Table of Contents
AUGUST NINTH AT NATURAL BRIDGE
For Ann Arensberg and Anne N. Barrett
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Touching Hand and Six Short Stories, by Sallie Bingham (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967).
The Way It Is Now, stories by Sallie Bingham (The Viking Press, 1972).
Transgressions, stories by Sallie Bingham (Sarabande Books, 2002) .
Red Car, stories by Sallie Bingham (Sarabande Books, 2008).
“Mending” was published in a textbook anthology, Imagine What It’s Like, a Literature and Medicine Anthology ed. Ruth Nadelhatt, Biographical Center of the University of Hawaii, 2008.
“Mending” is also included in an anthology from 1977, ed. Linda Hamalian and Leo Hamalian, Dell, Solo: Women on Women Alone.
“Selling The Farm” originally appeared The Arkansas Review.
MENDING
ON FIFTH AVENUE IN THE MIDDLE FALL, the apartment buildings stand like pyramids in the sunlight. They are expensive and well-maintained, but for me their grandeur stems not from the big windows with the silk curtains where occasionally you can see a maid dusting with vague gestures but from the doctors’ names in the ground-floor windows. Some buildings have bronze plaques for the doctors’ names beside the entrance door. Whether those doctors are more magical than the ones who are proclaimed in the windows is one of the puzzles I amuse myself with as I ply my trade up and down the avenue.
My trade is not what might be expected from the height of my red-heeled sandals or the swing of my patent-leather bag. I am, after all, a good girl, a fairly young girl, although I have a few lines and a tendency to wake up at five in the morning. Taxi drivers still comment on my down-home accent, and although for a while I tried to dispel that impression by buying my clothes at Bloomingdale’s, I have given up the effort.
My trade is doctors, and it is essential. I have a doctor for my eyes and another for my skin; I have a special man for my allergies—which are not crippling—and I also have a specialist for the inside of my head. For a while it seemed that my head was as far as he would go, with an occasional foray down my throat. Finally a choking sensation forced me to cancel my appointments. I suppose I should not expect anyone to take that at face value. He was a very handsome man; he is still, and it is still painful for me to imagine the man whose lap I longed to sit on presiding behind his profession, gazing with those curious green, unshadowed eyes at the women (why are they all women?)—the young ones, the old ones who hang their coats on his rack and sling their bags beside their feet as they sit down, with sighs, or in silence, on his couch.
My childhood was made to order to produce a high-heeled trader in doctors on Fifth Avenue, although my childhood would never have provided the money. My mother was blond and a beauty, and she had a penchant for changing men. My favorite was a truck driver from Georgia who used to let me ride with him on all-night trips down the coast. Mother didn’t approve of that, but it took me off her hands. He would sing and I would doze in the big, high cab, which seemed to me as hot and solid as a lump of molten lead—as hard to get out of, too, as I discovered when I tried to open the door. Oh, that truck cab was ecstasy. That was as close as I could come. My mother lost interest in him when I was six and replaced him with a white-collar worker. She thought Edwin was a step up, but for me, he never had any kind of appeal; he was the first of her men to carry a briefcase, and I learned an aversion then I have never been able to overcome to men who tie their shoes with very big bows and carry cow-smelling leather briefcases.
There were many others after Edwin, but they washed over me and I do not remember disliking them at all. They did not make much of an impression, as my mother would say; that was left to my first doctor, a personable Cincinnati gynecologist. My mother, who had settled in that town with a railroad man, made the appointment for me. She wanted me to know the facts, and she did not feel up to explaining them. Of course by then I knew everything, as well as the fact that if you turn a boy down, he will suffer from an excruciating disease. I did not really need to know that to be persuaded, since the interiors of those 1950 Chevrolets smelled just like the cab of