Kinflicks

by Lisa Alther

  ‘I have a new Descartes for you, Miss Babcock.’ Prior to my decision to die, I’d been doing surprisingly well in her course, mainly because I liked her and wanted to do well for her, in contrast to my other professors. I especially liked Descartes, largely because he was Miss Head’s specialty. ‘But I’m not leaving it. You have to turn over and take it from me.’ I was tempted, especially since I had some very painful bedsores on that side, due to my determination to turn my face to the wall and await my death.

  ‘Well, I have to get home now to baste my turkey,’ she announced regretfully. ‘And to mash my potatoes and bake my rolls and so on.’

  Against my better judgment, my mouth watering, I began turning, Lazarus rising from the dead. Miss Head was standing there in a green loden coat, her sallow cheeks flushed from the cold. She extended a wrapped present saying, ‘Merry Christmas, Miss Babcock.’

  I started crying in great wracking sobs. ‘But I don’t have anything for you!’ I wailed.

  Miss Head turned away, looking embarrassed. ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘What?’ I asked suspiciously. Who was this woman who could manipulate me so shamelessly — getting me to Worthley in the first place, and now trying to interfere with my death plans?

  ‘Get up and get dressed and come have Christmas dinner with me.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly. I have pneumonia.’

  ‘Not anymore you don’t, Miss Babcock. I asked your doctor. She said it was a good idea for you to get up and around, as it were.’

  ‘How would she know? She’s not the one who’s sick.’

  ‘And you’re not either,’ Miss Head insisted, looking out over the rims of her glasses. She was suppressing a faint amused smile.

  The thing was, I’d come to like the infirmary in my weeks there. I lay silently all day in a bed, with metal bars enclosing me like the sides of a casket. My meals were brought to me, when I deigned to eat. I was bathed without my having to move. My back was rubbed. Bedpans appeared and disappeared. Nothing was expected of me, least of all that I think. It was as close to being dead without actually being in the ground as I could hope for. It would be tough to give up this way of life. Damn Miss Head anyway.

  ‘You’d been working too hard. Why don’t you come over to my apartment and have a relaxing evening? Just the two of us. You’d be doing me a favor. After all, I persuaded the admissions board to accept you. I do have a professional stake in your well-being, as it were. Apart from any personal stake I might have. Come along, Miss Babcock.’

  Obediently I swung my legs out of the bed. My feet hit the floor for the first time in three weeks. I fancied that my circulatory system was thrown out of kilter by this unexpected development, after weeks of lying supine, and that all the blood was rushing to my toes. I would have thrown myself back under the covers in a blind panic except that Miss Head was holding my hand and leading me over to the chair where my clothes lay. Shakily, I dressed, while she went discreetly into the bathroom and patted her crimped gray bun in front of the mirror.

  I walked into the bathroom and glanced around her into the mirror. ‘Oh, Christ!’ I moaned. My hair was so oily and dirty from three weeks of neglect that it was plastered to my skull. And my face was gaunt from eating as little as was consonant with staying conscious so that I could savor my suffering.

  ‘You can wash your hair at my apartment if you want to.’ I looked at her, startled. My dealings with Miss Head in the past had been of such an ethereal nature that it had never occurred to me that she knew about normal bodily functions like the washing of hair.

  I threw Clem’s red dragon windbreaker on over my straight black skirt and black cardigan. Miss Head glanced at me doubtfully but said nothing.

  I hobbled down the hall next to her, my legs rubbery from disuse. My left leg was aching badly at the site of its break and rebreak.

  Miss Head’s apartment was in a wing of my dormitory, down a hall lined with inspirational portraits of stern alumnae who had managed to accomplish significant things in the world. One of these portraits had two right hands, a fact that Miss Head had never noticed until I pointed it out to her that night.

  Miss Head’s door was of oak with wrought-iron strap hinges and hardware. It was located in a dark stone alcove, reached by ducking through an archway lined with stone gargoyles. Above this archway, carved into the stone, was the phrase, ‘In the quiet and still air of delightful studies.’

