Kinflicks (64 page)

‘No,' I said quietly.

Atheliah looked at me with disappointment, Mona with scorn.

‘You mean you
like
living like this?' Mona asked in disbelief, waving her hand around to include the baby blue swirnming pool and the antique stone colonial.

‘Sure. It's all right,' I said softly, thinking of Eddie, how horrified she'd have been to see me now.

‘What would Eddie say?' Atheliah said sadly.

‘I never think of Eddie,' I said quickly, bathed in pain.

‘Your loyalties certainly are short-lived,' Mona said. We lay in silence. Soon, they got up and dressed and left

During the two weeks that I was alone in that echoing house, I came to a decision: I wanted a baby. Father Bliss had been dead for one hundred and fifty years, but he lived on in that stone house. He lived on in the memories of his descendants, who passed on to their children the story of his carving five miniature tombstones in the backyard burying plot for his five children who died of small-pox in one month. He lived on through his genes. You had only to look at the current-day Bliss clan to see the features that remained constant, even through the onslaught of intermarriage. Looking at them all, I knew what Father Bliss had looked like, would have known even without his brooding portrait in the parlor. Living in his house and among his descendants, I felt his continuing presence.

Well, I, too, wanted to be a continuing presence. That was why I needed a baby. This child would be my hostage against Death.

‘Ira, how do you feel about our having a baby?' I asked a couple of days after he returned from his mock war, sore and exhausted.

‘You're not…?'

‘No, no. I was just thinking about it while you were gone.'

He beamed. ‘Ginny, I'd
love
to have a baby. My first wife never wanted children, so I didn't want to suggest it to you.'

‘Ira, I want your baby,' I said fervently. We made love, even though it was 7:15 on a Tuesday night. Ira missed his fire department meeting, and the phone rang unanswered fifteen times as the firemen tried to locate him. And I had an orgasm, one that outdid even those with Eddie. Ira lay with his head on my rash-covered chest and wept with joy. His warm tears bathed my splotched breasts.

Bird season came, but Ira stayed home to bring me saltines in bed for my morning sickness. The snows began, but Ira's Sno Cat sat untouched in the tool shed while he lay with his head on my belly listening for heartbeats and letting the fetus kick him in the face from its uterine fastness. Rodney came by to take him ice fishing, but Ira lent him his drill and stayed home to massage my swollen ankles. No longer did he demand of me if I was happy. He knew I was, and I knew he was.

Never was a child more eagerly awaited. Or so it seemed to us. I read book after book on childbirth, things like this: ‘Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto welcomed our daughter into this world! Our daughter! This lofty victorious music provided the background for her first yell, her lusty salutation to her triumphant parents! I glow with delight as I gaze down at our little cherub. She enthralls me! I experience a profoundly reverent serenity in the depths of my soul, as after an assignment successfully completed!'

No wonder there was a population crisis, I reflected, if delivery did all that for a woman. I couldn't wait. At last I had found myself; all along I had been destined to be a brood mare. Why had it taken me so long to come around to accepting my fate with grace?

One afternoon I came waddling down the stairs and into the living room in pursuit of a Rolaid. The room erupted with shrieking faces. I fell to the floor in terror, tripping over a cord and bringing a lamp smashing down on my head. Angela, who had arranged this surprise shower, hovered anxiously over me while Ira's assembled aunts and cousins and I all waited to see if I would miscarry. When it appeared that I would not, I was able to stop spitting and snarling and cursing Angela and get on with opening my gifts.

Freshly armed with stacks of crib sheets and stretch diapers, outfitted with bushels of large safety pins, I was now ready for anything the maternity ward might bring.

Except for the pain. Such pain isn't possible, I told myself as I lay writhing on my labor bed. I had been pleading like a junky for a fix of Demerol. The delivery itself, which I watched in mirrors even more intricately arranged than those Laverne had employed to view her cervix, passed in a blur of vivid colors — green from the baby's first of many bowel movements, the black of her Bliss hair, the red of my own blood. Rather than the sense of triumph my books had promised, I felt mostly relief to have the unendurable pain over with.

