Kinflicks (58 page)

Because it
was
healing, there was no question in Ginny's mind. It was an inexpressible relief just to give up. People came and went, marked charts, plumped pillows, straightened sheets. ‘Beat the Clock' came on the television, and a frazzle-haired woman in a yellow slicker tried to balance milk cartons full of water on her forehead while flying across the stage on a skate board, as the huge monster clock ticked away relentlessly devouring her prize money.

‘Turn it off, would you please?' Ginny asked Mrs. Childress. And the two of them, mother and daughter, floated on through the afternoon as their ancestral clock on the bedside table ticked ever more slowly. Ginny couldn't tell if the clock was running down or if her ears were going haywire. But she didn't really care. Eventually the clock stopped altogether.

Ginny reached the big house in the same languid frame of mind. Her determination to struggle, against anything, had vanished as completely as last winter's snow under the hot spring sun in Vermont. She got the mail from the box. In it was her letter to Miss Head, unopened and marked in Miss Head's pinched handwriting ‘Return to Sender.' Without emotion, Ginny slid it into her overalls pocket. She strolled with indifference past the Southland Realty
FOR SALE
sign in the front yard.

She went upstairs to her room, which was untouched since she had lived in it nine years ago. A canopied double bed with a cannon-ball frame, a skirted dressing table, a Queen Anne highboy. Her mother had been suggesting gently, ever since she had left home, that she sort out the stuff in her closet. And each time her mother had hinted at this, Ginny had snapped back, ‘Why? Are you planning to take in roomers or something? What's wrong with it the way it is?' Nevertheless, each trip home she had gone to her closet to clean it out. Each time she had become engrossed in a scrapbook or a diary; each time she had decided that there was nothing she could part with. Her complete set of Hullsport High athletic game programs from 1960-1962; the sales slip from her first Never-Tell bra; the list in Joe Bob's childish scrawl of all the Hullsport High couples in 1962 who had ‘gone all the way'; her moth-riddled flag swinger jacket and the flag with ‘To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield' on it; the ribbon from the Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival; her shoulder pads and face-guarded helmet; four strapless net and chiffon gowns; a stack of Scrooge comic books, which were collector's items by now. Each time she had decided that they all had to stay.

Besides, Ginny had somehow always felt that if she actually cleared her stuff out, her mother might move someone else in. An irrational feeling, since there was no one around the house needing a room, but there it was. She still thought of this house as ‘home,' this room as ‘her room'; not Ira's stone house in Vermont, not her garret at Worthley, not the Cambridge apartment or the Stark's Bog cabin.

The past had always been more real, more present to her than the present. But this day, without regret and without satisfaction, with total indifference, Ginny cleaned out her entire closet, bundling up all the stuff and toting it out back to the trash cans. She had fantasized that she and Wendy would live in this house, that this would be Wendy's room, that she would continue to hoard all her junk to show Wendy. But she knew now that this would never happen, it was absurd to keep this clutter around any longer. It was time to purge herself of her constipated past.

Back at the cabin, the screeching of baby birds greeted her. Languidly, she got their gooey food from the refrigerator and dropped a few balls of it and some water down their gaping throats, without pleasure and without concern. If they died, so be it. Then she lay down on the big double bed where she had been born. She lay, without guilt over inactivity, without the satisfaction of well-earned leisure, without agony over past failings or apprehension about her uncertain future.

Mrs. Babcock woke up as though stung awake by bees. All she could think about was the previous afternoon, which she had spent in bed utterly motionless and emotionless. She had been demoralized and had just given up. It reminded her of the descriptions of people in the last stages of consciousness before freezing, when they acquiesced to the idea of death and gave up the struggle to stay alive. Well, she never would get out of this terrible place that way. And here when she had so much to do — notes to write thanking people for flowers, her embroidery stitches to practice, the last volume of the encyclopedia to get through.

She climbed down and headed for the bathroom, glancing out the window and smiling with pleasure at the antics of the red squirrels, who were carefully dropping twigs down onto the people entering the hospital.

