The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Mrs. Babcock is embroidering a sampler.’

  ‘I didn’t even know she could embroider,’ Ginny said, wondering at how little she really knew about this woman with whom she’d spent eighteen years. The nurse handed her an embroidery frame from the foot of her mother’s bed. Apparently her mother couldn’t embroider. The frame was a mess — colors and stitches all scrambled together in no apparent pattern. Unless it was a new folk art form.

  “Who’s the man next door?’ Ginny asked in a whisper.

  The nurse looked at her suspiciously. ‘Bicknell,’ she replied out of the corner of her mouth, with a nervous glance around the room to see if she’d been overheard. ‘He was Coach over at the high school before Coach Sparks.’ Ginny’s heart leapt with terror at the nearness of her old enemy. ‘He’s had a stroke.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ Ginny said with scarcely contained pleasure. ‘I used to know him.’

  ‘Won two hundred and three football games and lost eight. Can’t beat that, can you? He was a great athlete and an outstanding coach.’

  But a lousy son of a bitch, Ginny thought as she nodded solemnly — and then, suddenly, felt uncharitable. The poor man was a demented vegetable now — no threat to her any longer, if he ever really had been. Why should she corrode her heart by harboring an enduring hatred for him? And yet…if she gave up her grudge, wouldn’t that be admitting that all the burning loves and hatreds of her life were nothing but fleeting whims in the face of ultimate mortal frailty?

  As the nurse whisked out the door, a whirlwind of white-starched competence, Ginny could hear Coach’s disembodied commands still floating up and down the hall: ‘Now, you listen to me right now: I need me three men out there on that field right now. No more, and no less. Can you get me those men? I need three men…’ The door sucked shut and all was quiet.

  Ginny stood up and walked over to her mother’s bedside table. It was littered with magazines. Volume 22 of the family’s encyclopedia lay on top of the magazines, a marker at the two-thirds point. Her remarkable mother had read the whole set straight through in the past nine years and was now a storehouse of all kinds of fascinating, if useless, crumbs of knowledge. Also on the table was a large syringe, poised for action, which the nurse had just left.

  Carefully, Ginny opened the table drawer, thinking of her promise to her mother years ago to put her out of her misery and hoping to find huge bottles crammed with pain-killing tablets and capsules of all kinds that she could slip to her mother if that was what the situation required. But there were no bottles, only a worn Bible and an Anglican prayer book. The central commissary was elsewhere. Ginny tried picturing the alternatives -smuggling a pistol in under her poncho, concealing a razor blade in her Afro. She could see the spotless sheets and septic walls splattered with her mother’s blood…

  But why such morbid thoughts? Her mother had a clotting disorder, that was all. She’d had it before, Mrs. Yancy had said. She’d probably have it again. It hadn’t even merited a phone call to Vermont the last time. Yes, she looked grotesque, but basically she wasn’t that sick. Mrs. Yancy had said so. And anyway, it was impossible for a woman her mother’s age to be mortally ill.

  The nurse streaked back in. Unobtrusively, Ginny tried to close the drawer.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the nurse said irritably, shoving Ginny away. She picked up the syringe, reached under the covers with a cotton swab, and injected whatever it was into Mrs. Babcock’s hip. Mrs.. Babcock didn’t so much as flinch.

  ‘You may as well go home and come back in the morning. Mrs. Babcock will be out for the night.’

  ‘But I just got here,’ Ginny protested. ‘I haven’t even said hello to her.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  “What exactly is idiopathic thrombo — whatever it is?’

  The nurse glared at her. “Have you talked with the doctor yet?’

  ‘Dr. Tyler?’ Ginny asked, invoking the sacred name of the general practitioner who had for decades performed every medical service the family had required. He had, for instance, delivered Ginny.

  ‘Tyler’s retired.’

  Dr. Tyler retired? How was that possible? How could he desert her family just when they needed him? It was unthinkable. ‘Who is her doctor then?’

  ‘Vogel,’ snapped the nurse. ‘The new hematologist. You ask him about Mrs. Babcock’s condition. I’m not permitted to discuss it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ginny asked, staring with anxiety at her mother’s round yellow moonlike face and cotton-packed nostrils. The nurse stared with obvious displeasure at Ginny’s peasant dress and combat boots and then raced out of the room on stiff legs, like an angry marathon walker.

