by Lisa Alther
‘What’s new?’ I’d demand as Ira walked in the door at night.
‘Nothing much.’
“Whom did you see?’ I’d pant.
‘Nobody much.’ He’d shrug off my interrogations to inquire about teething and toilet training. Wistfully he’d ask about my period, in hopes that an intrepid sperm had skirted my stalwart diaphragm. (I continued to postpone my decision on son production.)
One night in early fall he skulked in guiltily. As I hung on him and searched his face for evidence of tidings from the outside world, he mumbled sheepishly, ‘Thought I might go up to camp with Rodney this week. Shoot me some birds.’
I let my arms fall from around his neck and stared at him, stricken. So! Ira was intent upon breaking up our home. All right. If that was the way he wanted it, let him desert his wife and child. I turned away, swallowing tears.
‘Fine!’ I said brightly. ‘Great! Just run along and have fun! Wendy and I will be just fine, and waiting for Daddy when he gets home! Won’t we, Wendy?’
Since my marriage I had resolutely avoided the evening news on the theory that if you don’t like something, it’s best to insulate yourself from it. Unread magazines and newspapers from the past year sat in piles in the television room. But that Monday night, when Ira and I would have been making love if he weren’t off shooting birds, I sat down and watched Howard K. Smith, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite back to back. Then I stayed up all night reading my way through the stacks of newsprint.
It was incredible! Monster tanks were rolling through rain forests leaving wakes of dead bodies. Nuclear warheads dotted the globe with the frequency of mice turds in my cupboards.
Starving children were fighting over undigested grain in cow dung. Busloads of black children were being overturned by white mobs. The oceans were poison soups. Jesus Christ, Eddie was right after all! Ours was a death-dealing society. How was it possible that I was still alive? And here I had been fretting over whether or not to conceive another ruling-class consumer. It was obscene.
I leapt up and stalked back and forth through the echoing house. Then I flung myself on the parlor couch and stared up at ponytailed Father Bliss, thinking about the Major’s coffin being lowered into the ground. It’s not enough! It’s not enough, I kept wailing. So what if you do have descendants? That still doesn’t prevent your suffocating on factory emissions, doesn’t prevent your being sizzled in a nuclear holocaust, doesn’t prevent your dying an agonized death. If you are lucky, the most you can hope for is to be lowered into the ground where you will rot and be eaten by worms….
The world needed me, and I was trapped here in the woods rinsing bibs and mashing bananas! For a fucking little vampire bat of a kid who nourished herself by sucking my strength, leaving me shriveled like a poorly embalmed mummy in the process….
In a moment of clarity, I realized that I had gone crazy overnight. I picked up the phone and called Angela, the only person I could begin to talk to in town. After the usual politeness, I exploded, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of it all, Angela — the same thing day after day after day, year after year? Meals to cook, beds to change, laundry to fold, toys to pick up. Baths, naps, diapers. Trout season, bird season, buck season. It just goes on and on. Nothing ever changes. It’s like being in prison. And meanwhile, people are dropping like flies, and the world is collapsing, and…’
‘Oh sure, I get like that sometimes,’ Angela interrupted, clearly confused by my call.
‘What do you do?’
‘Oh, Bill and I scream at each other and kick and throw plates. And then Bill drags me off to bed and knocks me up and I have another baby.’ She laughed merrily.
I stared at the phone in horror. ‘Really?’
‘You should have another baby, Ginny. Really you should. Two are so much easier than one.’
She has to think that, I reminded myself carefully. She has four. She wants to think she’s taken the best possible course. She’s out looking for converts, like everyone else.
‘That’s what everyone always says…’
‘Oh, but it’s true. And it gets easier with each one. Why, I’m so relaxed with four that I’m about to fall apart.’
