The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Mrs. Childress sighed sadly. Apparently her blood was failing the test once again. ‘Twelve minutes,’ Mrs. Childress muttered to herself, shaking her head. ‘What we gonna do wid you, honey?’

  ‘The drugs aren’t working then?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. You’ll have to ask the doctor, honey.’ Then in a whisper she added, ‘But if you want my opinion, dear, they ain’t no tellin what would happen without ‘em. So you just keep takin’ ‘em like the doctor says.’ She handed Mrs. Babcock her prednisone, and Mrs. Babcock raised her hand to her mouth and placed the white pills on her tongue, like a communicant the wafer. Mrs. Childress held a cup of water to her hps. All that was needed was for Mrs. Childress to recite, ‘The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’

  Mrs. Childress held an enamel pan under Mrs. Babcock’s nose. With tweezers she began pulling out the bloody cotton wads. They were saturated and had been on the verge of leaking. Mrs. Babcock held the pan and watched blood dribble from her nostrils onto the soaked cotton. Then she laid her head against her pillows while Mrs. Childress blotted her nose and mouth with tissue and started packing her nostrils with fresh cotton. Blood was oozing down her throat. She had to keep swallowing in order not to choke on it. Standing and walking increased the bleeding. But she still tried to get around as much as she could. For instance, she walked to the sun porch for meals. She figured that if she gave in to the temptation of lying around in bed all day, she never would get out of this place and back to her own house where the silver had to be polished, and the closets straightened, and a hundred different things she resolutely tried to look forward to.

  ‘Do you have to go into the bathroom?’ Mrs. Childress’ approach to this topic was an advance on that of Miss Sturgill, who would bark like an army sergeant, ‘How about a B.M. for us, Mrs. Babcock?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Mrs. Babcock said, sitting up and swinging her legs slowly over the side. Mrs. Childress put the fur-lined suede slippers on Mrs. Babcock’s feet, inspecting with a sympathetic grimace the giant moist purple bruise that covered most of Mrs. Babcock’s left foot and ankle. It was throbbing dully as blood rushed to it. Mrs. Childress held out her arm, like a gentleman to a lady at a dance. Mrs. Babcock clasped it and stood up, her limbs aching as her faulty arterial system revved up.

  And so she and Mrs. Childress began their thrice daily stroll down the dim hallway with its spotless white plaster walls and green marbleized tile floor. Mrs. Babcock negotiated the fifty feet to the sun porch by shuffling her feet forward a few inches at a time.

  ‘I had the strangest dream last night,’ she told Mrs. Childress companionably. ‘I dreamed that Miss Sturgill and my daughter, Ginny, the one in Vermont, were whispering at the foot of my bed. I wonder what that means. Funny how real dreams can seem.’

  ‘Weren’t no dream, honey. I seen her myself.’

  Mrs. Babcock stopped. ‘You mean Ginny’s here?’

  Mrs. Childress nodded.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Mrs. Yancy explained it to you. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘She did?’

  “How she had to go over at Europe, and how your daughter was comin’ down to keep you company?’

  ‘Yes?’ Mrs. Babcock honestly couldn’t remember. Was it the drugs, or was it senility? ‘But I don’t need someone here with me every day. You’d think I were dying or something.’ She chuckled. When Mrs. Childress didn’t laugh, she looked at her face questioningly, like a prisoner studying her jailer for some clue as to when she’d be paroled. Mrs. Childress’ face was mask-like, but it was always mask-like when her sciatica was bothering her.

  The others were already at their place at the table — Mr. Solomon, Sister Theresa, and Mrs. Cabel. The four of them were the only ones on the corridor who were ambulatory. The other dozen or so ate in their rooms and were seldom seen, either because they couldn’t make it to the sun porch or because they chose not to try. Mrs. Babcock nodded and took her seat between Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Cabel. Mr. Solomon was a wizened little man with a band of frizzy gray hair encircling his bald dome. His glasses lenses were probably half an inch thick and magnified his eyes to the size of dinner plates. Behind these lenses his eyes were clouded over with the gray film of inoperable cataracts.

