Kinflicks (28 page)

Suddenly all the children stopped singing and started laughing. It was an example of laughter at its most pure: a release of the nervous tension that stemmed from the superimposition of two contradictory concepts. They laughed and laughed. There wasn't enough laughter in all of Hullsport to relieve the strain of this absurdity — grown-up young people, for so they regarded themselves, engaged in a tired replay of meaningless myths and rituals. Their mother began to weep quietly. Gradually as one after another noticed her, their mirth died. Finally, the three of them skulked from the room to their private pursuits, each in various stages of resentment and remorse, leaving their mother there shaking with mute sobs. She didn't know how to let go gracefully, and they didn't know how to take their leave with tact. Independence was rarely given, Ginny knew; it was taken. But to take it would be to deprive her mother of her function in life. Guilt.

‘But Vogel didn't
say
you were dying, Mother,' Ginny mumbled.

Mrs. Babcock shook her head no.

‘Shall I leave?'

Her mother shook her head no again. Then she reached over to her bedside table and picked up the white pills from that morning and downed them with a sip of water. ‘What time is it?'

‘About seven, I think.'

‘I keep losing track of the time here.'

‘I'll bring you a clock.'

A little later Ginny told her about the baby birds. ‘What do you think I should do with them?'

Mrs. Babcock was startled to be asked for an opinion. She'd been looked after for so long in this hospital that it was hard for her to believe that someone actually cared what she thought about anything. ‘Well, I don't know really. Things like that always used to kill me when you children were little. I'd put them up in trees, and the cats would get them, and you could never understand why nature was set up that way. And of course I never knew what to tell you because I didn't understand either.

‘Remember our yellow cat Molly? We had her when you were six or so. One time you went out in the back yard and found her under the mulberry tree with a tiny bird head in front of her. You started screaming and throwing sticks at her, I remember. I raced out and you were standing there sobbing. “But it's not
fair,
Mommy,” you kept saying. Without thinking, I said, “But
life's
not fair, sweetie.” You wouldn't speak to me for days. The parent birds don't appear to be feeding them?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘You mean they're just sitting on the chimney watching them starve?'

‘It looks like it.' Ginny could tell that their unparently behavior was annoying her mother as much as it had her. ‘They should be shot.'

‘I agree. But I don't know what to do. After all, they're birds, not people. I guess you can't bind them to our codes.'

‘There's that bird book in the bookcase by the fireplace. Maybe you can find something there.'

Ginny and her mother went on chatting as though their outburst had never happened, until Miss Sturgill arrived with a sleeping pill.

It was late twilight as Ginny passed the Cloyd house. She tooted. Through the fuzzy gloom that made everything look out of focus, she saw a figure down the hill waving its hand. She stopped and backed up and got out. It was Clem, walking toward her, smiling.

‘Heard you was comin',' he said. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn't of knowed it was you.' He nodded at her peasant dress. He was in a dirty sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans and manure-caked high-top work shoes. He looked hot and tired.

‘Just finished chores?'

‘Yup. Little late tonight. My hired man's sick.'

‘I hear you're doing good things with the farm.'

‘Highest production per head in the state. Got me $18,000's worth of prize sperm in the freezer,' he said with a proud smile, wiping beads of sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

‘That's great. Did you hear my mother is in the hospital?'

‘Yeah, I did. I'm real sorry. She's done had a bad year, ain't she? Pray God she'll be out soon. Is she bad sick this time?'

Ginny looked at him quickly. Pray God? Was this
the
Clem Cloyd, star of Hullsport low life? ‘Uh, well, I don't know exactly. She's had this before and has snapped right out of it. I don't see why she shouldn't this time. She looks terrible, but she's up and around, more or less.'

‘Why don't you come in for a while and say hi to Maxine?'

‘Okay. For a minute. If you have to milk in the morning, you'll be wanting to eat and get to bed.'

