by Alice Adams
Punchy with fear, Molly repressed her impulse to run out of there, to find the nearest acupuncture clinic, or maybe just a friendly drugstore, with some over-the-counter, proven remedies, and a kindly druggist.
He looked up her nose and down her throat and into her ears, with his small mirrors and long sharp steel instruments. For about three minutes.
“Don’t see a thing,” he finished. “We may have to go in there and look.”
“Go in there?”
“Surgically. No big deal. I do it every day.”
“But—”
“Well, that’s my recommendation. Of course you can get a second opinion.”
“Of course I will.”
The nurse glared as Molly left. “Good-bye, Mrs. Steffins.”
Dave Jacobs had taken to calling Molly every day, just to see how she was, he said. Thus, from the beginning, his role as potential lover (Molly could not call anyone over fifty a boyfriend) and as doctor were confused. Since she was not feeling well she welcomed all that attention, and also she had to admit to the rise of other feelings about him. To put it most simply, he turned her on. She observed with a horny pleasure the very good shape of his body: tall and lean, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped.
One day he called and asked if she wanted to take a walk; he had a free couple of hours, it would do her good, he said. They walked from Molly’s house up to Pacific Heights, and back. At every corner, in a protective (or dominating?) way, he took her arm, which led to their holding hands for the last few blocks of the walk. Molly recognized in herself the small rush of specific heat, which she had not felt for some time. Not since Paul. Dave had to get back to his office then, and she wished that he could have stayed. That they could at least have kissed.
Once inside her house, though, alone, she castigated herself. Did she really want to involve herself with a man whom she did not much like, with whom even the most minor conversations included arguments? They had argued over everything from vitamin C to the Grand Canyon, where Molly had never been and did not much want to go.
“You’re crazy!” Dave told her.
“What a horrible person!” she told Dave on the phone, the night of her visit to Dr. Beckle. “Going out of his way to scare me. And keeping me waiting all that time with no apology, ever. I really hated him and so did his nurse. I think it’s an awful office. I think you can tell a lot about doctors from the tone of their offices, how their nurses are.”
“Good Lord, Molly, I never heard anything so silly. How their girls feel is so totally irrelevant—”
“Girls! Can’t you even call them nurses? Jesus, Dave. Anyway, why do they try to scare you? Does it have to do with malpractice suits? I just feel so much worse after seeing that guy, I’ll never go back to him.”
“Whether or not you like the doctor has nothing to do with anything. He probably kept you waiting because he was in surgery.”
“He could have said that, I’m not really unreasonable. If he’d said he was sorry it would have been okay. Or if he was in surgery the nurse didn’t have to put me in that room for all that time.”
“Well, I always apologize to patients when I’m late. But its not all that important. You make such a point over manners. That Southern stuff. The point is his competence as a physician.”
“I can’t stand short men.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
Her conversation with Dr. Macklin, in his office, was considerably less heated. More rational and coherent.
He said, “I’m sorry you had such a bad time. I probably shouldn’t have sent you there. He does overbook and I’ve heard from other patients who didn’t like him, including my wife. She couldn’t stand him. The problem was, Stinger was out of town, and he’s where I wanted you to go. And I do think whether or not you like a doctor is relevant. After all, communication is important, and if you hate a guy you can’t exactly talk to him easily.”
“Next time I think you should listen to your wife.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
Molly had the occasional fleeting thought that Dr. Macklin was, if anything, too pleasant. How would he handle some hard, unpleasant situation? She wondered, but at the same time she told herself that he was highly intelligent. That was why she liked him, wasn’t it?
• • •
Dr. Stinger, to whom she went next, was also short.
Molly asked Dave, “Does something about ENT attract short men?”
“Christ, only you would generalize from two examples.”
He probably had a point, which of course Molly did not admit. (Dave always brought out her most childishly defiant qualities, which cannot have been entirely his fault.)
Dr. Mark Stinger, then, was short but dark and handsome, and while Molly did not agree with the received opinion holding that handsome men are generally bad (she rather preferred that they be handsome), still she did not like him much, and at the time she was not at all sure why. He was polite (God knows more polite than Dr. Beckle had been), and he seemed intelligent—what more did she want?
Dr. Stinger prescribed some antibiotics, which he assured her would work. (Was that it, his assurance, just short of arrogance?)
And they did not work. Molly felt worse and worse, more heavy in her head, and in her veins. The smallest tasks, like making her lunch, seemed difficult, and reading was almost impossible. She could not believe that she could hardly read; always, she read enormously.
“Call Stinger and tell him how you feel,” said Dave. “You patients don’t tell your doctors enough, and then you blame us.”
Molly did call Stinger, and she told the nurse how terrible she felt; she would call her back, the nurse said (she, not the doctor). She did call back, with another antibiotic prescription.
“I don’t like doctors whom you can’t even get to talk to,” Molly told Dave.
He hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s not the way I do things, I always get back to patients eventually. But maybe he has it worked out this way.” A meaningless defense, Molly felt.
• • •
Dave asked her out to dinner. “No free concert tonight,” he told her, with a laugh. “Worse luck. We’ll probably even have to pay for dinner.”
