by Neil Hetzner
The tubes in the woman’s nose made a gurgling sound that drew Bett’s attention away from the flowers. The patient’s cheek muscles moved and the breathing grew more guttural. Bett was unsure whether to go into the room to lie down or whether she should continue her travels, then, check back later to see if the woman had awakened. She thought it would be a breach of privacy to move in next to a stranger without first having been introduced, but she knew that the etiquette of a hospital was not that of the outside world. In the last few days total strangers had seen and touched more of her body than Neil or any member of her family ever had.
As Bett was wrestling with her decision, the woman’s nasal drain made a sound reminiscent of pulling the plug on a sink full of dish water. Her face tilted farther forward in its search for sustenance and she opened her eyes. Once opened, the eyes stared straight ahead. Bett waited to be noticed for at least a minute before she tapped the doorway with her knuckles.
“Hello. How are you? I’m Bett Koster. I’m going to be joining you.”
Bett nodded toward the empty bed.
The woman looked to where Bett had nodded and seemed surprised to see a bed there. She moved her mouth several times before wetting her cracked lips with her milk-colored tongue.
“Ellen. Mordeck. Hello.”
Ellen paused to devote all of her attention to withdrawing an arm from under the covers. In slow motion she spread her fingers and tipped her hand toward the empty bed.
“Welcome. Pajama party. Popcorn. Elvis. Dance.”
Bett stared hard at Ellen’s small yellow face to see if a sense of gallows humor or the dreams of drugs were responsible for the fractured invitation.
When Ellen closed the fingers of her upraised hand, the IV that was taped to her wrist writhed itself into a large coil. Bett watched intently as Ellen rubbed her middle finger against her thumb. It took her a long moment to realize that Ellen was trying to snap her fingers but with the same soggy, soundless ineffectuality of a fog-softened match against a damp striker.
Bett snapped fingers on both her hands twice. Ellen nodded and smiled a slow-growing crooked smile. After that exchange, Bett walked in and put her purse and the radiation handout on the night stand next to her bed. She wondered about the protocol of the pajama-striped room divider. Would pulling the curtain be interpreted as respect for Ellen’s privacy or rejection of her? Would leaving it undrawn be read as friendliness or nosiness? She half-turned to Ellen.
“Should I draw this?”
“Forget Frost. No fences. Just neighbors.”
“I hope very good neighbors,” Bett said quietly.
Ellen slowly nodded her head in affirmation.
* * *
When Bett left the hospital four days later it was hard for her to decide who had been the better neighbor. Each had succored the other’s wounds. Each had nursed the other, with most of the ministrations going to the heart. They had laughed at the absurdity of immortality. They had laughed harder at the absurdity of mortality. Although each was acidic in her humor, each worked to keep the other from saying anything too bilious to swallow. There had been no growing friendship. They had been good friends from the first moments. As early as the evening of the second day, Bett and Ellen had talked of how each had felt a comfort from the other from the first moments. Several times in those days, they wondered whether the closeness came from being kindred souls or because they were in kindred circumstances.
Despite the attention that was paid to them by others, Ellen and Bett drew a special sustenance from the other. Neil would come to visit Bett. He would be warm, concerned, caring, and, unknown to himself, obviously fearful. He would try to be useful, offering Bett juice or town news or his arm for a walk. Ellen’s husband, Barry, or her sons, Marty and Phil, or her daughters-in-law, Lauren and Liz would come for a visit. They would bring flowers, laughter, messages of good will from neighbors. The visitors would come and give of themselves and, then, finally, leave, and the patients would be left exhausted. After everyone had gone, Ellen and Bett would pass their friendship back and forth like a canteen until they had refilled the strength which their well-meaning guests had depleted.
The two patients talked several times about the energy it took to be a good patient-host. It had reminded both of them of coming home from the hospital with a newborn to a house full of neighbors and family. They talked of the rhythms of their healing. Ellen’s adventure with death had begun as a temporary colostomy as a partial treatment for diverticulitis. When the surgeon botched the colostomy, she had come in close to dying from peritonitis. The surgery to repair the first surgery had taken forever. There had been complications. There had been more infection. The infection had led to all the IV lines and feverishness. The feverishness had led to nightmares. The nightmares had led to… She was going to make it. She knew it.
They talked about the ironies. Ellen had to get well so that she would be strong enough that they could make her sick again when they operated to reverse the colostomy. Bett had to be made sick with radiation so that she might be well.
They talked of guilt. Ellen felt guilty that she had put her body and her family through so much for so little reason. Doctors, nurses, family members and friends had come out of the woodwork to tell her that the addition of a little bran to her diet would have prevented her condition. An occasional muffin, a sprinkling on cereal could have prevented a fast dance with death, two surgeries, thousands of dollars and all the fear and worry that she had to feel and, worse, watch. She felt herself a fool.
