She said, “You’re not going to ask me to do anything, are you?”
“Hardly.” I really surprised myself. Maybe I wasn’t so bad after all.
I drove Clarice to her house. It saddened me to see so inventive a young woman walk into such a shack. I could only think of what I might have felt dropping her off had I managed to exploit her imagined debt. She didn’t see the nobility. I could tell by the way she looked at me and shook her head that she thought I was a sucker. In a way, she was right. I do know that by the time I got home, there was something about myself, based on this extremely foolish episode, that I was sick of.
I would be embarrassed by my private detective charade when, three years later, Clarice appeared in my office as a patient. I remembered my lie immediately and took it as a benchmark of what I hoped I had left behind. Deluded again. Clarice had grown up, was out of trouble and holding a good job. I first hoped she wouldn’t recognize me, but I realized as she studied me with surprise what folly that was: still, the discovery of my real identity seemed to humanize me in her eyes. She looked back on our episode of the hot dog stand with humor and affection, and I found myself caring for Clarice in the way I wished I cared for everybody. I was about to comment that she had finally grown up when she said more or less the same thing to me.
Clarice came to me only occasionally, for allergies at first. When she married, she began to see me more frequently, initially for chronic indigestion and then for various other stress-related ailments, hives and insomnia mostly. She moved around various county situations, and her husband had a dangerous job in a mine that paid quite well, so I didn’t think financial issues were driving her problems. But she was a worried young woman and not candid with me about her marriage. We had become good acquaintances, which was not ideal for objectivity, necessarily, or candor. Worrying about her felt inappropriately parental.
I was told early in the days of my practice that the battered housewife was the bread and butter of the general practitioner. While this may have been an overstatement — sports physicals, pointless reassurances for things caused by viruses, and flock shooting generalized pain were more remunerative — it was disturbing how many women came to me with injuries that did not match the explanations. Clarice appeared the morning after our four-day rodeo with the customary facial contusions and a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. A nosebleed that won’t stop is a serious problem, and a CBC indicated she had lost quite a bit of blood. This necessitated a very discomforting procedure after chemical cold packs and pressure had failed to stop the flow. The abrasions to Clarice’s face made clear the sort of injuries that had led to the bleeding, which she ascribed to the dry mountain air. She was very uneasy about my moving her head around to get a better view of the nasal vestibule, as though flinching from the possibility of further blows. I was able to identify several bleeding sites with the speculum, one requiring cauterization. This, while not pleasant, obviated packing the nasal passages with cotton, which required twisting the material into place at the cost of considerable patient suffering.
I asked who abused her and got a remarkably philosophical reply made more dramatic by the condition of her face. She seemed ashamed of what had happened and may have explained her hostility to me whom she’d known for a long time. She said, “It’s not abuse if you saw it coming.”
“Are you saying you had it coming?”
“No, I said I saw it coming.”
“And you didn’t get out of the way.”
“Right.”
“And since you didn’t get out of the way you share responsibility for what happened to you?”
“Right.”
I said, “I don’t get it.”
She said, “You don’t have to get it. It’s not your life.”
“Clarice! I don’t believe this! I’m trying to help.”
She began to cry. What was most painful was the thought that when I had first known her, when she had problems with the law and was just another reckless girl having not yet learned to conform and lead a regular life, she would have never put up with this. I had the fleeting idea that her problems arose from being domesticated and that she had been safe as a wild girl but was endangered as a wife.
Our dialogue would grow less formal on her ensuing visits. Some of it was even lighthearted: she reminded me that when she’d first met me I was actually excited to run her hot dog stand. But the comfort was short-lived. I had noticed that as battery went on, the injuries seemed to have migrated to less obvious places, which in my mind aggravated the anger with cruelty. On one visit, Clarice came in almost cheerily and sat down. She had put on weight, though a shadow of former girlishness could still be discerned. I at first mistook it for flirtation, but it was just a part of her self that still survived. In showing me the bruising around her midriff, her modesty seemed touchingly out of place. Once again I made my pitch for counseling, rescue services, restraining orders — and got nowhere. Nevertheless, she continued coming for her injuries, which she showed me with a rueful smile. It was driving me crazy in an abnormal, disorienting way, as though I were falling in love with her. I wished I understood this wild and emotional feeling, which was in some part the wish to protect her, and in another, the queer intimacy engendered by examining and treating this parade of lacerations. There came a point at which I understood that I was not handling this as well as I should, that my rising emotions were inappropriate to the caring detachment proper to a good physician; I had known her as a youngster and she had met me in the twilight of my foolishness. I was losing my objectivity and feeling far too strongly about Clarice’s situation, into which, as she herself had pointed out, I had no business interfering; my job was to provide medical treatment, period. To the turbulence of my emotions, therefore, was added the indignity of rejected friendship. As to the possibility of these matters altering my life forever, the timing could not have been worse.
Clarice now worked at the county courthouse researching titles; she had been there since finishing her probation for something not major, shoplifting I think, making few friends among her coworkers, who found her girlishness unappealing. Clarice’s husband was probably a drug user of some sort, a man who also consoled himself by drinking, consoled himself for enduring a lousy life in a platinum mine south of Columbus in exchange for high pay. I tried to offer Clarice advice and understanding, all of which was smiled away. I had at that time in my life and career an inadequate idea of what my responsibilities were, and I saw so many people doing things that were not good for them that I had grown quite detached — or at least detached once I had dropped my formulaic, avuncular comments and called it a day. I got rid of the little moustache. My colleagues seemed to know what was going on; in fact, Clarice had seen some of them when she thought I knew too much about her situation. I will say on my behalf that their angry wishes for the husband were unlawful. Clarice’s worst physical problems were not visible as bruises would be but were the less apparent somewhat crippling effects of having limbs twisted. Physical therapy was out of the question because “he” wouldn’t pay for it and besides “it’s nothing I can’t handle.” My attempts to learn anything more just reinstated her sullenness and reminded me that I had gotten too close to her. I had adopted a pleading tone, which only made things worse. She ceased to seem like a friend or even a longtime patient. With a consummate lack of professionalism, I found that my feelings were hurt. I felt rejected.
“Do you have family in the area?”
“No.”
“Where do they live?”
“Harlowton.”
“That’s forty miles.”