Goldy Schulz 01 Catering to Nobody (29 page)

"You bet," said Marla, "come quickly before I eat it all."

Running suit-attired Trixie trotted in carrying hand weights. I begged her to leave them by the door, which she did.

"Hoo-hool" yodeled Vonette from the front door. She was already tipsy. Her orange hair looked like an abandoned robins' nest.

"Time to get started," I warned them as Vonette splashed dessert sherry into her coffee.

"What we do here," I began, "is talk, share, and give support."

Trixie said, "I just don't see how this can help."

I said, "Then why don't you go first? Tell us what's bothering you."

"I hate doctors," she said evenly, "and I don't want to talk about it."

“Aw, c'mon honey," coaxed Vonette. "I don't mind. And I'm married to one." She took a healthy swig from her coffee cup.

Patty Sue said, "I'm feeling sick."

"You see?" accused Trixie. "Somebody starts talking about doctors and right away, somebody feels sick. Why do we depend on them so much?"

"Chocolate's more reliable," said Marla, who was waddling out to the kitchen to replenish the brownie platter, which I had stupidly put within her reach.

Patty Sue said faintly, "I think we have to trust our doctors. Either that or the treatment doesn't work."

"Trix?" I said. "Do you want to talk or not?"

Trixie ground her teeth. "I did trust a doctor and look at where it got me."

Marla plopped back down at her place. Patty Sue gave me her wide-eyed look.

I concentrated my gaze on Trixie and said, "You feel angry."

"What do you think?"

“And so," I went on, "you throw - "

Marla said, "Oh my God. You throw up? What a waste."

"Please don't talk about throwing up," said Patty Sue as she stood to go out to the bathroom.

"This is great," Marla commented. "We say we're going to talk about men and all we talk about is food and barf."

Vonette cleared her throat. "Well, girls," she began, "I can talk about it without talking about food. You see, I know something about doctors. I can tell you-" She stopped to pour sherry directly into her cup, an action I felt I should stop, since she was already pretty sloshed.

I said, "Tell us, Vonette."

But Trixie interrupted her. "If you're angry too, Vonette, why don't you do something? Talk, talk, talk! How about a little action?"

"Temper, temper," said Marla. "Have a ginger snap." To demonstrate, she had one herself.

A limp-looking Patty Sue sat down again. I turned back to Vonette.

"So what do you want to tell us, Vonette?"

She took another long sip from her cup. "Do you girls talk about sex in here?"

Everyone was immediately quiet. "Sure," said Marla.

"He's impotent with me," Vonette said finally, her voice dropping. "But not with everyone else. He says be cause I drink too much, our lack of a sex life is all my fault."

Patty Sue said, "I wish we could change the subject."

Marla rolled her eyes at me. "Everybody thinks I don't know what goes on," Vonette was saying, "but I know. It's just that. . . thinking about it gives me these awful headaches. Thirty-six years," she muttered into her cup before draining it. "For what? Oh, my little Bebe." She started to sniffle. "I miss you. Bebe, Bebe."

"Do you think Laura had," I said tentatively, "something on Fritz, that she was going to confront him - "

"Confront?" yelled Trixie. "Confront? Why do we have I to listen to shrink talk all the time?"

"She had something," said Vonette. "Of course she did. Oh, my." She reached into her purse and pulled out what I knew was her Valium pillbox, then downed one of the green pills with her newly filled coffee cup of sherry.

"You see," said Marla as she sliced a piece of the Burnt-Sugar Cake. "This is what happens when you abandon food for other palliatives."

"What palliatives?" asked Patty Sue.

"Forget it," said Marla, with her mouth full.

"This just makes me so angry," said Trixie, her forehead wrinkled into a scowl. "Yak, yak, yak. I knew it wouldn't do any good to come."

"Trixie," I said, "how else could you express your anger?"

"What's that," she said, "more shrink talk? How about having some of these doctors pay for the damage they inflict? I mean really pay?"

I said, "What would that look like?"

Trixie groaned and got up from the table, then flopped down on my living room couch with her arms folded across her chest.

"This is getting out of control," I said under my breath to Marla.

"Don't tell me," she said after swallowing, "I learned all about control when I had to deal with the Jerk's lawyer."

