The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘What did you do?’ Mona prompted, tossing her long black hair out of her eyes with a jerk of her head.

  ‘I just lay there. I was so stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I lay there trying to get my head straight. Stunned first that he wasn’t pleased like I was; and second that he was calling me a whore, because I had really loved him. He knew I had never had sex with anyone before him. And I especially couldn’t believe that he had hit me. He’d always been, like, so kind and gentle. But the next thing I knew, he was kicking me in the stomach. He was wearing combat boots, and he just kept kicking me, hard. He kept yelling that he wasn’t going to let himself be tied down by some two-bit whore. And he kept kicking me in the stomach, so that I couldn’t get my breath.’

  She started gasping for breath. One of the group began pumping her chest to help her breathe. Everyone’s face was set in a grim expression.

  ‘And what happened?’ Mona asked, looking more and more vindictive.

  ‘When I was seven months pregnant, he walked out and never came back. It was six in the morning, I remember. I was on my knees scrubbing the kitchen linoleum. He was a real cleanliness freak. I didn’t care that much about gleaming linoleum. I was doing it for him, before I left for work. He wasn’t working regularly at the time. Some nights he played with a band. I was supporting both of us. Anyhow, that morning I was kneeling over the scrub bucket, surrounded by a floorful of dirty water, and I started crying. I was just so tired, with working all day and being seven months pregnant and getting up early to scrub the floor and iron his shirts. Tears were dripping off my face and into the sudsy water. About that time, he stomped in. He’d been out all night, possibly with another woman. He stared at me with disgust and said, “Christ! Look at you! You’re a mess — dirt all over you and your hair in tangles. Is it any wonder I stay away from you as much as I can?” And he threw his stuff in a duffel bag and left. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Go on. Get angry,’ Mona whispered. ‘Give in to it’

  The woman’s expression changed abruptly from luxurious self-pity to fury. ‘The bastard!’ she screamed. ‘The goddam mother-fucking son of a bitch! Jesus, I hate that lousy cock-sucking Spic!’

  The group rolled her over on her stomach. She began pounding the floor with her fists in a rhythmic tattoo of rage.

  ‘And what would you like to do to him?’ Mona whispered.

  ‘I’d like to take a huge sharp carving knife and…’

  I walked fast into the kitchen so that I wouldn’t have to hear what she was going to do with her knife. Much as I sympathized with her, I found it distinctly embarrassing to have experienced such unearned intimacy with a woman I’d never seen before and would most likely never see again. A quickie of the emotions.

  Atheliah was somewhere in the cabin, conducting a session on ‘Women and Work’. I knew that housework and child-bearing were being roundly dumped on, and that I would feel agonizingly bougie once I felt compelled to mention what a trip I found cleaning the shower to be; how I would remove all my clothes and climb in with a sponge and Comet and really get into it.

  I sat down and tried not to listen to the poundings and shrieking from the Women and Rage workshop, where the woman was in the process of hacking her ex-lover to bits. I was feeling estranged from my sisters, and forlorn about feeling estranged. And I was a little bit scared because I knew that if I sat in on the Women and Rage workshop for a few minutes, having lowered this sense of estrangement that I used as a defense, I’d be beating the floor with the best of them.

  After lunch came recreation. Some women went sledding and skiing and snowshoeing on the meadow. Several built a great towering female torso from snow outside the living room window. Others sat around smoking dope and drinking Annie Green Springs Country Cherry Wine. A couple were playing guitars and singing.

  After dinner Bev Butch and the Four Femmes, a women’s rock band from Boston who had come for the weekend, set up their instruments and speakers in the living room. They played loud songs from the early sixties, and we all boogied, either as couples or singly. It was like being at a junior high sock hop before any of the boys had gotten up the courage or coordination to dance.

  As the evening progressed, the living room became hot and stuffy from all the exercising bodies, in spite of subzero temperatures outside. Every dancer’s face was dripping with sweat, and each Anglo-Afro hairdo was becoming even frizzier. Country Cherry Wine was being guzzled like lemonade on a summer afternoon. Finally Laverne in a grand gesture threw off her Off the Pigs T-shirt. There it was — her magnificent chest, glistening with sweat. A dozen or more women followed suit, until the entire living room seemed filled with bare breasts swaying and jouncing to the driving beat. I was lying with Eddie against someone’s rolled up sleeping bag. We were holding hands and were passing a joint.

