Kinflicks (49 page)

When he had pinned the hearts on all five of us, he nodded and said, ‘Thank you, girls, for helping out our boys in Vietnam.'

In unison we did a double take. ‘Is
that
what happens to it?' Eddie asked. ‘I thought it was for the blood bank that serves
our
area.'

‘Usually it is,' he said with a pleasant smile. “But today is a special drawing for American troops.'

Eddie blanched and clutched my arm all the way back to the truck. We rode to the cabin in politically uncomfortable silence, and not entirely because of Ira's patriarchal
faux pas
in referring to us women as ‘girls.'

The next time I saw Ira was under considerably less friendly circumstances, in our birth control information center on Main Street. Our personal finances had started rankling: We had continued to send checks to underground theater groups and countercultural coffee houses in Boston. But, not being there to survey their operations, Eddie had become uneasy. She insisted that a drug rehabilitation center we were helping was a front for FBI infiltration of radical policies. So we abruptly cut them off. Besides, we wanted to brighten our own immediate corner. Each time we had ventured into town for supplies, we had seen women our own age, grossly overweight with no teeth and greasy hair, being dragged in four directions at once by as many small children. These women were our sisters. They merited our help more than a bunch of storefront rip-offs in Boston.

And so we had rented a vacant shop. We furnished it with castoffs and stocked it with free literature on family management from Planned Parenthood. We put a sign out front that euphemistically read ‘Family Planning Center.' One of us was there at all times during working hours, prepared to discuss birth control devices and to refer women to the local doctor to acquire one. We also planned to refer women under the table to sympathetic doctors in Montreal for illegal abortions and to lobby at the statehouse in Montpelier to liberalize the state abortion laws.

All of us did these things except Mona, who explained one night, ‘Kill yourself first, but don't have an abortion. Not if the father is a man you love, or have loved. It's like ripping off one of your own limbs and stomping on it.'

‘Sometimes you have to sacrifice a limb for the well-being of the tree,' Eddie replied curtly.

After ten days, we had had two clients. The first was a frail young woman with darting eyes. She sneaked through the door, glancing nervously up and down the street to be sure she wasn't being observed by her friends and neighbors.

‘May I help you?' I inquired cordially, as she stood squirming in front of the desk.

‘I -1 want to do it,' she stuttered, blushing.

‘Yes, certainly,' I said, assuming that she was a young virgin about to embark upon the treacherous sea of sexuality, a high school girl perhaps whose illegitimate pregnancy I would prevent. ‘Won't you have a seat?'

She perched tentatively, prepared to flee.

‘Now!' I began, searching for tactful terminology. ‘Your — partner, have you known him long?'

She looked at me strangely. ‘Well, yes. I mean, we been
married
four years, but nothing happens.'

I pondered this revelation carefully. ‘You mean you — uh…' I broke into a sweat.

The girl's eyes whirled in their sockets with stress.

‘I'm not sure I understand. You're been married four years, you say. But you've never — ah —
done
it?' When in doubt, resort to the client's phraseology.

‘Done what?'

‘Well,
you
know.' I had used the verb ‘to fuck' for so long that I couldn't remember its socially acceptable synonym. ‘It.'

‘It?'

‘Well, when you came in, you said you wanted to “do it.”'

‘Yes. Plan my family,' she mumbled. ‘It said on the sign “Family Planning Center.” Is this the wrong place?'

‘No, no,' I assured her hastily. ‘Yes, that's what we do here all right — plan families. Now, all right, yes. Four years you've been married, you say? Yes, so what have you been — using, as it were?'

‘Using? Using for what?'

‘For family planning.'

She stared at me with consternation. ‘Well, you know, the same as what everyone else uses.'

I realized that I wasn't as up on the contraceptive folkways of Vermont as I should have been. ‘What's that — condoms or a diaphragm or what?'

She looked at me blankly. ‘I thought you didn't use none of that stuff when you're trying to have a family?'

‘No, but I thought you were trying
not
to?'

‘I said I come in here because the sign said “Family Planning Center.” I been trying to have a family for four years now and nothing happens.'

I looked at her, horrified. ‘You mean you
want
to get pregnant?'

‘Thank you all the same, ma'am,' she whispered, sidling toward the door and bolting out.

Our second client had been handled by Eddie with somewhat more finesse. She was a high school girl, premaritally pregnant. The father of the child was desperate to marry her, according to her. But she wanted nothing to do with him. Eddie made arrangements with a doctor in Montreal and lent her some dividend money. She wrote Eddie the next week saying that the operation had gone well, that she had gotten a work permit and found a waitressing job, that she intended to stay in Montreal, and she was very happy and very grateful.

