Kinflicks (82 page)

‘Please come back, Ginny. We can have another baby and everything will be fine. The house is a wreck. I haven't had a hot meal in weeks. Wendy cries herself to sleep at night. She needs a full-time mother, Ginny. And I need a wife. A
real
wife.'

Ginny froze, thinking of her bruised mother, who had been a real wife, a real mother — for as long as she was needed. How would her mother advise her? To profit from her example and behave differently, or to copy her martyrdom and thus validate it? Ginny studied the question. Then she remembered that what her
mother
wanted or didn't want of her was no longer to be the determining factor in her life. The leading lady had magnanimously removed herself from Ginny's script. Ginny was on her own. And there was too little time left to condemn herself to a living death at age twenty-seven. “No,' she said faintly.

‘No?'

‘I'm filing for divorce, Ira. And I want Wendy.'

‘To marry that hippy creep?'

‘No.'

‘Where are you going?'

She paused, trying to decide. ‘I don't know.'

‘Of
course
you can't have Wendy. I'm not having my child raised by a lunatic.'

‘A lunatic who
happens
to be her mother,' she pointed out, warming to the fray.

‘Hasn't the poor child suffered enough from you? You run off with another man without so much as saying good-by to her…'

‘You chased me out with a rifle in the middle of the night.'

‘…and now when
you
need
her,
for sick reasons of your own, you crawl back trying to weasel your way into her affections. But it won't work, Ginny. She doesn't want you anymore. She already calls Angela “Mommy.” Give the child a break. Leave her alone.'

Ginny was breathless with pain at the thought of Wendy's calling Angela Mommy. ‘But I thought she cried herself to sleep?' she gasped.

‘Hardly.'

‘But that's what you
said?'

‘You flatter yourself. You know, marrying you was the biggest mistake of my life.'

‘I wouldn't class it among my finest hours either.' Wendy, her infant Isaac, lay on the altar. Was she prepared to sacrifice her to the god of selfhood? Or would she crawl back to Ira on his terms, which appeared to be the only ones he was capable of considering?

‘I'm sorry about your mother,' Ira said, softening. ‘She was a fine devoted family woman. You could do worse than to model yourself after her.'

In the course of their conversation, they had been through the sentic cycles of longing and anger. Ginny could tell from the tone of Ira's voice that they could now proceed to regret and reconciliation if she would cooperate. She could do worse than to model herself after her mother, he had just said. And yet her hyper-devoted mother, in the end, had to dismiss Ginny for the sake of her own development.

Quietly, she hung up. Then she collapsed, shivering, on the bed next to the phone. She had phoned Ira with every intention of effecting a reconciliation on renegotiated terms. She had accomplished the exact opposite. If she was no longer Ira's wife, Wendy's mother, her mother's daughter, who
was
she?

In a panic, she called Georgia information and got the number for Hawk's home. It was a shot in the dark.

A deep authoritative male voice with a thick southern accent answered.

‘Hello. I'm a friend of Will's. I wonder if you could tell me how to get in touch with him?'

The man on the other end paused and cleared his throat. ‘May I ask who's callin', please?'

‘Sure. My name is Ginny Babcock. I knew Will — uh — at college.'

‘That so? Well, this is William's father.'

‘How do you do, Colonel Hawk? Will used to speak of you.' She was deliberately increasing her southern accent, hoping to capture his trust: She was his fellow countryman — countryperson, as Eddie would say.

‘I'll be quite honest with you, Miss Babcock. William is in the VA hospital at Athens right now.'

Ginny gasped.

‘William has had some trouble the past few years. His mother and I knew something was wrong when he deserted from the army a couple of years ago. He'd been in Vietnam and he came home talkin' about “war crimes” and imperialism and hippy nonsense like that. And then he ran away to Canada. We thought he must have been drugged by the SDS or somethin'.

‘Well, he came crawlin in one night several weeks ago. Literally crawlin', Miss Babcock. Through the grass in the front yard on his belly. Talkin' about somebody's bein' after him. He looked as though he hadn't eaten in days, and he hadn't shaved in a week. He kept insistin' that “They” were tryin' to suck the heat from his body. We'd say,
“Who
is, William?” And he'd mutter, “Management.” Damned if
I
knew what he was talkin' about. The doctors have diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.'

