The Doctor's Wife (2 page)

“Fine, don't tell me,” Nancy says. “I have a solid five.”

Jim Taylor puts his arm around his wife. “You gals better get us some sewers. I'm tired of digging up the drain field on the nastiest day of the year.”

“I'm tired of having you complain about it,” Nancy drawls back. The truth is that everybody is sick of dealing with the septic systems. At least the Taylors and the Hagens have septic tanks. From some houses a pipe pumps raw sewage directly into the lake. A few years ago, after horrible smelling algae bloomed in the lake, the Doctor started taking samples three times a week, sending them to the Snohomish County Health Department. The levels of coliform bacterium were at a count of 1,000 per 100 mL of tested water, four times the amount considered safe for drinking, and high enough so that the lake should have been closed for swimming. The county wouldn't do anything about the bacteria. Over the past year, the Doctor's Wife and Nancy have worked with the Community Development Bureau of the University of Washington to establish a sewer district. That was part one of the battle. Part two is to convince homeowners that it's in their own best interests to vote for the bond issue to fund the sewer.

“You know what Greta Sorenson told me? She's swum in the lake for fifty years and she's never been bothered. She's never had typhoid and nobody she's known has had typhoid, so why do we need sewers?” Nancy says.

“What did you say to her?” the Doctor's Wife asks.

“I told her, ‘This community is going nowhere without a sewer. If you don't help out, then don't ever bitch to me about getting a dentist to come to town.'”

“Some people aren't as bright as the two of us.”

“No,” Nancy cackles.

But Greta isn't the only problem. The people on the hill say things like, “I don't live on the lake, so why should I have to pay?” She knows that some think that she and Nancy are rich bastards twisting people's arms to make them cough up money they don't have. But this is a gross distortion of the facts. The Doctor's Wife grew up in the Depression, and she knows what it is to count a penny. But money isn't God. Even God isn't God as far as the Doctor's Wife is concerned.

“I'll tell you one thing, it'll be a fight to convince these people to vote for the bond issue,” the Doctor's Wife says to Nancy.

“If I have to go to every house,” Nancy says.

“Me too,” the Doctor's Wife says, feeling a competitive twinge.

The Doctor, standing with Jim and the other men suddenly turns, winking at his wife. “A dance?” he asks.

“We're conferring,” she says, but she's pleased.

“Go on ahead, my shoes pinch anyway,” Nancy says, rolling her eyes about Jim, who's busy telling a story to a crowd. The Doctor leads the Doctor's Wife to the dance floor.

“I think you live across the street from me,” the Doctor had said, cutting in, the first time they ever spoke. On Fridays in the summer, the student union of the University of Kansas blocked off streets on campus, strung up Chinese lanterns, put down a dance floor and hired a big band to play.

“Is that so?” she'd replied.

But the truth was, she'd had her eye on him. Every morning from the parlor of her sorority house she watched him leaving his rooming house across the street toting a microscope, the case slung over his shoulder, held tight against his tall, skinny body.

She can feel the Doctor's ribs through his blazer as they dance on the small dance floor set up by the windows overlooking the fairway. The Doctor's Wife tells herself that the kids are getting ready for bed at home.

(They are not. They have not even brushed their teeth or washed their faces. They are playing a rambunctious game with Hazel—a grownup—chasing each other through a burrow built of sofa pillows, blankets, and overturned chairs.)

This morning they've already had to go to church and now Chrissy is waiting in the car with her mother and siblings for the Doctor to finish his rounds at Providence, the second hospital of the morning.

Chrissy watches the clouds, wondering how her life will change when she's no longer the youngest. There are pros and cons. She'll be able to dress the baby, but the baby will probably cry a lot. The baby might be stinky, and Chrissy has a very sensitive nose.

Chrissy tries to amuse herself by nibbling off the offending edge of her left thumbnail.

“You know what's going to happen?” Ann asks quietly.

“Happen with what?” Chrissy asks as she tears off a satisfying piece of nail with her teeth.

“The fibers of your fingernails are going to form a big ball in your stomach and the ball will stay there until you die.”

