Carrots!By Kate Henderson
It was at Dr. Stephen’s funeral I realized I had a thing for him. But I guess we all did.
I can pinpoint when I knew. It was the day a blind spot showed up in my left eye, walking home from the pharmacy after my blood pressure check, which was a little high, but not off the charts. The dark thing grew from a little floater, like everyone gets, to an honest-to-god hole. I was trying to blink it away, rubbing my eye like mad. I pictured a tumour encroaching on my optic nerve like oak roots into a well bed. I felt like I was on the very brink of something insurmountable. I ran over to Dr. Stephen’s and caught my breath while his secretary Kathy finished on the phone. I told her I was going blind and she got me in to see him. I’m a good patient, so she didn’t hesitate. Dr. Stephen shone his lights into my eye, asked me when the spot came, how big it was, and how long it lasted, assuming it was gone now which, thank god, it was. “I know it’s off-putting, Rosemary.” He patted the back of my hand. “But your eyes are as gorgeous as ever.” “I thought it might be fast onset macular degeneration. Maybe retinal detachment.” “Yes, of course, instant blindness. And I’m sure you considered a brain tumour?” He smiled like open air, and a great relief came over me. It always did with him. A brain tumour, how ridiculous, I laughed along. He took one of the little tissue rectangles he puts on the strap of the eye exam machine, where patients rest their chins, then he leaned on the counter. There was something about the tilt of his hips, all of a sudden. What with my having gone so quickly from death back to life and all. He scribbled something on the tissue paper and handed it over to me. His fingertips were cool. It said, merely, Carrots! “We assume it’s a myth, from so many cartoons and the like. But, truly, Rosemary.” Dr. Stephen had a way of always infusing my name with sweetness. “Carrots. Your body will use the beta-carotene to produce Vitamin A. You can take supplements, sure, but too much Vitamin A doesn’t work. You want that perfect balance the beta-carotene gives you. Fighter pilots used to swear by the stuff, and they know a thing or two about nighttime targets. Listen, Rosemary, we all have little bits, cells, floating around in our heads. Sometimes it’s a blow to the head we received long ago that’s healed up inside. Sometimes it’s just a collection of stuff our body is sending around. These things float by now and then, and they carry on. You let me know, of course, if this keeps happening, but I don’t think it will. And please remember the carrots.” That was a couple of months after Herbert left me, humiliated and fat, for the apprentice librarian, a blonde whip with ankle boots. So Dr. Stephen said things I needed to hear, sure. But there was more as well. When I went back for my follow up a few weeks later, he said, as I left: “As I’m sure you know, Rosemary, Herbert is a fool.” As in, Dr. Stephen wouldn’t have let me go. Even though, clearly, I was not what I used to be. What a silver-tongued devil. Pretty much all of the townspeople went to his funeral. Except for Donna Mucci of course, that dry branch who’d made a tidy sum as a stand-in for actors getting needles in movies. And her daughter Belle. Because Donna Mucci, the most narcissistic liar in the world, killed Dr. Stephen. If I’m forced to be fair, looking at it from where I am now, I’ll say there were other hints maybe, before Donna and Belle, about Dr. Stephen’s practice. For example, Grant Armitage, the dentist. Who crashed his car into the postal boxes on Concession 3 on a clear Sunday afternoon. “I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see!” he sobbed to the officers. “Of course you couldn’t see, Grant. You’re hammered.” And in fact, Grant had been returning home from the groundbreaking ceremony for the new library, but he insisted he’d had only one flute of champagne. And he blew 0.4. “I really couldn’t see anything. With my eyes.” He kept on saying it, so they detained him in the drunk tank for the night to sober up, then let him go unceremoniously. He couldn’t bring himself to make anything more of it, most people presumed. Also poor Widow Grace, who walked too close to the Ferris wheel during last year’s Whistling Jubilee and sustained a mild concussion. But it was Donna’s hysteria that did it. What happened was she took Belle to Dr. Stephen after Belle had been complaining of headaches. The kid was only four, so who knew what she was really feeling. Who can describe pain anyway? And we don’t know, can’t know, what Dr. Stephen did or didn’t see at the back of Belle’s eyes at that point. All we know is he paused, infinitesimally, before he smiled at Donna and said: “Our princess Belle is as beautiful as ever. You have nothing to worry about. She needs sunshine. Some running around in the daylight. She needs Vitamin D.” But the pause was something Donna noted then, and later on affirmed in her affidavit. And I get it. I