The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘Does that bother you?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘Bother me? Of course it bothers me. Wouldn’t it bother you to have to listen all day to a lunatic?’

  ‘Yes, I guess it would.’

  ‘You’d better believe it would!’

  Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa nodded at Ginny and her mother. Ginny sat down and watched in silence as the others ate.

  Partway through the meal, Ginny suggested, ‘Mother, you’d better eat your beets.’

  ‘I don’t like beets.’

  ‘Eat them anyway. They’re good for your anemia.’ Ginny realized with a start that she was stepping into the dietitian’s role her mother had performed for her for so many years. It occurred to her that parents spent years urging their children to eat, and that those children, grown, spent the rest of their lives trying to stop eating.

  ‘Good for me? Good for me? Since when have you ever cared what’s good for me?’

  ‘Now, Mother,’ Ginny said with an embarrassed chuckle. She looked to Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa for support against this irrational harpy who was inhabiting her meek mother’s body. But they went on eating quietly without looking up. “Don’t get all upset, Mother. Just eat your beets, that’s all.’

  ‘“Eat your beets,” she says. You just want me to choke down this garbage so that I’ll go take a nap and you can get out of this place.’

  She had scored a direct hit. Ginny looked down at her hands with a guilty blush.

  ‘Well?’ Mrs. Babcock inquired triumphantly. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  Ginny said nothing. She couldn’t figure out how to behave. Everything she could think of to say, her mother in this mood would be able to twist around and quarrel with. She had never seen her like this. It seemed best to say nothing at all.

  Finally her mother said more quietly, ‘But at least you come to see me. That’s more than I can say for my sons.’

  ‘But…’ Ginny started to point out that they were in California and Germany, but then thought better of saying anything in support of her rival siblings.

  ‘I asked them never to give me squash,’ Mr. Solomon sighed, ‘and here it is again.’

  Mrs. Babcock — whom Ginny had never seen do anything more insurrectionary than prop open an occasional pay-toilet door — suggested under her breath, ‘Dump it on the floor and pretend you spilled it.’

  ‘Mother!’ Ginny said with mock horror, intending to turn it into a joke.

  Mrs. Babcock looked at her, her eyes flashing, and said, ‘Don’t you “Mother” me. I don’t even know you.’

  Ginny turned the laced leather thong on her wrist around and around as she tried to decide whether her mother’s statement was intended to be factual or figurative: The drugs had affected her so that she literally didn’t know who Ginny was; or she could identify Ginny as her daughter but didn’t know what she was really like?

  Ginny helped her mother back to her room and into bed. ‘Shall I do your hair?’ she offered lamely, trying to think of something noncontroversial to occupy them. ‘You know, comb it out and stuff?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it the way it is?’

  ‘Nothing. It looks fine. I just thought maybe…’

  Miss Sturgill burst in, saying like a disconnected operator, ‘Hello, hello, hello!’

  She started cranking up Mrs. Babcock’s bed to a sitting position. Mrs. Babcock said sharply, ‘If I wanted my chin resting on my knees, I’d do sit-ups, Miss Sturgill.’

  Miss Sturgill stopped cranking and stuck a thermometer in Mrs. Babcock’s mouth, which Mrs. Babcock suffered to remain there. After reading the thermometer and shaking it down, the nurse departed in a cloud of starch to perform other errands of mercy.

  Ginny turned on the television to the afternoon soap opera, ‘Hidden Heartbeats,’ and settled into the easy chair. In the first place, she and her mother could stare at the program and thus have a socially acceptable excuse for not talking. In the second place, Ginny had a secret passion for ‘Hidden Heartbeats.’ She had watched it faithfully every afternoon as she was nursing Wendy. What sort of bizarre influences had she unleashed on her baby by requiring her to imbibe ‘Hidden Heartbeats’ with her afternoon quota of mother’s milk? There she had lain, as Wendy’s little tummy had swelled with milk, contrasting her own bliss with the misery of most of the characters on ‘Hidden Heartbeats.’ She wanted to take them all fondly by the hand and counsel them to have babies. It was clearly the only route to true contentment. She had slipped her nipple out of the sleeping baby’s mouth and had whiled away the rest of the program by working Wendy’s joints. The toes and fingers, the knees and ankles and elbows, all bent where they were supposed to! The fine brown eyelashes resting on the chubby pink cheeks, the moist pink lips still pursed for sucking. It was a miracle! How had two such flawed mortals as Ira and she managed to create this perfection in miniature…

