Kinflicks (62 page)

I would fall into Ira's arms with relief when it was time for him to swing me as his corner lady. He would hold me tightly against his chest and would study my face. ‘Are you having fun, Ginny? Isn't this great stuff?'

‘Wonderful!' I'd gasp gaily, twirling off to another do-si-do with Rodney.

But Angela, Ira's younger sister, had befriended me. She had been to secretarial school in Albany before relenting and returning to marry her high school boyfriend and live happily ever after. She would always say reassuringly, ‘Jesum Crow, Ginny, I saw hippies a
lot
worse than you in Albany.'

Angela was a big gun on the surprise shower scene and among the Tupperware party set. (Actually, the two groups were one and the same.) She also happened to be refreshment chairman of the Women's Auxiliary of the Stark's Bog Volunteer Fire Department. In short, Angela was my In.

I started out modestly by attending a Tupperware party at Angela's split-level ranch on the opposite edge of town. Fifteen women of different ages were there. Angela had warned them in advance so that they wouldn't blanch too noticeably as I walked through the door. Several of the less socially hardy had left in a huff. Those who remained behaved admirably, there being an awkward silence of only three and a half minutes upon my arrival. I smiled a lot to indicate my unimpeachable good will, and I talked as little as possible, intent upon mastering the jargon and discerning the sanctioned topics for conversation first. These turned out to be as follows: 1) the weather; 2) one's children; 3) cooking; 4) the weather. I had no children, and clearly none of the assembled were into soybean casseroles. But vis a vis the weather, I snatched the ball and ran with it.

‘Gee, mud season is really hanging on this spring, isn't it?' I asked a large gray-haired woman with a wart on her nose.

‘Yes, it is,' she agreed, startled to be addressed by a reformed Soybeaner on such a harmless topic.

‘Some weather for May, huh?'

‘A-yup.'

‘I keep waiting for some sunshine,' I confessed.

‘Hmmm,' she replied noncommittally. Could the same sun that shone on Soybean People possibly be the one that shone on Stark's Boggers? she appeared to be asking herself.

‘Do you think it's unusually cool this spring?'

“Well — don't know. Could be.' She glanced around the room at her friends, fearful that they might think she was conversing voluntarily with this subversive.

‘Maybe we're skipping spring and moving right into summer!' I laughed weakly.

She looked at me with distaste.

Undaunted, I said, “Yup, sure looks like we're due for a gorgeous summer after this rotten spring.'

Just as I was exhausting my variations on this theme, our area Tupperware representative, a svelte young woman in a navy pantsuit and a blond bouffant such as I hadn't seen since the Bloody Bucket, stood up and welcomed us and began her pitch designed to raise our kitchen consciousness.

‘Now, girls,' she began urgently, ‘I
know
you've all been
waiting
to hear about the grr-eat new Tupperware products that have just come out, designed as always to help today's busy homemaker. So I won't waste another minute!'

A dizzying succession of plastic bacon keepers, cauliflower crispers, bowls and canisters and molds swirled from hand to hand. Each woman was inspecting them with the eye of an expert jeweler for cut diamonds, turning them this way and that, making remarks to neighbors.

‘Yes, girls,' the Tupperware lady continued, ‘this is
exactly
why we sell our kitchen-tested products on the unique home party plan, so that all the outstanding features can be demonstrated right in the comfort of your own living room. Treat your Tupperware as you would your hands, and it will give you a long life of faithful service, and open up whole new worlds of food economy and flavor…'

By the end of the ‘party,' everyone in the room had committed herself to dozens of plastic objects. Except me. I had bought nothing. I was overwhelmed with all the things my kitchen lacked. How had I managed to get meals on the table to date? Angela assured me as I departed in a daze that I hadn't wrecked my chances on the Tupperware circuit simply through failing to buy, that I could make up for this lapse in manners at the next party.

Soon after this Angela got me invited to a surprise shower for one of Ira's cousins, who was about to marry a local boy. Our unfortunate victim, Wanda Bliss, sauntered into our web of deceit (which we had woven in her very own television room) wearing rollers the size of bedsprings. She squealed with terror and tried to dash out when she saw three dozen of her closest friends and relatives bobbing up from behind couches and chairs. Her mother forced her to return. Chagrined, but pretending to smile, she opened the mountain of gifts and passed them around. Mine was a tin serving tray with wooden handles, and with a picture of a covered bridge and “Vermont, The Green Mountain State' painted on it. Everyone passed it on as though it were the meal tray from a plague patient when she read the card saying that it was from me.

