Miss Ball had been a farm girl. She could remember seeing her father pushing whole barrows of nourishing dung across rotting boards to the fields. She had peeled potatoes, she had awakened in a musty room covered with a damp quilt. That’s how it was when you lived close to the ground. It was damp and you were always kicking plants and dirt back into place, sifting stones, building walls, rocking on the porch and watching the crops fail. This was where Miss Ball learned Mother Nature’s spiteful ways.
But her operation had cost her a pretty penny and now, with her childhood thoughts of crabgrass and her recent discovery that lungs ballooned and adenoids reappeared, and — most discouraging of all — that Juan had been extremely, shall we say, virile, and now was dead, Miss Ball could not remember if the doctor had given her a warranty.
She had gotten one with her Snooz-Alarm — it was a big green-edged one-year warranty that looked like a savings bond. And she had gotten one with her hair dryer, her mixer, her vibrator and her juicer. If anything went wrong she didn’t have to raise a fuss. She just told the clerk that it was not in working order and she would get a new one, a new dryer or juicer. But she hadn’t got a warranty from the doctor.
She had asked herself many times if she needed one and had always decided no. But she had not yet realized her power over men. She had thought she was too old for that sort of thing. She could always reassure herself that Juan was doing it for the money. Was she too old? Harold Potts didn’t think so. And that’s finally what scared her.
“You look marvellous!” the doctor said with professional enthusiasm as Miss Ball seated herself on the other side of the desk.
“That’s the outside you’re looking at. It’s the inside I’m worried about.”
“There’s not much left to worry about,” the doctor said. He was going to say ha-ha, but he changed his mind when he saw the expression on Miss Ball’s face. He decided to reassure her. “What I mean is, you’re empty. So why worry?”
“Empty? That doesn’t sound too medical to me.”
“I try to simplify things for my patients.”
“I’m not stupid, doctor. You can talk plain to me.”
“I’m talking plain, Miss Ball. Now what’s wrong?”
“I want a warranty and I want it now.”
“A what?”
“A warranty. I haven’t had a wink of sleep for the past two days. All I could think of was my things, the things you say you removed, only God knows whether you did or not.”
“Miss Ball, I’m a medical doctor. I have taken the Hippocratic Oath. Every doctor takes it — it’s part of being a doctor.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Miss Ball snapped.
“About the guarantee. .”
“Warranty.”
“As far as the warranty goes. Why, I can’t imagine why you’d want something like that.”
“I have one for my radio, my juicer and everything else.” Miss Ball laughed helplessly, hollowly, for no reason at all. “I was foolish to have the operation without getting it warranteed.”
“You want it warranteed, is that it? That’s why you came here today — so I could swear out a warranty?”
“You could have been taking me for a ride.”
“A ride?” The doctor aimed the top of his head at Miss Ball. “Do you know what you’re saying, Miss Ball? Now you’re talking about ethics. Yes you are. You’re talking about my ethics!”
“How’s a body supposed to know what’s going on? You come into the room and stab me with a needle. I fall flat and then you fiddle around for three hours. .”
“Fiddle around? I take you for a ride to fiddle around, and for this you want a warranty?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m a very busy man.”
“I lived on a farm, don’t worry.”
“Why should I worry about you living on a farm?”
“Sure,” was all Miss Ball said.
“I want to assure you that I operated on you. I did my level best, as I do with each and every patient. I have not hounded you for the money.”
“You can whistle and wait, for all I care.”
“I have nothing but your health in mind.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve seen things grow back — grass, eyebrows, adenoids. I’ve seen things go wrong — my toaster, my dryer, my mixer. .”
“That’s a doctor’s business — health. We don’t try to frighten patients. We are very busy men.”
“Busy my foot. You think you’re special, you doctors. That’s the trouble with you — you think you’re better than other people that have to work for a living. You wouldn’t know about that, would you? Hard work! Hah! Ever get your hands dirty, real dirty and filthy with hard work?”
“Not that I remember, Miss Ball. I couldn’t call myself a doctor if I went around getting. .”
“And you call yourself a man! Ever wheel a whole barrow of cow manure up a plank? Bet you think it’s easy!”
“I never said that wheeling cow manure was easy. It’s probably very hard work.”
“Probably,” said Miss Ball in the same tone of voice.
The doctor asked Miss Ball if she thought he was a quack. “You think I’m a quack, don’t you?” he asked.
“Who cares what I think. No one cares.”
“I care, Miss Ball. I care a great deal what you think,” the doctor said softly.
“All right, I think you’re a quack,” said Miss Ball.
The doctor bit his lip. He said he had been a doctor a long time. He had healed a lot of wounds, not all of them physical. He had seen a lot of people come and go.
Things grow, Miss Ball thought. Things kept growing and there was little or nothing you could do to stop them. It was Mother Nature’s way of getting even with the human race. Everyone suffered. Nature liked ugliness and suffering. Nature wanted fat people and failed crops. Nature wouldn’t make you lovely and light. She would keep you fat and fertile. Fertile.
Miss Ball leaned toward the doctor. She almost did not have to act scared. She was scared. But she acted scared just the same, and she shook her head from side to side and up and down, and she said very plainly, “Doctor, I want you to know I’m a very frightened person. I never get a wink of sleep any more.”
The doctor reflected and was about to speak. But it was Miss Ball that spoke.
“I think they’re growing back, and I want a warranty so they don’t.”
When all the words reached the doctor he still did not seem to understand what Miss Ball was saying.
“You think what are growing back?”
“My things.”
“You mean your fallopian tubes?”
“Yes,” Miss Ball bit her lip, “those. And the other things you said you took out.”
The doctor started to giggle.
“You think it’s funny!”
The doctor could not answer.
“You think human suffering and worry is a big laugh!” Miss Ball began to cry, loudly at first, then worked it down to a whimper. Miss Ball sniffed and dabbed at her cheek with a lace hanky. “Cruel. You’re a cruel, cruel man.”
The doctor apologized. He asked Miss Ball to explain what she meant by the warranty.
After a little hesitation Miss Ball told the whole story. She talked about Mother Nature, about weeds that grew all night and were tall in the morning, about lungs and tonsils, about how she had seen Mother Nature kill her father, about her things — how they would be back as sure as shooting. The least the doctor could do was give her a warranty so they wouldn’t grow back. She finished with, “. . I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for ages.”