THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  “What a gift for personnel management you have, Judith. Yes, I suppose I should be off. Any last minute items you’d like me to pick up?”

  “No, I have everything I need. But there is one thing I meant to ask. I couldn’t help overhearing Winky remind you that the two of you mean to begin to call William by his proper name, instead of calling him Billy as you did before. Was that your idea originally, or his?”

  Sondra hesitated. “It was Ben’s idea. And speaking of proper names, Judith, you know Ben hates to be called Winky.”

  “And did Ben say what inspired his idea?”

  Sondra avoided her stepdaughter’s gaze. She knew very well what Judith was driving at. Ben had read the letter that Judith had slipped under William’s door in the middle of the night. It would make little difference to Judith that her father approved the contents of the letter, that he’d become almost lyrical at lunchtime on the subject of his daughter’s character. To Judith it would be a simple open-and-shut case of violation of privacy, a felony charge in the court of her own opinion. “No,” Sondra said, improvising slowly, “or if he did tell me, I’ve forgotten.”

  “Had William talked to him, did he say?”

  Sondra took the bait gratefully. “Yes, that was it. It was William’s idea.”

  “That’s strange, because I was in the room from the moment that William came down for breakfast, to the moment we set off on the school bus. And I don’t remember William saying anything on the subject. We all just watched the news reports about Mount St. Helens.”

  “Then it must be that William had said something to him earlier, and that Ben remembered it today. Probably because of its being his thirteenth birthday.”

  “Oh. And what is the connection with his birthday?”

  “You really will have to ask Ben these questions, dear. And now, as you’ve pointed out, I’ve got to get into motion, if I’m going to be back in time to welcome old Dragonbreath to our happy home.”

  Judith nodded, pursing her lips in a skeptical smile, the very image of a prosecutor dismissing an uncooperative (but innocent) witness and getting ready to examine the accused.

  35

  Judith, with a spotless chef’s apron cinched tightly about her twenty-three-inch waist, appeared in the archway that opened onto the dining area and announced that dinner was served.

  “Great!” said Dan Turnage, grinding out his fifth cigarette (Sondra had been keeping count) in the big free-form blue-and-white glass ashtray on the marbleized Chinese-type coffee table around which the sectional formed a kind of oxbow. Turnage had already consumed most of a package of Crispy Cheese Doodles, and despite much finger-licking his fingers glowed yellow-orange with Cheese Doodle coloring. He had also, since arriving forty-five minutes ago, consumed three generous glasses of bourbon. And who knew how much at the Hyatt’s happy hour? He was the very definition, Sondra had decided, of a drunken sailor, and what do you do with a drunken sailor? Feed him, if you can.

  They rose from the various sections of the sectional and followed Judith into the dining area, where, in the middle of the rosewood table, a fourteen-inch anchovy and pepperoni pizza had been cut with scientific accuracy into ten equal slices.

  “You’re there, Mr. Turnage,” Judith directed, pointing to the foot of the table. “And William, you’re here beside me.” Her seating arrangement placed Turnage and her father at opposite ends of the table, which had been expanded by its middle leaf. Judith and William sat side by side across from Sondra, William next to Turnage, Judith by her father. “In theory there are two slices for everyone,” Judith said, “but in practice there’s more, since I can’t stand anchovies and will have to pass on the pizza. But this is only the first course, so save room.” She signaled the beginning of the meal by helping herself to a sliver of carrot from the lazy Susan beside the pizza.

  As soon as he’d helped himself to a slice of pizza and picked up the trailing strings of cheese he’d let ooze down onto the tablecloth, Turnage continued his analysis of the prospects of the Twins in the season ahead. It was a subject on which no one else had any contribution to make, though Ben was able from time to time to think of leading questions that would rekindle Turnage’s powers of speculation. “So how do you think our boys will stack up against the Royals?” Ben asked.

