Kinflicks

by Lisa Alther

  ‘What would Eddie say?’ Atheliah said sadly.

  ‘I never think of Eddie,’ I said quickly, bathed in pain.

  ‘Your loyalties certainly are short-lived,’ Mona said. We lay in silence. Soon, they got up and dressed and left

  During the two weeks that I was alone in that echoing house, I came to a decision: I wanted a baby. Father Bliss had been dead for one hundred and fifty years, but he lived on in that stone house. He lived on in the memories of his descendants, who passed on to their children the story of his carving five miniature tombstones in the backyard burying plot for his five children who died of small-pox in one month. He lived on through his genes. You had only to look at the current-day Bliss clan to see the features that remained constant, even through the onslaught of intermarriage. Looking at them all, I knew what Father Bliss had looked like, would have known even without his brooding portrait in the parlor. Living in his house and among his descendants, I felt his continuing presence.

  Well, I, too, wanted to be a continuing presence. That was why I needed a baby. This child would be my hostage against Death.

  ‘Ira, how do you feel about our having a baby?’ I asked a couple of days after he returned from his mock war, sore and exhausted.

  ‘You’re not…?’

  ‘No, no. I was just thinking about it while you were gone.’

  He beamed. ‘Ginny, I’d love to have a baby. My first wife never wanted children, so I didn’t want to suggest it to you.’

  ‘Ira, I want your baby,’ I said fervently. We made love, even though it was 7:15 on a Tuesday night. Ira missed his fire department meeting, and the phone rang unanswered fifteen times as the firemen tried to locate him. And I had an orgasm, one that outdid even those with Eddie. Ira lay with his head on my rash-covered chest and wept with joy. His warm tears bathed my splotched breasts.

  Bird season came, but Ira stayed home to bring me saltines in bed for my morning sickness. The snows began, but Ira’s Sno Cat sat untouched in the tool shed while he lay with his head on my belly listening for heartbeats and letting the fetus kick him in the face from its uterine fastness. Rodney came by to take him ice fishing, but Ira lent him his drill and stayed home to massage my swollen ankles. No longer did he demand of me if I was happy. He knew I was, and I knew he was.

  Never was a child more eagerly awaited. Or so it seemed to us. I read book after book on childbirth, things like this: ‘Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto welcomed our daughter into this world! Our daughter! This lofty victorious music provided the background for her first yell, her lusty salutation to her triumphant parents! I glow with delight as I gaze down at our little cherub. She enthralls me! I experience a profoundly reverent serenity in the depths of my soul, as after an assignment successfully completed!’

  No wonder there was a population crisis, I reflected, if delivery did all that for a woman. I couldn’t wait. At last I had found myself; all along I had been destined to be a brood mare. Why had it taken me so long to come around to accepting my fate with grace?

  One afternoon I came waddling down the stairs and into the living room in pursuit of a Rolaid. The room erupted with shrieking faces. I fell to the floor in terror, tripping over a cord and bringing a lamp smashing down on my head. Angela, who had arranged this surprise shower, hovered anxiously over me while Ira’s assembled aunts and cousins and I all waited to see if I would miscarry. When it appeared that I would not, I was able to stop spitting and snarling and cursing Angela and get on with opening my gifts.

  Freshly armed with stacks of crib sheets and stretch diapers, outfitted with bushels of large safety pins, I was now ready for anything the maternity ward might bring.

  Except for the pain. Such pain isn’t possible, I told myself as I lay writhing on my labor bed. I had been pleading like a junky for a fix of Demerol. The delivery itself, which I watched in mirrors even more intricately arranged than those Laverne had employed to view her cervix, passed in a blur of vivid colors — green from the baby’s first of many bowel movements, the black of her Bliss hair, the red of my own blood. Rather than the sense of triumph my books had promised, I felt mostly relief to have the unendurable pain over with.

  Wendy had been born shortly before the opening day of trout season, but Ira’s fishing tackle hung unused in the mud room. Instead Ira lay on our bed and watched with fascination as the tiny girl baby kneaded my bulging breasts and nuzzled and suckled them. At last, a profession I could summon some genuine enthusiasm for: wetnursehood.