  ‘Well, I think it’s a success, don’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘I guess so,’ she agreed. ‘But I think most of them are just here for a good time.’

  ‘That’s okay, isn’t it?’ I was forgetting Eddie’s vision of a multi-hued phalanx of women working the land shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘Sure, if you’re running a fucking resort. Besides, there’s only one black woman here. No Puerto Ricans, no Indians. How can we have a Third World Collective with no Third World women?’

  ‘I’m part Cherokee Indian,’ I offered.

  She turned on me with astonished delight. ‘You’re kidding? How come you never told me? Are you ashamed of it or what?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I never think about it. Does that make me an Uncle Tom-Tom?’ I collapsed with laughter at my little joke.

  ‘Repression,’ she said darkly. ‘You’re repressing your heritage. Society has made you ashamed of your birthright. You think Indians are second-class citizens.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, ever vigilant for my manifestations of bourgeois prejudice. ‘It just never seemed that significant. My great-great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee squaw. That makes me one thirty-second part Cherokee Indian. Up against all that Anglo-Saxonry. Big deal.’

  ‘Big deal? That happens to be the missing link in your character! I could never figure out why you weren’t altogether impossible with that mansion of yours, and those fascist parents. But you’ve got soul after all, Ginny.’ She rolled over and kissed me passionately. I was pleased that my genetic configuration had made her so happy.

  ‘And my grandfather was a coal miner,’ I offered, wanting to make her another gift. ‘Lots of my cousins still are. In the Appalachians.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’’ Eddie said, beaming. ‘Far out. Jesus, Ginny, you’ve been holding out on me! Let’s dance. I want to hold you.’

  Bev Butch was singing a slow song, ‘Longer Than Always Is a Long Long Time.’ Eddie and I wrapped our arms around each other and swayed in place, burying our mouths in each other’s neck. Around the room many other couples were embracing in time to the music — in several cases one or both partners were shirtless, and much caressing of breasts was going on. Marijuana smoke hung over the room like industrial smog over Hullsport. Most of the lights were out. Those that were still on were flicking rhythmically to Laverne’s vibrator in an upstairs bedroom. Couples or threesomes were drifting off to the bedrooms. I sighed with contentment. My feelings of estrangement from that morning seemed distant indeed. This was where I belonged; at last after much searching I had found my niche — it was here in Eddie Holzer’s arms.

  The door flew open and crashed against the wall. Snow swept in. A dozen huge figures in felt boots and dark quilted jumpsuits and visored helmets tramped in. They looked like astronauts on a moon mission, only more sinister and not so clean cut. The band stopped abruptly. The dancing couples looked up and pulled apart.

  The snowmobilers lined up across one end of the room. Their tiny eyes, almost lost in the dark caverns of their helmets, gleamed with lust. They began moving forward as a line, clomping one booted foot slowly in front of the other.

/>   Mindless panic gripped me as they herded us together like sheep for the slaughter. A figure on an outside edge reached out and grabbed the wrist of a bare-breasted woman in low-slung blue jeans who was cowering by the wall. She tried to scratch at his eyes, but her fingernails skittered down his tinted plastic visor. She tried to bite his hand, but got a mouthful of padded leather. She screamed and struggled as he started dragging her to the door. Several women moved to help her, but became immediately aware that they had pressing problems of their own as the line of dark figures closed in.

  Apparently what they had in mind was a Sabine women scene. Each would grab one of us and throw her across his snow machine and disappear into the night. I saw no reason why they shouldn’t do this, as long as they left me out of it.

  Eddie moved away from me and stood directly in their path with her hands resting on her hips. A figure in the line was moving toward me. I couldn’t see through his visor very well; what little light there was was reflecting off the plastic rather than penetrating it. But I could have sworn I recognized Ira’s alarmed eyes and his flaring nostrils and his full quivering lips. His expression wasn’t malicious, though; it was wistful. I looked back somewhat wistfully myself, as Juliet must have gazed at her Romeo among his enemy kinsmen.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Eddie demanded in a voice that would have caused flowers to wilt in the spring.

