The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Except for brief visits to the cabin to feed the young chimney swift and send it on its training flights and to check the mailbox for notes from Ira and Wendy that never arrived, Ginny was now spending most of her time in her mother’s room. She slept in the spare bed. It wasn’t that her mother needed her. Her mother appeared to need no one. They never spoke. An observer would have said her mother was severely depressed. But on the whole, Ginny thought that she probably wasn’t. She was silent, unresponsive, it was true, but more because she seemed wrapped up in an interior dialogue that required all her concentration. This was why Ginny spent most of her time now at the hospital. She needed her mother, or rather needed to go through this vigil with her in hopes of being tossed some crumbs of the wisdom her mother was acquiring in her solitary confrontation with Death.

  One morning Ginny woke up to find her mother already awake, sitting up watching the squirrels with her good eye. The one they had concluded was the father was sitting on a branch on his haunches munching seeds. A streak of early morning sunlight fell across his glistening red back. His fluffy tail twitched rhythmically as he stuffed seeds into his tiny mouth with his delicate paws. The elm tree swayed in a light breeze, and its leaves shimmied.

  Ginny glanced at her mother. Tears were flowing down her cheek from her good eye. Ginny was bathed in pain. She clambered down and snatched up a Kleenex and careened to her mother’s side and started blotting.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ she blurted out, on the verge of tears herself.

  Her mother closed her eye and shook her head slowly. Her mouth was contorted in pain. ‘No. No, it isn’t all right at all.’

  Ginny stopped blotting and backed over to her own bed. She couldn’t recall ever having seen her mother cry. Her mother had always gallantly put a good face on things — to the point of foolishness perhaps. It seemed to Ginny that she was witnessing a lapse of faith.

  Tears continued to squeeze out from under her mother’s eyelid and dribble down her face. Ginny certainly didn’t want to require now, as she and her brothers and her father had always done in the past, that her mother ‘put a good face on things.’ So she sat quietly and watched her cry.

  Mrs. Childress lumbered in, normally a raisin in their pudding. Today, though, she was definitely a pebble: She carried a lancet for a bleeding test. When she saw Mrs. Babcock’s tears, she raced to the Kleenex box and started blotting, just as Ginny had done, muttering, ‘There, there, Mrs. Babcock honey. It’s gonna be all right.’

  Mrs. Babcock scowled.

  Mrs. Childress crammed a thermometer in her mouth and sliced her ear lobe. When she had left, shaking her head in dismay at the result of the bleeding test, Mrs. Babcock snapped at Ginny, ‘Pull the shades down please. And get rid of those flowers.’

  That afternoon, Mrs. Babcock’s other eye was bandaged to relieve eyestrain and a headache. She now lay in a darkened, soundless, scentless room with bandages over both eyes. It was impossible to tell if she was awake or asleep most of the time. It occurred to Ginny that her mother might be terrified, thinking she was alone in a black void.

  ‘Mother?’ Ginny asked urgently. ‘Shall I get a book and read to you?’

  Her mother didn’t answer. Ginny decided that she was asleep. But eventually her mother replied quietly, ‘I’d like to be alone now please.’

  It was like a slap in the face. Ginny was being dismissed, and at a time when she had thought she was being useful. ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied in a startled voice, scrambling to her feet. She reminded herself that during childbirth, she had wanted at certain points to be alone with her pain. Also, she felt she understood from her sessions with Hawk something of what her mother was doing, consciously or not: weaning herself from her senses, trying to prepare for a dimension in which a space-time limitation didn’t exist. She was undoing all the ties that bound her here, including her affection and concern for her own daughter. But the dismissal was still hard to take.

  ‘But, Mother,’ she cried, like an abandoned child, ‘what about all the junk in the closets at the house? What should I do with it?’

  Her mother turned away without answering.

  Back at the cabin, Ginny took the young bird out of its basket. It squawked with delight when it saw her. She fed it little balls of the disgusting meat paste in between its screeches.