  Every morning at ten Ira would rush home from his Sno Cat salesroom to help me give Wendy a bath. We would gaze enraptured as she flailed at the water in the small white bowl with her pudgy arms and legs. Had any couple ever before produced such a perfect little body? We thought not. We would encase her, like a baked pigeon in clay, in a gooey white crust; so entranced were we that we’d fail to notice that one was powdering where the other had already oiled.

  At night when Ira came home, his first question was always, “Well, and did our little angel have a bowel movement this afternoon?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Still hard?’

  ‘No, softer this time, thank goodness.’

  ‘Like oatmeal, or more like banana?’

  ‘Well, less like thick cream soup than yesterday. More like scrambled eggs. Only brown.’

  ‘Not green?’

  ‘No, caramel colored, rather than chocolate.’

  ‘Did she have to strain?’

  ‘Some. But not like yesterday.’

  ‘Sounds pretty good,’ said he, aficionado of feces.

  Ira and I would be in our bed at night after she had finished nursing and was spewing white vomit all over our sheets, and we would inspect minutely each tiny, painfully perfect limb and feature, like new-car owners searching for dents and scratches. Never did an infant have less privacy. She would casually kick out a foot, or wrinkle her forehead, or purse her lips, and we would both instantaneously snap to attention, searching for ways in which to satisfy whatever cryptic whim she might be expressing.

  One night at supper I said to Ira, ‘Why don’t you take a week off so that we can go to Tennessee to show Wendy to my parents?’

  Except for rare trips to Montreal and Boston for a hockey or baseball game, Ira had been out of Vermont only during his army years at Fort Dix and during summer camp at Camp Drum. He said resolutely that if New Jersey were what the rest of the world was like, he wanted nothing to do with it. ‘Guess I already live in just about the nicest place around,’ he’d say smugly. ‘Why do I need to go to Schenectady?’

  Meanwhile, Ira had choked on his pork chop. ‘You said your parents were dead,’ he said with astonishment.

  It was true. I had told him my parents couldn’t come to our wedding or reception because they were dead.

  ‘They were, to me, at that time,’ I explained feebly, incapable of justifying my cutting them out of my life in hopes of minimizing their bourgeois influences on me. In retrospect, what I had done was clearly unjustifiable. I saw going home to them with a husband and a baby as a gesture of apology and reconciliation.

  ‘Please, Ira. Tennessee is not like New Jersey.’ I carefully refrained from claiming that Tennessee was nicer than New Jersey.

  Ira stared at me and then returned sadly to his pork chops. ‘All right,’ he finally said. ‘Then we could go down to Boca Raton to show her to my parents. Let’s do it in March.’ I knew that only the prospect of displaying Wendy would ever have budged him out of Stark’s Bog.

  My parents greeted us at the airport gate as though we were immigrant relatives who had finally made it to the New World. I had never before experienced such rib-smashing embraces from them. Mother’s Instamatic devoured yard after yard of film. Clearly, they were savoring their victory: After more than four years of silence, unbroken by so much as a covered-bridge post card asking for bail, their wild-eyed daughter had returned to the fold (as they had assured each other she inevitably would) with a handso
me son-in-law and an adorable granddaughter in tow. Their Ginny had finally come around.

  They were very discreet, however, about not rubbing it in. Mother immediately assumed complete care of Wendy and allowed her to wreck her house without so much as a concealed grimace. Wendy was by now learning to walk and careened around grabbing hold of things like tablecloths set with heirloom china in order to steady herself.

  The Major put his arm around Ira’s shoulder — Ira glancing down uneasily to note his missing finger — and led him on a tour of his factory and his farm. He took him to play golf at the country club. He even discussed the possibility of buying a whole-life policy.

  One afternoon while Ira and the Major were out golfing and Wendy was napping, Mother and I sat in awkward silence in the living room, listening to the ticking of her steepled family clock.

  ‘We’ve missed hearing from you, dear,’ she began with considerable embarrassment.

  ‘Yes, well…’

  ‘I hope you’ve been well and happy.’ I glanced at her with restrained hatred for her charity. Here she’d been hoping I was well and happy, and I’d been in Vermont wishing they would drop dead so that I could finally escape their all-pervasive influence — having realized some time back that even when I wasn’t living the life they had reared me for, I was still reacting against them; so that how I’d lived had never yet been a pure decision of what I really wanted. It was a most unsettling insight. It shot theories of free will all to hell.

