Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper

as it were, to a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Fortunately, these patients can in many cases be re-educated—not in their minds but in their bodies.”
    â€œI see,” I said, though I didn’t.
    Dr. Munro was willing—not to say eager—to prescribe a “wand” for home use if I felt so disposed. “Thank you. I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said politely. At the end of that day’s treatment, I dashed down his brownstone steps, nearly bumping into Mrs. Munro on her way up. She was a plump woman in a squishy layered bonnet resembling a meringue, and I wondered if she ever consoled herself with one of her husband’s vibrating wands.
    A few days later I told my parents that Dr. Munro was not helping me, and they did not object to my discontinuing his ministrations.
    At first I could not identify what the Dr. Munro episode reminded me of. Finally I recalled a strange conversation that took place years ago on the horse-omnibus that took the pupils from Beacon Hill to Mrs. Agassiz’s school in Cambridge. I was fifteen, a newcomer at the school, and was sitting beside Grace Coolidge, a new nonentity like myself. On the omnibus there was always a great deal of horseplay, shouting, tossing of hats and muffs, songs with multiple rollicking verses that everyone but Grace and I and a few others knew. I had no idea how to approach these clannish Boston girls.
    The driver pulled over to the side of the road twice that morningto reprimand the pupils for not “behaving like young ladies.” From my seat, I could see the girls’ shoulders heaving in silent hilarity.
    When we pulled over for the second reprimand, Grace turned to me and asked, “Alice, have you ever heard of the ‘local treatment’?”
    â€œNo. What is it?”
    Well, she said, something dreadful happened to her aunt years ago and she swore on a stack of bibles that it was true. The aunt suffered from a form of hysteria known as “wandering womb” and went to a doctor for the “local treatment.” This consisted of painful manipulations and injections in the “female areas” and at some point—Grace’s voice dropped to a horrified whisper—the doctors placed leeches inside her and by mistake they crawled up into her womb.
    â€œWhat do you mean, inside her ?”
    â€œYou know, Alice!” She dropped her voice to a whisper behind her cupped hand. “ Down there .”
    The words “down there” immediately triggered a twinge down there in me. I crossed my legs; then finding that my thigh was pressing against “down there,” uncrossed them again.
    â€œHow ghastly! Did she die?”
    â€œNo, but she was never the same afterward.” The leeches weren’t meant to be in the uterus, she explained, but one or two crawled up inside. The pain was “beyond imagining,” she said. Her aunt, a spinster, became a lifelong invalid, queer in her mind and an epic hoarder of newspapers.
    At the time I suspected that Grace made up this dramatic story to impress me, as mousy, unpopular girls are apt to do. (You have no idea of tall tales until you’ve heard the rumors that young girls circulate at school.) But after my sessions with Dr. Munro, I saw that such things could happen. It would start with casual questions, such as whether your periods were regular, whether you ever felt faint, and before you knew it, you’d end up with leeches in your womb.
    I saw no more of Dr. Munro, but after my ordeal in his office, I did feel somewhat better, almost normal for a while. This was probably due to the sheer relief of being relieved of Dr. Munro’s massages and his tuneless humming. Aunt Kate attributed my improvement, of course, to the doctor’s skill.

    W ILLIAM J AMES
    D EAR A LICE
    Your excellent long letter of Sept. 5th reached me in due time. If about that time you felt yourself strongly hugged by some invisible