The Doctor's Wife (8 page)

“We have enough to buy a horse,” Chrissy announces at dinner.

“Where will you keep it?” the Doctor asks.

“We can build a barn in the back yard.”

“No, we can't,” the Doctor says.

“We'll board the horse at the Boggses'.”

“Do you know how much money it costs to board a horse?”

“It's not that much. Alison said her dad could get us a deal.”

The Doctor's Wife laughs, a short, mirthless exhalation.

“We'll work at the stables and pay for the boarding ourselves.”

“How will you decide who gets to ride the horse?”

“We'll trade off,” Chrissy says firmly.

“Dad?” Ann asks.

“You're not going to buy a horse.”

“Why not?”

“It isn't fair! We saved our own money!” Chrissy says, but they can't really complain that much since the riding lessons continue until the winter, when they discover the ski bus to Stevens Pass. On Sundays during January and February, the bus from Grammel's, the sporting goods store in Everett, picks them up at the end of the trestle and then continues on Highway 2 up to the mountains. If they go skiing they don't have to go to church, and there are boys on the bus.

The third Sunday they go, Chrissy has a new idea about how to spend their money. Once home, they take the cigar box out from under their bed to confirm they have enough to buy two pairs of snow skis.

“We aren't buying a horse,” Chrissy says at dinner.

“Why not?”

“We're buying skis.”

“Do what you want with your money,” the Doctor's Wife says.

“She said what? I'm positive we didn't learn how to ride Western. We only learned how to ride English, I remember learning how to post,” my mother says. “She's wrong about the snow skis too. We bought a water ski. I remember because it was really special, Roy Warnock at the marina made it.”

“But you must not have been old enough to want a single ski. You didn't even have a boat then,” I say.

“We didn't?”

Everybody remembers things differently. My mom remembers seeing John's body the day he died. But Chrissy, who since college has been known as Petrea, writes:

Mom called us in and told us John had died (plain words). His body was already upstairs, in the crib I think, that Mom and Dad put in the sewing area for him. I don't think I ever saw him (big mistake). Ann and I looked at each other and one of us said, “I didn't think I would feel so bad.” Then we cried. The day after—or maybe the day or shortly after the funeral—we went on a picnic in some forest. And I thought how strange it was, and empty. I think now it was empty because we just walked out of the house and, for the first time in years, didn't leave John behind at home.

Petrea says to me on the phone, “Oh, and Bob and dad were hunting when dad got stung by the bee, not fishing. But I guess that's OK since these are like confabulated family stories.”

I wrack my brain. What does “confabulated” mean? I look it up. To confabulate in the psychological sense is to make up stories to compensate for the loss of memory, which is correct in a way.

“What else do you remember?” I ask Petrea.

“Once, Mom and John were away at Children's Hospital for a couple of months. We'd go up on Saturdays and wave from the parking lot because healthy kids weren't allowed in the hospital.”

“Months?” my grandmother asks. “No, I don't think so. One time we had to go up for a few days. It may have just felt like months. What I do remember is that we were supposed to have guests that weekend.”

“Who were they?”

“Some friends of your grandfather. I didn't give a hoot what happened to them.”

He's trying as hard as she is. The Doctor hammers flattened pieces of tire to the pilings where the boat will rest. He wants the kids to have fun. He didn't have much of a childhood. When he was twelve, his father died of a heart attack. His mother died of grief a month later, then he and his twin brother were packed off to boarding school in Missouri. The Doctor's Wife understands this and she understands the kids have to be taught that life goes on whether you like it or not. But she also imagines her children being chewed up by the propeller of the boat.

“Come on in, Mom,” the kids urge.

The Doctor's Wife steps in to the boat, a fast looking red and white thing propelled by a not-so-strong 75 horsepower Johnson outboard. She perches uneasily on the edge of the front seat. The dogs stand on the end of the dock barking wildly. Bob is to be the first water skier. He is a big boy, already taller than six feet. He has to hang on for a long time before he pops up out of the water. There are certain people on the lake who have powerful inboard boats, pretty mahogany Chris-Crafts, but the Doctor's Wife is not interested in having a particular boat. She is interested in living a productive life.