  The apartment consisted of a living room, bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, and was furnished with Orientals and with prim-looking Victorian settees and fragile chairs whose seats were covered with needlepoint. Turkey odors wafted through the living room as Miss Head hung up her loden coat and my windbreaker.

  ‘Just make yourself comfortable while I tend to a few things in the kitchen, as it were.’ I perched tentatively on the edge of a needlepoint chair whose back consisted of carved wooden rosettes and dedicated myself to the considerable task of making myself comfortable in it.

  Miss Head, turning around just before entering the kitchen, grimaced and said quickly, ‘Not that chair, I’m afraid. It’s just to look at.’ I jumped up and backed away and placed myself on the overly bespringed horsehair sofa, which had claws for feet and was as challenging as the rickety chair, comfort-wise. Miss Head offered me some sherry, which I eagerly accepted. She handed me a small crystal goblet only a third full. ‘We don’t want it to go to your head, as it were.’ I decided this wasn’t the time to mention the raw moonshine at the Bloody Bucket.

  I placed my glass on a coaster on a marble-top table and set about opening my gift. My heart leapt when I saw it — Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason by Rene Descartes! Inside the front cover was an inscription: ‘To Virginia Babcock from Helena Head, Christmas 1963.’

  Eagerly I opened the book and read with delight: ‘In our search for the direct road toward the truth we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certainty equal to that of the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry.’

  As I sat absorbed in Descartes’s instructions for the attainment of certainty, Miss Head poured herself some sherry and sat down opposite me on a small settee covered in gold. ‘Now! What’s this all about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This business of your lying in bed and missing your exams?’

  I sighed weakly and looked at Miss Head for a long time, trying to think how to unburden myself. Finally I blurted out, ‘My boyfriend from high school married someone else.’

  She waited. When I didn’t continue, she said with disbelief, ‘You mean that’s all?’

  ‘That’s not enough?’

  ‘Well, it hardly seems worth sacrificing your college career to.’

  At the time, it never occurred to me that I was in the process of being brainwashed. ‘Now that you put it that way,’ I replied, cooperative convert that I’ve always been, ‘it does seem kind of dumb.’

  ‘Well, not dumb exactly, but illogical certainly.’

  I nodded in agreement, noting that the worst condemnation Miss Head could heap on any action was to label it ‘illogical.’

  ‘You see,’ Miss Head explained, ‘the human organism has only so much energy at its disposal. If you divert a great deal of it into any one channel, you can expect the others to collapse or atrophy. If you squander your vital energies on your emotional life, as you have been doing, plan to be physically and mentally bankrupt, as it were.’

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. It sounded suspiciously mystical for someone devoted to rationality in all its manifestations. ‘Do you think I’ll be allowed to make up the papers and exams?’

  ‘Well, you were in the infirmary with pneumonia, apart from the fact that you were there twice as long as was medically indicated, as it were. But I should think that if you went to your professors individually and apologized and explained the circumstances — the physical illness, not the rest of it — that each would be willing to make special arrangemen
ts. I, for one, certainly will.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Miss Head. What shall I do to complete your course?’

  ‘I’d like a twenty-page paper by the end of next month on a topic of your choosing. Perhaps something dealing with Descartes? And for your own edification and enjoyment, I should think you would want to finish the reading list. Of course, you’ve missed quite a number of lectures. But I’ll be delighted to talk with you any time about questions you may have.’

  The mind’s equivalent of the body’s adrenaline was surging through my system. I wanted nothing more than to race to my garret and tear into unexpurgated Spinoza.

  ‘But relax this evening and have a nice dinner with me. You may call your parents on my phone to wish them a Merry Christmas if you like.’

  I shot her a look of betrayal. She’d been consorting with the enemy?

  ‘Well, obviously they’ve been worried.’

  I glared at her with distrust. If you couldn’t trust your philosophy professor, whom could you trust?

  ‘All right, I’ve been in touch with your parents a time or two,’ she confessed. ‘Is that so terrible?’

