The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Through a major effort of will, Ginny managed not to reply unpleasantly. She looked out the window resolutely. It was her favorite time of day in the South — early evening when the sun was low, but not yet setting. The landscape — the factory and the foothills and the church circle and the train station — was bathed in an indirect golden glow; and all God’s creatures, her peevish mother included, seemed to pause for a moment and reflect, suspended between the frantic flurry of daytime activity and the long night of rest and oblivion. Ginny took a deep breath and sighed.

  ‘Bored?’ her mother inquired. ‘Just remember that I didn’t ask you to come down from Vermont.’

  ‘No, Mother, I’m not bored, I’m relaxed,’ Ginny assured her, surprised at her unexpected reserves of patience.

  Back in her mother’s room, Ginny turned on the television again in desperation. There were only cartoons and a cowboy show on now. Ginny left the cowboy show on. The blond beefy crew-cut head of Dr. Vogel appeared around the door, like a decoy on a target shooting game. ‘And how are you tonight?’

  ‘How do you think I am?’ Mrs. Babcock shot back. She’d absolutely had it. She felt she was going to scream if anyone asked her one more polite question that he didn’t really want answered.

  ‘Good. Fine,’ Dr Vogel chuckled uncertainly.

  ‘Doctor!’ He looked at her anxiously, then looked at the floor. ‘Am I dying?’

  There was total silence for about ten seconds. Taking a deep breath, Dr. Vogel said, ‘What black thoughts we’re having on this lovely summer evening, Mrs. Babcock.’ His eyes darted nervously around the room, avoiding Mrs. Babcock’s. ‘We’ve done regular platelet counts, Ivy bleeding times, a one-stage prothrombin time, a fibrinogen level’ — he was ticking these off doggedly on his meaty red fingers — ‘MacPherson and Hardisty’s modification of the Hicks-Pitney thromboplastin screening test, the euglobulin clot lysis time, clot retraction time, bone marrow studies. We should know any day now whether your disorder is associated with megakaryocydc hyperplasia of the bone marrow, or consumption coagulopathy, extravascular sequestration, or an autoimmune mechanism. Please count on us, Mrs. Babcock. I assure you that we are using every tool modern medicine has available. But it would help if you would cooperate.’ He hesitated, then turned around quickly and left.

  What kind of an answer was that to a simple question, Ginny wondered as she sat with her head propped on her hand staring blankly at the cowboy show. Was it a yes or a no? Ginny glanced at her mother, who was looking dazed. A pile of mangled bodies dominated the foreground of the television screen. The main characters — two cowboy brothers — sat off to one side drinking and laughing.

  Mrs. Babcock pointed at the screen. ‘Look at that! Look at that! Every idiot in America thinks you kill somebody and they just pop right back up. They should all try dying sometime themselves and see how much fun it is!’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘And you!’ she cried. “Why are you still alive? You should be the one in this bed instead of me. You’ve done nothing but ask for it your entire life — racing around on motorcycles and drinking moonshine and going on peace marches. You’ve done nothing with your life but pursue your selfish personal pleasures. Me — I’ve always done my duty. I waited on you and your father and your brothers hand and foot for years. For the first time in my life, I had no one to account to but myself. I was going to travel, go back to college, teach. And now this. Why me?’

  ‘What do you mean, “why you” ?’ Ginny raged back, suddenly out of control. ‘Why not you, Mother? Millions of people die every day. You’ve been preparing for this ever since I can remember, with your goddam tombstone rubbings and your fucking epitaphs. That’s all I ever heard from you and the Major. Why are you so offended now that your bluff is being called?’

  ‘Don’t use your gutter language on me, Virginia Babcock Bliss!’

  ‘And as for your waiting on us hand and foot, as you say, we never asked you to. You did it so that you’d have something to do with yourself. It was for you, Mother, not for us. And if all I’ve ever done is chase after my personal pleasures, then how come I’m not having any fun?’ She collapsed into her chair. Beads of sweat stood out on her mother’s round yellow face. They sat exhausted, glaring at each other. After a while, Ginny closed her eyes in remorse.

