The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  One April evening Eddie came galloping up the stairs. She stood in the doorway panting, distress spread over her expressive face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked nervously from the desk where I sat writing a check to a struggling head shop.

  “The coffee house is being torn down to build a bank!’ She lowered herself gingerly onto the sagging couch.

  ‘You’re kidding? That’s awful!’

  ‘But I’m afraid there’s more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This dump we call home has been condemned. We have to get out by next month.’

  ‘What? Where are we supposed to go?’

  We sat staring at each other, perplexed. Our cozy world was tumbling down.

  When the initial shock had worn off, we huddled over my checkbook and the Apartments for Rent section of the Globe. According to our calculations, either we would have to cut off our blood money donations to the Day-Glo poster shops and related enterprises and spend it for rent, or one of us would have to find a job.

  We both looked around halfheartedly for work for a couple of weeks. Singers of protest songs weren’t in demand by that time, acid rock having taken over. And without a college degree, I could find only a waitress job at Waldorf’s Cafeteria in Harvard Square, where I had eaten Thanksgiving dinner my freshman year. Eddie was trying to persuade me that the job was a worthy one, would expose me to contact with The People, would perhaps correct some of the unfortunate petit bourgeois prejudices I’d inherited from my impossible parents, would inestimably enhance my political education. I resisted because I felt incapable any longer of keeping to a schedule. And what had Eddie been teaching me if not to honor my feelings?

  With two weeks to go before we would be evicted, we decided to ignore this impasse and visit two friends of Eddie’s in Vermont. They had been seniors at Worthley when she was a sophomore and had been editors on the paper when Eddie had been a reporter. Eddie credited them with having ‘politicized’ her. She bore them the same sentimental affection that I did Clem Cloyd for having deflowered me. Both women, having been social workers in Newark, were now living with some other people on a farm near a town called Stark’s Bog.

  Mona was tall and emaciated, with wide feverish eyes that she shielded behind purple-tinted goggle lenses that made her eye sockets look bruised. She wore her black hair in a Prince Valiant cut with long bangs. She had a way of hunching her back and tucking in her chin and gazing through her purple lenses that made her look a little like a vulture.

  Atheliah was also tall, but was broad and muscled as well, with frizzy red hair that shot out like solar flares during an eclipse. She was jovial, laughing and smiling almost constantly in a way that narrowed her eyes to slits. They both embraced Eddie — Mona gravely and Atheliah boisterously. They lived with five men and one other woman in a crumbling white farm house which was attached by a sagging ell to a huge barn. In the barn, when our tour took us there, along with several decades’ worth of trampled manure were a couple of Holsteins and some scavenging hens.

  The inside of the house looked like Coney Island the day after the Fourth of July. Clothes and bedding and books and papers and dishes and sleeping bodies were strewn everywhere. The damp interior walls were coated with a bright green mold.

  It was planting season, and Eddie and I spent most of our first afternoon helping the brothers and sisters plant the seeds in carefree lines across the freshly tilled garden soil. The sun was hot, and clouds of moisture steamed up from the soggy, thawing fields. Sluggish flies buzzed languidly in the grass; and in the distance, treed foothills tinged with the chartreuse of new leaves rose up in layer upon layer.

  Dinner was a murky soup, filled with dark sodden clumps that looked like leaves from the bottom of a compost pile and that tasted like decomposing seaweed, and whole grain bread which you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew. Afterward seven of us lay around on the living room debris passing joints as two mangy barn cats climbed up on the dining table and licked our dishes clean for us.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ Eddie demanded of Mona and Atheliah. “You two used to be the most socially concerned people I knew. I modeled myself after you. After you left Worthley, I tried to run the paper the same way you had. Articles about world affairs and stuff and not just coming-out-party portraits. And fasts for Roxbury busing and stuff. I don’t get this earth trip you’re on.’

  ‘I got tired,’ Mona said languidly, holding the last quarter inch of the most recent joint between her thumb and index fingernails and sucking the smoke into her lungs through clenched teeth with a hiss. Holding her breath until her face turned a distressing purple, she squashed the glowing tip on her boot sole and leaned back and closed her alarming dark dilated eyes.

