Kinflicks (83 page)

If she stained the slide properly and increased magnification, she would view the red oxygen-carrying cells, the less populous but more varied white cells and — the platelets. The platelets, those tiny cells that, malfunctioning, had killed both her mother and the Major, being too sparse and inactive in her case and overly so in his. And here Ginny sat with her platelets poised briefly between the two. In time, genes being what they were, her platelets would probably have let her down too.

But her platelets being functional for the moment, the blob of blood on her wrist was now viscous with fibrin. Miss Sturgill would have admired her clotting time. She hadn't kept track of it, but it was negligible compared to her mother's.

If she could have shrunk herself down to microbe size and insinuated herself into the area of the knife cut, she'd have been able to witness a high drama. Shock troops of phagocytes would be arriving via the area capillaries. They'd be sticking to the capillary walls until they could extend artificial feet through the overlapping cells of the vessel walls. They'd drag themselves along after their feet, out of the blood vessels and into the fray. Sniffing like bloodhounds, they would track down the thousands of bacteria that had invaded via the knife point Antibodies and various other chemical solutions would already have arrived to bathe these invading bacteria so as to render them appetizing. The encircling phagocytes would then proceed to embrace like Russian politicos these newly delectable bacteria, devouring them whole and alive. Various proteins were also arriving to mend the sliced tissues. The healing process was undertaken instantly and automatically by the bloodstream. In a matter of days, the cut would be healed, and healed so perfectly that no one would be able to locate it

Unless the knife point had introduced an especially belligerent germ, one with an outer wall that could shed the libations from the antibodies. Such a germ would be able to repel the hungry phagocytes, gain a foothold, reproduce, and perhaps destroy her with its wastes, as had happened to Dixie Lee Hull with her recipe card.

And yet, as far as Ginny with her crude senses was concerned, nothing much was going on. She'd sliced her wrist, and the cut had already clotted. And now came the last series of questions that she intended to allow herself in this life. Was she a cell in some infinitely larger organism, an organism that couldn't be bothered with her activities any more than she could be with those of the 60 trillion cells in her own body, as long as they performed their assigned functions? And were there, say, white blood cells that — not being able to see themselves as Ginny could, as a group, under magnification, stained to highlight determining characteristics — had not been able to figure out what their ‘assigned function' was, whether they were supposed to perform as macrophages or neutrophils or eosinophils or lymphocytes? And did those perplexed blood cells then take it upon themselves to self-destruct in a huff at not receiving enough individual attention and guidance from her personally? Autophagy, it was called, when cells unleashed on their own cytoplasm their suicide bags of digestive enzymes. Autophagy, which literally meant ‘self-eating.'

Ginny was reminded of Clem's description of a revolting incident during his adolescence in which he and his hoodlum friends had hunched over their own laps, vainly trying to eat themselves. Onanism, autophagy, suicide, it was all the same — a component part trying to run the whole show. She smiled reluctantly and returned the knife to its sheath.

Like most of her undertakings, her proposed suicide had degenerated into burlesque. Apparently she was condemned to survival. At least for the time being.

She went into the bedroom. She wrapped her mother's clock in her faded Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt and packed it in Hawk's knapsack with her other scant belongings. She left the cabin, to go where she had no idea.

Epilogue

A scavenger walking down the street of the perfume-sellers fell down as if dead. People tried to revive him with sweet odours, but he only became worse.

Finally a former scavenger came along, and recognized the situation. He held something filthy under the man's nose and he immediately revived, calling out: ‘This is indeed perfume!'

You must prepare yourself for the transition in which there will be none of the things to which you have accustomed yourself. After death your identity will have to respond to stimuli of which you have a chance to get a foretaste here.

If you remain attached to the few things with which you are familiar, it will only make you miserable, as the perfume did the scavenger in the street of the perfume-makers.

-G
HAZALI, FROM
Tales of the Dervishes
BY
I
DRIES
S
HAH

A Biography of Lisa Alther

For novelist Lisa Alther, as for so many of her fellow Southerners, the past is ever present, particularly in places like Kingsport, Tennessee, the small town where she was born in 1944. One of five children, Alther grew up in a region known for its coal mining and factories, surrounded by a close-knit Appalachian community. Her father was a second-generation town doctor, and her mother was a former English teacher from upstate New York. Another strong presence in her upbringing was her paternal grandmother, the founder of the Virginia Club and a pillar of the Southern way of life. Lisa attended public schools in Kingsport, taking her place in the marching band after an unsuccessful brush with flag swinging, living the typical life of a 1950s teen.

Alther left Tennessee to attend Wellesley College and moved to New York after graduation in 1966 to work in book publishing at Atheneum. During college she met a Cornell co-ed, Richard Alther, whom she later married. Their daughter, Sara, was born in 1968. The family moved to Vermont, where Richard pursued his painting. In the years that followed, Alther began writing journalism pieces, but inspired by the great Southern women writers and storytellers, she also worked on novels. After many rejections, her first novel,
Kinflicks
was published in 1976 to critical praise and became a bestseller.

Kinflicks
was the first of six bestselling novels: The others were
Original Sins
(1982),
Other Women
(1984),
Bedrock
(1990),
Birdman and the Dancer
(1993), and
Five Minutes in Heaven
(1995). Alther also taught Southern fiction at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, and produced one work of nonfiction,
Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree
. For
Kinfolks
(2007), she researched her family's possible connection to the Melungeon people, a little-known population in eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia whose ethnic origins are unclear but may be traced to Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish sailors who integrated with the Cherokee people in the seventeenth century.

Following her divorce, Alther remained in Vermont, where she has lived now for over thirty years. She has written novels set both in the South and in her adopted northern home, and takes inspiration from both her past and present neighbors and family. Her novels feature a comic wit that addresses human foibles as gracefully as her more serious prose tackles weightier topics such as racism, feminism, domestic abuse, politics, and sexuality. Her work aims “to portray the human reality behind the cultural stereotypes, particularly those regarding women.”

Alther divides her time between Vermont and New York City.

A baby Alther on July 23, 1945, sitting at the edge of Conesus Lake in New York.

Alther in 1948, at age four.

An eight-year-old Alther in June of 1952.

Alther, at age eleven, with her parents, Alice and Shelton Reed, and brothers Michael, Bill, and John, in June of 1955. This photo was taken at Alther's aunt's cottage at Conesus Lake in upstate New York.

Alther's high school graduation photo. She attended Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee, where she played clarinet in the band, was the editor of the school newspaper, and belonged to several community service and social clubs.

Alther at her farmhouse in Vermont in 1976 on the day of the publication of her first novel,
Kinflicks
.