I was sitting next to Angela, taking mental notes on proper surprise shower conduct. A box came by. Angela looked in and sighed with envy. She turned around to a middle-aged woman and whispered covetously, ‘Don't you just
love
it, Aunt Clare? It's
impossible
to find a decent bureau scarf these days. Don't you agree, Ginny?'

Pleased to be included, I replied, ‘I know what you mean.'

A pair of hollow-stemmed champagne glasses etched with frosted bride and groom silhouettes came by, followed closely by plastic place mats with a Kodachrome Vermont landscape and a psalm printed on each. Angela leaned across me and demanded, “Will
your
family eat squash, Jean? I can't get Bill to
touch
it!'

Jean allowed as how Hal would leave her on the spot if she ever dared to serve squash on his dinner plate.

‘Ira hates squash, too,' I offered companionably.

Several stacks of sheets and towels later, Angela said out of the corner of her mouth, ‘You should have
seen
Jimmy the other day, Bernice. He got Bill's razor and lathered up his face and shaved himself! At five and a half!'

‘Five and a half! Goodness, don't they grow up fast?'

‘I know. They act so big, and then they get all tired out and come crawling up on your lap wanting to be babied.'

‘Isn't it the truth?' confirmed Bernice. ‘Well, baby them while you can, Angela honey, because it passes so quickly.'

By the conclusion of this shower, I had decided that elopement had a lot going for it. Angela told me as we left that she was pretty certain that, after a few more showers, she would be able to get me voted into the Women's Auxiliary, especially since Ira was the president of the fire department. Perhaps she could even get me in in time to work on the fashion show.

‘What does the auxiliary do?'

‘Oh, we mostly clean up the room after meetings. Pick up the bottles and stuff. Sometimes we make refreshments for the meetings.'

‘I'd like that,' I assured her.

‘I've thought about our little problem, Ginny,' Ira said one night in bed.

‘What
problem?' I wasn't aware that we had any. For me, everything was peachy. That day I had been voted into the Women's Auxiliary. Unanimously, Angela said. Except for Jean, and what could you expect from a woman like that?

‘The fact that I'm not satisfying you sexually.'

‘Oh but you
are!'

‘Please, Ginny. I've asked you not to lie about it.'

‘But I don't
want
to be satisfied. Or rather I don't mind not being. In other words, I
am
satisfied by the state of our sex life.'

‘No, you're not. I've thought about it a lot. And I've figured out what the trouble is.'

I looked at him expectantly. To have problems solved before you'd even acknowledged their existence was the height of luxury.

‘You're used to a very exciting life, Ginny — Boston and all your…different friends.'

‘Who?
Me?'

‘Yes, you
are,
Ginny.'

‘But I'm
not,
Ira. Really. I just got in with the wrong crowd. I'm not really like that at
all,'
I insisted, believing it

‘No, living with me must seem very dull after all that.'

‘I
like
it dull. Uh, I mean I don't think it's dull at
all.
I like our life the way it is, Ira. I wouldn't have married you if I didn't.'

‘So…' he said, ignoring me, ‘I've decided to try to make things more exciting. I so much want you to be as happy with me as I am with you, Ginny.' He threw off the bedcovers and revealed his gorgeous nude muscled body, pale white below his neckline. But there was some black contraption obscuring his genitals.

‘What in the hell?'

‘A leather jock strap,' he said proudly. ‘Go ahead. Feel it.'

I poked it tentatively.

‘Do much for you?'

‘Well, I don't know…'

‘Now! For you!' Out from under the bed he pulled a transparent raincoat and held it up for me to put on. ‘Go ahead! Put it on!'

I did — and felt like a topless traffic cop.

‘What do you think?' he asked with boyish delight.

‘Neat.'

He turned out the light and embraced me. I crackled like a cellophane toilet paper wrapper. ‘Uh, now what, Ira?'

He sat up and turned on the light and took a book off his bedside table and consulted the index. ‘Uh, yes, well. I guess we're just supposed to look at each other. It says some women are turned on by the smell and feel of leather.'