Wendy had been born shortly before the opening day of trout season, but Ira's fishing tackle hung unused in the mud room. Instead Ira lay on our bed and watched with fascination as the tiny girl baby kneaded my bulging breasts and nuzzled and suckled them. At last, a profession I could summon some genuine enthusiasm for: wetnursehood.

Every morning at ten Ira would rush home from his Sno Cat salesroom to help me give Wendy a bath. We would gaze enraptured as she flailed at the water in the small white bowl with her pudgy arms and legs. Had any couple ever before produced such a perfect little body? We thought not. We would encase her, like a baked pigeon in clay, in a gooey white crust; so entranced were we that we'd fail to notice that one was powdering where the other had already oiled.

At night when Ira came home, his first question was always, “Well, and did our little angel have a bowel movement this afternoon?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Still hard?'

‘No, softer this time, thank goodness.'

‘Like oatmeal, or more like banana?'

‘Well, less like thick cream soup than yesterday. More like scrambled eggs. Only brown.'

‘Not green?'

‘No, caramel colored, rather than chocolate.'

‘Did she have to strain?'

‘Some. But not like yesterday.'

‘Sounds pretty good,' said he, aficionado of feces.

Ira and I would be in our bed at night after she had finished nursing and was spewing white vomit all over our sheets, and we would inspect minutely each tiny, painfully perfect limb and feature, like new-car owners searching for dents and scratches. Never did an infant have less privacy. She would casually kick out a foot, or wrinkle her forehead, or purse her lips, and we would both instantaneously snap to attention, searching for ways in which to satisfy whatever cryptic whim she might be expressing.

One night at supper I said to Ira, ‘Why don't you take a week off so that we can go to Tennessee to show Wendy to my parents?'

Except for rare trips to Montreal and Boston for a hockey or baseball game, Ira had been out of Vermont only during his army years at Fort Dix and during summer camp at Camp Drum. He said resolutely that if New Jersey were what the rest of the world was like, he wanted nothing to do with it. ‘Guess I already live in just about the nicest place around,' he'd say smugly. ‘Why do I need to go to Schenectady?'

Meanwhile, Ira had choked on his pork chop. ‘You said your parents were dead,' he said with astonishment.

It was true. I had told him my parents couldn't come to our wedding or reception because they were dead.

‘They
were,
to me, at that time,' I explained feebly, incapable of justifying my cutting them out of my life in hopes of minimizing their bourgeois influences on me. In retrospect, what I had done was clearly unjustifiable. I saw going home to them with a husband and a baby as a gesture of apology and reconciliation.

‘Please,
Ira. Tennessee is not like New Jersey.' I carefully refrained from claiming that Tennessee was
nicer
than New Jersey.

Ira stared at me and then returned sadly to his pork chops. ‘All right,' he finally said. ‘Then we could go down to Boca Raton to show her to my parents. Let's do it in March.' I knew that only the prospect of displaying Wendy would ever have budged him out of Stark's Bog.

My parents greeted us at the airport gate as though we were immigrant relatives who had finally made it to the New World. I had never before experienced such rib-smashing embraces from them. Mother's Instamatic devoured yard after yard of film. Clearly, they were savoring their victory: After more than four years of silence, unbroken by so much as a covered-bridge post card asking for bail, their wild-eyed daughter had returned to the fold (as they had assured each other she inevitably would) with a handsome son-in-law and an adorable granddaughter in tow. Their Ginny had finally come around.

They were very discreet, however, about not rubbing it in. Mother immediately assumed complete care of Wendy and allowed her to wreck her house without so much as a concealed grimace. Wendy was by now learning to walk and careened around grabbing hold of things like tablecloths set with heirloom china in order to steady herself.

The Major put his arm around Ira's shoulder — Ira glancing down uneasily to note his missing finger — and led him on a tour of his factory and his farm. He took him to play golf at the country club. He even discussed the possibility of buying a whole-life policy.