“I got a job,” Bob tells his mother after biking home from the marina. He takes cookies from Smiley, the ceramic pig cookie jar, and runs them under the water so that, for efficiency's sake, they turn into a mush he can shove in his mouth. He's bulking up for football.

“That's so gross,” Chrissy says.

“What kind of a job?” the Doctor's Wife asks.

“Roy Warnock hired me to be a boat mechanic.”

“You don't know how to fix motors. What did you tell Roy?”

“I told him I know how to fix outboards. I think I can learn,” Bob says, cramming another wad of soggy cookies into his mouth. “Do we have any manuals?”

The Doctor's Wife retrieves the outboard handbooks from her boat file, one for the Evinrude used on the fishing boat, another for the ski boat. Bob takes them to his room.

A boat motor is fairly simple. Most outboards are two-stroke engines. The carburetor releases a fine spray of gasoline that mixes with the air in the chamber. Spark plugs ignite the mixture of gas and air. This explosion compresses the air, which leads to the movement of rotors and eventually the spinning of the propeller in the water. This much is clear to Bob already.

He reads the chapter on how to troubleshoot. You start with the ignition switch, examining it to make sure the key clicks in place. Next, you make sure that there isn't any corrosion and that the connections are made properly. If this is all functioning, you move on to inspecting the distributor. The distributor regulates the firing of the spark plugs by turning the rotor, touching the points of the lugs, which then connect to the spark plugs.

This is a bit harder than he thought it would be. He holds the image of the figure in his head as he goes down to the dock, manual in hand, and looks at the boat. He takes the cover off the motor, examining the pieces until they become fairly familiar.

The next day he bikes to the marina, taking with him a lunch packed by his mother, three sandwiches of buttered bread, ham, cheese and lettuce, a wax paper package of cookies, two apples.

Roy Warnock sets Bob to work. He seems to believe that Bob knows what he's doing.

“Tell me about the time you slammed the car door on Mom's hand.”

“I'd been trying all morning to get everybody out of the house. I finally got everybody in the car and ready to go and your mother started crying. I thought, ‘What's that brat screaming about now?'”

“When was that? Was it when John was sick?”

“I don't know. I don't remember dates.”

“Well what happened next?”

“She showed me her hand. Oh, I felt so guilty.”

The Doctor's Wife drapes a dyed black sheet around herself, cinching it at the waist. Looking in the downstairs bathroom mirror, she adjusts her warty green rubber mask. To finish off the look she places a white wig on her head, tying two long tendrils of hair under her chin. Confident the costume looks suitably scary, she pushes the mask to the top of her head, where it is held in place by the wig. She's worn the same outfit for the past couple of years, but this year, she's roped her mother in on the act. Petie is wearing a black dress and her long white hair, usually up, is brushed straight so that it falls to her waist. Petie is going to sit in the corner in view of the door and not do anything exactly but sit there and be creepy.

When the kids were younger, the Doctor's Wife threw a yearly party in the basement, leading their friends through the big door that leads from the outside. In the darkened interior, she set out bowls of skinned grapes meant to feel like eyeballs and noodles boiled to the consistency of brains. But the kids are too old for that now.

“Maybe nobody will come this year,” the Doctor's Wife says.

“They'll come,” Petie says.

The Doctor's Wife steps outside to make sure the porch looks right. The curtains in the kitchen are drawn and the Doctor's Wife has swapped the regular light bulb on the front porch for a blue light. She's draped spider webby stuff over the screen door and along the railings. A lit jack-o'-lantern sits on a small table next to the door.

“Come back inside, quick!” says Petie, who has been peering through a crack in the curtain. The Doctor's Wife hurries in, shutting the door behind herself. She adjusts her mask and takes up her noisemaker, the kind that when spun around makes a loud crackling noise.