It was true. Angela did look unhinged most of the time. Her children were all about two years apart. Most people’s were. That meant that Angela’s method of fighting the domestic doldrums would last for about fifteen months between the birth of the last child and the conception of the next. Wendy was older than fifteen months. Any day now Ira and I would be dragging each other off to bed to make another baby in an effort to restore my sanity. I preferred to think that conception was a rational decision. But if I wanted my babies to be rational decisions, I had better pull myself together and get busy deciding whether or not I wanted another.
When Ira returned from his great bird hunt, I was lying in a state of nervous collapse on the parlor couch staring at the portrait of Father Bliss. Books from the bookcase lay strewn over the floor. Spinach was caked all over the kitchen and all through my hair. I had just completed a series of letters — requesting brochures on land purchases in the Klondike, job opportunities in New Zealand, immigration policies in Zambia. This behavior was in keeping with the adage that had ruled my life to date: ‘When in doubt, cut out.’
‘Where’s my little angel?’ Ira asked, flinging half a dozen decaying sparrows at me to clean for supper.
‘Damned if I know,’ I whispered.
‘What? You don’t know?’
‘The back yard maybe?’
Ira raced into the yard calling, ‘Wendy, Daddy’s home!’ The calls got farther and farther from the house, and increasingly panicked.
Ira found Wendy careering down the road to town on her chubby little legs with her damp diaper trailing in the dirt.
When he carried her, miraculously unharmed, into the house, he was quivering with rage. I had never seen my assiduously good-natured husband angry before. I watched, fascinated, delighted, as his black eyes flashed sparks of fury.
He went upstairs and put Wendy in her crib. Then he came stomping down and stood looking at me, speechless.
I shrugged indifferently. ‘I counted up today. I’ve been at this baby stuff for twenty-seven months. And I’m tired of it.’
‘Tired of it?’ he shouted. ‘So you just thought you’d let her wander down the road and get run over, so that you won’t have to be bothered with her anymore?’
‘I didn’t know she was in the road.’
‘That’s just the point!’ he yelled. ‘You didn’t know where our baby was!’
‘Baby this, baby that. I’m sick of fucking babies!’ I screamed. ‘Maybe I want to think about something else for a change, talk about something besides bowel movements, do something besides rinse diapers!’
“Well, that’s tough if you’re sick of it, Ginny,’ Ira snarled. “Because you and I have quite a few more years left of Wendy. I know you’re used to just packing up and leaving when you get tired of things. That’s how you’ve lived your whole life. You’re a spoiled brat! But you chose to have this baby, Ginny. It was your idea. Just remember that. And you’re dang well going to care for her! It’s your duty!’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ I suggested calmly. I hurled his dead birds at him. ‘And take your goddam sparrows and shove them up your ass.’
‘If you use your Soybean language on me once more, Ginny Bliss, I’m going to knock the hang out of you!’
“Well, well, Prince Holier Than Thou shows his true colors,’ I said thoughtfully, extending my bare foot and studying my toenails. ‘Mr. Bland has come out of his closet to side with his illustrious array of bigoted relatives — the charming and fascinating folk of Stark’s Bog, Vermont.’
I looked up to discover Ira’s rifle aimed at my head.
‘I’m going to splatter you all over this room if you don’t shut your filthy dyke mouth!’ he gasped.
I looked down the barrel without emotion. So this was it? Death had been stalking me all my li
fe and now had the upper hand. It appeared I was to die a homicide victim in a stone colonial in Stark’s Bog, Vermont — an unexpected fate for a country girl from Tennessee. Well, so be it. It was my just desserts. I had married a man without ‘loving’ him, whatever that lofty term might mean, which I no longer knew. I was in the process of coming to loathe him, a kind and decent man, for being exactly what I had married him for being — responsible and reliable and disciplined, and predictable and dull and boring. Ira had fulfilled his end of our bargain by providing me with an orderly life, but I was apparently no longer prepared to fulfill my end by being a quiet gentle woman who was a joy to come home to. I closed my eyes and waited for my head to smash to bits, like a dropped pumpkin.
