The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Ginny peered around like a lookout in a ship’s crow’s-nest. From this vantage point, she could see over the lip of the kudzu-lined bowl, all the way through fields and pastures to Clem’s maroon house. If Clem had been interested, he could have looked through binoculars from his attic window and seen her balancing nude on her tin roof gazing in his direction.

  Looking straight up, Ginny saw a bright blue sky. And perched on the top of the chimney, looking down, an adult chimney swift. Hastily, she crawled back into the house to leave the scene open for a joyous reunion.

  Still nude, the original Liberated Housewife, Ginny fixed herself some toast and tea, cleaned up, and made her bed. She dusted and swept and rearranged. Then she took the machete and went outside and hacked at the kudzu. She could have sworn that what she had chopped the previous evening had regenerated itself during the night.

  Before long, the sun was moving toward noon and was blazing hot. Her body was clammy with sweat. She walked to the pond and swam her regal breaststroke through the scum. Then she returned to the house and got out a straw mat to lie on.

  She knew that she ought to be at the hospital by now. But she couldn’t face it just yet. Her mother and she had had very little to say to each other even when they had lived together full time. Her mother had always insisted, ‘I am your parent, not your pal.’ But Ginny had always envied friends who had had the pal-type mothers, mothers you could speak to frankly without disappointing or horrifying them, Ann Landers-type mothers you could burden with your problems. Instead, her own mother had erected an impenetrable barrier of propriety between them. She was forever declaiming principles like ‘Sex outside of marriage is vulgar.’ The only way Ginny had been able to approach her principled mother in those years when she had most wanted to was under the guise of pretense — pretending she wasn’t giving Joe Bob hand jobs in the trunk of Doyle’s Dodge and so forth. Until the time had finally come when she had simply stopped trying to approach her at all. And what was there to say now, when they had seen each other only four times in the last nine years? Anything she could tell her mother about herself — that Ira had run her out with a rifle for screwing an army deserter in his family graveyard — would be bound to trigger a relapse. What was Mrs. Yancy thinking of when she asked Ginny to keep her mother company? Did you invite snakes to keep company with toads?

  But pal or not, her mother had left her mark, Ginny reflected. She had a recurring daydream: Her mother was dressed in a hard hat and work clothes and wielded a jackhammer, with which she was drilling neural channels through the gray matter of Ginny’s brain. Ginny knew that almost everything she had done to date had been either in emulation of, or in reaction against, this powerful nonpal of a woman, or her equally influential husband. The house of Ira, for instance, the man she had ‘chosen’ for her husband, had a shape and room layout identical to that of the white mansion in which she’d grown up. ‘Men are sometimes free to do what they wish,’ Hobbes said in a Philosophy 108 text at Worthley, ‘but they are never free in their wishes.’ Ginny had no idea how her parents might better have occupied themselves in life, but there had to be other ways for adults to amuse themselves than by irreparably molding the young minds placed in their charge. By leaving Wendy was Ginny setting her free from this? Or was it too late, had Ginny already wired her circuits in their years together? Or was it inescapable, would a new electrician merely take up where Ginny had left off?

  But the main reason Ginny couldn’t get up off her straw mat to head for the hospital was that she was profoundly upset at seeing her mother covered with black and blue bruises, her attractive face round and yellow from drugs. She preferred to think of her mother, needed to think of her, as strong and healthy and invulnerable — a shield between Ginny and mortality.

  Ginny was calculating how few visits she could get away with in all decency when she remembered the baby birds on the roof. She decided to check to be sure their parents had rescued them, or were at least feeding them. And to postpone even further the dreaded trip to the hospital. She went upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window. Nestled by the chimney was the rag-filled bowl, but it was empty. With relief, Ginny climbed out to retrieve it.

  There, to one side of the bowl, were two stiff baby bird corpses, wings spread and heads thrown back. They had fried to a crisp on the hot tin roof. Given a plate and a lettuce leaf, they could have passed for the scrawny game birds Ira was always bagging on hunting trips and insisting on Ginny’s rendering edible. A great wave of guilt and grief washed over her. She had placed birds that were accustomed to the cool damp of an unused stone chimney in a blast furnace.