  Then she carried it outside on her finger. As they reached a part of the yard that she had cleared of kudzu for use as a landing strip, the bird plummeted from her finger of its own accord. Flapping furiously, it managed to swoop across the yard before gliding in and touching down. Ginny applauded. Any day now the bird would fly off and leave her here alone. This thought filled her with dismay. Startled that it should, she examined her dismay. After her initial fascination with the birds had worn off, she had resented them, had yearned for them to leave, had had to restrain herself from strangling them. But now as the day for the last one’s departure approached, she was seized with anxiety. How could it possibly cope without her? It would starve, crash, be devoured by predators or rejected by its peers. It needed her.

  More to the point, she realized with surprise, she needed it. If its well-being during these weeks had been her foremost concern, she wouldn’t have kept it in the basket. She’d have perched it on a branch outside. She had needed it, had needed something to fret over and fuss with, something to stand in for Wendy. Maternal behavior couldn’t be turned on and off at will, like a faucet. Once triggered, it remained — and it inevitably sought an object. What was she to do with these infernal instincts of hers when the bird had gone?

  Reluctantly, Ginny perched it on the windowsill inside. The window needed washing badly, but since the cabin was already sold, why bother? Through the murky haze, the bird could see the yard and the pine tree and the kudzu-covered field down to the pond. And occasionally it could see adult chimney swifts, its rotten parents among them perhaps, with their sleek forked wings and velvety wheat-colored chests. They would dive-bomb the pond, darting in from nowhere and swooping in a breathtaking arc to barely skim the pond surface. The bird’s head turned alertly as it followed the activities of its elders. The little creep actually looked eager to join them. That was the thanks she got for her weeks of devotion.

  The next day her mother’s room was dark with the shades still drawn. Her mother lay very still, breathing heavily, her eyes bandaged and her face round and yellow.

  ‘Mother, it’s me — Ginny.’

  Her mother didn’t stir. She was either asleep or uninterested.

  Ginny lay on the spare bed and brooded. Her mother had a hell of a nerve — bringing her into this life in the first place, and now ducking out without having provided her with essential information about its conduct. And after all these weeks Ginny had spent hovering by her bedside gratifying her every whim. Since when had her own mother ever refused her time and attention? Goddam it, her mother owed her some explanations! About life and death, about love and marriage and motherhood. She was furious. Sitting up, she said loudly, ‘Mother!’

  The round yellow bandaged face showed no sign of response.

  As Ginny glared at it, her rage began transmuting itself into misery. The misery of a child lost in busy city streets. She threw herself back down. Christ, her mother was abandoning her. She’d die, and Ginny would be left behind all alone. Panic seized her. Tending her mother had filled the void for a time, but the void was still there, waiting. Where would she go? What would she do? Was it even possible to live once you’d tasted the imminence — and eminence — of Death? Death was easy for the dead. But how were the living to cope with it?

  ‘Mother!’ she wailed.

  No answer.

  After several hours of studying her unresponsive mother in silence, Ginny returned to the cabin. It was mid-afternoon. The sun was bright and hot. Bees bumbled languidly.

  She picked the small bird out of the basket and placed it on her finger. It blinked its beady black eyes and opened its pink mouth for food. As G
inny walked toward the door, the bird suddenly plunged from her finger and darted crazily around the room. This was the moment Ginny had thought she’d been waiting for. Like a child learning to ride a bike, all of a sudden, in a flash of inspiration, the young bird had grasped the concept of flying! Unfortunately, this moment was supposed to have occurred outside.

  The bird flapped madly around the living room, bouncing off the walls. Ginny decided to do nothing, for fear of frightening it even more. She would wait for it to alight, when she would grab it and carry it outside.

  Eventually the bird did alight, on the mantel. Ginny crept over to it. Just as she lunged, the bird took off in a panic. Apparently it had already forgotten Ginny and her weeks of care and concern? That was gratitude for you.

  The living room was dark and cool. The bird headed for the light — the window where it had sat looking out. It crashed into the glass and dropped dazed to the sill. Before Ginny could get to it, it took off again. It circled near the ceiling, screeching.

