The Doctor's Wife (11 page)

I sit with my grandfather, dad, and brother in the metal boat, fishing for perch on the lake. Perch are usually far below my grandfather's standards, but he's grown worse. The clouds hang low, spitting rain. My grandfather and dad cast into the lake. My brother and I don't have fishing poles, so we sit in our raincoats, sharing the same little bench. We're too young to know what we're feeling is boredom. And then my grandfather catches a mallard duck. She flaps her wings, quacking very loudly.

I know the ducks from feeding them pieces of stale bread and, during one exciting week, the Donut-O's that my brother and I begged for and then refused to eat. It's exciting to have the duck bite us with the sharp little ridges of her bill.

My grandfather reels the duck in, wrestles her aboard and performs surgery. Once free of the hook, the duck ruffles her feathers and then flies away, low over the water, one webbed foot dragging. She settles back down in the lake, far away from us.

We are cold and damp when we get back to the house. My dad draws a hot bath for my brother and me while my grandfather builds a fire. It feels strange for the menfolk to be the only ones attending to our needs.

They had plans to buy an apartment in Seattle so that they don't have to drive home after the symphony, or Seattle Arts and Lectures, but the Doctor's Parkinson's grows worse. He also has cancer, a list of other bad things. He's not even that old. He's barely sixty.

The dining room is turned into a sick room to save the trip upstairs. The Doctor's Wife nurses him.

Gretel lived to be twenty-four. She was never a bright dog. When I was very little she'd come close to me and then topple over, taking me down with her.

I wave my hand in front of my brother's facemask and we dive down, reaching for the golf ball at the same time. We swim up, throwing the ball into the floor of the raft, where it joins the others we've already collected.

We're getting ready to dive back down again when the Dussler boys drive their big yellow ski boat very close to us. The raft bobs up and down violently. Pat Dussler's electric bullhorn squawks on.

“You nearly killed those two little boys!” she yells, the bullhorn carrying her voice from her front deck out across the lake.

My brother and I find the Dusslers endlessly captivating. For one thing, if it wasn't for them, there wouldn't be any golf balls to collect—the Dusslers knock golf balls off their lawn into the lake. Collecting the golf balls doesn't seem to interest them, so we do it, though we don't return them, we keep them in a big bucket in the canning room. The golf balls are the least of what is interesting about them.

The Dusslers are beefy, athletic boys who aren't physically afraid, even when they should be. They sometimes ride a seat-less BMX bike off the roof of the boathouse, flying into the water. Once, they drove a borrowed ski boat over a big rock and tore out the engine. Another time, while trimming a new plank on the dock, Fred Jr. and Jimmy Joe stood in the water while operating an electric saw.

Pat Dussler uses the electronic bullhorn so she can be as loud as her husband and sons. She used to work at the meat counter of the B&M before she met Fred Senior. Fred and his brother own a small local burger chain. One year they began to build what they said were stables right next to our garden. After the concrete foundation was poured, an ugly building of buff colored steel rose quickly. Once completed, there were no horses to be seen. At five in the morning, metal doors banged open, starting a day full of the noises of a truck garage. My grandmother and grandfather filed a lawsuit. The land around the lake was zoned for agricultural use, so it wasn't a clear-cut case, but the suit prevailed and the garage was torn down. Now there's a frostiness between the two families. This frostiness does not diminish our fascination—actually the opposite.

Once their ski boat is tied up, the Dussler boys stand giggling at the end of the dock.

“Hey mom,” Freddie yells. My brother and I poke our heads above water and watch.

Pat is on the front porch watering her pansies.

“Hey mom,” Freddie says again.

We tread water. What are they going to do?

“Hey mom,” Jimmy Joe says.

She turns around. “What?” she asks into her bullhorn. The two big boys pull down their trunks and moon her, their laughs booming across the lake.

I'm downstairs with my brother in the basement, waiting for the rain to stop so that we can swim. We've found a rattrap. I pull the crossbar back, straining against the heavy-duty spring. My brother puts a pencil on the base of the trap and then I let loose the bar. The pencil snaps in two, sending shards flying. We immediately start to look for other things we can break.

