The Doctor's Wife (10 page)

“It would be easier if I got out and pushed,” Chrissy says. And then she does it, paddling around to the back of the boat, where she kicks strongly. Ann jumps in the water and joins her.

Today is the second day in a row of frozen trees, icy roads, snow, and general mess. Nobody can get anywhere. Chrissy sees no reason to get out of her cozy bed, so she snuggles down into her covers, ready for a long second sleep.

“Good morning, merry sunshine, how did you wake so soon?” the Doctor's Wife comes into the room, singing in her forceful tenor.

“Go away,” Chrissy says.

“You've scared the little stars away and shone away the moon!” her mother continues the rest of the chorus.

After breakfast, Chrissy sits in the nook by the window. The furnace kicks on and Chrissy sighs, looking up from her book. The snow continues to fall. She blinks, looking out the window. It's so quiet with everybody gone away to college.

Through the snow, a large shadowy figure makes its way up the driveway. Then it isn't a shape, it's Chrissy's friend Pat Rheingold riding up to the back porch on her horse.

“I got so sick of being inside and I couldn't get my car out,” Pat says. “Want to go for a ride?”

Chrissy scrambles into jeans and snow boots, parka. She climbs up behind Pat, holding her around the waist. The horse is obliging,
_{clopping,
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I ask my mother's best friend from college, a Japanese-American woman originally from East L.A., what she remembers about the Hagens. “I remember Bob coming to dinner at Branner Hall when we were freshmen. I guess he was checking up on Ann.”

“What else?”

“I remember visiting Lake Stevens the first time, the summer after freshman year. Your grandmother ironed the sheets.”

“She what?”

“And starched them.”

“She wasn't always like that,” Petrea says. “Not when we were little. When we were little the house would get messy sometimes.”

“And then?”

“Once John got sick she made housekeeping into an art.”

Bob says because of the situation in the world he's not going to finish his senior year. He and the Doctor cast into the river as the Doctor thinks about what Bob just said. The Doctor doesn't understand. Is this about the Vietnam War? The Doctor doesn't support the war either. One day he stood up in the staff room at Everett General and gave an anti-war speech. That didn't earn him any friends, but it was the right thing to do.

“You'll regret it if you don't finish college,” the Doctor says forcefully. It is hard for him to get the words out. He still has a temper and he'd like to be able to control it. This is ridiculous. You don't go to college for three years and then drop out. The Doctor went straight to medical school after college, from there to his residency, and then to the war. He'd say this to Bob, but he doesn't like to hold himself up as an example of anything.

Earlier in the spring, Bob led a march to protest the military-industrial complex. The march ended with Bob standing on the roof of the Stanford Research Institute. Later that week, the dean of admissions pronounced that no Hagen relative or progeny would ever attend Stanford again. As though it matters what a dean of admissions thinks. Bob knows a revolution is coming. When he gets back to California, he's going to enlist in the Army and volunteer to be sent to the Vietnam War so he can take the operation down from the inside.

Bob wonders if he should be fishing. It's bourgeois, or at least the way it's practiced in this family. On the other hand, he is soothed by the familiar feel of his waders, the pull of the river rushing past.

Spring break of her senior year in high school, Chrissy takes a trip to Hawaii with her parents. Ann and Bob have never gone and they are bitter about her trip, which is satisfying. The Hagens are traveling with the Taylors, including their two boys James and Bill, and the dentist Dr. Kirkshank and his wife. After they spend a few days in Oahu they're flying to Maui. The first night at the hotel on Waikiki Beach, Chrissy opens her windows to feel the ocean breezes while she sleeps. She's a bit hot and itchy from the bad sunburn she got that afternoon, but she's just gotten her braces off and the vacation stretches before her.

The next morning, Chrissy, Bill and James walk down the beach to the Royal Hawaiian, a massive old pink hotel where they've heard they can rent surfboards from the concession stand, a little Tiki hut. The guy who runs the place is a real surfer, gorgeously tanned. Chrissy smiles, feeling especially glad the braces are gone.

