by Lisa Alther
And, Ginny suspected, they were all — if they’d only admit it — inspecting each other with the care of housewives at a supermarket meat counter, as possible main courses should their craft be lost atop a remote peak in the Smokies.
But at least she still rode planes, Ginny reminded herself — unlike her mother, who in recent years had scarcely left the house at all for fear of being overtaken by disaster among strangers, insisting that it was vulgar to die among people one didn’t know. How was her mother feeling about that now, as she lay in a hospital bed in Hullsport hemorrhaging like an overripe tomato? ‘A clotting disorder,’ their neighbor Mrs. Yancy had called it in her note suggesting that Ginny come down and keep her mother company while Mrs. Yancy went on a trip to the Holy Land. ‘Nothing serious,’ the note had assured her. Her mother knew she’d be out of the hospital soon and hadn’t wanted to worry Ginny with the news. But if it weren’t serious, why was her mother in a place that she would necessarily hate, feeling as she did about strangers? And why had Mrs. Yancy asked Ginny to come down, knowing as she must that in recent years Ginny and her mother had been hitting it off like Moses and the Pharaoh?
Before giving up flying altogether, her mother had gone on business trips regularly with the Major. His condition on her going was that they take separate planes so that when one of them died during landing, the other would remain to carry on.
Doesn’t it just double the likelihood of one of your bags going to Des Moines?’ Ginny had demanded of her mother one winter afternoon when she was in high school and was making her second trip to the airport, having taken the Major to catch his flight to New York that morning. They were in the Major’s huge black Mercedes. Her mother had loved that car. Because it looked and drove like a hearse, Ginny suspected. Practice.
“Don’t ask me. Ask your father,” she replied, closing her eyes in anticipation of a head-on collision as Ginny negotiated a traffic circle. Any time her mother couldn’t be bothered with having an opinion on something, she’d say, “Don’t ask me. Ask your father.” Ever since the Major had died, she must have been somewhat at a loss for words.
“I don’t know why I go along with all this,” she mused. “I wouldn’t even want to ‘carry on’ if your father’s plane crashed.”
“You’d just throw yourself on his funeral pyre, like a suttee?” Ginny didn’t enjoy being sarcastic to the woman who had rinsed her dirty diapers, but it seemed unjust that she should be saddled with these passive-dependent attitudes simply because this woman and she had lived in the same house for eighteen years. After all, what about free will?
“Yes, I think I would. I don’t think it’s such a bad custom at all.”
“You don’t,” Ginny said flatly, more as a statement than as a question, since she knew her mother didn’t. “Does it bother you that you don’t?” Ginny asked this blandly to conceal how much it was bothering her that the custom appealed so enormously to her too.
“Bother me?” her mother asked with an intense frown, working an imaginary brake with her foot.
“Please, Mother, I’m a very safe driver,” Ginny snapped. “Bother you. You know. Do you sometimes wish that there were things in life that seemed important to you other than your family?”
“I’m not really all that interested in life. I mean, it’s okay, I guess. But I’m not hog wild about it.”
“Well, why do you go on with it?” Ginny demanded irritably.
“Why not?”
“But if the only thing you’re interested in is your great family reunion in the sky, why don’t you get on with it? What keeps you hanging around here?”
Her mother looked at her thoughtfully for a while and then gave a careful and sincere answer: “It’s character building. What does it matter what I might prefer?” As Ginny understood the lengthy explanation that ensued, her mother was saying that the human soul was like a green tomato that had to be ripened by the sun of earthly suffering before the gods would deign to pluck it for use at their cosmic clambake. It hadn’t made sense to an impatient seventeen-year-old.
But that incident was why Ginny was so surprised several years later when her mother said, with great intensity, “Ginny, you must promise me that you will put me out of my misery if I’m ever sick and dying a lingering death.”