  ‘So it’s a cop-out, then? A sort of rural rest home for fucked-over radicals?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Atheliah corrected her, in a brisk voice like Julia Child’s on ‘The French Chef just after she’s dropped a roast on the floor and tossed it back on the platter. ‘We’re trying to live our theories. Do you know who paid my salary when I was organizing in Newark? HEW, that’s who! You can’t work to overthrow a system, and live off it at the same time. When the host dies, so do its parasites. First earn an honest living side by side with The People. Then talk to me about death-dealing societies and inequity and injustice! Anything else is schizy.’

  Mona nodded in agreement, letting out her smoke in a great gush of breathlessness. She wove into the kitchen and fumbled around in the freezer and returned with a plastic container of frozen Magic Mushrooms. ‘“Teonanacd,” the Aztecs called them,’ Mona muttered, litany-like, as she passed them. ‘“God’s flesh,” the key to communion with the Deity.’

  Hesitantly I took one of the icy chunks and pondered the topic of eating God, turning the mushroom in my fingers and staring at it with distaste.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you do drugs?’ Mona asked incredulously, poised to cross me off their Christmas card list.

  ‘Of course she does,’ Eddie assured them.

  My upbringing won out over my eagerness to please Eddie: I didn’t trust pushers. I’d read that Magic Mushrooms were often regular mushrooms dipped in hog tranquilizer. If I ate this thing, I would die a horrible death on the floor of this remote Vermont farmhouse. Feigning a bite, I held it down by my side and offered it to the cats, who sniffed it and then wanted nothing to do with it either.

  Eddie was clearly impressed by Atheliah’s line of reasoning. She looked thoughtful for the rest of our visit and asked a lot of questions about gardening and animal care and land prices.

  ‘Are Mona and Atheliah, like — simpatico, sexually?’ I asked Eddie as we slouched in our bus seats on the way back to Boston. Our knees were propped on the seat backs in front of us. Soggy meadows and evergreen forests and mountain peaks with faint remnants of snow flashed by the bus windows.

  ‘Well, they’re not asimpatico, which is all that matters, isn’t it?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘They’re not lovers, if that’s what you’re asking. Neither of them is interested in sex with anybody, as far as I can tell. I think that’s the bond between them.’

  ‘How dull’

  ‘Do you think so? I find it refreshing.’

  We glared at each other with hostility, at having come to need each other physically.

  ‘How did they come to be so blessed?’

  ‘Well, I remember Mona had this — male friend when she was at Worthley. A medical student he was. She used to meet him in the morgue when he was on night duty at some Boston hospital, and they’d make love all night on a stretcher in the office.’

  ‘At least they didn’t have to worry about getting caught,’ I said, weak with distaste. A morgue was almost as creepy a site for sex as a bomb shelter.

  ‘Ah, but they did get caught! She became pregnant. I remember the day she told me. We were sitting in the newspaper office correcting the proofs of an editorial o
n the Free Speech Movement, and all of a sudden she collapsed on the table and started weeping. I couldn’t believe it. I’d always thought of Mona as this paragon of restraint. Well, it all came out in a great gush of confession. And then she sat up and blew her nose and set about trying to blot the tear-soaked proofs.

  ‘“What are you going to do?” I asked.

  ‘“Leave school and get married of course,” she said curtly.

  ‘Well, she disappeared one weekend, and then returned looking all gray and haggard. And she never said another word about it. She was on my hall, and as far as I know, she never went out on a date again — not with her medical student or with anyone else. I never felt at liberty to ask her about it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked Atheliah?’

  ‘No. I never felt I could. For all I knew, Atheliah didn’t even know about it. Anyhow, it wasn’t the sort of thing you asked Atheliah. She’s probably the only twenty-six-year-old virgin I know.’

  ‘Has she told you she is?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m just, like, speculating.’