  Hearing her door open, Mrs. Babcock lay still and breathed as evenly and as quietly as she could with cotton wadded in her nostrils. She hoped to fool Miss Sturgill into letting her ‘sleep’ through the infernal craft program. Although she’d gotten much better in recent years about saying no to things she really didn’t want to do, she was having a difficult time saying no to the craft program. It was run by young high school girls; and Mrs. Babcock, well trained in the art of nurturing young egos, couldn’t bring herself to tell them that she’d rather be left alone to lick her wounds in solitude, like a cat. The girls assumed that the patients were bored and loved the invigorating company of young people. They were wrong; but no mother would ever dream of disillusioning them in their first fumbling attempts at philanthropy. Dressed in pink striped pinafores, fresh and scrubbed, they were always so pathetically eager to sympathize with complaints, to chatter mindlessly about themselves and their activities at school. In sum, they were so unlike Ginny at sixteen. That was what was appealing about them; that was why Mrs. Babcock twice a week embroidered a sampler she wasn’t remotely interested in. The sessions furnished her with the companionship of young girls that Ginny had deprived her of by being so resolutely secretive. Of course, a great deal of Ginny’s conduct had merited secrecy. Mrs. Babcock would sit in the activity room, fumbling with her embroidery frame and studying these lively charming chattering female creatures, and would wonder where she had gone wrong with Ginny. Or did these girls become sullen and defiant the minute they set foot in their own houses?

  Well, Ginny had always been a difficult child. A sharp word or an unpleasant look had triggered a flood of penitent tears in Karl and Jim as small children. But Ginny had merely turned around and glared, making Mrs. Babcock think of Lizzie Borden and her ax. The boys were reliable, predictable in their very different ways. Karl, after West Point, had been sent to Germany and had recently been promoted to captain. As his father had been, Karl was matter-of-fact and disciplined and efficient. Jim was probably more like herself, Mrs. Babcock thought — laboring under a disinclination to become involved in the real world. His meager living at sandal making had to be supplemented by the dividend checks from his trust fund.

  But Ginny, born between the two boys, was the difficult one — difficult because she was neither a Karl nor a Jim. She fluctuated between the two personality types at such a rate that one never knew how to approach her, never knew which role she was ‘into’ at any given moment. Although Jim professed to hate everything his ‘bourgeois’ parents stood for, at least they always knew where they stood with him. With Ginny they were never sure. You never knew from one week to the next whether you were a heinous criminal perpetrating crimes on humanity, or whether you were eligible for sainthood and an exemplar of all virtue.

  The one thing the three children did share, though, was the requirement that their parents not change. Children could change, could wear different kinds of clothes, try out new hairdos, espouse new ideologies — but parents were not allowed to change because it would confuse the children, who needed something stable and consistent to butt heads with. It was most irritating if you yourself, as a parent, didn’t happen to consider your development a closed book. ‘But, Mother,’ they would shriek when she would toss out an idea that they’
d never expected from her, ‘you’re not being consistent!’ Never mind that none of them had ever been consistent for longer than two minutes at any point in their lives.

  Mrs. Babcock hadn’t heard the door reopen. Apparently Miss Sturgill hadn’t yet given up on her as a candidate for the craft program and was still lurking somewhere in the room waiting to pounce on her should she open an eye. This was so childish! It was like playing possum as a child, when she hadn’t wanted to get up on a summer morning. She had to get out of this place before she regressed to infancy.

  Mrs. Babcock could sense the presence of another person at the foot of her bed. Cautiously, she opened one eye just enough to see through her eyelashes. It clearly wasn’t Miss Sturgill. For one thing, Miss Sturgill would never stand still for that long. Besides, the form, a silhouette against the bright light through the window, wasn’t dressed in dazzling white. It looked like Ginny, of all people. Was she dreaming without realizing it? Or hallucinating due to having been thinking about Ginny?

