The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  In fact, she had to grill him on the topic of her mother’s bleeding stomach. She descended to the basement lab in the elevator. In one corner of the metal box was a small puddle of drying blood.

  The elevator came to a stop. Ginny didn’t move. She was transfixed by the blood. She felt nauseated, but she couldn’t take her eyes off it. Whose was it? What sort of vessel had it sloshed out of? Was it healthy or diseased? What was its clotting time, its platelet lysis time? What type was it? As she stared, the puddle seemed to throb, in obedience to its absent heart. Blood, all the same everywhere — each person’s the ionic composition of dilute sea water, containing cells that performed the same functions, governed by the same enzymes and hormones. And yet, in spite of all this sameness, like snowflakes or fingerprints, samples from no two people were identical. So many things to go haywire…

  ‘Miss? Miss?’ An orderly in white stood impatiently outside the elevator.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ginny said, stepping out in a daze.

  She walked into the impersonal green-walled lab office. The secretary’s desk chair was empty. Ginny peeked around the doorway. Dr. Vogel in a white lab coat was peering through a microscope, continuously readjusting the focus. Next to him sat a centrifuge and a rack of test tubes. He was making hurried notations on a record form.

  ‘Dr. Vogel?’

  He looked up. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Babcock. I’m very busy right now. Could you leave a message with my secretary?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  He averted his eyes as Ginny walked over to him. ‘Would you say the transfusion hasn’t worked?’

  ‘Well, she’s just had one. And it performed the function we intended: It relieved her anemia and cut down her bleeding temporarily while we worked at isolating the cause. But of course her platelet count is back down now — to 25,000/mm.’

  ‘Compared to what?’

  ‘Compared to right after the transfusion, when it was in the vicinity of 100,000/mm.’

  ‘May I look?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know…This is highly unconventional, Miss Babcock, your coming in here like this.’

  Ginny looked through the microscope and saw clusters of transparent blobs on a grid of etched squares. So these were the culprits — her mother’s languid platelets. They might even be her own, left over from the transfusion.

  When she looked up, Dr. Vogel was holding a test tube with some red liquid in it, blood presumably, up to the overhead light. He studied it intently. Flipping on a fluorescent light directly over the counter, he picked up a second test tube and glanced back and forth between the two.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We’re testing your mother’s blood for platelet antibodies to determine if her ITP is being triggered by an autoimmune mechanism. We’ve incubated some of her serum with your blood and a sample of the drug your mother was on prior to admission, and we’re checking for clot reaction.’

  ‘What drug?’

  ‘Amitriptylene. Elavil to the layman.’

  ‘For what?’

  He glanced at her, amazed at the breadth of her ignorance. ‘For depression, of course.’

  Of course? Ginny winced. Dr. Tyler had mentioned depression. Now this. What had her mother been depressed about? Mr Zed’s death? The Major’s death? Guilt swept over Ginny. Her children had been a disappointment. Ginny didn’t know precisely what her mother had wanted from them, but she clearly hadn’t gotten it. It was evident from the way she spoke of Jim and Karl — tolerantly, but with frowns and sighs. And presumaby she spoke to them of her in the same way. Maybe her mother was right after all: Important things did eventually get themselves ‘communicated,’ one way or another.

  ‘Well, I think we have every reason to believe we’re about to get this thing under control, don’t you?’ he asked.

  Ginny struggled in the grip of her need to believe this. Due to having been reared by parents who were incapable of saying ‘I don’t know,’ she knew that she suffered from what the psychology texts at Worthley had labeled an Authority Neurosis. She had gone through life setting up tin gods who were supposed to restore to her the sense of certainty she had enjoyed under her parents’ rule. Although this desperate longing for someone who really knew what he or she was doing remained, common sense told her that Dr. Vogel was just an ordinary flawed and confused mortal like herself.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she replied, not believing it. ‘But how sick is she?’

