Kinflicks (65 page)

Ira looked up in surprise from
Road and Track
and said, ‘Well, so do our fathers. So do I. Don't you?'

Apparently people on all levels had already made the decision. I resented being transformed into a baby machine. ‘I don't know.'

‘You
don't know?
Well, we can't have just
one
child.'

‘Why not?'

‘But people don't
have
just one child. Jesum Crow, Ginny. Besides, you want a son, don't you?'

We went from perpetual midsummer in Boca to deep-drifted spring in Stark's Bog, with only our tans to remind us that we'd been away. Snow had piled up in our absence to the bottom of our downstairs windowsills, and temperatures hadn't been above freezing for ten days.

‘There now, wasn't that neat getting away for some sun in the middle of winter?' I asked Ira.

‘I don't see why we need to go all the way down there. Vermont gets sun, too, you know.'

‘Where?'

Two months later Wendy and I rushed back to Tennessee under considerably less gala circumstances: The Major was dead, of a heart attack on his office floor. I saw Jim and Karl for the first time in several years and discovered that we now had very little to say to each other, in spite of our shared past. As the Major's coffin was lowered into the ground, I reflected that it really wasn't enough: The fact that he was leaving behind him these offspring to bear his genes into the future really didn't compensate for the extinction that he had always insisted lay beyond the grave.

Back in Vermont, things were suddenly different. Wendy stubbornly insisted on a cup when I offered my breast. I was destroyed. I had intended to nurse her for at
least
another year, in keeping with my Earth Mother self-image. This was my first hint of the enormity of my folly: Wendy was supposed to be an extension of me, my lifeline to the Future. Was it really possible that
she
might have things she wanted to do?

What she now wanted instead of my milk were foodstuffs she could dump on the floor and hurl around the kitchen. Spinach began flying against the walls like bugs splattering against a car windshield in midsummer. What she wanted was to toddle furiously through the house, her damp diapers sagging behind her. What she wanted was to cling to the living room bookcase five times a day and drag down all the books, which I would foolishly replace each time in preparation for the next.

My schedule had become nothing more than a superimposition of Ira's schedule on Wendy's. Wendy was up at six thirty for her breakfast of mashed fruit and hot cereal and milk. She roared around on her missions of destruction while I mopped up the kitchen, washed down the walls, shampooed the rug, fixed Ira's breakfast. When Ira left, Wendy went back to bed until ten. At ten she had her bath, which Ira no longer rushed home to witness, then her lunch of mashed something or other and milk; then another crawl or toddle through the house to recreate the havoc I had undone during her nap. Then another nap until two, when we watched ‘Hidden Heartbeats' and ‘Westview General,' a relic of our lost nursing days. Then supper of chopped meat and vegetables and milk, most of which ended up on the floor and on her shirt and on my face. Into her sleep suit to be ready for an hour of attention from Ira when he got home. That meant I had to myself an hour and a half in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, between the hours of six thirty in the morning and ten thirty at night, when I fell into an exhausted sleep — during which time I had to do my housework, iron Ira's shirts, fix dinner, scrape Wendy's food off the walls, wash and fold her diapers. It was too much — even for a glutton for structure like myself.

I began to resent every volume Wendy pulled down, every diaper I rinsed. I even hated her charming clowning antics designed to amuse me, like when she'd stand with her back to me and bend over and look at me upside down through her legs. Even if I took her outside and tried to pull the weeds in our borders, when I looked around she'd be hanging over the swimming pool staring at her reflection. Or she'd be halfway down the driveway toward the road. My former neat orderly life was chaos. My serene placid Stark's Bog personality was frayed and frazzled. My polyester pantsuits were splattered with apricot. And on top of it all, Wendy was displaying an alarming interest in giving up her morning nap.

I had been too wrapped up in Wendy to bother finding babysitters, so I never went out. I was on leave from the Women's Auxiliary, and I hadn't been to a surprise shower since my own over a year ago. The only people I ever saw were Wendy and Ira. I clung desperately to Ira. When he came in at night, my first words were invariably, ‘What's the gossip? Whom did you see today? What's new?'

