Goldy Schulz 01 Catering to Nobody (17 page)

Preheat the oven to 375°. Spread the pecans in two 9-inch glass pie plates, and roast until the nuts have turned slightly darker and are well toasted, about 10 minutes. Stir once or twice during the roasting process to ensure even browning. Remove the pecans from the oven, spread out to cool on paper towels, and set aside until you finish the toffee.

Butter two 9 x 13-inch glass pans and set aside. Unwrap the chocolate and divide it between two plates. Break all the chocolate into squares and set aside. Using a deep, heavy-bottomed pan, melt the butter with the sugar and cook over medium to medium-high heat, stirring constantly until a candy thermometer hits 285° to 290 (high altitude: 300 ), the soft- crack stage. (Candy will be very hot; be sure to protect your skin and clothing through the cooking and pouring processes.) Pour the toffee into the prepared pans and immediately place the squares of chocolate in rows across the toffee (1 pound of chocolate per pan). When the chocolate has softened, spread it to the edges of the toffee. Sprinkle 1 cup of the toasted pecans over the chocolate in each pan. Allow to cool, then cover with foil an chill.

Using a large, heavy-duty knife, break the toffee into 1- to 3-inch pieces.

Makes approximately 6 dozen pieces

I stirred, and remembered when Arch was five. We had spent a lot of time playing the game Candyland. This had led to long discussions about how they made all the sweets for that place, which Arch believed existed outside of the game board. The Candyland cement mixer trucks were full of toffee, he insisted, because they could keep it moving all the time. Car engines had little blades to chop up peppermint drops so you could stir them into Christmas fudge. Two years later John Richard moved out, and two months after that dismal Christmas I found a hoard of old mint-flavored fudge in one of Arch's drawers. When I asked him about it he said he just kept it there to smell it, so he could pretend he was in Candyland instead of being at home.

The thermometer hit 300°; I poured the bubbling brown stuff into the two pans. Then each pan got a pound bar of chocolate, which I had successfully hidden from Patty Sue. I pushed the bars around over the molten toffee until they melted into soft chocolate lakes. For fancy par- ties I would have sprinkled minced pecans or filberts on top, but kids were finicky about pimentos, olives, and nuts, so I always omitted them.

"Man," said Patty Sue as she entered the kitchen at ten o'clock, "what smells so great?"

"Toffee for Arch's school Halloween party," I replied. I looked at her. Her face was wan. Her hair, like her general outlook, had dulled since she had arrived in August. She puttered slowly around the kitchen, and I wondered if more could be wrong with her than her cyclical problems.

"Patty Sue," I began, "are you feeling all right?"

She was taking an English muffin out of the toaster. "Sure," she said without looking at me. "I was just tired after my run yesterday." She spread chokecherry jelly on the muffin, then changed her mind and scraped it off.

I walked over to her and said in a low voice, "Are Dr. Korman's treatments working at all? You don't look very good. Is he giving you iron or any special medication?"

She said, "Yes, he's giving me some pills and no, I'm not normal yet." She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. "He knows what he's doing. Why would my doctor send me out here if he didn't?"

"I don't know. Why did you talk to Laura Smiley about it?"

She froze in midbite.

I said, "Trixie told me."

She said, "Well, uh . . ." and then was quiet.

"Patty Sue, I didn't even know you knew Laura Smiley."

"I didn't know her."

"You talked to her."

"One time."

"When did this conversation take place? Did she say she wanted to show you an article about Fritz?"

Patty Sue pushed the plate away and began to catch her breath, as if she was about to cry. "I'm sorry," she said, "I'm just so sorry."

"For what?"

She stood up. "Please leave me alone, please, Goldy, I feel really bad."

“About what?"

"About everything," she said with a cough, before running out of the room. She called back, "Please leave me alone!"

"I'm coming with you to the doctor's office tomorrow," I yelled after her.

"Gee, Mom," said a sleepy Arch as he shuffled into the kitchen. "What's going on? What's all the racket about? Are you sick?"

"No. I just told Patty Sue that I'm taking her to her appointment tomorrow, that's all."