"Laura," came Vonette's drunken voice. In her stupor at the end of the table, she had heard little of the previous conversation. "Laura had something. But not just on him, if you see what I mean."

I said, "I'm not following you."

"You don't?" said Vonette with a confused look. "Don't you see that stuff Bebe wrote to her teacher about her home life said something about me, too?" She finished what was in her cup. "At that moment, when my Bebe died, my life was over. Laura had something on us, all right. It's not over, though. I'm going to get him. I'm going to go home and call him an impotent old ass. I'm going to tell him I'm going to turn him in to the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners. Ha! That man screwed anyone, even his own patients!"

Marla and I looked at each other.

Trixie screamed, "You see what I mean?"

Patty Sue had her usual reaction to acute stress. She fainted.

-25- Halloween. A thick shroud of October fog clung to the ground as I drove back up to the mountains at five-thirty Halloween morning. Already Colorado was in costume - a shroud mourning the loss of Indian summer. Or perhaps the loss of innocence.

Patty Sue was in the hospital. The doctor had said she was about two months pregnant. After the women's meeting she hadn't felt any better, even when I brought her back to consciousness with a little ammonia on a paper towel. She was in pain; a couple of pills "to relieve periodic suffering" did no good. It was late anyway, so I'd sent everybody home. Vonette was still babbling on about getting Fritz, even after we'd stuffed her into Marla's car.

About three A.M. Patty Sue's cramping from what she'd thought was her period had become so intense that even I became frightened. There was more blood. I scuttled the idea of an ambulance, figuring I could get her down to a Denver hospital more quickly myself. After a quick call to the Emergency Room, we were on our way.

The on-call gynecologist was courteous, informative, and even sympathetic. Trixie should have been there to see a few stereotypes break down. He said they'd have to keep Patty Sue for a while. It looked as if there had been a small separation of the placenta. The fetus appeared healthy and had a good heartbeat. I was worried that the X-rays for Patty Sue's broken arm might have harmed the fetus, but again the doc said not to worry. Poor Patty Sue.

In her room I swabbed her face with a wet cloth.

Her eyes, dulled by the loss of sleep, fixed on my face. "I feel awful," she said.

"First three months are the worst," I said. "I should : have figured it out. . . the way you've been sick."

"Doctor Korman is the one - " she began, but tears started rolling down onto her pillow.

"It's okay," I said, and then stopped to take her hand. I said, "That's what you told Laura Smiley, isn't it? That he had been having relations with you."

She nodded. "He said it would help my condition. Laura already knew what was going on. She told me she I needed to talk to me about it."

I said gently, "What did she say?"

"She said I had to get him to stop. But I told her I was afraid of him. What did I know about medicine? Maybe he was right. And he told me that if I told anyone about the treatment he would call my parents and tell them I was uncooperative."

She started to cry again, a miserable sobbing that erupted from her chest. I leaned over and hugged her until she stopped.

I said into her ear, "Can you just tell me what Laura , said when you said you couldn't confront him?"

Patty Sue coughed before whispering back, "She said she could get him to stop. She thought he had changed from the way he was before, you know, from what Vonette told us. Laura said she thought Fritz had reformed. Then it was strange because she said she could ruin his practice. She said she had the power to do that."

"Do you know what she meant?"

"The next time I heard about Laura, she was dead."

I called Patty Sue's parents. Her mother answered. When I related my news there was a long silence.

Patty Sue's mother said, "She didn't tell us she had a boyfriend."

I told her Patty Sue would tell them all about it. She said she and her husband could be at the hospital shortly after eight that morning.

Now the mist clouded my windshield so thickly that I slowed to twenty miles an hour and pulled over into the far right lane. When winter approaches in Colorado, it comes like the poet's cat. It pads along the back roads and darkens the sky earlier each evening until finally, near mid-December, it plops on its ample backside as the cold sets in. During those months of early darkness, the residents take refuge by their firesides or bulk themselves up with Coors and ski stories to await the coming snows.

And it began this way, not with the ferocious onslaught of thunder and hail that mark spring's arrival, but gently, subtly, with a cold cloud of mist.