  He blushed and averted his eyes. ‘Miss Babcock,’ he finally answered, ‘you ask that as though I can give you a number on a scale from one to ten. I can’t. Besides, I’ve been trained to save lives. I don’t believe in writing patients off.’ He bent over his microscope by way of dismissal.

  Ginny glared at him. What did that mean?

  Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa were in the middle of a discussion when Ginny arrived at the sun porch to witness her mother’s lunch.

  ‘…and so you see, Sister, there’s nothing in man that is vorth extending throughout infinity. I mean really, Sister, vould you vish us on eternity? No, it doesn’t make sense. Ve are a flawed species. The only thing to be said in our favor is that our bodies can rot and be devoured by grubs and vorms; and the elements that are released can go into making up the bodies of a different — and ideally not morally retarded — species.’

  ‘My dear Mr. Solomon, my heart goes out to you,’ Sister Theresa said, fondling her ‘Not My Will But Thine’ medal. ‘If that hope is the only force that sustains you, I don’t know why you’re still alive. I really don’t. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to you that our Lord can esteem us and provide for us in spite of our many vanities and frailties, but can’t you feel it in your heart? Look out there, Mr. Solomon,’ she invited, gesturing in the direction of the factory. The electric chimes were playing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone. ‘When you see sunlight playing on the meadows, don’t you feel here’ — she patted the site of her missing breast — ‘that there are factors even you haven’t taken into account, forces you know not of, that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world? Because, believe me, Mr. Solomon, He is.’

  ‘Since you put it that way, Sister,’ he said, patting his emphysematous lung, ‘no, I don’t feel it here. I think…’

  ‘Stop it!’ Mrs. Babcock screamed, hurling her bowl of cream soup on the floor. ‘Can’t you two just shut up? You go on and on and on, saying the same things over and over again. Neither of you is affected by what the other says, or even listens to it! Why can’t you just be quiet? Mrs. Cabel is the only one in this room with any sense.’ She stood shakily, as the others stared with alarm.

  She started her agonizing shuffle toward the door. Ginny jumped up and took her arm. They started down the hall, leaving the others to cope with the spilled soup and broken china.

  ‘Mother,’ Ginny began, framing a gentle reprimand. True, her mother was sick, but there was no reason to turn into a savage.

  “Not one word. Not one word.’

  As Mrs. Babcock struggled up the hall on her aching legs, something happened. It was as though her brain were shifting gears. The hall telescoped — it looked miles long. She shuffled along, holding Ginny’s arm. She could have been walking like this for minutes or for months. She didn’t know or care.

  Back in bed, she lay limp and lethargic. It was as though a plug had been pulled and her vital energies were flowing out of her. But it wasn’t the weariness of depression. That she was thoroughly acquainted with. Depression was a very active state really. Even if you appeared to an observer to be immobilized, your mind was in a frenzy of paralysis. You were unable to function, but were actively despising yourself for it. This frame of mind was entirely different. Its only emotion, if it could be called that, was sublime indifference. Nothing mattered anymore. If she was dying, so be it. Languidly, she raised an arm and observed the bruises — dark red and deep purple and green. What did this grotesque arm have to do with her? For heaven’s sake, what was all the fus
s about?

  A haze had settled in over the room. People were rushing around, doing different things to her pathetic body. Their voices as they questioned her urgently hummed and buzzed like angry bees. She wanted to tell them all just to relax and leave her alone.

  Dr. Vogel, who had come running, turned to Ginny and said, ‘She seems all right. All her vital signs are in order. Maybe she’s just tired out.’

  As her mother lay limp, with blood from another donor running into her arm, Ginny watched ‘Westview General’ on television. Doctors Turcott and Adrian, the two handsome bachelor main characters, were performing an impossibly intricate operation that was snatching a small boy from the jaws of death, and were at the same time cracking jokes and quoting Shakespeare and making dates with the surgical nurses, who somehow managed to look provocative in low-fashion sterile gowns and caps.

