Kinflicks (48 page)

‘It occurred to me.'

‘I knew it! You're tired of me!'

‘I'm not,' I assured her without conviction.

‘Can I help it if I don't have a penis?'

‘Of course not,' I said wearily. ‘I've told you that it doesn't matter to me. There are all sorts of compensations to being with you instead of a man.'

‘Compensations?
Compensations?
Go ahead, Scarlett. Go drag one of those young studs on his macho trip out into the woods with you! I dare you to! You'll come crawling back to me in minutes! Go on!'

‘Maybe I will.' Under Eddie's abuse, I was becoming more interested in the idea all the time.

That night we walked back to our cabin in an icy silence, me with the crusted soybean croquette dish under my arm. We climbed into bed and turned our backs on each other.

Later that night I woke up being caressed by Eddie. Warm tears were dripping from her eyes and onto my bare chest

“Don't leave me, Ginny. Please don't. I couldn't stand it if I knew you were with a man. I get sick just thinking about it. Don't do it to us.'

Reflexively, I took her in my arms, and we kissed and held each other. She parted my knees and began stroking me. On the verge of orgasm, I felt something hard and cold slide into me and start moving back and forth. It felt fantastic. Curiosity finally quelling lust, I sat up and said, ‘What
are
you doing, Eddie?' I turned on the light

She smiled sheepishly and held up a greased cucumber. I looked at her with horror. ‘It's all right,' she assured me. ‘It's organically grown.'

The incident with Laverne, as unimpressed as people had seemed by it at the time, had repercussions far beyond those on Eddie's and my relationship. For one thing, Mona and Atheliah moved in with us the following week.

‘We didn't want to interfere with Laverne's honeymoon,' Mona said with distaste as we sat in captain's chairs around our wood stove the night of their arrival. The autumn air was chilly, and we had a small fire going.

‘You mean — she's there with all those men just…?' Eddie asked with uncharacteristic delicacy.

As Mona nodded with a sardonic smile, Eddie shuddered. ‘Well, I can certainly understand your leaving. You're welcome to live with us for as long as you like.'

‘Be fair, Mona,' Atheliah said. ‘It wasn't just Laverne. This has been building up for a long time.' Atheliah was sharpening her ax on a whetstone, testing the blade with her callused thumb. Occasionally she'd put it down to smoke a cigarette, which she'd hold between her thumb and index finger, cupping the glowing butt in her huge hand.

Mona nodded in agreement She was smoking a joint, had inhaled deeply and was holding her breath. Her face was turning dark red, like a child's in a tantrum. Her bruised-looking eyes were beginning to glaze over behind her purple lenses.

‘It got to be a total turn-off,' Atheliah continued. ‘They wanted to fart around in the garden all day and come in to find that the womenfolk had hot meals waiting for them.'

‘No!'
said Eddie. She picked up her chair and moved it behind mine. Sitting with a knee on either side of my chair, she began unbraiding my hair carefully.

‘Yes,' Atheliah confirmed. ‘Or one of them would say, peremptorily, “Mona?” And would point to his cup to indicate that he wanted more tea. It was totally unreal.'

‘I can't believe it,' Eddie said.

‘I know, but it's true,' Atheliah insisted. ‘They're on a real macho trip over there — me Tarzan, you Jane.'

‘What it comes down to,' Mona said in a gush of exhaled smoke, ‘is that Atheliah and I just need a larger life space to work in. Laverne gets her rocks off on this macho stuff, but it's a total turn-off for us.'

‘Turn-off isn't the word for it,' Eddie said with disgust. She was brushing out my tangled hair with short sharp brush strokes.

‘It's not their fault,' I suggested, speaking from personal experience. ‘It's how they were brought up, with their masochistic mothers hovering over them anticipating their every need. They're macho, I'm bougie. We can't help ourselves.'

‘That's cool,' Mona agreed, hunched over with her elbows on her chair arms and her dark hair hanging in her eyes. ‘But at what point do the obnoxious personality traits that have survived your childhood start being your own responsibility, rather than your parents'?'

We all sat meditating upon this question and listening to the hypnotic grinding whir of Atheliah's ax on the whetstone. Eddie got up and shoved a log into the stove. When she sat back down, she began to smooth my long mass of hair, which crackled with electricity. A window rattled in its frame, and a few flakes of early snow whirled past. The effect of the grinding fell somewhere between a back rub and fingernails skittering across a blackboard.

