Elizabeth Brundage - The Doctors Wife

Table of Contents

A PLUME BOOK THE DOCTORS WIFE

ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and winner of a James Michener Award. Her short fiction has been published in The Greensboro Review, The Witness, and New Letters . She lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Praise for The Doctors Wife

What Elizabeth Brundage has done with The Doctors Wife kept me up two nightsthe first was the one in which I read it, and the second was the night when I kept trying to argue with her. He wouldnt do that, I wanted to saybut yes, he would. He would almost surely do all that. And so would she.

Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller

The Doctors Wife is certainly a tense and compelling psychological thriller, but its more than just a page-turner. In her dark depiction of small-town intolerance, Brundage invites us to question... our engagement with the world. My favorite (and truly the darkest and saddest) line of the book is the very last.

Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

Elizabeth Brundage has exquisitely captured the tension that resides at the crossroads of self and society. The Doctors Wife encapsulates not only our uncertain, conflicted times but the maddening, endearing, fascinating contradictions of the American moral construct. This novel is as politically pertinent as it is a page-turner.

Meghan Daum, author of The Quality of Life Report

The Doctors Wife is a full meal of sex, danger, and small-town paranoia which I greedily devoured.

Laurie Fox, author of The Lost Girls

Elizabeth Brundages prose reveals an honesty, clarity and grace uncommon for any novel, let alone a debut, and her insights consistently surprise and astonish... The Doctors Wife is a novel to savor, praise and share.

David Corbett, author of The Devils Redhead and Done for a Dime

Steeped in psychological suspense, compelling and compulsively readable.

Bookreporter.com

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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a
Viking edition.
First Plume Printing, December 2005

Copyright Elizabeth Brundage, 2004

All rights reserved
Title-page photograph Brian Cencula/CORBIS

REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Viking edition as follows:
Brundage, Elizabeth.
The doctors wife : a novel / by Elizabeth Brundage.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-436-25926-2

1. Physicians spousesFiction. 2. New York (State)Fiction.
3. PhysiciansFiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R84D63 2004
813.6dc22 2003065773

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Scott, Hannah, Sophie, and Sam

Goosey Goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,
And in my ladys chamber;
There I met an old man who wouldnt say his prayers;
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

MOTHER GOOSE

Prologue

The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun. I remember holding it. It felt good, cold. And inside my body it was hot, blistering hot, and I took the gun out of my apron and started walking across the kitchen floor and it came to me that I had memorized every squeal in those old wood planks and I went to the cellar door, which was laughing blatantly in my face, and I got my hammer and I started whaling on that door thinking, Fuck you, you assholes, fuck you a thousand times and fuck all your mothers! And I hacked away at that door like it was some kind of live animal, and then it was open, it was broken, it was striated, and there was wood all over the place, and chipped paint like all the pieces of my heart, and I helped myself to the darkness beyond it, and I rumbled down the stairs in my work boots, into the cold stink of the cellar, and I grabbed him. I said, Get up, youve caused me enough fucking trouble, and he shook in my grasp, like a child, he shook, and I could see in his face the reckoning, I could see he was sorry, he had come around, he had come full circle, and I knew somehow that I was responsible for that, I had done that and it made me proud. I yanked on him and he in his weakened state cowered and I could feel the temptation to do it right then, I could feel it, I had to work at suppressing it. I wanted it to be over, I wanted him to be somewhere else, buried deep in the ground where no one would ever look and in the spring it would be covered with flowers and those lovely fluffy dandelions that you can blow into a thousand pieces. I used to do that when I was little and I used to wish for things but I never got what I asked for and now, in retrospect, when I consider my unrelenting devotion to Jesus, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed.

They find me on the ground, drooling in the dirt, the river howling in my ears, my mothers red wool coat twisted up my hips. I can taste blood in my mouth, and can see a little bit of my yellow hair on the ground and my hand is like a dead bird, and I can see now that the gun is there and it is dead, too. The gun is a dead skunk. And my hand is just a white bird. And the skunk has made a bad smell. I wish my husband had tried harder, because then we would have had a chance. I wouldnt have done any of this. I just wanted to lead a good Christian life. But I was the Devils wife, thats the truth of it. And even Jesus cant save you from that. For years I have tried to overcome my weaknesses. For years I have told myself that it didnt matter, what he did to me, all those years ago. That hot summer day when he knocked on my fathers door. I was just this little girl, a black taste like tar in my mouth when I picture the real truth to that. And he was already a man, he had hair on his face, a well-defined Adams apple, a deep voice. I was just a small skinny girl with cuts on my knees and burrs stuck to my dress. He took that from me. He stole it. And I want it back now, pathetic as it may sound to you. I want it back.