by Lisa Alther
‘I see,’ she said weakly. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
‘Well, at least he finally came home and faced up to his responsibilities like a man,’ his father said cheerfully.
She hung up. Every cell in her cried out in requiem for Hawk, her heroic nonwarrior. But she didn’t feel up to mourning him properly. She was all mourned out
As she lay on her bed, she reflected on her mother’s death. She had learned at least one thing. Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects had to be undone. There her mother had lain, her body decaying and in constant pain, her eyes bandaged, her surroundings sterile, nurses and doctors rushed and overworked, food bland and repetitive — what was there that could possibly have held her? There was a family clock. There was a huge white house, built by her megalomaniacal father. There were cherished photos of ancestors. There was a red squirrel in an elm tree. There was her anguished daughter, demanding as her right to be told things that could be learned only by going through them. All these had had to go. Her mother had had to work on doing without them because she must have suspected that she was about to leap into a realm where she would have none of these familiar comforts to orient her, where unresolved earthly attachments would only have flayed her to bits. Like a squid, she had carefully drawn in her tentacles. And presumably, when she had done so, she ended it all, of her own accord, springing away free at last from the bruised body that had served her well and then had failed her abysmally. Having been preceded by this deliberate diminishment of self, by this scaling down of earthly existence to a recurring series of unpleasant or uninteresting routines, her death had been like the dislodging of a dried brown leaf from a tree branch in a soft breeze. Rather than like the violent uprooting of a healthy sapling in a hurricane, as had been the case with Eddie, who had had so much still to do and so much still to learn.
Or at least that was how Ginny chose to think of the process that her mother had undergone. How was she to know? But if that view was correct and one ended it by choice when the weaning was accomplished, then Ginny felt that her time had come too. She had died several small deaths already, to ways of life and people loved. The Big One didn’t seem very imposing anymore. Everyone who had been important to her was now dead, or as good as dead for her purposes. She had nothing that she dreaded being severed from. Her tapes had been erased. What was there to hold her here? Why should she go through forming new attachments, only to have to renounce them later when Death finally brought her to her knees? Why not end it now? As she saw it, the only way to outwit Death was to kill herself.
As she had lain trying to nap the afternoon after her mother’s death, Ginny had fantasized that she was standing at the bottom of a down escalator in a huge department store. Bells were bonging in the background summoning clerks. Joe Bob in his Gant shirt and chinos grabbed her hand and made her run with him up this down escalator. After decades of effort, with sweat pouring down their faces, they reached the top, where the Major was waiting. But just as Ginny reached out to embrace the Major, Clem, in his studded jeans and red silk windbreaker, grabbed her hand and dragged her down the up escalator. They ran and they ran, like chipmunks on an exercise wheel, Clem lurching and hobbling on his bad leg. Her mother was waiting at the bottom. But just as Ginny stumbled toward her, Miss Head in her gray bun and Ben Franklin glasses pulled Ginny back onto the down escalator. Then, at the top as Ginny reached out for the Major, Eddie dragged her off to charge down the up escalator. After Ira had made her run with him up the down escalator, she finally collapsed in exhaustion while going down the up escalator with Hawk. As she was being carried under the moving steps, down into the guts of the department store, she reflected that, after all that effort, she hadn’t made any progress, as Hegel had promised that she would. And as she imagined the escalator mechanism chewing her to bits, she sighed with relief.
Ginny changed into her best bathing suit, for the same reason that her mother used to recommend wearing good underwear when leaving the house. Except her best bathing suit wasn’t for the benefit of the emergency room staff — it was for the Hullsport mortuary trade. She wanted to look her best when she arrived at the Slumber Room to be powdered by the waxen yellow hands of Mr. Renfrew.
She grabbed a rope and the oars to the rowboat. Down by the pond she dumped a modest boulder into the boat. Then she rowed to the canvas-covered dock, unloaded the boulder, and climbed out.
She wrapped the rope around the rock and tied it tightly. Then she tied the other end around her ankle. Glancing around, she made her peace with the kudzu-covered hills and the log cabin where, on different occasions, she had been very happy. But really, enough was enough. All around her frogs were devouring grasshoppers, snakes were swallowing frogs whole, Floyd Cloyd’s sons were slicing snakes like salamis, and Death lurked around waiting to consume little boys. It was all too much. She didn’t think even Management could expect her to endure it for much more than twenty-seven years. Like a snake swallowing its tail, she had come full circle: She had returned to her birthplace to die.
She picked up the boulder. Closing her eyes, she dropped it off the edge. She heard it splash and waited to be tugged down to a murky scum-covered grave.
Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and glanced down. A couple of coils of rope still lay on the dock. Disgruntled, she hauled the boulder back up. This time she wrapped the rope many times around the rock and around her ankle to take up all the slack.