‘Jesus,' Mona sighed, sinking lower in her chair and sticking her feet out straight. ‘I'm really getting off on that grinding. It's enough to totally bliss me out.'

After a few more minutes, having finally satisfied herself as to the sharpness of her blade, Atheliah oiled it and sheathed it in a tan leather case, for all the world like a mother bathing and oiling and dressing a well-loved baby.

‘Thanks for taking us in,' Atheliah said.

‘It feels good having you here,' Eddie said. ‘And we could use a couple more backs on the land.'

I laughed.

‘What's so funny?' Eddie asked affectionately.

‘It's just that I haven't been referred to as a “back” since my football days. A brain, a cunt, a piece of ass. But never a back. It's refreshing, to say the least.'

The next morning Atheliah showed us how to fell trees. There had been a small supply of firewood on the front porch when we arrived, but it had almost all been used for cooking. Now that autumn was upon us, we needed wood for heat. It unsettled both Eddie and me that we hadn't realized this fact until recently — that we had taken heat for granted, as something supplied automatically by one's landlord. Luckily, we now had two extra backs.'

Dressed in a red plaid lumberjack shirt and olive army fatigue pants and green rubber boots, Atheliah nicked the ax blade with her thumb to test it, as though she hadn't spent an hour the previous evening honing it to razor sharpness. She planted her legs firmly and raised her treasured ax in both hands high over one shoulder like a baseball bat. Her frozen breath encircled her Medusa-esque head of red hair like an aura. Then she brought the ax down diagonally on a birch trunk. Working the ax back and forth, she withdrew it from the trunk and swung again. A large triangular chunk of white barked wood flew out. Half a dozen carefully positioned strokes later, the trunk was cut halfway through. Then she shifted to the other side of the tree and whacked out a chunk slightly higher than the original cut. The tree listed slowly. Atheliah threw her shoulder against it, and it came crashing down.

‘Where
did you learn
that?'
Eddie asked in awe.

‘I used to be a Curved Bar Girl Scout back in Ohio,' Atheliah admitted.

‘Far out,' Eddie said.

Mona took the ax and began deftly trimming off branches. Her chopping technique was less dramatic than Atheliah's, but was equally effective; she chopped with short quick strokes, her back hunched, throwing up a shower of tiny wood chips. When the flurry of chips settled, the log was cut to order.

A pattern developed at the Free Farm, as we had come to call the place. Every morning when we got up, I would cook breakfast. Then as I did the dishes, Eddie and Atheliah and Mona would hitch up the workhorses we had bought and would go up the hill to the woodlot. We soon had nearly enough wood for the winter, but the others wanted to fill the wood bin at the sugar shack now so that everything would be ready for sugaring in late February. While they were up the hill, I stayed at the cabin and cleaned. I also spun and dyed wool and used it to crochet rainbow curtains for our bare windows. I felt like Snow White, the others of course being the dwarfs.

And by the time I heard the clanking of the horses' harnesses coming down the hill, I would have a hearty lunch ready -soybean fritters or sprouted soybean sukiyaki or soy grits pilaf. Each noon we four would sit at our groaning board as I'd serve up a new culinary delight. Everyone would take a cautious bite, wait for a moment, and then Eddie would say, “Well! This is certainly delicious, Ginny.'

‘Delicious,' the other two would echo.

‘And so much roughage,' one would add.

One morning as I sat crocheting the violet band of my fifth rainbow curtain, there was a knock at the door. I was startled because I hadn't heard any car or truck arrive. When I opened the door, there was Laverne, a knapsack on her back and a duffel bag in her hand, looking luscious in faded bib overalls and a flannel shirt, with her curly blond hair waving around her fresh face.

‘Hi, Ginny.'

‘What do you want?' I asked, trying to sound disapproving.

‘To move in with you all.'

“You're kidding? What's wrong? Did your boyfriends kick you out?'

‘I'm through with men forever! I've
had
it with them!'

I looked at her suspiciously, but stood aside and let her enter. She dumped her gear on the floor and looked around. I was proud of the place, which was a model of cleanliness compared to the disaster area she had just fled from.

‘I don't know, Laverne. I don't know if you can stay or not. You'll have to see what the others say. They'll be back for lunch soon.'

‘I know they don't care for my sexual proclivities.' She had a habit of wetting her lower lip with her tongue and then slowly rubbing the lip with her middle finger.