do. Just think of the things mothers know that no one tells them. Think of those stories of poor abducted kids, when the dad and grandparents make a tearful plea in the media. And later reports say, “The mother was too distraught to provide a comment.” Maybe Donna was too distraught, if I have to be charitable to her. So Donna took Belle in to the City hospital. Where after a series of tests, they found a tumor. Retinoblastoma. In the paperwork, Donna claimed that had she heeded Dr. Stephen, had she not gone to the City, Belle would have died. Leaving aside, as I understand it, that it’s one of the most easily treated childhood cancers, and Belle’s symptoms would have been much worse if it had been progressing. After the paperwork was filed, Dr. Stephen put up a good show for a month or so. It seemed to me the town’s collective heart was aching for him. Imagine being accused of harming a child, even if her mother is the world’s worst apostate. Then after a while he wasn’t shaking people’s hands, touching our elbows, telling us how we looked as hale as ever. He would only wear a smile like an unflattering shade of lipstick, and walk on. His grey hair shining and tousled by the breeze. Until he wasn’t walking around at all anymore, and eventually we all heard about the morphine, and Dr. Stephen all alone in his bedroom. I think most of us were in a daze, passing each other at the market or town hall, all of us with a perfect image of him in our minds. The crisp features of a dead person the moment you hear they’re gone. After the funeral it dawned on me the Whistling Jubilee was six weeks away. Dr. Stephen had won it eight years running. Hands down. I competed, too, along with the head librarian and usually one of the children. But no one could touch Dr. Stephen, when every time he’d start with an old Woody Guthrie tune, like Muleskinner Blues or Your Smile Cured Me. Then he’d kill us all with Bach’s Variation 6: Canon on the Second. When people here talk about the whistling, we talk about life. At the Jubilee, when Dr. Stephen was performing, we would well up, maybe just the stimulation of it all, all of us there in the sunshine together. As he whistled we would look around and catch each other’s eyes. Asking each other, wasn’t it the loveliest sound? Weren’t we, each one of us, capable of all to which we put our minds? Weren’t the birds overhead all part of it, too? And when he’d hit that last note. Well, all rise. But this year, we’d most likely be adrift. The only silver lining, I thought guiltily, was maybe this year I stood a chance. If I could bring myself to take the stage. After Donna Mucci’s lawsuit was filed, the Medical Board immediately sent in its replacement doctor, Phyllis Brant, whose thin grey suit turned us off. To more than half of us, Dr. Brant prescribed glasses. Long overdue, she called it. Grant Armitage began driving again and the Widow Grace exclaimed she hadn’t felt so fearless in decades. But I think we were all in a great undoing, an adjustment period. Especially the people with progressives, for distance and reading both. At the funeral, despite her exclamations, the Widow Grace nearly fell, monstrously, onto the coffin as she threw her dirt, and the priest had to save her. Plenty of people were stumbling due to vertigo. Everything was small and shifty through our new lenses. Everything seemed weighed on an uncalibrated scale, slightly off, though who knew in what direction. I felt I could see everything, then, through time and space. I felt I could see Dr. Stephen’s sad visage through the thickness of his coffin. I knew he had grown a paunch. That the seam of his suit jacket was stretched at the shoulder and that his socks were threadbare. I could rattle off a list. But in a nutshell, I could see, then, that he’d been going to seed right under our noses. Despite his exquisite whistling. But we didn’t love him any less. I didn’t love him less, anyhow. On the contrary, all that happened was my heart broke again, additionally, separately, freshly, magnificently. Speaking of darkness, I’ve been wondering the last few days if the floaters in my eyes are getting thicker. And it feels to me as if I’m forgetting words, for example ‘safe deposit box’ and ‘laugh.’ I’m too frightened to explain it all to Dr. Brant, that imposter, because I don’t want her to know. I don’t want her to look at me. I want Dr. Stephen to lean on the counter and scrawl out some notes for me on a rectangle of tissue and tell me what a good woman I am. How certain he is that life-long regret will weigh Herbert down. I want to eat my carrots and whistle for the championship, and watch for Dr. Stephen in the crowd as I receive my standing ovation. Kate Henderson's writing has appeared in literary journals, including filling Station. She lives in Toronto with her family, where she works as an entertainment lawyer. In her spare time, she grows wildflowers, and is writing her second novel.
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