The Doctor's Wife (9 page)

“What can you do about it?”

“I'll lance it.” The Doctor already has his bag open.

“No,” Chrissy shrieks.

“Do you want to get rid of it or not?”

“Yes, but I don't want—”

The doctor jabs her face. “Look at that pus roll out!” he says as he pulls the lancet from the cyst.

Chrissy feels woozy.

“Now it'll get better,” he says.

“Hold on to the rope, Mom! Keep your legs together.”

Her rotten children rev the engine of the motorboat. She's dragged halfway across the lake before she finally lets go. That's enough of that and nobody can say she didn't try, she thinks as she coughs up a couple hundred gallons of water.

The boat circles around, Bob at the wheel. Ann and Chrissy gather up the skis that have flown off her feet. They're laughing so hard they have to hold each other up.

“Let me in the boat.”

“Try once more,” they say, wheezing.

“Let me in right this instant.”

“You almost have it. Try once more.”

She puts on the skis and is again dragged through the water, again swallows half the lake. The scene repeats itself several more times. For the children, it is more hilarious each time.

In the downstairs bathroom, Ann and Chrissy apply zinc oxide to their noses. It's the afternoon and they've both finished their jobs for the day. They are listening to KJR, hoping that either Jan and Dean or the Beach Boys will come on. The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife expect their children to be gainfully employed, so Ann has spent the morning in the Doctor's lab, scrubbing test tubes crusted with blood and other bodily fluids, while Chrissy babysat.

They've both already changed into the two-pieces that show their belly buttons. The Doctor's Wife is thankfully the sort of mother who understands that fashions change. Ann's is polka dotted. Chrissy's is red and white, bought at Frederick and Nelson and chosen because the colors match the boat. They snap off the radio, grab towels from the utility porch and pour themselves glasses of iced tea. Ann takes extra cut lemon out of the refrigerator. They go down to the basement where they collect the skis and life belts and then exit out the basement door to the side yard. They need more hands. Chrissy's towel slips out from under her arm and onto the lawn, and Ann drops the lemons in the sand, but they finally make it with all of their gear to the boat.

“Squeeze the lemon here,” Chrissy says, indicating the top of her head. Both Ann and Chrissy are very blonde, but lemon intensifies the effect. Now they are ready to go. Ann turns the key. Chrissy uncoils the bow line from the cleat and then leaps into the boat as Ann steers the boat away from the dock, driving slowly until they're in the open water, where she pushes the throttle forward. It's the middle of the afternoon during the week, so there aren't many people on the lake. The sun catches the chop of the waves. A million flashes of light wink under the blue sky.

The first thing they do is pick Bob up from the marina. He fills the tank, they throw his bike in the boat, and then they drive to the middle of the lake where they turn off the motor and float.

Bob is going away to Stanford in the fall. He's not going to play football, and Ann is glad. She never liked the idea of her brother getting smacked around. He's really big, but that doesn't matter. Sometimes the littler guys go after the big one just to see if they can take him down. Ann stretches out on a towel on the floor of the boat so that the sun can go all the way into her bones. Chrissy dives over the side of the boat. She can be heard splashing in the water.

“Let's do something,” Chrissy says when she climbs back in. She's dripping over Ann, which totally ruins the good the sun has done.

“What's wrong with lying here and tanning?”

“It's boring.”

“You're boring.”

“Let's torpedo,” Bob says.

Torpedoing means that one person drives the boat as fast as it'll go and then the others dive off the side of the boat. The Doctor's Wife doesn't know about this game.

Bob volunteers to drive first. “Faster,” Chrissy yells.

Ann perches on the side of the boat and then dives. The surface slaps her face and it's a stunning sort of concussion, then water up the nose and darkness. The depths of the lake call her down. There's a story that there's a train at the bottom of the lake, an accident from the days of logging.

But back up on the surface, the water sparkles, sunny, and Chrissy is bobbing next to Ann. They climb up the ladder at the back of the boat.

“My turn to drive,” Chrissy says, grinning. There's no point in doing something fun just once.

“I was only depressed for, like, 40 years,” Petrea says to me.

