The Doctor's Wife by Luis Jaramillo Page A

the other side of the lake. He and Tom are still friends, and one evening at the end of a dinner party, the Doctor agrees to go waterskiing behind Tom’s new boat.
    The sun doesn’t set until almost ten in the summer, but it’s late, and as the sun dips below the trees, the sky turns orange. Smudges of gnats swarm just above the surface of the lake. Fish jump, plopping back into the dark water. A muskrat slips under the dock. The Doctor’s Wife shivers, pulling her cardigan around herself. It should be time for a cigarette but she’s just quit. She and the Doctor have always known smoking is dangerous, that it leads to death.
    She and the others step down into the boat. The Doctor takes his shirt off and then jumps in the water, fastening the white life belt around his waist. The Doctor isn’t like the kids. He can’t be pulled up on one ski. He has to start on two and then drop one, so he sits in the water with the tips of the two skis poking above the surface. He gives the thumbs up signal and as the boat takes off, the Doctor’s Wife feels herself pressed against the seat. She blinks her eyes against the rush of air. The Doctor rises, standing.
    The Critchfield and Hagen kids cheer from the dock. Then something goes wrong. The Doctor’s legs are wide apart, too wide. It’s hard to make out his face. “Bring your legs closer together!” the Doctor’s Wife shouts.
    This doesn’t work. His legs spread farther and farther and then when they can’t possibly extend any more, he pitches forward into the water. Tom spins the boat around to pick up the Doctor as Vivian Critchfield coils the towrope. The Doctor’s Wife doesn’t know how to do that, nor does she care to.
    â€œHow are you, darling?” she asks as her husband climbs aboard the boat. She puts a towel around his shoulders.
    He’s pale. “I think I hurt my testicles.”
    â€œHar har har,” Tom laughs.
    This is the sort of thing Tom and the Doctor talked about at the dinner table when she and the Doctor were newlyweds in Seattle. They’d been so poor she lived in the Y and he lived at Swedish Hospital, saving until they had enough money to rent an apartment on First Hill. Every night they ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria. The Doctor and his friends talked about diarrhea, bowel movements. They talked about the gruesome things they’d soon see in the war. They talked about guts spilling out of bellies in the emergency room. The Doctor’s Wife was certainly not reared that way. Her father was a professor, and neither he nor her mother would have put up with any discussion of bodily functions—not to mention malfunctions—at the dinner table.
    When they get home she examines her husband. His scrotum is an angry purple.
    â€œDo you want to put ice it?” she asks doubtfully.
    â€œNo need,” he says. He’s a conservative doctor, continuing to believe that the body can usually heal itself.

Lundeen’s
    During the day, Lundeen’s is a private park. People pay to play on the beach and swim in the area between two big piers. When they were younger, Chrissy and Ann would walk to the end of Sandy Beach Drive and look across the creek at the people attending the annual Scott Paper company picnic and Chrissy would feel sorry for the people who had to work at the smelly pulp plant and only once a year got to come to the lake.
    At night, the place turns into a roadhouse, and on weekend nights you can hear the bands playing. Once, the front seat of a car was found on the beach after a Saturday night. Lundeen’s drives the Doctor’s Wife crazy. All you have to do is mention it and she shakes her head, setting her jaw. This only makes Lundeen’s more interesting for Chrissy.
    One night that summer before Bob leaves for college, the Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife are driving home from dinner when they see Bob walking unsteadily along the road,