Kinflicks (15 page)

As Dr. Vogel explained it, everyone's capillaries were ripped open all the time by the ordinary activities of living. Normally, platelets would mass at the site of these rips and mend them. In her case, however, there were very few platelets, and rips didn't get mended. Her blood oozed from the rips into her tissues to form the bruises. She'd read in the encyclopedia that the gorgeous fall leaf colors that everyone gasped at resulted from essentially the same process. The membranes around each cell in a leaf became leaky and no longer functioned as a semi-permeable wall, so that the cell fluids began seeping into the surrounding spaces, rendering the leaf translucent. Wesley, on the other hand, had had an abundance of platelets that were overly eager to amass; they had formed the clots that had caused his heart attacks. If only the two of them could somehow have merged their blood supplies, as they had their minds and their bodies and their lives in almost every other way…

Hunching up into a sitting position, she inspected herself more closely. Her pale breasts, drooping and etched with silver stretch marks from childbearing, stood out in sharp contrast to their colorful backdrop. She looked like the Japanese Irezumi men she'd read about in the encyclopedia who were tattooed all over with stylized dragons and sumaris in shades of black and blue and red and purple. That anyone would actually choose this condition for his body was beyond her comprehension. Her pubic hair, sodden and matted, surrounded by hues of blue, perched like a rain-soaked bird's nest. Her whole body was puffing up like a weather balloon from the steroids. She had already gained ten pounds, and her flesh was spongy to the touch. Her hair was coming out in clumps.

All in all, she was just as glad that Wesley wasn't around to witness what had happened to her body since his death. Their life together had been predicated upon this body — his attraction to it, and its own greed to replicate itself. The children found it difficult to believe that she and their father could have a sex life. She smiled remembering the embarrassed scandalized looks on their faces whenever, as young children and especially as adolescents, they had walked in on their parents' embraces and caresses. One weekend afternoon when Ginny was at the high school practicing her ridiculous flag swinging, she and Wesley had begun by kissing and had ended up in bed together. This happened only rarely by this time because Wesley was always exhausted after work during the week, and because the children were always around with their friends the rest of the time. But the interest and the capacity were still there, and flowered on these rare and prized occasions. This particular time, however, Ginny had come bursting back into the house shortly after leaving. She and Wesley froze in the act, as guilty as two teenagers whose parents have come home unexpectedly. Ginny started calling for Wesley. They heard her footsteps on the stairs and stared at each other in consternation. Finally, swearing under his breath, Wesley rolled out of bed and threw on a robe and went out to confront her, his face scarlet from embarrassment and exertion.

‘I need the Jeep, Pop. I'm going up to see Grandpa.'

‘So
take
it.'

‘I can't find the keys.'

‘I left them in it.'

‘Where's Mother? I need to ask her something.'

‘Uh, yes, well your mother and I are — uh, taking a nap right now.'

‘A
nap?
At twelve thirty in the — oh. Yeah. Well, uh. See you, Pop.' She careened down the steps.

Why could children not accept the fact that their parents had had their days in the sun, too? Ginny appeared to believe that she had sprung full-grown into existence through a sort of spontaneous regeneration. She liked to think that her generation had discovered the pleasures of the flesh. Whereas in fact, this despised body of her mother's, and her father's attraction to it, and nothing to do with the inherent desirability of Ginny herself, accounted for Ginny's existence. Because of this body (she now knew, though at the time she would have vehemently denied it), Wesley and she had married and had one day found themselves with three children to raise. Because of it, Wesley had spent three decades in a town he didn't much like. And now that body, which had largely determined the shape of his life and of hers, was a puffed-up mass of overlapping hematomas that ached to the touch. It was another example of the elaborate scheme of malicious practical jokes that Wesley had always insisted constituted the phenomenon known as Life. In any case, malicious or not in intent, what was happening now definitely made one wonder about the point of all the attention she and Wesley had showered on this body over the years. Yes, Wesley was fortunate to have been spared this punch line in the anecdote that was their life together.

Mrs. Babcock grabbed the chrome bar and hauled herself out of the water. When she returned to her room in a fresh yellow gown, she discovered with satisfaction that her bed was already done, fresh sheets replacing the old ones, which had had dribbles of dried blood here and there. She paused and gently touched the shocking pink peonies in a vase on the windowsill. She almost allowed herself tears of frustration. She couldn't smell with her nose packed, and peonies were her favorite. She made do with looking at them and touching them. Then she turned on the television and hoisted herself into bed. Rarely had she watched television, except for the evening news. But her eyes could endure only so much reading; they strained very easily these days. A church service was on.

Bored, Mrs. Babcock picked up her embroidery hoop and started stitching compulsively. What had Ginny's get-up yesterday signified? The last time she'd been home, for Wesley's funeral, she'd been wearing a pantsuit, and her hair was long and neat and tied back with a scarf. What did a Heidi dress mean?

With irritation she threw down the hoop. Why was Ginny here anyhow? As a silent reprimand after their years of failing to get through to each other?

She picked up volume 22 of the encyclopedia and opened it at ‘Varicose Veins.' After nine years, she was finally reaching the end of this ill-conceived project. One more volume and she'd be finished.

For whatever good that would do her. She had started reading them when Ginny left for Boston for several reasons: to have something to do with herself; to round out her liberal arts education, which had been abruptly terminated by marriage and by the relentless arrival of babies. But mostly she'd been looking for some pegs to hang her philosophical hat on. She'd grown up terrorized by the prospect of hell-fire and damnation from sermons every Sunday at the Southern Baptist church. The austere Anglican Book of Common Prayer had been balm to her cowering spirit. The Episcopal approach was really more her style: ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable…'

But she regarded the Book of Common Prayer as uplifting literature, the Episcopal services as soothing ritual, a ceremonial link to the past. Her faith had always resided elsewhere, in the form of a mute confidence in the scheme of things. However much she might question some of its manifestations, she had maintained a silent conviction that there was a point to life, and to having lived. She had begun reading the encyclopedia in search of labels. What was this kind of religious belief called? Who were the people who saw things as she did? As she approached the last volume, though, she had no more idea than when she had started. What she
did
have was a miraculous backlog of little-known facts that would have allowed her to clean up on any television quiz show. Ever since volume 12 or so, she'd been reading on strictly to satisfy her neurotic compulsion to finish things begun, like cleaning up your plate at a meal.