So Ira and I sat and looked at each other. Then he took off his jock strap, and I slipped out of my transparent raincoat, and he settled his furry head between my tanned legs — a tarantula nested in a bunch of overripe bananas. As Ira amused himself, I pondered the topic of whether to take pot roast or pork liver out of the freezer for supper the next day.

I didn't come.

Ira sat up and marked two X's in the book over the sections entitled ‘Leather' and ‘Polyethylene', saying, ‘Now, don't be discouraged, Ginny. Each time we'll try something different.'

On Memorial Day morning, I stood on Main Street and watched as Ira marched by in his olive National Guard uniform, followed closely by Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Brownies, and Girl Scouts. The Stark Mountain Regional High School marching band came next, led by prancing majorettes who were nowhere near as good as I remembered being. Then came the fire department float, featuring a uniformed representative from each National Guard unit in the area. They were saluting a bank of flowers tilted against the truck cab. The flowers were white carnations, some dyed red and blue and densely packed in a wire frame to form an American flag. A hand-printed inscription around the truck bed read, ‘Serving to Keep America Strong and Free.' Then came some volunteer firemen, in their swept-back hats and raincoats and rubber boots, hanging from the town's gleaming hook and ladder trucks.

After the parade, the men and boys had been invited to the General Machine Gun Testing Range — the one Eddie and Atheliah and Mona and I had discovered — to view a new type of mortar launcher to be used in Vietnam. Half the men in town had been working on the project for over a year. They took as much pride in it as their forebears must have taken in their spikes and staples in the 1800's when General Machine had been a nail factory.

Meanwhile, the women and girls went to the parish hall for the Women's Auxiliary fashion show. The fashion coordinator from Sears, Roebuck in St. Johnsbury had outfitted us auxiliary members and had written the script, which Angela was reading:

‘Lovely Ginny Bliss waltzes into summer in this…'

That was my cue. The thought had flickered through my diabolical brain to whisk out attired in my transparent raincoat and Ira's black leather jock strap. Eddie would have done it. But I was trying hard to forget Eddie. I never allowed myself to think of her. The only time she sneaked up on me was when I was asleep. She would appear in dreams, saying in an accusing voice, ‘You keep thinking I'm, like, dead or something.' Then I'd reach out to embrace her. And I'd wake up and find myself clinging to Ira, who would interpret this as an invitation to roll on top of me for a tryst, while I choked back sobs of longing for Eddie and tried not to fantasize that Ira's hands and mouth and tongue moving across my body were hers. I was grateful to Ira for taking me on. If I couldn't throw myself into sex with him, at least I wouldn't cuckold him spiritually by pretending that he was someone else.

I swept out in my backless pink paisley halter-front harem pants. ‘…fetching nylon acetate ensemble. The halter front with its matching fabric tie strings, and the billowing legs of the look-alike pants' — here I turned and paused to display my fabric tie strings — ‘will make you feel like a pampered slave girl in an opulent harem, when that sultan of yours comes home at night.'

I took several steps so that my legs would billow.

‘Accented with a handsome wide copper bracelet' — I held up my shackled wrist — ‘and glittering gold sandals — just the thing for a Stark's Bog back yard barbecue. Or a Bliss family Memorial Day picnic, Ginny?'

I smiled ingenuously and descended the steps to a thunder of applause. I was pleased. I had finally been accepted, had overcome my Soybean origins. No one knew about my nocturnal lapses.

After the fashion show, we womenfolk split into our rival clans for family picnics. Almost everyone in town was related to one or more of the five main families, the Blisses being one. The Bliss family picnics were always held at the old homestead — Ira's and my house- regardless of which hapless relative happened to inhabit it at the time. And this picnic was no exception. I had been up all night chopping potatoes for potato salad. Ira was back from the firing range by the time I got home and had removed the cover from the swimming pool and had tapped a keg of Genesee. His relatives were starting to drift in. I couldn't tell them apart — they were all solid, well-built people with dark or gray curly hair. Old men kept putting arms around me and whispering, ‘Ira's a lucky man to have such a lovely bride.' Ira watched with pride and gratitude: His family had accepted me. I smiled at the old men warmly.