Chapter Fifteen
Henry called Dr. Collins the next morning. Who am I kidding? He probably had Alice do it once he got to the office. All I knew was that after I cooked and served him his eggs that morning, he said, “You’re not well, Lulu.”
I couldn’t argue with him. Somehow I had avoided the cold Katherine had given Wesley, but something had turned my stomach the night before and caused me to faint in the driveway. Plus, there were all the strange ways I had been feeling since Esther was born. Maybe I was imagining some of it. I knew it had taken time to feel like myself after Wesley, but this felt different.
It was best if we got to the bottom of it.
Dr. Collins arrived during naptime, having had to run through an afternoon downpour to get to the front door. The day had started full of sunlight, but by afternoon, the gray settled overhead until the clouds became too thick and heavy to hold back the precipitation any longer. I wondered where Luna was, if she had a shelter to keep her out of the rain.
“I spoke with Henry,” the doctor said after he folded his umbrella and placed it in the stand in the foyer. I spent two books worth of stamps on the stand shortly after we had been married. It seemed like an item a good hostess would have, but it rarely got used.
Dr. Collins motioned for me to sit down on my own davenport. “How’s about telling me what’s going on?”
What was going on? Didn’t Henry tell him? Or at least tell him his version of it? I suppose I should’ve been happy that the doctor wanted me to tell him.
I was tired, sometimes nauseous. I wasn’t sleeping well. I got hot when I left the house. Some days I had headaches. Sometimes I smelled colors. But I knew how all that sounded, so what did he want me to say?
“I suppose Henry told you about last night?” That seemed like a good place to start, but before offering him more details, I waited for him to respond, wondering if that was as much as I needed to say.
“Mmm-hmmm. Henry mentioned that.” The doctor seemed distracted. He looked around the living room instead of at me, his caterpillar eyebrows twitching downward as he squinted. “Do you mind if we turn on some lights?”
Perhaps I should’ve thought of that. The house was dark that day, especially since the rain had started, but I hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights. As I said, the day had started bright, sunny, with birds chirping outside until the storm rolled in. It reminded me of that Sunday afternoon back in 1940 when the moon eclipsed the sun. The day had started so bright, but everyone knew what was coming.
After church, we’d all headed home and didn’t visit with neighbors or family like we usually did on the Lord’s day. Instead, we sat in the house and waited. They told me not to look at the sun when the eclipse started, and I listened, too afraid of losing my sight to not obey. Mama and Daddy stayed inside, and Georgie wasn’t born yet. I went out back and sat beneath my tree, watching the shapes of the leaves change to crescent moons as the sky darkened, the birds quieted, and the crickets sang their nighttime song in the middle of the afternoon.
I wondered if Henry saw that eclipse. We never talked about it, but I imagined he did. Everyone seemed to take notice, at least in our town, but maybe he’d had better things to do that day.
I clicked on the lamps and sat back down on the davenport as I started to tell Dr. Collins how I’d been feeling. “I’ve been pretty tired lately.” He
nodded like he understood, so I kept going. “I suppose I haven’t been getting the best sleep. It’s hard, you know.” He assured me that he did understand.
“Not much of an appetite for a while. Oh, and sometimes I’ve been getting headaches.” His woolly-worm brows scrunched together, so I stopped.
“And passing out? Was last night the first time?”
“Yes.” As much as I wanted to feel better, I didn’t like the look on his face, the downward turn of his lips, how his eyes squinted. I know doctors are meant to help, but they don’t always bring the news we wanted to hear. “I’m guessing it’s a touch of something. Thankfully, I feel better this morning.”
Hopefully that meant I wouldn’t be getting anyone else sick.
“Henry said you had some champagne.” He opened his bag and pulled out a stethoscope.
“Yes.” Who hadn’t had a few drinks at the party? But I was the only one who seemed to feel sick.
“Perhaps it was a bit too much?”
“I don’t know that I’d say that.”
“You are still postpartum.” He held the stethoscope to my chest and told me to take a deep breath. “Have you been drinking much in that time?”
Did he expect me to breathe or answer? “No.”
“Maybe your body’s adjusted and last night was too much, too soon.”
Perhaps he was right. “Tell me more about how you’ve been sleeping since —”
“Not well. But after Wesley”—and my entire life—“I expected as much.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Dr. Collins asked me to lie down. “Of course, this isn’t like Wesley.”
I suppose every baby is different. Look at me and Georgie. Mama said he had such an easy disposition, so different from my own.
He pressed on my abdomen and asked, “Is it possible that you’re—”
“No.” I was certain that pregnancy was not a possibility, and he seemed to agree, because he changed the subject.
“How many hours of sleep are you getting at night?”
I wanted to be honest. But I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth. Even Henry didn’t know how little sleep I got. Even I didn’t, because I didn’t want to know for myself. I would start off with a couple of hours, but then my body would rouse, my mind would wake, and there was no returning to sleep after that. Sure, I would stare out the window and maybe drift off for a few minutes. But sometimes it felt more like passing time than drifting off.