  ‘I have been well and happy, Mother. In between being sick and miserable.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s life,’ she said glibly, closing the door on the topic.

  But wait! everything in me raged. Why don’t you want to hear the ways in which I’ve been sick and miserable? Because I knew she didn’t.

  ‘Such a delightful child — Wendy.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother. I must be doing something right for a change, huh?’

  Mother chose to ignore my challenge, as usual. ‘You mustn’t wait too long to have your second,’ she said in a confiding tone, having welcomed me into the charmed circle of multiparous mothers without consulting me. ‘It’s fun for them to grow up together.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mother, the thought of a second child has never entered my mind.’ That was a boldfaced lie. In fact, I knew that motherhood was my chosen profession. I was good at it. It blissed me out, as Eddie used to say. I had finally found myself. And the thought of a second baby had definitely been festering in my mind for the past couple of months. However,

  I felt Mother’s remark was presumptuous. I didn’t like her taking my allegiances for granted.

  She looked taken aback. ‘Oh well, excuse me, Ginny. It’s just that only children are often so lonely. And having two makes taking care of the first one so much easier.’

  ‘If you ask me, that’s like saying that we can get out of Vietnam by invading Laos.’ Why did I have to be so insistently snippy to my poor mother?

  Mom and Dad Bliss’s luxury condominium rose up like a gray stone asparagus spear on the Boca Raton coastline. ‘Boca,’ they called it.

  ‘Kids! Don’t you love them? Have lots! Fill Father Bliss’s house to the rafters with them!’ Mom Bliss instructed me one afternoon on the beach while Ira was off playing golf with Dad Bliss. Mom Bliss was lying in a red-flowered bathing suit in the damp sand, sinking slowly, with water seeping up around her. Wendy was tottering toward the surf as it receded, then squealing and tottering back to me as new waves broke and swept in. It was hard not to love kids in that setting — their perfect compact little bodies baked brown under the scorching sun; each shell, each bird, each piece of slimy seaweed a thing of wonder and mystery. Watching Wendy was like drinking a six-pack of Geritol; my senses, jaded by four months of blinding white snow, opened up like starving Venus’s flytraps would during black fly season in Vermont.

  ‘There’s nothing more rewarding for a woman than watching her children flourish.’

  ‘What if they don’t flourish?’ I asked, trying hard to resist this brainwashing by secret agents for the goddess of fertility. Damn it, I wanted this second baby I was about to embark on to be my own pure unbiased decision. But was such a decision possible?

  ‘Yes sir, it’s just so everlastingly interesting having children around.’

  ‘How come you moved to Boca?’

  ‘Well, it’s just so cold in Vermont as you get older.’

  ‘Don’t you miss seeing your children and grandchildren?’

  ‘Dad and I have earned a rest,’ she said, forgetting that she was in the middle of a P.R. job for parenthood. ‘Angela would come over with her four and say, “Mom, would you keep them for the day?” It just got to be too much. I’ve spent my whole life looking after kids — eight of them. Did we ever have all this fancy birth control stuff you kids today have? We did not! No. We had our babies as they came, and were grateful if we lived through it! And I never asked my mother to keep them, you can bet. So I think I deserve some peace and quiet before I die.’

  On the plane home, while Wendy was struggling to get down from my lap in order to lurch down the aisle tripping up stewardesses and snatching magazines from passengers, I said to Ira, ‘Our mothers think we should have another baby.’

  Ira looked up in surprise from Road and Track and said, ‘Well, so do our fathers. So do I. Don’t you?’

  Apparently people on all levels had already made the decision. I resented being transformed into a baby machine. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? Well, we can’t have just one child.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘But people don’t have just one child. Jesum Crow, Ginny. Besides, you want a son, don’t you?’

  We went from perpetual midsummer in Boca to deep-drifted spring in Stark’s Bog, with only our tans to remind us that we’d been away. Snow had piled up in our absence to the bottom of our downstairs windowsills, and temperatures hadn’t been above freezing for ten days.

  ‘There now, wasn’t that neat getting away for some sun in the middle of winter?’ I asked Ira.

  ‘I don’t see why we need to go all the way down there. Vermont gets sun, too, you know.’

  ‘Where?’

