Warm Wuinter's Garden (4 page)

Dilly had spent many a laundry day working
through examples of her system. Everything was worked out except
the exact mechanism for assigning the L.E.s. She was leaning toward
it becoming one of the primary responsibilities of the public
health system. It would, of necessity, have to be an intrusive
system, but she was sure that the rewards in longevity would be
worth the cost in privacy.

Dilly was positive that her father did not
have long to live. At age sixty-six, Neil Koster’s L.E. should be
sixteen years, but she doubted whether she could, in good
conscience, give him more than three or four more years. This
woefully short time was the reason for her mission. She was going
to spend her Labor Day holiday doing the things necessary to
recover the lost years of her father’s life.

After she finished folding and sorting the
laundry, Dilly arranged the separate stacks of socks and underwear
on the long trestle table in the dining room which she always used
as a staging area for trips. She laid out the different-colored
backpacks of her three children. She began arranging stacks of
clothes on top of each backpack. This was the kind of work that led
to her best thinking.

Dilly had spent much of her adult life
discovering and working through the complex equations of human
life. She avidly scanned newspapers and magazines and spent hours
listening to daytime television to keep up with the scientific
discoveries that affected life’s equations. Additional linkages of
cigarettes to lung cancer and heart disease, stronger correlations
between alcohol and stomach and pancreatic cancer, and more
findings on the relationship between cholesterol and
atherosclerosis were always exciting news. Even more thrilling
could be a report that a study in The New England Journal of
Medicine, or some other well-respected scientific journal magazine,
showed some important variable had been misread. A sudden reversal,
from something positive to something negative, was especially
satisfying. Something in Dilly’s soul was sated by scientific
betrayal. Milk was bad. Eggs were bad. Hard-bristled toothbrushes
were bad. She had been ecstatic upon reading a report that detailed
the hazards of eating too much spinach. Spinach had high
concentrations of oxalic acid, an agent used to clean the insides
of automobile radiators and bleach laundry. It was an exquisite
shock to find an article delineating the dangerous levels of
afflatoxin, a naturally occurring carcinogen, in such a politically
righteous food as George Washington Carver’s peanuts. An
investigative report of people dying from fiber blockages in their
colons from eating too much bran was as heady for Dilly as finding
Communists had been for Joe McCarthy. Life’s dangers were
everywhere. Food and habits, long trusted, could be traitors. A
mother and wife’s constant vigilance were necessary to protect a
loved one’s life, even one who thought that work was more important
than family.

With each new bit of information that she
gathered, Dilly would recalculate the life expectancies of her
family members. Wound warm in her ratty robe, drinking double
strength coffee, syrupy thick with family-forbidden sugar, filled
with a horrible excitement, she would read the latest health
dangers in the Boston Globe. While her husband still slept, close
to suffocation under the pounds and pounds of covers which had
mounded their winter bed since the discovery of the microwave
hazards of electric blankets, Dilly would process the new threats
and recalculate Bill’s remaining years. Reading the latest
betrayal—spinach, for example—she would reduce Bill’s remaining
time on earth downward from 41.2 to 40.6 years. She would mourn his
earlier death, work through the implications of how her own life
would change with widowhood coming six tenths of a year earlier,
and brush away any guilt from having fed her family such copious
quantities of spinach—a vegetable all of them, except Uppy the
rabbit, detested.