  Back in Boston we continued our search for jobs, or for an apartment we could afford on my unsupplemented dividend checks. Our search took us one afternoon to an area of Boston I’d never seen before. Even though it was a sunny afternoon, the streets we were walking down were dark and damp, permanently shielded from the sun by towering expressway ramps overhead. Trash cans were overflowing; and the facades of the formerly elegant townhouses, with crumbling plaster cupids in their cornices, were grimy and bleak. A blanket of damp exhaust fumes lay over the section.

  Eddie was unusually quiet as we searched for an address listed in the paper as containing a cheap two-room apartment. As we passed a flight of concrete steps that descended into a dark basement, Eddie said grimly, ‘That was the site of my conception.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, staring with horror at a drunk collapsed in a nearby doorway and trying to picture this as my new neighborhood.

  ‘Down in that cellar. That’s where my father, whoever he was, raped my mother.’

  I asked carefully, ‘Uh, how do you know?’

  We stopped and stared down the grungy steps and into the recessed doorway, which was strewn with empty liquor bottles and broken glass.

  She laughed bitterly. ‘How do I know? It’s the family shrine, that’s how. My mother used to bring me here and point it out when I was a teen-ager. As an instructive exercise about the male of the species, in whom I was exhibiting an inordinate interest at the tune.’

  ‘You mean you lived around here?’

  ‘Five blocks east,’ she said with a defiant look. ‘Does that appall you, Scarlett?’ She’d taken to calling me Scarlett, after Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, every time I displayed my southern refinement

  ‘I — I — didn’t know.’

  She sighed with disgust. ‘Does it matter where I grew up? You grew up in a mansion with slaves, and I grew up in a slum. So what?’

  Feeling that she was being unusually charitable about my feudal origins, I nodded in eager agreement. We stood frozen to the spot, gazing down the steps, picturing the rape scene, with loathing for the male animal in our hearts.

  ‘He held a knife to her throat,’ Eddie added in a choked voice. ‘She was fifteen. On her way home from school late one afternoon in early spring. She wanted to be a hairdresser, but she had to drop out of school when she turned out to be pregnant with me.’

  ‘Couldn’t she have had an abortion?’

  ‘Are you kidding? In 1944? In Massachusetts? With no bread?’

  ‘She’s not very old then. Does she still live around here?’

  Eddie nodded.

  ‘Maybe we should go see her. I’d like to meet your mother. After all, you’ve met mine. And it is a rather crucial factor in a person’s life, as we all know from Psychology 101.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to meet my mother.’

  ‘Oh, but I would.’

  ‘No,’ Eddie said abruptly. ‘I haven’t seen her for a year or more. Families are a real bummer.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No!’

  I looked at her with surprise. Her face was twitching with suppressed emotion.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me back the way we’d come.

  A month later we were living in a rented prefab log cabin on a farm adjacent to Mona’s and Atheliah’s. The cabin sat on a hill overlooking an eighteen-acre beaver pond. A wide meadow of timothy stretched from the cabin to the thicket of cattails at the pond edge. Out of the pond pointed the dead gray branches of hundreds of drowned trees. And at one end, in an area cleared of the skeletal trees, was the mud lodge where the beavers lived.

  The evening of our arrival, with our possessions in a U-Haul truck, Eddie and I sat in rush-seated rocking chairs on the front porch. I was leaning back, my feet propped on a log railing. Eddie sat behind me gravely smoothing and rebraiding my hair. The sun had set in a red smear behind the tree-covered cliffs that formed a backdrop to the pond, and a dense mist was rising up from the pond surface and enveloping the gray trunks.

  Eddie and I sighed simultaneously with contentment as she stroked my frizzy hair into orderly plaitable bundles.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘I think we’re finally getting our heads straight.’

  But of course we’d only just arrived. Compared to Broadway in Cambridge, our rutted dirt road in Stark’s Bog, Vermont, was the end of the earth. Little did we know that we’d moved onto a battlefield. But the battles came later. Our first month was untainted bliss. We felt we’d come home at last, only now realizing how far astray we’d gone. We had renounced our pasts totally by not leaving a forwarding address at the Cambridge post office (except of course with the Westwood Chemical Corporation, so that they would know where to send the checks).