I crossed my ankles and folded my hands across my stomach, my fingers gripped tightly. “I’d say six hours.” I couldn’t look him in the eye. But, really, what could this little white lie hurt?
“Six?” he asked.
I nodded.
“How do you feel throughout the day?”
“Tired.”
“And would you say you feel happy?”
I didn’t mean to laugh. Only a short one escaped before I caught myself.
What kind of a question was that? Was I happy? Were Nora and Hatti? Was Bitsy, with her wobbly ankles and flinching shoulders? Was the woman with her head stuck in the oven? Was anyone well and truly happy?
Yes, they were. They had to be. It was me; I was the problem.
At one point, happiness was all I thought I needed. I’d felt so smart saying that to Mama one day, as if I had found some true search in life that no one else had thought of. But really all it did was reveal something about my family: The idea of happiness was so foreign that I assumed no one else had thought to strive for it.
All Mama wanted was security. A good husband. A good farm. A good
harvest. A good son to take over when the time came. A good daughter who would settle for the boy down the road. “There’s no chasin’ happiness,” she said to me when I begged her to let me go away to college.
But I knew people believed in it. Look at Hatti with her kids and Bitsy with that smile always on her face. Then there was Henry, thinking that happiness was something he could conquer and achieve. Perhaps for him, it was. A house with all the modern conveniences—the Mobile Maid, the car in the driveway. A beautiful wife with an easy smile and desirable body. A job that came with promotions, promise, and a steady paycheck. He did have something to work for, a way to find happiness. He somehow thought that was possible for us as well. When it didn’t come easily, he made sure to find ways to make it happen.
I remember rolling my eyes at Mama that day in the kitchen when she dismissed my hope for the future. That woman never seemed to understand me. Now I see that she was only trying to teach me. I thought I was so much smarter than her, heading to college, an opportunity she never had. But she didn’t need to go away, read a bunch of books, and listen to professors speak to packed lecture halls. She already knew the truth of the matter: Happiness was a fool’s errand.
I paused long enough that I didn’t need to answer Dr. Collins’s question.
He proceeded to give me the standard once-over, checking my pulse, looking into my eyes and ears, rubbing his cold hands along my neck.
“What you’re dealing with here is nothing new,” the doctor began.
“Physically, you’re fine. Right as rain, from best I can tell, but sometimes we see this.”
I swallowed hard, waiting and yet also not wanting to hear what he had to say. Daddy’s diagnosis had not been unusual. Though they never told me what it was, they always acted like it wasn’t too much to worry about, but look what happened to him. Did I want to know what was wrong with me?
Though the bigger question was: Could Dr. Collins fix me?
“We call this hysteria.” He said it so matter-of-factly. I didn’t feel hysterical, and I wanted to tell him that, but I feared that anything I said would only prove his point. Instead, I smiled and nodded. He packed up his bag and continued, saying, “I see this in women such as yourself all the time, this housewife syndrome. You’re a bit tired, doing a lot around the house.
Not really feeling like yourself. Finding yourself a bit moody like your kids.
The good news is that we can treat this. I’m going to write you a prescription for Miltown. Take it twice a day, morning and evening. It will take a few days to get into your system, but then I think you’ll be happy with the results.”
He tore off a prescription and handed it to me. I looked down at the scribbles.
“A pill?”
“Yes. I like to call it ‘emotional aspirin.’”
“That’s all I need?”
“This is pretty common. And Miltown is better than the stronger tranquilizers we used to use. I write a prescription for this a few times a week now. Soon enough, the wives are back to themselves and the husbands are happier than ever. Works wonders. You’ll be good as new in no time.” I hoped he was right.
The downpour had turned to a drizzle sometime during the examination.
As the doctor left, I stood on the front step and let the drops dampen me. I wanted to go across the street, walk through the front door to my own home, stretch out on the davenport I had chosen, and settle in for a long nap with Luna by my side. I might need the place if Henry ever got around to running off with Alice.
Lightning flashed with a roll of thunder trailing a few seconds behind it.
The light in the Betsers’ front bedroom switched on, reminding me that the
house wasn’t mine. If anyone needed drugs, it was Bitsy, that woman who talked in short sentences and tried to force her way into friendships with pretzel salad. She seemed to spend a lot of time in that room. Maybe she was unpacking all those boxes. Maybe she was hiding something. Or maybe the soul of the place was making her restless and she was packing to leave.
I pulled my arms across my body and rubbed at the rash. I had forgotten to tell the doctor about that, but maybe it was all part of this housewife syndrome, my body showing it was as unhappy as my mind. Henry would probably be glad that there was a way to fix me. If the drugs did their job, then maybe I’d be the wife he remembered, the one he had chosen to marry.
Then maybe he’d forget all about Alice, and we could live happily ever after like we were supposed to.
