Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

On my way to the Morenos’ I stopped at the P.O. There was a letter from Hallie, which I would save for later. I liked reading them alone, with time for filling in whatever she might leave out.

It turned out the Moreno visit had been unexpectedly brief, and he’d left already. The oxygen machine had stopped making noises all on its own. I walked back up the hill alone. By the time I finally did get to Doc Homer’s kitchen his pork chops were cooked and he was just sitting down.

He looked surprised, almost pleased, his face turning up from the table, and he offered to put something on the stove for me but I told him I wasn’t hungry. I sat down at my old place at the table where I’d passively refused food a thousand times before. But tonight it made me sad to watch him eat his solitary supper-he’d cooked one serving of an entire balanced meal, vegetables and everything. This amazed me. When Carlo went on his work binges at the hospital, I skipped meals notoriously; I was lucky if I hit all the food groups in four consecutive days. But I supposed Doc Homer had gotten the knack of solitude. For him it wasn’t a waiting period, it was life.

“I hear you were kind of hard on Rita Cardenal,” I said.

He flushed slightly. “Do you know her? She’s expecting twins. She needs to take better care of herself.”

“I know. She was one of my students till day before yesterday. She’s a good kid.”

“I’m sure she is,” he said. “But she is rather hard to talk to. I wrote down a prescribed diet for her, which she wadded up and threw in the wastepaper basket before she left my office. She said she would eat what she pleased, since her life was already a totally creeped scenario. That is a quote.”

I smiled. “Kids here have their own minds, I’m finding out. I hadn’t really expected that.”

“They do.”

“My students talk like a cross between Huck Finn and a television set.”

He seemed slightly amused. I knew I was avoiding the issue. I took a deep breath. “I think I’ve let things go too long. I should have talked to you a long time before now. I don’t think you’re doing too well, and I feel like I should be taking care of you, but I don’t know how. We’re the blind leading the blind here. All I know is it’s up to me to do it.”

“There is no problem, Codi. I’m taking an acridine derivative. Tacrine. It keeps the decline of mental functions in check.”

“Tacrine slows the decline of mental functions, if you’re lucky. And it’s experimental. I’m not stupid, I did a lot of reading in the medical library after you told me about this.”

“No, you are not stupid. And I am fine.”

“You always say you’re fine.”

“Because I always am.”

“Look, I’m only here till next summer. We need to get things squared away. What are you going to do when you can’t keep up your practice anymore? Do you think you’re being fair?”

He cut up his cauliflower, running the knife between the tines of his fork. He dissected it into neat, identical-sized cubes, and did not answer me until he was completely finished. “I’ll do what I’ve always planned to do, I’ll retire.”

“You’re sixty-six,” I said. “When do you plan to retire?”

“When I can no longer work carefully and capably.”

“And who’s going to be the judge of that?”

“I am.”

I stared at him. “Well, I think there’s some evidence that you’re slipping in the careful and capable department.” My heart was beating hard-I’d never come even close to saying something like that to him. I didn’t wait for an answer. I got up and walked into the living room. It was the same, piles of junk everywhere. I was startled by something new: a dozen women’s shoes from somewhere, arranged in a neat circle, toes pointed in. Superficial order imposed on chaos. It’s exactly how I would have expected Doc Homer to lose his marbles. I felt dizzy and unsupported by my legs or Doc Homer’s floor, and I sat down. I couldn’t even tell Hallie this. She would come home.

The old red-and-black wool afghan, Hallie’s and my comfort blanket in old times, was still folded tidily on the sofa. In the months I’d been here it hadn’t been unfolded once, I was sure. I took the thick bundle of it into my arms and walked back into the kitchen and sat down, this time in Hallie’s chair, the afghan pressed against my chest like a shield.

“I’m taking this, if you don’t mind. I’ll need it when it gets cooler.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

I stared at him for another minute. “Do you know what people in Grace are saying?”

“That the moon is made of green cheese, I imagine.” He got up and began to wash the dishes from his small meal. A large and a small skillet, a vegetable steamer, a saucepan, plate and glass, spoons and knives of various sizes, and the Piper forceps. Including the pot lids, around twenty separate utensils to cook and consume maybe eight ounces of food. I felt obsessive myself for counting it all up, but it seemed to be a symbol of something. The way he’d lived his life, doing everything in the manner he thought proper, whether it made sense or not.

“They’re saying I’m a doctor,” I said to his back. “That I’ve come here to save Grace.” Hallie and I had already used up all the possible jokes on our town and Doc Homer: Saving Grace, Amazing Grace. Every one left a bitter taste in the mouth.

“And how do they propose that you’re going to do that?”

“I don’t know. However doctors usually perform their miracles.”

“You know very well what doctors do. You finished four years of medical school and you nearly finished your internship. You were only two or three months away from being licensed to practice.”

I touched my fingertip to some vagrant bread crumbs scattered across the table. Because his back was turned I had the courage to ask the question point blank. “How severely do you hold that against me? That I didn’t make doctor?”

“Who is saying you didn’t make it?”

“I’m saying it, right now. I don’t have it in me, now or ever. Just the idea of me being a doctor is ridiculous. People depending on me in a life-or-death situation? Remember when I took Red Cross swimming lessons? I tried out the elbow-hold rescue on Ginny Galvez and we had a near-death experience.”

He spoke without turning around. “How did you arrive at the conclusion that you could not be a doctor?”

For a minute I buried my face in the afghan, which smelled like a familiar animal. When I looked up again he was facing me, drying his hands on a dish towel, one finger at a time. “I would just like to know,” he said.

“I couldn’t make it through my rotation on OB-GYN. I was delivering a premature baby, which turned out also to be breach, and there was fetal distress, and the mother’s pressure started to shoot up. I just walked away from it. I don’t even remember exactly what I did, but I know I left her there. She could have died.” I corrected myself. “They both could have died.”

“You were only a first-year resident and it was a high-risk delivery. I’m sure there was someone on hand to back you up. Malpractice laws being what they are.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You don’t have to deliver babies to be a physician. I no longer deliver babies myself. There are a hundred specialties you could choose that have nothing to do with obstetrics.”

“That isn’t the point. People were looking to me for a decision, and I lost my nerve. You can’t lose your nerve. You’re the one that taught me that.”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I lose my nerve a dozen times a day.”

It was the last thing on earth I expected to hear. I felt as if I’d been robbed. I put my face back in the afghan and suddenly I started to cry. I have no idea where the tears came from, they just came from my eyes. I didn’t want either one of us to admit helplessness here. I kept my face down for a long time, soaking the wool. When I finally glanced up he was putting something away in the refrigerator. In the dark kitchen, the brightly lit interior of the refrigerator was a whole, bright little foreign land of cheerful white boxes, stacked like condominiums. There must have been fifty tupperware containers in there: pies, cakes, casseroles. I thought of Uda’s squash pie, and understood with surprise that all the women of Grace were taking care of Doc Homer. As a caretaker, I was superfluous.