The Doctor's Wife (12 page)

“What about the Alaskan native languages? Once those are lost we're never getting them back. That doesn't worry you?” my mom asks.

“I think it would be better if we all spoke English. Then we could communicate better with each other.”

“You just don't understand, do you?”

“Don't understand what?”

“You don't understand how hard it can be for people,” my mother says, growing louder.

“You girls, you're just do-gooders. We've got too many do-gooders trying to change things in this country that don't need changing.”

“Well, insurance companies are ruining this country,” my grandmother jumps in.

“Do you want me to be a do-gooder too?” Bob asks the group.

“You think that's all I am?” asks my mother.

“I don't want to be a social worker. I don't think that helps anything.”

“You're such an asshole!” my mom says through gritted teeth. She begins crying, jerking herself up from the table and taking her plate with her into the kitchen.

Bob clomps down the outside stairs. My brother and I start to take dishes in to the kitchen, where my mom is still crying, loading the dishwasher.

“How can he believe that shit?” asks Petrea when she comes in, taking a dishrag from the drying cabinet next to the sink.

“I don't fucking know,” says my mother. Bob enters through the back door.

“I'm sorry girls,” he says, touching his sister's shoulders. “I didn't mean to make anybody cry.”

“That's OK. I think you're right Bob,” Petrea says.

“I'm right?” he asks. His deep voice lilts up.

“Yeah, why don't we just cut out people's tongues if they try and speak Spanish?” Petrea asks. “That would solve the problem, right?”

“Hee hee hee,” is the way Bob laughs. He's a giant, six feet six inches and two hundred and forty pounds. His eyes squint as he shakes. When he laughs he really goes for it.

My brother and I drive with Bob to the concrete yard in Everett to buy the ten-inch sewer pipes we'll use to fix the dock's rotting pilings. The wooden pilings don't rot underwater, so only the tops have to be cut off. After Bob cuts the rot off, we'll cap the piling with the sewer pipe and then we'll make forms out of tarpaper. The forms will be filled with cement up to the crossbeams of the dock.

Bob stands in the deep water sawing down a piling while my brother and I transport the pipes from the car, pushing the wheelbarrow down the lawn to the cabana and then down to the end of the dock. Bob gets out of the water. The wind howls. I shiver in my t-shirt and swimming trunks. Bob takes a green length of rope to make a noose to go around the pipe so that we can ease it down into position. As we're lowering it down, the pipe slips out of the noose and sinks to the bottom of the lake. Somebody will have to dive to get it.

Bob jumps in, facemask on. He is a sea mammal glowing under water, tugging at the rope, bringing his arms around the pipe and then pushing off the bottom, lifting the pipe to the surface where he slips it over the top of the piling.

I don't care for this kind of work. Why can't the my grandmother hire somebody to take care of this for us? She agrees with us, imploring Bob to stop.

“I'll just replace the pilings a few at a time,” Bob says.

One summer while I'm still at Stanford, I call to ask the Doctor's Wife if I can bring a friend. My friend Namazzi is from Uganda by way of Deerfield and Stanford. Her three brothers are scattered around New England and Europe at boarding schools. She has a long neck, her hair is twisted into tiny inch-long braids, she has a wide nose, and is very beautifully, evenly, deep dark brown in the way that hardly anybody is evenly anything. Her grandmother's uncle was the king of Uganda.

“You invite whoever you want. We've had all kinds come here,” the Doctor's Wife says, unimpressed when I tell her Namazzi's family history.

That summer we also spend a few days working on the dock, replacing the planking near the cabana. Namazzi works along with the rest of us, wielding a hammer.

“Oh, we've even had royalty visit,” I hear my grandmother say casually, a couple of years later.

“I hate to think about what to fix for breakfast. I never know what people want,” my grandmother says to me.

“Can't they get their own breakfasts?” I ask. I'm here before an invasion of the other family members. I flatter myself by thinking I'm here to help.

“Do people want eggs?” she asks.

“You don't want eggs.”

“No, I don't want eggs,” she says shuddering. “What should we have for breakfast this morning?”

“Cereal?”