The bright light in the kitchen blinded Ginny long enough for Maxine to bustle over and enclose her between her arms and her soft massive mammaries. When Ginny could see again, she discovered that Maxine looked much as she had during Bloody Bucket days, only more so. Her huge breasts, no longer shaped to points, hung nearly to her waist; her golden cross was still lodged firmly between them. There were women who looked merely dumpy when they got fat, and there were women whose appearance increased in warmth and voluptuosity as the pounds added up. Maxine was in the latter category. She dwarfed Clem, who was still slight, though wiry and toughened by all his physical labor. His face, on the other hand, usually tense and sneering and unhappy in high school, had softened and relaxed. With a start, Ginny put her finger on the big change in Clem: He no longer limped. She had known him so well that she had become almost unaware of his crippled gait, but it was definitely gone altogether now. Unobtrusively she glanced at the floor and noted that his left work shoe had a normal sole and his right foot no longer turned inward. He'd had surgery or something?

Supper sat steaming on the table. Three small dark children with Clem's Melungeon features squirmed shyly at their places. This didn't seem the time to be asking about Clem's leg.

‘Eat with us,' Maxine insisted.

‘Thanks, but I've eaten. Anyhow, I've got to get back to the cabin to check on some things. But I'll be back.'

‘Make it soon,' Maxine instructed.

7
Worthley Material

When I regained consciousness after my plunge from Clem's speeding Harley — a princess restored to life by a watchful genie — I found myself swathed in gauze and plaster, with various limbs suspended from pulleys. Out the window the sun was shining, and the trees were tufted with the fluffy chartreuse of leafing buds. Several weeks had passed without my knowledge.

Clem wasn't allowed to visit me during my convalescence. It was just as well. I was extremely busy filling out college applications, under duress applied in my weakened condition by the Major. They were all to women's colleges in New England. ‘Why do you wish to attend Worthley?' Answer: ‘I don't really wish to attend Worthley. I'm being held a prisoner in a hospital bed. Please send help.'

I got a letter back from the Worthley board of admissions inviting me for an interview, based on my ‘most intriguing and original application.' The Major intercepted the letter before I had a chance to chew it up and swallow it. Hardly was I up off my skin-grafted back than I was whisked away for my interview, by the Major himself, who had to go to Boston on business.

In a last-ditch gesture of defiance, I wore a black, too-tight straight skirt; a black cardigan buttoned up the back with a Do-It Pruitt pointed bra underneath; Clem's red dragon wind-breaker, the tatters of which I had carefully stitched together upon finding them among Mother's cleaning cloths; black ballet slippers; and Clem's huge clanking identification bracelet.

When Miss Head saw me in her doorway, she eyed me uneasily, as though expecting to be mugged among her eighteenth-century antiques. She had wavy gray hair pulled back in a severe bun. The stubborn crimp of her hair made her head look like a plastic model of the human cerebrum that sat in the Hullsport High biology lab. Her coloring was ashen. She wore Ben Franklin horn-rim glasses with a chain attached to either earpiece; they bounced precariously on her nose as she talked. Her beige nylon blouse was high-necked and firmly secured at the throat by a rose-tinted cameo brooch; the brooch featured chaste maidens in diaphanous gowns who were wafting around a tumbled Grecian pillar. On the jacket of her burnt orange tweed suit, over her left breast, hung a small round watch, suspended from a tiny bow fashioned of gold.

As we talked, the corners of her mouth soon began twitching. She was trying not to smile at my answers. In short, she liked me. I was appalled. I had been doing my Hullsport best to wreck my chances of ever obtaining a spot on the Worthley roster. Her office was furnished in Sheraton pieces and Oriental carpets and elaborately engraved copper trays. One wall was of hand-hewn stone. I had found this place only after wandering lost through miles of twisting stone corridors. Everywhere I went, medieval gargoyles and portraits of Renaissance ladies in gilded frames stared down at me, judging. Was I Worthley material, they seemed to demand of each other. I sincerely hoped not. The odor was of moldy stone and desiccated woodwork. The din of pealing carillon bells, echoing and reechoing through the hollow deserted stone hallways, filled my ears as I walked faster and faster, and finally ran — a Rapunzel from Hullsport, held captive in this castle keep of academe.

