by Alice Adams
The nurse, a large and handsome middle-aged black woman, was sympathetic. “The noise, you’re right, it’s pretty terrible. I don’t know how anyone can sleep. All this trundling up and down corridors.”
“You must be glad when you go home.”
“Oh really, I really am.” The nurse smiled, and then spoke in a serious way. “But you need to get some sleep, I don’t think you’ll be going home for a week or so. So, I’m going to give you a real knockout drop,” and she handed Molly a small brown pill. “You take this early, about seven-thirty or eight, and I can guarantee you’ll sleep.”
“Wonderful.”
Molly was still dubious, but she appreciated what had felt like sympathy.
And she took the pill at eight, convinced that it would not work.
It did. Almost right away her mind began to float outward, as though she was lying back against pillows, so comfortably, in an unmoored boat on a lake in Maine. Sometimes she opened her eyes to sky, to shifting clouds; at other times she looked back to observe the shoreline, the sandy beach, big gray rocks, and birches, bent down from the bank, that rose up from the sand steeply to some woods of pine and hemlock, and more birches.
Or she was not in a boat at all but right there, in her hospital room, and she wondered sleepily, now almost awake, Where is Felicia? Why hasn’t she come to see me? But then she floated out again, in Maine, on the lake.
A rap on the door brought her back, but only partially. Vaguely she thought of the beautiful dark and mysterious person, the orderly, and she smiled, anticipating him. Would he possibly kiss her good night?
The door pushed open, and Molly knew then that she was still asleep—or perhaps she had died in her sleep.
It was Paul who kissed her, passionately.
TWELVE
“It was Matthew, of course. But I never quite woke up, and I thought I was kissing Paul. He must have been startled.”
Home at last, Molly lay in her own wide sunny bed. At the moment, she was being visited by Felicia, who had brought a great bunch of roses, the last from her garden. “How’d he get in?” she asked Molly, speaking of Matthew, whom she had never met; Paul was enough, she thought. She said, “It must have been late.”
“Easy.” Molly laughed. “He said he was a doctor. But it’s more of a Paul kind of caper, actually. Matthew’s always been very law-abiding.”
“Maybe now he’s inherited Paul’s character. Don’t twins sometimes do that, shift back and forth?”
“That’s what their mother said, but then when Matthew called the next morning he was more like himself. Pretty stiff. But very proud of his out-of-character exploit. He said all you need to prove you’re a doctor is an expensive suit and a pushy manner.”
“Sounds right. Sandy pays two thousand for London suits—can you believe it? Is Matthew living here now?”
“Oh no. Or I don’t really know where he’s living. I seem not to be getting things straight.”
“Me neither,” Felicia told her. And then she said, “I’m really getting scared about Sandy. I keep seeing him, or else I’m hallucinating.”
“Maybe he’s stalking you.”
“I suppose, but could he be, really? A famous doctor and all that?”
“O.J. was famous.”
“If Sandy is stalking, you’d think he’d be better at it. I mean, do it so I wouldn’t see him.”
“But isn’t part of the point to scare the woman?—let her know you’re stalking?”
“Of course. You’re right,” Felicia conceded. “He’s probably terrific at stalking. In control, as usual.” She added, “I’m going to start looking for another job. I think that would help.” And then she said, “I could swear I heard him in my garden last night. I think he was, uh, peeing. Again.”
“Why do you think it was Sandy? He pees in some special way?”
“I thought I got a glimpse of his hair in the streetlight.”
“What an odd thing to do, though. To pee in your garden.”
“He has a problem with his prostate. And it would be a way of saying he’s not afraid. And claiming territory, like a dog.”
Molly smiled; she felt grateful to Felicia for making this a funny story as well as a scary one. Somewhere in the story, though, there were threads that she was too tired to follow. And some clue that she had forgotten. In fact, for some weeks she did not remember that Sandy had come to see her in the hospital.
