Staggerford (21 page)

Miles sat alone in Dr. Karstenburg’s waiting room, a funhouse. The walls were carpeted in purple and green, and tacked to the carpet at crazy angles were posters of football stars and country-music stars and movie stars. A pinball machine stood in one corner, blinking. From a speaker in the ceiling came a number entitled, “I Took My Broad to the Beach,” the lyrics of which consisted entirely of that statement, repeated forty or fifty times. It appeared to Miles that he was rather far along in life to be visiting a wisdom-tooth specialist.

After a long wait, a frail girl in a white uniform led Miles into a small room with a padded black chair—not one of the sleek new dental chairs that adjust at a touch to twelve different positions, but an upright, old-fashioned barber’s chair. He sat down and she tied a bib on him. “I’m Joy,” she said. Then she blindfolded him.

“Is that necessary?” Miles asked.

“Yes, it’s so the light doesn’t bother your eyes.”

“Light doesn’t bother me,” he told her.

“It might,” she said. He heard her leave.

Except for the trickle of water, the room was silent for a long time. Then a man’s voice said, “Hi, Karstenburg here.” He lifted one of Mile’s hands and squeezed it. The doctor’s was a fat hand. “You’ve got a real doozy in that mouth of yours,” he said happily. “Oppegaard phoned me about it.”

He gave Miles a shot of Novocain in the hinge of his jaw, then he left the room. In a few seconds he was back to ask if his mouth was numb. Miles said it wasn’t. The dentist gave him a second shot and went immediately to work. He clamped his pliers on the wisdom tooth and tried to rock it loose. Miles’s head rocked with the tooth.

“Joy,” called the dentist, and soon Miles felt a pair of hands press themselves around his head—Joy’s hands, surprisingly strong.

Novocain never worked fast with Miles, and the gum
around his tooth hurt where Karstenburg was tearing it with his pliers. Miles began to sweat. The dentist rocked the tooth until he was out of breath. Miles felt him take the pliers out of his mouth and heard him pull up a chair or a stool and sit on it, panting. Joy sponged off Miles’s forehead.

When the dentist went back to work, it was with a larger tool, something with a handgrip that felt to Miles’s upper lip like a pipe wrench. The dentist squeezed and grunted. The tooth crumbled. He dropped the wrench and went in with a pick. Miles fainted.

He awoke with his head on his knee and something cold on the back of his neck. He was still blindfolded. He could not hear the doctor breathing. Was he alone? He straightened up and felt Joy remove the ice pack from his neck.

“He’s coming out of it,” she called, and the dentist returned.

The Novocain was at last beginning to take effect, and although it required effort, Miles was able to remain conscious through the rest of the slicing, prying, and picking. When it was over the doctor left the room without a word of farewell. Joy removed the blindfold and bib. Miles didn’t feel like standing up.

“You may go now,” said Joy.

It was so good having nothing going on in his mouth that he wanted to remain in the chair for a while and savor the peace.

“It’s over,” she said.

It was all he could do to stand up. He was not steady on his feet. Joy wiped blood from his chin with a Kleenex and turned him toward the waiting room.

He tried to say good-by (it was to be his first word in what seemed like days), but discovered his mouth full of rags.

“Keep the cotton pressed into the hole,” said Joy.

He nodded and staggered through the waiting room, where “I Took My Broad to the Beach” was playing again (or yet) with no one to hear it. He went outside into the
sunlight where Imogene was supposed to be waiting, but Imogene wasn’t there.

He stood on the curb and took out his handkerchief to catch the string of blood that hung from his mouth. It was an elastic string without an end. In retribution to Dr. Karstenburg he took the handkerchief away from his mouth whenever a car passed and let the blood swing from his lower lip and drape itself into the gutter for all the world to see. During the half hour he waited for Imogene, sensations returned to his jaw, nerve by nerve—a series of prickles under the skin like a plucking of strings, building to a crescendo of full, rich pain. In that half hour no one entered Dr. Karstenburg’s office. Miles wondered if Karstenburg was a joke in the profession. A butcher your dentist sent you to if he didn’t like you? If you called him an ack-comedian?

“Drive me home,” Miles mumbled when Imogene finally appeared. “Karstenburg has done me wrong.”

“Oh dear,” said Imogene. “That means no movie and no dinner. And no winter coat.”

