THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  Mrs. Obstschmecker got up out of the chair and went to stand over the shampoo basin. As she tilted her head to look down at the mass of foam-whitened hair clogging the drain, the towel about her head came loose and fell to her shoulders.

  “It’s not my fault,” Sonia insisted stonily.

  For the first time since her earliest childhood (for as a girl she had been quite sedate and not given to tantrums and displays) Mrs. Obstschmecker screamed. She lifted her hands to touch the sides of her head, as though touch might contradict the evidence of sight. Not a curl of hair remained on her head. She was as bald as Porky Pig.

  18

  By the time Henry got home, all smiles, with a Red Owl shopping bag bulging with a good-sized pumpkin and several bags of candy, Madge was seething. She’d spent most of the last four hours trying to comfort or at least to quiet her hysterical mother. Finally it was only by the professional expedient of giving Mrs. Obstschmecker a placebo that she was told was a powerful barbiturate and tranquilizer that Madge had been able to get a minute to herself. Time enough to mix a screwdriver and then to call the lawyer whose name Dr. Allard of chemotherapy had given her. Alex Grossbart had offices in the Foshay Tower and specialized in products liability law. She called the office and managed to talk her way past the receptionist and get Grossbart’s advice as to the immediate steps to be taken. Then she just sat and stewed.

  “Hey,” said Henry, setting down the shopping bag, “what’s wrong? Why are you home from the hospital so early? Is something the matter with Ned?”

  “Why are you home so late?”

  He held up his arms in mock surrender to her anger. “Hey, I’m innocent. Just following the instructions you gave me this morning. Remember?” He reached down into the shopping bag with both hands, took out the pumpkin, and held it up as a peace offering. “I got this, and the candy for Billy to take to his party, and other candy for the trick-or-treaters who come round here. They had a special on miniature Heath bars. You want one?”

  Madge grimaced. “Not with orange juice.”

  Henry looked at the almost empty glass in Madge’s hand. He knew her well enough to know that except at breakfast she didn’t drink orange juice unless she was having a screwdriver, but he made no comment. “Something must be wrong. You look shell-shocked.”

  “It’s Mother,” Madge said, letting her shoulders slump. “She’s had an accident. And I don’t understand it. It makes no sense.”

  “Goddamn. She didn’t fall again, did she?”

  Madge shook her head woefully. “She’s lost her hair.”

  Henry crinkled his eyebrows into an expression of puzzlement and sat in the chair across the kitchen table from his wife. “Run that one by again.”

  Madge took a deep breath and launched into the account that she’d already, waiting for Henry, recited in her imagination a dozen times—how Grandma O. had called the hospital in a state of upset bordering on incoherence, how she’d tried to get him to go fetch the poor woman from the beauty parlor on Ludens Street but couldn’t get hold of him (“But you know, Madge, that I’m usually not here at that time of day”—a protest that won him only a baleful glance), how she’d driven to the beauty parlor and found Grandma O. in a state of near collapse and was screamed at by the woman who ran the place. “As though what had happened were Mother’s fault! Poor Mother just sat there with her hands trembling and almost out of her mind, and really I couldn’t blame her. It looks so dreadful. But you mustn’t say anything to her, Henry. She’s very touchy about it, anyone would be.”

  “Let me get this straight. She went into a beauty parlor and started getting a shampoo, and the shampoo took off all her hair?”

  “Well, obviously, it wasn’t shampoo. There must have been a mistake in the packaging, or else this Sonia is lying, but she swears it was just ordinary baby shampoo that she’d bought at a drugstore. I did have the presence of mind to take the shampoo bottle she used so it can be analyzed. I told her if she didn’t let me take it with me I would call the police in then and there. She’s almost as upset as Mother, of course. Something like that could ruin her business. It’s only a hole-in-the-wall operation. And she’s not insured against this sort of thing happening.”

  Henry tried to envision his mother-in-law bald.

  “Henry, this isn’t funny. This is serious. Mother’s in a state. Imagine if the same thing had happened to you.”

