by Lisa Alther
When I got up and had dressed in my tweed suit, I descended in the elevator to the first floor. It was 3:25. I knew Miss Head would be just finishing her afternoon cello practice and settling down to work on her book.
I paused outside her door, under the stern gaze of the Worthley hall of fame, and tried to decide exactly why I was there. Unsuccessful, I knocked on the thick door. Miss Head opened it and inspected me with a mixture of pleasure and irritation at having her careful afternoon schedule interrupted, and by someone who knew how important it was to her.
‘Come in,’ she invited reluctandy.
I marched in and stood awkwardly in her living room shifting from one low-heeled pump to the other.
‘Sit down,’ she suggested, looking at me curiously. ‘Tea?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Well! What can I do for you, Miss Babcock?’ she asked as she handed me a cup and saucer.
I braced myself and waited for my words to flow. I even opened my mouth. But nothing came out. The speech centers of my brain were betraying me. ‘Nothing much. Just passing by.’
‘How nice,’ she said, with a forced smile. I knew how it upset her to have her routine disturbed because I had experienced the same irritation two nights ago when Bev had asked me to drop everything and have supper with her.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, after a long wait to see what I wanted, ‘but I was just finishing up work on some Schubert lieder. Let me run through one to be sure I’ve got it.’
She set the metronome to ticking at a slow pace. Then she picked up her bow and positioned her cello. After one measure, she stopped and said, ‘Be sure to notice the exquisite coloratura, Miss Babcock. A young man is singing. It’s spring and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing and building their nests. But he is distraught, unable to participate in this sense of renewal because his true love has died during the winter. I suggest you observe the ways in which Schubert manipulates his melodies so as to set up this tension between the living and the dead.’ She nodded at me sternly.
I gritted my teeth, but she didn’t notice my anger. Nodding to pick up the beat from the metronome, she began again, swaying on her antique chair. The song alternated between a sweeping soulful line in the lower registers, and a high, light dancing line that suggested flickering sunlight and fluttering leaves and warbling birds. Miss Head started singing the German words sofdy. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the neck of the cello as she fingered the strings with a trembling pressure. As I watched, her knees tightened their grip on the curved cello sides, and a flush rose into her pallid face.
I jumped up and stalked over and stood in front of her trembling.
‘Miss Head, I…I…’ I was trying to tell her that I loved her, or something equally ill-thought-out. I yearned to grab away her infernal red cello and enfold the dear misguided woman in my strong, alive flesh. Because of my tutelage under Eddie last night, I felt it my mission to save Miss Head from her own plodding brain.
Her eyes flew open, and she stared at me with alarm as I stood quivering with repressed fervor before her.
“Why, Miss Babcock, whatever is the matter?’ she demanded, letting her bow drop to the floor. The metronome ticked on slowly. The hot spring sun beat down through her leaded glass windows and onto her Oriental rugs.
‘It’s not possible,’ I insisted in a low anguished voice. ‘What you want — it isn’t possible. You have to plunge in and make messes and risk rejection — and stuff.’ My sermonette wasn’t coming off as I’d intended.
She sat up stiffly in her chair and inquired coolly, “What are you talking about, Miss Babcock? You’re not making sense.’
I looked at her helplessly as the metronome ticked slower and slower; either it was running down, or time was telescoping. ‘I…I…I’m not going to finish out my independent study with you this term!’
‘Nonsense. Of course you are, Miss Babcock.’
‘But I’m not.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘I won’t!’
‘You will!’
‘Miss Head, I’m a lesbian,’ I announced defiantly.
She sat perfectly still and said nothing.
I cleared my throat. ‘I spent all last night making love with Eddie Holzer, and it was wonderful.’
Eventually Miss Head looked up. ‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘And would you like some more tea?’
I grabbed the metronome and wrenched off the pendulum and hurled it to the floor. ‘Will you stop this goddam thing and listen to me?’
‘My dear Miss Babcock,’ she replied evenly, looking at her wrecked metronome, ‘I am not your mother. Don’t come to me for approval.’
‘I haven’t come to you for approval! I don’t give a shit what you think!’
