Doc in the Box

by Elaine Viets

  CHAPTER 3

  “Do you know who I am?” the massive man demanded. He was irate that he had to stand in line with the rest of us at Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. Breakfast goers were lined up out the door into the parking lot, but this guy was the only unhappy one. He was about the size of a rhino and just as mean. I figured anybody that big had the stamina to endure a ten-minute wait.

  “Who is he?” I asked the brunette behind me in line. She shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Her twelve-year-old son was shocked by this ignorance. “Mom! Don’t you recognize him? He’s with the St. Louis Blues. That’s the hockey team,” he added in case we were too dumb to recognize that, too. “He’s …”

  Before we could learn his name, the rhino’s voice grew louder and more insistent, drowning out all other conversation: “I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

  The hostess was seating a party of four in the back room. Marlene, the waitress, appeared to deal with this emergency. “No, sir,” she said politely, “but we can call some people at the state hospital who can help you find out.”

  The rhino angrily charged through the crowd, rudely shouldering his way out the door. “Sorry,” Marlene said, but she wasn’t really. The crowd cheered his departure. The Cardinals’ Mark McGwire would have been recognized immediately, but even he would have had to wait in line at Uncle Bob’s. Everyone did. The line was a handy place to gossip, network, or eavesdrop, depending on who you were. The mayor stood in line at Uncle Bob’s. So did aldermen, congressmen, police, city attorneys, assorted crooks in and out of office, and lots of hardworking citizens.

  For me, Uncle Bob’s was a combination office and family substitute, and you could find me there most mornings. If there was no line out front, Tom the cook had my one egg scrambled before my car was even parked. Marlene the waitress popped in two pieces of wheat toast and poured my decaf coffee by the time I took off my coat. That had been my breakfast routine for the last eight years. Readers who couldn’t get through the Gazette switchboard knew they could reach me at Uncle Bob’s most mornings, and the waitresses took more accurate messages for me than Scarlette, our department secretary.

  It was another ten minutes before Cheryl the hostess could seat me, plenty of time to find out what caused the crowd this morning. St. Philomena’s Catholic Church had a Recognition Day for students and parents, then gave the kids the rest of the day off. All those proud parents and their offspring had worked up an appetite picking up their achievement certificates.

  “No booth for you today, Francesca,” Cheryl said. “It’s too crowded. I’m gonna have to stick you at the little table in the corner, but it’s in Marlene’s station.”

  Marlene was my favorite server, a generously proportioned woman with an innocent Irish face and a wicked comeback for everything. Today she barely had time to pour my coffee and plop down my plate. I buried my face in a murder mystery. I’m an addict. I read five a week.

  A few minutes later, Cheryl the hostess came over. “There’s a call for you,” she said. “You can take it at the front desk.”

  It was Georgia.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just don’t want to call you at the Gazette. You know the phones are bugged there. Listen, can you pick me up an hour earlier for my radiation appointment?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Are you sure? How are you going to get your stripper story finished?”

  “I worked on it at home on my laptop. It’s nearly done. I just have to ask Leo a couple of questions.”

  “Good. I need to buy a wig. I’ll be losing my hair in another week or two. I want to have my wig styled and ready.”

  “Sure, I’ll be glad to go with you,” I lied. I’d hate it. But I couldn’t tell her that. The woman’s hair was going to fall out, and I was whining because it made me feel uncomfortable. She needed me to be with her, and I would. Friends don’t let friends go bald alone.

  “Is an hour going to be enough time?” I said. “I can leave earlier.”

  “I have dyed blond hair in a wedge cut, like every other woman my age. How difficult can it be?”

  I thought it was going to be very difficult. I hung up, dreading the wig appointment. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, and the day was already in a nosedive.

  By the time I sat down again to cold coffee, Marlene’s tables had cleared out enough that she could join me on her break. She poured me a fresh cup. Then she sympathized about Georgia’s hair. To lighten things up, I told her the story about the missing stripper, Leo D. Nardo. But Marlene didn’t laugh. “Monday night was the last time anyone saw him,” she said. “This is Thursday. If he doesn’t show up for work today, I’d say it’s time to get seriously worried.”

