Free Wildwood by Drusilla Campbell Page B

Her name’s Mitzi Sandler. I know her from the Spring Festival Committee. Most of the invaders are two income families, too busy to get into town affairs. She’s different. We don’t really know each other but she seems okay, better than most maybe.”
    “I wonder what it was that made my parents buy such a big house in the first place,” Liz said. “They never intended to have a family. If they told me once I was an accident, they told me a hundred times. I’m so used to thinking of them as totally a-parental, but this house . . . I mean it’s such a . . . grandmotherly house. You know what I mean, Hannah? Maybe there was a time when . . .”
    Or maybe the big house made it easier to pretend she wasn’t there.
    Beyond Manzanita and Greenwood and Oak Streets, Casabella Road leveled out again and followed the shoulder of the hill for a quarter mile then dropped abruptly into a shadowy canyon and a hairpin curve across a bridge over Bluegang Creek. When it rose again, Liz saw a sign, a discreet bronze rectangle: HILLTOP SCHOOL , ONE QUARTER MILE .
    Hannah said, “Low keyed and very high priced these days.”
    At the end of a long driveway Hannah and Dan Tarwater’s white country farmhouse sprawled in the shade of half a dozen California live oaks. Hannah stopped at the mailbox and leaned out the car window to open it. She riffled through the bundle of envelopes, advertising flyers, and catalogs. She held a large overnight mail envelope, reading the return address. “This is for you,” she said and handed it to Liz, eyebrows raised. “It’s from a doctor. In Miami.”

Friday
    D r. Reed Wallace was young. His diplomas hung on the wall, but Roman numerals confused Liz and besides, she didn’t really want to know exactly how young. Under the circumstances, age made no difference anyway. The lab in Miami had provided his name in San Jose and no other.
    He entered the examining room, her chart in hand, a few strands of dark brown hair engagingly drooped across his forehead, and leaned against the wall smiling and comfortable as a neighbor chatting over a fence. Easy for you. You’re not going to be east-west in the stirrups, gaping like a Bekins box. She perched on the end of the examining table and answered his routine questions—her age (advanced), her general health (perimenopausal), childhood ailments (emotional neglect), allergies (good-looking young ob-gyns; they made her blush).
    He was tall and slender with excellent teeth and probably wearing contact lenses. Clean fingernails, a discreet yin/yang tattoo on his wrist.
    Wallace left her alone in the examining room to strip and don a paper hospital gown. His nurse—a petite Asian woman with a name tag saying Marilu—came in. She weighed Liz, took her temperature and then her blood pressure. Her smile never dimmed from incandescent.
    “You can get up on the table now.”
    Knees up, feet in the stirrups, scoot down, a little farther, a little farther, always a little farther.
    Bad as this was, always was and would be because there was no way of doing a pelvic that was not humiliating, physically uncomfortable and emotionally tense, her first exam had been the worst.
    She had expected condemnation for wanting birth control pills at a time when the sexual revolution had barely entered the guerrilla skirmish stage. But her lover, Willy, had assured her that in France clinic doctors were worldly and approved of sex. The exam had been carried out in an ill-heated, badly lighted examining room with a speculum the size of a tire jack; and her prescription had come in an ordinary glass bottle, twenty-five at a time. In those days, there weren’t even safety caps to struggle with.
    On the way home from the dispensing chemist Liz had purchased a little plastic tray divided into seven lidded sections. As she was writing the days of the week on the lids using a laundry pen, she had suddenly remembered Billy Phillips and Hannah’s underpants and the mystery of their