Molly had been talked into leaving the hospital before she wanted to. Before she felt that she was ready to go. “Forced out,” is how she thought of it, but that was possibly too strong—and unfair to Dr. Bill Donovan, who had come to her one morning, with his proud and happy entourage of residents, and announced, “Well, young lady, you’ll be ready to go home tomorrow. Just can’t keep you around anymore, as much as I’d like to. You’ve done so well.”
“But I’m not—I really don’t think—” Molly weakly attempted to argue. What she meant was that she could not yet take care of herself, as she was used to doing. Even if she hired someone to come in and cook and do errands, she could not quite tell Dave to go away, please to leave her.
As Dave full well knew. “You’ve got to listen to Bill, and do what he says. He’s had years of experience with this.”
“But he’s the one who said I could go swimming next week.”
Dave paused, but only for a moment. “You may have misunderstood him. He probably meant next month, whatever he said.”
“But I didn’t misunderstand—he said next week.” Too tired to argue, though, Molly let it go. In fact, once she got home, she was too tired to do anything except to lie back against the pillows of her bed, to watch the birds that plummeted from the eaves of her house to the tops of trees, clustering there in ceremonious droves, big black-feathered birds with their tiny curious heads and lively beaks. Raising her eyes to the statelier, grander view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the magnificent, lordly hills of Marin County, would have taken too much of an effort. She was not strong enough for such grandeur, not now.
Dave was taking care of her.
“I could just have Lupe come more often,” she had told him wistfully, her first day home.
“Lupe’s hopeless, you know that. You just like her, some female-sympathy thing. I told her to take a little time off, and in the meantime Pat said she could give you some hours. She’ll get everything done in no time.”
All true. Lupe, whom Felicia had come upon in the shelter (she had shifted from Open Hand) and who needed work, was indeed quite hopeless at cleaning, and she tended to break almost any machine. She dusted around things and was too small to reach most shelves. But she was also sweet and eager to please, and her great dark-brown eyes were full of precocious sorrow. (God knows what the generals in Guatemala had done to her family.) Whereas Pat, a large grandmotherly type from Texas, was a perfectly functioning, perfectly quiet machine herself, whose hard white expressionless face was terrifying to Molly.
“But I’d have trouble telling Pat what to do,” Molly told Dave. “Or asking for anything.”
“That’s your problem, not hers. Just force yourself. She’ll do anything you say.” He added, “Besides, you won’t see her much. We’ll be down at Mount Watson getting your radiation.” He grinned very happily.
The half-shaven front of Molly’s head was still quite stubbly; she supposed it was growing back, but it seemed to grow far more slowly than even grass grew, or a man’s scratchy beard. She tried adjusting scarves, but the effect was all wrong: she looked exactly like what she felt herself to be, a woman with something to hide. A woman ashamed.
“I guess I’m not good with scarves,” she told Felicia, on the phone. “You know—some are, some aren’t.”
“I have an idea. I’ll be right over,” Felicia told her.
Felicia brought over two nice big wool berets, one bright red, the other black.
In which Molly felt—not exactly herself, but someone very stylish, and quite disguised.
&n
bsp; At Mt. Watson, in all those terrible broad bright high-tech corridors, many people in wheelchairs or just walking around wore some sort of covering on their heads. Seeing no other berets, Molly tried to pretend—to believe—that she had worn hers on purpose, so to speak. She had chosen this bright-red beret, so jauntily positioned, and she was not in a wheelchair or a hospital gown. She was standing up straight, and walking as fast as she could.
In the waiting room (she seemed to spend most of that day in various waiting rooms, or just waiting somewhere), she observed an elderly man in a wheelchair. A patrician head with fine thin hair, a broad lined brow, and wide pale eyes. But dressed in the awful greenish hospital garb, and some terrible slippers. And there he was, in his wheelchair. Those old eyes avoided Molly’s eyes as though from shame at his situation, certainly not of his choosing. His reduction—to this.
In all the time that she spent, hours and hours in those corridors, Molly saw that same look again and again, a look of embarrassment, of wondering, What terrible thing have I done to be brought so low, to this place of punishment and pain?