She got onto the highway leading out of the city.

“I’m tall for a woman, Pruitt. You may not believe this but I am taller than eighty percent of the women in the U.S.A., and therefore I have difficulty finding clothes in Staggerford.”

She talked all the way home—the size of women, the styles for winter, the origins of dentistry, and the harnessing of atomic energy—changing the subject at ten-mile intervals.

Miles, at ten-mile intervals, ate aspirin.

Arriving home from school at three o’clock, Miss McGee found Miles watching “The Turning of Our Lives.” His pain had expanded to regions of his brain and collarbone. She served him broth. When “The Turning of Our Lives” ended with the pregnant virgin finding that she was not pregnant after all, merely flatulent, Miles went upstairs to lie down.

In a few minutes Beverly Bingham drove up to the house
in her black pickup. At the front door she rang the bell and crossed her fingers, hoping Mr. Pruitt would answer, not his crabby landlady.

The door with the oval glass opened. Miss McGee said, “Yes?”

“I have to see Mr. Pruitt. He wasn’t in school today and there’s something I have to see him about.”

“I’m sorry, but he’s not at all well this afternoon. You will have to see him tomorrow. Or perhaps you wish to leave a message with me.”

“He has a letter of mine to the junior college in Berrington. I’m applying for admission. I wanted to get it in the mail today.”

“Well, I’m sure it can wait. It’s very early to be applying for college.”

“But Mr. Pruitt says there’s a lot of competition for scholarships. He says it’s best to be early.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Beverly did not turn to go. She was peering beyond Miss McGee into the dark living room. Were those books behind glass?

“Would you like to come in?”

Beverly was undecided. She had heard about this fearsome woman all her life. She had not expected her to be civil. She looked back at her truck parked at the curb.

“Come in and we’ll have a glass of nectar.”

This was her chance to see how Mr. Pruitt lived. She stepped inside and while Miss McGee prepared the drinks she stood before the glass doors of the bookcase and read the titles stamped on the faded spines of the old lady’s library. Joyce Kilmer’s
Anthology of Catholic Poets
. Belloc’s
Path to Rome
. Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy
. A set, in black, of Hawthorne.

“If you see anything you wish to read, you may borrow it,” said Miss McGee, carrying in a pitcher of something purple and icy.

Merton’s
Seven-Storey Mountain
, Bernanos’
Diary of a Country Priest
. Mauriac’s
Vipers’ Tangle
. “I don’t recognize anybody but Hawthorne,” said Beverly.

“Well … ” Miss McGee sighed for what was lacking in a secular education. “Come and have some nectar.”

Beverly sat in the wing chair, where Governor Rice and the archbishop had sat in their day. She tasted what Miss McGee handed her in a heavy goblet.

“This is nectar?”

“It is.”

“It tastes like Kool-Aid.

“It is.”

Beverly studied the old lady. She saw that each of the old lady’s shoes had five pairs of shoestring holes. She wore a skirt of some heavy, pale blue material and an open jacket to match, and spilling down her front were the folds and frills of the most ruffled, ornamental blouse Beverly had ever seen. The blouse and shoes didn’t go together, and yet they did go together, thought Beverly. The fanciness of the blouse made it as old-fashioned as the high black shoes. The old lady’s hair, nearly white, was pulled back in a bun tight enough to withstand a day in the classroom and the walk home in any weather. The old lady’s eyes, like her own, were blue.

Miss McGee considered the girl. Her jeans and shirt were dirty. Her fingernails were chewed and her hair was snarled. With cosmetics she had done something ghastly around her eyes. She was sitting on one of her feet without having removed her dirty tennis shoe.

“It’s such a lovely day for November,” said Miss McGee.

Beverly nodded. Her eyes were on the frills of the blouse at the old lady’s throat.

“Poor Mr. Pruitt came home in great pain from his visit to a dentist in Duluth.”

Beverly said nothing. There was a long silence.

“This is grape,” said Miss McGee. “I think grape is tastiest.”

Beverly said nothing.

“Miss Bingham, is your mind on something other than the conversation I am trying to start? If so, I wish you would speak up and tell me about it, rather than sit there
speechless.” Silence, golden in the classroom, was unrefined over nectar.

“I was wondering how long it takes you to iron that blouse.”

“This? Oh, I suppose a quarter of an hour.”