And the hideous thing was that, to hear Ira tell it,
nothing
was ever new. He never brought home juicy tidbits about the latest premarital pregnancies and closet alcoholics. He'd never even reveal who had bought how much insurance naming whom as beneficiary. Ira didn't have a malicious bone in his body; he didn't approve of gossip. That was why it was occurring to me that basically I loathed him. His bland, amiable acceptance of everything and everyone in his narrow little world was driving me bananas. I had originally considered this quality tolerance developed to a lofty degree, a tolerance that had allowed him to marry a Soybeaner in the face of dismay from friends and family. I was coming to suspect that the quality was instead an absence of discernment. Ira had no taste — not
poor
taste,
no
taste. For instance he had married me, who was clearly not what he wanted or needed (in spite of my efforts to convince us both that I was the quiet gentle woman of our dreams). For Ira, nothing was any better or any worse than anything else. His rotten friend Rodney Lamoureux at least snarled and snapped and fought for what he thought was right, like Eddie herself. Never mind that what Rodney and Eddie thought was right was usually wrong.

‘What's new?' I'd demand as Ira walked in the door at night.

‘Nothing much.'

“Whom did you see?' I'd pant.

‘Nobody much.' He'd shrug off my interrogations to inquire about teething and toilet training. Wistfully he'd ask about my period, in hopes that an intrepid sperm had skirted my stalwart diaphragm. (I continued to postpone my decision on son production.)

One night in early fall he skulked in guiltily. As I hung on him and searched his face for evidence of tidings from the outside world, he mumbled sheepishly, ‘Thought I might go up to camp with Rodney this week. Shoot me some birds.'

I let my arms fall from around his neck and stared at him, stricken. So! Ira was intent upon breaking up our home. All right. If that was the way he wanted it, let him desert his wife and child. I turned away, swallowing tears.

‘Fine!' I said brightly. ‘Great! Just run along and have fun! Wendy and I will be just
fine,
and waiting for Daddy when he gets home! Won't we, Wendy?'

Since my marriage I had resolutely avoided the evening news on the theory that if you don't like something, it's best to insulate yourself from it. Unread magazines and newspapers from the past year sat in piles in the television room. But that Monday night, when Ira and I would have been making love if he weren't off shooting birds, I sat down and watched Howard K. Smith, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite back to back. Then I stayed up all night reading my way through the stacks of newsprint.

It was incredible! Monster tanks were rolling through rain forests leaving wakes of dead bodies. Nuclear warheads dotted the globe with the frequency of mice turds in my cupboards.

Starving children were fighting over undigested grain in cow dung. Busloads of black children were being overturned by white mobs. The oceans were poison soups. Jesus Christ, Eddie was
right
after all! Ours was a death-dealing society. How was it possible that I was still alive? And here I had been fretting over whether or not to conceive another ruling-class consumer. It was obscene.

I leapt up and stalked back and forth through the echoing house. Then I flung myself on the parlor couch and stared up at pony-tailed Father Bliss, thinking about the Major's coffin being lowered into the ground. It's not enough! It's not
enough,
I kept wailing. So what if you
do
have descendants? That still doesn't prevent your suffocating on factory emissions, doesn't prevent your being sizzled in a nuclear holocaust, doesn't prevent your dying an agonized death. If you are
lucky,
the most you can hope for is to be lowered into the ground where you will rot and be eaten by worms….

The world
needed
me, and I was trapped here in the woods rinsing bibs and mashing bananas! For a fucking little vampire bat of a kid who nourished herself by sucking my strength, leaving me shriveled like a poorly embalmed mummy in the process….

In a moment of clarity, I realized that I had gone crazy overnight. I picked up the phone and called Angela, the only person I could begin to talk to in town. After the usual politeness, I exploded, ‘Don't you ever get
tired
of it all, Angela — the same thing day after day after day, year after year? Meals to cook, beds to change, laundry to fold, toys to pick up. Baths, naps, diapers. Trout season, bird season, buck season. It just goes on and on. Nothing ever changes. It's like being in prison. And meanwhile, people are dropping like flies, and the world is collapsing, and…'

‘Oh sure, I get like that sometimes,' Angela interrupted, clearly confused by my call.