  But gradually, as though catching an infection from her mother, Ginny felt herself being flooded with cosmic indifference. She just stopped caring — about the young surgeons on ‘Westview General,’ about her ill mother, about Wendy and Ira. It was as though the incredible strain of the past few weeks had mounted to a point beyond which she could not go. Her system was simply shutting down; her emotions were closing up shop. There she and her mother lay, in their separate beds, awash on a healing sea of indifference.

  Because it was healing, there was no question in Ginny’s mind. It was an inexpressible relief just to give up. People came and went, marked charts, plumped pillows, straightened sheets. ‘Beat the Clock’ came on the television, and a frazzle-haired woman in a yellow slicker tried to balance milk cartons full of water on her forehead while flying across the stage on a skate board, as the huge monster clock ticked away relentlessly devouring her prize money.

  ‘Turn it off, would you please?’ Ginny asked Mrs. Childress. And the two of them, mother and daughter, floated on through the afternoon as their ancestral clock on the bedside table ticked ever more slowly. Ginny couldn’t tell if the clock was running down or if her ears were going haywire. But she didn’t really care. Eventually the clock stopped altogether.

  Ginny reached the big house in the same languid frame of mind. Her determination to struggle, against anything, had vanished as completely as last winter’s snow under the hot spring sun in Vermont. She got the mail from the box. In it was her letter to Miss Head, unopened and marked in Miss Head’s pinched handwriting ‘Return to Sender.’ Without emotion, Ginny slid it into her overalls pocket. She strolled with indifference past the Southland Realty FOR SALE sign in the front yard.

  She went upstairs to her room, which was untouched since she had lived in it nine years ago. A canopied double bed with a cannon-ball frame, a skirted dressing table, a Queen Anne highboy. Her mother had been suggesting gently, ever since she had left home, that she sort out the stuff in her closet. And each time her mother had hinted at this, Ginny had snapped back, ‘Why? Are you planning to take in roomers or something? What’s wrong with it the way it is?’ Nevertheless, each trip home she had gone to her closet to clean it out. Each time she had become engrossed in a scrapbook or a diary; each time she had decided that there was nothing she could part with. Her complete set of Hullsport High athletic game programs from 1960-1962; the sales slip from her first Never-Tell bra; the list in Joe Bob’s childish scrawl of all the Hullsport High couples in 1962 who had ‘gone all the way’; her moth-riddled flag swinger jacket and the flag with ‘To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield’ on it; the ribbon from the Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival; her shoulder pads and face-guarded helmet; four strapless net and chiffon gowns; a stack of Scrooge comic books, which were collector’s items by now. Each time she had decided that they all had to stay.

  Besides, Ginny had somehow always felt that if she actually cleared her stuff out, her mother might move someone else in. An irrational feeling, since there was no one around the house needing a room, but there it was. She still thought of this house as ‘home,’ this room as ‘her room’; not Ira’s stone house in Vermont, not her garret at Worthley, not the Cambridge apartment or the Stark’s Bog cabin.

  The past had always been more real, more present to her than the present. But this day, without regret and without satisfaction, with total indifference, Ginny cleaned out her entire closet, bundling up all the stuff and toting it out back to the trash cans. She had fantasized that she and Wendy would live in this house, that this would be Wendy’s room, that she would continue to hoard all her junk to show Wendy. But she knew now that this would never happen, it was absurd to keep this clutter around any longer. It was time to purge herself of her constipated past.

  Back at the cabin, the screeching of baby birds greeted her. Languidly, she got their gooey food from the refrigerator and dropped a few balls of it and some water down their gaping throats, without pleasure and without concern. If they died, so be it. Then she lay down on the big double bed where she had been born. She lay, without guilt over inactivity, without the satisfaction of well-earned leisure, without agony over past failings or apprehension about her uncertain future.

  Mrs. Babcock woke up as though stung awake by bees. All she could think about was the previous afternoon, which she had spent in bed utterly motionless and emotionless. She had been demoralized and had just given up. It reminded her of the descriptions of people in the last stages of consciousness before freezing, when they acquiesced to the idea of death and gave up the struggle to stay alive. Well, she never would get out of this terrible place that way. And here when she had so much to do — notes to write thanking people for flowers, her embroidery stitches to practice, the last volume of the encyclopedia to get through.

