T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Margaret. Margaret McKenzie.”

“I suppose you were watching all along.”

“Well, I just happened to be in the front yard and I couldn’t help but… She’s a good girl, with the best references. And she came all the way out here on the ferry just to—”

“I’m sorry,” he said, cutting me off, and I was startled by the tone of his voice, “but I just can’t have any interference in my personal life. You people brought me here to establish a practice and that’s what I’m doing. If you find funding for a nurse, you let me know — otherwise, stay clear, do you hear me?”

Of course, I had no choice but to report this turn of events, not to mention the doctor’s rudeness, to just about everyone I could think of, my phone tied up for the rest of the day and well into the evening so that Wyatt had to wait on his supper, which wound up being leftovers spruced up with a garden salad. We hashed it over at the next meeting, but no one had a good solution beyond giving the doctor his notice and that would have left us in a vulnerable position until we could find a replacement. I took it on myself to try to contact the woman from Burkina Faso in the hope that she’d completed her requirements and received her license in the interim, but a recording told me her telephone was no longer in service and my follow-up letter came back stamped Addressee Unknown.

We were at a stalemate. The tourists and summer people thronged the doctor’s porch with their blood-stained T-shirts and improvised bandages even as we islanders took our place in line and shuffled into his ever-filthier offices to announce our ailments because we had no choice in the matter. Would you let him put a needle in you? Betsy Fike demanded over the phone one day. Even in an emergency? Or blood — would you want him drawing blood? I felt very tired that day, crushed really, and I could barely rise to his defense and point out that his syringes were disposable and the blood things too. I know, I said finally, my voice ragged and weary, I know.

Autumn came early, blowing off shore with a cold wind just after Labor Day. The summer people departed, leaves flamed and died, the geese flapped overhead and showed up in roasting pans and crockpots. The first snow fell at the end of October and I felt so low and depressed it might as well have been the frozen white lid of my coffin, and when Thanksgiving rolled round I just didn’t feel up to it. Normally, Wyatt and I opened the house to a dozen or more guests and really made it festive — I baked for a week, served cod chowder, broiled oysters and turkey with all the trimmings, and it was one of the highlights of the year, and not just for Wyatt and me, but for our neighbors too. Yet this year was different, and it wasn’t just because I would have had to invite the doctor — that was a given. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize what it was till Wyatt brought it up.

“You know, you’re running yourself into the ground, worrying over every little detail all the time,” Wyatt said one night when he came in the door from work. “Have you had a look at yourself in the mirror? You’re as white as”—I watched him mentally juggling clichés before he gave up—“I don’t know, just white. Pale, you know.”

What I hadn’t told him, what I hadn’t told anybody, was that I’d begun spotting again. And this wasn’t just a faint discoloration, but blood, actual blood, crusted and dried till it was brown as dirt. I’d spent a long afternoon at our little one-room library (open Tuesday and Thursday, ten to four), masking the computer screen while I searched the Internet for information and that only scared and depressed me the more. I read about endometrial polyps, cancer of the uterus and fallopian tubes, anemia, hysterectomy, sonar and radiation treatments, the sickness that lingers and kills. I didn’t want to go to the mainland, didn’t want to pick doctors out of the phone book, didn’t want them probing and cutting and laying me up in some hospital in the city while strangers haunted the corridors and shot by obliviously in their shiny little Japanese cars. I went to the drugstore and stocked up on iron pills, multipurpose vitamins, a calcium supplement, and I hid my underthings at the bottom of the hamper as if that would solve anything.

One afternoon — it was just after Christmas, which I’d tried to make as cheerful for Wyatt as I could, though I didn’t feel up to caroling, not this time around — I was sitting at the front window, sipping tea and looking out into the fog that had begun to drift in. It was a typical winter fog, dense and shifting, so that the far side of the street just seemed to evaporate one minute only to reappear the next. At some point a stray shaft of sunlight cut through it all and lit up the front of the Trumbull House like a movie set and I could see something hanging on the door there, a sheet of white cardboard, it looked like. I plucked my binoculars from the table and focused in. It was a note of some sort, big and boxy, outsized like everything about Dr. Murdbritter, even his mess, but I couldn’t make out what it said. I knew in my heart that I needed to see him, confide in him, have him examine me even if I had to drag Wyatt into the room along with me, but I was afraid — not only of the tests he’d insist on and what they might show, but of letting him touch me there, and of the dirt, the dirt above all else.

I put on my coat, looked both ways on the porch to be sure no one was watching, and crossed the street to the doctor’s house. His car — he’d had Joe Gilvey replace the tire for him after Mervis drafted an official letter of complaint — was gone, and that was strange. After those first few weeks when he’d traced each of our six blacktop roads to where they petered out in a salt marsh or bay, he’d given up exploring, and then he’d had the flat and the car had just sat there like a natural feature of the environment for I don’t know how long. When I got to his porch, the mystery cleared itself up: the note said that he was taking the ferry to the mainland on personal business and would be back the following afternoon, directing all emergencies that might arise in his absence to the sheriff’s office. I don’t know what I felt at that moment. One part of me had been ready to ring the bell, slink into his office and confess what was happening to me and how scared I was, while the other part held back.

I can’t explain what I did next, not in any rational way, but I somehow had the duplicate key in my hand, the one that had hung on its little hook above the calendar on the bulletin board in my kitchen, and why I’d thought to put it in my pocket I’ll never know. In the next moment, I was inside, the house cold and dank and smelling of things I wouldn’t want to name, let alone the cat box, which must have been changed sporadically, if at all. I found the coffeepot in the kitchen set atop a stove so stained and blackened you couldn’t tell what color it was — he had been cooking after all, I thought, but it was a small consolation. I brewed the strongest coffee I could stand and began looking through the closets for the cleaning supplies, the mop and broom and vacuum cleaner Dr. Braun had left behind in his haste to vacate the place.

Can I tell you that all the lethargy that had come over me in the past months vanished the moment I went to work? I keep the tidiest house on the island, take my word for it, though some of the other wives and homemakers might make the same claim for themselves. Cleanliness, the desire for order where there is none, the struggle to fight down the decay all around us, is what separates us from the animals, at least in my opinion. I’m alert to everything, every tarnish and scuff and speck of mold, and I can’t sit still till it’s gone. It’s just me, it’s just the way I am. My father told me that when the Nazis were retreating across France ahead of the Allies, they’d vacate a farmhouse one morning and the Allies would occupy it that evening, and the most common booby trap the Nazis left behind was this: they’d leave a picture just slightly askew on the wall and when a soldier went to straighten it, goodbye. They’d have got you, Missy, the very first day, my father used to say, and he’d say it with pride.