Startled, Ginny had looked at her closely. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and frown lines; and her neat cap of auburn hair was graying here and there. But she was agile and erect. With the insensitivity of the young to the concerns of their elders, Ginny laughed nervously and protested, “But Mother! Your hair is hardly even gray or anything. I’d say you’ve got a few years left!”
She gave Ginny a sharp look of betrayal and said sourly, “Believe me, after age thirty it’s all downhill. Everything starts giving out and falling apart.”
Her mother hadn’t been hog wild about living eleven years ago. Ginny wondered how she was feeling about it now that her bluff was being called. But was it being called? “Not serious,” Mrs. Yancy had said. And yet Ginny couldn’t seem to prevent herself from leaping to all kinds of dire conclusions. Why was her mother in the hospital if it wasn’t serious? How sick was she?
These questions, swarming through her head like fruit flies, temporarily distracted Ginny from the fact that she had survival problems of her own — both immediate, in that she was trapped aboard this airborne sarcophagus, and long-range with regard to the fact that she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. If indeed she did one day grow up, which was looking increasingly unlikely as she approached early middle age, with her twenty-seventh birthday recently behind her. The incidents in her life to date resembled the Stations of the Cross more than anything else. If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert without eating her vegetables.
Another problem was that the stewardesses were bullying the passengers that day. They kept parading past selling pennants and souvenirs, and requiring that everyone acknowledge their obvious talents with their lip brushes. Ginny finally concluded that the only way to get rid of them would be to throw up in the air-sickness bag and then try to find one of them to dispose of it.
And then there was the problem of the blond two-year-old in the next seat, imprisoned between her own mother and Ginny. The child kept popping up and down, unfastening and refastening her seat belt, lowering her seat-back tray and then replacing it, scattering the literature in the pocket all over the floor, putting the air-sickness bag over her head and then looking around for applause, removing her shoes and putting them back on the wrong feet, snapping the metal lid to the ashtray. It seemed a shame for all that energy to be going to waste, dissipating throughout the plane. Ginny suddenly understood the rationale behind child labor. Hooked up to a generator, this child’s ceaseless contortions could have been fueling the plane.
She found herself unable not to watch the child, as irritating as all her relentless activities were. Ginny was experiencing the Phantom Limb Syndrome familiar to all recent amputees: She felt, unmistakably, Wendy’s presence next to her. When she looked over and discovered that this presence was merely an unfamiliar child of the same age, she was flooded with an overwhelming misery that caused her to shut her eyes tightly with pain. Wendy was in Vermont now with her father, the bastard Ira Bliss, living a life that excluded her wicked, adulterous mother.
Ginny reflected glumly that that racy view of her behavior credited her with much more sexual savoir-faire than she actually possessed. Although in principle she was promiscuous, feeling that the wealth should be shared, in practice she had always been morbidly monogamous, even before her marriage to Ira. In fact, until the appearance of Will Hawk that afternoon, nude in her swimming pool in Vermont, she had always been doglike in her devotion to one partner. Even with Hawk, her unfaithfulness to Ira was spiritual only, not physical — although Ira had found that impossible to believe the night he had discovered Ginny and Hawk in his family
graveyard in poses that the unenlightened could only identify as post-coital.
Ginny tried to decide if her transports of fidelity were innate — an earthly translation of a transcendent intuition of oneness, a kind of sexual monotheism. Or whether she’d simply been brainwashed by a mother who would have liked nothing better than to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Or whether it was unadulterated practicality, a question of knowing which side her bed was buttered on, her bod was bettered on — a very sensible refusal to bite the hand that feels her. In such a culture as this, perhaps the only prayer most women had was to find a patron and cling to him for all he was worth. People knew a man by the company he kept, but they generally knew a woman by the man who kept her. Or by the woman who kept her, in the case of Ginny and Edna.
At one point the child’s mother, noticing Ginny’s self-punishing absorption with the little girl, leaned forward and asked with a smile, “Do you have children?”
“Yes,” Ginny replied with a pained smile. “One. Just this age.”
