by Lisa Alther
Quietly, she hung up. Then she collapsed, shivering, on the bed next to the phone. She had phoned Ira with every intention of effecting a reconciliation on renegotiated terms. She had accomplished the exact opposite. If she was no longer Ira’s wife, Wendy’s mother, her mother’s daughter, who was she?
In a panic, she called Georgia information and got the number for Hawk’s home. It was a shot in the dark.
A deep authoritative male voice with a thick southern accent answered.
‘Hello. I’m a friend of Will’s. I wonder if you could tell me how to get in touch with him?’
The man on the other end paused and cleared his throat. ‘May I ask who’s callin’, please?’
‘Sure. My name is Ginny Babcock. I knew Will — uh — at college.’
‘That so? Well, this is William’s father.’
‘How do you do, Colonel Hawk? Will used to speak of you.’ She was deliberately increasing her southern accent, hoping to capture his trust: She was his fellow countryman — countryperson, as Eddie would say.
‘I’ll be quite honest with you, Miss Babcock. William is in the VA hospital at Athens right now.’
Ginny gasped.
‘William has had some trouble the past few years. His mother and I knew something was wrong when he deserted from the army a couple of years ago. He’d been in Vietnam and he came home talkin’ about “war crimes” and imperialism and hippy nonsense like that. And then he ran away to Canada. We thought he must have been drugged by the SDS or somethin’.
‘Well, he came crawlin in one night several weeks ago. Literally crawlin’, Miss Babcock. Through the grass in the front yard on his belly. Talkin’ about somebody’s bein’ after him. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten in days, and he hadn’t shaved in a week. He kept insistin’ that “They” were tryin’ to suck the heat from his body. We’d say, “Who is, William?” And he’d mutter, “Management.” Damned if I knew what he was talkin’ about. The doctors have diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.’
Ginny felt ill. Hawk’s father sounded faintly pleased: His son was not an army deserter, he was sick. His son was not rejecting his father’s way of life — his son was a crazy.
‘I see,’ she said weakly. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
‘Well, at least he finally came home and faced up to his responsibilities like a man,’ his father said cheerfully.
She hung up. Every cell in her cried out in requiem for Hawk, her heroic nonwarrior. But she didn’t feel up to mourning him properly. She was all mourned out
As she lay on her bed, she reflected on her mother’s death. She had learned at least one thing. Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects had to be undone. There her mother had lain, her body decaying and in constant pain, her eyes bandaged, her surroundings sterile, nurses and doctors rushed and overworked, food bland and repetitive — what was there that could possibly have held her? There was a family clock. There was a huge white house, built by her megalomaniacal father. There were cherished photos of ancestors. There was a red squirrel in an elm tree. There was her anguished daughter, demanding as her right to be told things that could be learned only by going through them. All these had had to go. Her mother had had to work on doing without them because she must have suspected that she was about to leap into a realm where she would have none of these familiar comforts to orient her, where unresolved earthly attachments would only have flayed her to bits. Like a squid, she had carefully drawn in her tentacles. And presumably, when she had done so, she ended it all, of her own accord, springing away free at last from the bruised body that had served her well and then had failed her abysmally. Having been preceded by this deliberate diminishment of self, by this scaling down of earthly existence to a recurring series of unpleasant or uninteresting routines, her death had been like the dislodging of a dried brown leaf from a tree branch in a soft breeze. Rather than like the violent uprooting of a healthy sapling in a hurricane, as had been the case with Eddie, who had had so much still to do and so much still to learn.
Or at least that was how Ginny chose to think of the process that her mother had undergone. How was she to know? But if that view was correct and one ended it by choice when the weaning was accomplished, then Ginny felt that her time had come too. She had died several small deaths already, to ways of life and people loved. The Big One didn’t seem very imposing anymore. Everyone who had been important to her was now dead, or as good as dead for her purposes. She had nothing that she dreaded being severed from. Her tapes had been erased. What was there to hold her here? Why should she go through forming new attachments, only to have to renounce them later when Death finally brought her to her knees? Why not end it now? As she saw it, the only way to outwit Death was to kill herself.
As she had lain trying to nap the afternoon after her mother’s death, Ginny had fantasized that she was standing at the bottom of a down escalator in a huge department store. Bells were bonging in the background summoning clerks. Joe Bob in his Gant shirt and chinos grabbed her hand and made her run with him up this down escalator. After decades of effort, with sweat pouring down their faces, they reached the top, where the Major was waiting. But just as Ginny reached out to embrace the Major, Clem, in his studded jeans and red silk windbreaker, grabbed her hand and dragged her down the up escalator. They ran and they ran, like chipmunks on an exercise wheel, Clem lurching and hobbling on his bad leg. Her mother was waiting at the bottom. But just as Ginny stumbled toward her, Miss Head in her gray bun and Ben Franklin glasses pulled Ginny back onto the down escalator. Then, at the top as Ginny reached out for the Major, Eddie dragged her off to charge down the up escalator. After Ira had made her run with him up the down escalator, she finally collapsed in exhaustion while going down the up escalator with Hawk. As she was being carried under the moving steps, down into the guts of the department store, she reflected that, after all that effort, she hadn’t made any progress, as Hegel had promised that she would. And as she imagined the escalator mechanism chewing her to bits, she sighed with relief.