“Because of John?”

“Because of John.”

The Doctor went to medical school with Tom Critchfield, a gynecologist who lives on the other side of the lake. He and Tom are still friends, and one evening at the end of a dinner party, the Doctor agrees to go waterskiing behind Tom's new boat.

The sun doesn't set until almost ten in the summer, but it's late, and as the sun dips below the trees, the sky turns orange. Smudges of gnats swarm just above the surface of the lake. Fish jump, plopping back into the dark water. A muskrat slips under the dock. The Doctor's Wife shivers, pulling her cardigan around herself. It should be time for a cigarette but she's just quit. She and the Doctor have always known smoking is dangerous, that it leads to death.

She and the others step down into the boat. The Doctor takes his shirt off and then jumps in the water, fastening the white life belt around his waist. The Doctor isn't like the kids. He can't be pulled up on one ski. He has to start on two and then drop one, so he sits in the water with the tips of the two skis poking above the surface. He gives the thumbs up signal and as the boat takes off, the Doctor's Wife feels herself pressed against the seat. She blinks her eyes against the rush of air. The Doctor rises, standing.

The Critchfield and Hagen kids cheer from the dock. Then something goes wrong. The Doctor's legs are wide apart, too wide. It's hard to make out his face. “Bring your legs closer together!” the Doctor's Wife shouts.

This doesn't work. His legs spread farther and farther and then when they can't possibly extend any more, he pitches forward into the water. Tom spins the boat around to pick up the Doctor as Vivian Critchfield coils the towrope. The Doctor's Wife doesn't know how to do that, nor does she care to.

“How are you, darling?” she asks as her husband climbs aboard the boat. She puts a towel around his shoulders.

He's pale. “I think I hurt my testicles.”

“Har har har,” Tom laughs.

This is the sort of thing Tom and the Doctor talked about at the dinner table when she and the Doctor were newlyweds in Seattle. They'd been so poor she lived in the Y and he lived at Swedish Hospital, saving until they had enough money to rent an apartment on First Hill. Every night they ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria. The Doctor and his friends talked about diarrhea, bowel movements. They talked about the gruesome things they'd soon see in the war. They talked about guts spilling out of bellies in the emergency room. The Doctor's Wife was certainly not reared that way. Her father was a professor, and neither he nor her mother would have put up with any discussion of bodily functions—not to mention malfunctions—at the dinner table.

When they get home she examines her husband. His scrotum is an angry purple.

“Do you want to put ice it?” she asks doubtfully.

“No need,” he says. He's a conservative doctor, continuing to believe that the body can usually heal itself.

During the day, Lundeen's is a private park. People pay to play on the beach and swim in the area between two big piers. When they were younger, Chrissy and Ann would walk to the end of Sandy Beach Drive and look across the creek at the people attending the annual Scott Paper company picnic and Chrissy would feel sorry for the people who had to work at the smelly pulp plant and only once a year got to come to the lake.

At night, the place turns into a roadhouse, and on weekend nights you can hear the bands playing. Once, the front seat of a car was found on the beach after a Saturday night. Lundeen's drives the Doctor's Wife crazy. All you have to do is mention it and she shakes her head, setting her jaw. This only makes Lundeen's more interesting for Chrissy.

One night that summer before Bob leaves for college, the Doctor and the Doctor's Wife are driving home from dinner when they see Bob walking unsteadily along the road, leaving Lundeen's. Chrissy overhears the aftermath of this incident. She lies in bed, listening to the yelling downstairs.

Chrissy drives the boat fast, but she isn't wild.

The sewer is finally being built, but the Doctor's Wife and Nancy Taylor haven't withdrawn from the public sphere. When they hear of a scheme to build an apartment complex on pilings out over the lake, they go to the county courthouse to lodge a formal complaint. It's not that they're against development, it's just that you can't just let it happen at random, with no thought to how it will impact the people and the land.

“You have to have your husband's permission to complain,” the clerk says.

“Pardon?” Nancy asks.

“You're not the owners of record.”

“How so?”

“You're not on the deeds.”

“Who's on the deeds?”

