There are, I have learned, two schools of medicine in my wife’s family, and this morning, on the strength of a single sneeze, both of them were sent for.
I had made the error of sneezing at breakfast. I did not say I was ill — I would not have dared — I merely sneezed, once, with what I considered admirable restraint. But my wife has an ear for these things, and by mid-morning she had done the most alarming thing a wife can do, which is to decide the matter was beyond her and to send for reinforcements. She did not nurse me herself. She summoned her mother and her aunt, the way one summons specialists, and then withdrew to let them work.
My mother-in-law arrived first, as she does everything first. She regards illness as a moral lapse correctable by sufficient firmness, and she set about correcting mine. There was to be no lying down — lying down, she holds, is how people die — so I was propped upright against every pillow in the house and made to take a broth so fortifying that the cold, I believe, considered leaving of its own accord rather than share a body with it.
The aunt came behind her, and the aunt is another matter entirely. She has never married, has therefore never once been talked out of anything, and has spent a long life assembling a private pharmacy the rest of the family discusses only in lowered voices. She brought a jar. I did not ask what was in the jar. She applied a portion of the jar to my chest, and a further portion, for reasons known only to herself and possibly to her Maker, behind each ear; and the fumes rose up and stood my few remaining wits smartly to attention.
The two of them do not agree. They have not, so far as I can establish, agreed upon anything since roughly the Eisenhower administration, and a sickbed is merely a fresh country to contest. My mother-in-law believes in heat, broth, and an open window for the good air. The aunt believes in her jar and a sealed room, on the settled principle that air is the very thing that made me ill to begin with. I lay between them, the disputed territory, by turns steamed and chilled, dosed and salved, propped and re-propped, while the window was opened and shut so often that I lost the count of it along with my will.
My daughter put her head in once, surveyed the field — the jar, the broth, the contested window, her father upright and glistening and faintly luminous about the ears — and asked, with great seriousness, whether she ought to fetch a priest. Only I heard the joke. I laughed, which both women took for a symptom, and treated accordingly.
Somewhere in the afternoon it came to me, lying there outranked and outnumbered and smelling powerfully of the jar, that this is the thing I actually married. A man imagines he is marrying a woman; he discovers, across the years, that he has married a whole apparatus — a mother, an aunt, a town, a standing parliament of women who will descend at the first sneeze and contend furiously over his carcass in the shared and immovable conviction that he cannot be trusted to survive unsupervised. It is not restful. But it is not nothing, either, to be a man whom this many people flatly refuse to let die quietly of a head cold.
By evening they had argued one another to a draught — a truce, and also a beverage, both of which I was required to take. They have since gone home. The window is, for the moment, open. They will return tomorrow, I am told, to assess my progress; and I have resolved, between now and then, to effect a full and convincing recovery, that being the only known method of persuading them to stop curing me.