Again, she took her leave of the green hills, which writhed with rustling kudzu and the struggles of dying creatures. Again, she tossed the boulder into the water with a big splash. With satisfaction at a job well done, she felt her leg being jerked out from under her. Her eyes closed, she lost her balance and tumbled toward the water.
And landed in the rowboat, which had shifted and drifted in front of the dock as she had been retying the stone.
Her leg hung out of the boat and was being wrenched out of its pelvic socket by the heavy stone. The entire right side of her body was badly bruised by the fall. As she lay there becoming slightly seasick, she considered the unappetizing nature of what she was about to do. Either the rope would rot and she’d float to the surface for some poor trespassing fisherman to find, or she’d decay among the seaweed and be nibbled to bits by scavenging bluegills. She’d befoul the water, which supplied the cabin sinks. Weaning themselves from material concerns or not, housewives, however inept, are constitutionally incapable of total indifference to the messes they leave behind them.
She untied the rope and rowed back to shore. She took a rifle and a handful of bullets from the gun rack by the fireplace. She hiked up the kudzu-covered hill behind the pond. She recalled with delight how Clem and she as kids had hollowed out tunnels through a kudzu field near his house, matting down areas to form interconnected chambers, like an anthill. She hollowed out such a chamber for herself, a crypt of greenery. She would never be found. The voracious vines would devour her, just as they had devoured Mr. Zed’s headstone. No one would face the gruesome task of disposing of her remains. They would think when she couldn’t be located, ‘How like her mother she was. Thoughtful to the end.’
She sat down in her kudzu chamber with her knees propped up. With the rifle barrel in her mouth, she found she could pull the trigger with her big toe. She gazed through the leaves at the scum-covered pond and at the log cabin where she had first entered this inadequate life. The cabin now belonged to strangers. The past was dead and gone. It was all finished. She had no place to go and no one to love and all her underwear needed washing.
She took a bullet and rolled it thoughtfully between her thumb and index finger. Abruptly, she picked up the rifle and opened the bullet chamber. She took the bullet and inserted it…
…Tried to insert it. The bullet wouldn’t go in. It was too big for this type of rifle. She had brought the wrong kind of bullet for the fucking gun!
In despair at having her plans for the afternoon thwarted,
she jumped up and raced down the hill, the rifle waving in one hand like a Comanche’s in a raid. Tripping and stumbling on the vines, she sprinted to the cabin and searched the gun rack frantically. No bullets to fit her .22, no rifles to fit the bullets in her hand. Karl had taken them all for himself when she wasn’t looking, the grasping bastard.
She seized a hunting knife down from the wall. Sitting on the stone steps she made a small experimental cut in her left wrist. Laying the knife aside, she watched as a drop of blood popped up and grew and grew, into a large red globule. If she smeared this blood onto a slide and placed it under Dr. Vogel’s microscope, she’d witness a universe in miniature. She’d see teeming swarms of dots floating around mindlessly in plasma. It would look almost like the photo in her college astronomy text — taken by a high-powered telescope in toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy — of the amassed suns of billions of invisible planets.
If she stained the slide properly and increased magnification, she would view the red oxygen-carrying cells, the less populous but more varied white cells and — the platelets. The platelets, those tiny cells that, malfunctioning, had killed both her mother and the Major, being too sparse and inactive in her case and overly so in his. And here Ginny sat with her platelets poised briefly between the two. In time, genes being what they were, her platelets would probably have let her down too.
But her platelets being functional for the moment, the blob of blood on her wrist was now viscous with fibrin. Miss Sturgill would have admired her clotting time. She hadn’t kept track of it, but it was negligible compared to her mother’s.
If she could have shrunk herself down to microbe size and insinuated herself into the area of the knife cut, she’d have been able to witness a high drama. Shock troops of phagocytes would be arriving via the area capillaries. They’d be sticking to the capillary walls until they could extend artificial feet through the overlapping cells of the vessel walls. They’d drag themselves along after their feet, out of the blood vessels and into the fray. Sniffing like bloodhounds, they would track down the thousands of bacteria that had invaded via the knife point Antibodies and various other chemical solutions would already have arrived to bathe these invading bacteria so as to render them appetizing. The encircling phagocytes would then proceed to embrace like Russian politicos these newly delectable bacteria, devouring them whole and alive. Various proteins were also arriving to mend the sliced tissues. The healing process was undertaken instantly and automatically by the bloodstream. In a matter of days, the cut would be healed, and healed so perfectly that no one would be able to locate it
Unless the knife point had introduced an especially belligerent germ, one with an outer wall that could shed the libations from the antibodies. Such a germ would be able to repel the hungry phagocytes, gain a foothold, reproduce, and perhaps destroy her with its wastes, as had happened to Dixie Lee Hull with her recipe card.
