The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  The next afternoon Ginny and Mrs. Babcock lay watching ‘Hidden Heartbeats.’ Linda was in a frenzy of remorse over having betrayed Frank and having been banished from ever seeing her little daughter again.

  During a commercial in which a young mother was trying to get her bowels functioning again after childbirth, Mrs. Babcock said, ‘So you’ve left them?’

  Ginny froze in the act of maiming her cuticles with her teeth. ‘Who?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Ira and Wendy.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Ginny said, unable to meet the gaze from her mother’s unbandaged eye. ‘Did I?’

  ‘You’ve as much as said it several times.’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Then how do I know it?’ her mother asked with a sad smile. ‘Ginny dear, I’m afraid that, underneath it all, you and I are more alike than either of us would care to admit.’

  Ginny glared at her with distaste. She simply couldn’t see that they had much of anything in common, other than some specks of DNA. Why, it was all they could do most of the time to converse in a civil fashion. Their civil discussions weren’t interesting, and their interesting discussions weren’t civil.

  She had told her mother about Ira and Wendy? She searched her memory, trying to recall when this revelation had occurred. Then, unexpectedly, she began shaking with silent sobs. She looked at her mother in anguish. Then she closed her eyes and asked, ‘What should I do, Mother?’

  After this outburst, Ginny lay silent, wondering why she was even asking when she knew exactly what her mother would say: Do your duty, go back to them, make amends, spend the rest of your life in propitiation for the pain you’ve caused them. And then she realized she was asking exactly in order to be told those things, so that when she did in fact go back, she could blame all ensuing unhappiness on her unfortunate mother.

  Mrs. Babcock lay locked in a silent struggle for a long time. Her first impulse, successfully squelched, was to reach out and hold Ginny and tell her that everything would be all right. Her next impulse, under which she now lay writhing, was to issue instructions to do this, do that. Or to be specific: Do your duty. Exactly what her own mother had told her. And after all, what other model did she have to guide her? Besides, you wanted so much to protect your children from mistakes and failure and suffering. Small children were like planets, harnessed to their parents in orderly orbits by the firmly balanced forces of attraction and resistance. But these orbits as children aged became more comet-like; your offspring began swinging in wild ellipses in and out of your own force field — almost breaking away entirely, but then swooping back in to set off a riot of sparks and static with their conflicting charges. One didn’t issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.

  Besides, what if Ginny’s duty to Ira and Wendy didn’t happen to coincide with her duty to herself, as it was possible that Mrs. Babcock’s might not have during the Tired Years? And who was to know that but Ginny herself? Parents expected too much of children; it was unfair to use them, as she now recognized she herself had been used, to fulfill parental ambitions or philosophies.

  ‘I don’t know what you should do, Ginny,’ she replied finally, with enormous difficulty. ‘You must do as you think best.’

  Ginny’s eyes snapped open, as though she were Sleeping Beauty just kissed by the prince. She stared at her bruised mother. Mrs. Babcock opened her good eye and stared back. Was it possible that the generational spell had actually been broken? They smiled at each other, their delight mixed with distress.

  13

  The Mandala Tattoo

  I was lying by the pool in a red paisley bikini. The late spring sun was hot on my back. In half an hour Wendy would wake up from her nap. Ira had left a few days before for Camp Drum with his National Guard unit. I should have been delighted with my two delicious weeks of being unpressured by strategy sessions on how to nail Ellie Ovum with Sammy Sperm; they had been going on for six months without success. Each time after intercourse now, Ira insisted that I lie on my back with my legs propped against the wall for at least half an hour to maximize the number of sperm charging up my tubes. And on the key day each month, he had taken to rushing home from the Sno Cat showroom every two hours for a round of baby making. Each month as the day for my period had arrived, we had both held our breath — me with dread, and Ira with anticipation. Each month so far I had been able to send up a silent flag of celebration as the faithful red tide had begun.