‘Then why are you here?’
She had me there. I thought about it for a few moments. ‘I’m here, Miss Head, to try to save you from yourself before it’s too late. Don’t you see where you’re heading? You’re so goddam detached that you’re morally paralyzed! You’re so busy with your fucking ideas that you never have time for people! This is a living death!’ I gestured expansively around her apartment.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to leave, Miss Babcock.’
Aha! I knew it! I knew she would reject me if I failed to conform to her way of life. I stalked triumphantly to the door.
At the door I faltered. I turned around, and Miss Head and I gazed at each other with pain. I retained enough tattered objectivity to recognize what I had just said as a lie. I was projecting shamelessly, pinning my own failings with regard to Bev onto Miss Head. Miss Head, to the contrary, had involved herself — with me. She loved me almost as though I were her daughter, and I knew it. But she had served her purpose. She had been the thesis to Eddie’s antithesis. The show had to go on — however ruthlessly.
I looked at her helplessly. She seemed numb — gray and tired there in the spring sun. Did she understand what was taking place — that it was necessary to my development that I reject her by manipulating her into rejecting me? (I hadn’t taken Psychology 101 for nothing.) I almost ran back over to her to apologize, to explain this Hegelian phenomenon to which I was apparently a puppet. But she was the professor. And Eddie was waiting.
My face contorted with anguish, I spun around and strode out.
Eddie sat on her own window seat in the sun. She had her carving of the female torso in her lap and was lovingly rubbing linseed oil into it. I watched as she ran her hands up and down it, smoothing the oil over the breasts and down the thighs and into the crotch. My breathing quickened. Smiling with mixed delight and embarrassment at my new state of affairs, I curled up with Heidegger’s Being and Time on the foot of Eddie’s bed.
At some point I realized that I had been reading the same paragraph over and over again for several minutes without understanding any of it. I frowned. Finally I screamed, ‘Jesus! This doesn’t make any sense!’
Eddie looked up from her mahogany torso. ‘What doesn’t?’
‘Listen to this! “The running-ahead reveals to Being-there the lostness into Oneself and brings it before the possibility…of Being itself — itself, however, in the passionate freedom for death which has rid itself of the illusion of the One, become factual, certain of itself, and full of anxiety. The of-what of anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. That that which is threatening is nowhere, is characteristic of the of-what of anxiety. Dying shows that death is constituted ontologically by always-mineness and existence. It is in the Being (Seiri) of the things-that-are that the nihilation of Nothing (das Nichten des Nichte) recurs!”’
I was shivering by the time I finished, and I could hardly read the last sentence for the chattering of my teeth. A billowing black curtain was being drawn across my mind. Logic, pushed to its extreme, was about to short-circuit my brain.
Eddie wiped the linseed oil off her hands and on
to her jeans. She took the book from me and threw it across the room and sat down and took my head in her lap and stroked my face and hair. Slowly, as though waiting for me to stop her, she pulled my hairpins out and undid my tight Helena Head bun. She ran her hands through my hair and covered my face with it playfully. Then she divided it into three clumps and began plaiting it into one large braid down my back. ‘We’ve got to get out of this place,’ she said quietly, as the May Court danced around Artemis in the courtyard. ‘It’s a goddam madhouse.’
8
Tuesday, June 27
Mrs. Babcock could see nothing. It was pitch black and quiet as a tomb. Where was she? Her body was chilled. She was shivering, and her teeth were chattering. She couldn’t think where she was. She felt around her with her hands. She was clearly in a bed, on a mattress. She began enumerating the various beds in her life — the narrow cot at the farm cabin when she was a small child, the king-sized bed she had shared with Wesley…This bed was too wide to be the cot, too narrow to be the king-sized bed. Where was she?
She felt something clammy and sticky on the sheets. Panic flared up in her. Oh God, it was so cold and dark! Was she alone here, wherever she was? She listened intently, but heard nothing. She could taste blood as she swallowed. She thrashed out in terror, and in doing so found the light switch against her headboard.