In another waiting room, this time for X-ray, there were two young men, both husky-looking construction workers, who seemed to have become friends in this place, waiting together. One with a transplanted heart, the other for a bone marrow transplant. The bone marrow man had a pretty wife and a lively very small daughter along, and he picked up the little girl and held her high as she squealed with pleasure.
Dave had listened intently to all this exchange, and explained it, more or less, to Molly—but undoubtedly getting the illnesses straight. “You see?” he said. “Things aren’t necessarily so bad for you.”
“I know that. But I still don’t see why everyone has to wait so long. Everywhere.”
“Everyone is busy.”
“Yes, but the patients are sick.”
“Oh, sick,” he muttered, as though “sick” were nothing to “busy.” And Molly would not even view herself as sick, and so was left with her guilt, guilt for not being the exuberant good sport that the men were, with far more life-threatening, terrifying illnesses.
The longest wait, the longest process, was about the making of a mask.
“A mask?” she asked Dave.
“For radiation. You’ll put it on every time you come down so they can aim right, hit precisely the right spot. So you won’t lose all your teeth or go blind.” He chuckled.
“Dave, can you possibly think that’s funny?”
“You might as well inject a little humor into it all, don’t you think?” He chuckled again; for him, this was a wonderfully satisfying day, his total happiness was impenetrable.
The making of the mask involved breathing through straws—and was suffocating. This is insane for a person with sinus-breathing problems, was Molly’s thought. Insane, she nearly screamed. Very nearly.
“What about side effects?” Feeling remarkably controlled, at the near-end of that long hospital waiting day, Molly asked this question of Dr. Donovan and Dr. Duveneck, the chief radiologist, and a bevy of lesser medical men, whose names she either confused or quite possibly was not told.
“Probably no effects whatsoever,” said Bill Donovan.
“Sort of like coming down with the flu,” said Dr. Duveneck.
Though they had spoken almost in unison, both those sentences came through quite clearly to Molly, firm and contradictory.
But the two doctors smiled at each other as though they had perfectly agreed.
“Almost nothing. Negligible,” said Duveneck.
“The mildest flu.” Donovan smiled.
And the younger doctors smiled too, agreeing with everything.
“But don’t they know what they’re doing?” Molly fumed. “How can they do anything so drastic as radiation to a person’s head if they don’t know what the effects will be?”
“They do know the effects. Very precisely,” Dave assured her. “It’s side effects you wanted to know about.” “But that’s important too. I mean, does your hair fall out, do you throw up a lot?”
“I think you’re confusing chemo and radiation.”
“Maybe. But I still would think they’d know more. There’s a big difference between ‘nothing at all’ and flu.”
Dave conceded. “That’s true. But it may vary a lot among patients.”
“And doctors have never had it themselves, right? Christ, don’t they ever ask patients how they feel, and listen to what they say?”
“You are the most irrational girl—woman! Lord! laypeople—”
“You’re the one who said I’d go blind or lose my teeth if they got it wrong!”
“They’re not going to get it wrong. You’re getting the best possible, state-of-the-art medical care. I’ve seen to that. You don’t appreciate—”
Dave never finished that sentence, at that time or later, ever; he never actually said, You don’t appreciate me. But that was a continual subtext, and of course he was right; Molly did not appreciate him, nor what he had done for her. From whatever motives—and whose are ever pure? He had gone and he continued to go to enormous trouble for her. He had taken her to the surgeon who had managed to “get it all,” very likely had saved her life. Could another surgeon have done the same? This of course was something that Molly would never know. And she tended to focus on the impurity of Dave’s motives rather than the results of what he had actually done. She concentrated on his needs to control her, and to be with her, as well as his busy joy in a medical setting—and she thought much less of the fact that she was okay. She was well, or she would be well, once she got over the effects of radiation—whatever those effects were to be.
She would not even sleep with him. “You keep me awake,” she accused. “And I don’t feel great yet—I really need to sleep.” She added, “I need all my strength for this fucking radiation.”
“Your language!” He scowled, but could not deny the logic of what she said, and so he slept on the studio couch in her study-guest room.
