SELF-RELIANCE
WHEN CORNELIA FITCH RETIRED from the practice of gastroenterology, she purchased — on impulse, her daughter thought — a house beside a spring-fed pond in New Hampshire. She did not relinquish the small apartment of her widowhood, though — three judicious rooms with framed drawings on the gray walls. This apartment, in the Boston suburb of Godolphin, was a twenty-minute walk from the hospital where Cornelia had worked; and her daughter lived nearby, as did both of her friends; and at Godolphin Corner she could visit a good secondhand bookstore and an excellent seamstress. One of Cornelia’s legs was slightly longer than the other, a fault concealed by the clever tailleur. “Do you think there’s anybody what’s perfect,” her aunt Shelley had snorted when, at fifteen, Cornelia’s defect became apparent. Aunt Shelley had lived with the family; where else could she live? “You’re a knucklehead,” added that gracious dependent.
The place by the water — Cornelia had had her eye on it for years. It reminded her of the cottage of a gnome. “Guhnome,” Aunt Shelley used to miscorrect. The other houses in the loose settlement by the pond were darkly weathered wood, but Cornelia’s was made of the local pale gray granite, sparkling here and there with tiny golden specks. It had green shutters. There was one room downstairs and one up, an outdoor toilet, a small generator. Aquatic vines climbed the stones. Frogs and newts inhabited the moist garden.
She spent more and more time there. At the bottom of the pond, turtles inched their way to wherever they were going. Minnows traveled together, the whole congregation turning this way and then that, an underwater flag flapping in an underwater wind. Birches, lightly clothed in leaves, leaned toward the pond.
There was no beach. Most people had a rowboat or a canoe or a Sunfish. They were retirees like Cornelia, who passed their days as she did — reading, watching the mild wildlife, sometimes visiting each other. Their dirt road met the main road a mile away, where a Korean family kept a general store. Thompson the geezer — Cornelia thought of him as a geezer, though he was, like her, in his early seventies — sat on his porch all day, sketching the pond. Two middle-aged sisters played Scrabble at night, and Cornelia joined them once in a while.
“I worry about you in the middle of nowhere,” her daughter, Julie, said. But the glinting stones of the house, its whitewashed interior, summer’s greenness and winter’s pale blueness seen through its deep win dows, the mysterious endless brown of the peaked space above her bed … and pond and trees and loons and chipmunks … not no where. Somewhere. Herewhere.
“CORNELIA, GOOD SENSE demands that we treat this,” the oncologist said. “A course of chemo, some radia—” He paused. “We can beat it back.”
She stretched her legs — the long one, the longer. She liked her doctor’s old-fashioned office with its collection of worn books in a glass-fronted case. The glass now reflected her own handsome personage: short hair dyed bark, a beige linen pantsuit, cream shirt. A large sapphire ring was her one extravagance. And only a seeming extravagance, since the stone, though convincing, was glass. The ring had been Aunt Shelley’s, probably picked up at a pawnshop. But the woman who now wore this fake article was a woman to trust. People had trusted her. They’d trusted her with their knotty abdomens, their swollen small bowels, their bleeding ceca, their tortuous lower bowels. Meekly they presented their anuses so she could insert the scope and guide it in, past the rectum, the sigmoid, the descending colon …
“Cornelia?” He too was reliable — ten years younger than she, a slight man, a bit of a fop, but no fool. Yes, together they could beat back this recurrence, and wait for the next one.
“Well, what else can we do?” she said in a reasonable tone. “Will you ask your nurse to schedule me?”
He gave her a steady look. “I will. Next week, then.”
She nodded. “Write a new pain-med scrip, please. And the sleeping stuff, too.”
ON THE WAY NORTH she stopped at Julie’s house. The children were home from day camp — two enchanting little girls. Julie hugged her. “How nice it’s summer, I’m not teaching, I can be with you for the infusions.”
“Bring a book.” She hated chatter.
“Of course. Some lunch now, what do you say?”
“No thanks.” She touched her hair.
“And there’s that lovely wig, from the last time,” Julie said, shyly.
They waved good-bye: younger woman and children in the doorway, older woman in the car. It was a lovely wig. A bumptious genius of an artisan had exactly reproduced Cornelia’s style and color, meanwhile recommending platinum curls — hey, Doc, try something new! But she wanted the old, and she’d gotten it. There wasn’t much she’d wanted that she hadn’t gotten: increasing professional competence, wifehood, motherhood, papers published; even an affair years ago, when she was chief resident — she could hardly remember what he’d looked like. Well, if Henry had been less preoccupied … She had failed to master French and had lost her one-time facility with the flute. She was unlikely to correct those defects even with a remission. She had once perforated a colon, early in her career — it was repaired right away, no complications, and the forgiving woman remained her patient. She’d had a few miscarriages after Julie, then given up. Her opinions had been frequently requested. She’d supported Aunt Shelley in that rooming house, so messy; but the old lady, who liked bottle and weed, refused to go into a home. At retirement Cornelia had been given a plaque and an eighteenth-century engraving. Novels were okay, but she preferred biographies. If she hadn’t studied medicine, she might have become an interior designer, though it would have been difficult to accommodate to some people’s awful taste.
She stopped at the general store and bought heirloom tomatoes, white grape juice, a jug of water. “The corn is good,” advised the proprietor, his smile revealing his gold tooth.
“I’ll bet it is. I’ll be in again tomorrow.”
Now the tomatoes nestled in the striped bowl on her kitchen counter. For a moment she regretted having to leave them behind, their rough scars, their bulges. Then, eyes wide open, the knowledgeable Cornelia endured a vision: emaciation, murky awakenings, children obediently keeping still. She squinted at a bedside visitor, she sat dejectedly on the commode, she pushed a walker to the corner mailbox and demanded a medal for the accomplishment, she looked at a book upside down. The mantle of responsible dependency … it would not fit. With one eye still open, she winked the other at the tomatoes.
She changed into her bathing suit and took a quick swim, waving to the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer. Back in her house she put on jeans and a T-shirt, tossed the wet suit onto the crotch of a chokecherry tree. What should a person take for a predinner paddle? Binoculars, sun hat against insidious sidelong rays, towel, and the thermos she’d already filled with its careful cocktail. Pharmacology had been a continuing interest. “I’ll swallow three pills a day and not a gobbet more,” Aunt Shelley had declared. “You choose them, rascal.”
Cornelia pushed off vigorously, then used a sweep stroke to turn the canoe and look at the slate roof and stone walls of her house. Just a little granite place, she realized; not fantastical after all. She had merely exchanged one austerity for another. She thought of the tomatoes, and turned again and stroked, right side, left, right … Then, as if she were her own passenger, she opened a backrest and settled herself against it and slid the paddle under the seat. She drank her concoction slowly, forestalling nausea.
Sipping, not thinking, she drifted on a cobalt disk under an aquamarine dome. Birches bent to honor her, tall pines guarded the birches. She looked down the length of her body. She had not worn rubber boat shoes, only sandals, and her ten toenails winked flamingo.