‘That's putting it mildly.'

‘But that's over. I've reformed. I never want another man again as long as I live.'

Just then the others entered, clomping across my clean floor in their muddy boots. ‘Take off your boots!' I shrieked, like a housewife on a daytime TV commercial.

They all bent over to remove their boots, but one by one they became aware of Laverne's presence.

Finally Eddie said, ‘Well, well. If it isn't the Wife of Bath. To what do we owe the pleasure of your lascivious presence in our chaste abode?'

Laverne giggled nervously.

‘She wants to move in,' I explained.

‘Here?'
the three asked simultaneously.

‘I never want to
see
another man.'

‘He can do whatever he wants to with you just so long as you don't have to
see
him?' Eddie inquired.

“Honestly. I'm through with men. They're just one disappointment after another. Their readiness and their stamina are just so unreliable. Believe me, I just want to be left alone with my vibrator.'

We all laughed at this, yet another example of job obsolescence, men being replaced by their machines. Then we stopped laughing as we sat down to curried soybean cutlets.

The time had come, we decided, to involve ourselves with The People. We had kept to ourselves for too long, allowing a mythology to spring up among the Stark's Boggers: The Soybean People were Communists, lesbians, draft dodgers, atheists, food stamp recipients. Our seclusion had been necessary to get the Free Farmlet going. But now the sparse stunted produce from our overgrown garden was in jars and trays of sand in the musty dirt cellar. Wood for the cabin and for the sugar shack was cut and split and stacked. It was time to descend into Stark's Bog and mix and mingle with the folk with whom we had cast our lot. It was time to win over their heads and their hearts to The Revolution!

Our first gesture of solidarity was to attend the local blood drawing, which was being held at the grammar school. It was here that I first saw Ira face to face. I'm sure I must have seen him earlier — he being one of the active young businessmen about town, president of the Stark's Bog Volunteer Fire Department, veteran square dancer with the Wheelers ‘n' Reelers, and member of the Stark's Bog Cemetery Commission. But it is from the blood drawing that I retain my first clear picture of him.

The five of us walked into the school gym en masse, identical in our plaid wool lumberjack shirts and khaki army fatigue pants and green rubber boots. A hush fell over the large room as we gave our names to the kindly gray-haired lady behind the table. We sat side by side in folding chairs, waiting to be called for medical histories by a white-starched volunteer nurse. Part of the gym was occupied by wooden pallets on wheels with plastic bags strapped to their sides. Tubes led from the bags and into the arms of the supine Stark's Boggers. In one corner was a refreshment area, where the survivors stood chatting and munching doughnuts. I recognized the bag boy from the IGA, the owner of the feed store, a farmer down the road from us, a couple of other familiar faces. It gave me a great feeling of kinship to know that my plastic bag would nestle in the blood bank next to theirs. We were all in this business of life together.

One by one we were called for a conference with the nurse. Eventually, we lay on the tables, donating our life's blood for the well-being of our community — blood that would go into the veins of Vermont farmers who had had tractor accidents, Vermont women hemorrhaging during childbirth, Vermont children cut by their sled runners. We felt very good about the whole thing. Afterwards we mingled with our neighbors, endlessly exchanging such profundities as ‘Cold enough for you?' and ‘Looks like snow clouds blowing in from the north.' After doughnuts and Coke, we headed for the door.

There, handing out small red plastic hearts, was Ira Bliss IV, Missouri Mutual Insurance agent and owner of Sno Cat City. He looked like Victor Mature in
The Robe,
with high cheekbones and a firm mouth with full lips and wide dark alarmed eyes with bushy eyebrows that gave him a perpetually startled expression. His dark wavy hair hung so as partially to conceal a high forehead. His forehead and cheeks were ruddy and gleamed with sweat, making him look as though he'd just come up from some enforced rowing in the galley of a Roman ship. He wore a red soft-collared sports shirt, too tight, so that his biceps and chest muscles rippled the shirt when he moved. Three buttons were undone, and shocks of black curly chest hair peeked out. He stood just inside the doorway, his nostrils flaring like a racehorse's. In retrospect, I could swear that he and I exchanged lingering stares fraught with meaning. At the time, though, I merely stood still and allowed him to pin the plastic heart to the collar of my lumberjack shirt, like a young man's pinning a corsage on his date.