Victorian homes faced each other like a dowager standoff.
“Stop a second,” Liz said. “Pull over.”
It had been her intention to fix her gaze directly ahead when the car reached the corner of Casabella and Manzanita. But the wind was blowing hard again, stirring up the grit of memory. The two-storied Victorian stood in the middle of its half-acre lot and called her name.
Hannah said, “It belongs to some people from Rhode Island now. Big computer bucks.” The verge board, the bracketed eaves, and the arch of rosettes crowning every window: all had been scrupulously restored and, like the rest of the house, sparkled achingly white in the sunlight. On the porch there was a swing with a bright blue canvas awning.
“If you want to see inside I can call the owner. Her name’s Mitzi Sandler. I know her from the Spring Festival Committee. Most of the invaders are two income families, too busy to get into town affairs. She’s different. We don’t really know each other but she seems okay, better than most maybe.”
“I wonder what it was that made my parents buy such a big house in the first place,” Liz said. “They never intended to have a family. If they told me once I was an accident, they told me a hundred times. I’m so used to thinking of them as totally a-parental, but this house . . . I mean it’s such a . . . grandmotherly house. You know what I mean, Hannah? Maybe there was a time when . . .”
Or maybe the big house made it easier to pretend she wasn’t there.
Beyond Manzanita and Greenwood and Oak Streets, Casabella Road leveled out again and followed the shoulder of the hill for a quarter mile then dropped abruptly into a shadowy canyon and a hairpin curve across a bridge over Bluegang Creek. When it rose again, Liz saw a sign, a discreet bronze rectangle: HILLTOP SCHOOL, ONE QUARTER MILE.
Hannah said, “Low keyed and very high priced these days.”
At the end of a long driveway Hannah and Dan Tarwater’s white country farmhouse sprawled in the shade of half a dozen California live oaks. Hannah stopped at the mailbox and leaned out the car window to open it. She riffled through the bundle of envelopes, advertising flyers, and catalogs. She held a large overnight mail envelope, reading the return address. “This is for you,” she said and handed it to Liz, eyebrows raised. “It’s from a doctor. In Miami.”
Friday
Dr. Reed Wallace was young. His diplomas hung on the wall, but Roman numerals confused Liz and besides, she didn’t really want to know exactly how young. Under the circumstances, age made no difference anyway. The lab in Miami had provided his name in San Jose and no other.
He entered the examining room, her chart in hand, a few strands of dark brown hair engagingly drooped across his forehead, and leaned against the wall smiling and comfortable as a neighbor chatting over a fence. Easy for you. You’re not going to be east-west in the stirrups, gaping like a Bekins box. She perched on the end of the examining table and answered his routine questions—her age (advanced), her general health (perimenopausal), childhood ailments (emotional neglect), allergies (good-looking young ob-gyns; they made her blush).
He was tall and slender with excellent teeth and probably wearing contact lenses. Clean fingernails, a discreet yin/yang tattoo on his wrist.
Wallace left her alone in the examining room to strip and don a paper hospital gown. His nurse—a petite Asian woman with a name tag saying Marilu—came in. She weighed Liz, took her temperature and then her blood pressure. Her smile never dimmed from incandescent.
“You can get up on the table now.”
Knees up, feet in the stirrups, scoot down, a little farther, a little farther, always a little farther.
Bad as this was, always was and would be because there was no way of doing a pelvic that was not humiliating, physically uncomfortable and emotionally tense, her first exam had been the worst.
She had expected condemnation for wanting birth control pills at a time when the sexual revolution had barely entered the guerrilla skirmish stage. But her lover, Willy, had assured her that in France clinic doctors were worldly and approved of sex. The exam had been carried out in an ill-heated, badly lighted examining room with a speculum the size of a tire jack; and her prescription had come in an ordinary glass bottle, twenty-five at a time. In those days, there weren’t even safety caps to struggle with.
On the way home from the dispensing chemist Liz had purchased a little plastic tray divided into seven lidded sections. As she was writing the days of the week on the lids using a laundry pen, she had suddenly remembered Billy Phillips and Hannah’s underpants and the mystery of their disappearance. That’s how the memory of Bluegang was, a sleeping infection like herpes that awoke unexpectedly and made her miserable for a while.
The last thing she had ever wanted was a baby and for years she could no more begin a day without her birth control pill than she could walk out the door without her underpants although occasionally, she did that on purpose, just because she liked the feel of the air and the slightly risky sensation. She always took her pill, but she never quite trusted it to work. Looking back, she saw her adult life patterned by twenty-eight-day cycles of panic and relief.
After fifteen years the pill had become like a credit card she used impulsively, unwisely. She switched to a diaphragm and though occasionally inconvenient, she liked the system better. But the diaphragm made her panic cycle worse. Just to make sure she never got lulled into thinking sex was healthy or fun or even perfectly normal for an adult woman with a thriving body, she obsessed over microscopic holes and visions of deteriorating rubber. Even when she bled she fretted and remembered stories of women who continued to menstruate into their fifth and sixth months of pregnancy, the poor souls who arrived at the hospital complaining of gas pains and delivered healthy twins moments later.
A year ago when her periods had become irregular, and her doctor in Belize told her she was in early menopause, she had misplaced her sense of humor and slipped into a funk. She imagined her body’s depleted nest of eggs like last season’s potatoes growing mold at the bottom of the bin. One day, feeling a mixture of grief and glee, she cut her diaphragm in half with the kitchen shears and tossed the pieces in the trash.
Dr. Reed Wallace came back into the examining room. As he slipped on rubber gloves, he said, “I’ve never been to Belize. I hear it’s beautiful.” He opened the front of her gown and began to palpate her breasts. As he performed this exercise, he didn’t look at Liz or her anatomy. He gazed up at the holiday pictures tacked to the acoustical ceiling over the examining table. The travel agent photos of turquoise water and sugar-cookie beaches were there as much for him as for her.
“What do you do down there?”
Same as you, Doc.
“I own a bed and breakfast.”
“You get lots of business?”
In my time.
“The rain forest and the Mayan ruins are a big draw.”
“It’s not exactly Miami Beach though.”
“Thank God.”
He closed the front of her gown.
“You’re okay.”
Liz supposed that meant no suspicious lumps.
He sat on a wheeled stool and took up his position directly in front of her, facing the tent of sheet over her gaping legs. He spoke to Marilu, and she handed him an instrument. He raised the sheet, and Liz couldn’t see him at all. The whole procedure was less intimate than a root canal.
Reed Wallace said, “I was down in Panama with the Peace Corps.”
Liz tensed as she felt the warmed speculum slide into place. She experienced an instinctive and irrational panic that he would split her in half.
“Bocas del Toro. Miserable place.”
Something scraped her insides, Torquemada’s clamp loosened and was withdrawn. Liz heard