Kinflicks (66 page)

I looked up to discover Ira's rifle aimed at my head.

‘I'm going to splatter you all over this room if you don't shut your filthy dyke mouth!' he gasped.

I looked down the barrel without emotion. So this was it? Death had been stalking me all my life and now had the upper hand. It appeared I was to die a homicide victim in a stone colonial in Stark's Bog, Vermont — an unexpected fate for a country girl from Tennessee. Well, so be it. It was my just desserts. I had married a man without ‘loving' him, whatever that lofty term might mean, which I no longer knew. I was in the process of coming to loathe him, a kind and decent man, for being exactly what I had married him for being — responsible and reliable and disciplined, and predictable and dull and boring. Ira had fulfilled his end of our bargain by providing me with an orderly life, but I was apparently no longer prepared to fulfill my end by being a quiet gentle woman who was a joy to come home to. I closed my eyes and waited for my head to smash to bits, like a dropped pumpkin.

Nothing happened. I heard sobbing. I opened my eyes just as Ira hurled his rifle into the corner and collapsed weeping into Father Bliss's wing chair. We fell asleep and slept there all night. The next morning I woke up with a throbbing headache and the nausea of self-disgust. I opened one eye and discovered Ira gazing at me with despair. We flew on wings of contrition to embrace each other in the middle of the floor and to bathe each other's face in wild kisses. We spent the hour until Ira left for his office vowing to lead a new life of domestic devotion ever afterward.

‘I want to make you happy, Ginny,' he murmured.

‘I am happy, Ira,' I murmured back, trying to convince us both.

‘We'll make a son tonight,' Ira promised, as he nibbled my ear lobe just before rushing out to his car.

That night for supper I served up the game birds. I covered their pathetic little heads with lettuce leaves from my salad and poked away loyally, trying to flake the hauntingly meager layer of flesh from the delicate framework of bones.

‘Delicious!' Ira informed me, just as Eddie had always done concerning soybean croquettes.

‘Delicious,' I echoed weakly, acutely conscious of the fact that I was about to have a son implanted in my womb. Mother had always insisted that personal preference was irrelevant, that the doing of one's duty was what counted. It was my duty to provide my husband with an heir, and that was that.

But, as it turned out, that night wasn't an auspicious one for son-making. Although the orgasm I had experienced during Wendy's conception hadn't recurred, Ira had given up trying to make our sex life exciting. Hanging from the beam had shaken his confidence in his manual. The project he was now devoting his considerable organizational skills to was producing a son. He had clipped an article from the
Reader's Digest
on determining the sex of a baby at conception, based on the different rates at which male and female sperm traveled under different vaginal conditions. Marked in red pencil on the kitchen calendar now were the days of my menstrual cycle most propitious for the conception of a male. I felt like a medieval walled city about to be besieged. Ira bought me a douche bag and mixed up a solution in a jar. He was resolutely abstaining from sex so as to amass sperm for the big assault.

‘But why does it have to be a son?' I asked.

‘Why a
son? Everyone
wants a son.'

But I wasn't even convinced I wanted another
baby,
never mind its sex. However, if I wasn't going to fill Father Bliss's house to the rafters with descendants, what
was
I going to do? What excuse could I give Ira to delay or call off this procreative blitzkrieg? I had no idea. And there was my duty to be performed.

The first couple of attempts failed. Ira's sperm had undoubtedly drowned in the sea of baking soda solution he had pumped into me with the douche bag, as I lay sprawled in the bathtub pointing out weakly, ‘But Ira, I'll probably give birth to a batch of cookies, after all this baking soda.'

It was late fall by now. I stuck Wendy in a backpack and began taking marathon hikes across fields and through woods and down into valleys. These trips were tainted with a certain wistfulness: If I didn't hike now, I'd soon be pregnant and unable to hike very far with Wendy on my back. Wendy loved her new vantage point and bounced with glee as we walked.

Or she would exhaust herself with her bouncings and babblings and would fall asleep with her head on my shoulder. Sometimes I wasn't home to fix Ira's lunch, or got home so late that supper wasn't on the table until seven and Ira was late for his meetings. Much of the time the house was a shambles. I had simply stopped trying to keep up with it all. I did no more than an occasional pickup and a token vacuuming. Sometimes I would put a load of dirty clothes in the washer and leave them there for a week or more, forgetting to switch them to the dryer; they would emerge covered with green mold.