The piece of nail lodges in her throat. She has absolutely no doubt that what Ann says is true. There are consequences for her actions, usually unpleasant ones for anything actually fun. But what else was she supposed to do with the chewed bits? If she spit them out, her mother would not be happy. Chrissy wonders how large the ball is already. As big as a gumball? An egg? The nerves of the situation keep her chewing.

The Doctor's Wife works the crossword in the newspaper in the front seat. Bob leafs through a comic book. Ann is reading too, looking disgustingly smug. Chrissy tries to wrestle the book out of Ann's hands. Ann screams.

“I'll give a quarter to the child who stays quietest the longest,” the Doctor's Wife says briskly.

Chrissy returns to her nails. That is at least a quiet activity and she could use a quarter. Chrissy feels Ann's finger jab her right ribs.

“She's touching me!” Chrissy shrieks, bucking back into Bob.

“Knock it off,” he says, pushing her the other way.

Ann smiles at her, remaining silent. She's won the quarter, the beast. She won't even buy candy like anybody sensible would. She'll just squirrel it away and lord it over Chrissy.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a flash as the glass door to the parking lot catches the sun.

“You took forever,” Chrissy says when the Doctor lets himself into the car.

“Let me smell your breath,” the Doctor's Wife says. “Just as I suspected. Having coffee with the doctors again!”

“And probably the nurses too!” Chrissy says.

“Yes, probably,” the Doctor's Wife says, swatting the Doctor's bottom as he sits.

How unappealing!

The Doctor's Wife knows her husband to be a person somewhat fixated on safety. For example, if the Doctor sees somebody speeding or driving erratically, he'll say, “I'll see you at the hospital later.” He's always prepared to go fishing, a pole and flies at the ready in the car. But in case he has a heart attack while fishing—this is how his own father died, wading in a river, fishing pole in hand—he brings along a few pills of Valium (the drug calms the frantic patient) and Canadian Club whiskey in a flask (to act as a quick anticoagulant). Under no circumstances is anybody allowed to eat a cream pie from a restaurant. And speaking of restaurants, if the family is on a road trip and the silverware looks at all grimy, even if they've been driving for hours in hundred degree weather and it's air conditioned in the restaurant, the doctor will force the whole family to march in a humiliating parade back to the hot car to find a more hygienic establishment.

So it is very surprising when one morning that summer, the Doctor allows Bob to keep a live bat he claims he found “sleeping” in the front yard. “I think there's a cage in the basement,” the Doctor says with a shrug.

The Doctor's Wife gives a look to her husband as the kids run out of the kitchen making more noise than you could think three kids could make. She feels the baby kick.

“I thought it would keep them out of your hair,” he says. The Doctor's Wife sincerely hopes that neither the children nor the bat will be injured. She isn't a fatalist, not yet anyway.

In the basement, Bob eases the bat down on the floor of the cage. His sisters hang back, refusing to get near the cage, where the bat lies prone, its wings drawn around itself. Bob shows his sisters how he's not afraid to take the bat out of its cage and pet its head.

“What if it's rabid?” asks Ann.

“Let me hold it,” says Chrissy, grabbing at the animal, seeming to forget her initial fear. She tries to tug at the little claws at the end of the wings. “Why won't it open them? Now it just looks like a mouse.”

“It's daytime, so it's sleeping,” Bob says. “Dummy.”

Bob takes the bat back from Chrissy and sets it in the cage. He's pretty sure the bat isn't rabid.

“Do you think it's a boy or a girl?”

“I can't see anything,” Bob says.

“I mean the baby.”

“I hope it's a boy. I'm tired of so many girls,” Bob says.

“I hope it's a boy too,” says Chrissy, squinting her eyes at Ann.

The Doctor comes home with a German Shorthaired Pointer puppy he's already named Gretel. The Doctor's wife is assured that the puppy will be the Doctor's responsibility. The kids are thrilled about the new dog and immediately start to play with her. The Doctor's Wife narrowly saves Gretel from being made to wear a doll's dress.

A week after she has joined the family, Gretel is feverish, won't eat, and her eye oozes with pus. She coughs, has a fever, and vomits in her cardboard box in the basement.