On the way to the restaurant he made several small jokes about their possibly going dutch, which he understood was what people did these days. But when Molly said, “Sure, fine with me” (in fact she would have liked it much better), he bridled, as though scandalized, and he told her, “I guess you don’t know when I’m kidding.”
Which was true enough, both at the time and later on.
At dinner they talked again about how much they missed, respectively, Paul and Martha. And they argued. That was the first occasion of the Grand Canyon argument.
“Look,” Molly told him, “I’m almost forty. Old enough to have gone there by now if I’d wanted to.”
“And too young to be so rigid. It’s the most glorious experience of nature in this country.”
“I like Maine. New England. Lakes, the Atlantic coast.”
“But you won’t even try?”
“I’d hate it. I hate looking down from heights. Or even up.”
They drank martinis, and had a bottle of Beaujolais with their steak, that restaurant’s specialty. Molly hadn’t had steak for several years, and she had to admit that it was good.
They went back to her house and then, as they both must have known that they would, they went to bed.
Sex with Dave was pretty much just that, sex. At first Molly liked it, and responded happily to something she had not done for so long, and had missed. But after the first few slakings of thirst, she began to feel drowned.
Many women complain, with reason, of too little sex in their lives, as Molly had privately done about Henry. With Henry more and more often it was she who initiated sex, as some therapists say you should, and more and more often he turned her down, which made her feel terrible. Ugly and unloved—rejected.
But Dave
overdid it, so that Molly began to feel that he was engaged in some contest with himself. She was sure that he was counting: four times, not bad for a guy almost sixty. Try for five? But that was several too many times for Molly; she could not, was not thirsty anymore.
Love with Paul was not exactly perfect, whatever perfect love would be, but for quite a while it was perfect enough for Molly. Until (another sign that she should have read) it slacked off to almost never. But in the good days, early on, she surely never thought of numbers, nor of being drowned.
Invaded is actually what she felt with Dave. Assaulted. He almost never let her peacefully sleep; he kept waking her, prodding her, turning her over. And while he talked a lot about love, how much he loved her, how wonderful to find love twice in his lifetime, to Molly it did not feel like love but rather a form of aggression. She could have been anyone at all, Molly thought, and she often wondered, Why me?
She complained, “You’ve got to let me sleep. This is crazy. You don’t listen. I need more sleep, and I need to be sort of alone to sleep.”
“But you’re so terribly attractive to me. Aren’t you glad?”
Actually she was not glad, but she did not feel that she could tell him that, and so she only repeated, “I’ve got to get more sleep. I’ll never get well with no sleep.”
“Love is the greatest cure,” he told her, sententiously. “Haven’t you heard that? It’s what your friend Dr. Freud always said.” Like many so-called “real” doctors, Dave disliked and distrusted any form of psychotherapy; he was full of anecdotes (patients of his who had had terrible experiences with shrinks, and no help) and of very old bad jokes.
However, playing up her illness was effective, Molly found. And besides, what she said was true: sleep deprivation made her feel a great deal worse.
• • •
Dave and Martha, his wife, had made love every night of their marriage, Dave told Molly. Taken literally, that statement struck her as impossible, or most unlikely. The certain truth, though, was that Martha was a woman who could not say no, and Molly tried to imagine that poor masochistic lady, who Dave had assured her was not a feminist. (“I’ll bet not,” Molly had said.)
“I don’t remember her too well,” Felicia said. “I just met her once, at that terribly dark-brown house in the woods where they lived. It was a big party, and Dave was all over the place being host. She was more like the maid, serving things. She had the most boring perfect hair and perfect flowered silk dress, I do remember that. A real doctor’s wife, I thought. A fifties throwback. Of course that was early on with Sandy, and I was feeling a little hostile to wives, but still. That poor woman.”
“Wasn’t Donna Reed’s husband a doctor? Remember ‘The Donna Reed Show’?”
“I think so. The paradigmatic doctor’s wife, anyway.”
“Poor Martha. Is Sandy’s wife like that, do you think—poor Connie?”
After the tiniest pause, two beats, Felicia said, “Actually I don’t think so. I’ve heard lately that she’s doing really well. She went to AA, stopped drinking. And she’s fighting City Hall about the homeless.” Another pause. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“Neither do I.”
They laughed. Then Molly said, “I have a new theory about men like Dave who hate cats. They’re bullies, you know? And you can’t possibly bully a cat, that’s why they hate them.”
Molly called Dr. Stinger to say that these new antibiotics did not work either. She felt worse. Dr. Stinger was out of town, his nurse informed her. Perhaps Molly would like to see some of his residents? Molly thought that she would. Any doctor would—or might—help, she thought. Any doctor but Dave. She realized that in a very irrational way she was confusing her illness with Dave: I’m allergic to Dave, is what she more or less thought, as she made more and more excuses not to see him.
The two residents were both Chinese, both small. One plump, one thin, and both very courteous, shy, and thorough. They examined Molly gravely, with a small air of apology for invading her head in that way. They smiled a lot in her direction—a form of reassurance, she thought.