Bett, too. She was such a dedicated gardener. She culled out the smallest stones. She sorted through and tossed shriveled corms and spongy roots. She weeded. She pinched back buds. She watered and fed, pruned and trimmed. She trimmed and, occasionally, even buffed her nails. She shaved her legs, brushed and flossed her teeth. She rubbed creams onto her hands and cheeks. She had her hair cut and colored. Unlike Ellen, she even ate oat bran and made a point of getting enough iron and calcium. She took care of gardens, and others and herself in so many ways. But she did not regularly examine her breasts. Ellen did.
They talked of health and hope, children and husbands, new movies and old dances. During lunches they teased each other with made-up menus of what they would have served in lieu of what was on their trays. They talked of the less troubled joy of blood relations a generation removed—their grandparents and grandchildren. They talked of faith, of forgiveness and acceptance and courage. Twice they skirted near but didn’t talk of death.
In the hour before it was time for Bett to be checked out, they talked of continuing their friendship. Each promised to stay in touch, but neither knew if they could.
Chapter 10
Dilly Koster-Phelps churned across her parents’ lawn, up the steps and across the porch with the ungainly forthrightness of an M-1 tank through a stand of bamboo. Before her hand could reach the handle of the screen, her voice began its assault.
“Mother, Mother? Where are you? How are you? How could you? I can’t believe this. How could this have happened to us? Why didn’t you tell us? Mother? Mother?”
As Dilly pounded through the house the pitch of her voice bounced back and forth a full octave as it tried to find the right key for her concerns and complaints. Rushing through the downstairs rooms, she looked out the windows to see if her mother were down on the dock or out in one of the gardens. The treads thundered as she raced upstairs.
“Mother, Mother? Where are you?”
In the small interlude of silence as her lungs gulped for air, Dilly heard Bett’s voice, calm as always but, somehow, softer and flatter say, “Honey, I’m in Nita’s room. Come in.”
The sound of her mother’s voice, the same, yet changed, caused Dilly to stop moving. Since her father’s call that morning to tell her that her mother had had a breast removed and had been in the hospital for a week, Dilly had been in such turmoil that, despite her typically over-active imagination, she had not filled in all of the details of what her fath
er’s information meant. In one sense she knew that everything had changed, or would change. She knew that some carefree assumptions must change. Holidays would be different. There would be an even greater value put upon having the family together. Her mother’s body would be changed. Dilly, the frantic daughter, had imagined that the scars of the surgery might look like the puckered seams of a doll made from stuffing batting into a nylon stocking. As she had driven south through the glaring sun of a perfect September day, Dilly had thought about insurance coverage, sleeveless dresses, bathing suits and prosthetics. But, now, as she stood perfectly still except for the heaving of her chest and the unconscious rubbing of her sweat-dampened fingers, Dilly realized that there were a million changes that she had not considered.
She certainly had not considered that her mother’s voice might be different.
Although Dilly frequently changed the actuarial data of the rest of her family’s lives, she usually thought of both her mother’s and her own LEs as constants. While she scrutinized her father’s face for premonitions of a stroke, studied Nita’s hair for gray and attended to Lise’s breasts for signs of sagging, Dilly perceived her mother through a filter of memory which mitigated change. If Dilly had been asked to pick from an album the most representative photograph of her mother, the choice would have been one taken when Dilly was in her late teens and her mother in her early forties. It would have shown Bett’s short solid body. Bett’s broad face, prominent German wurst of a nose and jowly chin would have been quite tan. The beginnings of age would have been obvious—some gray in the hair, a network of lines around the eyes, faint crease marks dropping perpendiculars from the corners of her lips down across her first chin. That photo was the image that Dilly carried in her mind of her no longer aging mother.
At some deep level Dilly knew that her image of her mother was unreal. She knew age had acted as the confident sculptor, gouging ever deeper marks into the clay. She knew her deception, yet from an unspeakable fear, she submerged it. To see her mother as she really was would threaten Dilly’s carefully nurtured capacity to see herself as she would wish to be.
Change and stasis. One of the linchpins of constancy for Dilly was her mother’s voice. In many people the voice never changes. As all else rots and erodes, the vocal cords stay young. Walking into a fiftieth high school reunion one might hear much of the same ringing laughter of one’s youth and expect to see the same person responsible for that long ago sound. One turns and is surprised by a shrunken, mottled, wrinkled, cruelly caricatured visage. The voice is the body’s only enduring vestige of youth. It carries the bright sound of youth long past youth’s brief time, like an echoing cymbal at the end of a song.
In her time in the car, between the surges of panic and anger, Dilly had prepared herself to accept that her mother would not resemble her carefully kept image. She would find someone somewhat new, but of all the changes she had considered, she had never imagined that a different voice would greet her. Dilly shook her hands to evaporate the sweat and took two deep breaths before walking toward Lise’s room.
Entering the closed-blind shadows of the room, Dilly widened her focus to instantly absorb all of the details of the room and its occupant. She saw the glass of clear flat soda with a few straggling bubbles clinging to the side. The glass held a bent straw, a primary signal in the semiotics of sickness in the Koster family. A box of tissues and a bottle of skin lotion, an opened book tossed down on the bed sheets, a slowly rotating fan. Heavy arms looking dark in the umbrageous light. Hair flattened from perspiration and sleep. Flaccid skin over cheekbones. A smiling mouth. An unbalanced emptiness under the ancient shrug. Dilly saw everything but her mother’s eyes.