  But I was now past the point of finding pleasure in brief stolen moments of solitude. I lay aching with misery, my white skin sizzling in the sun. What was bothering me most was knowing that day exactly what I would be doing a year from that day, five years from that day: shopping in the IGA and chatting about the weather with the same people, most of them related to Ira; I would be performing my role with variations on the same schedules now being pursued by Ira and by Wendy and by our as-yet-to-be-conceived son.

  I had gone that morning in my red club blazer to a meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary. We were setting up the fall schedule for cleaning the firehouse. My despair at my manifest destiny must have been showing, although I was trying very hard to discuss with conviction what a beautiful sunny day it was and what a shame it was to be inside.

  Angela patted my forearm and whispered sympathetically, like an actress in a laxative commercial, “You look down today, Ginny.’

  I nodded glumly.

  ‘Take my word for it. Have another baby.’

  Like a Greek chorus, two women next to her picked up the theme; and soon it had spread around the entire table like athlete’s foot at a swimming pool: ‘You shouldn’t wait too long to have your second.’ ‘Only children get so lonely.’ ‘Aren’t kids great?’ ‘You’re so much more relaxed after the first one.’ ‘Two are so much easier than one.’ The more, the merrier!’ ‘Cheaper by the dozen!’

  I was definitely in a trap. What made it even worse was that it was a trap of my own making. I had my dividend checks, true. I could take Wendy and leave. But where would I go? What would I do? At this point, I was prepared to seize on anything that promised delivery from the deadening boredom of my routines. As I lay gnashing my teeth in existential despair, I heard a male voice behind the eight-foot plank fence that Ira had put up to keep Wendy out of the pool. ‘Hello? Hello?’

  I threw on a terry cloth robe and went to the gate. A young man was standing by the back door. He was shirtless, dressed in dirty bib overalls hooked on one side, with a fringed leather jacket hanging open over them. He had a Kelty pack on his back. It wasn’t an unusual sight. The Long Trail, which joined up with the Appalachian Trail, wasn’t far away. Hikers occasionally turned up to make a phone call or something. Also the workmen from the Pots o’ Gold condominium site sometimes came over for water or to use the phone.

  As I walked toward him, I could see that he wore a sweat-stained red bandanna around his long matted light brown hair, babushka-like. From one earlobe dangled a silver ring, and from it a small silver jingle bell. Because of his full tangled beard, only his lips and nose and eyes were visible. He looked like a sheepdog.

  ‘Yes?’

  He jerked around, his eyes alarmed.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I asked, perplexed that I’d triggered such a strong fear reaction.

  ‘Oh. Yes, ma’am. I wondered if I could please have a drink of water?’ I gazed at him, intrigued. He had a southern accent, southern manners, a rarity in Stark’s Bog.

  ‘Sure. Just a minute.’

  When I came out with ice water, this Jean Lafitte in his red bandanna was looking through the fence at the pool. He had removed his leather jacket. The back of his overalls was stained dark with sweat, and he was wiping his forehead with his forearm.

  He downed the water in one long gulp and handed me the glass, saying, ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  Charmed as I had never been by a southern accent in the
South, I asked eagerly, ‘More?’

  ‘No, thas just fine, thank you.’

  ‘Where are you from in the South?’

  The same alarmed furtive look as when he had first seen me came over this face — came into his eyes actually, since the rest of his face was well concealed by his beard. I was studying those eyes as intently as Coach used to study the slot machine windows at the Liberty Cafe in downtown Hullsport. ‘How did you know I was from the South?’

  I laughed. How does a sow know her piglets? ‘By your accent.’

  ‘I thought I’d gotten rid of that by now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘But then I can pick out a southern accent in a city street at rush hour, because I’m from Tennessee.’

  ‘No shit,’ he said with a comradely smile. ‘Where in Tennessee?’

  ‘Hullsport. Near the Virginia border.’

  ‘I’ll be damned! I’ve driven through there a hundred times heading north. Jesus, what a pit! That’s where that fuckin’ munitions plant is, isn’t it?’

  I nodded coolly. I could dump on my hometown, but no outsider had better try.