Ginny felt ill. Hawk's father sounded faintly pleased: His son was not an army deserter, he was sick. His son was not rejecting his father's way of life — his son was a crazy.

‘I see,' she said weakly. ‘I'm so very sorry.'

‘Well, at least he finally came home and faced up to his responsibilities like a man,' his father said cheerfully.

She hung up. Every cell in her cried out in requiem for Hawk, her heroic nonwarrior. But she didn't feel up to mourning him properly. She was all mourned out

As she lay on her bed, she reflected on her mother's death. She had learned at least one thing. Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects had to be undone. There her mother had lain, her body decaying and in constant pain, her eyes bandaged, her surroundings sterile, nurses and doctors rushed and overworked, food bland and repetitive — what was there that could possibly have held her? There was a family clock. There was a huge white house, built by her megalomaniacal father. There were cherished photos of ancestors. There was a red squirrel in an elm tree. There was her anguished daughter, demanding as her right to be told things that could be learned only by going through them. All these had had to go. Her mother had had to work on doing without them because she must have suspected that she was about to leap into a realm where she would have none of these familiar comforts to orient her, where unresolved earthly attachments would only have flayed her to bits. Like a squid, she had carefully drawn in her tentacles. And presumably, when she had done so, she ended it all, of her own accord, springing away free at last from the bruised body that had served her well and then had failed her abysmally. Having been preceded by this deliberate diminishment of self, by this scaling down of earthly existence to a recurring series of unpleasant or uninteresting routines, her death had been like the dislodging of a dried brown leaf from a tree branch in a soft breeze. Rather than like the violent uprooting of a healthy sapling in a hurricane, as had been the case with Eddie, who had had so much still to do and so much still to learn.

Or at least that was how Ginny chose to think of the process that her mother had undergone. How was she to know? But if that view was correct and one ended it by choice when the weaning was accomplished, then Ginny felt that her time had come too. She had died several small deaths already, to ways of life and people loved. The Big One didn't seem very imposing anymore. Everyone who had been important to her was now dead, or as good as dead for her purposes. She had nothing that she dreaded being severed from. Her tapes had been erased. What was there to hold her here? Why should she go through forming new attachments, only to have to renounce them later when Death finally brought her to her knees? Why not end it now? As she saw it, the only way to outwit Death was to kill herself.

As she had lain trying to nap the afternoon after her mother's death, Ginny had fantasized that she was standing at the bottom of a down escalator in a huge department store. Bells were bonging in the background summoning clerks. Joe Bob in his Gant shirt and chinos grabbed her hand and made her run with him up this down escalator. After decades of effort, with sweat pouring down their faces, they reached the top, where the Major was waiting. But just as Ginny reached out to embrace the Major, Clem, in his studded jeans and red silk windbreaker, grabbed her hand and dragged her down the up escalator. They ran and they ran, like chipmunks on an exercise wheel, Clem lurching and hobbling on his bad leg. Her mother was waiting at the bottom. But just as Ginny stumbled toward her, Miss Head in her gray bun and Ben Franklin glasses pulled Ginny back onto the down escalator. Then, at the top as Ginny reached out for the Major, Eddie dragged her off to charge down the up escalator. After Ira had made her run with him up the down escalator, she finally collapsed in exhaustion while going down the up escalator with Hawk. As she was being carried under the moving steps, down into the guts of the department store, she reflected that, after all that effort, she hadn't made any progress, as Hegel had promised that she would. And as she imagined the escalator mechanism chewing her to bits, she sighed with relief.

Ginny changed into her best bathing suit, for the same reason that her mother used to recommend wearing good underwear when leaving the house. Except her best bathing suit wasn't for the benefit of the emergency room staff — it was for the Hullsport mortuary trade. She wanted to look her best when she arrived at the Slumber Room to be powdered by the waxen yellow hands of Mr. Renfrew.