  Mrs. Babcock felt incapable of a rebuttal. She had detected some truth in Ginny’s outburst. Somewhere along the line she, Mrs. Babcock, had gone wrong. It was true. She had pandered to the needs of those ingrates she called her family for so long that her chief need had come to be that of being needed by them. What else could account for the depressions that had plagued her ever since the last of the children had left home? She had pinned the blame on a lot of external factors, but what it was, she knew, was that she was no longer needed, had no function, had to create a new function for herself — or die.

  Where had she gone wrong in the first place, though? At what one point could she have said no to demands other people were placing on her? When she had dropped out of Bryn Mawr to marry Wesley had been such a point. She could have insisted on postponing the marriage to get her degree so that she could have taught history, which was what had interested her. But could she have, with Wesley’s marching off to war and conceivably to his death? During those chaotic years all sorts of disastrous marriages occurred; people were having babies left and right, as though in response to unconscious urgings to replace all those who were being killed, just as a barren fruit tree will fruit when its trunk is girdled by a knife (according to the encyclopedia). And so she had married Wesley and had given birth to Karl ten months later. She and Karl followed Wesley to army bases around the country in an old Ford at 35 mph. And a year later Ginny was born in Hullsport during Wesley’s leave prior to his being shipped overseas. He left for France when Ginny was two months old. After that, Ginny woke up every night at 3 A.M. and screamed inconsolably. Only holding her while standing upright and singing lullabies would calm her. She clung like a little monkey, and whenever Mrs. Babcock tried to sit or set her down, Ginny would jerk awake and start screaming again. Then Karl would wake up and the two fatherless babies would wail together until dawn.

  Exhausted from lack of sleep and buffeted daily between hope and despair by the battle reports and by the arrival or nonarrival of letters from Wesley, Mrs. Babcock soon became a numb automaton. What she personally might or might not want became irrelevant. Here were these two pathetic children to bolster, who seemed somehow tuned in to the chaos in the world. And so she acted cheerful and sang and danced and rolled with them on the floor of the cabin, when she really wanted to be alone weeping or rereading Wesley’s love letters. And before long she no longer wanted to be alone weeping.

  And so Ginny was correct. Mrs. Babcock knew that she was a martyr. The children’s needs in those confused and unhappy war years had swamped her own needs, had become her own needs. And when the war years had passed, her needs were no longer in evidence; her awareness of them had been trained out of her, except for one brief flare-up during the time she now referred to, in her middle-aged mellowness, as the Tired Years, that seemingly endless chunk of her life when the three children were little. It had been all she could do then to drag herself from one hamper of dirty diapers to the next. She had been too worn out for sex most of the time, and she and Wesley were quarreling over a lot of secondary issues. Finding herself one day on the verge of busting open Karl’s head with a paperweight for sliding down the stair rail carrying the dog, she seized on the idea of just packing up and leaving the whole mess. She went to see her mother in the cabin and spelled out her despair in great detail. Her mother had looked at her coolly and had said, ‘You must do your duty, dear.’ So she had.

  And now here she was — falling apart in a hospital bed after years of satisfying other people’s needs, without ever having had a chance to figure out what she might need. It wasn’t Wesley’s or the children’s fault, but she couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t h
er own fault either. Ginny seemed to think that how many children to have and when to have them, how to rear them, were rational decisions based on personal preference. She would insist righteously on the integrity of the individual, the inviolability of human reason. She was probably incapable of seeing humanity as colonies of microbes, shunted here and there in response to force fields and chemical secretions. Becoming an adult was a process of becoming aware of one’s limitations, and therefore of one’s possibilities. Children couldn’t really appreciate a good ballet dancer, for example. They took the ability to leap gracefully five feet in the air for granted. It was only when you became conscious of all the massed forces a dancer was overcoming with his skill that you could begin to savor his achievement. Ginny had a lot to learn, even though she thought she already knew everything.