  She climbed down and headed for the bathroom, glancing out the window and smiling with pleasure at the antics of the red squirrels, who were carefully dropping twigs down onto the people entering the hospital.

  Looking in the mirror, she prodded the cotton wads in her nose and noted with satisfaction that they weren’t soaked through. Nor was the pad between her legs. And when Miss Sturgill whisked in and performed the bleeding test, her time was six minutes. The transfusion had worked again.

  She took the silent clock in her lap and wound it until it wouldn’t wind any more. She remembered its running down the previous afternoon — only at the time, she hadn’t thought of it as ‘running down.’ She had pretended that she was a child and that time was telescoping, as it did for children. She was contrasting what time used to be like when she was a schoolgirl, when summer vacation would stretch out luxuriously before her like an eternity. A day then had been the equivalent of a week now. A day now was nothing more than a sneeze. Time played tricks on people as they aged. She remembered from the encyclopedia that time seemed to expand as metabolic rates increased. The lifetimes of fast-moving unstable particles increased as their speed increased; when motion approached the speed of light, time slowed to such an extent as to appear to be standing still. Children had high metabolic rates; those rates slowed as a person’s body reached maturity and began its decline. As the metabolic rate slowed down, time sense speeded up. Easy to explain, painful to experience. Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

  She realized that the clock she had just wound wasn’t ticking. Why not? What had happened to it? Perhaps Mr. Solomon…With remorse, she recalled her scene at the lunch table. How could she have screamed at poor Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa, suffering, and perhaps dying, as they both were? In their conditions they were entitled to talk about whatever they wanted to. It seemed ludicrous to her to debate the nature of God, but if it comforted them, why shouldn’t they? If it upset her, she shouldn’t go to the sun porch.

  With a great burst of energy, she got out of bed and walked to Mr. Solomon’s room and apologized. Then to Sister Theresa’s room.

  ‘Please. Don’t apologize, Mrs. Babcock. I understand,’ Sister Theresa assured her.

  Mrs. Babcock doubted that she did.


  ‘I know it’s sometimes difficult to accept the workings of our Lord, Mrs. Babcock. For the believer, death is the whole meaning of life. But for those outside the fold, death renders life absurd, full of pain and poignancy.’

  Mrs. Babcock nodded solemnly, determined not to reply, since any reply she could possibly make would sound glib or cynical in the face of such spiritual ardor. If she had to choose between the two, Mrs. Babcock would pick Mr. Solomon’s bitterly jocular nihilism any day. Fortunately, she didn’t have to choose. She could suck what was helpful from both attitudes, for use when she too was in extremis — as she clearly was not now, in spite of Sister Theresa’s insinuations to the contrary.

  Ginny’s eyes snapped open. She lay fully clothed on the bed; sunlight was streaming through the window. With disgust, she realized that she’d squandered the entire previous afternoon and evening, lying around in some sort of neurotic stupor when she had so many urgent responsibilities — kudzu to chop, birds to feed. She had had a definite brush with what the psychology texts at Worthley had referred to as ‘ego chill.’

  She leapt up and stalked into the living room, where the baby birds were screeching from their wicker basket. It was a wonder they hadn’t starved in the night. She got their food. They squawked angrily, their beady black eyes gazing at her with despair, and their tiny yellow beaks quivering convulsively. Ginny dropped balls of the paste into their mouths and followed it with driblets of water.

  Closing the lid, she got down Birdsall’s book and searched through it as frantically as she had searched through Dr. Spock when Wendy had been an infant, for some clue as to what she should be doing. Were they screeching with such desperation because they were flourishing, or because they were in their death throes? Professor Birdsall wasn’t giving away any secrets. Like the ray of light in Einstein’s theory of the universe, she kept circling back and ending up where she had started — at the sentence that read, ‘It is best to kill such birds should they be found, to avoid prolonging their suffering.’