Molly dreamed of Paul, in this strange post-op, pre-radiation period, as she had not done since his death, when she used to wish that even in a dream she could see him again. But these were not good dreams; the Paul in these dreams was cruelly reckless, unkind, and aloof—a man whom, although she recognized him as Paul (he could be like that), she had not remembered until he showed up in her dreams.
She thought of the night when he had come to her in the hospital, and she had kissed him, so passionately, but then he turned out to be not Paul at all; he was Matthew, the boring twin.
THIRTEEN
“Really, though, why did we ever marry doctors—don’t you wonder?” Jane Stinger, wife of Dr. Mark, asked this not rhetorical question of Connie (Knowles) Sanderson, wife of Raleigh, over lunch at a health food restaurant out on Clement Street, in San Francisco. Both recovering alcoholics, the two women first met in a Sausalito AA meeting. The fact that both were married to doctors seemed one more linking coincidence. Also, it turned out that the same reasoning had led them both to this Sausalito meeting, rather than one in San Francisco: as prominent doctors’ wives—or, rather, wives of prominent doctors—they did not want to run into people they knew. Who knew them. They had not met each other before, although they might have done so at doctors’ cocktail parties, or some volunteer wives’ group. But both Connie and Jane had more or less dropped themselves out of all that. Too, since Jane and Mark were some fifteen or so years younger than the Sandersons, their circles did not quite coincide. Mark’s being Jewish would also have made a difference, still, in those doctor groups.
But in AA circles the two women had become strong friends; as they themselves would have said, they were supportive and caring of and for each other. And, having begun with the intense and intimate revelations that were encouraged, the “sharing” at meetings, they had continued in that vein, on that level. Marriages, sexuality, children, drugs, politics, money—all that had at one time or another been viewed, and reviewed. And often laughed a
t; maybe the best of all was that each woman found the other reliably amusing. The very Bostonian Connie and Irish (from Queens) Jane McBride Stinger.
Certainly they could not have looked less alike, but perhaps that very dissimilarity formed another bond, as did the fact that each had basically disliked her own looks, her “type.” Jane was small and dark, pretty and voluptuous. Years back, on Mark’s insistence, she had had her nose “done.” She now felt that it had been overdone; it was very small and turned up, piquant. “My mother says I look like a typical mick—her phrase—and for once she’s right. But Mark said early on that since noses were right up there, up front, and his specialty, he couldn’t be married to one like mine. Big joke. He also said why did he have to marry a mick with a big Jewish nose? Well, that’s his problem. And now with more self-esteem I’d like my old nose back! It was more me. Well, of course it was.”
Connie was tall and straight and now, without booze, almost thin again. Her hair was vague, flimsy. Gray-blond. Her eyes large and dark gray-blue. Dry-skinned, tending to lines, but her skin too had improved from no drinks. Her nose (unfixed, though Raleigh too had made that suggestion) was long and finely modeled, somewhat overshadowing her small but sexy, plumpish mouth.
Although this was familiar ground, Why doctors? she answered Jane’s question anyway, more or less. “For one thing it was something we did, back then,” she said. “Marrying interns from Mass. General.” By “we” she meant Boston girls who came out the same year she did, or thereabouts. Interns had been very popular at those forties and fifties deb parties, the first lavish “real” big parties since the war. And though some of those interns came from what the girls’ mothers would have termed “no background,” to the younger women they seemed genuinely more exciting and more adult than the Boston-Milton-Harvard boys they already knew. And medicine seemed a much more interesting direction than banking or manufacturing or Boston real estate. Just as, to the doctors from no background, the debs with their family houses on Chestnut Street or Brattle, in Cambridge, their summer places in Beverly or Ipswich—those girls, with their long blond hair and good white teeth and sailing tans looked both glamorous (though many were very flat-chested, but you can’t have everything, reasoned the doctors) and substantial. Perfect raw material for doctors’ wives, for mothers of doctors’ children (and a bunch of children might help in the breast department, they thought).