He poured himself some cereal. Between bites he said, "You always take her. Maybe after her driving lesson on Friday she'll be able to drive herself and you guys can stop yelling."

I said, "I doubt both."

He ate silently and then rinsed his bowl.

"Just remember," he said in his little- adult voice, "Pomeroy has some old- fashioned kind of driver-ed cars. That's what he told me. You'd better be careful."

I said, "You and Pomeroy had all kinds of conversations, didn't you?" Arch shrugged. "I think what he meant," I went on, "is that his cars are the old driver-ed kind, because he can't get an increase in funds from the school board to set up a more modern instructional program. I read about it in the paper."

"Oh-kay-ay," he said in that singsong cadence associated with Don't say I didn't warn you.

I narrowed my eyes at him and said, "I need to make an important phone call."

He nodded and drifted out of the kitchen while I dialed Janet Heath. She didn't sound too happy about being called on Sunday morning, but I was not going to risk another encounter with her answering machine.

"I would like to see you sometime soon," she said stiffly when we had exchanged pleasantries. “About Arch."

I coughed. I said, "Please tell me what's wrong."

"Well, that's what I don't know. I just need to talk to you about some things going on in the classroom. Can you come in this week?"

We settled on Friday before school and hung up. One more thing I just couldn't wait for.

The next morning frost painted the kitchen windows and I had the usual go- round with Arch concerning his outer clothing.

"But it gets so hot in the afternoon," he complained, "and kids make fun of me wearing my coat when they're in sweats."

"So let them," I said. "You won't be sick for Halloween and they will, which is all right because from what you say they don't care about it anyway."

He stomped out muttering something unintelligible. The van was doing its cough-and-sputter warm-up routine when Patty Sue came skittering out of the house in white lace blouse, white skirt, and matching white tights. No coat for her either. It was no wonder she had health problems. But I couldn't ask her about anything. We had been friends when she first arrived. What had happened?

When I pulled up in front of Korman and Korman, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Patty Sue gave me a puzzled look.

"Did you say you were sick?" she asked.

I sighed. "Yes and no.”

Entering K and K, I had always told John Richard, was an experience rivaled only by stepping into the big greenhouse at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Why obstetricians needed a jungle environment for an office was something better left to psychologists. Perhaps the sudden entry into leafiness suggested fecundity. Freud, I had told John Richard to his immense irritation, would have hypothesized something more specific. I avoided the enfolding arms of a stand of Norfolk pine, threaded my way through oversized bamboo plants, and ducked a hanging basket of wandering Jew before arriving at the reception desk.

"Do you have an appointment?" asked the nurse-receptionist.

"Yes," I said breezily. "You just don't recognize without my safari hat.”

"Name?"

"Bear," I said, ''as in Goldilocks and the Three - "

"I don't have a chart on you," she said without looking up. "You'll have to fill out new-patient papers." She handed me a clipboard filled with forms that would have given the IRS pause.

"But you don't understand," I said. "John Richard is my – “

I stopped as her withering glance shot through me. Perhaps it would be better not to advertise my presence in this office after a four-year absence. Nor did I feel welcome, given the Jerk's assumption of my guilt in the rat- poison affair. In fact I had better try to avoid him altogether.

"Tell you what," I said conspiratorially, "I'll bet I could find my file back there. Just let me take a look."

"Oh no - " she began, but was interrupted by an extremely distressed patient who had appeared at my side.

"I'm pregnant," whispered a woman to the nurse. Her voice broke. She said, "Unplanned." The patient signaled to her husband, who emerged from behind the foliage.

"You have two options," the nurse started to say as I slid behind the counter's side door.

“And we were so careful," the woman complained.

I surveyed the file cabinets. Inside these formidable gray metal boxes the files were color-coded, I knew. Since more than thirty-six months had elapsed since I had been treated by my ex-husband, I would be classified as inactive. I opened the top drawer, A through I, pink files.

I saw some names I recognized, but no Bear. Were these current? The next drawer, J through S, was more helpful. There was Jackson, T., which would be Trixie, and Korman, M., which would be Marla. She had been married to John Richard more recently than I, and might still be classified as active, although like me she now went to a female gynecologist in Denver. There was also Korman, V. - Vonette. At this juncture I remembered that the last time I had been in the Korman office, I too had been a Korman, so these must be the current or only recently inactive patients.

