Kinflicks (27 page)

‘What sports do you play?' she asked, glancing at his hard young body appraisingly. With a paper bag over his blond head he could have passed for Joe Bob at age seventeen any day. He possessed the identical bulging nonchalance.

‘All of ‘em.'

‘Yeah? Which do you like best?'

‘Oh, football, I guess. I want to get me a football scholarship next year. Maybe to Ole Miss. And then I want to coach.'

Ginny rounded the church circle and turned down Hull Street, joining the stream of cruising cars that had already assembled in the early evening sunlight. ‘We used to do the same thing,' Ginny said, with pain. ‘Spend all night driving up and down this street.'

‘Yeah?' he said with his tolerant grin.

‘Do people still go to the Dew Drop?'

‘Oh sure. A lot go out on the Sow Gap Highway, though. There's a chain of new places — a McDonald's and stuff.'

The only difference that Ginny could see, as she crept under the banner welcoming Mrs. Melody Dawn Bledsoe home as 1957 Pillsbury Bake-Off Champion, was that the clusters of boys sitting on their cars watching the passing traffic now had long hair instead of crew cuts, and patchy moustaches; and they wore bell bottoms and T-shirts instead of chinos and sports shirts.

At a stoplight, a Chevy pulled up beside the Jeep. A bunch of boys, friends of Billy's apparently, made suggestive faces; Billy blushed and tried not to grin with pleasure at his friends' knowing that he was about to get laid by an older woman. He shifted his muscled shoulders so as to turn his back on their obscenities.

This was getting ridiculous. Ginny realized in a flash that she wasn't a Yummy Mummy, that flag swinging and Joe Bob Sparks were dead for her, and that even this gorgeous young hunk of horny male flesh couldn't flog any more sentiment from this segment of her past. She decided to put a swift end to it. “You want to coach, huh? You know, I used to date your coach when I was in high school here.'

The boy snapped to attention, knees together, hands by his sides, and eyes straight ahead. ‘Coach Sparks?' he asked in a small nervous voice.

‘Yes. For almost two years.' Billy was immobilized at the mere mention of the name. Joe Bob had apparently done an admirable job of replacing the feared Coach Bicknell. She could just picture Joe Bob now, prowling through the Family Drive-In in search of curfew violators. “Where do you live?' she asked the terrified boy gently. He mentioned one of the developments in a weak voice, and she drove him directly there. She watched with regret as he lumbered up his sidewalk.

By the time Ginny got to the hospital, Mrs. Babcock was just finishing her dinner of canned ham and boiled potatoes and creamed spinach and applesauce. Unacknowledged, Ginny sat down on the sofa in silence.

Finally, wondering who or what would answer her, Ginny said, ‘Hello, Mother.'

‘I wondered if you'd deign to visit me.'

Ginny suppressed irritation and reminded her mother, ‘But I was here this afternoon. Have you forgotten? We watched “Hidden Heartbeats.'”

‘No, of course I haven't forgotten. What do you think I am, senile or something?'

Through a major effort of will, Ginny managed not to reply unpleasantly. She looked out the window resolutely. It was her favorite time of day in the South — early evening when the sun was low, but not yet setting. The landscape — the factory and the foothills and the church circle and the train station — was bathed in an indirect golden glow; and all God's creatures, her peevish mother included, seemed to pause for a moment and reflect, suspended between the frantic flurry of daytime activity and the long night of rest and oblivion. Ginny took a deep breath and sighed.

‘Bored?' her mother inquired. ‘Just remember that I didn't ask you to come down from Vermont.'

‘No, Mother, I'm not bored, I'm relaxed,' Ginny assured her, surprised at her unexpected reserves of patience.

Back in her mother's room, Ginny turned on the television again in desperation. There were only cartoons and a cowboy show on now. Ginny left the cowboy show on. The blond beefy crew-cut head of Dr. Vogel appeared around the door, like a decoy on a target shooting game. ‘And how are you tonight?'

‘How do you
think
I am?' Mrs. Babcock shot back. She'd absolutely had it. She felt she was going to scream if anyone asked her one more polite question that he didn't really want answered.

‘Good. Fine,' Dr Vogel chuckled uncertainly.