  Two months later Wendy and I rushed back to Tennessee under considerably less gala circumstances: The Major was dead, of a heart attack on his office floor. I saw Jim and Karl for the first time in several years and discovered that we now had very little to say to each other, in spite of our shared past. As the Major’s coffin was lowered into the ground, I reflected that it really wasn’t enough: The fact that he was leaving behind him these offspring to bear his genes into the future really didn’t compensate for the extinction that he had always insisted lay beyond the grave.

  Back in Vermont, things were suddenly different. Wendy stubbornly insisted on a cup when I offered my breast. I was destroyed. I had intended to nurse her for at least another year, in keeping with my Earth Mother self-image. This was my first hint of the enormity of my folly: Wendy was supposed to be an extension of me, my lifeline to the Future. Was it really possible that she might have things she wanted to do?

  What she now wanted instead of my milk were foodstuffs she could dump on the floor and hurl around the kitchen. Spinach began flying against the walls like bugs splattering against a car windshield in midsummer. What she wanted was to toddle furiously through the house, her damp diapers sagging behind her. What she wanted was to cling to the living room bookcase five times a day and drag down all the books, which I would foolishly replace each time in preparation for the next.

  My schedule had become nothing more than a superimposition of Ira’s schedule on Wendy’s. Wendy was up at six thirty for her breakfast of mashed fruit and hot cereal and milk. She roared around on her missions of destruction while I mopped up the kitchen, washed down the walls, shampooed the rug, fixed Ira’s breakfast. When Ira left, Wendy went back to bed until ten. At ten she had her bath, which Ira no longer rushed home to witness
, then her lunch of mashed something or other and milk; then another crawl or toddle through the house to recreate the havoc I had undone during her nap. Then another nap until two, when we watched ‘Hidden Heartbeats’ and ‘Westview General,’ a relic of our lost nursing days. Then supper of chopped meat and vegetables and milk, most of which ended up on the floor and on her shirt and on my face. Into her sleep suit to be ready for an hour of attention from Ira when he got home. That meant I had to myself an hour and a half in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, between the hours of six thirty in the morning and ten thirty at night, when I fell into an exhausted sleep — during which time I had to do my housework, iron Ira’s shirts, fix dinner, scrape Wendy’s food off the walls, wash and fold her diapers. It was too much — even for a glutton for structure like myself.

  I began to resent every volume Wendy pulled down, every diaper I rinsed. I even hated her charming clowning antics designed to amuse me, like when she’d stand with her back to me and bend over and look at me upside down through her legs. Even if I took her outside and tried to pull the weeds in our borders, when I looked around she’d be hanging over the swimming pool staring at her reflection. Or she’d be halfway down the driveway toward the road. My former neat orderly life was chaos. My serene placid Stark’s Bog personality was frayed and frazzled. My polyester pantsuits were splattered with apricot. And on top of it all, Wendy was displaying an alarming interest in giving up her morning nap.

  I had been too wrapped up in Wendy to bother finding babysitters, so I never went out. I was on leave from the Women’s Auxiliary, and I hadn’t been to a surprise shower since my own over a year ago. The only people I ever saw were Wendy and Ira. I clung desperately to Ira. When he came in at night, my first words were invariably, ‘What’s the gossip? Whom did you see today? What’s new?’

  And the hideous thing was that, to hear Ira tell it, nothing was ever new. He never brought home juicy tidbits about the latest premarital pregnancies and closet alcoholics. He’d never even reveal who had bought how much insurance naming whom as beneficiary. Ira didn’t have a malicious bone in his body; he didn’t approve of gossip. That was why it was occurring to me that basically I loathed him. His bland, amiable acceptance of everything and everyone in his narrow little world was driving me bananas. I had originally considered this quality tolerance developed to a lofty degree, a tolerance that had allowed him to marry a Soybeaner in the face of dismay from friends and family. I was coming to suspect that the quality was instead an absence of discernment. Ira had no taste — not poor taste, no taste. For instance he had married me, who was clearly not what he wanted or needed (in spite of my efforts to convince us both that I was the quiet gentle woman of our dreams). For Ira, nothing was any better or any worse than anything else. His rotten friend Rodney Lamoureux at least snarled and snapped and fought for what he thought was right, like Eddie herself. Never mind that what Rodney and Eddie thought was right was usually wrong.