“Hmm, I bought a quart of half-and-half but I forgot milk,” she says, looking in the refrigerator.

“I'll have toast.”

“No, we'll eat our cereal with cream. Everybody puts cream on cereal,” she says grandly. Everybody does not do this. We eat our cereal in quiet, blissful concentration.

“I have cinnamon rolls in the freezer,” she says, after we've licked the last drops of cream from our spoons. She has a full-sized freezer on the utility porch that holds pounds of butter, homemade chicken stock, salmon, wild blackberries, ice cream, nuts, butter, lamb chops, whole casseroles, and pies. When I was little I had access to a limitless supply of Fudgesicles, Otter Pops in lurid colors, strawberry yogurt Push-Ups.

She has been known to freeze garbage. “Everybody freezes garbage,” I've heard her say. “What else are you supposed to do with fish remains on Saturday and you don't want them stinking up the garbage cans?”

“Do you think the cinnamon rolls will be OK for breakfasts?” she asks.

“Of course they'll be OK,” I say. “My dad will eat a whole package by himself.”

To make the rolls she mixes the ingredients into a sticky dough, separating it into medium-sized balls. The dough rises and she punches it down a couple of times before using a rolling pin to flatten the balls into long rectangles. She shakes a cinnamon and sugar mixture over the surface, drops raisins on one edge, tucks dough over the edge with the raisins, continuing to roll until she has a log that she cuts into pieces. She lines the rolls up in a buttered Pyrex dish. The process usually begins in the early morning, continuing into the middle of the afternoon.

“I'm essentially a lazy person,” she explains, maybe even believing that this could be true. “I don't mind doing anything if I can do it ahead of time.”

My mom and I have tricked my grandmother into staying down at the lake while we make salmon salad sandwiches from last night's leftovers. We mix the grilled fish with chopped up celery, mayonnaise, dill and then spread butter thick on the bread, topping the sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes from Carleton's farm stand. I get a bag of chips from the bin kept on the utility porch and then load up a tray with iced tea, the sandwiches, and chips, to take down to the lake to my boyfriend Matthew, my grandmother, Petrea, and Petrea's almost all-grown-up daughters, my cousins.

The cousins wait until the last possible moment to come out from the sun and under the shade of the cabana. They are trying to get as dark as they can this summer. The older girl cousin is a scientist about to go UCSF for her PhD in immunology, but this summer she's working as an accountant for G.I. Joe's, a sporting goods store in Frontier Village. Frontier Village has outgrown its original confines, eating into the woods on all sides.

The other cousin, in college, has been helping my grandmother organize the basement this summer. There have been several battles about how things should go. No one in this family could be accused of not having an opinion. Both of the cousins' jobs allow them to work in the morning and then sun and swim in the afternoon.

As I set down the tray, I sense an odd sort of stillness. My brother and Petrea are reading. Matthew gives me a look like he wants to talk to me.

“I forgot to bring cups,” I say. “Matthew, do you want to help me?”

“Your aunt Petrea kicked me,” he says as we walk up the lawn.

“That means she likes you.”

“It hurt,” he says. “I think I'm going to have a bruise.”

“Really, if she didn't like you she'd just ignore you.”

“How old is she?”

“You know what my great-grandmother Petie used to say?”

“What?”

“The older we get the more like ourselves we become.”

He isn't impressed by this family saying.

Bob's leg has been hurting and so after limping around for six weeks, he visits his doctor. It turns out the leg is broken. It broke because he's riddled with cancer. This is in June of 2002.

In July, I stand in the kitchen with my arms around my grandmother, feeling strange to be crying so plainly. I'm not a crier, but the tears come hot and fast. My parents are in Italy for a month and a decision had been made not to ruin their trip. They are to be told how sick Bob is when they come back.

When Bob was in college and tried to enlist, he was rejected by the army because the FBI had put a red flag on his file. After he graduated from college, he moved to East Oakland, where he joined a Socialist Worker's Party commune. He was a labor organizer, took lots of LSD and was even arrested once. After he left the commune, he found a job at a big insurance company in San Francisco. He met Eve, an Arapajo aeronautical engineer who worked at Boeing. Together, they went deep into the philosophy of Gurdjieff, hoping to reach a higher level of consciousness.