“Dr. Hagen and Mr. Taylor. There's only room for one person's name on the line.”

“And it just happened to be the men's names that made it on the forms?” Nancy asks, drawing herself taller. She is very angry. The Doctor's Wife is mad too, but she also feels herself getting the bad giggles, which in turn infect Nancy. Once the giggles strike dignity is no longer an option. The clerk looks on as Nancy and the Doctor's Wife cry with laughter.

“The Bergs are moving and Beau needs a home. Beau's not clipped like a show poodle, he's shaggy and friendly,” Chrissy says at dinner.

“We don't need another dog,” the Doctor's Wife says.

Chrissy forces herself to cry. “Please? Otherwise he'll have to go to the pound. He'll be murdered.”

“Now, Chrissy,” the Doctor says, and the Doctor's Wife knows how this will end.

“He's not eating,” Chrissy says a week later, lying on her stomach on the kitchen floor trying to tempt Beau with a piece of cheddar cheese. All the other dogs lived outdoors, but since Beau had previously been a housedog it was determined—not by the Doctor's Wife—that he should continue in his ways. Poodles don't shed she was assured.

Beau turns his face away from the cheese, putting his muzzle down on his paws. “I don't understand. He loves C-H-E-E-S-E,” Chrissy says. Beau is said to be so smart he understands the spelling of the word. “He's wasting away.”

“He'll eat when he gets hungry,” the Doctor says, but days pass and Beau doesn't eat. Under his shaggy coat he begins to shrink.

Three nights into the hunger strike, the Doctor slaps his thigh. Beau looks up at him, wagging his tail. The two go upstairs. When the Doctor's Wife goes to bed she discovers Beau curled on top of the covers. From then on, Beau sleeps on the bed every night and during the day, he accompanies the Doctor on house calls, riding in the passenger seat. The Doctor's Wife is not glad to have a new dog, but she slips him chicken when no one is looking.

The plan is that Chrissy will swim across the lake, and Ann will accompany her in the rowboat.

“Just don't get run over,” the Doctor's Wife says as the girls bang the screen door behind themselves.

The Doctor's Wife watches from the window in the living room. The small boat makes its way toward the cove. She takes up the binoculars that rest on the table between the couch and the loveseat. All she can see is Ann rowing. Finally, the boat turns around and there are two blond heads visible, both sisters sitting in the rowboat.

When they come back, Chrissy's skin is purple.

“You're cyanotic!”

“Oh, Mom,” Chrissy says, moving past her to get a cookie from the jar.

Ann and Chrissy are in the little sailboat. Ann is the skipper for today. The wind fills the sails and the little boat leans with speed.

“Today I had to carry an amputated arm to the incinerator,” Chrissy says.

Ann doesn't have much sympathy. Chrissy is lucky to work at the hospital emergency room, amputated limbs or no. Ann's job is on the early shift at the pea factory where she drops peas into a basin of water. If they sink they are grade A. If they float they are grade B. Grade B has more starch than Grade A. She starts at six in the morning and gets off at six p.m. Today, she's home early because something happened to the hoppers and the line was shut down.

“An arm is nothing. Try looking at peas all day,” Ann says.

“Boo hoo. Try looking at peas all day,” Chrissy repeats in a singsong voice.

Chrissy is trying to get Ann to react, but Ann's not going to do it. The wind blows briskly to the point. It's been an easy sail out from the house, but the farther they go, the harder and longer the trip back will be. In a month Ann will join Bob at Stanford. She pushes the tiller to the right to turn the boat around, forgetting to warn Chrissy. The boom swings across, smacking the top of Chrissy's head.

“You jerk!” Chrissy yells.

“It barely touched you.”

“I bet I have a concussion. I saw stars!”

It's frustrating to tack from starboard to port, again and again, creeping along. Chrissy rubs her head and shoots dirty looks at Ann. The boat is heavy in proportion to the size of the sail, so if there isn't enough wind, somebody has to row. Chrissy inserts the oars into the oarlocks as Ann takes down the sail. This is done in absolute silence except for the squeaking of the oars as the boat pokes along.