1MARY’S USEFUL FIRE ACTIVITIES
Mary
2015
ALONE IN MY BEDROOM, I played this game. Light a candle and run a finger through the flame without getting burned. I was quick, so it didn’t hurt to glide my skin through fire at the perfect tempo. I would have done this all night until the candle burned down to a nub, but my mother caught me and flipped out. She worried I’d stay up late and burn the house down. I begged for one more minute and promised to move away from the curtains. She blamed the girls in my middle school for teaching me the candle game at their stupid slumber parties, but she was wrong. I learned this game from my cousin, Jimmy, who would close his eyes tight and pass his whole hand back and forth through the flame without saying a word.
A grown woman now, I start a lot of fires, and nobody gets suspicious or mad. That’s because fire is my tool, a potter’s inferno where I burn the things I make. I know how to tame the flames in a kiln to harden pots so they can hold water and be useful. And there are dozens of other useful fire activities, according to Jimmy. For instance, instead of sulking when he was benched in little league, he filled the coach’s rowboat with turpentine rags and dared me to toss the match.
To begin a kiln firing, I don’t need matches, even though every liquor store on Cape Cod gives them away for free. Instead, I carry a silver monogrammed lighter in my pocket and light up whenever I want. If I open the kiln burners to hissing gas, I flick my lighter, and poof, swirling flames will singe my eyelashes if I’m not careful. My silver lighter is handy too whenever I feel like a cigarette or if it’s time to light a candle for my birth mother. After all, for centuries, the churchgoing wives of seamen lit candles for the disappeared to come back, so you never know, my birth mother might get the message. She’s out there somewhere. I hope so. I am told she forgot to give me a name, so I was Baby Girl Number Two with the nuns for the first three months of my life. When the stork handed me over to my new mother, they had me baptized Mary Newcombe, and that was that.
Every woman in the Old Ladies Gossip Militia of Wellfleet will tell you my birth mother had three choices back then. 1. Keep the baby. 2. Call the stork. 3. Get a secret procedure to end it. In those days, Dr. William Newcombe, my adoptive father, was in charge of numbers two and three. He was never much of a talker, especially with me, so I don’t know how and where my life began. Besides, he’s dead now. Tell me, why can’t finding the woman who slipped me out between her legs be as simple as striking a match?
Unfortunately, going back to the Mayflower, none of the Newcombes were talkers or scribblers in ledgers or diaries, and they wrote almost nothing about their Pilgrim adventures for me to read. They didn’t save a single letter about anything important. Too bad for me. But one thing I do know, the Newcombes stayed on the crooked peninsula of Massachusetts, and here, fire is the way people settled disputes.
Burn it down.
2NURSE BARBARA HASKINS SUCKS HER THUMB
Barbara
TONIGHT, I AM SQUIRMING around in hell, a little hell of my own doing, if anyone ever bothered to ask. But nobody asks me much of anything, because I’m just ordinary Nurse Haskins with a bank account that’s emptier than empty.
It’s windy and dark without a single star on Christmas night and no help from the moonlight to find my way through the woods. Old-girl arthritis stabs at my knees every step as the snow crunches under my boots. I sneak up to the back door of the Wellfleet Health Clinic right around the time that nice holiday feeling goes sour from too much Christmas. Half the town is drunk or asleep by now, and when they wake up, my footprints better be slush.
Good Lord, I am so worn out from the prison-gray clouds of winter that I want to scream in somebody’s ear. Anybody. Loud, like one of those lunatic mothers who lost her son on a ship at sea, but I have no son, and I never will. Too old. All that medical technology did squat for me.
Inside the clinic, I head for the meds closet but turn into the third examining room by mistake. Don’t you dare turn on a light. I bump into the metal stirrups bolted to the table and stub my toe. For years, countless ladies have saddled up on this very table, parting their legs for a speculum instead of a bouncing lover. Mothers with too many kids already. Girls who got knocked up out of wedlock. Fifteen-year-old virgins who were in big trouble because of first-time careless sex and because one single sperm vigorously swam all the way to the egg, beating the mob of other sperm. Bull’s-eye.
All kinds of women were ready to fix it with a big wad of cash. End it. Way back then, the word abortion was never used by Dr. Newcombe, as far as I can remember, and breaking the law was beside the point. My strategy with these patients was to nod and look concerned but never, ever look into their eyes, because if I did, they’d start crying, desperate to get it out and get the procedure over with. Fair enough. I did my best not to judge. It was not my sin. I was only helping other women.
Go get the pills.
Twenty-four steps from the bathroom to the pharmacy, turn left, and then five steps to a lifetime supply of drugs. I work my way down the hallway, tapping the walls with my fingertips just as the phone rings, cutting through the silence like a burglar alarm. Jimmy must be waiting nearby with that odd twitch in his eye, anxious for whatever pills I can grab. I peek between the window blinds into the Cape Cod night. He’s out there, probably hiding behind a tree. What a jackass. Good thing Dr. Newcombe didn’t live long enough to see his nephew now.
I snap the blinds closed and trip over a wastebasket, toppling out the contents. Forget about cleaning it up. On my tiptoes, I hurry past the hall mirror where I usually stop to fix my lipstick. Shiny pink lipstick and a sexed-up toss of my ponytail might have gotten me this job years ago, but lipstick won’t help me now. In the beginning, I was required to dress in all white from head to toe, my dainty young feet so ugly in practical white nurse’s shoes. There were many mornings I had to get rid of the blood splats that had speckled my clean white shoes after an especially messy procedure. I built a tiny trapdoor in my mind that slammed shut when I started to worry about the hatchet jobs when Dr. Newcombe messed up. I taught myself to focus on shaky thighs and sterilized tools and never, ever think about life or death or little beating hearts. Hearts way smaller than an eraser head.