“Your puppy is sick,” the Doctor's Wife says when she calls her husband's office. Hazel Adelsheim is upstairs helping out with the kids. The Doctor's Wife had planned on chairing a sewer meeting with Nancy.

“You're going to have to pull double duty today,” she says to Nancy on the phone.

“What's wrong?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Kid?”

“Dog,”
the Doctor's Wife says.

“It doesn't look good,” the vet says. He's a fishing buddy of the Doctor's. “Such a pretty little dog too. She has diphtheria. Dogs don't really ever get better from it. Even if they live, the encephalitis can cause bad trouble with the brain and the muscles. Any treatment would be only supportive. Want me to put her down?”

No, neither the Doctor nor the Doctor's Wife want that.

Gretel pants heavily in a cardboard box in the kitchen, whimpering. It's an awful noise, so full of suffering that the kids steer clear of the box, playing quietly upstairs. The Doctor is called away to Providence for an emergency, but she and the Doctor work as a team. She can't just let that little dog die.

She uses an eyedropper to keep Gretel hydrated. She wipes pus from Gretel's eyes, she cleans out the cardboard box as it becomes soiled, she puts cold clothes on the hot doggy body. This goes on for days until the Doctor's Wife starts to think that maybe it would have been better to allow the vet to do as he suggested.

But Gretel lives.

Chrissy gobbles down her lunch, hoping that today the Doctor's Wife will forget her rule that they wait half an hour to get in the water. She doesn't forget.

“It's boring to wait,” Chrissy wails.

“If you're bored, I'll give you something to do,” her mother says brightly.

Ann gives Chrissy a poisonous look. Everybody receives assignments. Ann's job is to vacuum and Chrissy's is to dust. All Bob has to do is take out the trash. The trash will only take two seconds and the vacuuming is easy too. Dusting will take years. Chrissy is prepared to rebel, but then an interesting thing happens. The Doctor's Wife walks quickly into the downstairs bathroom and shuts the door behind herself. Chrissy draws close enough to the door to hear a retching sound.

“Are you sick?” Chrissy asks.

The Doctor's Wife opens the door, toothbrush in mouth. “Sometimes when one is pregnant, one vomits.”

“Did you throw up when you were pregnant with me?”

“Of course.” She fixes her eyes on Chrissy. “Don't you have a job to do?”

Chrissy does, but she takes the long way around to the broom closet, through the kitchen instead of through the den. She opens the refrigerator and takes out two carrots. Chrissy loves carrots, crunchy and tasting of the color orange. She doesn't have time to scrape them today, and, anyway, she doesn't mind the skin. These are the first of the day, and they barely touch her hunger. She's eaten so many carrots this summer that her skin has started to turn a very pale yellow. Chrissy's goal is to turn orange.

“Right this instant,” her mother says.

“I'm almost there,” Chrissy replies, swallowing the last bite and entering the broom closet. Big roasting pans, splatter screens, a very large sieve and a smaller one with a black handle, a colander, and the biggest stock pot hang on hooks. Cleaning solutions including a big bottle of ammonia, Windex and Pledge sit on the middle shelf at the back of the closet. Chrissy grabs the canister of Pledge. The small vacuum cleaner used on the stairs looks like baby elephant draping its trunk over a hook. Next to the trunk hangs the stuffed bag of rags, soft and clean.

“Chrissy!” her mother says.

“I'm getting a rag,” Chrissy explains, leaving the broom closet with her rag and canister of polish. In the living room she vigorously mists the top of the piano, drawing the rag over the wood and then pounding on the keys with the wadded up cloth.

“Quit banging!” Ann yells over the noise of the stand-up vacuum cleaner she runs across the carpet in front of her.

“I'm not banging,” Chrissy yells back, thumping with her fist. Just because Ann can play the piano doesn't mean she should tell Chrissy what to do with the instrument. For good measure, Chrissy gives the low keys a last whack before slamming the lid and tackling what everybody calls the bone table, then all the little side tables, and then the mantle. At the bookshelf, she plops down to look at the German bible with the family names in it. Ann hits her thigh with the vacuum cleaner.