Dilly adjusted the lives and habits of her
family as a good captain would trim his sails with a shifting wind.
When the news broke that lead in the soil could be brought indoors
on the soles of shoes and build up in the carpeting to dangerous
concentrations, the captain enjoined her crew and all passengers to
remove their shoes at the door. As her shoeless hyper-energetic
children slid on the uncarpeted floors concussing heads, contusing
bones and bruising major muscle groups, and as they tore
fingernails making desperate lunges for a doorframe after coming
around a corner too quickly, Dilly reveled in the knowledge that by
preventing lead poisoning, she not only was giving her children
additional L.E. but also, because of the known cumulative effects
of lead on the brain, higher grades in school. Better grades led to
higher lifetime earnings. Studies had shown that fewer money
problems meant a lower probability of divorce. Since divorce and a
shorter life were highly correlated, Dilly added even more L.E. to
her kids totals. When the reports began on the deadly killer, radon
gas, emanating upward through the basement floors in the homes of
unsuspecting New Englanders, Dilly bought each member of the family
a pair of the cheapest sneakers. These shoes were to be used
exclusively for walking inside the house. The shoes’ wafer-thin
soles were supposed to protect the wearer from the radiation given
off as the earth’s radium disintegrated. A side effect of the radon
cure, that was of some importance to Dilly’s children, was that
their athletic careers improved as the number of practice days lost
to house fall injuries dropped significantly. The sneakers stayed a
part of the family L.E. regimen until a small study, one that Dilly
almost missed, showed a strong link between the early use of poorly
constructed sneakers and serious long term posture problems. When
she brought that information to the dinner table, her children
suggested that the solution be that they be given expensive
sneakers, but when Dilly fed the information of purchasing sixty
dollar sneakers for three children with growing feet into the L.E.
equation, the answer that came out was that outdoor shoes again
could be worn in the house. The family would make up the L.E. loss
from lead in other ways. The kids’ chore list was changed to
include more frequent, more thorough vacuuming of the house’s few
rugs until some research indicated that vacuuming actually had the
possibility of spreading lead dust.

With the same sense of safety that knowledge
brings to the smoking cardiologist and the obese school
nutritionist, Dilly fine-tuned her family’s lives without being
overly involved herself in the various regimens. As she replaced
beloved childhood cereals with brownish-gray extrusions of bran, as
she banned butter and bacon and issued ukases on safflower
margarine and red and white-dyed soybean ersatz bacon strips, as
she added prodigious amounts of such carotene-rich foods as carrots
and cantaloupe and squash, and cancer-killing cruciferous
vegetables such as mustard greens, kale and broccoli, and as she
restricted red meat to such an extent that it seemed to her family
that cattle must be an endangered species, Dilly herself, with her
children safely away at school, smashed chunks of baking chocolate
into bite size pieces for her lunch. After scooting her children
out the door for more fresh air, having fed them a worm-scarred,
alaric-free organic apple as dessert, she would concoct herself a
post-prandial paste of milk, vanilla and powdered sugar into which
she crumbled hunks of a frozen graham cracker crust. The crust was
one which was kept in the freezer for special occasions, which
never came, except for Dilly. Although she wore her street shoes in
the house, and although her appetite for high cruciferous, carotene
and fiber rich meals was small because of all the white foods that
she secretly wolfed down on the short ride home from the grocery or
while hiding in the gloom of the laundry room, or, occasionally,
even ate in the sanctuary of the bathroom, and although her four
times a week five mile jog rarely covered more than two and was apt
to be more a contemplative stroll, and even though she was more
than thirty pounds overweight on a five foot two inch frame, and
even though her cholesterol level stayed above three hundred
despite all the thinking that she did about it and even though her
blood pressure was 145/110, Dilly knew that her L.E. was excellent.
She could transcend her own theories because she, like her mother,
had good genes. Dilly never doubted that she and her mother would
outlive their husbands. The only question was how long they would
be a widowed. In order to rescue her mother from a long widowhood,
it was Dilly’s intention to sacrifice her well-deserved vacation by
using the Labor Day family reunion to fix her father’s life.

Dilly collected health disasters with the
same dedication others brought to baseball cards or Hummel
figurines. As she packed, she reviewed her collection with the
object of finding those with the most potential impact upon her
father…the carcinogens being created at the barbeque grill he
insisted on using for almost every summer meal. It would be a nice
retirement for him to be sitting in a hospital with drains gurgling
from where his tumor-ridden stomach had been removed…round worm
eggs hanging from the tips of every blade of grass, just waiting
for the precise moment that his lymphatic systems weakened enough
to invade the body and settle in their favorite places—the eyes and
brain. Stupid, blind and drooling. Was that the husband he wished
to be? …Shellfish toxins, capable of paralyzing or passing on
hepatitis that were sure to be carried in the quahogs and mussels
that he gathered in the cove. His muscles locking up as he was
driving along the traffic-congested lanes of Route One with God
only knew how many grandchildren in the car. No one ate shellfish
anymore. No one. Especially not raw.