Teeny tiny
thumbs half the size of my eyelash.
Dr. Newcombe would smile at the teenage girl, pat her shoulder, and say as he hovered too close to her face, “This is your decision.”
He always made sure I carefully counted the cash before he began his speech in his smooth radio broadcaster voice that made me feel like puking. When the speech was over, he filled the room with a stuffy silence as he examined the girls methodically. He scraped. He suctioned. He blotted the errant blood. And after that, he counted the money again.
Don’t get distracted. I remind myself that tonight I’m here at the clinic for one reason: to grab Oxy and Xannies as fast as I can. I try to do the math on how much money I’ll get for the pills, but the ghosts of teenage girls keep interrupting my count as they scurry through the hallway.
Is that Gina over there with her painted pink toenails, writhing around in the stirrups? Thirteen-year-old Gina Doanne, who’d hardly made the connection between menstrual blood and sex. Sweet Gina, who had enormous breasts that made men whistle, and she barely knew why they did that. Dr. Newcombe had worked quickly on Gina and the young ones, spewing out reassuring sentences.
Relax, breathe deeply, we’ll be done in a jiffy was the main part of his dumb speech. When he said that after suctioning sessions, my heart cracked open for the girls who came alone, whimpering from start to finish. I wanted to hold every girl’s hand and give a much better radio broadcast speech. Yes, your life will be full of female predicaments, big and small, but don’t let anyone tell you what’s best for you.
The married women were the easiest. They didn’t cry when Dr. Newcombe finished up with a few easy snips and clips and a stitch or two like with a Thanksgiving turkey. All done. The women paid him to end it, but it wasn’t so much of an ending but the beginning of how to get on with their lives. He was dirty and holy at the same time when he scraped away their troubles in less than an hour. Ladies of all ages loved him, the pregnant, the barren, the menopausal, the flirty widows, and so they kept coming.
“You can’t wipe a baby’s ass with a Bible,” Mrs. Crocker once said, laughing before a procedure. She begged Dr. Newcombe to cut her fallopian tubes.
“No more babies, please, oh please.”
Dr. Newcombe finally relented after he made a bundle off Mrs. Crocker, the wife of the chief of police. Chief Calvin Crocker was a Catholic most of the time, a man who simply loved sex and wouldn’t wear a rubber. Too tight. One time she confided in me how easy it was to slip a rubber on a practice cucumber but not the chief. No. He was a hefty man and a father
of six who looked the other way when Mrs. Crocker visited with Dr. Newcombe.
“Afterward, she gave me British tea in a real china teacup, so lovely of Nurse Barbara,” I heard Mrs. Crocker whisper into the office telephone, looking a bit green after her fourth procedure.
It seemed like every girl on the Cape, every mother, every auntie knew about Dr. Newcombe, and at the same time pretended they knew nothing about it. Keep it quiet over the Bourne Bridge, an unspoken pact between Dr. Newcombe and Mrs. Crocker, sealed with a wink.
The secret procedures were going great for a while, and the cash rolled in until Roe v. Wade ruined everything for us. I had warned him that his cash cow side business was about to dry up. And sure enough, in the middle of another miserable Cape Cod winter, January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, and Dr. Newcombe was screwed. No more cash business. Kaput. For a couple of weeks, he mulled over his next move, talking to me in dreamy sentences he couldn’t complete. In the middle of February, deep into a sleet storm, Dr. Newcombe called me into his office for advice.
“I’ve been thinking about how to retool my medical practice in light of the fact that family medicine won’t financially …” And then he fell forward flat on his face with a massive heart attack. I tried pouring cold coffee all over his face to wake him up, but Dr. Newcombe died anyway, inches from my clean white nursing shoes.
Put that man out of your mind and get back to business. I close my eyes and shake my head castanet quick. So many years have gone by, so really, what does all that stuff matter? My fingers tremble as I unlock the pharmacy door and punch in the combination to the meds closet. An old grammar school panic pops in my chest as the red light on the keyboard glows green. Jimmy and his sidekick Patrick will have to pay more for this haul of pills. I pull the office step stool out of the closet, and the sound of it scraping across the floor shoots a shiver straight up my knees. Just as I steady my feet on the top step, someone calls my name.
Bar-bar-a.
I whip around and bonk my head on the cabinet door, losing my balance, spinning to the floor. Someone is standing in the shadows, wheezing. I hear a loud crack from the other room, but in an instant, I realize it’s a hard whack to my skull. A cherry-bomb light flash goes off in my head. Everything goes black.
I wake up hot and sweaty, my cheek pressed against the linoleum floor, and I can’t lift my head. A sharp pain spears through the middle of my face. I smell smoke. In the distance, I hear sirens louder and closer. The room is sauna hot. The building is on fire.
Oh Lord, who will
think to look for me inside on Christmas night? I recite faint jumbled-up verses of what I can remember of the twenty-third psalm, because I heard that’s what people do when they’re scared shitless.
“ ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …’ ”
Sweat drips into my eyes. I can’t see. I’ve forgotten most of the prayer, so I switch to a simple Christmas carol.
“ ‘Joy to the world, the Lord is come.’ ”
Sing. I must keep singing. No passing out.
The walls dissolve into a blur of smoke. More sirens chirp in the distance, or is it a barking dog? I squint at my thumb, which lies inches from my cheek on the sticky linoleum floor. The room fills up with smoke, and my thumbnail is so close to my eyes that it looks like the face of a long-lost friend. I stare at my thumb until I have an overwhelming urge to pop it in my mouth and suck it. Suck my thumb, I do, and it tastes salty and good. It soothes me as the world begins to fade away, until all I can think about is my thumb. ...
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