  But she was tormenting herself again. She focused resolutely on the TV screen, where Sheila was on the phone with Ella. It was like meeting Joe Bob yesterday and discovering that he hadn’t changed. A year later Mark still hadn’t confessed to Sheila that the daughter being raised by her sister Linda had been fathered by their mother’s uncle.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Ginny said out loud to herself.

  ‘What?’ her mother asked. ‘You mean that Sheila still doesn’t know about Susie’s father?’

  Ginny glanced at her quickly, suppressing a grin. So her own mother shared her vice, sneaked in afternoons when no one was around and turned on ‘Hidden Heartbeats’?

  ‘Right. How could Sheila not know? In the first place, Susie doesn’t look a bit like Frank. Frank is very blond, but Susie has red hair, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, but Linda’s hair is auburn. Besides, genes are very curious things.’

  ‘True,’ Ginny agreed, grateful that they were finally having a civil conversation. ‘But don’t you think Mark owes it to Sheila to let her know why Uncle Clarence cut her out of the will?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ her mother said, biting her lower lip as she considered the ethics of the situation. ‘After all, there’s no telling how Sheila would react to Linda if she knew the truth, and they’ve got enough problems as it is, those two.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think Sheila would be upset at all. Do you really?’

  ‘Well, look at the way she reacted to being told about Regina’s unwed pregnancy. Knowing Sheila, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything she did.’

  ‘Hmm, I guess you’re right.’

  Sheila was having a bridge party. She stayed in the store picking out tallies for the last twenty minutes of the half-hour program. Soap operas were unsurpassable as social realism. Most fictional forms pruned and highlighted and rearranged, whereas soap operas were almost as tedious as real life itself. What got accomplished during half an hour in a soap opera closely approximated what was accomplished in half an hour of real life — i.e., next to nothing. The only thing that had occurred in the year since Ginny had last watched was that Frank had lost his job at the commercial art studio for doing pornographic photography on company time. Linda was suing for divorce, this being the last straw in a whole hayloft of previous offenses. Sheila was still unable to have children because of her distended cervix from a hatchet abortion when she was a teen-ager; and Mark, his ever-sensible and forbearing self, was still trying to talk her into adoption.

  When ‘Hidden Heartbeats’ was over, Ginny looked around to ask her mother which show she’d like to watch next. She was curious to discover if her mother’s addiction to the soaps involved a whole string of them, or just ‘Hidden Heartbeats.’ But her mother was asleep.

  Clomping down the hall in her combat boots, Ginny asked a volunteer at the nurses’ desk where she could find Dr. Vogel.

  ‘Try the lab. First floor.’

  When she asked for Vogel at the lab door, the secretary said, ‘I’m sorry, but he’s tied up right now.’ Just then, he came racing out, his white lab coat flying behind
him.

  ‘Dr. Vogel, can I speak to you a minute please?’

  ‘I’m very busy,’ he explained as he handed some papers to the secretary.

  ‘I’ll just take a minute.’ She was unaccustomed to this new twist in the art of healing. Dr. Tyler had appeared to spend most of his time talking to patients and their families, explaining what was going on, what treatments he was prescribing. ‘These drugs my mother won’t take — Mrs. Babcock in 307 — what are they supposed to do?’

  ‘There’s some evidence to support the concept that steroids — prednisone, cortisone — increase the clotting tendencies of the blood by reducing capillary fragility.’

  ‘Do you think they’re helping in her case?’

  He raised his blue eyes to the ceiling, struggling to be patient. ‘Obviously we do, or we wouldn’t be giving them to her, would we, Miss Babcock?’

  ‘How do they work?’

  ‘Uh — yes, well. We don’t know exactly.’

  Ginny could tell that, like her parents, he admitted to not knowing something with great difficulty. ‘What can you do if she continues to refuse the steroids?’