As she bent her lips to her mother’s cheek, she whispered, “Mother, Mother. Oh, my God, how are you?”
“Honey, I’m fine. Just tired. I’m in here because it’s cooler.”
“I almost died when Dad called. I can’t believe it.”
“I’m that way, too, sometimes. I’ll be myself for a minute, then, suddenly realize that not all of me is here. It’s an astounding feeling to realize that a part of your body is gone.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Actually it does, quite a lot. It’s a funny feeling. It can feel very hot and sharp and dull and throbbing all at the same time.”
“I couldn’t believe it when Dad said that you’d had a mastectomy. A modified radical. My God, aren’t they extinct? I couldn’t believe that you didn’t have a lumpectomy. Why not? They say they’re the same. Aren’t the results the same?”
“I guess with certain kinds of tumors they’re starting to think that’s true. I decided to make everything as simple as possible. To get it over with at once. It worked out okay. It was invasive. It was the kind of tumor that spreads easily. When they take your whole breast and the nodes, there’s a better chance of catching any cells that have begun to spread.”
Dilly looked away from Bett’s face. Her father hadn’t told her that. The next obvious question would be to ask about her mother’s prognosis, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask the obvious. Instead she asked, “How was the food?” with the same inflection of concern that she had used in her first questions.
As was frequently the case in a conversation with Dilly, it took Bett a moment to follow in the direction that her daughter had chosen to go. She had been expecting an interrogation regarding her prognosis, and she had her answers to that topic carefully rehearsed.
“Honey, what?”
“The food. How was it? Was it good? Was it healthy at all? I doubt it. You’re in a hospital. You’re fighting for your health. Your body needs all the help it can get. You need help, but you can expectﾁ Salisbury steak, iceberg lettuce and orange dressing and a double-sized brownie. Great. Brownies—the building blocks of good health. Did they try to build you back up with brownies?”
Bett was glad that Dilly’s attention had turned from Bett herself to the hospital. She decided to give her daughter grist, or she thought as Bett smiled to herself, in this particular instance, lack of grist for her mill.
“You know, Dilly, I think they work hard at the desserts because they know it perks up the patients. More so than barley or bulgur or beets.”
“So, a happy patient is a healthy patient? Keep smiling as you die from malnutrition and they find you stone cold and stiff with a frozen smile and a trail of chocolate drool down across your chin.”
“Honey, I’m home. I’m fine.”
“You must be the exception. People who get out of the hospital, those who manage to survive, aren’t fine. They need at least a week at home to recover from each day in the hospital. And that has nothing to do with the surgery or the reason that they went in the first place. That’s just the time it takes to recover from the lack of nutrition, the lack of fresh air, the exposure to every kind of germ imaginable and the lack of sleep from the constant noise and interruptions. It’s got to take two weeks just to de-tox from the television. Were you in a private or a double room?”
Bett felt a small knot in her stomach draw tight as the search light swung back onto her. She quickly formulated her answer in a way that she thought might divert Dilly’s attention.
“Both. I started in a private room and then moved to another room when I got tired of being alone. There were two of us. A very nice woman. Very nice. With diverticulitis.”
“Oh, my God. She’d probably just had a colonoscopy. It must have been terrible. How bad was the smell?”
“Honey, there wasn’t any.”
“Mother, Mother, how could there not be a smell? They made a hole in her colon. How could she not smell?”
“Dilly, she didn’t smell, she was fitted with a bag.”
Dilly gave two loud sighs as she shifted her voice into its patient mode. She began to speak more slowly as if her mother were from China.
“Mother, Mother, you know how you complain when Dad brings that terrible limburger cheese home from the grocery.”
“
Yes, dear. It’s not my favorite. The odor has caught me off-guard several times.”
“That would be the odor of a dirty diaper?”
Bett laughed. “It’s close.”
“And where does the limburger come from?” asked Dilly with more than a tinge of smugness.
“From Germany.”
The anticipatory thrill of approaching victory entered Dilly’s tone. “Yes, Mother, from Germany. The Germans make limburger. The same people that are credited with both brilliant business acumen and, even more so, outstanding engineering and scientific skills. Right, Mother?”
Knowing now what Dilly’s conclusion was going to be Bett tried to enrich her voice with as much concessionary defeat as possible. For just the briefest moment she considered drawing Dilly’s conclusion for her, but her maternal love quelled her urge to best her fractious daughter in such a small meaningless skirmish.
“Yes, Dilly, the Germans have always been highly regarded as scientists and engineers.”
“So, if the brilliant German scientists can’t figure out a type of packaging to keep a small block of cheese from smelling like death by diarrhea before it has even been opened, how can someone, an American, with a hole in her colon not smell? You see?”
“Yes, dear. I see what you’re saying. You may be right, you probably are. Perhaps, she did smell, but I just failed to notice it. Perhaps it was the medications that I was on.”