  But at least three had been saved. She put the two rigid birds reverently in the dish. Then she turned to climb back in the window — and discovered, clinging to the house in a small patch of shifting shade, the three remaining birds. Their small bright yellow beaks were opening and shutting convulsively but noiselessly.

  As she stood there, in imminent danger of falling to her death on the stone steps below, studying with horror her three surviving charges, an adult swift swooped down and glided across the roof and disappeared over its peak.

  ‘You goddam bastard!’ Ginny screamed. ‘Come help your babies!’ She stood trembling with rage.

  Drained by her outburst, Ginny began reasoning: There was probably no way the parents could get the baby birds back into the chimney unless the babies were on the verge of flight, which they didn’t appear to be. And the tin roof was too hot for them. Therefore, the thing to do next was to place the surviving babies in a tree, where the parents could come to feed them and eventually teach them to fly. Resolutely, she took a piece of rag to pick up the three living birds. They hung vertically like bats, their tiny talons dug deeply into the crumbling clunking between two logs. Detaching them was like removing burrs from a dog’s coat. They clung so frantically that she was afraid of tearing off their little claws.

  In the side yard, swamped by kudzu, was a sturdy pine tree. The lower branches spread out almost horizontally. Ginny placed the bowl on a platform of pine needles formed by two branches. She removed the two dead birds and tossed them into the kudzu, saying a silent eulogy. She had thought Nature took care of Her own. It hadn’t occurred to her that She would need Ginny Babcock Bliss’s fumbling assistance.

  As she turned away, she looked up toward the chimney and thought she caught a glimpse of a bird’s head peering down over the edge. ‘They’re all yours,’ she called up cheerily.

  When Mrs. Childress clomped in at 6:30 to wake her, Mrs. Babcock was furious. Not over being awakened so early, though that in itself was reason enough. She was just generally enraged, as she couldn’t remember being since once, when she was a small child, when her pony had thrown her on purpose into a rose bush. If she hadn’t been so weak, she suspected she might have been on her feet smashing windows and hurling that hideous fake Danish modern furniture against the walls.

  Instead, she snatched the thermometer out of her mouth and threw it on the floor. Both she and Mrs. Childress watched as tiny silver balls of mercury skittered around the tiles like minute insects. Then Mrs. Childress looked at her in startled reprimand.

  ‘I’m — sorry,’ Mrs. Babcock fumbled, startled herself at the force of her outburst. ‘It was — ah — an accident.’ So well-trained was she in the notion that one didn’t even feel hostile emotions, much less give expression to them, that for a moment she genuinely believed it had been an accident, that her hand had simply slipped.

  But then a wave of fury swept over her again. No! It hadn’t been an accident, and she was perfectly justified in having done it! Why was someone always coming in here and waking her up to shove things in her mouth or her nose, to slice her with razors, to jab her with needles? What right had they? Whose body was it?

  Mrs. Childress handed her her prednisone.

  ‘No,’ Mrs. Babcock announced, not taking the pills.

  Mrs. Childress looked at her with surprise and held out the pills agai
n.

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘Honey, you got to take your medicine to get better,’ Mrs. Childress explained patiently, as though to a small child.

  ‘I’m not taking it. It isn’t working, and I’m sick of gaining all this weight,’

  ‘How do you know it ain’t workin, Mrs. Babcock honey? You don’t know how you’d be widout it, do you now?’

  ‘Obviously it’s not working,’ Mrs. Babcock snapped, holding out her swollen bruised arms.

  ‘You got to give it time, honey.’

  ‘I’m not taking it,’ Mrs. Babcock repeated, amazed with herself.

  ‘Ain’t no telling what’ll happen.’ Mrs. Childress looked at her once-amiable patient with amazement.

  “Let it. It couldn’t be worse than this.’

  “We’ll see what the doctor says,’ Mrs. Childress said primly, putting the pills on the table, clearly appalled that anyone could question treatment prescribed by a doctor.