‘What do you do?'

‘Oh, Bill and I scream at each other and kick and throw plates. And then Bill drags me off to bed and knocks me up and I have another baby.' She laughed merrily.

I stared at the phone in horror.
‘Really?'

‘You should have another baby, Ginny. Really you should. Two are so much easier than one.'

She
has
to think that, I reminded myself carefully. She has four. She wants to think she's taken the best possible course. She's out looking for converts, like everyone else.

‘That's what everyone always says…'

‘Oh, but it's true. And it gets easier with each one. Why, I'm so relaxed with four that I'm about to fall apart.'

It was true. Angela did look unhinged most of the time. Her children were all about two years apart. Most people's were. That meant that Angela's method of fighting the domestic doldrums would last for about fifteen months between the birth of the last child and the conception of the next. Wendy was older than fifteen months. Any day now Ira and I would be dragging each other off to bed to make another baby in an effort to restore my sanity. I preferred to think that conception was a rational decision. But if I wanted my babies to be rational decisions, I had better pull myself together and get busy deciding whether or not I wanted another.

When Ira returned from his great bird hunt, I was lying in a state of nervous collapse on the parlor couch staring at the portrait of Father Bliss. Books from the bookcase lay strewn over the floor. Spinach was caked all over the kitchen and all through my hair. I had just completed a series of letters — requesting brochures on land purchases in the Klondike, job opportunities in New Zealand, immigration policies in Zambia. This behavior was in keeping with the adage that had ruled my life to date: ‘When in doubt, cut out.'

‘Where's my little angel?' Ira asked, flinging half a dozen decaying sparrows at me to clean for supper.

‘Damned if I know,' I whispered.

‘What?
You
don't know?'

‘The back yard maybe?'

Ira raced into the yard calling, ‘Wendy, Daddy's home!' The calls got farther and farther from the house, and increasingly panicked.

Ira found Wendy careering down the road to town on her chubby little legs with her damp diaper trailing in the dirt.

When he carried her, miraculously unharmed, into the house, he was quivering with rage. I had never seen my assiduously good-natured husband angry before. I watched, fascinated, delighted, as his black eyes flashed sparks of fury.

He went upstairs and put Wendy in her crib. Then he came stomping down and stood looking at me, speechless.

I shrugged indifferently. ‘I counted up today. I've been at this baby stuff for twenty-seven months. And I'm tired of it.'

‘Tired
of it?' he shouted. ‘So you just thought you'd let her wander down the road and get run over, so that you won't have to be bothered with her anymore?'

‘I didn't know she was in the road.'

‘That's just the point!' he yelled.
‘You didn't know where our baby was!'

‘Baby this, baby that. I'm
sick
of fucking babies!' I screamed. ‘Maybe I want to think about something else for a change,
talk
about something besides bowel movements,
do
something besides rinse diapers!'

“Well, that's
tough
if you're sick of it, Ginny,' Ira snarled. “Because you and I have quite a few more years left of Wendy. I know you're used to just packing up and leaving when you get tired of things. That's how you've lived your whole life. You're a spoiled brat! But you
chose
to have this baby, Ginny. It was
your
idea. Just remember that. And you're dang well going to care for her! It's your
duty!'

‘Go fuck yourself,' I suggested calmly. I hurled his dead birds at him. ‘And take your goddam sparrows and shove them up your ass.'

‘If you use your Soybean language on me
once
more, Ginny Bliss, I'm going to knock the hang out of you!'

“Well, well, Prince Holier Than Thou shows his true colors,' I said thoughtfully, extending my bare foot and studying my toenails. ‘Mr. Bland has come out of his closet to side with his illustrious array of bigoted relatives — the charming and fascinating folk of Stark's Bog, Vermont.'