  Mrs. Babcock strained her faintly opened eye. Yes, it was definitely Ginny, this wan unhappy-looking creature, dressed in a colorful patchwork dress with puffy sleeves and a low neck and a laced bodice. Who was she this time — Heidi? She wore a leather thong of some sort on one wrist. And her hair — dear God, what had she done to her hair? It. was cut short. Its natural curl had made it lie in soft damp ringlets around her flushed face during her sleep when she was a toddler. Ginny had spent probably three whole years of her life sporting giant pink curlers that resembled cardboard toilet paper cylinders in order to eliminate this curl. Wesley used to enrage her by telling her that the rollers made her look as though she had holes in her head. This same natural curl, unleashed, now made Ginny’s hair stick out frizzily, as though she were holding a bared electric wire. The Unkempt Look, it was probably called in the fashion magazines. It looked awful, of course, but no worse than the hairdos she’d come up with half a dozen times in the last twelve years — the ridiculous pony tail she’d insisted on when she was a flag swinger; the puffy bouffant when she’d been hanging around with the horrid Cloyd boy, which had made her head look twice its normal size and had required half an hour of backcombing; the severe bun she’d returned from Worthley with; the plaited braid the time she’d brought home that unfortunate Holzer girl and had picketed Wesley’s factory. Honestly, when would Ginny listen to her mother and accept the fact that her hair would look most becoming simply cut short and allowed to wave softly, as if had when she was a little girl?

  So annoyed was she with Ginny’s obstinacy that Mrs. Babcock almost gave herself away by sitting up to suggest that Ginny try wetting her hair down to see if she couldn’t do something more attractive with it than this current fright wig. Then she realized that the crucial issue for the moment was not Ginny’s hair but rather the fact of her presence. Why was she here, standing at the foot of the bed? Mrs. Babcock pondered the topic for a while and finally concluded that she was dreaming. How ridiculous! Of course she was dreaming. Ginny was in Vermont and rarely came to Hullsport anymore if she could avoid it. It must be the drugs they’d been giving her.

  Just then the door burst open. Miss Sturgill this time, come to shanghai her to the activity room. Mrs. Babcock stubbornly closed her eye — confused, because if she was dreaming, then why would she have to pretend to be asleep to outwit Miss Sturgill? Or was Miss Sturgill part of the dream too? She heard the two of them whispering, and was lulled off into authentic sleep.

  The next morning Mrs. Childress came in to wake her. It was unclear to Mrs. Babcock why she had to wake up at 6:30 each morning when she had very little to do all day except to lie in bed and try to nap. Nevertheless, that was the rule, and she was in no position to challenge it, trapped as she was in this unfamiliar place at the mercy of unending streams of strangers dressed in starched white.

  Mrs. Childress was taking her pulse, studying the large round face of her sturdy man’s wristwatch. Mrs. Babcock found this pulse ritual profoundly reassuring. The rest of her system might be breaking down, but her faithful heart was still pumping away, albeit faster than usual because of her blood loss. More than 89,000 times a day it expanded and contracted to circulate some 72,000 quarts of defective blood through her tired bruised body. Two and a half billion times it would beat, if God granted her a normal life. (All of these things she knew from the encyclopedia.) Such dependability was gratifying wherever you found it. But why did Mrs. Childress have to check it every morning at 6:30? What was she expecting to discover?

  ‘Why do you do this every morning?’

  Mrs. Childress shut her eyes, calculating Mrs. Babcock’s pulse rate. ‘Standard procedure,’ she grumbled as she pulled up the sleeve of Mrs.. Babcock’s nightgown and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her upper arm. This was how they first confirmed that she was having another bout with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, that afternoon when she had appeared in the emergency room with a nose that wouldn’t stop bleeding — with a blood pressure cuff. A tourniquet test, it was called, to determine capillary fragility. Dr. Vogel had arrived, blond and breathless and red-faced. He had taken her blood pressure, pausing for five minutes midway between diastolic and systolic. With a pen he had drawn a circle five centimeters in diameter on her forearm. Fifteen minutes later he had counted the tiny bruises that had formed. There were dozens, when five or so would have been normal. It seemed such a quaint technique, in these days of heart-lung machines and organ transplants. Since that unfortunate afternoon, the tiny bruises -petechiae, as Dr. Vogel insisted on referring to them — had appeared all over her body. They had proceeded to grow and merge with each other to form large bruises — ecchymoses, he called them, for reasons known only to the medical profession.