  Ginny sat with her eyes closed, unable to apologize but unable to resume the attack, paralyzed by her mother’s most deadly weapon — guilt. Because every word her mother had spoken had been true. She had slaved for Ginny and her father and brothers, thanklessly, for years. But the pound of flesh her mother extracted for this selfless devotion was that its recipients adorn her self-concept. Ginny had failed to do this. She didn’t know exactly what her mother would have liked her to be — but it was clearly nothing that she had been so far. All attempted roles to date had been disasters in her mother’s eyes, Ginny knew. Wife to Ira, mother to Wendy — this her mother approved of. But it was all over. Guilt.

  Ginny’s last Hullsport Christmas was the year before she left for Boston. Karl and Jim were home from their schools. Their mother had rushed around merrily performing all the preparation rituals single-handedly — the wreaths, the cookies, the tree, the presents. On Christmas Eve they had had their standard feast — roast goose and fixings and plum pudding. The Major was upstairs in bed with a migraine. After dinner they retired to the living room and sang carols in front of the fire, as they had done every Christmas Eve of recorded history. That year, though, each of the three children had dates later on, to midnight services at various churches. As a family choir, they’d always been agonizingly off key, but they’d scarcely noticed it before. That particular Christmas Eve, however, Jim’s newly changed voice was cracking as he sang. Ginny was preoccupied with the prospect of some heavy petting with Clem after the midnight service. Karl, bored, was singing dutifully. Here they were, new and different people, grubs sprung from the cocoons of childhood into resplendent pubescence, still struggling to perform the scorned rituals of their despised grubhood.

  Suddenly all the children stopped singing and started laughing. It was an example of laughter at its most pure: a release of the nervous tension that stemmed from the superimposition of two contradictory concepts. They laughed and laughed. There wasn’t enough laughter in all of Hullsport to relieve the strain of this absurdity — grown-up young people, for so they regarded themselves, engaged in a tired replay of meaningless myths and rituals. Their mother began to weep quietly. Gradually as one after another noticed her, their mirth died. Finally, the three of them skulked from the room to their private pursuits, each in various stages of resentment and remorse, leaving their mother there shaking with mute sobs. She didn’t know how to let go gracefully, and they didn’t know how to take their leave with tact. Independence was rarely given, Ginny knew; it was taken. But to take it would be to deprive her mother of her function in life. Guilt.

  ‘But Vogel didn’t say you were dying, Mother,’ Ginny mumbled.

  Mrs. Babcock shook her head no.

  ‘Shall I leave?’

  Her mother shook her head no again. Then she reached over to her bedside table and picked up the white pills from that morning and downed them with a sip of water. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘About seven, I think.’

  ‘I keep losing track of the time here.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a clock.’

  A little later Ginny told her about the baby birds. ‘What do you think I should do with them?’

  Mrs. Babcock was startled to be asked for an opinion. She’d been looked after for so long in this hospital that it was hard for her to believe that someone actually cared what she thought about anything. ‘Well, I don’t know really. Things like that always used to kill me when you children were little. I’d put them up in trees, and the cats would get them, and you could never understand why nature was set up that way. And of course I never knew what to tell you because I didn’t understand either.

  ‘Remember our yellow cat Molly? We had her when you were six or so. One time you went out in the back yard and found her under the mulberry tree with a tiny bird head in front of her. You started screaming and throwing sticks at her, I remember. I raced out and you were standing there sobbing. “But it’s not fair, Mommy,” you kept saying. Without thinking, I said, “But life’s not fair, sweetie.” You wouldn’t speak to me for days. The parent birds don’t appear to be feeding them?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You mean they’re just sitting on the chimney watching them starve?’

  ‘It looks like it.’ Ginny could tell that their unparently behavior was annoying her mother as much as it had her. ‘They should be shot.’

  ‘I agree. But I don’t know what to do. After all, they’re birds, not people. I guess you can’t bind them to our codes.’

  ‘There’s that bird book in the bookcase by the fireplace. Maybe you can find something there.’

  Ginny and her mother went on chatting as though their outburst had never happened, until Miss Sturgill arrived with a sleeping pill.