  “No, you’re right, of course. But I don’t see there’s much that can be done. Will it grow out again?”

  Madge scowled. “Now how would I know that? God, I hope so. Mother’s certain she has cancer. She must have heard of baldness being a side effect of chemotherapy and confused cause and effect. She’s in such a state, but the lawyer says you have to take a picture of her. As soon as possible. Is there film in the camera?”

  “The lawyer? This is the first I’ve heard of a lawyer.”

  “Dr. Allard in chemotherapy gave me his name. He specializes in cases like this.”

  “Dr. Allard or the lawyer?”

  “Henry, please, this is nothing to joke about. I went to chemotherapy in the first place because I had the harebrained idea—”

  “Harebrained? Now who’s cracking wise?”

  “Henry! I went there because I thought they might have an extra woman’s wig on hand. Sometimes when they’re counseling women who face chemotherapy and the prospect of massive hair loss—”

  “Oof, that sounds worse than going bald.”

  Madge finished the screwdriver with a gulp and a grimace. “Anyhow, they didn’t have one, but in the process of my asking, Dr. Allard suggested I get in touch with this lawyer Alex Grossbart in the Foshay Tower. So I called him, and he said that what we had to do right away is take photographs of… the accident. In profile and looking straight ahead. In case we do end up suing the manufacturer, it will be necessary as evidence in the court. So if the camera doesn’t have film in it, maybe you could get some?”

  “Sure. But does it have to be this minute? The drugstore stays open till nine.”

  “Whenever.”

  “It’s too bad there’s no positive role models for bald women. If you’re a man, there’s Kojak, and Yul Brynner, and, um, Mr. Clean. But not much for women.”

  Before Madge could decide whether he was being sarcastic or sincere, the front door slammed shut loudly and a moment later Billy appeared in the kitchen to announce, with tears running down his face and a general air of tragic loss: “I’m not going to the Halloween party!”

  “Billy-boy, what’s the problem? Did you get in a fight at school?” Henry patted his lap. “Come, sit down, tell us what happened.”

  Billy shook his head and wiped at the tears on his cheek with the cuffs of his flannel shirt, but he did not move any closer to his father. “I wasn’t in a fight. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just went to the blackboard to do a division problem and everyone started laughing. Sister told them to stop, and they stopped for a while, and I explained the problem, which was how many times does six go into ninety-five.”

  “You’ve got me,” said Henry. “How many times?”

  But Billy was not to be humored so easily. He frowned down at the kitchen floor and fresh tears formed at the corners of his eyes. Henry felt the sudden familiar ache of parental helplessness and got down on his knees beside Billy and hugged him till the boy’s body surrendered to the force of his love and Billy returned the hug and began to cry in earnest.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he sobbed. “But they were all laughing, and then Sister saw what it was and she took it off my back and tore it up. But she wouldn’t say what it said. She made everyone stay in class an extra fifteen minutes, because no one would say who’d put it on my back. It wasn’t Janet Daly, who has the desk behind me, ‘cause she was out sick today. And all the time during the detention period they kept laughing, all of them. I waited out on the playground till they were let out, but no one would tell my what was on the paper, not even my best friends. They
said they couldn’t read it. But they were laughing.”

  “Maybe it was funny—did you ever think of that?”

  Billy’s body stiffened at the betrayal represented by Henry’s suggestion.

  “I know what it probably said,” said Madge in her cool Nurse-Michaels tone of voice. “It probably said ‘Kick me.’”

  “Probably,” Henry agreed, grateful for Madge’s quick teamwork.

  “Kick me?” Billy repeated.

  “That’s what kids used to stick on other kids’ backs back when I was in school,” Madge said, nodding. “They usually didn’t do it in the classroom, though, they did it at recess. It was a very common practical joke in those days. But you shouldn’t take it so seriously. No one means any real harm by it.”

  Billy looked baleful but he’d stopped crying. “And if you have that on your back on the playground and someone reads it, then do they kick you?”

