The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘He’s retired,’ Mrs. Babcock replied glumly.

  ‘How can he be retired? You don’t just stop seeing people you’ve cared for all your life.’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask Dr. Tyler. I guess he had to quit sometime.’

  ‘What does this Vogel say about when you can go home?’

  ‘I haven’t asked,’ she confessed miserably.

  ‘I’ll ask.’ It was like playing dress-up as a child — putting on her mother’s lipstick and spike heels and pretending that she was in charge. It was so ludicrous that Ginny almost laughed out loud.

  Just then, as though summoned by their conversation, a beefy face crowned by a blond flat top appeared around the door. The face was attached to a tall broad frame that looked like that of a defensive left tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. ‘How are we today?’ he asked cheerfully, glancing at a chart in his hand. Not waiting for an answer, he inquired of the air-conditioned room at large, ‘Hot enough for ya today?’ And then the head disappeared as abruptly as it had appeared.

  ‘Was that Vogel?’ Ginny asked. Her mother nodded yes, her eyes closed again. Ginny raced out into the hall, catching sight of a massive white back turning a corner.

  She sprinted down the hall, her clogs clattering like the hoofs of a runaway horse. Her wide painter’s overall legs swirling like dust mops gone berserk, she skidded around the corner and almost ran into a huge white wall. Dr. Vogel turned around at the clattering and looked at Ginny with alarm.

  ‘Excuse me, Doctor. I’m Mrs. Babcock’s daughter, Virginia. May I ask you a few questions about my mother?’

  Well, I’m pretty busy, Miss Babcock.’

  ‘Then I’ll just take a couple of minutes. What’s her prognosis?’

  ‘She has idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura.’

  ‘So I hear. But what does that mean?’

  “Platelet insufficiency of unknown origin. Perhaps an autoimmune response. Perhaps a malfunction of the spleen, or a megakaryocytic disorder. Characterized by multiple petechiae and ecchymoses.’

  ‘The bruises?’

  ‘Hmmm, yes. Hemorrhagic bullae of the buccal mucosa are a common feature…’

  ‘I see,’ said Ginny, dazed. ‘Is she — like, you know — badly sick or anything?’

  ‘Please don’t worry about your mother, Miss Babcock,’ he said with a winning smile. ‘We’re performing batteries of tests. There’s quite an arsenal of treatments. If one doesn’t work, we’ll try another.’ He patted her shoulder paternally.

  Ginny felt a great sense of relief. This white giant of a man had the situation firmly in hand, backed by legions of modern medicine men in starched white lab coats who carried racks of test tubes bubbling with newly synthesized wonder drugs. There was nothing for Virginia Babcock, college dropout, to worry her empty little head about.

  But if everything was ‘under control,’ why was her mother in the hospital, at $70 a day? ‘When can she go home?’

  ‘When we get her bleeding under control.’ He waved good-by with the fingers of one hand, whirled, and strode off down the hall like a Norse deity.

  Her mother was asleep, so Ginny decided to go calling.

  Driving through town, she followed the exact route Joe Bob and she used to take to their parking spot overlooking Hullsport. As she started up the hill, she passed through an entrance marked on each side by a freestanding white Corinthian column. A plaster cast of a liveried darkie held out a sign that said in Olde English script ‘Plantation Estates.’ Bouncing up the gravel road in the Jeep, she passed on either side identical single-level ranch houses with flat roofs which stuck out in front to form porticoes and which were supported by four skinny four-by-fours apiece. It looked as though the whole thing would start flapping in a strong breeze.

  Ginny pulled into Joe Bob’s driveway. Black letters above the garage door spelled out ‘Thirty-eight,’ Joe Bob’s old football jersey number. As Ginny was walking toward the front door, Doreen came bursting out and hurled her arms around her, overcompensating for the fact that ten years ago she had seduced Joe Bob. ‘Why I declare!’ she said petulantly, thrusting out her lower lip and stepping back to eye Ginny’s Afro and her Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt. ‘I wouldn’t of knowed you, Ginny Babcock!’ That was her tactful way of expressing distaste.

  ‘Well, Doreen, I would have known you anywhere. You haven’t changed a bit since high school!’ Doreen preened with pleasure. And in fact she hadn’t changed a bit. She looked exactly as she had when Joe Bob and Ginny double-dated with her and Doyle at the Family Drive-in. Except for her chest, which had increased by probably ten inches. She was playing her newfound bounty to the hilt, too, displaying her tight cleavage in a ruffled blouse with a nursing neckline. Ginny’s eyes were transfixed. If Doreen had lowered her chin ever so slightly, she could have rested it on these billowing piles of flesh.