Light flooded her hospital room. She sighed with relief. Until she looked down and discovered that her pillow and sheets were soaked with dark blood. She studied the blood with detachment, as though it had nothing to do with her. It looked like anyone else’s blood. It looked exactly as her own blood had always looked. What then was wrong with it, that it was gushing out like this? She rubbed an index finger in a congealing splotch and brought it to her tongue. The blood tasted as salty as usual. She joined her thumb and index finger, and then pulled them gently apart. It seemed as sticky as ever. Why was it failing her like this?
She pressed her call button. Soon she heard steps. In bustled Miss Sturgill, who froze halfway across the room, staring with concealed horror at Mrs. Babcock’s bedding. ‘Oh dear!’ she said. ‘Oh my!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve made a mess.’
‘Oh goodness.’
Miss Sturgill helped Mrs. Babcock to the bathroom and handed her a sanitary pad. ‘Wait a minute. Let me get you some tampons too.’
When Mrs. Babcock emerged, Miss Sturgill had changed the bed. The stained sheets lay in a heap. Miss Sturgill helped her back into bed and then pulled the saturated cotton from her nose and into a pan. Mrs. Babcock lay back exhausted, with blood trickling down her throat, while Miss Sturgill repacked her nostrils and scrubbed the caked blood off her cheeks and chin and thighs with a sponge.
There!’ Miss Sturgill said briskly, as though to a child. ‘Doesn’t it feel nice having fresh clean sheets?’
‘Not in the middle of the night.’ She’d intended the remark to sound wry and witty. Instead it came out whiny and pathetic. ‘Thank you, Miss Sturgill,’ she added, trying to redeem herself.
Miss Sturgill rushed out to call Dr. Vogel. She rushed back in and gave Mrs. Babcock half a sleeping pill. ‘He wants you to sleep until he comes in to do his rounds in a couple of hours.’
Dr. Vogel dragged her from her drug-induced slumber by inquiring with forced cheer, ‘And how are we this morning, Mrs. Babcock?’
Mrs. Babcock explored her body mentally and decided that ‘we’ felt pretty well, all in all, considering that she’d nearly bled to death in the night. Dr. Vogel examined her chart and poked at the cotton in her nostrils and inspected the pad between her legs and took her pulse and blood pressure and temperature. Occasionally he muttered, ‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm.’
‘I must remind you, Mrs. Babcock,’ he finally said, ‘that I did warn you of possible repercussions from failure to take your medication.’
Mrs. Babcock pointed mutely to the empty spot on her table, formerly occupied by the spurned steroids. Dr Vogel flushed and said, ‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm.’
‘Well!’ he said. ‘Hot enough for you?’
‘I haven’t been outside for weeks.’
‘Yup, a scorcher today. A real scorcher.’ He folded his stethoscope and stuck it in the jacket of his lab coat and sidled toward the door.
‘Dr. Vogel?’
His blond head swiveled toward her with reluctance; his hand was on the door handle.
‘I don’t understand what’s happening to me, Dr. Vogel. Would you be good enough to explain it, in simple words?’
He blushed to the roots of his blond hair. ‘Well, I do have to complete my rounds…’
‘After your rounds, then.’
‘Yes, certainly, Mrs. Babcock.’
Mrs. Babcock settled back to await the arrival of a nurse to walk her to breakfast. She punched impatiently at her embroidery hoop with the needle. Pamela, the high school girl who was helping her with it, would be crushed this afternoon at how little she’d accomplished in a week. She glanced out the window at the red squirrels, which were dashing up and down the trunk of the elm and flicking their tails and chattering busily.
She tried to calculate when Ginny would be arriving. It was difficult without a clock. If only Ginny would think to bring her one. But Ginny had never been noted for her thoughtfulness…Judging from the sun, it was about six. Knowing Ginny, she wouldn’t be out of bed before ten. Today Mrs. Babcock proposed to suggest that she return to Vermont. After all, these weren’t ideal conditions for a pleasant mother/daughter visit. Ginny could return to Tennessee when Mrs. Babcock had recovered. Their relationship had been difficult in the best of times: Ginny’s repertoire of responses to her parents had been twofold — sulking and joking, both equally irritating. But the relationship that even normally was trying for them both seemed impossible under these circumstances. The blow-up yesterday had been absurd. If inevitable: Ginny had her household in Vermont to worry about, and Mrs. Babcock her blood. They couldn’t help each other, and it was ridiculous to try. It was best that Ginny leave. Her child and her husband needed her.
