Kinflicks
Authors: Lisa Alther
Kinflicks
Lisa Alther
Contents
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3. Walking the Knife's Edge, or Blue Balls in Bibleland
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5. Harleys, Hoodlums, and Home-Brew
KINFLICKS
Different sections of the community are, to all realities, “nations.”â¦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.
S
AMARQANDI,
in
Caravan of Dreams;
BY
I
DRIES
S
HAH
So here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing.
D
YING WORDS OF
H
ENRY
J
AMES
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 mouthsâ¦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 âA Mighty Fortress Is Our God' should go before or after âDeus 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?
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.