Ira was becoming sullen. He no longer assured me of his concern for my happiness. ‘It's not that you're asked to do very much,' he complained one night after a supper of TV dinners as he drew on his cigar.

‘Not
much
!' I itemized the details that went into maintaining the slave labor camp he called his home.

‘But Ginny, it's your
job.
I work all day doing lots of things
I
don't like so that we can have money to live on. Adults have to work to live. It's as simple as that. You're
not
doing your duty, Ginny.'

‘God!' I gasped with outrage. ‘You and your accountant mentality!'

‘If you don't want to live in my house and be my wife and have my babies,' Ira notified me, very sure of himself, ‘you'd better be thinking about what you
do
want to do.' He took down the calendar and devoted himself to a calculation of my fertile days for that month.

On one of my walks, I ended up at the beaver pond, having approached it unexpectedly from a new direction. Wendy was asleep. I held my breath, waiting to be socked with a gutful of emotion at the sight of the place. I had been back since, but only at night on the back of Ira's Sno Cat, which wasn't the same as being there alone in late fall during the day.

So far the emotion was mild, bearable, pleasantly nostalgic. I walked around the edge of the pond. The sun was indirect but hot, and the meadow of dried timothy rustled as I walked slowly up through it toward the cabin site. Some black charred rubble remained, not much. The winter's snows had been about their healing work, washing the ashes down into the meadow. A few bold burdocks had fought their way up through the ruins.

I looked down toward the pond, so still and quiet compared to that last insane winter. Occasional water bugs scooted across the surface, sending out patterns of concentric ripples. The dead gray trees, not as ominous as usual under the bright sun, stood like silent brooding sentinels to the human folly that had surrounded them that winter.

I strolled around slowly, testing myself for emotion, like dipping a toe in hot bathwater, heading ultimately for our former garden site. It was completely taken over by a tangled riot of weeds. Growing up from the tomato patch where I had spread Eddie's ashes were some dried goldenrod. I picked one stalk and stuck it through my buttonhole.

I walked down the path toward Mona's and Atheliah's farm. The path was overgrown, nearly undetectable. I thought I might stop by and say hello. I hadn't seen them for over a year. The last time had been in the IGA. They raced up with arms outstretched to embrace me. I glanced around nervously. Two of Ira's aunts and several cousins and the owner of the store were watching. Where did my loyalties lie? I knew by now that both sides refused to let them lie in both places. It was a wrenching moment of truth. My arms rose flutteringly from my sides of their own accord. Hastily, I drew them down and greeted Mona and Atheliah coolly, with words alone. I had made my choice. But I was now no longer quite so sure about it.

I stood overlooking the rambling house. A party was in progress. They had probably drummed up some obscure saint's day as an excuse for a festival, or perhaps it was an Indian Summer rite. Black pots were being stirred over fires. People lay around in the sun, mostly undressed, playing instruments, smoking dope, laughing. A wild running and leaping game was going on where the cornfield had been. I saw no evidence of even a token garden this year. I started down the hill toward the encampment, with a big smile on my face.

Then I stopped abruptly and stared at the scene, while the pain I had been expecting finally swept over me in a great tidal wave. I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes tightly against it. I shook with agony. And I knew that there was no going back. I didn't know how to go forward, but I knew I couldn't go back. I would turn into a pillar of salt, like Lot's wife fleeing Sodom. But I wanted to go back. I wanted to loll in the sun with Eddie again and smoke dope and laugh and forget about baking soda douches and dirty diapers. I wanted to default on my duty. But the flip side of lolling in the sun was the burst of insanity that resulted in my neglect of Wendy, the day Ira found her in the road. The two went hand in hand and had killed Eddie….

Wendy awoke with a start and began whimpering. I slid off the pack and lifted her out. Then I sat against a rock, holding her on my lap facing me. I kissed her chubby face, all flushed and damp and grumpy at being awake. She smiled reluctantly. I bounced her and blew in her ear to cheer her up. She laughed, but angrily, not wanting to.

My little vampire bat grabbed the dried goldenrod out of my buttonhole. I restrained an impulse to grab it back. I forced myself to sit and watch calmly as she slowly dismembered it, leaf by leaf. Then I took the pack in one hand, and Wendy's moist chubby little hand in the other, and we tottered back through the woods toward town.

12
Friday, July 7

By now, when Ginny tossed the baby birds into the air, they at least flapped their wings cooperatively as they plummeted to the ground like stones. They were getting the idea. They were exercising their muscles, and perhaps even hastening the development of feathers. She told herself that their learning to fly would happen like Wendy's learning to walk: One moment she was crawling, watching adults towering past, and the next moment, in a burst of inspiration, she too was walking. One morning the birds would suddenly fly away and never be seen again. Ideally.