“A quarter of an hour. God.”

“No more than that, certainly. It’s of a synthetic fabric and no work at all.”

“I don’t like anything I have to iron.”

This fact was too obvious to pursue, and Miss McGee turned back to the weather. “I don’t remember a day this warm this late in the year.”

“It’s nice all right.”

“After two such dreary days it’s a godsend. I am not fond of rain.”

“Our chickens aren’t fond of it either. When it rains hard like it did Sunday, the henhouse floods.”

“But you live in the gulch. Surely there’s enough slope in the gulch to carry off the rain.”

“Not where our henhouse is. It’s in sort of a scooped-out place.”

“Then you must do some ditching. Take a spade and ditch from the henhouse in the direction of the creek. You can’t have a henhouse standing in water.”

“Christ, if it was up to me we wouldn’t have a henhouse at all. I’m so sick of cleaning and picking and gutting chickens—God.”

“Tut. You must pull your weight. You can’t expect your mother to run your farm single-handedly.”

“Well, my mother … I mean you’ve got that all wrong. My mother doesn’t do hardly anything and hasn’t for a long time, except grind up bones. I’m doing it all, you might say—well, anyway three-fourths of it, and I’ve gotten to the point where I despise chickens. It’s different with the garden. I work all summer in the garden and I never get tired of that. I could work in a garden year-round and never get tired of it. We have a produce stand on the highway, you know, July and August.”

“Yes, I know. I’m told your green beans are superb.”

“It’s the chicken manure. I like the garden and I like selling the produce. That whole end of things I like. But I’m just plain damn sick of chickens.”

“I have my own garden, otherwise you can be sure I would be one of your best customers. My neighbor Lillian Kite says your green beans are superb.”

“Is she the one who always wears a floppy hat? There’s an old lady drives out in a green car and she’s always wearing this floppy hat. She buys a lot of stuff including beans.”

“No, you’re thinking of Mrs. Murphy, the housekeeper at St. Isidore’s. Father Finn’s housekeeper. She, too, does a good deal of shopping at your stand. She buys a good many onions, doesn’t she?”

“When we have them.”

“Yes, Father Finn is a great one for onions.” Miss McGee shook her head, regretting the odor of onions in the confessional. “Would you like more nectar?”

“Yea. Can I smoke?”

“Smoke?” Miss McGee went to the dining room and drew from her china closet a cut-glass ash tray. She placed it on the coffee table next to the wing chair.

Beverly asked Miss McGee if she had a cigarette handy.

“Goodness no. Neither Mr. Pruitt nor I have ever smoked. No one in my family ever smoked. My father, who was otherwise quite a man of the world—”

“That’s okay. I’ve got some in the truck.” Beverly ran outside and returned with a flip-top box containing, besides three or four cigarettes, a rolled-up dollar bill and a tube of lipstick. She struck a match and brought it up to her cigarette, crossing her eyes to see what she was doing.

“Now that I think about it, my brother would smoke a pipe now and then,” said Miss McGee. “But he died of the flu in nineteen.”

“In other words, I’m about the first one to ever light up in this house.”

“No, we had a Mrs. Mulloy in our circle one time who smoked constantly, but she moved to Denver. And Father
Finn is a great one for cigars. When he stops in for a visit, he always has a cigar.” She shook her head, regretting the odor of cigars in the confessional.

“I just started a couple of weeks ago when I got my job at the Hub. It really does a lot for my nerves. It calms me down.”

“It looks like a very nervous activity to me. And furthermore, though I mean no offense to you personnally, I dislike seeing a woman smoke.”

“That’s an old attitude.”

“It may be old, but I am currently holding it. Old attitudes are not necessarily bad attitudes.”

“No, but they’re old.” Beverly clumsily poked her ashes in the direction of the ash tray. “I mean that attitude is from the days when women were down.” She sucked in smoke and coughed it out. “In your day women were down more.”

“And now we’re up?”

“Well, at least we’re on our way. Don’t you think so?”

Miss McGee sat back and closed her eyes. She could feel the strength leaving her body. It was the Dark Age dyspepsia. She wished to hear no more about old attitudes as opposed to new. There was no point in telling this girl what was really happening to womanhood, no point in telling her what womanhood had once been. The girl could not hope to understand. There was no point in discussing with her the way the world was going, no point in telling her that doom was about to crack.