  Joe Bob stood behind Doreen, beaming with pride. Ginny would have known Joe Bob anywhere, too, even if she hadn’t run into him yesterday. In fact, a bulletin mailed out after their Hullsport High homecoming last year had included a note about Joe Bob’s being the new coach: ‘Those of you who were classmates of Joe Bob Sparks will be relieved to hear that ole Sparky hasn’t changed one bit since high school days!’ Ginny hadn’t been relieved; she’d been appalled. It took an extraordinary mentality to be relieved to find that old friends hadn’t changed since you’d known them — a mentality based on insecurity, as if change always had to be equated to deterioration. On her better days, the notion of change seemed profoundly liberating: She wouldn’t have to be a flag swinger through all eternity! Not that her current role as the Madame Bovary of Stark’s Bog was anything to boast about. But at least it was different, and there was a modicum of comfort in variety.

  ‘Only those who continue to change remain my kin,’ Nietzsche had said in a Philosophy 240 text at Worthley. Miss Head had hated Nietzsche, though. And now that Ginny thought about it, who’d want to be kin to him?

  Doreen took Ginny’s hand and led her into the plantation estate itself. It was furnished with new pecan furniture — tables, chairs, and sideboard in the dining nook, sofa and armchairs and coffee table in the living room. ‘The Heirloom I-talian Mediterranean Ensemble,’ Doreen informed her. And spreading across one entire eggshell white wall in the living room was a vast piece that looked like a king-sized coffin. It was embossed with the inevitable factory-hacked filigree. This piece, occupying the spot that an altar would in a church, with all seats turned to face it in worship, was the pecan Italian Mediterranean solid state TV-stereo color console. The rugs and curtains of the living room and dining nook were in tones of harvest gold and antique yellow.

  ‘What do you think?’ Doreen asked, gesturing expansively around the living room.

  ‘You’ve done quite a job,’ Ginny said.

  ‘Doreen’s a real little homemaker,’ Joe Bob said, hugging her from behind.

  ‘I can see that she is.’

  With one of his wrist-weighted arms, he reached down and patted Doreen’s stomach proprietarily. ‘Got me an Oakland Raider cookin’ in here.’

  Doreen poked him playfully with an elbow and said, ‘Sparky, honey, you know we’re not tellin’ people yet.’

  ‘Ginny’s not people, sweetie. Ginny’s a friend. Anyhow, if we don’t tell her now, she won’t never know. She’s going back up at Vermont in a few days.’

  Finally realizing what they were telling her, Ginny said, ‘Oh! A baby. How nice. But what if it’s a girl?’

  Well,’ Joe Bob said thoughtfully, distractedly scratching his crotch, ‘if it’s a girl, I reckon we just keep on tryin’ till I get me mah boy.’

  Ginny knew that if he could, Joe Bob would have the fetus growing in a decanter on his coffee table so that he could oversee its development — flushing it down the toilet and starting over if it was a girl. But if it was a boy — if it was a boy! He would pipe fight songs through the amniotic fluid and exercise its tiny embryonic limbs with electric currents.
He would prop his stopwatch next to the bottle so that the fetus could accustom itself to the challenging sweep of the second hand.

  ‘Doreen, honey, get me a Pabst, will you?’ he asked, looking at a huge Swiss clock on the wall. He opened the doors of his color console and turned it on. He also turned on a small black-and-white portable set on top of the console. Then he dragged an armchair to within five feet of the two sets, which featured two different baseball games. ‘I’ll let you girls talk about woman things,’ he said with a coy grin as he sank into the chair, like a flight engineer at Mission Control in Houston. Without taking his eyes from the screens, he extended his hand for the beer that Doreen brought him. With his other hand, he fingered the stopwatch around his neck.

  ‘Beer?’ Ginny asked.

  He grinned. ‘Shoot, I’m done with my trainin’. Let my boys suffer now.’