“There seems to be some kind of mistake,' I was explaining to this nice lady, Miss Head. ‘As you can probably see from my transcript, I don't
begin
to have grades or test scores to come to Worthley. I'd be lost here. It would be
such
a waste when there are so many well-prepared girls in Westchester who'd love to come.'

‘Oh well, grades. What are a few…' Leaning her head back on her neck and looking down through her half-lenses at my transcript, she blanched. ‘Indeed,' she said, sobered.

‘So you see,' I continued eagerly, ‘it would probably be just as well if I withdrew my application right now, and saved you the trouble of having to mail me a rejection letter.' I lunged for my application, which Miss Head deftly whisked out of my reach. I looked up at her from where I lay sprawled across her antique desktop.

‘Yes, but you see, we've never had a girl here from, ah…Hullsport, as it were.'

‘Yes, I can appreciate that,' I said reasonably, plopping back into my comb-back Windsor chair.

‘And you see, this year, ah…perhaps I shouldn't be telling you this, as it were. But just between the two of us, this year at Worthley we
do have
a geographical quota to fill, ah, in order to qualify, as it were, for a sizable bequest from an alumna. And we
do
have to have' — she was beaming and pointing at me with her index finger — ‘one more Tennessean. And I'm sure you can appreciate the fact, Miss Babcock, that Tennesseans aren't exactly beating down our doors here at Worthley. So I'm afraid, young lady, that it has to be you.' She was like an obstetrician notifying me that I was premaritally pregnant. She lifted the small clock hanging over her breast and glanced at it. ‘So could you just run and call in that nice father of yours, so that we can share with him your exciting news?'

‘He's not out there,' I said glumly.

‘Indeed,' she intoned with evident displeasure, accustomed to having anxious parents hovering in her foyer awaiting her pleasure. ‘Well, then, we'll just sit and get acquainted until he comes, shall we?' She whisked out of the office.

If I could somehow get out of this stone fortress, I could get a message to Clem and we could flee somewhere together…I hunted through my pocket book and discovered twenty-three cents, not even enough for a phone call to Clem. I leapt up and felt along the cold damp stone wall in hopes of finding a secret doorway into another world.

Miss Head returned, carrying a silver tray with a silver tea service and cups and saucers on it. She looked at me strangely as I stood propped against her wall.

‘Just admiring your lovely stone wall,' I explained feebly, patting one of the boulders with affection.

‘It
is
lovely, isn't it? But there are lots of stone walls around campus. Oh, I'm sure you'll come to love Worthley just as we all do.'

I smiled weakly and returned to my chair. Although I didn't know it at the time, the ritual I was watching was to be the one skill I salvaged from my Worthley experience. Miss Head performed it slowly, repeating for me to watch the especially intricate steps, like a master craftswoman coaching her apprentice. She picked up a flowered bone china saucer and gently but firmly placed a matching cup on it. Holding the saucer rim between thumb and forefinger, with the remaining fingers of that hand stretched out gracefully, she moved the cup below and in front of the ornate silver tea pot, which was encrusted with stylized vines and leaves. I expected her to pick up the teapot with her free hand. But no! Instead she deftly tilted the trick pot on its hinged base. Just so, so that a steady, but not gushing, stream of reddish brown tea poured into the cup, the cup being held close enough to the spout so as not to splash out the tea, but far enough away so as not to look too easy. When the cup was half full, she returned the pot to its base. Then she moved the cup underneath the tap on the other silver urn, turned the handle forty-five degrees and no more, and finished filling the cup with water until it was three-quarters of an inch from the top. Looking up with the confident smile of experts who know they're good, she inquired, ‘Milk or lemon?'

‘Both, please.'

She frowned slightly, so that I knew I'd done something gauche. But she could afford to be generous, from her perch at the pinnacle of world tea service, so she laughed merrily, her glasses bouncing on her nose and said, ‘But of
course
! One teaspoon of sugar or two?'

‘Three?'

Grimacing, she ladled three spoonfuls of sugar into my tea, added the optimum amount of milk, and placed a thin lemon slice on my saucer. Then, with a flourish, she handed me the chef d'oeuvre.