“You have to bring your board back here or you'll lose your deposit,” he says.

She carries her board into the crashing waves. It is hard work getting out past the breakers, but Chrissy hasn't been swimming her whole life for nothing. She watches the locals survey the waves coming in. She's bodysurfed before, so she knows how it feels when a wave is right, how the power of the water surges the body forward onto shore.

Chrissy squints her eyes as she catches sight of a big wave. She paddles in front of it, feels the wave pick up the surfboard and then she scrambles upright. For a few glorious seconds she stands on her board before she falls back, launching the board away from her. She kicks to the surface, scans the waves for her board and when she spots it, swims for it.

“Look out, look out!” she hears. She turns around and James Taylor's surfboard whacks her right in the face. She swims in, her head pounding. When she reaches the beach she pauses to examine herself. Her teeth feel wrong and her lip is split from the inside to the outside.

“You've gotta bring your own surfboard in!” yells the attendant from the surfboard concession. Chrissy heads back to the hotel, unable to worry about him or the stupid surfboard. She tries to hold her teeth in her mouth but doesn't wipe away the blood as it gushes out.

Bill follows behind Chrissy. “We shouldn't say that James was the one who hit you, we'll say it's a stranger,” he says. This seems right. This will go better if there's no one single person to blame, and even though Chrissy is the one injured, she can see that she might be accused of bringing this on herself for being such a risk-taker. Chrissy finds the adults in the hotel restaurant having lunch. The Doctor's Wife leaps up.

“She got hit by somebody's surfboard,” Bill Taylor explains.

“Were you knocked unconscious?” the Doctor asks.

Chrissy shakes her head no.

“Let me see your mouth,” Dr. Kirkshank says.

She shakes her head again.

“I can't do anything unless we can see.”

Chrissy opens. Dr. Kirkshank pushes the loose teeth back into position. She'd like to scream, but his fingers are in the way, and all she can manage is a strangled kind of noise.

“I've got to stitch your lip up, but I need to get Novocain first,” the Doctor says.

“Just do it now,” Chrissy says, garbling the words. “It hurts so bad anyway.”

“No, I need Novocain.”

Chrissy holds ice to her lip while he's gone. It's a Sunday and it takes two hours for the Doctor to find an open pharmacy. Her sunburn from the day before suddenly becomes worse. She looks like a horrible monster, she can feel it. She won't be able to meet any boys. She won't even be able to chew the sweet pineapple she's been promised.

The summer after her freshman year at Whitman College, Chrissy becomes Petrea. The Doctor's Wife understands why she'd want to make the change. Petrea is her given name. It sounds more grown-up.

Also that summer, what was once the swamp across the road becomes the garden. The Doctor's Wife and her husband turn the lot over with pitchforks until their hands blister. They add fertilizer, install a spigot for water. Cottonwood trees at the back of the property shield the garden from the view and sound of the Vernon Road. They raise peas, beets, onions, potatoes. Green beans and cucumbers are eaten fresh or put up in a spicy brine. They grow tomatoes, corn. The corn you can eat right from the stalk, raw in the garden.

“I will too marry a black man if I want to!” Petrea yells at the conclusion of a debate with her father, loud enough for everyone else in the Golden Temple Chinese Restaurant to hear. The Doctor's Wife and her husband have always tried to encourage civic engagement and interest in the political questions of the day, so in one way you could say they are to blame.

“Are you a Marxist or a Maoist?” is the very first thing Bob says to Ann's fiancé, Carlos. It's 1972 and all the younger men wear mustaches. Bob's is blond and Carlos's mustache is black. Carlos is from El Paso, Texas. One side of his family is from Mexico and the other has been in New Mexico for four hundred years. This is what Ann told the Doctor's Wife when the Doctor's Wife asked where he came from.

The Doctor's Wife rolls out pie dough. It is a simple recipe, shortening, flour, ice water, salt, which produces a flaky crust. The filling today is wild blackberries picked from the mountains, from secret logged off spots that foragers don't share with each other. The Doctor's Wife has picked her own plenty of times, but for today's pies she ordered a gallon of berries from a friend. The berries are tartly intense and they take a lot of sugar to make the filling taste right.

