Mendocino and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

thirty-three minutes to walk the ten blocks to his doctor's appointment, he was stricken by a fear of being late—a lifelong fear, one of his many crippling lifelong fears. He forced down the last of his sundae as quickly as he could and stood up. He put on his jacket, but as he was wrapping his scarf around his neck he felt a sharp pain scorch the surface of his upper arm, and he groaned and sat down again. He rubbed at the sore spot with his other hand, a futile gesture, he knew: the pain was too fast for him, disappearing so quickly he sometimes wondered whether it existed at all. It was the other pain, the one in his elbow, that he could count on. More of a dull ache, he would say to the doctor, a consistent dull ache. He stood up again, and as he headed out of the Chocolate Factory he patted his back pocket to make sure his notebook was still there—it contained a list of all the symptoms he'd had, back to the first radiating heat from his armpit to his fingers in June of 1988. A few months ago Linda had joked that he had a sore arm the way other people had a hobby. Sore? he'd wanted to say. I'm in pain. He knew it was a bad sign that he no longer saw any humor in his situation.
    Walking along Beach Street toward the Cannery he saw a cable car filling with tourists. Last to board was an elderly couple, and Charlie watched as the conductor gently helped them up. The conductor wore a dark uniform and a peaked cap, and for a moment Charlie thought, What a great job! Then he thought, a conductor? He was regressing—first the sundae and now this. And what do you want to be when you grow up, little boy? Charlieworked thirty hours a week at a frame shop on Chestnut, a few blocks from the apartment, and he liked it—he got a discount on framing materials. Linda said she knew it was a good
job;
she wanted him to have a career, but Charlie put careers in a group with pets and lawns—people were always talking about them and tending to them, but they just weren't that interesting.
    IN HIS SEARCH to discover what, after all, was wrong with his arm, Charlie had been in many New York waiting rooms during the past couple of years, but this was the first in California and he didn't know what to make of it: it was empty. He was accustomed to a two-hour waiting room wait followed by a forty-five minute examining room wait, sitting there in a paper nightgown. And the New York doctors, who'd never think to apologize for keeping you—Charlie had liked them: their clean, meaty hands, their arrogance.
    A tall, red-haired woman in a white coat opened a door and said Charlie's name. He followed her into the doctor's office, and when she circled the desk, sat down, and said, “So, your arm hurts,” he blushed and buried his face in his hands. Dr.
Lee
Price. He'd gotten the name from Linda, who'd gotten it from someone in her office, and he hadn't thought—he just hadn't thought.
    “Let me guess,” she said. “You thought I was the nurse. You assumed Lee Price would be a man. You feel like an idiot—you're really not like this.” She smiled at him. “Does that sum it up?”
    “You forgot the part about how I'm much more of a feminist than a lot of women I know.”
    “So I did,” she said. “So I did.” She unfolded a pair of glasses and slid them on, and her eyes seemed to open up, a delicate pale green. “It's really Leonora,” she said. “Big secret. Now tell me about your arm.”
    She didn't comment as he talked, but every few minutes she held up a finger for him to pause and scribbled something on an unlined sheet of paper. With her head angled toward the page he was free to stare at her, and he took in her softly curling auburn hair, her clear, creamy skin, her narrow body. Lovely, he thought, and then,
lovely
? It wasn't in his working vocabulary.
    “Any headaches?” she asked, still bent over her notes.
    “No more than two or three a day.”
    She looked up and narrowed her eyes. “And Tylenol does the trick, or