  “Good question!” Turnage answered, having taken advantage of the pause in his own flow to bolt down half the slice of pizza. Then off he went through the permutations and combinations, comparing the pitching styles of the Royals’ Rich Gale and Renie Martin and estimating how the Twins’ best batters would fare against each of them. Sondra actually began to enjoy the situation, since both the children, instead of displaying overt hostility, had adopted her own tactic of giving the man endless rope. Once Ben had satisfied himself that Turnage wasn’t aware of how he was monopolizing the conversation, or at least that he was content to do so, even he seemed to take a secret pleasure in leading Turnage on. The man’s powers of insensitivity were truly amazing. But at last he reached a kind of conclusion, predicting that the Royals would take the American League pennant, but would then lose the World Series, probably to Philadelphia.

  “Do you want to bet on that?” said William, in a tone suitable to a serious wager, neither friendly nor hostile.

  “Why, sure.” Turnage gave a condescending smile. “The Series is still a long ways off. But I’m game. Who do you favor then?”

  “No one. I’ll just bet that Philadelphia doesn’t beat Kansas City in the World Series. I’ll bet everything in this envelope—” From his back pocket he took the folded birthday card with Ben’s gift and set it down on the stained tablecloth.

  “William,” Sondra pretended to object, “that’s your birthday present.”

  “It’s his money,” Ben said, “and he’s entitled to spend it as he likes. But it’s scarcely a fair bet for Dan here.”

  “Why not?” Judith asked. “Mr. Turnage seemed very confident of his predictions, and he was able to give so many good reasons for making them. He convinced me. But perhaps he doesn’t believe in gambling. We Catholics gamble so much we never stop to think that many other religions consider gambling a vice.”

  Turnage chuckled in just the pained, mirthless way he’d chuckled when he’d appeared on “Sixty Minutes.” “I don’t belong to one of those religions, Judy.” He turned to William. “You got a bet, son. How much is in the envelope?”

  William smiled. “I don’t know. I haven’t counted it.”

  That was a lie, of course, but such a nicely double-edged lie that Sondra could in no way find fault with him for it. It made his wager seem all the more flamboyant, and at the same time it was a reproach to Ben for not having bothered to get a proper birthday present. Such style, and only thirteen years old; she felt a genuine glow of pride.

  With fingers greasy with oil from the pizza, Turnage counted the money enclosed in the birthday card. “Two hundred fifty dollars. You want to bet that much?”

  “Sure.”

  After the bet was sealed with a handshake, Judith rose from her chair and said, “You’ll have to excuse me, while I get the next course ready. It’ll only take two or three minutes.”

  William pushed back his chair. “I’ll help,” he said decisively. Both Judith and Sondra gave him odd looks, but neither raised any objection.

  When the three adults had been left to themselves, Turnage asked if he could have an ashtray. Sondra obligingly went into the living room and returned with the big blue-and-white glass ashtray from the coffee table. Ben, meanwhile, had opened a bottle of Almaden. Sondra had never known Ben to serve Almaden to company. Turnage lit a cigarette. Ben filled three glasses and, raising his glass to Turnage, proposed a toast: “Your health!”

  Turnage knocked back half the glass of wine, and commented, “That’s some sharp kid.”

  “You shouldn’t have let him egg you on into that bet,” Ben said.

  “It was Judith who did the egging on,” Sondra observed. “She’s no
t such a featherbrain that she doesn’t understand how the odds favor William. I’m sure she was leading you on quite deliberately.”

  “I’ll admit I kind of admired their teamwork,” Turnage said. “But what the hell, if I win, it’ll be worth it. And if I lose, I’ll deduct it as a business expense. I’ll just put it down as ‘dinner,’ and speaking of dinner, I like the way you got ‘em trained to do the cooking. The way they both hopped up to go out to the kitchen, you don’t see that every day.”

  “It’s something we don’t see every day either,” Sondra said defensively. “But Judith insisted that she make the entire dinner for William’s birthday, and we try to go along with anything that encourages her to show an interest in food.”

  “She has anorexia,” Ben said, by way of explanation. He refilled his own and Sondra’s glasses, then placed the bottle where Turnage would be able to reach it by a long stretch.

