by Lisa Alther
Kinflicks
Lisa Alther
Contents
1. The Art of Dying Well
2. Saturday, June 24
3. Walking the Knife’s Edge, or Blue Balls in Bibleland
4. Saturday, June 24
5. Harleys, Hoodlums, and Home-Brew
6. Monday, June 26
7. Worthley Material
8. Tuesday, June 27
9. Divided Loyalties
10. Friday, June 30
11. Wedded Bliss
12. Friday, July 7
13. The Mandala Tattoo
14. Saturday, July 22
Epilogue
A Biography of Lisa Alther
KINFLICKS
Different sections of the community are, to all realities, “nations.”…The clerics, doctors, literary men, nobles, and peasants really could be called nations; for each has its own customs and casts of thought. To imagine that they are just the same as you simply because they live in the same country or speak the same language is a feeling to be examined.
SAMARQANDI, in Caravan of Dreams; BY IDRIES SHAH
So here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing.
DYING WORDS OF HENRY JAMES
1
The Art of Dying Well
My family has always been into death. My father, the Major, used to insist on having an ice pick next to his placemat at meals so that he could perform an emergency tracheotomy when one of us strangled on a piece of meat. Even now, by running my index fingers along my collarbones to the indentation where the bones join, I can locate the optimal site for a tracheal puncture with the same deftness as a junky a vein.
The Major wasn’t always a virtuoso at disaster prediction, however. When I was very young, he was all brisk efficiency, and made no room whatsoever for the unscheduled or the unexpected. “Ridiculous!” he would bark at Mother as she sat composing drafts of her epitaph. “Do you want to turn the children into a bunch of psychotics like the rest of your crazy family?” Perhaps, like my southern mother, you have to be the heiress to a conquered civilization to take your own vulnerability seriously prior to actually experiencing it. At least if you were born, as was the Major, in 1918 B.B. (Before the Bomb).
Whatever the reason, the Major’s Cassandra complex developed late in life. He was a carpetbagger by profession, brought to Hullsport, Tennessee, from Boston to run the chemical plant that is the town’s only industry. During the Korean War the plant, with its acres of red brick buildings and forests of billowing smoke stacks, was converted from production of synthetic fabrics to munitions; there were contracts from the federal government and top-secret contacts with the laboratories at Oak Ridge. On summer evenings, the Major used to take us kids out for cones of soft ice cream dipped in chocolate glaze, and then to the firing range where the new shell models were tested. Licking our dripping cones, we would watch proudly as the Major, tall and thin and elegant, listing forward on the balls of his feet, signaled the blasts with upraised arms, like an orchestra conductor cuing cymbal crashes.
Shortly after the conversion of the plant to munitions, the Major experienced his own personal conversion, and in a fashion that even an experienced aficionado of calamity like Mother could never have foreseen: He caught his platinum wedding band on a loose screw on a loaded truck bed at the factory and was dragged along until his ring finger popped out of its socket like a fried chicken wing being dismembered. Then his legs were run over by the rear wheels. There he lay, a fallen industrial cowboy, his boot caught in a stirrup, trampled by his own horse. Truckloads of hams and cakes and casseroles began arriving at the house from bereaved admirers/employees. All the downtown churches offered up hours of prayers for his recovery.
Ira was hurt, in the early days of our marriage, when I wouldn’t wear my wedding band. He considered it symbolic of the tepidity of my response to him. Maybe he was right, but Ira had never seen a hand with only the bloody remains of a knuckle socket where the ring finger used to be. He merely assumed, until the day he ran me out of his house in Vermont with a rifle, that I was frigid. Well, he had to find some rational explanation for the failure of our union, because it was impossible for him to entertain the notion that he, Ira Braithwaite Bliss IV, might simply have picked a lemon from the tree of life. But more later of my refusal to share Ira’s bed.
When the Major emerged from his casts, a metamorphosis had occurred: He was no longer bold and brash. In fact, the first project he undertook was to renovate the basement family room into a bomb shelter as a surprise for Mother’s birthday. Her reaction to the atmospheric nuclear tests going on all over the world then was to join a group in Hullsport called Mothers’ Organization for Peace. MOP consisted of a dozen housewives, mostly wives of chemical plant executives who’d been exiled to Hullsport for a dreary year as grooming for high managerial posts in Boston. MOP meetings consisted of a handful of women with abrasive Yankee accents who sipped tea and twisted handkerchief corners and insisted bravely that Russian mothers must feel the same about strontium 90 in their babies’ bones.
The Major, sneering at MOP, kept going with his bomb shelter. We kids were delighted. I took my girl friends down there to play house; and we confronted such ethical issues as whether or not to let old Mr. Thornberg next door share our shelter when the bomb dropped, or whether to slam the door in his miserly face, as he did to us on Halloween nights. Later we girls took Clem Cloyd and the acned boys from Magnolia Manor development down there to play Five Minutes in Heaven. While the others counted outside, the designated couple went into the chemical toilet enclosure to execute the painful grinding of braces that left us all with raw and bruised mouths…but in love. And in high school I brought dates down for serious sessions of heavy petting. In fact, I broke the heart of Joe Bob Sparks, star tailback of the Hullsport Pirates and body beautiful of Hullsport Regional High School, by forfeiting my maidenhead to Clem Cloyd one night on the altarlike wooden sleeping platform, double-locked behind the foot-thick steel door, while Mother and the Major slept on blissfully unaware upstairs. But more about the many charms of Joe Bob and Clem later.