  ‘Nice day,’ he said with a wide smile.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Babcock agreed coolly. She had known Mr. Solomon slightly for many years. He had been head of the jewelry department at one of the downtown department stores, and Wesley had always taken him their clocks and watches for repair. Wesley had also bought Ginny’s high school graduation present from Mr. Solomon — a twenty-one-jewel white gold Lady Bulova wristwatch, which Ginny had since worn sporadically. Nevertheless, Mrs. Babcock preferred to keep her distance. After all, just because they were stuck in this hospital together was no reason for instant friendship, when twenty-five years of acquaintanceship hadn’t produced it. Anyhow, why invest the emotional energy necessary to initiate a friendship when it would be terminated very soon by her leaving. And perhaps by his leaving as well. She couldn’t be sure. He had emphysema and sounded awful, but she was no doctor.

  Mrs. Babcock glanced out the window to check on the ‘nice day’ Mr. Solomon had mentioned. The morning sun had just cleared one of the red clay foothills behind Wesley’s factory. The face of the foothill was etched with interconnected gullies that fed run-off water into the Crockett River below. Because of the nature of her illness, Mrs. Babcock knew that she was bound to see the gully pattern as an arterial system, the huge gullies at the top branching down the face of the slope into dozens of lesser gullies, which branched in their turn into an intricate lacy design and eventually tapered off into nothingness.

  Mrs. Cabel was grunting insistently. Mrs. Babcock looked in her direction, determined to be pleasant, no matter how upsetting she might find Mrs. Cabel’s greasy hair and crossed eyes and sputtering efforts to make words. They had gone to the Episcopal church together for years; Mrs. Cabel had taught Mrs. Babcock’s children in Sunday school. It certainly wasn’t Mrs. Cabel’s fault that she had had a stroke. But on the other hand, it wasn’t Mrs. Babcock’s fault either; and she didn’t understand why, when she herself was sick, she should be required to function as a social chairman when she just wanted to be left alone. Of course, she could remain in her room for meals, and thus never have to see these people, but that wasn’t the point. She needed to be up and around. If she could only be at home, she could do that without encountering at every corner fellow townspeople who were even sicker than she and who served merely to depress her. Why did Dr. Vogel insist that she be here? It wasn’t as though she were dying.

  Miss Sturgill came in pushing the food trays. Mrs. Babcock couldn’t figure out why she looked forward to mealtimes when the food was invariably bland and unattractive. Perhaps it was because mealtime was one of the few activities in her day, and about the only activity she could anticipate with pleasure, the others being shots and tests and so on. She lifted the metal warming pan and confronted an ice cream scoop of Cream of Wheat, powdered scrambled eggs, limp greasy bacon, Mother’s Glory white toast and strawberry jam.

  Sister Theresa reverently crossed herself and folded her hands at chest level and bowed her head. Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Babcock froze guiltily in mid-bite, though Mrs. Cabel went on eating noisily. Sister was a large beefy woman with a red face and with gray hair pinned into a severe bun. She had taught for many years at the Catholic grammar school in town. She wore the hospital-issue gown and robe of green wash-and-wear material; around her neck hung a gold-plated medallion featuring praying hands and the phrase, “Not My Will But Thine.’ Sister had cancer, had had one breast removed. Secondary tumors had popped up since in her lungs, and there was a chance that the other breast would have to go, too.

  They ate in silence. Partway through her reconstituted eggs, Mrs. Babcock heard the theme from ‘Love Story’ wafting up from the Southern Bapti
st church on the circle in downtown Hullsport.

  ‘I installed those chimes,’ Mr. Solomon informed them with a modest blush.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ Mrs. Babcock assured him.

  ‘Vell, at least you can rely on them for a change.’ They were gonging out the hour — six, seven.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mrs. Babcock asked.

  ‘Vell, they’re electric The hand chimes only got rung if somebody vas there and felt like ringing them. But these go off every fifteen minutes vithout fail, rain or shine, day in and day out. And you get a different song every hour.’