Looking in the mirror, she prodded the cotton wads in her nose and noted with satisfaction that they weren't soaked through. Nor was the pad between her legs. And when Miss Sturgill whisked in and performed the bleeding test, her time was six minutes. The transfusion had worked again.

She took the silent clock in her lap and wound it until it wouldn't wind any more. She remembered its running down the previous afternoon — only at the time, she hadn't thought of it as ‘running down.' She had pretended that she was a child and that time was telescoping, as it did for children. She was contrasting what time used to be like when she was a schoolgirl, when summer vacation would stretch out luxuriously before her like an eternity. A day then had been the equivalent of a week now. A day now was nothing more than a sneeze. Time played tricks on people as they aged. She remembered from the encyclopedia that time seemed to expand as metabolic rates increased. The lifetimes of fast-moving unstable particles increased as their speed increased; when motion approached the speed of light, time slowed to such an extent as to appear to be standing still. Children had high metabolic rates; those rates slowed as a person's body reached maturity and began its decline. As the metabolic rate slowed down, time sense speeded up. Easy to explain, painful to experience. Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

She realized that the clock she had just wound wasn't ticking. Why not? What had happened to it? Perhaps Mr. Solomon…With remorse, she recalled her scene at the lunch table. How
could
she have screamed at poor Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa, suffering, and perhaps dying, as they both were? In their conditions they were entitled to talk about whatever they wanted to. It seemed ludicrous to
her
to debate the nature of God, but if it comforted
them,
why shouldn't they? If it upset her, she shouldn't go to the sun porch.

With a great burst of energy, she got out of bed and walked to Mr. Solomon's room and apologized. Then to Sister Theresa's room.

‘Please. Don't apologize, Mrs. Babcock. I understand,' Sister Theresa assured her.

Mrs. Babcock doubted that she did.

‘I know it's sometimes difficult to accept the workings of our Lord, Mrs. Babcock. For the believer, death is the whole meaning of life. But for those outside the fold, death renders life absurd, full of pain and poignancy.'

Mrs. Babcock nodded solemnly, determined not to reply, since any reply she could possibly make would sound glib or cynical in the face of such spiritual ardor. If she had to choose between the two, Mrs. Babcock would pick Mr. Solomon's bitterly jocular nihilism any day. Fortunately, she didn't have to choose. She could suck what was helpful from both attitudes, for use when she too was
in extremis
— as she clearly was
not
now, in spite of Sister Theresa's insinuations to the contrary.

Ginny's eyes snapped open. She lay fully clothed on the bed; sunlight was streaming through the window. With disgust, she realized that she'd squandered the entire previous afternoon and evening, lying around in some sort of neurotic stupor when she had so many urgent responsibilities — kudzu to chop, birds to feed. She had had a definite brush with what the psychology texts at Worthley had referred to as ‘ego chill.'

She leapt up and stalked into the living room, where the baby birds were screeching from their wicker basket. It was a wonder they hadn't starved in the night. She got their food. They squawked angrily, their beady black eyes gazing at her with despair, and their tiny yellow beaks quivering convulsively. Ginny dropped balls of the paste into their mouths and followed it with driblets of water.

Closing the lid, she got down Birdsall's book and searched through it as frantically as she had searched through Dr. Spock when Wendy had been an infant, for some clue as to what she should be doing. Were they screeching with such desperation because they were flourishing, or because they were in their death throes? Professor Birdsall wasn't giving away any secrets. Like the ray of light in Einstein's theory of the universe, she kept circling back and ending up where she had started — at the sentence that read, ‘It is best to kill such birds should they be found, to avoid prolonging their suffering.'

‘No!' she growled. Who the fuck was Professor Wilbur J. Birdsall anyhow? There he sat in his laboratory at the University of Chicago, miles away from the wild birdlife that was his life's work. What did he know? It was conceivable that he was wrong about swifts' digestion. The babies were accepting the gooey mess of flour and tuna and hamburg. They weren't vomiting it back up. What was happening in the face of dire necessity might be very different from what happened in the leisurely laboratory circumstances concocted by Professor Birdsall. She had to beat back her Authority Neurosis and trust her own observations.