There's a knock on the door. She throws the door open and jumps out on the porch, spinning the noisemaker. The children run screaming down the stairs, piling up at the bottom. One brave kid, a pirate, stops his retreat, forcing the others back upstairs, where the Doctor's Wife is waiting with a basket of candy. “I wasn't scared,” says the pirate. But the Doctors Wife still has the mask on and the kid keeps looking in the corner, where Petie sits immobile.

“Yes! Yes! That was perfect,” The Doctor's Wife says when they leave.

Petie gives her hair a quick brush.

His senior year of high school, Bob is the center of the Lake Stevens High School football team. He likes certain parts of football, running, eating, lifting weights. He likes to push the sleds across the field. He likes the feeling of his feet digging into the ground and he doesn't even mind getting tackled. What he hates is to hit the other boys.

He's sitting in the locker room holding his helmet in his hands, working himself up to go out onto the field. It won't be long before the game is over. All he has to do is get on the field. All he has to do is block. He doesn't need to hurt anybody.

“You ready to go, big boy?”

“Yes, Coach,” he says.

He runs out onto the field with the other players. The lights shine down brightly on the field. There's a big crowd for this game against Concrete High School.

Right before half time, the huge middle linebacker on the opposite side looks through his helmet into Bob's eyes. “I'm going to kill you,” he says.

This isn't necessary at all.

The ball is snapped and Bob knocks the asshole flat on his back. He doesn't move. Bob helps him up. “Are you OK?”

The Concrete middle linebacker spits out blood and a tooth lands on the grass. “Get your hands off me.”

After the game, a scout from the University of Washington is waiting. He claps his hand on Bob's shoulder. “I'd be very surprised if we didn't offer you a place on the U Dub team. What would you think about that?”

“I'd be honored, sir,” he says, but he feels worried. In the locker room he strips his muddy clothes off. He can't imagine four more years of this. Bob is interested in something beyond what he's seen so far. He stands under the shower, aware of the other boys horsing around, celebrating the victory.

My grandfather bought a five-acre piece of property on the Stilliguamish, meaning to use the land for fishing, but mostly we went for family picnics. The first time I remember going was when I was about two-and-a-half. I don't remember driving up past Arlington and then east, toward the mountains, through the long green valley. I don't remember my grandfather unlocking the gate or driving on the road to the edge of our property. I don't remember walking—maybe I was carried—through the thick stands of cottonwoods to our narrow strip of beach. I'm guessing my grandmother had made a lunch of fried chicken and bread and butter sandwiches. (“That's what you make for a picnic,” she says, which may have been true once.)

All I remember is standing on a big mossy rock and then slipping into the cold river.

“You fell into the current and I thought, there goes my first son,” my mom says when I ask her if I was actually in any danger. This seems awfully breezy, but my mother was younger then than I am now. John had died long before. There was no real reason to be superstitious, no reason to think that there might be an extra element of danger for the males of the family.

The Doctor likes to go to the Friday fish fry at the Everett Yacht Club. Chrissy has put on a fresh dress and brushed her hair, excited for the dinner out. The whole family is going even though Bob says he's broken his foot. The foot is likely just sprained and a trip to the emergency room will ruin everybody's evening, says the Doctor. Chrissy agrees.

Bob limps. His foot has been wrapped up and he uses crutches retrieved from the basement. Ann has brought a book, which Chrissy disapproves of. Colorful signal pennants swoop down from the ceiling in festive rows. The picture windows look out at the mouth of the Snohomish River, over Port Gardner Bay and in the distance, Whidbey Island. A band plays on a stage.

“Can we dance, Daddy?” Chrissy asks.

He takes her to the dance floor. She feels lucky to have her father to herself.

Chrissy is sitting at the kitchen table, she has a huge zit on her face, and the doctor is holding her chin, looking down at her.

“It's a cyst,” says the Doctor.