  ‘Let me show you the rest of the house,’ Doreen insisted, dragging Ginny into her all-electric harvest gold kitchen. They inspected each of her appliances with care — from the twin-door side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, right through to the eleven-speed multi-attachment mixer/grinder/blender. All the accessories — note pads and pencils, dishtowels, toothpicks — were in complementary shades of yellow and gold. Doreen pointed to eighteen king-sized cans of corned beef hash and said proudly, ‘On sale at the Super Mart for seventy-three cents a can.’

  ‘Well, I swear,’ Ginny said.

  ‘I wish there were something new to do with hash.’

  Ginny forced herself not to suggest that she try smoking it. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘The bedroom next,’ Doreen promised, leading Ginny down a short dark hallway. Opening a door, Doreen revealed a room that was all bed. It was king-sized and stretched from one wall across to the opposite wall. The headboard was pecan Italian Mediterranean. The spread was quilted harvest-gold flowers. ‘Sparky calls it Sparks Field,’ Doreen giggled. ‘Ballpark. Get it?’

  ‘Oh ho! Yes!’ Ginny laughed weakly. She squelched the urge to say, ‘Oh, you mean he’s finally getting it up?’

  Doreen gasped with horror. ‘Oh Ginny, honey! Forgive me!’ She poked Ginny’s arm apologetically with two outstretched fingers. ‘I forgot about you and Sparky…This is real insensitive of me to be talkin’ like this.’

  ‘It’s okay. That was years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just mortified!’

  “Don’t be. It doesn’t matter. Really it doesn’t.’ And the interesting thing was that it didn’t. In fact, Ginny at the moment was awash with relief, thinking, ‘This could have been me, my house, my life.’ On the other hand, there was a certain appeal to it all. She had to own up to it. Part of her secretly longed to be immersed in such issues as, ‘Are the dishes in the dishwasher clean or dirty?’ But mostly she continued to be transfixed by Doreen’s remarkable bosom. She couldn’t take her eyes off those breasts, kept studying them with quick sideward glances.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Doreen said, noticing Ginny’s fascination and moving closer. ‘Poke one.’

  Ginny was startled. Doreen was bisexual? Too bad, because Ginny thought that on the whole she herself wasn’t anymore. Or at least not with Doreen. ‘Oh no, Doreen. I wasn’t -’

  ‘Go on. Poke one.’

  Obligingly, Ginny poked one. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be noting about it. It felt pliably firm and smooth, like your normal run-of-the-mill tit. She looked at Doreen questioningly. Was there a tumor she was supposed to be feeling?

  ‘Feels like the real thing, don’t it?’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘I had me a boob job,’ she whispered. ‘It was my Christmas present to Sparky last year.’

  ‘They’re magnificent. Joe Bob must love them,’ said Ginny, not without personal knowledge of his tastes in female anatomy. She remembered his initial disappointment when he discovered that her Never-Tell padded bra had contributed a fraudulent fullness to her minimal chest. If bras, like shoes, had come in quadruple A cups, that would have been her size then. Things were better now, though.

  ‘Oh, he’s crazy about them. He just can’t get enough of them,’ she confided, as Joe Bob in the next room shouted at the TV, ‘Nail the bastard, you idiot!’ ‘Why, if I let him, he’d spend all night just -’ Throwing her hands to her face, she squealed, ‘Oh, shit! I’ve done it again! Ginny honey, you’ll never forgive me!’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Ginny insisted, as Doreen threw open the closet doors to reveal silver lame jump suits, suede pantsuits, sheer midriff tops, high-waisted Loretta Young hostess pants, filmy flowing harem pants, lacy body shirts, turbans, boas, Grecian halters, long skirts, mini-skirts, maxi-skirts, diaphanous dressing gowns, hot pants, high-neck gowns, low-neck gowns, no-back gowns, saris, dozens of pairs of boots and clogs and sandals, each with matching handbag. Ginny stifled a yawn. ‘Joe Bob’s closet?’

  Doreen giggled. ‘Still that same old sense of humor, Ginny. Law, I like to died those nights at the Family Drive-In listenin’ to you explainin’ to Sparky why you couldn’t screw him. Dole and I lay up there in the front seat just howlin’ at some of the things you come up with.’

  Ginny repressed her reaction of outrage at knowing that she’d been eavesdropped on. To change the subject she nodded at Sparks Field and said cooperatively, ‘To spend so much time undressed, you sure have a lot of nice clothes.’ Then, suddenly, she felt very tired of all this. ‘Look,’ she said in a subdued voice, ‘my mother’s sick in the hospital, and I’ve got to get back to her.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible! Nothing serious, I hope?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know. I don’t think so. It’s a clotting disorder. She’s had it before.’