Fog swallowed the cars around me. I straightened up to peer through the glass and thought about Patty Sue. When she came to live with us she had worked hard learning to cook. She had asked questions about my life, and she had told me about hers. It was in September that she wafted off, first into indifference, and late in the month into distraction. The distracted behavior coincided, I now realized, with the confession to Laura and Laura's death.

My heart tugged for this twenty-year-old about to learn the rigors of motherhood. I would have stayed with her longer but I was worried about Arch. He had been very drowsy when I had told him of the impending trip to the hospital. Arch, Arch. What was he up to with liches and magic spells and lessons in making Molotov cocktails? Worse than that, what were his plans for a used surgical kit?

I pushed open the front door. The house's air was warm and still, a place wrapped in sleep. Soon Arch's alarm broke the silence. I ground coffee beans, ran water, and turned up the radio news, which warned of clouds and wind and possibly snow in the mountains Halloween night.

The phone rang: Marla. She said, "Vonette overdosed last night. She's really in bad shape. There's a possibility it was a suicide attempt."

"Oh my God. How'd you hear that?"

"Fritz called the priest from the hospital and the churchwomen set up a phone tree. I feel horrible. What do you think we should do?"

"Not sure. I have to get Arch off to school. How about if you call John Richard? We have to keep up with how she's doing."

"Thanks a lot," Marla said without enthusiasm. "Don't suppose it could wait until tonight, do you? I mean, if she's out of danger and they're still going to come to the party. I suppose that would be beaucoup crass."

"I wouldn't put anything past them. Call me later. I'll be up to my rear in chips and dip. Almost forgot. Patty Sue's two months pregnant."

"What? Expecting? I didn't even know."

"Neither did she. By Fritz, no less."

"Jesus," Marla said. "That guy never quits. If I were Vonette, I'd want to die too."

An hour later I had shooed Arch off to school wearing his lich costume. Asking him tough questions was simply not within my emotional repertoire after the events of the previous night. The house was silent. No clients calling for parties. No Arch sneaking about. No Patty Sue bumping into walls. Still. Questions hung heavily in the air.

Time to let the mind cook along with the hands. As usual.

First on the agenda for the athletic club party was the: preparation of guy bow, an Oriental chicken-and-egg affair I seasoned with soy and encased in a bread shell.

But as I folded and rolled out the dough, I could not: get the image of Vonette out of my mind. She seemed a sudden absence. Prayer had been a difficult proposition since I'd stopped teaching Sunday school. But I prayed; now for Vonette.

I set aside the guy bow and prayed. Please, please. Then I peeled, pitted, and mashed the plump avocados destined for my Holy Moly Guacamole. Once the rich dip was done, I set it aside and tried to think.

HOLY MOLY GUACAMOLE

1 large or 2 small avocados, peeled, pitted and mashed to make 1 cup 1 1/2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 1 teaspoon freshly grated onion ¼ teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon picante sauce ¼ cup mayonnaise Corn Chips

Place the mashed avocado in a non-metallic bowl. Mix in the juice, onion, salt, and picante sauce until well blended. Spread the mayonnaise over the top to the edges, cover the bowl, and refrigerate. At serving time, uncover the bowl and thoroughly mix in the mayonnaise. Serve with corn chips.

Makes 1 ¼ cups

Why had Vonette done it? Had the headaches finally become unbearable? Had something not killed the pain?

Worst question of all was one that filled my mind like the bowls of silky guacamole.

Had the messy anger of our meeting the evening before triggered some deep mechanism that had been operating all along, only incrementally, with liquor and drugs? Instead of killing herself slowly, had Vonette gone over the edge because of what the meeting had made her think about? And what about her oath to confront Fritz?

About that I did not even want to think. But had to.

Before starting the deviled eggs and empanadas I called the hospital. Patty Sue was okay; her parents were with her.

A nurse who knew me said Vonette Korman was in a coma. I didn't ask if anyone was with her. I could imagine her face and her curly orange hair, but she wasn't there. It I was as if the ground around our relationship had suddenly collapsed.

I tried to focus back on the party. My next task was to arrange concentric circles of the empanadas and deviled eggs. With the eggs in the guy bow we'd have a cholesterol-heavy night, but what the hey. Eggs were cheap and I looked good. Besides, they filled people up, a key concept' in catering.