“My dad and I used to eat tamales from the can,” she hears Ann tell Carlos, as though explaining why this was always meant to be.

“I've planed the bottom, but it's still jamming,” the Doctor says as he opens and closes the front door, demonstrating where it sticks.

“It's so wet here in Washington. It must expand because of the moisture and then it sticks,” Carlos says. He wants to impress his future father-in-law.

“So what do we do?”

“We take the door down and adjust the hinges. It's more work, but that's the only long-term solution.”

“Come look at this,” the Doctor says.

Carlos follows the Doctor into the kitchen. The Doctor opens and closes the spice cabinet.

“What are you doing?” the Doctor's Wife asks.

“We probably ought to work on these hinges too, isn't that right, Carlos?”

“Yes.”

“Probably that's what's the matter with the upstairs shower door. Isn't that right, Carlos?”

“Are you going to finish the front door first?” the Doctor's Wife asks.

Carlos and the Doctor take the door off the hinges, walking it down the stairs, around to the big basement door. Gretel follows the two inside the basement, parking herself next to the table saw.

“Oil-based paint is a whole lot messier and a pain to deal with, but water-based paint doesn't stick to wood,” says the Doctor. “Isn't that right, Carlos?”

“Yes.”

“I recently repainted the south side of the house with anti-spider formula. Reduced the number of spiders by a lot. I don't know of any formula for spiders that I can put into water-based paint. For my money, I feel more comfortable with the oil-based.”

Carlos gets ready to answer in the affirmative.

“Isn't that right, Gretel?” the Doctor asks.

Gretel examines her undercarriage.

The Doctor is on the phone. It's 1974 and Ann is pregnant.

“You need to go get tested, you and Carlos.”

“For what?”

“To make sure your baby doesn't have what John had.”

What John had? All Ann can remember is that John had bright eyes, was smart, smart, and then he didn't let go of the coffee table when he was supposed to. She remembers he was healthy and then he was dying. She doesn't remember the in-between.

“It's a genetic disease. There's a test now.”

Ann and Luis drive up to the Stanford Medical Center where they have plugs of skin taken out of their arms, the fleshy part at the back of the bicep. The plug has a depth of four millimeters to get down to the subcutaneous fat so that the doctor can look for unmylenated nerve fibers and to check for the production of Asulfaditide (A). Both parents have to be carriers. If both parents are carriers, their offspring have a one-in-four chance of getting the disease.

The handle of the badminton racquet is my microphone. I've arranged everyone in the living room after dinner. The curtains are open to the lake. My mom holds my little brother, a baby, on the low couch on one side of the bone table. Petrea and her new husband, who happens to be Jewish and from Los Angeles, sit on the other. The Doctor sits in his moss green Danish recliner. My dad and grandmother lean forward as I give the order to the Doctor to dance around the room like an Indian. The Doctor has a tremor and even I know his health isn't good, but that will not excuse him from his act. He dances in a two-step shuffle, circling the room as he whoops with his palm in front of his mouth.

Everybody else nearly dies laughing, but I don't appreciate the hilarity. The Indian Dance is supposed to be solemn.

I'm four, my brother is two and our parents have gone away to Europe for six weeks. For the first three we stay in Lake Stevens. On the wall of the upstairs hallway, my grandmother hangs up a large world map. We jab pushpins in where our parents are expected to be, and then connect the pins with pieces of colored string. They are now supposedly taking an overnight train from Rome to Paris.

“They sleep on the train?” I ask.

“Oh yes, I've slept on lots of trains in my life,” our grandmother says.

Then we climb in the car and drive to Frontier Village to pick out presents for the day. We stop by Taylor's Pharmacy then pass through to the B&M via the automatic glass door—this is a necessary and interesting part of the trip—and then we make our way to the toy aisle. I choose a sleeve of colored markers. My brother points at a bag of plastic dinosaurs. I have a vague, unexplored feeling of being spoiled.