  ‘We intended to transfuse anyway. She’s anemic, her blood volume is down, she needs donor platelets.’ He was alternately smiling sympathetically and twitching irritably in his impatience to resume his lab work. He clearly wasn’t accustomed to revealing his proposed treatments or to having them questioned by a layman.

  Back at the cabin, Ginny went directly to the pine tree. She was delighted not to see baby birds in the wooden bowl or on the ground below. They were fairly old; it was possible that the parents had been able to give them quick flying lessons. As she strolled with relief back toward the house, the forlorn screeching started up. She whirled around and spotted them. They had climbed out of the dish and were hanging vertically from twigs. Presumably they had hung on the chimney wall and preferred it to sitting. All right. Let them hang.

  Ginny went into the cabin and watched out the window to see if the parents were arriving with food and’ comfort. But nothing happened, no beaks full of worms arrived. Finally she went into the kitchen and made a tuna sandwich. When she returned to her lookout, she discovered a wild tabby cat crouching expectantly under the tree, paw poised and eyes gleaming. As she raced out the door, the cat leapt away. Upon closer observation, it looked likely that the birds’ claws would slip right off the twigs and that they’d crash to the ground. So she returned them to their dish.

  As she was finishing this operation, an adult swift swooped down and perched on the chimney. Another wave of rage swept over her, and she shrieked, ‘Goddam it! You get your ass down here right now! Your babies need you!’ She was so furious that she couldn’t move. Gradually, she contained herself by speculating on the absurdity of attributing human motives and powers of comprehension to birds. But goddam it, did they or didn’t they fly thousands of miles in the autumn unaided by a compass?

  Penitent, Ginny went in and phoned Dr. Tyler. She wanted to pick his brain on the topic of steroids, but there was no answer.

  To delay her return to the hospital, she drove the long way around, past Hullsport High. Neither Joe Bob nor his ‘boys’ were on the track. Ginny crept past the practice field in the Jeep. By the gym door were three young girls. They were marching, and yes, they were twirling flags. She stopped and watched, remembering, the past as usual threatening to swamp the present. The maroon and gray flags swirled and snapped hypnotically in the familiar patterns.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a young man’s voice asked.

  ‘What?’ Ginny asked, startled. Looking up, she saw a teenage boy, his long blond hair damp and slicked back. He wore bell bottom jeans and a T-shirt. She recognized him as Billy Barnes, the prize stud in Joe Bob’s stable.

  ‘You look, like, lost. I wondered if you needed, like, directions or somethin’.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Actually, I was just watching the flag swingers.’

  ‘Yeah? Good, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not bad. I used to be the flag swinger here.’ For some unknown reason, she said this with pride.

  ‘No kiddin’,’ he said with a pleasant, even, white-toothed grin.

  Ginny felt he was studying her lined forehead and graying Afro with disbelief; she suppressed a need to assure him that it was true, that she had once been as slim and fresh and graceful as the three young girls they were both watching with admiration.

  ‘Yes, ten years ago.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. It doesn’t look as though the routines have changed much.’

  ‘No?’

  He was now obviously humoring her. She was feeling more middle-aged all the time. ‘Well, I’ve got to be going. Thanks anyway for the offer of directions.’ She revved up the Jeep. ‘Say, do you need a ride somewhere?’

  He hesitated and blushed. ‘Sure,’ he said nervously, climbing in.

  ‘Where to?’

  He stuttered. Ginny knew his problem. He didn’t know how to take her: Was she offering him a ride, or was she offering more? Joe Bob had often mentioned with relish the women who tried to pick him up — the Yummy Mummies, he and Doyle called them. They were former cheerleaders or former girlfriends of football stars who, closing in on middle age, panicked and began yearning for past glory. These women, once dazzlingly good-looking but now dowdy from years of housework and children, descended on the current crop of sports giants, offering themselves up in hopes of recapturing a taste of that fleeting glory. Was Ginny offering this handsome muscular young man a ride home, or was she now a Yummy Mummy, offering him herself? She wasn’t sure. She was merely waiting to see what would happen.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ he said uneasily, blushing and running his hand through his long hair. ‘Say, you live here now?’