“Oh, well!” the mother said briskly. “Then you’ll want this.” She took two index cards from her alligator pocketbook and began copying from one onto the other. When she finished, she reread what she’d written and handed it to Ginny with pride. It read: “Homemade Play Dough: mix 21/4 cups flour with 1 cup salt; add 1 cup water mixed with 2 T vegetable oil; add food color to water before mixing.”
“Neat,” Ginny said, stuffing it quickly into the pocket of her patchwork dress. “Thanks.” She decided not to wreck this moment of sharing by mentioning that her child’s father had kicked her out and that she might never see Wendy again, much less mix Play Dough for her.
“Be sure to use all the salt. Otherwise they eat it.”
“I’ll remember,” Ginny assured her, wondering if Ira really could prevent her from ever seeing Wendy again, as he had vowed he would. In spite of her apparent moral turpitude, Ginny was still Wendy’s natural mother. Didn’t that count for something in the eyes of the law?
The child had ripped the arm off her doll and was hitting her mother over the head with it. It occurred to Ginny, as the plane’s engines were cut and she grabbed the handle of the emergency door preparing to wrench it open, that someone should invent a God doll — wind Him up and He delivers us from evil. Mattel could make a fortune.
Rather than spiraling down into fiery death, the plane began its normal descent into the Crockett River valley. As it emerged from the fluffy white clouds, Ginny could see the Crockett, forking all along its length into hundreds of tiny capillary-like tributaries that interpenetrated the forested foothills and flashed silver in the sun. The treed bluffs on either side of the river were crimped like a piecrust of green Play Dough.
Soon Hullsport itself was beneath them, its defunct docks crumbling into the Crockett. They were low enough now so that the river, having had its moment of poetry from higher up, looked more like its old self — a dark muddy yellow frothed with chemical wastes from the Major’s factory. The river valley containing the town was ringed by red clay foothills, which were gashed with deep red gullies from indiscriminate clearing for housing developments. From eight thousand feet Ginny’s hometown looked like a case of terminal acne.
She could see the factory now, a veritable city of red brick buildings, their hundreds of windows reflecting the yellow brown of the river. Dozens of huge white waste tanks, crisscrossed with catwalks of ladders like the stitching on softballs, lined the riverbank. Behind the tanks bubbled and swirled murky aeration ponds. Vast groves of tall red tile stacks were exhaling the harmless-looking puffy white smoke that had settled in over the valley like the mists of Nepal and had given Hullsport the distinction of harboring the vilest air for human lungs of any town its size in a nation of notoriously vile air.
The factory was having its revenge on Hullsport. It had never really been included in the town plan. Everyone knew that it was essential to the economy, in this region that relied mostly on dirt farming and coal mining. But aesthetically the factory had offended; and so it had been stuck out in the low flat flood plain of the Crockett, like an outhouse screened from view behind a mansion. But, like any suppressed or ignored or despised human function, the scorned factory had come to dominate life in Hullsport anyway through its riot of noxious exudations.
On the opposite side of the river from the factory, connected to it by a railroad bridge, a footbridge, and an auto bridge, was the town of Hullsport itself — the Model City, it had been nicknamed by its founder, Ginny’s grandfather, her mother’s father, Zedediah Hull, or Mr. Zed as everyone had referred to him. Faced with a lifetime in the coalmines of southwest Virginia, he had packed it in to come to this area of Tennessee. Then he had gone north and, in spite of his doubtful accent, had persuaded Westwood Chemical Company of Boston to open a plant in his as-yet-unbuilt model town and to back his project financially. At that time the rural South was regarded by northern businesses as prime ground for colonization, with all the attractions of any underdeveloped country — cheap land, grateful and obedient labor, low taxes, plentiful raw materials, little likelihood of intervention from local government. Mr. Zed then hired a world-famous town planner to draw up plans for Shangri-La South.