  ‘Georgia, I’m from. Atlanta. But I’ve been away a long time.’

  ‘What are you doing up here?’

  He glared at me and said curtly, ‘It’s a long story.’ Then he added, ‘God, don’t you love this heat? Jesus, I haven’t sweated like this since Georgia in July! I don’t know how people live up here in this goddam icebox!’

  ‘I don’t either,’ I agreed grimly. And then, inspired to an uncharacteristic display of southern hospitality by the presence of my fellow countryman, I added, ‘Would you like a swim before you leave?’

  He glanced nervously around the yard. ‘Far out.’

  We went through the gate. I removed my robe and sat by the pool. He took off his babushka and shook out his damp hair. He unhooked his overall straps and let them fall and was suddenly nude.

  I was stunned. I suppose I had been expecting him to be wearing jockey shorts like Ira’s, with racing stripes down the sides, which he could use as trunks. Or maybe I’d planned on his donning his bandanna like a loincloth. In any case, I stared. His body had an intriguing symmetry that Ira’s, because his face was beardless, lacked: This man’s penis, hanging in its mat of pubic hair, was the mirror image of his hairy face with its prominent nose.

  After I had recovered from the aesthetic pleasure of this discovery, I pondered the ethics of the situation a la Stark’s Bog morality: Here was a man I’d just met, nude next to me by my swimming pool, while Ira was away serving his country. My moral diagnosis didn’t look good. Screw them all, I thought bravely, as my countryman plunged into the water. With his hair and beard soaked and somewhat tamed, he looked more human, less like a sheepdog. He began doing laps in an easy freestyle. I sat watching the sun flashing off his shiny brown shoulders as he churned up and down the pool. Then I noticed with concern what looked like a huge dark bruise on his upper left arm. It spread over his bicep and flashed and rippled in the sunlight as he swam. God only knows what terrible thing he’d done to himself.

  Eventually, he jumped out and sat in a spreading puddle next to me. I handed him a towel, and he scrubbed his hair and beard and rubbed his body dry. As he did so, I discovered that the dark blue patch on his arm wasn’t a bruise or a wound after all. It was a huge tattoo. I stared at it, fixated. It was circular, with an elaborate filigreed circumference. Immediately inside the filigree were two bands of what looked like stylized flower petals. And within the bands of petals, four triangles of graduated sizes, points up, interlocked with four identical points-down triangles to form dozens of smaller triangles and tetrahedrons. The effect of the design was to suck my attention in past the filigree, through the flower petals, across the geometric grid -to the inner triangle in the exact middle. After the careful, precise stylizations, the figure in this central triangle was startling in its baroque convolutions. It was skillfully built up by contrasting swirls of dark blue tattoo ink with the brownish skin tones of the man’s arm. Out from this chaos of clashing blobs of color popped the most hideous monster I’d ever encountered, even in the midnight horror features at the Family Drive-in in Hullsport. Its huge eyes bulged with rage. On its head was a crown of tiny skulls, with a sacrificial flaying knife rising up out of the center. Pointed animal ears grew out of the monster’s head. Its mouth was contorted in a frightful grimace that revealed pointed fangs. And out from this mouth appeared to spew dark streams of blood, or perhaps vomit. This blood, or whatever it was, as it gushed from the monster’s mouth immediately formed swirling patterns and became one with the orderly mesh of surrounding triangles.

  ‘That was fantastic,’ he said as he pulled on his overalls. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I replied automatically, unable to remove my eyes from his arm. It made the butterfly tattoo on my hip, which I had thought pretty skillful, look as crude as the skull and crossbones gougings of Clem Cloyd on his forearm with his knife.

  The gate handle rattled. I knew it was Wendy, up from her nap, having scrambled over her crib bars and crashed to the floor and come in search of me — the latest trick in her arsenal of infant liberation stunts. L’il Abner, however, didn’t know this, and he started at the noise and crouched like a cornered animal.

  ‘My child,’ I explained. I opened the gate and picked up Wendy and sat her on my hip, all damp and squishy and smelly in her dirty diapers.

