enough that earwig infested fennel came to mind.
If it was nothing…. It was nothing. A slit, a nick, a stitch. A day, or two, of churning. A phone call. Benign. A sigh. A great whoosh of relief. A great gratitude to…to…something…God.
Despite all the noisy static inside her head, Bett could anticipate what it would feel like to have her muscles unclench themselves, to have her mind stop darting as the darning needle which continued its haphazard flight up and down the shore. The right word would bring a honey-thick sense of well-being to fill up her hollowness. A word would warm and fill her up— through her toes and ankles, her calves and thighs, her shivery stomach, her balsa wood light arms, her scattered head as flighty as a balloon on a string. BENIGN would fill her with a heavy sweetness. A kind of post-prandial, post-sexual, logy well-being. Tomorrow was Tuesday. Wednesday evening she would be prepped. Thursday morning was the biopsy. It was no more difficult than waiting out the last days of a pregnancy.
There always had been worried questions. Would it be a normal delivery? Would it be perfectly formed? Would it be a boy or girl? This was the same thing. She needed to be patient.
Dr. Maurer had said that most lumps in the breast were cysts, abscesses or a thickening of the milk glands. If it were none of those things, if it were a tumor, he had said that the chances were that it was benign. Bett put her cup of cooled tea down on the smooth gray paint of the dock. She unbuttoned her blouse to reach inside. She insinuated her fingers inside her bra to pinch and knead her breast as if she were making bread. Deep inside the warm soft dough she could just barely discern the difference in resilience that defined the lump. It didn’t feel hard; it only felt more solid than that which surrounded it. After a week, it no longer felt foreign, like a splinter of wood or a piece of thorn caught beneath the skin. It had come to feel no more foreign than the knotted flesh of a charley horse. As Bett’s fingers probed the character of what was growing inside her flesh, she felt no pain. There was no soreness at all. She removed her hand and re-buttoned her blouse against the coolness brought by the slight breeze coming off the cove. She dropped her hands down to her waist. She pushed and probed her womb as she had done so many times during the many months and many times she had spent pregnan
t.
She had been used for growth before. Something had attached itself to her. It had used her for blood and oxygen. It had grown warm from her warmth. She had never thought that she had given a child life. Conception was far too mysterious and miraculous to claim that. But, once life had begun, she had sustained it. For four times nine months and four shorter times more, she had shared her body. She was sharing it now. Something mysterious wanted life. It had chosen her as the means. It was too warm, too formless, and too painless to be feared.
Bett wanted to keep her maternal feelings. She wanted to keep her understanding of the will for life, but as she worked to keep more than a moment’s peace while she sat on the slightly swaying dock, her mind started to fill with the disgust that she had felt when the earwigs scattered from their nest inside the shelter of the fennel stems.
If it were cancer. If it were CANCER. If something unwanted, something not her, had chosen her to make its infestation, she would have to fight to eradicate it. As any good gardener would a pest. Earwigs and Japanese beetles, tomato worms and slugs, the gray excrescences of corn smut. They were life, they had a right, but they had to go. They had a right to be alive, but not in the garden.
Trying to grow still within herself, Bett realized that the calm she always felt on the dock in the dark actually had been there despite the surroundings. Listening, she realized that there was noise all around her. The gentle undulations from the rising tide struck soft bass notes, so low and resonant that she could feel them move up her spine as they vibrated along the length of the pilings. There was the unceasing buzz of the cicadas—a sound which recalled the sounds of Opa’s creaking rocker, and the squeak of she herself in the red canvas hammock watching the Indiana sky grow dark and, in the background, the noise of dishes and silverware sliding about in soapy water. The chirping of crickets, the creak of a boat at its mooring, the slight rustle of a pennant on another boat, the persistent pings of a halyard against a mast. Bett listened hard. There were at least three more levels of insect sound. Each species seemed to broadcast on a different frequency so as not to interfere with the others’ transmissions. Despite all the variety in the insects’ sounds, they all sounded shrill to her as if the passage of Labor Day, the end of summer, had brought a new insistence to each voice. As she listened she heard the various voices come together to sing GGGGEEEEETTTTTTTTT IIIIITTTTT DDDDOOOOOONE.