Soon, no situation was too safe for the Major to be unable to locate its potential for tragedy. Death to him was not the inevitable companion of one’s later years, the kindly warden who freed each soul from its earthly prison. Death to him was a sneak and a cheat who was ever vigilant to ambush the unwary, of whom the Major was determined not to be one. In contrast to Mother, who regarded Death as some kind of demon lover. The challenge, as she saw it, was to be ready for the assignation, so that you weren’t distracted during consummation by unresolved earthly matters. The trick was in being both willing to die and able to at the same time. Dying properly was like achieving simultaneous orgasm.
Mother had many photographs, matted in eggshell white and framed in narrow black wood, on the fireplace mantel in her bedroom. As I was growing up, she would sit me on her lap and take down these yellowed cracked photos and tell me about the people in them, people who had already experienced, prepared for it or not, this ultimate fuck with Death. Her grandmother, Dixie Lee Hull, in a blouse with a high lace neck, who had cut her finger on a recipe card for spoon bread and had died of septicemia at age twenty-nine. Great-uncle Lester, a druggist in Sow Gap, who became addicted to cough syrup and one night threw himself under the southbound train to Chattanooga. Cousin Louella, who dove into a nest of water moccasins in an abandoned stone quarry at a family reunion in 1932. Another cousin who stuck his head out of a car window to read a historical marker about the Battle of Lookout Mountain and was side swiped by a Mason-Dixon transport truck. It was always so unsatisfying to rage at her in a tantrum, as children do, “I hate you! I hope you die!” She’d reply calmly, “Don’t worry, I will. And so will you.”
> At spots in our decor where lesser women would have settled for Audubon prints or college diplomas, Mother hung handsomely framed and matted rubbings of the tombstones of our forebears, done in dark chalk on fine rice paper. The Major always planned family vacations around business conferences so that expenses would be tax deductible and so that he wouldn’t have to spend long stretches trapped with his family. Mother used to coordinate his meetings with trips for the rest of us to unvisited gravesites of remote relations. I spent most of my first seventeen summers weeding and edging and planting around obscure ancestral crypts. Mother considered these pilgrimages to burying plots around the nation as didactic exercises for us children, far superior to the overworked landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty, on the American Freedom Trail.
Apparently a trait like fascination with eschatology is hereditary. At any rate, it seems to run in our family. Mother’s ancestors, however humble their circumstances (and most of them were in very humble circumstances, being dirt farmers and coal miners), invested a great deal of thought and money in their memorials to themselves. In any given cemetery, the most elaborately carved urns and weeping willows and hands pointing confidently to heaven invariably belong to my ancestors. Also the most catchy epitaphs: “Stop and look as you pass by./As you are now, so once was I./ As I am now, so you will be./ Prepare to die and follow me.” Mother considered that one, by a great-great-aunt named Hattie, the pinnacle of our family’s achievement. Mother had dozens of trial epitaphs for herself, saved up in a small black loose-leaf notebook. The prime contender when I left home for college in Boston was, “The way that is weary, dark, and cold/May lead to shelter within the fold./Grieve not for me when I am gone./The body’s dark night: the soul’s dawn.”
When Mother wasn’t working on her epitaph, she was rewriting her funeral ceremony. “Let’s see” , she’d say to me as I sat on the floor beside her mahogany Chippendale desk dressing my doll in black crepe for a wake. “Do you think ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ should go before or after ‘Deus Noster Refugium’?” I’d look up from my doll’s funeral. “You won’t forget, will you, dear?” she’d inquire sternly. “The agenda for my memorial service will be in my upper right-hand desk drawer.”
Or she’d repolish her obituary and worry over whether or not the Knoxville Sentinel would accept it for publication. I have since come to understand her agony. When my classmates were taking frantic notes on penile lengths in first term Physiology 101 at Worthley College, I was diligently preparing the wording of my engagement announcement in the margin of my notebook: “Major and Mrs. Wesley Marshall Babcock IV of Hullsport, Tennessee, and Hickory, Virginia, take pleasure in announcing the engagement of their daughter Virginia Hull Babcock to Clemuel Cloyd…” Years later, when the time finally came to dust off this draft and replace the name of Clemuel Cloyd with Ira Bliss, I discovered that the Boston Globe wouldn’t print it, in spite of the fact that I’d read their damned paper dutifully every Sunday for the two years I’d been in college there. What could bring more posthumous humiliation than to have your obituary rejected by a paper like the Knoxville Sentinel?