  If my infirmary bed had been there, I would have climbed into it immediately and turned my face to the wall. Miss Head was faithless and treacherous after all.

  She shrugged and went into the kitchen.

  After several phone calls from Hullsport, which I had refused to answer, the Major had one day appeared in my infirmary room. I had declined to acknowledge his existence. After all, but for him, I might at that very moment have been Mrs. Clem Cloyd. All my current problems would have been nonexistent.

  Finally he had roared, ‘Ginny, this is ridiculous! Get up out of that bed this instant! I’m taking you home!’

  I had looked at him disdainfully and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure. I have no home.’ A couple of doctors had appeared and had lured him into the hall, where a heated discussion had ensued, the result of which was that I had remained where I was.

  As I sat fuming, Miss Head called me to the table — a mahogany-veneer pedestal-type table. The spread was dazzling to someone accustomed to hospital trays — Limoges china, Waterford crystal, encrusted antique silverware, Brussels lace place mats and napkins. A small golden turkey; silver dishes of pale mashed potatoes, orange butternut squash, dark brown gravy, dark red cranberry sauce, bright green peas. All my weeks of self-denial came to a head, and I almost did a half-gainer into the gravy boat. Miss Head smiled at my exuberance and nodded for me to sit down.

  As I did so, a new aspect of the situation presented itself to me: Here was this gorgeous Christmas feast prepared by Miss Head — for me? What if I had refused to come? Miss Head would be sitting here eating all this alone? My heart ached for her, as she looked over the tops of her half-lenses to carve the turkey. Tears filled my eyes. This competent, self-contained woman — could it be that she was ever actually lonely, the way I had been lonely as I lay week after week pretending I wanted to die? Did she have a secret lover, or some good friend whom she had evicted tonight so that she could save my soul? I sincerely hoped so.

  ‘Where did you get all this beautiful china and stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘It was my mother’s. I was their only child, so I inherited it all. Although I have very little use for twelve place settings, since there’s just me.’

  I was studying her face intently, trying to decide whether or not that bothered her — the way it was bothering me, being, for all practical purposes, parentless and loverless and friendless. Was it possible for life to go on under these circumstances?

  After dinner we returned to our respective settees for coffee and mints. Then she went into her bedroom and returned with a gleaming reddish cello. She sat on the edge of a kindling-like needlepoint chair. Balancing the point of the cello on the Oriental prayer rug, she spread her knees and positioned the instrument between them. She inspected the bow, turning it over and sighting down it like an archer with an arrow. Then she reached over and took the lid off a metronome and set it going.

  Nodding in time to it, she abruptly reached up the neck and began fingering with one hand, while she drew and pushed the bow with the other. She played the cello part to various songs from The Messiah in an irrepressible fashion, the chair swaying alarmingly under her. Like the bluegrass banjo at the Bloody Bucket, which technique had developed in response to the dreary life in Appalachian mining towns, Miss Head’s baroque cello refused to yield a beat to the massed forces of despair and dispersal. Her glasses bounced precariously.

  At the conclusion of the Hallelujah Chorus, she leaned her head against the neck and closed her eyes. After a minute or two, she opened her eyes, set her cello against the wall, and turned over the watch on her breast. She stood up, saying quietly, ‘It’s ten thirty. You must be tired, Miss Babcock, on your first night out. I’ll drive you back to the infirmary.’

  ‘I guess I’ll go up to my room here in the dorm.’

  She looked at me with a tired smile and patted my shoulder and said, ‘Indeed. Yes. Good.’

  I heaved open her massive oaken door and found myself alone in the echoing alcove, the glaring portraits lying in wait for me in the hall beyond. Squaring my shoulders, I walked bravely into their collective stare. I had failed them so far. I had squandered my personal resources, yearning only to be loved and protected and defined by a man. I would not fail them in the future, however. I strode confidently up the hall under their gaze, past the antique high-backed wooden bishops’ chairs that lined the dim corridor.