Nothing happened. I heard sobbing. I opened my eyes just as Ira hurled his rifle into the corner and collapsed weeping into Father Bliss’s wing chair. We fell asleep and slept there all night. The next morning I woke up with a throbbing headache and the nausea of self-disgust. I opened one eye and discovered Ira gazing at me with despair. We flew on wings of contrition to embrace each other in the middle of the floor and to bathe each other’s face in wild kisses. We spent the hour until Ira left for his office vowing to lead a new life of domestic devotion ever afterward.
‘I want to make you happy, Ginny,’ he murmured.
‘I am happy, Ira,’ I murmured back, trying to convince us both.
‘We’ll make a son tonight,’ Ira promised, as he nibbled my ear lobe just before rushing out to his car.
That night for supper I served up the game birds. I covered their pathetic little heads with lettuce leaves from my salad and poked away loyally, trying to flake the hauntingly meager layer of flesh from the delicate framework of bones.
‘Delicious!’ Ira informed me, just as Eddie had always done concerning soybean croquettes.
‘Delicious,’ I echoed weakly, acutely conscious of the fact that I was about to have a son implanted in my womb. Mother had always insisted that personal preference was irrelevant, that the doing of one’s duty was what counted. It was my duty to provide my husband with an heir, and that was that.
But, as it turned out, that night wasn’t an auspicious one for son-making. Although the orgasm I had experienced during Wendy’s conception hadn’t recurred, Ira had given up trying to make our sex life exciting. Hanging from the beam had shaken his confidence in his manual. The project he was now devoting his considerable organizational skills to was producing a son. He had clipped an article from the Reader’s Digest on determining the sex of a baby at conception, based on the different rates at which male and female sperm traveled under different vaginal conditions. Marked in red pencil on the kitchen calendar now were the days of my menstrual cycle most propitious for the conception of a male. I felt like a medieval walled city about to be besieged. Ira bought me a douche bag and mixed up a solution in a jar. He was resolutely abstaining from sex so as to amass sperm for the big assault.
‘But why does it have to be a son?’ I asked.
‘Why a son? Everyone wants a son.’
But I wasn’t even convinced I wanted another baby, never mind its sex. However, if I wasn’t going to fill Father Bliss’s house to the rafters with descendants, what was I going to do? What excuse could I give Ira to delay or call off this procreative blitzkrieg? I had no idea. And there was my duty to be performed.
The first couple of attempts failed. Ira’s sperm had undoubtedly drowned in the sea of baking soda solution he had pumped into me with the douche bag, as I lay sprawled in the bathtub pointing out weakly, ‘But Ira, I’ll probably give birth to a batch of cookies, after all this baking soda.’
It was late fall by now. I stuck Wendy in a backpack and began taking marathon hikes across fields and through woods and down into valleys. These trips were tainted with a certain wistfulness: If I didn’t hike now, I’d soon be pregnant and unable to hike very far with Wendy on my back. Wendy loved her new vantage point and bounced with glee as we walked.
Or she would exhaust herself with her bouncings and babblings and would fall asleep with her head on my shoulder. Sometimes I wasn’t home to fix Ira’s lunch, or got home so late that supper wasn’t on the table until seven and Ira was late for his meetings. Much of the time the house was a shambles. I had simply stopped trying to keep up with it all. I did no more than an occasional pickup and a token vacuuming. Sometimes I would put a load of dirty clothes in the washer and leave them there for a week or more, forgetting to switch them to the dryer; they would emerge covered with green mold.
Ira was becoming sullen. He no longer assured me of his concern for my happiness. ‘It’s not that you’re asked to do very much,’ he complained one night after a supper of TV dinners as he drew on his cigar.
‘Not much!’ I itemized the details that went into maintaining the slave labor camp he called his home.
‘But Ginny, it’s your job. I work all day doing lots of things I don’t like so that we can have money to live on. Adults have to work to live. It’s as simple as that. You’re not doing your duty, Ginny.’