  “Oh, come on, Marlene. This is a stripper. An absolute airhead.”

  “Francesca,” she said, “if a man said that about a woman stripper, you’d be indignant. You’d say he was discounting her because she was a woman in a marginal profession. Men deserve equal treatment.”

  “But it’s different.”

  “Why? Male and female strippers are both in businesses that attract a lot of weirdos.”

  “But he’s …”

  “He’s a sex object. He just happens to be a male sex object. But he deserves equal treatment. How do you know he even went anywhere with a woman? Does he have a girlfriend? Did anyone see him with a special admirer that night? Did he have any money with him so he could take a sudden trip or get a hotel room for several days?”

  “Just his tips,” I said.

  “How much is that—a couple hundred?”

  “More than twelve hundred dollars in cash,” I said. “In a blue nylon gym bag.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded bizarre.

  Marlene stared at me like I was thicker than Uncle Bob’s knotty pine paneling. “A guy built like a Greek god who’s been dancing nearly naked for a room full of screaming women walks out at one A.M. with twelve hundred dollars in untraceable cash, and hasn’t been seen since—and you don’t think anything is wrong? What’s the matter with you, Francesca?”

  She was right. What was wrong with me today? Might as well go to the Gazette, where I was expected to be wrong. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d hardly reached my desk when my editor, Wendy the Whiner, came over wearing a wrinkled suit that looked like it had been swiped from a Goodwill donation box. “Charlie’s been looking for you all morning. I didn’t know where to find you,” she said, accusingly.

  “Where you’ll find me every morning, at Uncle Bob’s looking for stories,” I said.

  “He’s not happy with you,” she said, with satisfaction.

  Charlie’s door was open, and he was sitting at his vast, empty black desk in his huge sterile office. I’d always suspected his chair was built up to make the sawed-off little hairbag seem taller. He was smiling, a bad sign. His blue suit was styled to hide his paunch. His red tie matched his nose.

  “Sit down, Francesca,” he said. “You’re late. Most people start work at the Gazette at nine A.M.”

  “I do, too, Charlie,” I said, still standing, because I knew it irritated him. He hated any reminder that I was considerably taller than he was. “I was at Uncle Bob’s.”

  “You count eating breakfast as work?”

  He counted expense account lunches as work, but I didn’t remind him of that. “That’s where I meet readers, Charlie, and they tell me stories for my column.”

  “Well, see if you can eat your breakfast on your own time in the future,” he said. I figured I could ignore that as bluster. He was too eager to deliver his bad news. The man was practically wiggling in anticipation like a puppy. Either that, or he had to use the john.

  “In order to have a closer link with our readership,” he began, with a solemnity usually reserved for Vatican Square, “we at the Gazette want to publish something with the common touch. Of course, we thought of you.”

  I knew this was insulting. I just wasn’t sure how.


  “We are doing a compendium of St. Louis recipes. We’d like you to write the foreword and contribute a recipe.”

  “I don’t cook, Charlie,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t cook? You’re a woman, aren’t you?”

  “Cooking isn’t a sex-linked gene. That is an incredibly sexist statement.”

  “I figured you’d try to hide behind that EEOC stuff,” he said. “So I’m offering you this choice: if you find a recipe too offensively female, you can do a Dialog St. Louis page.”

  Oh, my god, not that. Anything but that.

  Charlie must have seen the look of horror on my face. It was why I don’t play poker. “It’s your decision, Francesca. If I don’t have your recipe by tomorrow, I’ll expect you to begin working on the next Dialog St. Louis. That subject is: The Information Highway.”

  Trust the Gazette to go down that well-worn road where no reader wanted to follow. Charlie had been sold on something called “public journalism” at a newspaper conference he attended in South Carolina. Nobody was quite sure what public journalism was, but we could recognize it by its catch phrases: “solution-oriented stories,” “focusing on community resources,” “deliberative conversations,” “citizen commitment.”