  ‘Sparky darling,’ Doreen called, leading Ginny away from Sparks Field and toward Mission Control. ‘Ginny’s mother’s in the hospital, honey.’

  Eyes glued to the color console, Joe Bob said with annoyance, ‘Do whut, Doreen?’

  ‘The hospital, honey.’

  ‘It’s too soon to go to the hospital, baby love. You’re just three months, peaches.’

  ‘No. Ginny’s mother, sweetie. She’s in the hospital.’

  Well, I swear,’ he said, finally looking up. ‘I hate to hear that, Ginny. Is she real sick?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. But I’ve got to get back over there.’ Actually, she was going back to the cabin. But she’d had enough here.

  ‘Well, I hoped you’d set a spell and have a Pabst. But I can see you’ve got to go.’

  ‘Wait!’ screeched Doreen. ‘You haven’t seen the bathroom!’ She pushed Ginny in front of her through another doorway and threw on a light switch. They were both reflected in a huge mirror that covered half of one wall. The light was harsh. Ginny felt as though she were in a police line-up. Squinting, she glanced hastily at herself in the mirror. Horrified, she looked away. The tile was harvest gold, and the towels and soap and toilet paper were yellow. Doreen threw open the cabinet doors so that Ginny could view her Isotoner Chin Strap and her Sauna girdle, her hair wax and deep cleanser and turtle oil moisturizer, several pairs of wash ‘n’ wear eyelashes, mud pack mix, six economy boxes of raspberry douche mix, depilatory cream, eyelash dye, every kind of hair roller, sixteen shades of nail polish, a Water Pik, tweezers, endless tubes and vials and bottles.

  With renewed fascination, Ginny studied Doreen in the mirror. For an afternoon around the house, she had on blusher, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, mascara, lip gloss, and powder. Her pierced ear lobes sagged under gold filigree. She reeked of deodorant and perfume, and undoubtedly of raspberry douche if Ginny were to sniff up close. Her blond hair was impeccably dyed and teased and waxed and curled; pink nail polish, flawlessly unchipped; calves and armpits, satiny; chin, firm. She wore bright green contact lenses. Her E-cup breasts were artificially inflated, and an embryonic Oakland Raider inhabited her womb. What part of her body could she call her own?

  Ginny’s thoughts flashed briefly to her mother’s black and blue swollen body. What was the point of D
oreen’s machinations? If she herself were in Doreen’s rhinestone wedgies, as she might very well have been but for Clem Cloyd, would Ginny have gone this route, too? Or would she have vanished from Plantation Estates one dark November night and have turned up the next morning, corroded to death in the fetid Crockett River? Would she have hijacked a plane to Esalen? What would she have done? She didn’t know. In any case, she wouldn’t have been what she was now. Which probably would have been a considerable relief to everyone.

  Doreen was studying Ginny in the mirror, too. She reached over and started yanking out Ginny’s gray hairs as though plucking a dead hen. ‘It’s such a shame,’ she murmured, ‘when there are so many nice shades of brown on the market.’

  Ginny shot her a resentful look. Doreen was sounding alarmingly like Ginny’s own mother.

  ‘Well! But if you don’t start dyein’ pretty soon, everone’s goin’ to know when you do.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Ginny asked wearily. She was thinking about what a truly terrible thing it was to have hair too limp for an Afro, but too wavy to be worn long and straight and parted in the middle. She had to concede that her mother’s unspoken criticism was right; she looked like the Before picture in a cream rinse ad. Not that she would ever have admitted it to her mother.

  ‘Let me walk you to your car,’ Joe Bob suggested gallantly as Ginny was leaving. Just then the doors on the Swiss clock opened. A man in lederhosen ducked in and out alternately with a fraulein in a dirndl, while ‘Edelweiss’ played. It seemed out of keeping with an Italian Mediterranean ensemble.

  ‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ Doreen said coyly, fading into her kitchen, a domestic scientist retiring to her laboratory to discover something new to do with hash. Her harvest-gold hairdo blended right into the surroundings. Ginny wondered if she was supposed to pull Joe Bob down on top of her on the living room rug to fulfill Doreen’s fantasies. Doreen was okay, though. There was nothing wrong with her that a vasectomy of the vocal cords wouldn’t fix.