The Law of Similars

  Clearly, my image of rice was simplistic compared to that of the people who shopped here. When I thought of rice, I thought white. Here, however, there were dozens and dozens of kinds of rice, and the distinctions were considerably more varied than color (brown versus white), or the length of the grain. Little markets like this probably didn't make the rice buyer at Grand Union quake in his boots, but it had to affect the guy's self-esteem: In four neat rows of clear plastic buckets, each row eight buckets long, was a universe of rice I'd never imagined existed. I wasn't sure any store really needed five kinds of basmati--white, brown, Indian, organic, and something called Piper and Slim's Hindu Love--but the choice was impressive. And so was the handwriting. Calligraphy on yellow and blue slips of colored paper.

  There'd been a time back in the sixth or seventh grade when my parents had joined a natural-foods co-op. Like their revolutionary reading group--Soul on Ice, The Greening of America, biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald as feminist martyr--it hadn't lasted very long. Fortunately.

  "Hi, Leland."

  I turned, thrilled that Whitney had remembered my name.

  "Evening, Whitney."

  "How are you doing?"

  A heavy sweater tonight, instead of a button-down blouse. But still a big skirt and sandals. It took more than a little snow on the ground to make those feet grow modest.

  "Good. Better, maybe."

  "Cool. Back for more echinacea?"

  "Can't have too much."

  "Oh, I bet you can. Need some help here?"

  I turned back to the rice. "Um, yeah. Basmati. I was going to get just plain basmati, but now I'm not so sure."

  "White?"

  "I guess that's what I had in mind."

  "Try Piper and Slim's instead."

  "The Hindu Love?"

  "Cooks up perfect. It's Piper's absolute fave."

  "Slim's, too?"

  "He practically inhales the stuff."

  "Okay. I'm sold," I said, grabbing the scoop and a brown paper lunch bag.

  "Did you ever go see my aunt?" she asked.

  "As a matter of fact, I did. Last night."

  "Cool," she said, her head bobbing with approval. "What did you think?"

  "Of her? Or homeopathy?" The two questions slipped out reflexively before I could stop myself.

  "Whichever. No, my aunt. Isn't she savage?"

  "Awesome."

  "Think so?"

  "I think so."

  "What's the remedy?"

  "She hasn't decided."

  "The first time she gave me a remedy, I felt like this little baby bird in her hands. Then, when they were gone, I got all tingly. It was the best."

  "They?"

  "The remedy. The sugar pills."

  "Sugar's a remedy?"

  She shook her head. "Doubt it. But some of the remedies are dropped onto small sucrose pellets."

  "How many...remedies has your aunt given you?"

  "Two."

  "For the same thing?"

  "Oh, no way!"

  "Each worked?"

  "Sure did."

  "Can I ask why you were seeing her?"

  "Sure. I broke my arm playing field hockey when I was sixteen, and it hurt like crazy even after the doctor said it was healed. Aunt Carissa took care of the pain completely. Hasn't hurt a bit in four or five years."

  "And the other time?"

  "Mondo woman's problems. Cramps, bloating. I become a real pain in the ass twelve or thirteen times a year. And so this summer I asked her if there was a remedy."

  "And there was?"

  "Pulsatilla. I think it's made from windflower."

  "And it worked?"

  She smiled and opened her arms. "Am I not one sweet girl this very minute? I'm going to get my period Sunday or Monday. If I hadn't seen Carissa in August--you know, professionally--we wouldn't be talking right now because you'd still be staring at the rice and I'd be fuming at the counter. I'd be, like, screaming at you in my mind to hurry the fuck up."

  "Are all her patients so satisfied?"

  "You bet."

  I nodded, and for a long moment I felt her staring at me.

  "So," she said abruptly. "When are you going to see her again?"

  "She said she'd call me when she has a remedy."

  "And you're going to wait?"

  "Shouldn't I?"

  "I'd call her."

  "Really?" I thought I knew what she was hinting at, but I wasn't completely sure. I decided confirmation was worth the possible embarrassment.

  "Is your aunt seeing anyone?"

  "You mean, other than patients?"

  "Yes."

  "Not a soul."

  The word appeared from my mouth like magic, and I wondered if there was something transforming in the air of the health-food store: "Cool," I said, and I watched her face--already impossibly radiant--brighten some more.

  "We need to decorate the house for Christmas this year," Abby informed me as we drove home to East Bartlett in the pickup.

  "Didn't we last year?" I asked, hoping I didn't sound defensive. The fact was, I really hadn't done a whole lot in the two Christmases since Elizabeth had died. A tree had been about it, and even that had always been a last-second addition.

  "We need lots of decorations."

  "Lots?"