“What are you doing down there?” our grandmother calls.

“Nothing,” we shout up.

Where can we find more pencils? I look around the basement. The canning room was meant for Mason jars, but is now mostly filled with toys for the beach, inner tubes, skis, buckets and shovels. On a cross beam near the door to the outside are two outboard motors, a battered army-green 10 horsepower, the other a 25 horsepower in a cream and mustard colored plastic case. Behind these are a series of cabinets crammed with other stuff—an extra badminton net, the badminton racquets, the birdies, mismatched croquet balls, a sail wrapped around itself. None of these things will fit in the trap. How badly would it hurt if we put a finger in the trap?

“Boys! Come upstairs for lunch!” we are called.

Bob is on a mail plane landing at the Barrow Airport. Barrow is the northernmost city on the continent, 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's February and the temperature hovers around negative twenty degrees. Bob lives in Fairbanks, but even there it is so cold in the winter that Bob's German Shorthair Jed has burned his whiskers off by huddling too close to the wood burning stove.

Bob has come to Barrow to sell insurance—life, property-home, car, boat, snowmobile—because Barrow is the closest town to Prudhoe Bay, the base for the oilfields of the North Slope. Despite all the oil money around, the Barrow Airport is a simple affair, one runway, a single low building. Bob takes a taxi to the hotel, in sight of the Chukchi Sea. The houses stand on stilts and are made of unpainted plywood. Whale bones share yards with broken down cars, new snowmobiles.

He checks in to the King Eider Inn and calls his mother, as he has every day since his dad died.

“Hi, Mama,” he says.

“Darling!” she replies.

My brother and I play croquet early in the morning while we wait for the Rubatinos to wake up. How can they sleep so late? We've already been up for a couple of hours.

The front lawn is uneven, sloping slightly toward the juniper hedge. Dark green spots alternate with straw-colored barrens. The Doctor's Wife doesn't think it's worth installing a sprinkler system and she certainly doesn't fertilize. Fertilizer runs straight into the lake and causes algae blooms. The Dusslers have a green lawn.

I'm aiming for my brother's croquet ball. This is my last chance to redeem myself. If I hit him, then I get two extra shots and can maybe catch up. I tap my ball. It wobbles to the left as it runs through the dewy stubble, coming to rest an inch from his ball. He clicks his ball into mine and then knocks me into the sand. I throw my mallet across the lawn.

“Let's play again,” he says.

Is he kidding? I'm very angry and I stalk away down the dock, taking my shirt off, ready to go for the first swim of the day, away from the cruel wickets.

“Are you sure you don't want to play again?” my younger brother asks. “You can have a head start.”

Today we're having a hot dog roast for lunch and the Rubatinos are here too. Mom is holding a pot and grandma is carrying the big wicker hamper. Spicy cowboy beans are in the pot. From the hamper comes potato chips, mustard, relish, pickles, chopped up onions, paper plates, reusable plastic spoons, marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers.

The hotdog skewers hang from a nail in the cabana. The skewers are sturdy pieces of metal twisted around themselves so that they form a fork at one end and a loop at the other. I'm inordinately proud of our hotdog skewers. Other people have to use coat hangers. Even my mom had to use coat hangers.

I stick the skewer into the fire so that it glows. I like to do this for two reasons. One is I like to think that I'm disinfecting the skewer. The second is that the hot dog sizzles when put on the hot metal. I prefer my hot dog burned on the outside, so it goes into the center of the fire until it is black and then into a hot dog bun with mustard and relish, no ketchup.

The fire dies down and then we make smores. My brother holds his marshmallow over the fire, patiently turning it so that it becomes a caramel color. The Rubatinos have their own varying ways of roasting the marshmallows, falling somewhere in between the extremes of my brother's method and mine. My way is the best. I stick my marshmallow close enough to the embers so that it ignites, which as far as I'm concerned is the whole point of marshmallows and fire.