  It was late twilight as Ginny passed the Cloyd house. She tooted. Through the fuzzy gloom that made everything look out of focus, she saw a figure down the hill waving its hand. She stopped and backed up and got out. It was Clem, walking toward her, smiling.

  ‘Heard you was comin’,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t of knowed it was you.’ He nodded at her peasant dress. He was in a dirty sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans and manure-caked high-top work shoes. He looked hot and tired.

  ‘Just finished chores?’

  ‘Yup. Little late tonight. My hired man’s sick.’

  ‘I hear you’re doing good things with the farm.’

  ‘Highest production per head in the state. Got me $18,000’s worth of prize sperm in the freezer,’ he said with a proud smile, wiping beads of sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  ‘That’s great. Did you hear my mother is in the hospital?’

  ‘Yeah, I did. I’m real sorry. She’s done had a bad year, ain’t she? Pray God she’ll be out soon. Is she bad sick this time?’

  Ginny looked at him quickly. Pray God? Was this the Clem Cloyd, star of Hullsport low life? ‘Uh, well, I don’t know exactly. She’s had this before and has snapped right out of it. I don’t see why she shouldn’t this time. She looks terrible, but she’s up and around, more or less.’

  ‘Why don’t you come in for a while and say hi to Maxine?’

  ‘Okay. For a minute. If you have to milk in the morning, you’ll be wanting to eat and get to bed.’

  The bright light in the kitchen blinded Ginny long enough for Maxine to bustle over and enclose her between her arms and her soft massive mammaries. When Ginny could see again, she discovered that Maxine looked much as she had during Bloody Bucket days, only more so. Her huge breasts, no longer shaped to points, hung nearly to her waist; her golden cross was still lodged firmly between them. There were women who looked merely dumpy when they got fat, and there were women whose appearance increased in warmth and voluptuosity as the pounds added up. Maxine was in the latter category. She dwarfed Clem, who was still slight, though wiry and toughened by all his physical labor. His face, on the other hand, usually tense and sneering and unhappy in high school, had softened and relaxed. With a start, Ginny put her finger on the big change in Clem: He no longer limped. She had known him so well that she had become almost unaware of his crippled gait, but it was definitely gone altogether now.
Unobtrusively she glanced at the floor and noted that his left work shoe had a normal sole and his right foot no longer turned inward. He’d had surgery or something?

  Supper sat steaming on the table. Three small dark children with Clem’s Melungeon features squirmed shyly at their places. This didn’t seem the time to be asking about Clem’s leg.

  ‘Eat with us,’ Maxine insisted.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve eaten. Anyhow, I’ve got to get back to the cabin to check on some things. But I’ll be back.’

  ‘Make it soon,’ Maxine instructed.

  7

  Worthley Material

  When I regained consciousness after my plunge from Clem’s speeding Harley — a princess restored to life by a watchful genie — I found myself swathed in gauze and plaster, with various limbs suspended from pulleys. Out the window the sun was shining, and the trees were tufted with the fluffy chartreuse of leafing buds. Several weeks had passed without my knowledge.

  Clem wasn’t allowed to visit me during my convalescence. It was just as well. I was extremely busy filling out college applications, under duress applied in my weakened condition by the Major. They were all to women’s colleges in New England. ‘Why do you wish to attend Worthley?’ Answer: ‘I don’t really wish to attend Worthley. I’m being held a prisoner in a hospital bed. Please send help.’

  I got a letter back from the Worthley board of admissions inviting me for an interview, based on my ‘most intriguing and original application.’ The Major intercepted the letter before I had a chance to chew it up and swallow it. Hardly was I up off my skin-grafted back than I was whisked away for my interview, by the Major himself, who had to go to Boston on business.

  In a last-ditch gesture of defiance, I wore a black, too-tight straight skirt; a black cardigan buttoned up the back with a Do-It Pruitt pointed bra underneath; Clem’s red dragon wind-breaker, the tatters of which I had carefully stitched together upon finding them among Mother’s cleaning cloths; black ballet slippers; and Clem’s huge clanking identification bracelet.