  “What’s anorexia? A disease?”

  “Not in the usual sense,” Sondra said. “It’s a psychological stage she’s going through. It means she has no appetite.”

  “Oh, anorexics have an appetite all right,” said Ben. “But they become obsessed with their own willpower. It starts out with dieting, and in the most extreme cases it can end with someone starving herself to death. It’s almost always women who come down with it, usually teenage girls. We’ve become experts on the subject, haven’t we, sugar?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  Turnage reached for the wine bottle. “What my folks used to do with me when I wouldn’t eat my dinner was they’d make me sit with a plate of food in front of me until I’d eaten it. Ever try that?”

  Sondra shook her head. “When she’s forced to eat, she throws up afterward. Violently. It’s not induced, she doesn’t push a finger down her throat. I’ve seen it happen, it’s completely spontaneous. But it’s not something we should be talking about now. She’ll hear us, and there’s nothing likelier to make her finicky than being reminded of her problem.”

  Turnage stubbed out his cigarette and grinned. “Bobby Snyder, catcher with the White Sox, used to be just the same. He was usually a fair batter, but around ‘73, ‘74, he had a slump. I mean, he was batting zee-roe. And if anyone talked to him about it, that just made him play worse, he’d start messing up behind the plate. It was a no-win situation.”

  “It is,” Ben agreed, “a no-win situation.”

  Sondra smiled and changed the subject: “And how is—” She tried to remember: Clara? Charlotte? She couldn’t be sure. “Mrs. Turnage? Wasn’t she able to accompany you on this trip?”

  Turnage scowled. “If you mean my mother, she’s doing fine. If you mean Cindy, we got divorced.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette, then snapped open his lighter and tried to light it. The lighter wouldn’t catch.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Sondra said.

  “It’s been two years,” said Ben, with a glance to let Sondra know that he was on to her tricks. They’d already discussed Turnage’s divorce and agreed that it had been one of those events, like the impeachment vote against Nixon, that makes a person believe that in the long run there is justice in the world. “Dan is probably over the worst of the shock by now.”

  “Oh no, every time I have to write an alimony check, the pain is as bad as ever.” Turnage laughed at his own joke with a judicious amount of false gusto. Then he glared intently at the end of his cigarette and tried once again to scratch a flame from his lighter.

  Sondra, though she smoked herself, hated people who smoked at the dinner table. She thought it gave a bad name to smokers in general. Even so, she was about to do the hostesslike thing and fetch the big silver lighter from the whatnot in the foyer, when Judith, stripped of her apron and looking to Sondra’s stepmotherly eye more than usually like a concentration camp victim, returned to her place at the table.

  “William,” Judith said, sitting down and placing her fingertips on the edge of the table, as for a séance, “insists that because it’s his birthday, he is going to serve the dinner. I tried to argue, but it truly is his birthday, so finally I was overruled.”

  “So, what’s for dinner?” Turnage asked hopefully.

  “It’s a hot dish of Spam with scalloped potatoes, but it’s also sort of Mexican.”

  “Spam?” Sondra asked, vaguely alarmed, as though at the mention of a distant relative serving time in prison. “Why Spam?”

  “Well, I’d been planning to make tacos, because I know William likes them, but then on the bus coming home from school I heard from my friend Betty about the essay William had written for his German class. Betty’s in the same class.”

  “German?” Turnage gave up on his unlighted cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. “What’s he want to study German for? We won that war forty years ago.” He showed, with a little bark of laughter, that this was meant as a joke.

  “Thirty-five years ago actually,” said William, who approached the table gauntleted by the quilted oven glove and bearing the four-quart Pyrex bowl, which gave off a powerful odor of scorched mustard. “And I really don’t have any good reason for studying German except that I like the sound of it, and you have to have taken one language to get into most good medical schools. Mom, I can’t serve you anything when your napkin’s on your plate.”

  “Guests are served first, William,” Sondra pointed out.

