Free Medicine Men by Alice Adams Page B

look at these pictures a little.”
    Scowling hard, he held a series of what looked like X-rays up against a light—all images of shadows, all dark and terrible.
    But the sheer relief of being out of that tube had made Molly manic. She was mildly hysterical. “I suppose you’re finding lots of brain tumors.” That was her notion of a joke, at that moment.
    “We’re not allowed to give diagnoses.” He frowned more deeply. “Well, I guess you can go now.”

SIX
    As a small child, near the banks of the James River, in Richmond, what Molly liked best was the game of doctor—and “like” is not the correct word; this was an obsession, a major passion. She played that quite unregulated game with various other children, often new ones, but later she was unable to remember how the activity was ever proposed. Was it always she who made the suggestion? Molly was a shy, on the whole very inhibited child, and so she found it unlikely that she should have been so bold. She remembered her intense eagerness for the game, but maybe all the children involved felt the same. They were like a bunch of addicts among whom a lot of verbal communication was unnecessary.
    And calling what they did a game is misleading: the doctors that those children played at did nothing but examine, and that not very thoroughly. They only looked at each other, they showed themselves off. No mutual touching, and God knows nothing more advanced like “foreign objects.”
    Molly played doctor with many children, then, but for several years her best and most interested companion in that pursuit was a handsome, blond, and green-eyed little boy named Craig Stuart. His parents were friends and drinking companionsof Molly’s parents, and the Stuarts lived in a large, white, and somewhat forbidding house on a bluff above the river, with an ancient mysteriously laid out garden, full of inexplicable and wonderfully secret nooks and glades. And so that is where Molly and Craig exhibited their small pale-pink genitals to each other, among the sheltering, giant pre-Civil War boxwood, the magnolias and crepe myrtle. Their parents were pleased that they were friends, and that they liked to play together so often, and so contentedly.
    Craig’s was the first penis that Molly ever saw, and she thought it was marvelous. Tiny and a pretty peachy-pink, it sometimes stood straight up. Craig could make it do this just by thinking about it, he said. So interesting, Molly thought. A sort of magic.
    When she told Felicia about playing doctor, after they had become friends and were talking about what they were like as children, Felicia said that Molly was the only person she knew with a genuine case of penis envy, but Molly said that was not true. She didn’t envy Craig’s penis, she only admired and wondered at it. It was much more interesting to look at than a girl’s tiny fold, she thought.
    Craig was also very interested in something that he persisted in calling “poopoo,” a minor obsession that Molly considered babyish, unworthy. He liked poopoo jokes, and he told Molly that once he had “made poopoo” in his sandbox; proudly confiding, he giggled with pleasure.
    “Didn’t they find it and punish you?” Molly was frightened at the very thought of such a discovery by parents. Horrifying!
    “They thought it was a dog!” Triumphant laughter from Craig.
    Molly did not find it all that funny but she laughed enthusiastically anyway. (Southern female training kicks in early.)
    On the other hand, Molly was interested in kissing, and Craig was not. Molly did not think that doctors kissed their patients, and certainly they did not kiss each other; still, makingsome obscure but definite connection, she felt that playing doctor should include an occasional kiss. Sometimes she would kiss Craig, her small mouth pressed for the one instant he allowed it to his cool smooth cheek. Molly especially like the smell of his shirts when she did that, a clean ironed boyish