Chris Roll
8-12-12
Playing Doctor
A new
problem was loosed upon the world the day three-year-old Eunice Maywether first
pulled the arm off the porcelain doll she had received for her birthday. She stared
at the arm for hours, amazed that it could be looked at from the usually unseen
angle of the empty socket and the disconnected shoulder. Then she ran giddily
to find the rest of her doll collection.
The
idea that physical forms could be dismantled prompted an immediate, insatiable
interest in medicine and the way bodies worked, although with her father’s
low-paying job at the sawmill there was no chance she’d ever get to go to
medical school. Instead, her fascination moved to vivisection. Many an
unfortunate animal, wild or relatively tame, was disassembled behind the barn
before her parents put a stop to it . . . temporarily. Little Eunice was
nothing if not resourceful when it came to hiding her pursuits.
Eunice
Maywether grew old. Living by herself in the Ozarks, her once-productive garden
became choked with weeds and thistles. The barn that once housed horses and
goats was on the verge of collapsing. And her yard was strewn with old,
cast-off doll parts as far as the eye could see.
This
unsettling sight was what the occasional visitor would see as he or she warily
pulled into Maywether’s driveway. Not that she ever received deliberate
visitors, of course; it was only the handful of people each year who got lost in
search of a gravel road not hers. They would drive up to her front gate,
sometimes getting out of their cars, only to recoil and drive away as though
the devil were on their tailpipes once they saw the doll carcasses. Eunice
would peer through the window at them as they drove away, her dead green eyes
joining the unblinking eyes of the countless doll heads in watching the cars
depart.
Sometimes,
though, a more brazen traveler would ask for directions, having stepped past
the minefield of broken faces to reach Eunice’s porch. Eunice would come to the
door at the fifth or sixth insistent rap, putting on her most pleasant
brown-toothed smile. She would invite the unintended visitor inside, offering
the use of her phone (which was ridiculous because she didn’t have one) or a
cup of tea (which was ridiculous because she didn’t drink tea). There might be
an awkward moment when she asked the person to have a seat in one of the
recliners, broken down and sunken in from years of use, and she would sit
across, still smiling but looking intently at her visitor, mentally processing
every joint, every muscle, every detail. Then she would invite her visitor to
the kitchen, letting the visitor go ahead of her. Then she would bean her
visitor with the wooden mallet she had stashed behind her favorite chair.
Comical, really.
You
see, dolls were fun to take apart, but they were too passive. Animals reacted
to being cut or pulled apart, but they, too, grew tiresome after a while. But
people were different—what better thrill could there be for an aspiring doctor
than to pop the limbs off something so similar to yourself? Or to cut them open
and to pull out all the things you could never examine inside yourself without
dying?
“Tell
me where it hurts,” Eunice Maywether would say, her rotten grin stretching from
ear to ear as she applied the tools of her trade. Knives rusted from years of
being soaked in fresh blood, handsaws dulled from cutting through ever so many
bones, hammers and chisels that had pried loose many a kneecap—these were her
instruments of discovery. This was what was in her doctor’s bag.
When
you find yourself on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, take care. When it
takes you too far from the main road and you think you’re a bit too isolated
from civilization, you very well may be. Don’t stop. Don’t ask for directions.
And make sure you don’t get a flat. Because sometimes asking for help is far
worse than being lost.