She grabbed a rope and the oars to the rowboat. Down by the pond she dumped a modest boulder into the boat. Then she rowed to the canvas-covered dock, unloaded the boulder, and climbed out.

She wrapped the rope around the rock and tied it tightly. Then she tied the other end around her ankle. Glancing around, she made her peace with the kudzu-covered hills and the log cabin where, on different occasions, she had been very happy. But really, enough was enough. All around her frogs were devouring grasshoppers, snakes were swallowing frogs whole, Floyd Cloyd's sons were slicing snakes like salamis, and Death lurked around waiting to consume little boys. It was all too much. She didn't think even Management could expect her to endure it for much more than twenty-seven years. Like a snake swallowing its tail, she had come full circle: She had returned to her birthplace to die.

She picked up the boulder. Closing her eyes, she dropped it off the edge. She heard it splash and waited to be tugged down to a murky scum-covered grave.

Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and glanced down. A couple of coils of rope still lay on the dock. Disgruntled, she hauled the boulder back up. This time she wrapped the rope many times around the rock and around her ankle to take up all the slack.

Again, she took her leave of the green hills, which writhed with rustling kudzu and the struggles of dying creatures. Again, she tossed the boulder into the water with a big splash. With satisfaction at a job well done, she felt her leg being jerked out from under her. Her eyes closed, she lost her balance and tumbled toward the water.

And landed in the rowboat, which had shifted and drifted in front of the dock as she had been retying the stone.

Her leg hung out of the boat and was being wrenched out of its pelvic socket by the heavy stone. The entire right side of her body was badly bruised by the fall. As she lay there becoming slightly seasick, she considered the unappetizing nature of what she was about to do. Either the rope would rot and she'd float to the surface for some poor trespassing fisherman to find, or she'd decay among the seaweed and be nibbled to bits by scavenging bluegills. She'd befoul the water, which supplied the cabin sinks. Weaning themselves from material concerns or not, housewives, however inept, are constitutionally incapable of total indifference to the messes they leave behind them.

She untied the rope and rowed back to shore. She took a rifle and a handful of bullets from the gun rack by the fireplace. She hiked up the kudzu-covered hill behind the pond. She recalled with delight how Clem and she as kids had hollowed out tunnels through a kudzu field near his house, matting down areas to form interconnected chambers, like an anthill. She hollowed out such a chamber for herself, a crypt of greenery. She would never be found. The voracious vines would devour her, just as they had devoured Mr. Zed's headstone. No one would face the gruesome task of disposing of her remains. They would think when she couldn't be located, ‘How like her mother she was. Thoughtful to the end.'

She sat down in her kudzu chamber with her knees propped up. With the rifle barrel in her mouth, she found she could pull the trigger with her big toe. She gazed through the leaves at the scum-covered pond and at the log cabin where she had first entered this inadequate life. The cabin now belonged to strangers. The past was dead and gone. It was all finished. She had no place to go and no one to love and all her underwear needed washing.

She took a bullet and rolled it thoughtfully between her thumb and index finger. Abruptly, she picked up the rifle and opened the bullet chamber. She took the bullet and inserted it…

…Tried to insert it. The bullet wouldn't go in. It was too big for this type of rifle. She had brought the wrong kind of bullet for the fucking gun!

In despair at having her plans for the afternoon thwarted, she jumped up and raced down the hill, the rifle waving in one hand like a Comanche's in a raid. Tripping and stumbling on the vines, she sprinted to the cabin and searched the gun rack frantically. No bullets to fit her .22, no rifles to fit the bullets in her hand. Karl had taken them all for himself when she wasn't looking, the grasping bastard.

She seized a hunting knife down from the wall. Sitting on the stone steps she made a small experimental cut in her left wrist. Laying the knife aside, she watched as a drop of blood popped up and grew and grew, into a large red globule. If she smeared this blood onto a slide and placed it under Dr. Vogel's microscope, she'd witness a universe in miniature. She'd see teeming swarms of dots floating around mindlessly in plasma. It would look almost like the photo in her college astronomy text — taken by a high-powered telescope in toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy — of the amassed suns of billions of invisible planets.