  "Stuff on the windows. And stuff on the tables. And stuff in bowls."

  "Stuff in bowls?"

  "It's a project," she said. Project was the word Kelly McDonough, the woman who ran Abby's day care, used for everything the kids did with glue sticks and colored paper. Sometimes the arts-and-crafts efforts were ingenious: puppets made from Popsicle sticks, poker chips, and small scraps of fabric. And sometimes they were simply insane: The pretend stained-glass windows they'd made by pressing grape jelly and lemonade drink mix between thin strips of clear plastic had looked beautiful for a day, but had gone bad pretty fast. And since they'd made the mock windows in July, some parents suspected the "project" was actually a do-it-yourself ant farm. The thing was a magnet for bugs.

  "Oh, I see," I said.

  "It'll be ready tomorrow."

  "Does it have a name?"

  "Wellllllll, it's got lots of pinecones and leaves and stuff. And cotton balls."

  "For snow?"

  "Uh-huh. And Daddy?"

  "Yes, sweetheart?"

  "Can we have stockings this year?"

  "Sure."

  She nodded, satisfied, and stretched her leg in her booster seat, using the toe of her snow boot to push an audiocassette into the truck's tape player. I reached over and turned up the volume, and we listened to the story of Madeline for the last few minutes of our drive home.

  I almost called Carissa the moment I'd put Abby to bed Thursday night, going so far as to stare at her name in the residential part of the phone book. But I couldn't bring myself to bother her at nine o'clock at her house--or, worse, not bother her because she actually had a life and was out for the night.

  I considered leaving a message on her machine at her office, but decided against the idea because she'd told me she would call when she was ready, and that might take a couple of days.

  And I wondered if she even had an answering machine in the Octagon. Perhaps she had an answering service instead. Maybe her phone clicked over to a live human being who answered calls for a living, and that person beeped Carissa when there was a patient in crisis:

  Hi, Carissa, this is your service. The young lady who took foxglove this afternoon says she's having heart palpitations. She thinks she may have taken too much.

  Even if there wasn't such a thing as a homeopathic emergency, perhaps she needed a service as a psychologist. Or was it a psychiatrist? I couldn't remember. She'd said she was a licensed something, and so maybe she still saw patients as a shrink.

  I could call and find out. I could call and see if I got an answering machine or a service. And then hang up.

  No, I couldn't do that. After all, I'd probably get an answering machine, and no
single woman wanted to press a button to retrieve her messages and find a hang-up recorded. Not even in Vermont. Especially in Vermont.

  And so if I wanted to call her, I'd have to wait till tomorrow. I'd have to wait to call her during the day.

  Before changing into my pajamas, I went out to the pickup to unpack the long strips of wood that would form a railing at the church Saturday afternoon. The materials felt good in my hands, and the idea of building something excited me. Especially something for the church: That little congregation had helped me to retain a semblance of sanity in the months after Elizabeth died.

  When the screws and brackets and wood were tucked in the barn, I went back inside, unusually tired for nine-thirty at night. As I brushed my teeth, I remembered why: I'd made it through the day without coffee. Whole damn day, nine to five, and all those hours on either side.

  Granted, it had taken a couple of Advil mid-morning and a third one just after lunch to silence the giant rotary drill that was pounding through my skull in search of water. But at some point that afternoon, the caffeine-withdrawal ache in my brain had gone away and I'd completely forgotten that I wanted a cup of coffee.

  Son of a bitch, I thought, there's hope for me yet. Tonight I am going to sleep like a baby.

  I couldn't remember any details of the dream, I just knew it had awakened me. No, I didn't know even that. For all I knew, it was the sore throat that had caused me to open my eyes.

  There were no Halls upstairs, that was guaranteed. So, there would be no falling back to sleep without an excursion downstairs. I kicked off the sheets and walked through the house without turning on a light. Past the bedroom in which my daughter was sleeping soundly. Past the guest room still dominated by a cardboard mover's wardrobe full of Elizabeth's clothes, and the smaller boxes with the scarves and purses and shoes I planned to offer Abby as she grew up. Down the stairs that descended sixteen steps, through the thin hallway that led to the kitchen, and then into the old house's lone bathroom.

  I smacked my tongue against my teeth after zapping my throat with Chloraseptic.

  Sweet.

  Not, I imagined, as sweet as a sugar pill--even a sugar pill doused in belladonna or Pulsatilla, or whatever it was that Whitney had said she'd been given.

  I decided I wouldn't have minded if Whitney had been in my dream. Of course, if someone was going to intrude upon my sleep, I would have preferred Carissa. But if not the homeopath...I would have forgiven Whitney.