  ‘And I’m skipping breakfast this morning.’

  Mrs. Childress looked at her with a perplexed frown. ‘Honey, you got to eat.’

  ‘Why do I?’

  ‘So’s you’ll get well. You’re anemic, you know, from losin’ so much blood.’

  ‘I don’t see that the garbage we’re fed here is going to contribute much to my health.’ She felt ill at the thought of the inevitable powdered eggs and canned orange juice and Cream of Wheat. And the prunes for her anemia.

  ‘Mrs. Carter, our dietitian, knows what our patients need,’ Mrs. Childress replied righteously as she exited.

  A bath was what she wanted, a hot steamy bath that would bake away her aches. She sat up slowly and swung her legs to the floor. She closed her eyes as the blood rushed down her bruised legs, causing them to throb dully. She shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the hot water.

  Settled with warm water to her chin, she felt her rage subside somewhat. She closed her eyes and allowed her battered limbs to float. The ache was relieved when, like this, her circulatory system wasn’t having to battle gravity along with everything else.

  She lay suspended for a while — how long she had no idea — devoid of thoughts and feelings. But gradually thoughts began seeping in, like wastewater in a leach field, uncharitable thoughts that triggered a return of the anger. So Wesley had failed her again. He wasn’t here when she needed him. It was so typical. Regularly he had come home from work with migraines and had taken to bed, whimpering. Illness, he felt, was beyond any mortal’s control; therefore, it was all right for him to collapse with headaches. She was sure that he had sat around his office yearning for migraines, so that he could lie in a darkened room and have her bring him meals on trays and bathe his throbbing forehead with cloths dampened in vinegar and make the children tiptoe and whisper. But let her come down with something and want to go to bed and be waited on and have the children tended, and he’d be nowhere in sight — hiding out in his office. Goodness knows at how many Boy Scout banquets, Little League games, father/son car washes she’d had to stand in for him.

  He had always behaved as though he hated Hullsport, as though it were his cross to bear for the sake of his poor wife, who couldn’t face leaving the South for someplace where he might have been happier. The truth was that a position in Boston had never been offered him. He had been sent to Hullsport fresh out of Harvard. Normally trainees stayed in Hullsport only a couple of years. After a couple of years, however, Wesley had gone into the army and been sent overseas. When he was mustered out, he had lost his place in the corporate scramble and was sent back to Hullsport and had never been recalled to Boston. Whether it was bad timing or a reflection on his capabilities, the fact remained that it wasn’t her fault that he had spent his adult years in Hullsport. And yet in order to spare his ego, everyone, herself included, until the afternoon he had died on his office floor, had gone through this charade of pretending that Major Babcock remained in Hullsport to humor his wife.

  It seemed to Mrs. Babcock suddenly that she had spent her entire life pampering other people’s egos. Ginny’s, for instance. She had a real nerve, showing up here in those dingy white overalls and a T-shirt without a bra. She had always done her best to chagrin her parents, and her performance yesterday was in keeping with that tradition. Yet Mrs. Babcock had endured it all silently, not daring to ask her to wear a nice dress or suit next time, for fear of hurting her feelings, or making her self-conscious about her appearance, or causing her to rebel and come up with something even more outlandish.

  But the real question was why Ginny was here at all. She was like some kind of vulture: She couldn’t be bothered to pay regular visits to her parents like normal children; it required a major catastrophe to coerce her into behaving as she should have all along. Probably the only reason she was here this time was to go through the furniture and claim what she wanted for her house in Vermont before Karl and Jim had a chance at it. She had always been so secretive about her activities and her motives, but a mother could see through them anyway.

  Stepping back from herself for a moment, Mrs. Babcock was appalled. These unpleasant sentiments about the people she loved were a new experience for her. She had spent her entire life in mediation. Wesley and the children had brawled throughout the width and breadth of the big house. She had trailed along behind, wiping away the tears of the combatants, explaining Wesley to the children and the children to Wesley. Never had she given vent to her own opinions, so that she rarely even knew what her own opinions were. Until today, when they were flooding in on her with a vengeance. But were they what she ‘really’ thought?

