Connie Willis - Time Out

A sure-fire cure. It was too bad liquor wasn’t allowed in dorms.

Dr. Young refused to give up on the project, even though by the end of the first week there was almost no one left to test. “We’ll work with the data we’ve got until the epidemic’s over,” he said, not at all upset. “How long does it take to get over the chicken pox?”

“Two weeks,” Dr. Lejeune said, “but Sherri says these outbreaks usually last at least a month. Why don’t we go back to the university until it’s over? We could leave the equipment here.”

“Absolutely not!” Dr. Young thundered. “It is that kind of attitude that has undermined this project from the start!” He stomped off, presumably to go to work with the data they had.

We don’t have any data, Dr. Lejeune thought, going up to the office, and my attitude is not what’s undermining this project. She wondered why he was so upset. Andrew’s leaving hadn’t upset him, Carolyn’s leaving hadn’t upset him, not even the chicken pox had upset him. But the suggestion of leaving here had turned the top of his bald head bright pink.

Sherri was dabbing calamine lotion on a fourth-grader. “I finally found the tests,” she said. She handed them to Dr. Lejeune. “Sorry it took so long, but I had six kids go home this morning, three of them to Carolyn Hendricks’s house.”

Dr. Lejeune looked at the tests. The one on the top was the Idelman-Ponoffo that they’d been giving the kids, and under it were an assortment of psychological tests.

“And as if that isn’t bad enough, Old Paperwork decides he wants me to alphabetize the field-trip release slips.”

The last test was something called the Rick. Dr. Lejeune didn’t recognize it. She asked Sherri if she could use Mr. Paprocki’s office and place a call to the psych department at the university.

“It tests logical thinking, responsibility, and devotion to duty,” the graduate assistant said.

“How about fidelity?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, Dr. Young over in the physics department just used it in a project of his. He wanted to test the likelihood of affairs among forty-year-olds.”

“Say someone scored a six hundred ninety-two on the Rick, what would their chances of having an extramarital affair be?”

“Six hundred ninety-two?” the graduate assistant said. “Nonexistent. Seven hundred’s a perfect score.”

Perfect, Dr. Lejeune thought. “You wouldn’t happen to have Dr. Andrew Simons’s score on file, would you?”

“I know Dr. Young did a Rick on him, but I’m not sure where it—”

“Never mind,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already know what he got.”

Carolyn checked Wendy’s stomach every morning for two weeks, but she didn’t show any signs of getting the chicken pox, even though at one point Carolyn had five patients on Wendy’s bed, her and Don’s bed, and the family-room couch. “I can’t get sick,” Wendy told her, yanking her T-shirt down after Carolyn had checked her stomach. “We’ve got a game this afternoon. I have to start. Sarah Perkins got sick yesterday. Coach Nicotero had to call a time out and everything.”

That’s what I need, Carolyn thought, driving her to practice. A time out. Only there aren’t any in this game.

“I’ve narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts,” Liz said when Carolyn got back. She was lying on the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her legs and reading college catalogs. “How important do you think VCRs in the dorms are, Mom?”

The phone rang. “I am so sorry to do this to you,” Sherri said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. It’s Shannon Williams. I called her mother at the bank. Do you think I should have done that?”

“Was she there?”

“I don’t know,” Sherri said, lowering her voice. “He answered the phone and he said she wasn’t there, but he sounded really angry and I think she was. So can you come pick her up?”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said.

She settled Erin in Wendy’s bed with her popsicle and some of Wendy’s comics. “I’ve got to go get Shannon Williams,” she told Liz, who had given up on the catalog and was watching All My Children .

“Is her mother in real estate, too?”

“No,” Carolyn said. Her mother is in deep trouble if her husband finds out. And how did that happen? I know how it happened, Carolyn thought. She knew exactly where he was, and she wasn’t thinking about her husband or her kids because right then they didn’t exist. Talk about time displacement. It was as if that moment, as she stood there in the dark, knowing all she had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her, was out of time altogether.

Only it wasn’t. Shannon Williams’s mother was just kidding herself that it was. It would be wonderful if people could step out of time as Dr. Young seemed to think they could, go back to when they were in college and unencumbered with families and responsibilities, but they couldn’t. And standing there in the dark, Shannon’s mother should have been thinking about how much this was going to hurt her husband. She should have been thinking about who was going to take Shannon to volleyball practice and the orthodontist after the divorce was final.

The phone rang. It was Don. “How are things going?” he asked.

“Great,” she said. “Erin Peterson is on the couch, I am on my way to pick up Shannon Williams, we are all out of Popsicles and calamine lotion, and you have just called to tell me you’re going to be late again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to do this to you when you’ve got all those kids to take care of, but somebody erased all the floor ex music, and we’ve got a big invitational tomorrow. Luckily, Linda’s got a dual tape deck at her apartment, so we’re going over there. I’ll get home as soon as I can. And listen, you take it easy. You sound terrible.”

“Thank you,” Carolyn said coldly. She opened the refrigerator. They were all out of pop, too.

“That’s what I mean. You’re so edgy. Linda thinks you’re doing way too much with all these poxy kids. She says a woman your age has to be careful not to overdo.”

“Or my arthritis might kick up again?” she said. She hung up, called the bank, and asked for the head loan officer.

“You tell Shannon Williams’s mother that I don’t care if she’s there or not, but she has a sick child and she’d better come pick her up,” she said, and hung up.

The phone rang. “I have bad news,” Sherri said.

“I don’t care who it is,” Carolyn said. “Their mother has got to come arid get them.”

“It’s Wendy,” Sherri said.

By the end of three weeks, a few scabby children had started to trickle back, but Dr. Young showed no interest in screening them.

“If we’re not going to use the music room, why don’t we at least move some of that equipment out so the music teacher can get back in?” Dr. Lejeune suggested.

“You are not moving anything anywhere,” Dr. Young shouted, his bald head turning fuchsia. “It is that kind of attitude—”

“I know, I know,” Dr. Lejeune said, but she went down to the music room anyway. She could at least shift things around so the music teacher could get to the piano.

She dismantled the video camera and stuck it in the music cupboard. At the back between two xylophones was a flashlight. That would come in handy if the lights went out, Dr. Lejeune thought. She put it in her pocket and sidled over to the piano to get the temporal oscillator. The gray box that didn’t plug into anything was still on top of the piano, but the two smaller flat ones weren’t.

She went upstairs to the office and called Carolyn. “Did Dr. Young send anything home with you?” she asked.