  Hell, I would have forgiven that older woman who worked in the store, too, the one with the toes from heaven. I would have been perfectly happy if it had been her in some kind of sexy dream.

  The problem was that the dream hadn't been sexy at all. It had been stupid and violent and messy. It had had something to do with a particularly brutish drunk who'd passed through the system that day, a guy who for no apparent reason--other, perhaps, than a four-dollar pint of Canadian Ltd.--had taken a shotgun and blown out the windows of a parked patrol car in Burlington. It was a miracle that no one had been hurt.

  I stared at the shadow in the bathroom mirror that was as close as I'd get to a reflection in the dark, and saw myself shaking my head as I sighed. It was three in the morning and I was awake once more with a sore throat, and it was all because of some idiot who'd drunk way too much whiskey. Unbelievable.

  And the most frustrating part, I decided, was that I hadn't had a single cup of coffee all day. Not one tiny drop. And still I was awake in the night.

  Chapter 6.

  Number 27

  The curative virtue of medicines thus depends on their symptoms being similar to those of the disease, but stronger.

  It follows that...disease can be destroyed and removed most surely, thoroughly, swiftly, and permanently only by a medicine that can make a human being feel a totality of symptoms most completely similar to it but stronger.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  .

  Jennifer Emmons would call the state psychology board about Carissa the day after Christmas, probably not long after calling the State's Attorneys Office in Burlington, the physician who was treating her husband for asthma, and the Attorney General's Office in Montpelier.

  It was from someone in the Attorney General's Office that she had learned that the state of Vermont does not regulate homeopaths. Naturopaths and hypnotherapists and acupuncturists, yes. Diathermists and hydrotherapists, most certainly.

  But not homeopaths.

  Nevertheless, at some point she'd recalled that Carissa was also a psychologist. And psychologists were regulated in Vermont.

  Jennifer would make her calls from the phone in the waiting room outside the ICU. When she left messages, she would leave the number for the hospital, along with the extension for the nursing station near her husband's room. And then she would return to the chair beside her husband's bed and wait for people to call her back.

  Richard's physician was enraged, though I think a part of his anger stemmed from the fact that his patient had gone behind his back to another healer. Richard had never told the fellow he had gone to a homeopath, and I imagine there was a certain amount of territoriality in the doctor's response.

  The lawyer in my office who returned her call, Bob McFarland, only spoke with her for a minute or two, just long enough to determine that she'd already given a statement to a trooper.

  Her longest conversation that morning, without a doubt, was with Garrick Turnbull--the head of the state psychology board and the husband of young prosecutor and date-eater Margaret Turnbull. When he called Jennifer back, she told him all that she understood about the Law of Similars, because she knew that it mattered. She wasn't completely sure why, not yet anyway, but never for a moment had she thought that her husband had tried to kill himself. Not for a second.

  No, in her mind, he did what he did because of a ludicrous philosophy of healing called homeopathy and a dangerously irresponsible homeopath named Carissa Lake. And so she had related to Garrick the little she knew about homeopathy, and what she said Richard had told her about the Law of Similars.

  "The law of what?" she'd asked Richard when he first tried explaining it to her one evening in early December, sipping the eggnog he'd poured.

  "Similars," Richard had said, stretching his legs in his chair. Lately he'd complained to her that on top of everything else--on top of his asthma and his eczema--his joints had started to ache in the night. Only when he moved did the aching subside. "She calls it the Law of Similars."

  "Meaning?"

  "Like cures like. Sort of like immunization. You know, giving someone a little polio in a polio vaccine. Or the way you'll give a cat a trace of feline leukemia."

  "She's going to give you asthma? How is she going to give you asthma?"

  She hadn't meant for the question to sound antagonistic, but she knew instantly that it had--especially since it was clear Richard himself understood that his grasp of homeopathic basics was pretty shaky. He had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about, and what, therefore, he was getting himself into.

  "Why are you being so skeptical about all this?"

  "Well, you have to admit, it sounds pretty kooky," she'd said, trying to make light of her concern. "It sounds a little like some of that New Age hokum you hear about at pricey spas."

  "Wouldn't you like to see me off drugs?" he'd asked.

  Outside their living-room window, great, puffy dots of white had continued to fall. It had started to snow that day just after lunch, and it hadn't stopped for a moment ever since. There was probably a half-foot on the ground by the time Richard had gotten home. Christmas, then, was still close to three weeks away, but we were all confident it would be white.

  "No. I don't care about the drugs. You do. I just want to see you well."

  "Well, that's why I'm seeing her."

  She'd sighed. She'd wanted the conversation behind them before dinner, because she didn't want to be having this discussion in front of the
kids. "If she's not going to give you asthma, what exactly is she going to give you?"

  "I won't know until I see her again next week."