  The topic I chose for my paper for Miss Head was the following: ‘Who made the world and why?’ I sat down that night and wrote until four o’clock on Christmas morning. I had finished fourteen pages and had dealt with the first half of the topic. Using the Cartesian method, I had constructed an elegant proof of the existence of God, based on the postulate that it was impossible to conceive of something unless it existed in the first place. I read what I had written, and I saw that it was good, and I went to bed as well pleased as God Himself must have been after that sixth day on which He had conjured man into existence.

  On Christmas morning I leapt out of bed and threw on a bathrobe and sat down at my desk and set to work finishing it. But the Why had me stumped. Every string of interlaced theorems I unveiled collapsed like a house of cards. Finally I chopped the ‘why’ off the topic and submitted a fourteen-page paper.

  A couple of days later, Miss Head returned it to me with a big red C and a note saying that she was giving me a break because I’d missed so many classes. I had posed my topic incorrectly. My argument suffered from circularity. The wording of the topic implied its answer. ‘Who’ presupposed an anthropomorphic creator of some sort. Likewise, ‘made’ implied a specific process of bringing the world into being, whereas it may in fact have come to be what it is through a number of other processes. As for my use of the word ‘world,’ well, no one could possibly take my question, thus stated, seriously enough to attempt an answer. ‘World’ contained an ambiguity that rendered the question untenable. By ‘world’ did I intend to indicate the total complex of entities and occurrences that have existed in the past and will exist in the future and are existing in the present? Because if so, such a ‘world’ includes all beings who have ever made anything and all things ever made, and therefore could not be the subject of the erroneously used verb ‘to make’ anyway. Or did I intend to indicate some fragmentary portion of the above-mentioned totality; and if so, what portion? In spite of my false start, I had handled my proof of the existence of God skillfully. My grasp of the mind-body dichotomy was sound. My improvement over the semester had been striking and would continue to be, she was certain. I must not be discouraged by my C. I was clinging to sentimental assumptions, conditioned into me by my upbringing. She had marked the points at which these assumptions had surfaced with a red pencil. I should work at rooting out such subjective emotional reactions.

  I was very discouraged, not the
least by the fact that I couldn’t fathom the meaning of her remarks. She might just as well have been talking in Urdu. I sulked around and thought about re-enrolling in the infirmary.

  Instead I went out and bought Clem and Maxine a wedding gift — a salt shaker in the shape of a bull’s head and a pepper shaker in the shape of a cow’s head. These I mailed with a friendly note apologizing for my tardiness and wishing them many years of great happiness. In the package I included Clem’s patched windbreaker and his bracelet.

  Then I went to a beauty parlor and had my hair done. I was letting it grow out so as to wear it in a bun. In the meantime, I wanted it as flat and unobtrusive as possible. After a year and a half of hefting around a lacquered bouffant, like a plastic space helmet, a close-fitting coif was a considerable relief.

  I also bought half a dozen wool suits and some high-necked nylon blouses, an antique cameo brooch, and some low-heeled simple shoes. I now wore a size smaller than upon entering the infirmary with my broken heart. It was good to have less of me to keep track of.

  Dressed in a new outfit, I descended to Miss Head’s chambers. The Christmas vacation was ending the next day, and the other students would begin returning in early evening. I wanted to gobble up Miss Head’s undivided attention while I could.

  She opened her huge door, looked me up and down, and exclaimed, ‘Why, Miss Babcock! I scarcely recognized you. You have a new suit. It’s perfectly lovely.’ She invited me in, and I perched on the overstuffed horsehair loveseat. ‘I was just making myself some tea. Would you like some?’

  I was by now well hooked on tea. I required it, fix-like, every afternoon. ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  Miss Head performed the intricate tea rite in exactly the same way as the day of my interview. Only this time, wiser, I said, ‘With lemon, please. But no sugar.’

  Nodding with satisfaction at my acquired finesse, she handed me my cup. Then she looked at me questioningly.

  ‘I wondered,’ I explained, ‘if you could help me with my schedule for next term. I have no idea what to take.’