  ‘Hmmm, yes,’ Mrs. Babcock said doubtfully, remembering ringing the carillon bells herself as a member of the Southern Baptist youth group — prior to marriage and to Wesley’s insistence that she convert to the more dignified Episcopal church. Ringing the chimes had been considered a rare honor then. People scheduled themselves months in advance. She and two others would climb the steep narrow steps into the white wooden bell tower. From there you could see across the Crockett to her father’s factory, with the then-forested foothills behind it. You could see the white mansion where she lived, and the farm stretching out behind it, until the ridge on which the Cloyds’ maroon house sat intervened. You could look down at the much lower steeples of the four other churches around the circle. The barn swallows that lived in the bell tower would be darting around at eye level. You could look past them down Hull Street to the train station, where a train might be arriving in great puffs of black smoke, pulling cars mounded high with gleaming chunks of black coal from southwest Virginia.

  When the clock on the face of the train station read 4:55, they would begin the hymns, pulling carefully on their assigned ropes. Sometimes someone pulled the wrong one, or two discordant notes were sounded in unison, or the beat faltered. But usually it went pretty well, and ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ or ‘Rock of Ages’ or ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ would peal out across the town and countryside, bouncing back and forth among the surrounding foothills. Townspeople, wherever they were and whatever they were doing, would stop everything to listen to the concert. And when the hands on the train station clock read approximately 5:00, the hymns would end and the hour would toll.

  If it were winter and the sun were due to set soon, she and the others would sometimes stay up in the tower and watch for it, their chatter falling silent as the orange ball slid behind the jagged pines on a foothill that bordered her family’s farm. As the bats in the tower began stirring in the dusk, the young people would descend to their families and their suppers. Somehow, this ritual gave them a comforting sense of control over the passing time of their lives.

  But now, thanks to Mr. Solomon and modern technology, the chimes tolled every fifteen minutes, a different show tune every hour. People could confidently set their Accutron watches by the chimes. And no one had to go to the ‘bother’ of clambering up that rickety bell tower every afternoon. There was progress for you!

  Clutching the chrome bar on the tile wall next to the tub, Mrs. Babcock slowly lowered herself into the cool water. She would have preferred a good hot steaming bath, but Dr. Vogel forbade it, insisting that it would cause her blood to flow even more copiously. Settled in the tub with water to her chin, she regarded her submerged body. There was a dark blue cast to the water. At all the points where bone rubbed flesh — in other words, almost everywhere but on her inner thighs, her buttocks and her breasts — were huge bruises of variegated colors, according to their age. A bruise would start out black and blue, then mellow to purple, then green, then yellow, like a fruit ripening. Once it had faded completely, it would be replaced by a fresh new bruise, as the regenerated capillaries re-ruptured. Her flesh was a veritable rainbow. She could have provided a perfect instructional exercise for young children in the ways colors blend together to form new colors.

  As Dr. Vogel explained it, everyone’s capillaries were ripped open all the time by the ordinary activities of living. Normally, platelets would mass at the site of these rips and mend them. In her case, however, there were very few platelets, and rips didn’t get mended. Her blood oozed from the rips into her tissues to form the bruises. She’d read in the encyclopedia that the gorgeous fall leaf colors that everyone gasped at resulted from essentially the same process. The membranes around each cell in a leaf became leaky and no longer functioned as a semi-permeable wall, so that the cell fluids began seeping into the surrounding spaces, rendering the leaf translucent. Wesley, on the other hand, had had an abundance of platelets that were overly eager to amass; they had formed the clots that had caused his heart attacks. If only the two of them could somehow have merged their blood supplies, as they had their minds and their bodies and their lives in almost every other way…

  Hunching up into a sitting position, she inspected herself more closely. Her pale breasts, drooping and etched with silver stretch marks from childbearing, stood out in sharp contrast to their colorful backdrop. She looked like the Japanese Irezumi men she’d read about in the encyclopedia who were tattooed all over with stylized dragons and sumaris in shades of black and blue and red and purple. That anyone would actually choose this condition for his body was beyond her comprehension. Her pubic hair, sodden and matted, surrounded by hues of blue, perched like a rain-soaked bird’s nest. Her whole body was puffing up like a weather balloon from the steroids. She had already gained ten pounds, and her flesh was spongy to the touch. Her hair was coming out in clumps.