‘God!’ I gasped with outrage. ‘You and your accountant mentality!’
‘If you don’t want to live in my house and be my wife and have my babies,’ Ira notified me, very sure of himself, ‘you’d better be thinking about what you do want to do.’ He took down the calendar and devoted himself to a calculation of my fertile days for that month.
On one of my walks, I ended up at the beaver pond, having approached it unexpectedly from a new direction. Wendy was asleep. I held my breath, waiting to be socked with a gutful of emotion at the sight of the place. I had been back since, but only at night on the back of Ira’s Sno Cat, which wasn’t the same as being there alone in late fall during the day.
So far the emotion was mild, bearable, pleasantly nostalgic. I walked around the edge of the pond. The sun was indirect but hot, and the meadow of dried timothy rustled as I walked slowly up through it toward the cabin site. Some black charred rubble remained, not much. The winter’s snows had been about their healing work, washing the ashes down into the meadow. A few bold burdocks had fought their way up through the ruins.
I looked down toward the pond, so still and quiet compared to that last insane winter. Occasional water bugs scooted across the surface, sending out patterns of concentric ripples. The dead gray trees, not as ominous as usual under the bright sun, stood like silent brooding sentinels to the human folly that had surrounded them that winter.
I strolled around slowly, testing myself for emotion, like dipping a toe in hot bathwater, heading ultimately for our former garden site. It was completely taken over by a tangled riot of weeds. Growing up from the tomato patch where I had spread Eddie’s ashes were some dried goldenrod. I picked one stalk and stuck it through my buttonhole.
I walked down the path toward Mona’s and Atheliah’s farm. The path was overgrown, nearly undetectable. I thought I might stop by and say hello. I hadn’t seen them for over a year. The last time had been in the IGA. They raced up with arms outstretched to embrace me. I glanced around nervously. Two of Ira’s aunts and several cousins and the owner of the store were watching. Where did my loyalties lie? I knew by now that both sides refused to let them lie in both places. It was a wrenching moment of truth. My arms rose flutteringly from my sides of their own accord. Hastily, I drew them down and greeted Mona and Atheliah coolly, with words alone. I had made my choice. But I was now no longer quite so sure about it.
I stood overlooking the rambling house. A party was in progress. They had probably drummed up some obscure saint’s day as an excuse for a festival, or perhaps it was an Indian Summer rite. Black pots were being stirred over fires. People lay around in the sun, mostly undressed, playing instruments, smoking dope, laughing. A wild running and leaping game was going on where the cornfield had been. I saw no evidence of even a token garden this year. I started down the hill toward the encampment, with a big smile on my face.
Then I stopped abruptly and s
tared at the scene, while the pain I had been expecting finally swept over me in a great tidal wave. I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes tightly against it. I shook with agony. And I knew that there was no going back. I didn’t know how to go forward, but I knew I couldn’t go back. I would turn into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom. But I wanted to go back. I wanted to loll in the sun with Eddie again and smoke dope and laugh and forget about baking soda douches and dirty diapers. I wanted to default on my duty. But the flip side of lolling in the sun was the burst of insanity that resulted in my neglect of Wendy, the day Ira found her in the road. The two went hand in hand and had killed Eddie….
Wendy awoke with a start and began whimpering. I slid off the pack and lifted her out. Then I sat against a rock, holding her on my lap facing me. I kissed her chubby face, all flushed and damp and grumpy at being awake. She smiled reluctantly. I bounced her and blew in her ear to cheer her up. She laughed, but angrily, not wanting to.
My little vampire bat grabbed the dried goldenrod out of my buttonhole. I restrained an impulse to grab it back. I forced myself to sit and watch calmly as she slowly dismembered it, leaf by leaf. Then I took the pack in one hand, and Wendy’s moist chubby little hand in the other, and we tottered back through the woods toward town.