Ginny changed into her best bathing suit, for the same reason that her mother used to recommend wearing good underwear when leaving the house. Except her best bathing suit wasn’t for the benefit of the emergency room staff — it was for the Hullsport mortuary trade. She wanted to look her best when she arrived at the Slumber Room to be powdered by the waxen yellow hands of Mr. Renfrew.
She grabbed a rope and the oars to the rowboat. Down by the pond she dumped a modest boulder into the boat. Then she rowed to the canvas-covered dock, unloaded the boulder, and climbed out.
She wrapped the rope around the rock and tied it tightly. Then she tied the other end around her ankle. Glancing around, she made her peace with the kudzu-covered hills and the log cabin where, on different occasions, she had been very happy. But really, enough was enough. All around her frogs were devouring grasshoppers, snakes were swallowing frogs whole, Floyd Cloyd’s sons were slicing snakes like salamis, and Death lurked around waiting to consume little boys. It was all too much. She didn’t think even Management could expect her to endure it for much more than twenty-seven years. Like a snake swallowing its tail, she had come full circle: She had returned to her birthplace to die.
She picked up the boulder. Closing her eyes, she dropped it off the edge. She heard it splash and waited to be tugged down to a murky scum-covered grave.
Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and glanced down. A couple of coils of rope still lay on the dock. Disgruntled, she hauled the boulder back up. This time she wrapped the rope many times around the rock and around her ankle to take up all the slack.
Again, she took her leave of the green hills, which writhed with rustling kudzu and the struggles of dying creatures. Again, she tossed the boulder into the water with a big splash. With satisfaction at a job well done, she felt her leg being jerked out from under her. Her eyes closed, she lost her balance and tumbled toward the water.
&nbs
p; And landed in the rowboat, which had shifted and drifted in front of the dock as she had been retying the stone.
Her leg hung out of the boat and was being wrenched out of its pelvic socket by the heavy stone. The entire right side of her body was badly bruised by the fall. As she lay there becoming slightly seasick, she considered the unappetizing nature of what she was about to do. Either the rope would rot and she’d float to the surface for some poor trespassing fisherman to find, or she’d decay among the seaweed and be nibbled to bits by scavenging bluegills. She’d befoul the water, which supplied the cabin sinks. Weaning themselves from material concerns or not, housewives, however inept, are constitutionally incapable of total indifference to the messes they leave behind them.
She untied the rope and rowed back to shore. She took a rifle and a handful of bullets from the gun rack by the fireplace. She hiked up the kudzu-covered hill behind the pond. She recalled with delight how Clem and she as kids had hollowed out tunnels through a kudzu field near his house, matting down areas to form interconnected chambers, like an anthill. She hollowed out such a chamber for herself, a crypt of greenery. She would never be found. The voracious vines would devour her, just as they had devoured Mr. Zed’s headstone. No one would face the gruesome task of disposing of her remains. They would think when she couldn’t be located, ‘How like her mother she was. Thoughtful to the end.’
She sat down in her kudzu chamber with her knees propped up. With the rifle barrel in her mouth, she found she could pull the trigger with her big toe. She gazed through the leaves at the scum-covered pond and at the log cabin where she had first entered this inadequate life. The cabin now belonged to strangers. The past was dead and gone. It was all finished. She had no place to go and no one to love and all her underwear needed washing.
She took a bullet and rolled it thoughtfully between her thumb and index finger. Abruptly, she picked up the rifle and opened the bullet chamber. She took the bullet and inserted it…
…Tried to insert it. The bullet wouldn’t go in. It was too big for this type of rifle. She had brought the wrong kind of bullet for the fucking gun!
In despair at having her plans for the afternoon thwarted, she jumped up and raced down the hill, the rifle waving in one hand like a Comanche’s in a raid. Tripping and stumbling on the vines, she sprinted to the cabin and searched the gun rack frantically. No bullets to fit her .22, no rifles to fit the bullets in her hand. Karl had taken them all for himself when she wasn’t looking, the grasping bastard.
She seized a hunting knife down from the wall. Sitting on the stone steps she made a small experimental cut in her left wrist. Laying the knife aside, she watched as a drop of blood popped up and grew and grew, into a large red globule. If she smeared this blood onto a slide and placed it under Dr. Vogel’s microscope, she’d witness a universe in miniature. She’d see teeming swarms of dots floating around mindlessly in plasma. It would look almost like the photo in her college astronomy text — taken by a high-powered telescope in toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy — of the amassed suns of billions of invisible planets.
If she stained the slide properly and increased magnification, she would view the red oxygen-carrying cells, the less populous but more varied white cells and — the platelets. The platelets, those tiny cells that, malfunctioning, had killed both her mother and the Major, being too sparse and inactive in her case and overly so in his. And here Ginny sat with her platelets poised briefly between the two. In time, genes being what they were, her platelets would probably have let her down too.