One afternoon while Ira and the Major were out golfing and Wendy was napping, Mother and I sat in awkward silence in the living room, listening to the ticking of her steepled family clock.

‘We've missed hearing from you, dear,' she began with considerable embarrassment.

‘Yes, well…'

‘I hope you've been well and happy.' I glanced at her with restrained hatred for her charity. Here she'd been hoping I was well and happy, and I'd been in Vermont wishing they would drop dead so that I could finally escape their all-pervasive influence — having realized some time back that even when I wasn't living the life they had reared me for, I was still reacting
against
them; so that how I'd lived had never yet been a pure decision of what
I
really wanted. It was a most unsettling insight. It shot theories of free will all to hell.

‘I
have
been well and happy, Mother. In between being sick and miserable.'

‘Oh well, that's life,' she said glibly, closing the door on the topic.

But wait! everything in me raged.
Why
don't you want to hear the ways in which I've been sick and miserable? Because I knew she didn't.

‘Such a delightful child — Wendy.'

‘Thank you, Mother. I must be doing something right for a change, huh?'

Mother chose to ignore my challenge, as usual. ‘You mustn't wait too long to have your second,' she said in a confiding tone, having welcomed me into the charmed circle of multiparous mothers without consulting me. ‘It's fun for them to grow up together.'

‘To tell you the truth, Mother, the thought of a second child has never entered my mind.' That was a boldfaced lie. In fact, I knew that motherhood was my chosen profession. I was good at it. It blissed me out, as Eddie used to say. I had finally found myself. And the thought of a second baby had definitely been festering in my mind for the past couple of months. However,

I felt Mother's remark was presumptuous. I didn't like her taking my allegiances for granted.

She looked taken aback. ‘Oh well, excuse me, Ginny. It's just that only children are often so lonely. And having two makes taking care of the first one so much easier.'

‘If you ask me, that's like saying that we can get out of Vietnam by invading Laos.' Why did I have to be so insistently snippy to my poor mother?

Mom and Dad Bliss's luxury condominium rose up like a gray stone asparagus spear on the Boca Raton coastline. ‘Boca,' they called it.

‘Kids! Don't you love them? Have lots! Fill Father Bliss's house to the rafters with them!' Mom Bliss instructed me one afternoon on the beach while Ira was off playing golf with Dad Bliss. Mom Bliss was lying in a red-flowered bathing suit in the damp sand, sinking slowly, with water seeping up around her. Wendy was tottering toward the surf as it receded, then squealing and tottering back to me as new waves broke and swept in. It was hard
not
to love kids in that setting — their perfect compact little bodies baked brown under the scorching sun; each shell, each bird, each piece of slimy seaweed a thing of wonder and mystery. Watching Wendy was like drinking a six-pack of Geritol; my senses, jaded by four months of blinding white snow, opened up like starving Venus's flytraps would during black fly season in Vermont.

‘There's nothing more rewarding for a woman than watching her children flourish.'

‘What if they
don't
flourish?' I asked, trying hard to resist this brainwashing by secret agents for the goddess of fertility. Damn it, I wanted this second baby I was about to embark on to be my own pure unbiased decision. But was such a decision possible?

‘Yes sir, it's just so everlastingly
interesting
having children around.'

‘How come you moved to Boca?'

‘Well, it's just so
cold
in Vermont as you get older.'

‘Don't you miss seeing your children and grandchildren?'

‘Dad and I have earned a rest,' she said, forgetting that she was in the middle of a P.R. job for parenthood. ‘Angela would come over with her four and say, “Mom, would you keep them for the day?” It just got to be too much. I've spent my whole
life
looking after kids — eight of them. Did
we
ever have all this fancy birth control stuff you kids today have?
We did not!
No. We had our babies as they came, and were grateful if we lived through it! And I
never
asked
my
mother to keep them, you can bet. So I think I deserve some peace and quiet before I die.'

On the plane home, while Wendy was struggling to get down from my lap in order to lurch down the aisle tripping up stewardesses and snatching magazines from passengers, I said to Ira, ‘Our mothers think we should have another baby.'