  Then the bird spotted more light, an exit perhaps. It swooped down toward a large mirror in an ornate frame that hung over a low chest. Just as it reached the gleaming mirror, the bird did a crazy convoluted half-turn in mid-air and darted away. It had thought its own reflection was an enemy?

  Ginny raced over and propped open the screen door with the decorative quartz rock on the front porch. Maybe she could herd it out to freedom. She crept to the far side of the room to await her opportunity.

  The bird was now flying frantically back and forth between the murky window and the flashing mirror.

  Ginny finally saw her chance. The bird had fluttered into the mirror, turned around, and was heading for the window. If she leapt out at the proper angle, she could frighten it out the door. She jumped toward the bird, waving her arms. The bird darted sideways in a panic. And crashed into the window, its wings outstretched, cracking the glass with its head.

  It dropped to the floor, fluttered spasmodically, and lay still.

  Ginny ran over, tears streaming down her face. She picked it up. It was warm and twitching. Its creamy velvet breast throbbed crazily, and its forked wings flapped weakly. The filmy inner eyelids were drawing down over its black eyes. It shuddered, stiffened, and died in her hands.

  The next day Ginny’s mother didn’t answer her greeting. Ginny couldn’t tell if she was asleep or just making herself unavailable. She sat and waited for a sign from her. Nothing happened. After a while, she walked to her mother’s bedside. She regretted interfering in her mother’s efforts to sever her earthly connections, but she felt she had something significant to offer.

  She began talking quietly as though her mother was awake and listening. ‘The last bird died yesterday. I was taking it outside. All of a sudden it just hopped off my finger and started darting around, trying to get out. Finally it crashed into the window and fell on the floor dead. Mother,’ she said with emphasis, ‘the bird beat itself to death on a closed window. But the door next to it was wide open.’

  Ginny ceased abruptly. Her mother didn’t so much as stir. She was asleep. She hadn’t even heard.

  After a couple of minutes, though, her mother smiled her familiar wry smile and nodded her head slowly and said with amused detachment at Ginny’s earnest metaphorical efforts, ‘Maybe.’

  A few moments later she added, ‘Look after yourself, Ginny dear.’

  ‘You, too, Mother,’ Ginny replied in a choked voice.

  Ginny got a phone call after midnight. She raced to the hospital in the Jeep. Her mother had had a major motor seizure beginning in her right hand and spreading through the right side of her body. She was in a coma. Ginny could scarcely see her round yellow face, now paralyzed on the right side, for the team of white starched technicians who hovered over her making a pincushion of her hip with injections — anticonvulsants and corticosteroids. A bottle of fresh platelets hung dripping into her arm. Dr. Vogel was lifting her eyelids and studying her pupils with a small flashlight, pounding her patellae with a rubber hammer, rubbing the soles of her feet for Babinski reflexes. With huge syringes laboratory workers were withdrawing blood samples, bone marrow smears.

  Ginny elbowed through these battalions to Dr. Vogel and tugged at his lab coat. “Let her go,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Please!’ he hissed. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘She’s ready. Let her go.’

  He seated Ginny in a chair and demanded rhetorically, ‘Do you or don’t you want your mother to live?’

  She sat watching and listening to the low hum of consulting technicians.

  ‘We’ve done everything possible,’ Dr. Vogel informed her wearily, five hours of injections and extractions later.

  ‘I know you have, Dr. Vogel. And we appreciate it,’ Ginny assured him, trying to keep him from crying, which he looked as though he might begin to do at any moment.

  An hour later her mother died, quietly, without regaining consciousness.

  Ginny went back to the cabin and lay down on the bed in which she had been born and wept — because the people she had loved had all grown up and moved away and changed; because mountains corroded and rivers carved new courses and nothing stayed the same forever; because every living creature, herself included, had to die, and die alone.