And yet, as far as Ginny with her crude senses was concerned, nothing much was going on. She’d sliced her wrist, and the cut had already clotted. And now came the last series of questions that she intended to allow herself in this life. Was she a cell in some infinitely larger organism, an organism that couldn’t be bothered with her activities any more than she could be with those of the 60 trillion cells in her own body, as long as they performed their assigned functions? And were there, say, white blood cells that — not being able to see themselves as Ginny could, as a group, under magnification, stained to highlight determining characteristics — had not been able to figure out what their ‘assigned function’ was, whether they were supposed to perform as macrophages or neutrophils or eosinophils or lymphocytes? And did those perplexed blood cells then take it upon themselves to self-destruct in a huff at not receiving enough individual attention and guidance from her personally? Autophagy, it was called, when cells unleashed on their own cytoplasm their suicide bags of digestive enzymes. Autophagy, which literally meant ‘self-eating.’
Ginny was reminded of Clem’s description of a revolting incident during his adolescence in which he and his hoodlum friends had hunched over their own laps, vainly trying to eat themselves. Onanism, autophagy, suicide, it was all the same — a component part trying to run the whole show. She smiled reluctantly and returned the knife to its sheath.
Like most of her undertakings, her proposed suicide had degenerated into burlesque. Apparently she was condemned to survival. At least for the time being.
She went into the bedroom. She wrapped her mother’s clock in her faded Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt and packed it in Hawk’s knapsack with her other scant belongings. She left the cabin, to go where she had no idea.
Epilogue
A scavenger walking down the street of the perfume-sellers fell down as if dead. People tried to revive him with sweet odours, but he only became worse.
Finally a former scavenger came along, and recognized the situation. He held something filthy under the man’s nose and he immediately revived, calling out: ‘This is indeed perfume!’
You must prepare yourself for the transition in which there will be none of the things to which you have accustomed yourself. After death your identity will have to respond to stimuli of which you have a chance to get a foretaste here.
If you remain attached to the few things with which you are familiar, it will only make you miserable, as the perfume did the scavenger in the street of the perfume-makers.
-GHAZALI, FROM Tales of the Dervishes BY IDRIES SHAH
A Biography of Lisa Alther
For novelist Lisa Alther, as for so many of her fellow Southerners, the past is ever present, particularly in places like Kingsport, Tennessee, the small town where she was born in 1944. One of five children, Alther grew up in a region known for its coal mining and factories, surrounded by a close-knit Appalachian community. Her father was a second-generation town doctor, and her mother was a former English teacher from upstate New York. Another strong presence in her upbringing was her paternal grandmother, the founder of the Virginia Club and a pillar of the Southern way of life. Lisa attended public schools in Kingsport, taking her place in the marching band after an unsuccessful brush with flag swinging, living the typical life of a 1950s teen.
Alther left Tennessee to attend Wellesley College and moved to New York after graduation in 1966 to work in book publishing at Atheneum. During college she met a Cornell co-ed, Richard Alther, whom she later married. Their daughter, Sara, was born in 1968. The family moved to Vermont, where Richard pursued his painting. In the years that followed, Alther began writing journalism pieces, but inspired by the great Southern women writers and storytellers, she also worked on novels. After many rejections, her first novel, Kinflicks was published in 1976 to critical praise and became a bestseller.
Kinflicks was the first of six bestselling novels: The others were Original Sins (1982), Other Women (1984), Bedrock (1990), Birdman and the Dancer (1993), and Five Minutes in Heaven (1995). Alther also taught Southern fiction at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and produced one work of nonfiction, Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree. For Kinfolks (2007), she researched her family’s possible connection to the Melungeon people, a little-known population in eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia whose ethnic origins are unclear but may be traced to Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish sailors who integrated with the Cherokee people in the seventeenth century.
Following her divorce, Alther remained in Vermont, where she has lived now for over thirty years. She has written novels set both in the South and in her adopted northern home, and takes inspiration from both her past and present neighbors and family. Her novels feature a comic wit that addresses human foibles as gracefully as her more serious prose tackles weightier topics such as racism, feminism, domestic abuse, politics, and sexuality. Her work aims “to portray the human reality behind the cultural stereotypes, particularly those regarding women.”
Alther divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
A baby A
lther on July 23, 1945, sitting at the edge of Conesus Lake in New York.
Alther in 1948, at age four.
An eight-year-old Alther in June of 1952.
Alther, at age eleven, with her parents, Alice and Shelton Reed, and brothers Michael, Bill, and John, in June of 1955. This photo was taken at Alther’s aunt’s cottage at Conesus Lake in upstate New York.
Alther’s high school graduation photo. She attended Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee, where she played clarinet in the band, was the editor of the school newspaper, and belonged to several community service and social clubs.
Alther at her farmhouse in Vermont in 1976 on the day of the publication of her first novel, Kinflicks.
Seen here in 1992, Alther is posing in front of watercolors she painted and displayed at a group show in New York.
Alther with her grandsons Zachary, eight, and Oliver, three, in New York’s Central Park in December of 2009.
Alther with her mother, Alice, in Lake Champlain, Vermont, in 2000.
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