‘Doctor!'
He looked at her anxiously, then looked at the floor. ‘Am I dying?'

There was total silence for about ten seconds. Taking a deep breath, Dr. Vogel said, ‘What black thoughts we're having on this lovely summer evening, Mrs. Babcock.' His eyes darted nervously around the room, avoiding Mrs. Babcock's. ‘We've done regular platelet counts, Ivy bleeding times, a one-stage prothrombin time, a fibrinogen level' — he was ticking these off doggedly on his meaty red fingers — ‘MacPherson and Hardisty's modification of the Hicks-Pitney thromboplastin screening test, the euglobulin clot lysis time, clot retraction time, bone marrow studies. We should know any day now whether your disorder is associated with megakaryocydc hyperplasia of the bone marrow, or consumption coagulopathy, extravascular sequestration, or an autoimmune mechanism. Please count on us, Mrs. Babcock. I assure you that we are using every tool modern medicine has available. But it
would
help if you would cooperate.' He hesitated, then turned around quickly and left.

What kind of an answer was that to a simple question, Ginny wondered as she sat with her head propped on her hand staring blankly at the cowboy show. Was it a yes or a no? Ginny glanced at her mother, who was looking dazed. A pile of mangled bodies dominated the foreground of the television screen. The main characters — two cowboy brothers — sat off to one side drinking and laughing.

Mrs. Babcock pointed at the screen. ‘Look at that! Look at that! Every idiot in America thinks you kill somebody and they just pop right back up. They should all try dying sometime themselves and see how much fun it is!'

‘They will.'

‘And you!' she cried. “Why are
you
still alive?
You
should be the one in this bed instead of me. You've done nothing but ask for it your entire life — racing around on motorcycles and drinking moonshine and going on peace marches. You've done
nothing
with your life but pursue your selfish personal pleasures. Me — I've
always
done my duty. I waited on you and your father and your brothers hand and foot for years. For the first time in my life, I had no one to account to but myself. I was going to travel, go back to college, teach. And now
this. Why me?'

‘What do you
mean,
“why you” ?' Ginny raged back, suddenly out of control. ‘Why
not
you, Mother? Millions of people die every day. You've been preparing for this ever since I can remember, with your goddam tombstone rubbings and your fucking epitaphs. That's all I ever
heard
from you and the Major. Why are you so offended now that your bluff is being called?'

‘Don't use your gutter language on
me,
Virginia Babcock Bliss!'

‘And as for your waiting on us hand and foot, as you say, we never
asked
you to. You did it so that you'd have something to do with yourself. It was for
you,
Mother, not for us. And if all I've ever done is chase after my personal pleasures, then how come I'm not having any fun?' She collapsed into her chair. Beads of sweat stood out on her mother's round yellow face. They sat exhausted, glaring at each other. After a while, Ginny closed her eyes in remorse.

Mrs. Babcock felt incapable of a rebuttal. She had detected some truth in Ginny's outburst. Somewhere along the line she, Mrs. Babcock, had gone wrong. It was true. She had pandered to the needs of those ingrates she called her family for so long that her chief need had come to be that of being needed by them. What else could account for the depressions that had plagued her ever since the last of the children had left home? She had pinned the blame on a lot of external factors, but what it was, she knew, was that she was no longer needed, had no function, had to create a new function for herself — or die.

Where had she gone wrong in the first place, though? At what one point could she have said no to demands other people were placing on her? When she had dropped out of Bryn Mawr to marry Wesley had been such a point. She could have insisted on postponing the marriage to get her degree so that she could have taught history, which was what had interested her. But
could
she have, with Wesley's marching off to war and conceivably to his death? During those chaotic years all sorts of disastrous marriages occurred; people were having babies left and right, as though in response to unconscious urgings to replace all those who were being killed, just as a barren fruit tree will fruit when its trunk is girdled by a knife (according to the encyclopedia). And so she had married Wesley and had given birth to Karl ten months later. She and Karl followed Wesley to army bases around the country in an old Ford at 35 mph. And a year later Ginny was born in Hullsport during Wesley's leave prior to his being shipped overseas. He left for France when Ginny was two months old. After that, Ginny woke up every night at 3
A.M
. and screamed inconsolably. Only holding her while standing upright and singing lullabies would calm her. She clung like a little monkey, and whenever Mrs. Babcock tried to sit or set her down, Ginny would jerk awake and start screaming again. Then Karl would wake up and the two fatherless babies would wail together until dawn.