  The row halted abruptly, lead feet extended. Atheliah sauntered up to Eddie’s side. She was casually removing the leather case from her ax. She flicked its blade with her thumb and looked serenely at the snowsuited specters as though they were a row of saplings to be felled.

  ‘Get out of our house and off our land,’ Eddie ordered, in a tone that indicated that ‘our’ implied at least thirty-seven percent of the American people in a recent Harris poll, and not several dozen terrified females.

  The line stood still and mute for a full minute, the confrontation being waged in a dimension not involving, for the moment, words and actions.

  Finally, the man who had been approaching me, Ira it did turn out to be, raised his visor, knight-like, and said sheepishly, ‘We just heard the music and thought we’d drop by.’

  Eddie looked at him with amazement and said, ‘Well, you’re not invited, so get your trespassing ass out of here. And take your macho friends with you.’

  She turned her back on them and signaled to Bev Butch to start playing. Shakily, the band swung into an uncoordinated rendition of ‘Great Balls of Fire.’

  The snowmobilers skulked toward the door with sulky backward glances. When they were out on the porch, Eddie stalked over and called after them, enjoying her command, ‘And don’t come back until you’re invited. Which will be never!’

  Glumly, they stepped into the snow. I heard one mumble something about being ‘pussy whipped.’ Two, as they stomped past the towering bluish ice sculpture of the female torso, applied their shoulders to it and brought it crashing to the ground, where it broke into a thousand pieces.

  The next day as people were leaving, Eddie issued invitations to a carefully selected handful to join our Free Farm Third World Women’s Collective. When questioned about the Third World bit, she replied casually, ‘Oh, my lover is part Cherokee Indian; and of course her parents are Appalachian coal miners.’

  ‘Oh wow!’ said the woman who had challenged her, as impressed as any suburbanite would be to learn that a neighbor was a Worthley graduate.

  I preened shamelessly.

  ‘And of course my father was Puerto Rican,’ Eddie added.

  I looked at her questioningly.

  ‘Well, he might have been,’ she replied defensively after the woman left.

  We didn’t make any converts that afternoon, but we did feel we’d planted the seed in several receptive heads. We had also forged sisterly bonds with other area farms, and we had made plans to get together soon for the countercultural equivalent of afternoon bridge or morning coffee — some consciousness-raising.

  After we had tamed the debris in the cabin, Mona, Atheliah, Eddie, and I went skiing. Laverne stayed behind for an assignation with her vibrator.

  We skied in silence for several miles, savoring the quiet after the din of the weekend. We skied across meadows and through snow-laden pine forests. We peeked into hemlock trees and found deer hideouts — branches pinned tent-like to the ground by snow, and the snow within packed by tiny hoofs. Winter birds hopped around in the branches. The weak winter sun ducked and darted behind the clouds and the tall treetops. I was pervaded by a great sense of peace and well-being.

  ‘Whew! It’s nice to have that over with.’

  The others gave me looks of reprimand to indicate that I wasn’t displaying the appropriate collective feeling.

  ‘Well, it was kind of crowded and noisy, don’t you think? And the mess of all those bodies trying to eat and sleep and shit at once…’

  ‘Those “bodies” were our sisters,’ Mona pointed out.

  ‘Sisters or not, it’s nice to have them gone,’ I insisted with good humor.

  No one replied.

  We skied on, our tips clacking together, and the snow crunching under us, and the sun flashing on our faces. If not God, then Someone equally influential was in heaven, and all seemed right with the world — which sentiment was a considerable relief after my seizure of unutterable loneliness yesterday morning in the midst of my eighty sisters. We herringboned briskly up a hillside.

  As we began to descend the opposite side, a deafening boom enveloped the countryside. We looked at each other with concern.

  ‘A sonic boom,’ Eddie said confidently.

  At that point, we almost ran head-on into a chain-link fence.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Eddie grumbled.