Something about the Gurdjieffian rejection of modernity and, I'm sure, the incomparable hunting and fishing, brought Bob and Eve to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Bob became a Republican, and Eve an alcoholic. When their marriage ended, Bob, like many others in the state, became a Libertarian. Alaskans refer to the rest of the world as The Outside, a term that even the big Anchorage newspaper uses.

Bob hunted ptarmigan and ducks, fished for King salmon, married again, opened his own successful insurance agency, and when he was fifty, he adopted Native Alaskan twins. He'd seemed settled and happy finally.

Over the course of the summer Bob grows worse and worse. At the beginning of August, my mom and brother fly to Alaska to spend time with him and to help his wife out with the boys. My brother and Bob talk about God, the Christian God, because Bob has just joined the Presbyterian Church. My brother is in divinity school at Yale, on the academic rather than priestly track. Bob has thrown himself into Christianity like he's thrown himself into everything else. He subscribes to a journal called the
Biblical Archeology Review
.

In late August, he's in the hospital. My mother calls me to tell me the latest. Earlier in the day Bob jumped out of his hospital bed, stood up, drew himself to his true height, not the shrunken size he'd become, and ripped out his IV line, loudly demanding that he be allowed to die. This performance badly scared the nurse, who sent a psychiatrist, who had a long private talk with Bob. After the talk, the psychiatrist said that Bob was perfectly sane. Bob and the psychiatrist had already had the same conversation a couple of weeks before, agreeing that when Bob knew that there was no more hope, he'd refuse treatment.

“I'll book a ticket,” I tell my mom.

I've never been to Alaska, though Bob has invited us all many times before. His house is up on a hill overlooking the city of Anchorage on one side and on the other, the Chugach Peninsula's sandy hook, curving around Cook's Inlet. In the winter the winds blow ninety miles an hour. But the afternoon I arrive it is a sunny, warm day. Moments after I've carried in my luggage, a moose ambles into the yard to eat petunias from the flower borders. The dogs are kept inside so the moose doesn't gore them. They go crazy, flinging themselves against the glass in the door.

When the moose leaves, my mom takes me to see Bob at the hospital. He's alert enough to thank me for coming to Alaska, but he soon drifts into an uneasy kind of sleep.

For dinner we cook a salmon that Bob's wife caught earlier in the day from Ship Creek downtown. The sun sets at eleven. The next morning, Bob isn't talking anymore. He is deep inside himself, sometimes crying out. I can see the tumors under the skin of his chest and legs.

We don't know what else to do, so we sing. Even though most of us aren't religious, we sing hymns and spirituals,
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Morning Has Broken, Nearer My God to Thee
. I sing low, my grandmother takes the tenor parts and the two sisters sing up high. We absentmindedly work crossword puzzles. We play Bach cello sonatas on a little boom box my grandmother bought at Fred Meyer. When we feel restless, we leave the oncology wing and wander the halls, looking at the Native Alaskan artwork scattered around the hospital.

One afternoon, Petrea cries and cries, unable to stop herself. My grandmother and I leave to go back to the house to get dinner ready. On the way to the car, my grandmother is fiercely calm. “Why is Petrea crying? She needs to stop. She doesn't know what it is to lose two sons,” she says.

After three days of watching Bob try to die, three days of going to the hospital in shifts, three days of trips to the cafeteria for coffee and sandwiches, three days of going back to the house to ride bikes with the little boys, after three days of a horrible sort of waiting, a woman wearing a flowy gown and carrying a large velvet bag walks in to the hospital room. She takes a harp out of her velvet bag.

“Would you mind if I play for him?” she asks.

“He loves music,” my grandmother says. “Can you play any Mozart?”

“I usually play something that people don't know so they can't listen for a tune. That way they can forget what they're doing.” What she means is that they forget to hold on to life. She starts plucking the strings. I feel like I should stay in the room, but I haven't really slept for days and all I can think about is going to the small waiting room at the end of the hall and stretching out on one of the vinyl couches. From the couch I can still hear the strumming and I lie there, suspended between waking and dreaming.