  “That’s the joke,” said Henry. “Of course, it’s never a joke to really hurt someone, but that’s not usually the result. Anyhow I don’t think you should miss the Halloween party on account of a practical joke that everyone else has probably forgotten by now. Tell you what, you go up to your room and think it over, and in a couple minutes I’ll bring up that pumpkin there on the table and we can carve it into a jack-o’-lantern. Okay?”

  Billy brightened. Carving the jack-o’-lantern was the best part of Halloween. “Why can’t we do it now?”

  “Because,” said Madge, “your father and I have to talk about something. Grandma O. has had… an accident. And she’s feeling very upset. And for the time being we should all try to just… stay out of her way.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  Madge hesitated and then, seeing no way round having to tell him, she said, “An accident at the beauty parlor she went to.”

  “All her hair came off when she got shampooed,” said Henry, trying but still not quite managing to keep a straight face.

  “All of it?” Billy asked.

  “Yes,” said Madge, “but we must all try to act as though there’s nothing… strange about the way she looks. It’s been very upsetting for her. Think what you felt like at school when everyone was laughing and then just imagine what Grandma must feel.”

  “So we shouldn’t stare at her,” Henry elaborated, “or make any remarks that she might hear. Now, you scoot on upstairs.”

  Reluctantly, with his grievance against his classmates still gnawing at his pride like the fox the famous Spartan boy concealed beneath his shirt, Billy went upstairs. He paused at the door of Ned’s bedroom. Telling his parents what had happened at school hadn’t made him feel that much better, and he wasn’t inclined to go over it all again with Ned. It would just give him something to gloat about. As for what had happened to Grandma O.’s hair, Billy had gathered, from his father’s amused reaction, that that didn’t represent any serious harm, but was more in the nature of a practical joke. But at the moment his own misery loomed too large for him to take much pleasure in the joke.

  In his own room, he came upon a fresh reminder of his dilemma. There on the hook on the inside of the open closet door were the white jacket, white pants, and broken stethoscope that were the costume he and his parents had finally agreed he would go to the party in, instead of blacking his face with charcoal and coming as Little Black Sambo, an idea that Billy had been persuaded would be unwise.

  It had been an easy costume to put together. The pants were from his First Communion the year before, and the jacket was one his mother had got from the very smallest nurse’s aide at the hospital. There was also, atop the dresser, a headband with one of the funny flashlights on it that doctors use to look down people’s throats, plus a supply of wooden sticks for holding down their tongues. A doctor’s costume, clearly, but not just any doctor. Billy had been planning to go to the party as the hero of his favorite movie, which he’d seen twice when it came out the year before, Young Frankenstein.

  What most people don’t realize about Frankenstein is that he isn’t the monster, he’s the doctor. So really this was the perfect costume for Halloween, and Billy, though he’d complained so much about having to attend the school party instead of going treat-or-treating, had been looking forward intensely to wearing his Frankenstein costume to the party and repeating some of the jokes from the movie and using the sticks to depress people’s tongues and generally showing off and having fun. But now, because of what had happened in class, he would have to stay home. The unfairness of the situation rankled, but what could he do, what could he do?

  19

  Pumpkins are always tougher than you remember, and as Henry was sawing down from the corner of the jack-o’-lantern’s grinning mouth, the knife blade slipped and almost took off his finger. It did take off the jack-o’-lantern’s single central tooth. “This is one jack-o’-lantern,” Henry quipped, by way of an apology for the thing’s bland toothlessness, “that’s eaten too much candy.”

  Billy frowned, not immediately making the connection.

  “He’s lost all his teeth,” Henry explained, rotating the jack-o’-lantern so that its minimalist face—triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a simple crescent for a mouth—confronted Billy head on. “Because he eats too much candy and never brushes his teeth. Didn’t you know that candy rots teeth?”

  Billy giggled and gave his seal of approval. “Neat.”

  Henry next fit the white hurricane candle into the pumpkin’s hollowed core, another process less easily accomplished than memory gave warning of. Ten minutes and two books of matches later, however, the candle stood stable on its base, and when the lid was put in place and the light in the room turned off, the effect was undeniably eerie. What a weird thing for people to do, he thought. Wonder how it ever got started.