  “Right.” William went to stand by Turnage and sliced into the steaming hot dish in the bowl with a slotted metal spoon. He scooped out a large portion of potatoes in an ocher sauce complicated with diced bits of Spam, kernel corn, and flecks of green and red vegetable matter. Overall the impression was not promising.

  After William had gone round the table serving the hot dish, Judith finished answering Sondra’s question, Why Spam? “Anyhow Betty told me what William wrote in his essay about the earliest things he remembered, and one of them was Spam. In his essay William only mentioned Spam sandwiches, on Wonder Bread, but that didn’t seem fancy enough for a birthday dinner. We don’t usually have Spam in any form. I think Father thinks it’s beneath us. Like eating Twinkies for dessert.”

  “Now, Judith,” Ben said blandly, “you mustn’t dig for compliments. Spam can be quite tasty, properly prepared. One could even wish you’d been more generous with it. The potatoes could use some stronger contrast.”

  “I used the entire can,” Judith protested. “Plus a can of Mexicali corn niblets.”

  “The sauce is delicious,” William said.

  “Very tangy,” Sondra agreed.

  “Thank you,” said Judith without looking away from the single pink die of Spam speared on the end of her fork. She seemed visibly to be bracing herself to eat it. She lifted the fork to her mouth, which opened just wide enough to admit the morsel of meat. The empty fork was returned to rest on the plate. She chewed, and went on chewing as though she were dealing with a hunk of gristly steak. At last she swallowed. Sondra could have applauded. Only then did she realize that both her husband and Turnage had been watching the performance with the same fascination.

  “It’s tasty,” Judith said brightly, “if I say so myself. But maybe there’s more mustard in the sauce than there should be. Next time I think I’ll put in less mustard.”

  Ben laughed and then, his mouth being full of potatoes, began discreetly to choke. Once he’d stopped choking, he offered no explanation of what had provoked his laughter.

  They began, all five of them, to eat, slowly and stolidly, as though under duress, as though wishing for doggy bags into which they might surreptitiously scrape the food from their plates. Sondra tried to think of a neutral subject of conversation. But not baseball, they’d done baseball to death.

  It was Turnage who rescued them from the widening silence by turning to William and saying, “So tell us about this Apple computer. What are you going to be able to do with that that I can’t do on my little old pocket calculator? Think it’ll do your German for you?”

  William gave Tur
nage a commiserating look of the sort that Sondra usually got for well-meaning but dumb questions. Then he proceeded to explain. Soon he’d become as big a bore on the subject as Turnage had been about the Kansas City baseball team. Ben was looking chagrined, but it would not have looked good if he’d tried to cut off the flow of William’s enthusiasm for his birthday present from Madge Michaels, a gift that made his own envelope with $250 seem pretty paltry. So while William celebrated the new era dawning for the “computer literate,” they went on eating their dinner.

  There was something definitely peculiar about Judith’s hot dish. Not just the sauce, which tasted as though half the spice shelf had been emptied into it. There were also little scraps of paper in among the soggy slices of potato. Sondra had found two so far. One might have been accidental; two indicated something else, but exactly what Sondra did not wish to know. The scraps of paper were barely recognizable as such, and she’d eaten them without comment, but she feared that Ben, if he were to notice the same thing, might not react as mildly. An explanation, if one were required of Judith, would surely lead to a family quarrel.

  At last it was Judith who brought William’s monologue to a stop by asking her father if he wanted a second helping. He didn’t, but Turnage said he would (the poor man must have been starving), and while the oven glove and the bowl were passed to him, Judith introduced the subject they’d all politely been avoiding. Tobacco.

  “Can we look forward to seeing you on TV again any time soon, Mr. Turnage?”

  “I hope not, unless it’s for my induction into the Hall of Fame.”

  “You didn’t like being on ‘Sixty Minutes’?”

  “No one enjoys being publicly attacked, Judith,” her father observed. “Or privately attacked, for that matter. So please let’s preserve our usual truce tonight?”