THE DOCTOR’S WIFE
THE
DOCTOR’S WIFE
LUIS JARAMILLO
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
THE DOCTOR’S WIFE
Copyright © 2012, text by Luis Jaramillo.
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books - 1334 Woodbourne Street, Westland, MI 48186.
Published 2012 by Dzanc Books
Design by Steven Seighman
Cover photo by Jessica Antola
eBooks ISBN: 978-1-938103-63-6
First edition: October 2012
This project is supported in part by an award from
the National Endowment for the Arts and MCACA.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For GMD
Contents
PART I
Expecting
The Woods
The Sewer
Rounds
Boys
Gretel
The Lake
Sun Valley
Outside
Bond Issue I
Zoology
Sandy Beach Drive
Bond Issue II
Birth
Take Your Son
Table Manners
The Sunshine Club
John
The Bone Table
Dogfight
No
The Nurse Doll
Bedtime
Easter
1960
Broken Bones
Home
School
Eggs
Study Club
Seizures
Bond Issue III
A Sense of Humor
There’s Nothing Bad That Can’t Get Worse
Sleepaway Camp
The Pacific War
PART II
Me
Skis
Memory
Outboard
Boat Mechanic
Hurry Up
Halloween
Football
The Door to the River
Broken Bones II
Remorse
Trying
Surf City
In Contrast
The Body
Lundeen’s
Civic Engagement
The Doctor and the House Dog
The Long-distance Swim
Sailing
Snow
Housekeeping
Fishing
Bob’s Side
Hawaii
The Garden
Pronouncement
In Law
Isn’t That Right
Ann
Variety Show
Toys
They’ve Gone Shopping
New Start
Old Age
The Dusslers
The Basement
Barrow, Alaska
Does Not Deserve A Response
One Way
A Birthday Party
Fixing the Dock
More Work on the Dock
The Freezer
Attention
The Summer We Cry
Religion
She Began College at Fifteen
One Story Leads to the Next
Dumb Luck
Acknowledgments
THE DOCTOR’S WIFE
PART I
Expecting
The Doctor’s Wife is pregnant with her fourth child.
The Woods
It’s after lunch, and the Doctor’s Wife has given Ann and her siblings two packets of saltine crackers each and told them to play hard until she calls them for dinner.
Ann thinks that’s fine. She doesn’t want to be inside. On stormy spring days like this, the lake roils with inky waves and becomes the Atlantic Ocean. The world is in black and white like a newsreel. It’s up to Ann and her siblings to defend the United States against the Germans. The three kids have white-blond hair, blue eyes, and their last name is Hagen. Do they care that this is a German name? No.
They prepare for the grim battle. Bob is 10, Ann is 8 and Chrissy is 6. They drag the overturned metal fishing boat into position on the sand and now the boat is a bunker. The pieces of driftwood around the fire pit become a jail for the POWs. Ace, their black Labrador retriever, keeps dropping a wet stick at Ann’s feet and wagging his tail, but he is really a military police dog. Bob props oars against the boat, shoving the paddles into the sand and pointing the handles out to sea, so that the Americans have cannons with which to hit the approaching destroyers.
But the German attack is brutal.
“Retreat!” Bob yells. Ann runs, feeling the hot, fetid breath of the enemy behind her. She runs past the house, down the driveway, across the street and into the woods, pushing through the jungle of blackberry bushes, pine saplings. She turns past the hermit’s shack, stomping on ferns, pushing aside alder shoots tangling under the canopy of Douglas firs.
Ann meets her siblings at the tree house, a ramshackle collection of boards they’ve wedged in the crotch of a giant tree. Bob calls down for the other two to hurry up and climb, but Chrissy’s been hit by a bullet. Ann, now a nurse, kneels over her sister’s sprawled body, pressing ferns into her wounds to stanch the bleeding.