  Then she dried her eyes and straightened the bed and followed her mother’s very complete instructions on how to organize a funeral. Karl showed up in time, straight and tall and handsome in his uniform, the bearer of the Major’s baton in the relay race of life. Then he and she grimly sorted through the contents of the two houses, filled the trash barrels with memorabilia, put the heirlooms in indefinite storage and sold the rest of the furniture, completed the sale of the two houses and farm to the Major’s successor at the plant, signed endless papers, deposited chunks of cash in bank accounts for themselves and Jim, wrote large checks to the government, kissed and parted, conceivably for forever. Because their mother had always drummed into them the knowledge that each time they said farewell to someone, they might never see that person again, or at least not alive and well.

  Ira answered the phone.

  ‘Ira, this is Ginny. My mother is dead.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I’m sorry, Ginny. She was a fine woman.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, wondering why she did so. What did she have to do with her mother’s being a fine woman? ‘How’s Wendy?’ She could hear her crying in the background. Pangs of maternal longing swept through her.

  ‘She’s fine, just fine. She goes to Angela’s when I’m at work.’

  She forced herself not to ask if Wendy missed her, the way she missed Wendy. ‘Poor Angela. Doesn’t she mind?’

  ‘What’s one more when you already have five? The more the merrier,’ said he, who had never spent an entire day alone with a young child in his life.

  ‘Ira, I…’ She almost asked if she could come back. The poor dear man. She had hurt him terribly, had callously offended his standards, however stifling she might find them. There had to be some way to make amends, to go back to him — but on terms different from their previous neurotic symbiosis.

  “Yes?’ Ira asked eagerly.

  ‘I…I…’

  ‘Ginny, when are you coming home? Wendy and I need you.’

  Ginny’s staunch resolve to redefine their relationship turned instantly to mush. She needed them, too. Now more than ever, when she had no one else. ‘Well, Ira, I…’

  ‘Please come back, Ginny. We can have another baby and everything will be fine. The house is a wreck. I haven’t had a hot meal in weeks. Wendy cries herself to sleep at night. She needs a full-time mother, Ginny. And I need a wife. A real wife.’

  Ginny froze, thinking of her bruised mother, who had been a real wife, a real mother — for as long as she was needed. How would her mother advise her? To profit from her example and behave differently, or to copy her martyrdom and thus validate it? Ginny studied the question. Then she remembered that what her mother wanted or didn
’t want of her was no longer to be the determining factor in her life. The leading lady had magnanimously removed herself from Ginny’s script. Ginny was on her own. And there was too little time left to condemn herself to a living death at age twenty-seven. “No,’ she said faintly.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m filing for divorce, Ira. And I want Wendy.’

  ‘To marry that hippy creep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She paused, trying to decide. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you can’t have Wendy. I’m not having my child raised by a lunatic.’

  ‘A lunatic who happens to be her mother,’ she pointed out, warming to the fray.

  ‘Hasn’t the poor child suffered enough from you? You run off with another man without so much as saying good-by to her…’

  ‘You chased me out with a rifle in the middle of the night.’

  ‘…and now when you need her, for sick reasons of your own, you crawl back trying to weasel your way into her affections. But it won’t work, Ginny. She doesn’t want you anymore. She already calls Angela “Mommy.” Give the child a break. Leave her alone.’

  Ginny was breathless with pain at the thought of Wendy’s calling Angela Mommy. ‘But I thought she cried herself to sleep?’ she gasped.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘But that’s what you said?’

  ‘You flatter yourself. You know, marrying you was the biggest mistake of my life.’

  ‘I wouldn’t class it among my finest hours either.’ Wendy, her infant Isaac, lay on the altar. Was she prepared to sacrifice her to the god of selfhood? Or would she crawl back to Ira on his terms, which appeared to be the only ones he was capable of considering?

  ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ Ira said, softening. ‘She was a fine devoted family woman. You could do worse than to model yourself after her.’

  In the course of their conversation, they had been through the sentic cycles of longing and anger. Ginny could tell from the tone of Ira’s voice that they could now proceed to regret and reconciliation if she would cooperate. She could do worse than to model herself after her mother, he had just said. And yet her hyper-devoted mother, in the end, had to dismiss Ginny for the sake of her own development.