  ‘Who that?’ she asked, jabbing at the man with her fat finger. ‘Who that, Mommy?’

  ‘That’s a man who’s just had a swim in our pool.’

  ‘Who that?’

  ‘That’s a man who came over from the hiking trail to get a drink of water.’

  ‘Who that?’ she asked again, tilting her head and looking at me with a puzzled expression. I knew that this would go on all afternoon unless I channeled her conversational prowess onto another topic.

  ‘Would you like some juice and a cookie?’ I asked her. ‘Would you?’ I asked the young man.

  ‘I don’t want to put you out, ma’am,’ he said, his eyes greedy.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ I assured him, lapsing readily into the folkways of the South, where, as the saying goes, men put women on pedestals and then used the pedestals as footstools. ‘Will you please watch the baby a minute? Don’t let her get too near the edge. She thinks she can swim. She keeps jumping in and plummeting straight to the bottom.’

  He laughed, displaying bright white teeth, through his thicket of facial hair.

  I returned with lemonade, paper cups, cookies, and a clean diaper. Wendy was playing a game with the man in which she toddled to one side and headed toward the pool; he would scoot sideways to block her, and she would run headon into his legs. She would resolutely careen in the opposite direction and head for the pool again, only to be cut off once more. She was giggling with a mixture of delight and frustration, and was clutching with one hand at her soggy diaper, which was drooping down her pudgy thighs and threatening to trip her. The man was looking down at her with a pleasant grin.

  The three of us sat cross-legged on the grass, and I passed out the lemonade. “You seem familiar with the wiles of children. Do you have some?’

  ‘No, I’ve never been married,’ he mumbled. ‘And that’s the only way I’d want to get into a baby trip with a woman. I’ve been around friends’ children a lot. But to tell the truth — pardon me, delightful baby — the concept of parenthood never really appealed to me.’

  ‘Oh, come onl How could any adult not relish the prospect of a baby of his own — to carry his genes proudly down through the centuries?’ I asked this sarcastically, mocking my former romantic notions of what parenthood entailed.

  ‘I never looked at it that way. I always saw the world as a stage — from too much Shakespeare in prep school, I guess. And any child of mine would be a ballsy young actor waiting to run me off stage altogether, watching and waiting to bury me, so that he could assume cent
er stage.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said thoughtfully, wondering if that line of reasoning could serve to sour Ira on the idea of a son. I noticed that this man had, between sentences, managed to wolf down most of the cookies. ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

  What I could find of his face, behind his beard and underneath his hairdo, blushed. ‘Forgive me for eating all the cookies. I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.’

  ‘Good Lord.’ Why in the world not? I wondered. ‘Do you like bologna and cheese?’

  He grimaced. ‘Just plain cheese would be great.’

  As he finished his third sandwich, I asked casually, trying to figure out his story, ‘You say you’re hiking the Long Trail?’

  He gave me his suspicious alarmed look and eventually nodded yes, his mouth crammed with Wonder Bread. ‘Going home,’ he mumbled, chewing ravenously. ‘To Georgia.’

  ‘You’re hiking the entire trail?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How long will it take?’

  He shrugged. ‘A few months, I guess. I don’t know. When I get there, I get there. If I get there.’

  It was moving on toward late afternoon. The young man showed no eagerness to get back to the mountains. Sated, he stretched out in the slanting sun, his head on his pack, and fell asleep.

  As the sun was setting, he sat up and stretched and yawned. I had fed Wendy and put her to bed. I was about to settle down to Walter Cronkite and some serious nail chewing.

  “Look,’ I said, standing over him, ‘do you want to stay here tonight? It’ll be too dark soon to find the trail.’

  Without hesitation, he said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I sure would. Thank you very much.’

  ‘My name is Ginny. Ginny Bliss,’ I offered, wondering what Mother would say. Would Wendy and I be murdered in the night, and the Bliss family silver stolen?

  He glanced around nervously and said in a low voice, ‘You can call me Hawk.’

  Hawk slept that night in the guest room.