“I’m better now,” Chrissy says, leaping up. The kids run from the Germans again, fleeing toward the swamp, crossing the creek on the pieces of plywood they’ve made into bridges. In the swamp, Ann picks a skunk cabbage and flings it past Chrissy’s head toward the enemy. Chrissy stops, gagging at the smell. Ann doesn’t know why Chrissy has to always behave so dramatically. It must be her youth.
“Let’s hunt for frogs,” Bob says, and the Germans are forgotten. Ann uses a stick to push aside the pussy willows. Chrissy lunges for one frog, clumsily and too loudly. It’s Bob who first catches one, cupping it in his hands. He opens his hand enough so that they can see it.
“What are we going to do with it?” Ann asks.
“Keep it?” Chrissy asks.
Bob shakes his head, placing the frog gently down onto a dry patch, where it hops off into the reeds. They wipe their hands on their pants and unwrap the saltines. Ann licks the little bits of salt off the surface of her cracker.
After they’re done with their snack, Bob dares Ann to knock on the hermit’s door. There isn’t anything definitively bad about the hermit, but what you don’t know you make up, and Ann can imagine plenty. She shakes a little as she taps the door.
The hermit answers Ann’s knock. She tries to peer past him into his house, but sees only dark and shadows. He reaches into his pocket, pulling out a handful of butterscotches, the hard kind wrapped in yellow cellophane. Ann extends her hand to receive the gift.
Then the Doctor’s Wife is calling for them, her loud voice telling them to come in to dinner. They run back home through the woods, stopping when they get to the street to divide the candy evenly. When they’re in the kitchen setting the table, Chrissy pops a butterscotch in her mouth.
“Where did you get that?” their mother asks, and Chrissy is dumb enough to tell her.
The Doctor’s Wife becomes very angry.
The Sewer
The Doctor’s Wife is dressing for a dance at the Everett Country Club. She’s made her own dress, a simple black silk thing she hopes looks acceptable. She looks in the mirror at a side angle to see if it works or not. She smoothes down the fabric over her belly.
“Can you tell?” she asks.
“Not exactly,” the Doctor says, knotting his tie.
The doorbell rings. The Doctor’s Wife slips on her left pump as she hop skips down the stairs. Hazel Adelsheim is at the door, here to take care of the kids. She’s a blowsy sort of woman, scattered. Her husband is a real bastard.
“They need to be in bed by nine at the very latest,” the Doctor’s Wife says. Hazel waves her out the door.
The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife drive through a light drizzle, over the trestle above the Snohomish River and Ebey Slough. The drawbridge, which the Doctor’s Wife has never seen drawn, looks down over logging barges underneath. The wipers sweep the glass, the lights of other cars forming weird shapes in the wet swiping. In Everett, they turn at the sign for the club, up the drive. The clubhouse is clad in dark gray siding. The whole building needs to be replaced or at least rehabbed. The Doctor likes to golf and is good at it. The Doctor’s Wife occasionally walks around the course and knocks the ball into the bushes.
Under the porte cochère, the Doctor opens the door of their Plymouth, helping her out of the car. She doesn’t need the help but she takes his hand. Inside, she shakes out her coat and hands it to the attendant, heading upstairs.
“Where did you get that dress?” Nancy Taylor asks when the Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife walk into the banquet room.
“Oh, you know,” the Doctor’s Wife says.
“Seattle? I won’t tell your hubby how many hundreds of dollars you spent,” Nancy stage whispers.
“Thousands,” the Doctor’s Wife says.
Nancy shakes her head as understanding comes. “You made it yourself, you dirty dog! Everything I try to sew turns out looking like a flour sack.” Nancy is more of a craft person than a seamstress. She likes to make Santa and Mrs. Clauses out of pine cones and that sort of thing. Nancy narrows her eyes. “But it’s not just the dress. Something’s different about you.”
“There isn’t either,” The Doctor’s Wife says, not liking to lie, but she’s not ready to tell her best friend. The older three kids were born almost exactly two years apart from each other.
“Have you lost weight? Haircut?”
“How many people do you have lined up for the meeting?” the Doctor’s Wife asks.
“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.)
Rounds
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!
Boys
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.
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