  The cabin stood on the site of an old farmhouse, which had burned down. It had been built only a few years earlier as a summer retreat and winter ski house by a stockbroker in New York City. It was unclear why he was willing to rent such a slice of heaven, though it became clearer as time went on. But the original farmhouse had belonged to several generations of working farmers, so that the barn nearby was in good condition. We rushed out and bought a Guernsey milking cow named Minnie and half a dozen red and black Rhode Island hens and a vicious black and white Barred Rock rooster. All these we ensconced in the huge moldy old barn, the framework of which was massive hand-hewn pine beams. We ordered a beehive and nailed it together and dumped a package of bees from Kentucky into it. We placed the hive in an old apple orchard behind the house; the blossoms had recently fallen off, and tiny green apples were forming. The growing season well under way, we dug and planted a hasty garden, reading instructions from a manual.

  We had left behind The Family and The City. The plan now, according to Eddie, our resident theoretician, was to leave behind the American capitalist-imperialist economy altogether. We would grow and make almost all our material-requirements — our food, our clothes, our fuel. Inconvenient expenses like taxes we would cover from our maple sugaring operation in early spring, there being a vast sugar bush and a sugar shack filled with all the necessary equipment on a high hill behind the cabin. By saving my dividend checks, we could soon afford a down payment on the farm, which was for sale at a ludicrously low price, for reasons which too soon became apparent to us. And eventually we might even be able to wean ourselves entirely from that corporate enemy of The People, the Westwood Chemical Corporation. We concluded that very soon we would be able authentically to cast our lot with The People.

  As far as representatives of The People went in Stark’s Bog, we didn’t know any. We had been into town several times in the old Ford pickup owned by Mona and Atheliah to buy supplies. As we clattered and jounced down the hill on which our farms sat, we could see Stark’s Bog below us. Frame buildings clustered around three sides of the bog that
gave the town its name. In most parts of Vermont could be seen houses of brick and stone, built to last for generations. In Stark’s Bog, however, every house was frame, except Ira Bliss’s stone one. Apparently none of the early settlers except the Blisses had planned to stay if they could help it.

  In the winter, according to Mona and Atheliah, the marsh mud in the bog froze over. In the spring, it became a sea of muck, and animals that strayed into it were trapped and sucked under, like mammoth elephants in prehistoric asphalt pits. Now, however, it was summer, and the marsh grasses rustled. The mud had grown a coat of brilliant green slime. Mosquitoes teemed in fetid pools.

  Driving into town we would first pass the Dairy Delite soft ice cream stand. The Stark’s Boggers would cluster here after supper to buy root beer floats or butterscotch sundaes. Then they would drive or walk to the bog to watch the struggles of whatever animals were sinking in the goo offshore. Or if it was close to 6:27, they would amble to the train track and wait for the New York-Montreal special to roar through. (It had never stopped there. In fact, passengers tended to pull down their window shades as they passed through, to the disappointment of the frantically waving town children.)

  Although Stark’s Bog township actually included the bog and the surrounding hills and farms, the town proper consisted of one road, which came from St Johnsbury and led to a border crossing into Quebec. Where the road passed through town, it was lined with a feed store, a hardware store, a hotel where hunters stayed in the fall, an IGA grocery store, a gun shop, a taxidermy parlor, a funeral home, a farm equipment franchise, and a snow machine showroom called Sno Cat City. All these were housed in buildings from the early 1800’s with colonial cornices and returns and doorways, which were pleasing in their simplicity. Pleasing to everyone but the Stark’s Boggers, who were sick to death of them and had done their best to tear them down or cover them over with fluorescent plastic and neon tubing and plate glass and gleaming chrome. Each businessman yearned to raze the clapboard and beam structure on his premises and erect a molded plastic- and aluminum-sided showroom in its place. Sno Cat City, for instance, owned by Ira Bliss IV, had a huge orange mountain lion springing out from its facade; it being summer, row after row of gleaming yellow Honda trail bikes sat out front. Likewise, the goal of each Stark’s Bog householder was to knock down or sell the despised frame colonial his family had infested for centuries, and to throw up a prefab ranch house that would be airtight, with everything working properly.