  Lifting her head, she glanced into the blue-black water — and discovered a web-like pattern of blood near her upper thighs. Startled, she sat up and grabbed the overhead bar and hauled herself out. As she dried herself, she realized that blood was oozing from her vagina, which was theoretically impossible since she’d reached menopause several years ago.

  As she stood there perplexed, there was a knock at the door. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Dr. Vogel. May I come in’

  ‘I’m not dressed. I’ll be out in a moment.’ She drew on her gown and robe and stuffed some toilet paper between her legs.

  The young blond Dr. Vogel was half-sitting on her bed. When she emerged, he rushed over and took one of her arms.

  She jerked the arm away and snapped, ‘Take your hands off me, young man! I’m perfectly capable of walking by myself.’

  When she was settled in bed, acutely conscious of the leakage between her legs, Dr. Vogel said, ‘Now, Mrs. Babcock, what’s this I hear about your not wanting to take your medicine?’

  Instantly she felt apologetic; it would hurt this earnest young man’s feelings if she questioned the treatment he was prescribing for her. And if anything had been drummed into her in her years of motherhood, it was that you mustn’t squelch the young. It might stunt their precious development. Never mind about your own development. That was no longer important once you were a parent; you had been superseded as an evolving being. Her development hadn’t mattered since she was a junior at Bryn Mawr, when she had dropped out to marry Wesley, who was about to go off to war. And where was Wesley now?

  ‘That’s right. I’m not taking it anymore.’

  ‘But, Mrs. Babcock, this isn’t like you.’

  ‘How do you know what I’m like?’

  ‘Why won’t you take it?’ he asked, humoring her.

  Why was it, she wondered, that because she was ill, everyone insisted on treating her like a babbling idiot? ‘It isn’t working, Dr. Vogel. You might as well face it: I have more bruises every day. My nose is gushing. And I’ve gained ten pounds.’

  ‘You have to give it time, Mrs. Babcock.’

  ‘I’ve given it over two weeks. The way things are going, I may not have much time left to give it.’

  ‘Now, now. What morbid thoughts we’re having,’ he said with a nervous laugh.

  ‘The last two times the medication had a noticeable effect in
ten days.’

  He nodded, admitting the justice of her analysis. ‘All right!’ he said briskly, standing up. ‘I can’t force you to take the pills. I could give you an injection. But I won’t against your wishes. But please reconsider, Mrs. Babcock. I can’t take responsibility for what might happen to you if you continue to refuse your medication.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to,’ she informed him coolly, restraining a smile of satisfaction. ‘Uh, Dr. Vogel,’ she asked as his broad white back moved toward the door, ‘is it possible for a woman to resume her menstrual periods after reaching menopause?’

  He turned quickly to look at her. ‘You’re having a vaginal discharge?’ She nodded. He sighed and suppressed a frown. ‘I’ll have the nurse bring you some pads. But please reconsider your position on the medication, Mrs. Babcock. I’ll examine you after I finish my rounds, but I suspect…’ He whisked from the room.

  He suspects what? Mrs. Babcock wondered. He suspects that the bleeding from my vagina is an extension of the bleeding in my nose? If so, isn’t that proof that the drugs aren’t working?

  The door swung open and in walked Ginny in her low-cut Heidi dress. She was singed to the unattractive bright pink of a cooked shrimp.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ she mumbled, her shifty eyes lowered to the floor.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘I saw Vogel in the hall. He says you won’t take your medicine.’

  ‘That’s right. And don’t you patronize me too. I’m not dead yet.’

  Ginny looked at this unknown woman with amazement. She remembered her mother as either mild and forebearing, or silent and disapproving. Maybe it was the drugs?

  As Ginny walked slowly to the sun porch with her mother on her arm, she could hear Coach talking loudly in his room: ‘Yes, but I happen to be the coach around here. You tell him I said so. I don’t care what he said. Just tell him I said to tell him I’m coach around here. When he’s coach, he can run things his way. Ha, ha, ha, ha…’