After a breakfast of tea and toast, Ginny went to the pine to check her birds. They were hanging from twigs, their eyes closed and their mouths open — screaming silently. No sign of their parents.
Ginny searched the book cases, finally locating the bird book her mother had mentioned. It was bulky and authoritative-looking and had been written by the famous ornithologist Wilbur J. Birdsall, living proof of the axiom that name is destiny. Under a section entitled ‘Fledglings,’ Mr. Birdsall said, ‘Only ten to thirty percent of all baby birds survive to maturity. The others die of starvation, exposure or disease. Parents do not feed congenitally deformed offspring. Some disaster may befall the parent birds, on whom the infants are totally dependent for food. Often baby birds fall from the nest, either by accident or when learning to fly, where they either starve or are eaten by animals. The young of some species can be raised successfully by humans. Others, the swift family for example, feed on partially digested regurgitated food from the parent birds and cannot be hand fed in captivity. It is best to kill such birds should they be found, to avoid prolonging their suffering.’
Feeling ill, Ginny shut the book and sat for a long time. Then she went in the kitchen and got a glass of water. Outside she dipped her index finger in the water and shook a drop into the open mouth of a baby bird. Its eyes opened wide, and it trembled — and finally its pink throat contorted and the water disappeared. She repeated this several times for all three birds. It occurred to her that she could just as well pick them up one at a time and submerge them in the glass until they stopped struggling.
Instead, she sat on the stone steps and brooded. It seemed unlikely that she could throw up at will to provide them with food. And anyway, human digestive juices would probably corrode a bird’s gastric tract. Staring distractedly at the stone steps, another image assembled itself: She was holding a baby bird on a step in one hand. In the other hand, she held a big stone, like the decorative piece
of white quartz next to the doorway. One well-aimed stroke would do it…
Seizing a machete off the wall, she went out front and hacked away at the kudzu in the hot sun, trying to postpone the decision. But as she was hacking, she had another vision: a baby bird on the chopping block by the side of the cabin; one deft slice with the machete…
She marched to the pine tree. As she unhooked one bird from his perch, he opened his dark round eyes and screeched at her, as though beseeching her to deal with him mercifully. The water had apparently revived him? She made the decision not to decide. She would give the horrid parents one more chance. She definitely didn’t relish being God.
She put on a fresh Boone’s Farm Apple Wine T-shirt and some bib overalls. Then she sat down and tried to decide whether even to go to the hospital. She and her mother had wound up yesterday yelling at each other. That certainly couldn’t be very good for her mother. And she knew it wasn’t good for herself. She had woken up that morning with a horrible headache and overwhelming seizures of remorse. Maybe she should think of an excuse for rushing back to Vermont? And then go somewhere else instead. If only she had somewhere else, anywhere else, to go. And if only she could learn how serious this disease was.
She went to the phone and dialed Dr. Tyler. No answer again.
On the way to the hospital, she stopped at the big house and gathered up the photos of relatives from her mother’s bedroom mantel. She would take them as a peace offering. Taking down the photo of her Great-grandmother Hull, her mother’s grandmother, Ginny scrutinized it. Her mother had always said that Ginny looked so much like her. She was Ginny’s age in this photo, in her late twenties. She wore a high-necked lace blouse with a pin of some sort at the throat. Her hair was mostly pinned up, but wisps escaped here and there.
Ginny moved in front of the ornate gilded mirror above the mantel and studied herself. As always, it was a shock. She rarely recognized her own reflection. Her estimation of her looks varied with her mood; today she rated herself well below average. She held up the picture of her great-grandmother so that she could see the two of them side by side. Squinting her eyes and then opening them wide, she still couldn’t see the physical similarities that everyone had always insisted existed — other than the fact that they each had a nose and two eyes and so forth.