According to Birdsall, the babies were nowhere near being ready to fly. Could the same principle apply? Faced with the necessity of flying, would their wing muscles and feathers develop faster than usual? Or would they crash and die? Ginny decided to find out. They were locked in a race against time. Birdsall maintained that wild birds raised in captivity often died quite soon anyway. Ginny had to set her birds free before they either died or developed an unrenounceable dependence on her. But maybe they were already too dependent, since she couldn't, as a parent bird would, show them how to find bugs and seeds, or how to build a nest? Or was all that information encoded in their genes? If so, all the more reason to urge them off on their own, before those instincts were clouded over by artifice.

She opened the basket and unhooked the two fledglings from where they hung and carried them outside into the bright sunlight, They closed their black eyes and began screeching in protest. Setting one down, Ginny stroked the fluffy gray feathers of the other with her finger. It opened its tiny eyes and stared into hers. She held out her hand with the bird perched on it. Nothing happened. She made him perch on her index finger. Still nothing, no cooperative movements from him. He opened his beak and squawked with unhappiness.

Ginny enfolded him in her hand and rubbed his head. Then she tossed him into the air, like throwing confetti. He plummeted down, wings tight to his side, like a fluffy black bullet, and crashed into the kudzu.

Sighing, Ginny picked up the other one and repeated the process. Then she returned to the first one. According to her half-baked theory, development could occur in response to need. She had to convey to the centers of their brains that controlled physical maturation the urgency for wing feathers and muscles. So she tossed both, screeching with misery, a couple of more times before returning them to the basket.

As she collapsed on the sofa next to them, she heard a crackling sound in her pocket. She drew out the letter to Miss Head. Anguish stabbed through her. Miss Head, whom she had loved, whatever that might mean, who had loved her after her fashion, no longer wanted anything to do with her. Apparently seven years wasn't time enough to heal the wounds Ginny had inflicted. Ginny knew that she had behaved badly. Miss Head had shared all the things that were most important to her; and Ginny had repaid her by kicking her in the teeth. If seven years weren't time enough for Miss Head to forgive her, most likely an eternity wouldn't do. She felt tears poised in her eyes and allowed herself the luxury of letting them overflow. She licked them off her cheeks. They tasted salty, like seawater, like blood.

Wiping her face with her tie-dyed T-shirt, she stood up and prepared to leave.

When she got to the big house, she jumped out of the Jeep and charged across the weedy front yard to the Southland Realty sign. She gave a great heave and wrenched it out of the ground and tossed it way under the spreading branches of the magnolia tree. Then she lowered her face into smooth creamy magnolia blossoms and breathed deeply of the cloying scent. The petals enveloped her face. The odor summoned up a dizzying succession of summer weddings, high school dances, holiday feasts, at which the gorgeous blossoms had always been featured as centerpieces. She broke off a couple and placed them carefully in the Jeep.

Then she strode around the house and stared with dismay at her formal gowns, which were billowing out of a trash barrel like froth on an overfilled beer mug. Resolutely, she removed from the barrel everything she had dumped into it the previous afternoon. It took several trips to cart it all back up the stairs. She replaced it in her closet and chests exactly as it had been before her neurotic seizure of destructiveness. She could imagine Wendy's delight over the Scrooge comic books. She would pull out all the stuff and tell the fascinated child everything — well, almost everything — that she had done and expected and planned for as a girl. This room could be Wendy's. She removed from her bookcase her favorite tattered book from her own preliterate days. Its chewed torn pages featured pictures of baby farm animals with their mothers, in poses of affection and concern — lamb and ewe, colt and filly, piglet and sow. She put it in a large brown envelope and addressed it to Wendy.

When she got to the hospital, Ginny was pleased to find her mother sitting up writing letters. Her eyes were bright, and her face didn't look quite so puffy.