Pamela Bond: experimental prose

AND HER PHANTOMS

Think about the entire matter as you would an opera stage. The noisy audience dressed for the theater. A hush that envelopes each and every participant as the velvet curtain rises. The props. The scenery. Stage left. Stage right in the development of the characters.

Father was a military offer. The kind of planting and re-planting life most probably having something to do with the root systems of later. It was a large Catholic family.

Mother is best remembered by the servants down at the Allview Inn for her favorite dish, the Crab Imperial, and the pristine way she pronounced both her regular order and her sixth or seventh daughter's name. Most likely one had to be seated inside at the table's in the restaurant right across from the Country club to best understand what the all view was.

The smartest one in private girl's schools, or at least the best grade point. So goes college, law and/or medical school. She chose medicine. Years and years of medical schools.

To arrive at the office door of the Family Practice. The waiting room all done over in light blue stripes alternating with flowers. A room of good taste and perfunctory arrangements, to say the least. A cross on the wall, always the cross on the wall.

The corridors of the office are deep in examining rooms. Health advice exudes from every corner, hypertension, growth charts, all about your cholesterol. Country music usually plays on the piped in music, saying much about the patients,

The white coat-ians from the surrounding area put an i-e on the end of her name, even on their dictated reports. Like Vickie, Dixie, and Trixie, no matter where you went to school and no matter what you do, a working class girl is still a working class girl.

The nurses cite her by a last name only. like a drill sergeant or a third grade teacher you didn't like very much. In fairness to the nurses, there is a statistical likelihood that she isn't always right as she says she is.

It is in the ballet grace of her own daughters and their simple hair-do's that you come to see a different girl in the mirror than the hardened expression on her face, and the cake like make-up, she insists on wearing as though by rote.

Hippocrates' Oath, the Gaelic and the Catholic sayings all over the walls, it is a definite twist to the narrative when she points to her office hallways and says on stage, "Just put numbers on doors."

Were it not for the stethoscope of heart considerations over the prescription pad on top of the patient charts piled high on her physician's desk, it would be easy to fall out of sympathy with her immediately.

She never loses her demeanor. She is never ruffled. She is nice. Several doctors have come and gone from the office since the days when the original partnership was established.

"Our practices have been closed for years." (is most simply an unusual point of view to be heard from a doctor). The zig-zags of most EKG's often aren't quite as predestined.

The office has a security system. An electronic device on the front and back doors. "Most of us use our birth dates ," she explains, "that way we don't forget." "Mine got used up by painters during the remodeling, this one is my husbands."

Her husband, she tells you, is the computer doctor for the office. He installed the software and participates in repairs when needed. Somehow the thin curl of an Errol Flynn movie swashbuckling styled mustache on his upper lip is not the mark of her thick black coarse hair, close-cut in keeping with her military bearing and professional responsibilities. Nonetheless, she is quick to point out that he is an important part of the office. Their dialogue on stage closely mimics Ward Cleaver's household, or even Ozzie and Harriet.

One night in the clinic, who knows if it was the dissatisfied patient who accused her of having a whole ante-room of patients she just wasn't seeing (the waiting area did get backed up)? Her evening patients are very often women who have worked all day, fixed dinner, and then come to wait for their gynecological evaluations and their hypertension checks. The magazine on her office sofa had a lead article on PMS. One night she waxed philosophical as people often do, when they haven't returned their phone messages as quickly as the customers definitely thought they should.

The soliloquy talked about the chart of a person's life. Something about two birth dates on one chart. What had been born. Blood work and shit specimens. The meaning of the word laboratory, and the place called home.

The correction by the secretary at the front desk sign-in sheet becomes instantly clear. "He hates to be called Dr. B."

Her partner's office might be a study in crumby decorating were it not for the man's intellect and professional capabilities.

The fifties style light-blue velveteen sofa crunches at full length against one of the vertical walls. Over-sized to say the least. A homemade crocheted pillow with a pink

Moving from stage left to stage right, there is the physician's desk. On one side a small radio supports a picture of the virgin with a dark curly-haired child in her arms, embraced by the wind. On the other side, the Pope reaches out his arms in the sanctity of his robes for a blessing. A plastic Christ stands with his back to these figures holding out his open palms to the world as the great physician.

Between this decorating dichotomy, there is a large kitchen trash receptacle. Too large even for the amount of Kleenex the doctor uses on a daily basis. A perfect metaphor, though, for the facial scar from his childhood, back in the days when surgeons were less skillful, and hardly available at the insane asylum in the coal mining town where he says he was born.

What his part in the Family Practice has to do with the bumper sticker on the bulletin board over her desk: IT'S A HEART BEAT, NOT A CHOICE, is not clear. All the questions patients ask about her due date over seventeen years ago, is a matter they still discuss when warning staff about the closeness of their practice and s~m~e subsequent nosiness.

She has taken to expressing a lot of clinical judgement and decreasing the actual laboratory tests she finds necessary.

He probably goes over cultures too carefully, always exacting some matter he just can't find.

She told a patient that her oldest daughter told her that it is surprising she made it through medical school. Somehow the patient's laughter about the statement didn't seem to alleviate the hurt that she feels.

Down in hell a skeleton with two mouths in its face, walks off of a dusty stage with the curtain closed (silence).