I skipped the next drawer and opened drawer J through S in the adjoining cabinet, which bulged with green files. Inactive? The unhappily expectant patient at the desk was still bemoaning her fate; her husband was figuring out dates with the nurse. My ex-husband's voice floated out his office door.

If only there were some plants behind the counter. I needed cover.

I turned back to the green files and had a sudden thought. Could Laura Smiley be in here? Would she have been active or inactive? I flipped quickly back to the S pink files: Sandoval, Scalia, Sheffield, Smythe. Back to the green files I went, checking into Slacek, Smalrose, Smart, Smith. No Smiley in either green or pink. Perhaps it had been misfiled. I began with the green H's, where I saw Heath and Hilliard, then the J's, Jacoby, Jermaine, and so on, through K's, where I found Korman, G., and removed it, through the L’s, Lapham, Leduc, Locraft, and Ludmiller, when the sudden swift foot of John Richard kicked the file drawer out of my hands so that it crashed into the cabinet.

"You," he said. "What the hell are you doing in here? I mean, besides being nosy?"

"I'm not being nosy;" I said. I gritted my teeth and tried to cut him with a glance. From behind the waiting-room bushes faces appeared, like curious pygmies. "I was looking," I said airily, "for my file." I

waved it. "Which I found."

Whispers from the waiting room.

John Richard said to the nurse, "Why is she back here?"

The nurse looked at me and back at the Jerk, who was a large hulking blond presence in his white doctor coat. "She

was looking for her file," she said. "I think."

John Richard narrowed his eyes at me again. "I suppose you weaseled your way in here with an appointment?"

I murmured assent, holding my file like a life preserver with one hand, and gesturing to the appointment book, with the other. John Richard hunched over the book, and I prayed his pants would split. Then he glared back at me.

"Let me tell you something," he said in a rough whisper. His index finger stabbed the air between us. "I don't know what you're up to here. But you keep out of those confidential files, you little bitch. If you try to harm my father again I'll wring your neck. And listen up. Get yourself another doctor. Don't come back to this office or I'll call the cops."

"I've got another doctor," I said. "But feel free to call the cops. Ah . . . try the one I've been going out with. He shoots people for assault and battery."

John Richard gave me a look with enough steel in it to keep Pittsburgh going for a day. Then he whisked out in a cloud of anger and white coat."

"You can see Dr. Korman now," said the nurse, avoiding my eyes. "The other doctor. Just go on back." She knew' she had screwed up.

Patty Sue was nowhere in sight. I assumed she had already seen Fritz, come back out through the plants, and gone downstairs to the pastry shop for a bite to eat. Knowing Patty Sue, it would be more than a bite. I walked quickly past the waiting-room jungle and peered around the corner into the room where they drew blood and refrigerated samples and medications. This was also where they stored all the equipment for "office surgery," their euphemistic term for ridding the uterus of anything unwanted. My guess was that such a procedure would

be the next visit for the unexpectedly pregnant patient who had preceded me.

I knew I was also unwanted in this office. I peeked around the corner, unwilling to be removed myself.

The room with the abortion equipment was empty. I walked quietly past.

"Hi, Fritz," I said as I entered his office. "Hope you don't mind my coming in like this."

"Goldy." He looked up at me with a frown. He said, "You know you're not supposed to come in here. Let the nurse put you in one of the examination rooms. Then I'll come see you."

"Oh thanks," I said, and averted my eyes from his tall frame to the office greenery, which resembled the profusion of foliage in the waiting room. There were rows of geraniums on shelves in a built-out window, Swedish and other strains of ivy hanging behind the desk and couch, and tall rubber plants hugging the frame of a door. "Tell me, Fritz," I said, "do you have a repressed desire to be a botanist?" He smiled. He sat in his chair and swiveled toward me. With his head tilted, his bald pate caught the light and shone like a halo. He said, "Repressed desires? That's shrink talk. Now why don't you go to an examination room and we'll get on with our appointment?"