  We knew what that meant. Expensive and time-consuming investigative reporting was out. Blather by city planners, sociologists, and other experts was in. The Gazette would no longer attack corruption in City Hall, the state legislature, and the school system. Advertisers found that so upsetting. Instead, the paper would discuss what a fine future the city would have if we all pulled together. Public journalism turned a newspaper into a Miss Manners’ dinner party. Unsettling topics such as deadbeat dads, killer kids, and alcoholic moms would not be polite. So they were never mentioned in any Dialog St. Louis.

  Its appeal to management was immediate: public journalism was cheap and noncontroversial. It was also shallow and stupid, and Gazette readers, at least those old enough to remember its glory days when it was one of the first papers to fight against the Vietnam War, resented this drivel. The last Dialog St. Louis was “The Importance of Teaching Phonics.” Another featured this controversial subject: “Should St. Louis Parks Have Separate Paths for Bikers and Bladers?”

  The Weekly Reader was more controversial. Smarter, too. And it had more circulation. Charlie failed to realize public journalism was practiced by Podunk papers. I’d do anything to keep my name from appearing on that page of pablum. Even find a recipe. But I wasn’t lying to Charlie. I didn’t cook. Some would say I didn’t even eat. Breakfast was usually a scrambled egg and toast at Uncle Bob’s. Lunch was something pale and gray out of a Gazette sandwich machine. I ate well if I went out for dinner, but I did that less and less since I’d split with Lyle. Instead, I’d stop for pork fried rice or order up a pepperoni pizza. Maybe I could publish “Francesca’s Top Five Food Delivery Phone Numbers.” Sometimes, I just opened a can of tuna and ate it over the sink, or dredged pretzels through peanut butter. Wouldn’t that make a Martha Stewart Living layout?

  If my grandmother were alive, I wouldn’t have this problem. She was a superb cook. Of course, she never used recipes. She never even measured. She’d take a handful of flour or sugar, a lump of butter, a pinch of salt, or a dash of vanilla and whip up the best pies, cakes, and biscuits. I tried to watch and duplicate what she did, but I never could. I guess my hands weren’t the right size. Once I asked her for her recipe for biscuits. Her scratch biscuits were like fresh-baked clouds, light, fluffy, and warm. She handed me a box of Bisquick and said, “Don’t waste your time. Here’s your old family recipe.” I followed the directions on the box and made something that tasted like crunchy hockey pucks.

  Where was I going to find a St. Louis recipe? I grew up in the old German section, but strudel or sauerkraut were beyond me. I certainly couldn’t whip up something French as a tribute to our earliest settlers, or make collards and cornbread to honor our black population. A stove was foreign territory. I had till tomorrow to think of something, or I was condemned to serve on that mindless Dialog St. Louis page.

  Well, I’d think of some way out. I’d been at the paper less than half an hour and managed to get myself in trouble. It was ten-forty, time to pick up Georgia. I told Scarlette the department secretary that I was at the library doing research. That was the Gazette code for ducking out of the office. Once I actually ran into another reporter at the downtown library and we were both really doing research. It was very embarrassing.

  I blinked in the strong sunlight when I stepped outside the Gazette building. It was one of those heartbreakingly beautiful spring days. The trees were that tender yellow green you see only in spring. The white dogwoods were lush, romantic drifts of pearly petals. The pink dogwoods were like cotton candy. Even the dandelions looked perky on the fresh green lawns. I wondered why they were branded as weeds. I liked dandelions. There was still enough cold air under the warm spring day to remind you that a sudden cold snap could take everything away. I shivered. I didn’t need any reminders. Not when I was taking Georgia to buy a wig.

  When I picked her up in front of her building, she seemed surprisingly chipper. On the drive there, she talked about buying her wig. She was definite about what she wanted: “My hairdresser says I should have some fun, and get a couple of wigs in different styles. A long one, maybe, or something red and curly instead of my usual straight blond hair. I know she was being nice and trying to cheer me up, but I don’t want anyone to notice any difference. If I show up with red hair, Charlie will figure I’ve flipped, and start scheming to put me out to pasture.