But her platelets being functional for the moment, the blob of blood on her wrist was now viscous with fibrin. Miss Sturgill would have admired her clotting time. She hadn’t kept track of it, but it was negligible compared to her mother’s.
If she could have shrunk herself down to microbe size and insinuated herself into the area of the knife cut, she’d have been able to witness a high drama. Shock troops of phagocytes would be arriving via the area capillaries. They’d be sticking to the capillary walls until they could extend artificial feet through the overlapping cells of the vessel walls. They’d drag themselves along after their feet, out of the blood vessels and into the fray. Sniffing like bloodhounds, they would track down the thousands of bacteria that had invaded via the knife point Antibodies and various other chemical solutions would already have arrived to bathe these invading bacteria so as to render them appetizing. The encircling phagocytes would then proceed to embrace like Russian politicos these newly delectable bacteria, devouring them whole and alive. Various proteins were also arriving to mend the sliced tissues. The healing process was undertaken instantly and automatically by the bloodstream. In a matter of days, the cut would be healed, and healed so perfectly that no one would be able to locate it
Unless the knife point had introduced an especially belligerent germ, one with an outer wall that could shed the libations from the antibodies. Such a germ would be able to repel the hungry phagocytes, gain a foothold, reproduce, and perhaps destroy her with its wastes, as had happened to Dixie Lee Hull with her recipe card.
And yet, as far as Ginny with her crude senses was concerned, nothing much was going on. She’d sliced her wrist, and the cut had already clotted. And now came the last series of questions that she intended to allow herself in this life. Was she a cell in some infinitely larger organism, an organism that couldn’t be bothered with her activities any more than she could be with those of the 60 trillion cells in her own body, as long as they performed their assigned functions? And were there, say, white blood cells that — not being able to see themselves as Ginny could, as a group, under magnification, stained to highlight determining characteristics — had not been able to figure out what their ‘assigned function’ was, whether they were supposed to perform as macrophages or neutrophils or eosinophils or lymphocytes? And did those perplexed blood cells then take it upon themselves to self-destruct in a huff at not receiving enough individual attention and guidance from her personally? Autophagy, it was called, when cells unleashed on their own cytoplasm their suicide bags of digestive enzymes. Autophagy, which literally meant ‘self-eating.’
Ginny was reminded of Clem’s description of a revolting incident during his adolescence in which he and his hoodlum friends had hunched over their own laps, vainly trying to eat themselves. Onanism, autophagy, suicide, it was all the same — a component part trying to run the whole show. She smiled reluctantly and returned the knife to its sheath.
Like most of her undertakings, her proposed suicide had degenerated into burlesque. Apparently she was condemned to survival. At least for the time being.
She went into the bedroom. She wrapped her mother’s clock in her faded Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt and packed it in Hawk’s knapsack with her other scant belongings. She left the cabin, to go where she had no idea.
Epilogue
A scavenger walking down the street of the perfume-sellers fell down as if dead. People tried to revive him with sweet odours, but he only became worse.
Finally a former scavenger came along, and recognized the situation. He held something filthy under the man’s nose and he immediately revived, calling out: ‘This is indeed perfume!’
You must prepare yourself for the transition in which there will be none of the things to which you have accustomed yourself. After death your identity will have to respond to stimuli of which you have a chance to get a foretaste here.
If you remain attached to the few things with which you are familiar, it will only make you miserable, as the perfume did the scavenger in the street of the perfume-makers.
-GHAZALI, FROM Tales of the Dervishes BY IDRIES SHAH
Original Sins
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material:
Al Gallico Music Corp. /Algee Music Corp.: Excerpts from “Stand By Your Man,” words and music by Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill. Copyright
© 1968 Al Gallico Music Corp.; from “You Make Me Want to Be a Mother,” words and music by Billy Sherrill and Norris Wilson. Copyright © 1975 Algee Music Corp.; “Take Me to Your World,” words and music by Billy Sherrill and Glenn Sutton. Copyright © 1967 Al Gallico Music Corp.; “Woman to Woman,” words and music by Billy Sherrill. Copyright © 1974 Algee Music Corp.; “My Man,” words and music by Norris Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and Billy Sherrill. Copyright © 1972 Algee Music Corp. Used by permission.
Arc Music Corp.: Excerpt from “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” words and music by Chuck Berry. Copyright © 1958 and 1965 Arc Music Corp., New York. Used by permission.
Blackwood Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “Baby I’m Yours” by Van Allen McCoy. Copyright © 1964, 1965 Blackwood Music, Inc., 1330 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
Copyright Service Bureau Ltd. and American Metropolitan Enterprises of New York Ltd.: Excerpt from “(I Wanna Be) Bobby’s Girl” by Hoffman and Klein. Copyright © 1962 AME Music Ltd. used by permission.
Peer International Corporation and Campbell Connelly Ltd.: Excerpt from “Georgia on My Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell. Copyright 1930 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed 1957 by Peer International Corporation. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Warner Bros. Music: Excerpts from “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1962 Warner Bros. Inc.; from “Hello-Hurray” by Rolf Kempf (additional lyrics by Meg Christian). Copyright © 1968 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
For my friends and family,