My grandmother has taught us that there is always one correct way to do things.

My brother and I walk back from the lake, carrying the rubber raft on our heads, our towels draped over our shoulders. Everybody is here tonight, my mom and dad, Petrea and her husband and little daughters, Bob and his second wife. We've converged from up and down the West Coast, California, Oregon, and Alaska. My brother and I are the last up from the lake. We walk under the front deck to the door to the basement. We drop the raft off inside. Children are not allowed to come from the beach through the front door and across the carpet, nor are we allowed to walk upstairs from the basement, so we make our way along the side of the house, up the little steps and on the walkway below the willow tree. A small, square, metal plate with a finger hole rests over the pipe to the heating oil tank. I step on this metal plate so that it makes a noise as it shifts from one side to the other. I can't walk on this side of the house and not step on the plate. It's a rule I have.

Across from the garage and carport my grandmother is deadheading roses. She's wearing gardening gloves and holds clippers in her right hand. A bucket for the detritus rests on the blacktop. These are large roses, fat variegated, red, pink and peach, height of summer sun open.

“Come give this flower a sniff. It's called Fragrant Cloud.”

I put my nose in the middle of it. My feet are in a warm puddle. Grandma turns back to her work.

My brother and I hose our sandy legs off with the spray attachment that prickles. At a party one is generally expected to take a shower and put on clothes. Shoes are not absolutely necessary, but a clean pair of pants and a shirt is. I take a shower and then take my time, lying on my bed naked, reading my book from the stack of books we checked out from the Everett library. My brother and I share what is now referred to as the dormitory room but that used to be my mother's room. The beds my mother and aunt Petrea carved their names into are long gone. Twin beds flank a nightstand. On the wall hangs an oval mirror in a wooden frame, a tile with a duck on it, and a drawing of a gnarled oak tree. Petrea did the pen and ink drawing. She's still considered the artistic one of the family.

I hear grandma downstairs in the kitchen with Petrea and mom, getting dinner ready.

The adults are all showered and dressed when I go downstairs. The men pull the grill out from under the carport to cook the steaks. It's mom's birthday so hors d'oeuvres are in the living room. We have cheese and olives, but also Cheetohs in a Havilland bowl. The Cheetohs are a sort of a joke granny has made. The adults drink Champagne and the kids have Martinelli's in flutes. We eat dinner on the front porch, looking out over the rhododendron bushes to the lake. The umbrella is up to block the still bright sun. The adults drink their white wine.

“That's nasty,” my brother says, pointing at a loud motorboat flying across the lake. It's slim, sitting close to the surface of the water. The back sprouts what looks like a jet engine, and the boat is piloted by a bearded man wearing a Speedo. He doesn't even have anybody skiing behind him. We find him and his boat guilty on serious charges of sensibility and good taste. We don't have our own ski boat, so our scorn is mixed with jealousy.

“What's wrong with English?” Bob asks, as the adults grow quiet. My brother and I turn our attention to the conversation.

“What do you mean?” my mom asks slowly.

“It seems to work for an awful lot of people.”

“How about my students? They shouldn't have to give up their Spanish. They should be supported so they know more than one language.”

“Why would you want to keep learning the language you've been trying to forget?” Bob asks.

“Maybe they don't want to forget,” my mother replies.

“Why would anybody want to speak anything other than English?” Bob asks. “It's in their own best interests to only speak English.”

“Look, Bob, there's all sorts of research that shows that you don't have to give up your first language to learn English. Why wouldn't you want to know more than one language?”

“English works. What's wrong with it?”

“You've got to be kidding me!”

“I mean, aren't we all the same? Why can't we all speak the same language?”

“It's not that simple.”

“I think it emphasizes the differences.”

Bob's new wife, Petrea's husband, and my dad stay out of it.

“You live in Alaska, you don't know what it's like in the rest of the country,” Petrea says.

“We live differently in Alaska. There's no racism in Alaska.”