  All in all, she was just as glad that Wesley wasn’t around to witness what had happened to her body since his death. Their life together had been predicated upon this body — his attraction to it, and its own greed to replicate itself. The children found it difficult to believe that she and their father could have a sex life. She smiled remembering the embarrassed scandalized looks on their faces whenever, as young children and especially as adolescents, they had walked in on their parents’ embraces and caresses. One weekend afternoon when Ginny was at the high school practicing her ridiculous flag swinging, she and Wesley had begun by kissing and had ended up in bed together. This happened only rarely by this time because Wesley was always exhausted after work during the week, and because the children were always around with their friends the rest of the time. But the interest and the capacity were still there, and flowered on these rare and prized occasions. This particular time, however, Ginny had come bursting back into the house shortly after leaving. She and Wesley froze in the act, as guilty as two teenagers whose parents have come home unexpectedly. Ginny started calling for Wesley. They heard her footsteps on the stairs and stared at each other in consternation. Finally, swearing under his breath, Wesley rolled out of bed and threw on a robe and went out to confront her, his face scarlet from embarrassment and exertion.

  ‘I need the Jeep, Pop. I’m going up to see Grandpa.’

  ‘So take it.’

  ‘I can’t find the keys.’

  ‘I left them in it.’

  ‘Where’s Mother? I need to ask her something.’

  ‘Uh, yes, well your mother and I are — uh, taking a nap right now.’

  ‘A nap? At twelve thirty in the — oh. Yeah. Well, uh. See you, Pop.’ She careened down the steps.

  Why could children not accept the fact that their parents had had their days in the sun, too? Ginny appeared to believe that she had sprung full-grown into existence through a sort of spontaneous regeneration. She liked to think that her generation had discovered the pleasures of the flesh. Whereas in fact, this despised body of her mother’s, and her father’s attraction to it, and nothing to do with the inherent desirability of Ginny herself, accounted for Ginny’s existence. Because of this body (she now knew, though at the time she would have vehemently denied it), Wesley and she had married and had one day found themselves with three children to raise. Because of it, Wesley had spent three decades in a town he didn’t much like. And now that body, which had largely determined the shape of his life and of hers, was a puffed-up mass of overlapping
hematomas that ached to the touch. It was another example of the elaborate scheme of malicious practical jokes that Wesley had always insisted constituted the phenomenon known as Life. In any case, malicious or not in intent, what was happening now definitely made one wonder about the point of all the attention she and Wesley had showered on this body over the years. Yes, Wesley was fortunate to have been spared this punch line in the anecdote that was their life together.

  Mrs. Babcock grabbed the chrome bar and hauled herself out of the water. When she returned to her room in a fresh yellow gown, she discovered with satisfaction that her bed was already done, fresh sheets replacing the old ones, which had had dribbles of dried blood here and there. She paused and gently touched the shocking pink peonies in a vase on the windowsill. She almost allowed herself tears of frustration. She couldn’t smell with her nose packed, and peonies were her favorite. She made do with looking at them and touching them. Then she turned on the television and hoisted herself into bed. Rarely had she watched television, except for the evening news. But her eyes could endure only so much reading; they strained very easily these days. A church service was on.

  Bored, Mrs. Babcock picked up her embroidery hoop and started stitching compulsively. What had Ginny’s get-up yesterday signified? The last time she’d been home, for Wesley’s funeral, she’d been wearing a pantsuit, and her hair was long and neat and tied back with a scarf. What did a Heidi dress mean?

  With irritation she threw down the hoop. Why was Ginny here anyhow? As a silent reprimand after their years of failing to get through to each other?

  She picked up volume 22 of the encyclopedia and opened it at ‘Varicose Veins.’ After nine years, she was finally reaching the end of this ill-conceived project. One more volume and she’d be finished.

  For whatever good that would do her. She had started reading them when Ginny left for Boston for several reasons: to have something to do with herself; to round out her liberal arts education, which had been abruptly terminated by marriage and by the relentless arrival of babies. But mostly she’d been looking for some pegs to hang her philosophical hat on. She’d grown up terrorized by the prospect of hell-fire and damnation from sermons every Sunday at the Southern Baptist church. The austere Anglican Book of Common Prayer had been balm to her cowering spirit. The Episcopal approach was really more her style: ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable…’