2
Saturday, June 24
Groggy with two in-flight martinis, Ginny huddled by the DC-7’s emergency exit. When she’d picked up her ticket for this flight, she’d made a brave joke to the clerk about someone’s wanting to hijack a plane bound between Stark’s Bog, Vermont, and Hullsport, Tennessee. The clerk had replied without looking up, “Believe me, honey, no one in their right mind would want anything to do with those planes they send to Tennessee.” To be aware of death was one thing, she mused; to accept it, another. All her life, awash with shame, she had secretly rejoiced over each plane crash as it was reported in the papers because it meant They’d missed her again.
She grabbed the plastic card from the nubby green seat-back pocket and studied the operation of the plane’s emergency exits, deployment procedures for the inflatable slide. It occurred to her that if use of the emergency exits were required, she’d be frozen by panic and trampled by all her frenzied fellow passengers as they tried to get past her and out the escape hatch. It also occurred to her that perhaps the reason every person in the plane didn’t struggle to sit by an emergency exit, as she did, was that they knew something she didn’t: that the likelihood of needing to clamber out the exit to safety was more than offset by the likelihood of the exit’s flying open in mid-flight and sucking those near it into the troposphere.
But she knew that this pattern of blindly seeking out emergency exits was already too set in her to be thwarted with ease. Just as some people’s eyes, due to early experience with The Breast, were irresistibly drawn to bosoms throughout their lives, so were hers riveted by neon signs saying EXIT. At the Saturday morning cowboy serials as a child, she had been required by the Major to sit right next to the exit sign in case the theater should catch fire. He told her about a Boston theater fire when he was young in which a crazed man had carved his way with a Bowie knife through the hysterical crowds to an exit. Ever since, she’d been unable to watch a movie or listen to a lecture or ride in a plane without the comforting glow of an exit sign next to her, like a nightlight in a small child’s bedroom.
Nevertheless, on this particular flight, she first realized that the emergency exit, the escape lines coiled in the window casings, the yellow oxygen masks being playfully manipulated by the shapely stewardesses, were all totems designed to distract passengers from the fact that if the plane crashed, they’d all had it — splat! As eager as she was to deny the possibility of personal extinction while negotiating the hostile skies of United Air Lines, even Ginny was only faintly comforted by the presence of her seat cushion flotation device. She knew full well that the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia were below her should the engines falter and the plane flutter down like a winged bird. The sea was swelling some three hundred miles to the east. She tried to picture herself, stranded in a mountain crevice, afloat on her ritual seat cushion above a sea of gore and gasoline and in-flight martinis.
In the crush of the waiting room prior to boarding, Ginny had inspected with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner the visages of all her fellow passenger-victims: Were these the kind of people she’d want to be adrift with in a life raft? She could never decide how Fate worked it: Did planes stay aloft because of the absence of actively wicked people on board to be disposed of? Or was the opposite the case: Did planes falter and fall because of the absence of people sufficiently worthy to redeem the flight, people who had to be kept alive to perform crucial missions? Whichever was the case, Ginny had closely studied her companions in folly, looking for both damning and redeeming personality types and laying odds on a mid-air collision. With relief, she’d discovered three small babies.
Her fellow travelers had also scrutinized her upon boarding this winged silver coffin, Ginny reflected. In fact, one plump woman in a hideous Indian print caftan had studied her so closely that Ginny was sure the woman knew that she was the one who’d broken the macrobiotic recipe chain letter earlier that week. Which of the assembled Vermont housewives, they all must have wondered as they found their seats, would be the one to demand six thousand books of S & H Green Stamps and a parachute for a descent into a redemption center at a Paramus, New Jersey, shopping mall? Whose tote bag contained the bomb, nestled in a hollowed-out gift wheel of Vermont cheddar cheese, or submerged in a take-out container of spaghetti sauce? Ginny had often thought that she should carry such a bomb aboard her plane flights herself, because the likelihood of there being two bomb-toting psychopaths on the same flight was so infinitesimal as to be an impossibility. It was the mentality that fostered the arms race: Better to be done in by the bomb that she herself, in a last act of existential freedom, could detonate.
And, Ginny suspected, they were all — if they’d only admit it — inspecting each other with the care of housewives at a supermarket meat counter, as possible main courses should their craft be lost atop a remote peak in the Smokies.
Before giving up flying altogether, her mother had gone on business trips regularly with the Major. His condition on her going was that they take separate planes so that when one of them died during landing, the other would remain to carry on.
Doesn’t it just double the likelihood of one of your bags going to Des Moines?’ Ginny had demanded of her mother one winter afternoon when she was in high school and was making her second trip to the airport, having taken the Major to catch his flight to New York that morning. They were in the Major’s huge black Mercedes. Her mother had loved that car. Because it looked and drove like a hearse, Ginny suspected. Practice.
“Don’t ask me. Ask your father,” she replied, closing her eyes in anticipation of a head-on collision as Ginny negotiated a traffic circle. Any time her mother couldn’t be bothered with having an opinion on something, she’d say, “Don’t ask me. Ask your father.” Ever since the Major had died, she must have been somewhat at a loss for words.