But then, at the end, with a tiny frown the thin one told her, “We found some small polyps. High up.”
“Well, that would explain quite a lot, wouldn’t it?”
Evasively, their looks consulted each other. “We have to talk to Dr. Stinger.”
Dr. Stinger’s nurse told her that Dr. Stinger would like her to have an MRI, whatever that was.
Molly told Dave, “I really don’t like all this communicating through his nurse. He could call me. Dr. Macklin does. I’m not going to keep him on the phone.”
“His girl is good at communicating with patients, I’m sure. She’s trained for that.”
“Why do you insist on calling her a girl if she’s so highly trained? She’s a nurse. I met her, and she’s a very smart woman.”
Carping at Dave had become a way of complaining about her whole situation, for Molly. Otherwise she was really too enfeebled to protest. Her sense was that Dr. Stinger thought her a neurotic, hypochondriac woman—and she was not entirely sure that he was wrong.
“Everyone calls them girls,” Dave snarled.
“Not anymore. Besides, why didn’t Stinger find the polyps?” Molly had suddenly thought of that, another indictment. But it was a reasonable question, to which Dave had no answer.
The MRI.
Molly had to lie in a long white tube, with a lid fitted over her head and her legs strapped down. The nurse, Dr. Stinger’s “girl,” had asked as she made the schedule if Molly was claustrophobic, and Molly had said no, not especially, but lying there, locked in place, she thought that she really was claustrophobic, very. And what would she do if she was: would she kick and scream her way out of there?
Later, when various kind friends remarked that she had been such a good sport about everything, even that she had been “brave,” Molly thought that really she had not had much choice—as she had no choice in the MRI white tube. She just had to lie there. Enduring.
Almost the worst of it was the noise. The young doctor who put her in the tube had warned: “There’ll be a sort of pounding in your ears. If you’re really uncomfortable with it let me know.” He did not say how she would let him know. But before each bout of noise his disembodied voice would announce, “This first will take about five minutes … this will take seven … fifteen minutes.”
All those long sequences involved a pounding near Molly’s ears, as though someone were tearing through the next room with a jackhammer, Molly’s most hated noise; to her it sounded like a giant’s dentist drill. Sometimes in the intervals there was music, once a Haydn “Sinfonia Concertante” that she especially liked, so graceful, so literally full of grace. Superstitiously then, she thought, Oh good, a good sign, this will be okay.
So much for superstition.
Until that MRI, Molly had no idea how long seven or eight or fifteen minutes could be. Just lying there, with that terrible noise in her ears. Later, she had no idea what she had thought about during those endless minutes, nor for that matter how she had managed to get through it without some childish display.
At last the doctor, a dour and sallow young man, released her, and Molly sat up. “I can go now?” she asked, not believing it possible that she could.
And—right: she could not. He said, “I just have to look at these pictures a little.”
Scowling hard, he held a series of what looked like X-rays up against a light—all images of shadows, all dark and terrible.
But the sheer relief of being out of that tube had made Molly manic. She was mildly hysterical. “I suppose you’re finding lots of brain tumors.” That was her notion of a joke, at that moment.
“We’re not allowed to give diagnoses.” He frowned more deeply. “Well, I guess you can go now.”
SIX
As a small child, near the banks of the James River, in Richmond, what Molly liked best was the game of doctor—and “like” is not the correct
word; this was an obsession, a major passion. She played that quite unregulated game with various other children, often new ones, but later she was unable to remember how the activity was ever proposed. Was it always she who made the suggestion? Molly was a shy, on the whole very inhibited child, and so she found it unlikely that she should have been so bold. She remembered her intense eagerness for the game, but maybe all the children involved felt the same. They were like a bunch of addicts among whom a lot of verbal communication was unnecessary.
And calling what they did a game is misleading: the doctors that those children played at did nothing but examine, and that not very thoroughly. They only looked at each other, they showed themselves off. No mutual touching, and God knows nothing more advanced like “foreign objects.”
Molly played doctor with many children, then, but for several years her best and most interested companion in that pursuit was a handsome, blond, and green-eyed little boy named Craig Stuart. His parents were friends and drinking companions of Molly’s parents, and the Stuarts lived in a large, white, and somewhat forbidding house on a bluff above the river, with an ancient mysteriously laid out garden, full of inexplicable and wonderfully secret nooks and glades. And so that is where Molly and Craig exhibited their small pale-pink genitals to each other, among the sheltering, giant pre-Civil War boxwood, the magnolias and crepe myrtle. Their parents were pleased that they were friends, and that they liked to play together so often, and so contentedly.
Craig’s was the first penis that Molly ever saw, and she thought it was marvelous. Tiny and a pretty peachy-pink, it sometimes stood straight up. Craig could make it do this just by thinking about it, he said. So interesting, Molly thought. A sort of magic.
When she told Felicia about playing doctor, after they had become friends and were talking about what they were like as children, Felicia said that Molly was the only person she knew with a genuine case of penis envy, but Molly said that was not true. She didn’t envy Craig’s penis, she only admired and wondered at it. It was much more interesting to look at than a girl’s tiny fold, she thought.