  “So I want two wigs, both the same color and style as I have now. That way I can have one washed and set while I’m wearing the other.”

  She talked matter-of-factly. There were no tears or self-pity. Hair loss was a problem, but it was one she could solve, and right now so many of her problems had no answers. Tarkington’s Fine Wigs and Hair Fashions, a few blocks from the hospital, was exactly the right place to go. It was dignified and low-key. The quiet, helpful, older woman with the light blue eyes was used to dealing with chemo patients. Her voice was soft and soothing. “Are you in therapy, dear?” she asked, then sat Georgia down before a flattering mirror and showed her wigs that were the same shade as her own hair. I wandered around the store, looking at wild red wigs and a fascinating black Morticia Addams number. I longed to try on a jolly Dolly Parton wig and see how I’d look as a trashy blonde, but it seemed too frivolous under the circumstances.

  After about twenty minutes, Georgia found a short blond wig that could easily be trimmed into her regular style. The saleswoman made it fit nicely, then brought another one just like it. She also sold Georgia several turbans and a blue paisley scarf with blond bangs, “because nobody wants to wear a wig twenty-four hours a day, dear, and you can just throw these on if the UPS delivery person is at the door. Turbans are so glamorous, don’t you think? They always make me think of marabou and movie stars.”

  I loaded the wigs, stands, boxes, and packages into Ralph’s trunk. We still had plenty of time to get to the hospital for her radiation appointment.

  “That was painless,” Georgia said, combing her hair back in place with her fingers. I couldn’t believe it would be gone soon. It seemed so solidly rooted to her head. She must have seen me staring at it.

  “It just comes out, you know, all at once,” she said. “That’s what the chemo nurses told me. I’ll probably find it all over the floor of the shower one morning. All your hair falls out. Everything. Everywhere. Eyelashes, eyebrows, pubic hair, armpits, legs. It all goes. My eyelashes are so pale they’re hardly there anyway, and I think I can hide my missing eyebrows with big Sally Jessy glasses. I’ve been putting off getting my prescription changed for too long. This will give me an excuse to get new frames.”

  “Your arm and leg hair goes, too?” I said.

  “All of it,” she said.

  “Wow! Then you won’t have to shave your legs,” I said.r />
  “That’s what I like about you,” she said. “Always looking on the bright side.”

  I started laughing. She did, too. I could hardly drive the car around the parking garage, we were both laughing so hard. Snort. Giggle. Guffaw. It wasn’t that funny, but I had tears in my eyes. When I almost sideswiped a minivan pulling out of a parking spot on level six, I finally straightened up and behaved myself. I also grabbed the minivan’s spot.

  “This day isn’t going to be so bad after all,” I thought, as we headed for the hospital elevator. I was wrong again.

  Georgia had chemotherapy once every three weeks. She had radiation every day for six weeks. This was only the second radiation treatment, and I felt sick walking into the hospital. It was the smell. It hit me when the automatic doors opened. I felt my stomach lurch. It must have bothered Georgia, too. I could feel her stiffen beside me, but she didn’t say anything. What was that odor? Some compound of chilled air, cherry-scented disinfectant, something chemical, and something else—hospital lotion? A bleach-based cleaner? Whatever it was, the separate smells weren’t bad, but mixed together, they turned my stomach.

  We followed the blue line and opened the door to the radiation oncology waiting room. This time, the nasty receptionist wouldn’t let Georgia walk back into the patients’ waiting room. She had to wait with me. No reason was given, just a rude “you can’t go back there now.” It was almost noon, and the department must close around twelve or twelve-thirty for a lunch hour. The dreary pink “caregivers” room was empty except for the two of us and the exhausted magazines. We sat with our backs to the receptionist, so we wouldn’t have to look at her, but we could still hear her talking on the phone to a friend about her date last night. I heard her say, “… and then I said, ‘Listen, I just met you. What makes you think I’m so hard up, I’d …’ ”

  “Can you do me a favor?” Georgia asked, and I abandoned my easy listening.