  With annoyance at having our course disrupted, we turned south and skied alongside the high barbed-wire-capped fence. After fifty yards we came to a sign — white with red lettering — saying, ‘Keep Out! Gun Testing Range.’

  We looked at each other in astonishment. We were in the middle of a woods in an underpopulated area of a rural state. For several miles we had seen no other person, and only a handful of houses. What guns, for God’s sake, and who was there to test them?

  We skied on, following the fence, intent upon satisfying our curiosity. Meanwhile, shattering blasts kept rocking the small valley. Abruptly, the fence turned a corner. So did we, following it like Dorothy of Oz on the Yellow Brick Road.

  Several hundred yards and one right angle later, we found ourselves at a locked gate on which was a large sign reading ‘Keep Out. Gun Test Range. General Machine, Inc., Ludbury, Vermont’ Inside were clutches of men in army fatigues tending large mortar-type guns.

  ‘Christ, they’re everywhere,’ Eddie whispered. ‘They won’t be content until they’ve killed us all.’ She began trembling. I’d never seen her frightened of anything. But here she was, clearly having an anxiety attack such as seized all the rest of us on a regular basis. The confrontation with the snowmobilers must have drained her of her weekly allotment of courage.

  I took one of her arms, which was rigid with terror, and Atheliah took the other, and between us, we managed to slide her back into the woods, where she regained command enough to yell back toward the firing range, ‘Goddam butchers!’

  However, when we were about halfway back to the cabin, toiling through deeply drifted snow in the broad field, we heard a roar overhead. Stabbing our poles upright in the snow, we clapped our gloved hands over our ears. Three low-flying jets, in perfect formation, came straight at us. They were the flat triangular kind that looked like silver airborne stingrays.

  Eddie screamed, ‘Oh Christ! They’ve got me!’ And she threw herself headfirst into a snowdrift, tangling her skis around her in the process.

  The planes passed by well above us. The three of us dragged Eddie out of her snowbank. She sat quivering in the snow, her face buried in her hands.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked finally, disturbed by this displ
ay of weakness in my tower of strength.

  Wordlessly, she untangled her skis and stood up, and we pressed on.

  The next morning everyone left the cabin but me. Eddie and Laverne went down to the clinic. And Atheliah and Mona skied to their old farm to borrow some soybeans.

  I was sitting in the kitchen, my feet propped on the stove, savoring my solitude like the counterrevolutionary that I was beginning to think I really was: I was sick to death of sharing with the sisters. Suddenly I heard a snowmobile in our meadow. Reluctantly, I plunked my feet to the floor and looked out. Hopping off his Deluxe Sno Cat 44 and pulling off his helmet was Ira. I felt a fleeting pang of pleasure, which I promptly squelched. After all, but for Eddie, he would have carried me off into the night last Saturday.

  ‘Yes?’ I inquired coolly, sauntering out onto the porch.

  Ira wore a quilted snowsuit; his dark curly hair was a scrambled mess from his helmet, and his smiling white teeth were dazzling against his ruddy complexion.

  ‘Howdy. Ira Bliss,’ he said, slipping off his huge black leather glove and offering me his hand.

  I carefully ignored the hand and asked, ‘What do you want, Mr Bliss?’

  ‘Ira,’ he said, flashing his smile, his nostrils flaring. ‘May I come in for a minute?’ He blew on his hands and rubbed them. He was right. It was cold. I was shivering in my turtleneck.

  ‘I don’t see the need for that.’

  ‘Look, ma’am, I’m freezing,’

  ‘Then don’t roar around on your toy sled at sixty miles per hour.’

  ‘All right, look,’ he said, raising his arms as though someone had stuck a pistol in his ribs. ‘I run with a rowdy bunch. Sometimes they do things I don’t care for, and I go along with them because I don’t have the strength of character to stand up to them. But that’s really why I’m here. To apologize for Saturday night.’

  Ira had captured my sympathy. I knew what he meant: I ran with rowdy groups, too, and often lacked the gumption to be different when I didn’t approve of their activities. I smiled in spite of myself, a faint smile that acknowledged kinship. ‘All right, Mr. Bliss. Come in and warm up by the stove.’