Twice a day, in the morning when she got up and in the late afternoon when she got back from the hospital, Ginny would take them outside, stroking their heads with her index finger. By now those heads were covered half with the fluffy gray down of infancy and half with sleek black adult feathers. The down stuck out in unruly clumps from the smooth shiny hood that would soon extend to cover their backs as well. They were ugly, she had to admit it. They looked like Australian kiwi birds. They were clumsy and awkward and ugly, like any adolescent form of life. If she hadn't been a compulsive personality, she'd have flushed them down the toilet. She had to force herself not to strangle them. What in hell was she doing saddled with two young birds who screeched mercilessly the minute she set foot in the cabin? Didn't she have enough problems without theirs as well, what with going every day to play Clara Barton to her mother's Camille?

When Ginny reached her mother's door, she paused. Over the past two weeks she had developed a real reluctance to enter this room. She never knew what new horror of physical dysfunction would greet her. The second transfusion had worked for four days. The various membranes had stopped leaking, her mother's platelet count had risen, her bleeding time had fallen. Then everything had broken down again.

Taking a deep breath, she knocked, waited, then pushed in the door. How dreadful to be always available like this, for a woman who cherished her privacy. Her mother looked up from her encyclopedia and smiled faintly.

‘Hello, Mother.'

Her mother nodded.

Ginny sat down and tried to think of something cheerful to say. ‘Pretty day out,' was the best she could do.

‘Is it?'

‘Remember those birds?'

‘Yes. How are they doing?'

‘Fine. I'm giving them flying lessons.'

Her mother laughed. ‘That should be entertaining. What do you do — jump off the porch flapping your arms?'

Ginny smiled. ‘Actually, I just toss them into the air and let them figure it out. I wonder, though. Do you suppose birds know how to fly instinctively, or do they learn by watching their parents?'

‘Hmmm. Good question. I don't know. Did you look it up in that book?'

‘Birdsall doesn't know either. Or if he does, he's not telling. What I can't figure out is if I can speed things up. I have to get rid of them before they're totally dependent on me. After all, I won't be here much longer.'

‘Well,
I
could always take over when you go back to Vermont.' Mrs. Babcock was surprised at the ease with which this rolled off her tongue. Was Ginny
going
back to Vermont? Mrs. Babcock had reason to think not, adding up several dozen facial expressions and a few veiled remarks. And she herself wouldn't be out of this hospital any time soon, if at all. This morning in the bathroom mirror she had discovered blood blisters on her gums. It appeared that the mucous membranes of her mouth would be the next tissues to let her down. She hadn't yet notified Dr. Vogel or Miss Sturgill. She was feeling very protective toward them, and most of all toward her own worried and unhappy daughter. They were all young people, caught up in the problems of living, blissfully unaware of those of dying.

Ginny winced, both at her mother's belief that she'd be out of the hospital soon, or ever, and also at her mother's assumption that she herself would be returning to Vermont Although this was what she now thought she wanted. It was agony returning every evening to the empty cabin. When her evenings had been crammed with Wendy's bath and bedtime, with dirty dishes, with eleven o'clock feedings, with lovemaking, she had wished fervently for just
one
long luxurious evening uninterrupted by demands from her insatiable child and husband. Now, after two weeks of such evenings, she couldn't bear it any longer. She would pace the floor, hovering over the phone, struggling with herself not to pick it up and call Ira and beg his forgiveness. A dozen times a night she would open the refrigerator door and stare into it without being hungry. Cups of cold coffee and tea sat undrunk all over the living room. She would devote more time than she ever had to Wendy and Ira to her ridiculous birds — putting fresh grass in their basket, cleaning up fallen bits of food, stroking their ugly heads, when they only wanted to be left alone to sleep. The night noises — bullfrogs in the pond and locusts and lowing cattle — would alarm her into double-locking the doors and shutters and propping a loaded rifle by the front door. She would fling herself down on the couch and snatch a book from the bookcase, but her mind would be in Vermont — picturing Ira settling back in his armchair and drawing on his cigar, while Wendy scrambled onto his lap and intently tried to poke a finger through the smoke rings he'd blow for her. Ginny would crawl miserably into bed and wrap her arms and legs around her pillows, pretending that they were Ira's warm body.