  As Mrs. Childress squeezed the bulb to tighten the cuff, the colorful yellow and green and black and purple bruises on Mrs. Babcock’s arm began their dull ache, an ache that would eventually spread throughout her body. Mrs. Babcock grimaced. Another day of dull pain was beginning.

  ‘Sorry honey,’ Mrs. Childress said, watching the jerking dial. Mrs. Childress was a good person. It was always a relief to find herself awakened by Mrs. Childress rather than by the efficient Miss Sturgill. Mrs. Childress was older and more patient. In addition, her husband worked at the chemical plant. Mrs. Childress was honored to be packing the bloody nose of Major Babcock’s wife. Mrs. Childress suffered periodically from sciatica; her pain had mellowed her. But Miss Sturgill had promise. Let her give birth to a few babies or undergo a head-on collision or something, and she would mellow too.

  Mrs. Childress made notations on a chart. Then she picked up a spring lancet with a pointed razor blade on the end. Mrs. Babcock flinched reflexively, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Childress said firmly. ‘I’m afraid we have to do a bleeding test today.’

  ‘But you just did one yesterday.’

  ‘The last one was three days ago,’ Mrs. Childress assured her, taking her left lobe in one hand and pricking it quickly. Mrs.. Babcock reflected that she was getting to be like a junky: They were running out of sites for their tests. Could it be possible that the last one had been three days ago? Mrs. Childress dabbed at her bleeding lobe with a round disk of filter paper. The management of this place may have been utterly wrapped up in their variety of ways for measuring time — pulses and blood pressures and bleeding times. But for the patients, the only demarcations during the day were the various routines — the nurses’ rounds with medication and tests, meals, visitors. Otherwise, Mrs. Babcock had floated through her two weeks here suspended in time, with no awareness of its passage.

  Even when she had been well and at home, her time sense had been fuzzy. She knew the date only by counting backward to some significant date in the recent past — a birthday or a holiday, some milepost on the calendar. This was in glaring contrast to Wesley, who had known at all times not only the exact day, month, and year, but the precise hour and minute as well. Even without his hab
it of constantly glancing at his calendar watch as he talked. He had regarded time as a precious natural resource, to be parceled out to other people stingily and with reluctance. He had been robbed. His heart had stopped beating before completing its allotted 2.5 billion contractions.

  But here in the hospital there was nothing to look back on, to count forward from, with pleasure. There were no photos around to remind her of the children as babies, or of Wesley as a handsome young army officer, or of her wild white-haired father, or of any of the dozens of people that popped into her mind associatively at home. At home she could spend hours doing nothing but strolling through the rooms recalling incidents from the past. Here in this gleaming hospital, here in this anonymous green room, she had no past.

  Likewise, there was nothing here to look forward to. Either she would die here or she would leave as soon as she was well. In either case, the hospital itself was merely a way station, a purgatory of the present..

  But it was morbid to be thinking like this. Of course she wouldn’t die here, couldn’t even if she wanted to, which she had often enough in recent years. She was no longer young, but she wasn’t old yet either. She hadn’t paid her dues, done her time on earth. She wouldn’t be allowed to close out her accounts this soon, she was sure of it. She would recover from this attack just as she had from the two previous ones; she would survive, no doubt to sustain yet another attack of this disease before long. Or of another disease. So it went.

  Mrs. Childress was dabbing her ear lobe faithfully every fifteen seconds. Mrs. Childress’ filter paper disks were usually masterpieces. She blotted the cuts in spirals, the large stains on the outer rim growing progressively smaller as they swirled toward the center, eventually disappearing altogether when the blood finally clotted. Dr. Vogel had only to glance at a disk done by Mrs. Childress to read how long clotting had taken, how copiously the blood had flowed. Miss Sturgill tended to be too impatient when she did the test; her blots would smear or merge, or she would dislodge the newly forming clot and upset the reading.