  ‘No. I live in Vermont.’ His eyes brightened. A quickie maybe, with no strings attached?

  ‘Vermont, huh? That’s a weird place to live.’

  ‘Yeah. My mother lives here, though.’

  ‘Come back for a visit, huh?’ He clasped his hands and hung them between his knees and shifted his muscled shoulders awkwardly.

  ‘Right.’ It was interesting, this maneuvering between them as to who was going to suggest a tryst first. Ginny revved up the Jeep again and pulled out, heading for Hull Street. From Hull Street, who knew what might develop? She was getting more interested in Yummy Mummyhood all the time. She hadn’t had any really fervent sex for — God, for years and years, if ever at all. Sex for her had always been complicated and confused and permeated with every emotion and motive imaginable. Maybe a mindless tussle with a hot horny youth would be just the thing — an act of pure present, performed without distorting influences from her past, and without expectations for the future. A quickie, in other words. After all, if Ira was going to banish her for adultery, she might as well commit some. Whatever she and Hawk had thought they were doing that night, it wasn’t adultery.

  ‘What sports do you play?’ she asked, glancing at his hard young body appraisingly. With a paper bag over his blond head he could have passed for Joe Bob at age seventeen any day. He possessed the identical bulging nonchalance.

  ‘All of ‘em.’

  ‘Yeah? Which do you like best?’

  ‘Oh, football, I guess. I want to get me a football scholarship next year. Maybe to Ole Miss. And then I want to coach.’

  Ginny rounded the church circle and turned down Hull Street, joining the stream of cruising cars that had already assembled in the early evening sunlight. ‘We used to do the same thing,’ Ginny said, with pain. ‘Spend all night driving up and down this street.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said with his tolerant grin.

  ‘Do people still go to the Dew Drop?’

  ‘Oh sure. A lot go out on the Sow Gap Highway, though. There’s a chain of new places — a McDonald’s and stuff.’

  The only difference that Ginny could see, as she crept under the banner welcoming Mrs. Melody Dawn Bledsoe home as 1957 Pillsbury Bake-Off Champ
ion, was that the clusters of boys sitting on their cars watching the passing traffic now had long hair instead of crew cuts, and patchy moustaches; and they wore bell bottoms and T-shirts instead of chinos and sports shirts.

  At a stoplight, a Chevy pulled up beside the Jeep. A bunch of boys, friends of Billy’s apparently, made suggestive faces; Billy blushed and tried not to grin with pleasure at his friends’ knowing that he was about to get laid by an older woman. He shifted his muscled shoulders so as to turn his back on their obscenities.

  This was getting ridiculous. Ginny realized in a flash that she wasn’t a Yummy Mummy, that flag swinging and Joe Bob Sparks were dead for her, and that even this gorgeous young hunk of horny male flesh couldn’t flog any more sentiment from this segment of her past. She decided to put a swift end to it. “You want to coach, huh? You know, I used to date your coach when I was in high school here.’

  The boy snapped to attention, knees together, hands by his sides, and eyes straight ahead. ‘Coach Sparks?’ he asked in a small nervous voice.

  ‘Yes. For almost two years.’ Billy was immobilized at the mere mention of the name. Joe Bob had apparently done an admirable job of replacing the feared Coach Bicknell. She could just picture Joe Bob now, prowling through the Family Drive-In in search of curfew violators. “Where do you live?’ she asked the terrified boy gently. He mentioned one of the developments in a weak voice, and she drove him directly there. She watched with regret as he lumbered up his sidewalk.

  By the time Ginny got to the hospital, Mrs. Babcock was just finishing her dinner of canned ham and boiled potatoes and creamed spinach and applesauce. Unacknowledged, Ginny sat down on the sofa in silence.

  Finally, wondering who or what would answer her, Ginny said, ‘Hello, Mother.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d deign to visit me.’

  Ginny suppressed irritation and reminded her mother, ‘But I was here this afternoon. Have you forgotten? We watched “Hidden Heartbeats.’”

  ‘No, of course I haven’t forgotten. What do you think I am, senile or something?’