Exhausted from lack of sleep and buffeted daily between hope and despair by the battle reports and by the arrival or nonarrival of letters from Wesley, Mrs. Babcock soon became a numb automaton. What she personally might or might not want became irrelevant. Here were these two pathetic children to bolster, who seemed somehow tuned in to the chaos in the world. And so she acted cheerful and sang and danced and rolled with them on the floor of the cabin, when she really wanted to be alone weeping or rereading Wesley's love letters. And before long she no longer wanted to be alone weeping.

And so Ginny was correct. Mrs. Babcock knew that she was a martyr. The children's needs in those confused and unhappy war years had swamped her own needs, had
become
her own needs. And when the war years had passed, her needs were no longer in evidence; her awareness of them had been trained out of her, except for one brief flare-up during the time she now referred to, in her middle-aged mellowness, as the Tired Years, that seemingly endless chunk of her life when the three children were little. It had been all she could do then to drag herself from one hamper of dirty diapers to the next. She had been too worn out for sex most of the time, and she and Wesley were quarreling over a lot of secondary issues. Finding herself one day on the verge of busting open Karl's head with a paperweight for sliding down the stair rail carrying the dog, she seized on the idea of just packing up and leaving the whole mess. She went to see her mother in the cabin and spelled out her despair in great detail. Her mother had looked at her coolly and had said, ‘You must do your duty, dear.' So she had.

And now here she was — falling apart in a hospital bed after years of satisfying other people's needs, without ever having had a chance to figure out what
she
might need. It wasn't Wesley's or the children's fault, but she couldn't help feeling that it wasn't her own fault either. Ginny seemed to think that how many children to have and when to have them, how to rear them, were rational decisions based on personal preference. She would insist righteously on the integrity of the individual, the inviolability of human reason. She was probably incapable of seeing humanity as colonies of microbes, shunted here and there in response to force fields and chemical secretions. Becoming an adult was a process of becoming aware of one's limitations, and therefore of one's possibilities. Children couldn't really appreciate a good ballet dancer, for example. They took the ability to leap gracefully five feet in the air for granted. It was only when you became conscious of all the massed forces a dancer was overcoming with his skill that you could begin to savor his achievement. Ginny had a lot to learn, even though she thought she already knew everything.

Ginny sat with her eyes closed, unable to apologize but unable to resume the attack, paralyzed by her mother's most deadly weapon — guilt. Because every word her mother had spoken had been true. She
had
slaved for Ginny and her father and brothers, thanklessly, for years. But the pound of flesh her mother extracted for this selfless devotion was that its recipients adorn her self-concept. Ginny had failed to do this. She didn't know exactly what her mother would have liked her to be — but it was clearly nothing that she had been so far. All attempted roles to date had been disasters in her mother's eyes, Ginny knew. Wife to Ira, mother to Wendy — this her mother approved of. But it was all over. Guilt.

Ginny's last Hullsport Christmas was the year before she left for Boston. Karl and Jim were home from their schools. Their mother had rushed around merrily performing all the preparation rituals single-handedly — the wreaths, the cookies, the tree, the presents. On Christmas Eve they had had their standard feast — roast goose and fixings and plum pudding. The Major was upstairs in bed with a migraine. After dinner they retired to the living room and sang carols in front of the fire, as they had done every Christmas Eve of recorded history. That year, though, each of the three children had dates later on, to midnight services at various churches. As a family choir, they'd always been agonizingly off key, but they'd scarcely noticed it before. That particular Christmas Eve, however, Jim's newly changed voice was cracking as he sang. Ginny was preoccupied with the prospect of some heavy petting with Clem after the midnight service. Karl, bored, was singing dutifully. Here they were, new and different people, grubs sprung from the cocoons of childhood into resplendent pubescence, still struggling to perform the scorned rituals of their despised grubhood.