The real problem now was that her simple nameless faith had really been put to the test the past couple of years. It definitely needed bolstering of some kind. The form this faith had taken in the past had been a dedication to what she had seen as her duty — the care of three young lives, the nurturing of her relationship with Wesley. But now Wesley was dead, and the children were gone. Not only were the children gone, they were more or less a flop. She had devoted her life to them, and she couldn't see that they'd turned out very impressively. Karl was responsible; he did his job, looked after his family. But he lacked imagination; he led an unexamined life. She hated to admit it, but she found her own son — her heir, the product of years of her selfless devotion — a bore, a drudge. Jim, in California making sandals, was dear, but a mess. He had dropped out of college, had been dishonorably discharged from the army, had taken up and cast off a dozen kinds of work, a dozen serious girl friends. Apparently he now lived primarily to take drugs. He couldn't seem to stay with anything else that might give him long-term satisfaction. After many trying years, Ginny appeared to be coming around, had a charming child and a devoted young husband. But who knew how long it would last? She had about as much staying power as a spring snowstorm.

When she really faced up to it, Mrs. Babcock couldn't place herself in the vanguard of her profession of parenthood. She had been committed to endowing the world with three decent, imaginative, hardworking citizens. But she had to say now that she'd failed. There was nothing much wrong with her offspring, but they clearly weren't the superior beings she'd envisioned. It wasn't easy to admit that perhaps your life had been wasted. Having done so was possibly why she had found herself hemorrhaging in the emergency room on the first anniversary of her husband's death. In any case, it was definitely the reason why she was scouring these last two volumes of the encyclopedia so greedily. If assuring the continuation of the species wasn't what she was on earth for, what was?

There was a soft knock at her door. Normally the staff didn't bother knocking, and visiting hours were in the afternoon. Who could it be? The door swung inward. A stream of words came from the next room: ‘…I don't want to hear no excuses. You git out there and you do like I tell you, boy. You run till you drop, and then you pick yoursef up and you run some more. Do you understand? Do you understand? No excuses. Do you understand me or not?…'

A young woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in stained white overalls such as housepainters wore and a faded navy blue T-shirt that had writing of some sort on it — ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful,' whatever that meant.

‘Hello,' Ginny said. Her mother looked up from her encyclopedia, then looked back down with indifference. Ginny couldn't detect any hint of recognition. She was hurt. She hadn't come all the way from Vermont to be not recognized by her own mother, for Christ's sake.

‘How are you feeling today?' Ginny asked.

Mrs. Babcock looked up again and studied the friendly young woman. What did she want anyhow? Who was she — a young nursing trainee from the lab? That might explain the unbecoming white work pants. Mrs. Babcock was an intriguing case to the staff. Strangers were forever popping in to poke at her bruises and take blood samples, but rarely were they so insistently sociable. ‘Which one are
you?'
Mrs. Babcock asked in a hoarse, tired voice.

Ginny stared at her. Was it the drugs? ‘I'm
Ginny,
Mother.' Her mother looked at her as though sorting through a stack of names and faces of other daughters.

‘Oh yes, of course, Ginny.' But she was taken aback. She had seen Ginny yesterday, had accustomed herself to the notion of Ginny's presence, had been expecting her to appear today. But what she had been expecting was the Austrian mountain girl from
The Sound of Music,
not this housepainter's apprentice. Who, pray, was Ginny today?

Ginny was waiting to be told how nice it was of her to come all the way from Vermont. ‘From Vermont,' she added pointedly.

‘I'm aware of that.' Why was it that when someone was flat on her back, everyone immediately started patronizing her?

Ginny walked to her mother's bed, leaned down and kissed her lined forehead. She felt her mother studying her quizzically, critically. Backing over to a chair, she plopped down in it and braced herself for complaints about her appearance, her posture, her failure to write once a week. A beam of sunlight through the window fell across her mother's blanket at knee level.

‘Pretty day,' Ginny suggested. When in doubt discuss the weather, she had learned at Tupperware parties in Stark's Bog.

‘Is it?' Mrs. Babcock rarely noticed the weather here in her hospital room, rarely glanced out the window. Doing so, she discovered that the leaves of an elm tree outside her window were a bright yellow-green. A red squirrel perched chattering on a branch.

‘It's still June?' Mrs. Babcock asked.

Ginny nodded yes, startled.

‘How's your infant and your charming husband?'

Ginny grimaced. She longed to come clean right from the start and admit that Ira had kicked her out for cuckolding him — although in fact it hadn't been like that all. But she and her mother had never been noted for candor. ‘They're fine, thank you.'

Miss Sturgill came leaping in like a Cossack dancer and said brightly, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Babcock. How are we today?' She nodded briskly to Ginny and then said to her mother, ‘All ready to go?'

Closing her eyes, Mrs. Babcock asked wearily, ‘Where is it you're taking me
now?'
If only they'd all go away and leave her alone with her bruised body. Here she was, supposed to be resting and recovering; and yet she was having to function like the hostess of a television talk show, humoring Mrs. Childress with her sciatica and the candy-striped volunteers with their tedious craft program, trying to figure out how to engage Miss Sturgill and Ginny in a conversation. It was exhausting.