From the plane window, Ginny could see the scattered remnants of this original plan. Five large red brick churches — all various shades of Protestantism, all with white steeples of different design — surrounded a central green. From the church green ran Hull Street, which was lined with furniture stores, department stores, clothing stores, movie theaters, newsstands, finance companies, banks. At the far end of the street, facing the church circle and bordering on the river, was the red brick train station for the Crockett Railroad. The train station and the church circle were the two poles, worldly and otherworldly, that had been yoked together to pattern and energize the surrounding town. Out from this central axis radiated four main streets. Side streets joined these main streets in a pattern of concentric hexagons. Private houses lined the side streets. Squinting so as to see just the original pattern, and not what had been done to it since, Ginny decided that it looked almost like a spider web.
Alas, the master builders of the Model City in 1919 hadn’t foreseen the domination of Hullsport life by the motorcar. No parking space to speak of had been planned for the church circle or the shopping street, and it was now almost impossible to work your way to Hull Street and back out again during the day. Consequently, half a dozen large shopping plazas and a bustling interstate highway now circled the original hexagon. The farmers, who had come into Hullsport every Saturday of Ginny’s childhood in their rusting Ford pick-ups to sell a few vegetables and buy supplies and swap gossip down by the train station while squirting brown streams of tobacco juice through crooked teeth, were no longer in evidence. The railroad and the river shipping business had gone bankrupt, victims of competition with long-distance trucking. The red brick train station, with its garish late Victorian gingerbread, was deserted and vandalized, with obscene drawings and slogans painted all over the interior walls by the initiates of the Hullsport Regional High School fraternities. The station served now as a hangout for the town derelicts and delinquents and runaways, who congregated there at night to drink liquid shoe polish.
Nor had the town fathers, specifically Ginny’s grandfather, anticipated the Dutch elm disease, which had killed off most of the big old trees within the hexagon proper and had left Hulls-port looking like a raw new frontier town, baked under the relentless southern sun. Nor had he imagined that six times as many people as he had planned for would one day want to leave the farms and mines and crowd into Hullsport, and that clumps of houses for them would ring the hexagon in chaotic, eczema-like patches.
Hullsport, Tennessee, the Model City, Pearl of the Crockett River valley, birthplace of such notables as Mrs.. Melody Dawn Bledsoe, winner of the 1957 National Pillsbury Bake-Off, as a banner draped across Hull Street had reminded everyone ever since. Spawning ground of Joe Bob Sparks,
All-South running back for the University of Northeastern Tennessee Renegades — and prince charming for a couple of years to Virginia Hull Babcock, Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen of 1962. Ginny was prepared to acknowledge that time spent as Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen sounded trivial in the face of personal and global extinction; but it was as tobacco queen that she had first understood why people were leaving their tobacco farms to crowd into Hullsport and work at the Major’s munitions plant, why there were no longer clutches of farmers around the train station on Saturday mornings.
The plane was making its approach now to the pockmarked landing strip that Hullsport called its airport. Ginny could see the shadow of the plane passing over her childhood hermitage below — a huge white neo-Georgian thing with pillars and a portico across the front, a circular drive, a grove of towering magnolia trees out front which at that very moment would be laden with intoxicating cream-colored blossoms. It looked from a thousand feet up like the real thing — an authentic antebellum mansion. But it was a fraud. Her grandfather, apparently suffering the bends from a too-rapid ascent from the mines, had built it in 1921 on five hundred acres of farmland. It was copied from a plantation house in the delta near Memphis. The design clearly wasn’t intended for the hills of east Tennessee. Hullsport had expanded to meet the house, which was now surrounded on three sides by housing developments. But behind the house stretched the farm — a tobacco and dairying operation run now by none other than Clem Cloyd, Ginny’s first lover, whose father before him had run the farm for Ginny’s grandfather and father. The Cloyds’ small maroon-shingled house was diagonally across the five hundred acres from Ginny’s house. And at the opposite end, in a cleared bowl ringed by wooded foothills, across the invisible Virginia state line, was the restored log cabin that Ginny’s grandfather had withdrawn to toward the end of his life, in disgust with the progressive degradation of the Model City.