spiders!” Marcia actually shuddered. “I really hate and loathe spiders.”
“So. Rubber spiders in the underwear drawer?” Freddie giggled. It was good he had a wife to drive him home.
Marcia ignored him. “We had lots of woods behind our house. I was something of a tomboy. I loved to go romping through the woods. You know how my hair is—has always been.”
“Lovely to look at, delightful to hold,” said Grant, and behind his dark glasses there might have been a flash of memory.
“But a mess to keep combed,” Marcia finished. “Anyway, you know those really gross spiders that build their webs between trees and bushes in the woods? The ones that look like dried-up snot boogers with little legs, and they’re always strung out there across the middle of a path?”
“I was a Boy Scout,” Freddie remembered.
“Right! So I was always running into those yucky little suckers and getting their webs caught in my hair. Then I’d start screaming and clawing at my face and run back home, and my snotty brothers would laugh like hyenas.
“But here’s the worst part.” Marcia chugged a long swallow of beer. “You know how you never see those goddamn spiders once you’ve hit their webs? It’s like they see you coming, say ‘too big to fit into my parlor,’ and bail out just before you plow into their yucky webs. Like one second they’re there, ugly as a pile of pigeon shit with twenty eyes, and then they vanish into thin air.
“So. My dear big brothers convinced me that the spiders were trapped in my hair. Hiding out in this curly mess and waiting to crawl out for revenge. At night they were sure to creep out and crawl into my ears and eat my brain. Make a web across my nose and smother me. Wriggle beneath my eyelids and suck dry my eyeballs. Slip down my mouth and fill my tummy with spider eggs that would hatch out and eat through my skin. My brothers liked to say that they could see them spinning webs between my curls, just hoping to catch a few flies while they waited for the chance to get me.”
Marcia smiled and shivered. It still wasn’t easy to think about. “So, of course, I violently combed and brushed my hair as soon as I rushed home, shampooed for an hour—once I scrubbed my scalp with Ajax cleanser—just to be safe. So it’s a wonder that I still have my hair.”
“And are you still frightened of spiders?” Grant asked.
“Yes. But I wear a hat when I venture into the woods now. Saves wear and tear on the hair.”
“A poetess,” remarked Freddie. He was approaching the legless stage, and one of his sons fetched him a fresh beer. “So, Grant. So, Dr McDade, excuse me. We have bared our souls and told you of our secret horrors. What now, if anything, has left its emotional scars upon the good doctor? Anything at all?”
Marcia sensed the angry tension beneath Freddie’s growing drunkenness. She looked toward Grant. He had always been master of any event. He could take charge of a class reunion situation. He’d always taken charge.
Grant sighed and rubbed at his forehead. Marcia wished he’d take off those sunglasses so she could get a better feeling of what went on behind those eyes.
“Needles,” said Grant.
“Needles?” Freddie laughed, his momentary belligerence forgotten. “But you’re a surgeon!”
Grant grimaced and gripped his beer cup in his powerful, long-fingered hands. Marcia could visualize those hands—rubber-gloved and bloodstained—deftly repairing a dying heart.
“I was very young,” he said. “We were still living in our old house, and we moved from there before I was five. My memories of that time go back to just as I was learning to walk. The ice cream man still made his rounds in a horse-drawn cart. This was in the late 1940s.
“Like all children, I hated shots. And trips to the doctor, since all doctors did was give children shots. I would put up quite a fuss, despite promises of ice cream afterward. If you’ve ever seen someone try—or tried yourself—to give a screaming child a shot, you know the difficulty.”
Grant drew in his breath, still clutching the beer cup. Marcia hadn’t seen him take a sip of it since it had been refilled.
“I don’t know why I was getting a shot that day. Kids at that age never understand. Since I did make such a fuss, they tried something different. They’d already swabbed my upper arm with alcohol. Mother was holding