  The lighting of the jack-o’-lantern must have brought similar thoughts to Billy’s mind, for he asked his father: “Dad, when was the first jack-o-lantern?”

  Henry relished the challenge of improvising plausible answers to Billy’s dicier questions, and he proceeded to explain that in early times people had believed that ghosts, being naturally attracted to candle flames, as moths are, could be trapped inside a pumpkin shell and then made to tell their secrets, such as where they’d hidden their money before they died. He was even able to offer as supporting evidence the nursery rhyme about Peter, the pumpkin eater, who put his wife (his dead wife, in Peter’s case) into a pumpkin shell.

  Before Billy could begin to cross-examine him on this bit of instant folklore, there was a summons from downstairs. Madge had got back from the drugstore with a roll of film and wanted Henry to put it in the camera.

  Henry rolled up the heap of seeds and pulp inside the newspapers spread out on the floor of Billy’s room, but he left the jack-o’-lantern, all aglow and giving off a vivid stink of burnt pumpkin, on the top of the dresser, making Billy promise that if it started smoking more than it was already he would blow out the candle. On the way downstairs he checked his watch. Six forty-five. Less than half an hour to jolly Grandma O. into modeling her new trouble-free hairdo and then Madge would have to drive Billy to his party. Really they ought to wait till morning when, as a rule, Grandma O. was in a better humor than just after dinner (if you could call Swanson’s Chicken Pies and canned peas a dinner). But Madge had got the bee in her bonnet that the pictures had to be taken tonight, so what the hell.

  Madge was in the kitchen. The camera and the roll of film were on the table. “You load the film, will you, Henry, while I go talk to Mother again. She’s still so upset, and the idea of taking photos of what’s happened is naturally not very appealing, but I pointed out that if she wants to be able to sue the manufacturer she’ll need the evidence, and that seemed to bring her round.”

  “Hey,” said Henry, poker-faced. “That’s what I call strength of character.”

  Henry loaded the camera, and then, feeling antsy, took the wrappings and the contents of an ashtray over to the plastic garbage pail under the sink. H
e opened the pail with the foot lever and saw, on top of the crunched-up Swanson’s Chicken Pie boxes, the emptied fifth of vodka from the freezer. On a hunch he checked the freezer. There was now a full quart of vodka peeking out from behind the brick of Sealtest. That explained why Madge had been so willing to make the trip out of the house to get the film. Under the circumstances Henry could hardly blame her.

  He helped himself to a swig from the still-warm lip of the bottle and returned it to the freezer just as Madge gave the all-clear to come to Grandma O.’s bedroom.

  She was sitting in the platform rocker which had been moved to the middle of the room directly under the brass lighting fixture where the light was brightest for taking a picture. The camera did have a flash attachment, but they knew from experience that it wasn’t that dependable. She was wearing her pink quilted housecoat and, incongruously, Madge’s cold-weather cap with the fake fur earflaps that could be (and were now) tied under the chin. The cap was bulky enough in itself that it would have looked much the same on any head that it fit, however bald or hirsute. But it also looked ludicrous, and Henry had to restrain an impulse to smile.

  “Hello, Grandma O.,” he said in a soft, placating tone, such as one might adopt toward a dog known to be ill-tempered. “I was sorry to hear about your accident. It’s a terrible thing to happen.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker pressed her lips together tightly and agreed to this proposition with an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Mother,” Madge said, in the same tone of voice as Henry, “you’ll have to take your cap off now. So Henry can take the pictures.”

  Mrs. Obstschmecker glared at the camera in Henry’s hand and then, still glaring, undid the knotted strings of the cap. The task proved unexpectedly difficult, for the knot had been made very tight, and the loose, crepey flesh of her underchin prevented ready access. Finally it was Madge who got the knot undone, and Madge who, when Grandma O. remained stock-still, took off the cap to expose the hairless pink ovoid of her head.