This time, Dilly promised herself, she would
be as adamant as Christ had meant Peter to be. She would be a rock.
The gates of hell would not prevail. The killing must stop. As she
accessorized the kids’ piles of clothing with flip-flops,
learning-enhancing books, and politically-correct toys, she
mentally listed the foods that would not be allowed this time.
Hot-dogs. Hamburgers, if grilled. Sausages, whether kielbasa,
Italian, linguica or chorizo, unless made from turkey. Potato
chips. Potato salad , unless made with yogurt. Baked beans if made
with the Koster family recipe using big chunks of nitrosamine and
cholesterol-laden bacon.

As a just reward for finishing the children’s
packing more than seventy-two hours before embarkation, Dilly
climbed up on the kitchen stool to dig out the marshmallows. She
prized loose four of the units which were as hard and white as the
rubber ends of doorstoppers. Two she frosted with lavish dollops of
peanut butter. Over the years, the threat of being caught had
taught Dilly Koster how to bolt her treats with the same acumen as
a dog would a scrap of steak fat; however given the inherent
unchewability of the hardened marshmallow and with the addition of
a huge glob of viscid peanut butter, these treats could only be
savored. Dilly’s eyes rolled back as she rolled the adamantine
confection around in her mouth seeking some slight fissure or
weakness where her teeth could gain purchase. As a snake, after
swallowing a large prey, seeks safety, Dilly lifted the phone
receiver off its base during her minutes of incapacitation. The
muscles at the back of her jaw ached from working hard to muster up
enough fluid to dissolve or digest what was nearly indigestible.
The second two marshmallows were easier to eat after she hacked
them into halves with a ten inch chef’s knife and lubricated them
with a thick coating of Karo syrup. Ever the analyst, Dilly noted
that while the syrup-coated variety could be eaten much faster than
the peanut butter version, they took longer to clean up. Her
syrup-coated tongue, quickly becoming as thick and flaccid as a
drunk’s as the sugar raced to her brain, traced her lips several
times with no discernible removal of the stickiness. Finally, she
wiped her mouth hard with her hand and licked the last of the
sweetness from her palm.

With the pleasure of her small sin over,
Dilly looked at the kitchen clock to see how much longer it would
be before her neighbor Laura brought her two and Dilly’s three
children home from the day program at Camp Gustavus.

From the moment that her youngest, Kate, had
started school the previous fall, Dilly had pined for summer and
the return of little ones to do for. Unlike her mother, Dilly took
little satisfaction from being useful with things. Her deepest
pleasures came from being useful to those around her, even when
those chosen few would have willingly foregone some of Dilly’s
helpfulness.

When eleven year old Jessie, a mash of tomboy
and princess, had deigned to begin school six years before, Dilly
had had Roger, the Artful Dodger, then three, and newborn Kate left
at home. When the Dodger flew out the door to bring his pulsating
personality to an unsuspecting and unprepared room of classmates,
she still had the recalcitrant Kate to shape and mold. But, the
previous fall, when Kate had gone, tearless, with a waggly wave as
she pulled herself up the bus steps, Dilly found her satisfaction
in the day and her life to be greatly shrunk.

Dilly had kept herself as busy as before. She
did because she should, but she no longer knew the basis of the
shoulds. Dilly discovered that good works—laundry, vacuuming,
dishes, dusting, or ironing—without an audience was just drudgery.
Doing household chores without children around was like being a
straw boss without a crew.

Throughout the year Dilly had discussed
having another child with Bill. She argued that, at thirty-eight,
she wasn’t too old. The statistics on Down’s syndrome babies and
other age-related pregnancy complications didn’t become really bad
until after the mother was forty. He argued that they needed time
to prepare for their retirement. If they had another child, they
would be over sixty before that child graduated from college. When
would they ever save? What would they do when they were old? When
was it their turn? Bill couldn’t comprehend why she would want to
take a step backward. Why would she want to refill the house with
daytime noise just after it had become quiet for the first time in
eleven years?