Soon afterwards, Ira came storming into the clinic, his nostrils flaring and his forehead glistening with sweat. With him was a short stout man in green work clothes who slammed the glass door with a shuddering crash.

I looked up from a pamphlet on breast self-examination, which had just convinced me that I was dying of breast cancer. Recognizing Ira, I smiled. After all, we were fellow volunteers to the cause of alleviating human suffering, never mind if that suffering was self-inflicted in the case of the blood drawing for troops in Vietnam.

‘May I help you?'

‘Yes, you can!' Ira's fat friend growled. ‘Get the hell out of this town and take your goddam bull-dyke friends with you!'

I stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I was going to marry that girl!' he informed me, his voice quivering.

‘What girl?'

‘That girl you and your lesbo friends sent up to Montreal to be butchered!'

‘Maybe she didn't want to marry
you.'

‘Of course she didn't,' he growled. ‘That's why I knocked her up.'

I looked first at Ira and then at his friend in wonderment. ‘You did it on
purpose?'

‘How else could I get her to marry me?'

‘Do you know what it's
like
to be pregnant if you don't want to be?' I asked, implying that I
did.

‘Shut up, cunt!' he shouted, and stormed over to my desk, Ira lingering by the door. ‘Bunch of goddam Commies! Comin in here tryin' to bust up The Home and The Family!'

‘You wanted to marry her,' I snapped, gaining gumption. ‘What about what
she
wanted? Don't you care about that? Maybe she didn't
want
a home and a family.'

‘What
she
wanted was to get knocked up and
have
to have a home and a family. You women are all the same! That's what you
all
want!'

‘Garbage!' I screamed, leaping to my feet. ‘Bullshit! You men…'

The man reached out his stubby hands and wrapped a bumper sticker around my mouth, ending my stream of antimale invective. ‘And
you
want it, too, baby. Don't kid yourself,' he informed me as he stomped out.

Ira looked at me apologetically and said by way of explanation, ‘Rodney is a broken man. He loved that little girl.' He left, climbing into a beige Bronco outside. Rodney sat inside, doubled over, sobbing. Ira threw the Bronco into gear and roared off. A sticker on its rear bumper read ‘Abortion Is Murder.'

On my way home that afternoon I passed the beige Bronco parked at the back side of the hills that bordered our beaver pond. On its roof was tied a huge black bear corpse. Blood dribbled down the back of the Bronco and onto the ‘Abortion is Murder' sticker. To each of the front fenders was lashed a small bear cub. I stopped the truck and gazed in horror, my stomach churning with nausea.

Eventually I walked to the edge of the road and looked into the woods. I saw a faint path leading up through our land. I squatted down and let the air out of each tire. For good measure, I grabbed the radio antenna and snapped it off.

The war was on.

The next time I saw Ira he was a distant duck-shooting silhouette.

Earlier that week Atheliah had been slogging around in hip boots in the marsh on the far side of the pond looking for holes in the barbed-wire fence. We had half a dozen heifers by this time, and they kept getting out. They'd appear, milling around in dazed bovine confusion, on the road to town. We'd have to drive down and herd them home.

Atheliah, as reliable and relentless as a St. Bernard in an avalanche, tracked down and repaired the holes. But at the same time, she discovered a sagging gray duck blind. We'd never seen it before because it was largely camouflaged by the gray skeletons of drowned trees. Even after Atheliah pointed it out from the cabin, we could just barely pick it out when the light was right. Other times it blended right into the graveyard of standing tree trunks.

‘Just left over from other years,' Eddie informed us confidently. ‘No one would dare to use it now that we're here.' Eddie's method of expression — her deep voice and authoritative inflections, the way she stood with her legs planted like the pilings of a pier and with her arms folded serenely across her chest — gave her opinions the force of decrees. That was why I was so startled to be awakened at dawn on the opening day of duck season by rifle blasts.

I lay still trying to remember where I was. Gunshots weren't an unfamiliar sound to me. The Cloyds were forever killing something or other. Each Cloyd had his favorite rifle, and gun racks hung in their house with the frequency of crucifixes in a Catholic church. They were always dragging in bloodied carcasses as special treats for our family. Mother had tried to instill in me forbearance of the folkway: ‘Country people are just
like
that.' And she had exclaimed over the gory corpses like a mother over a small child's first finger painting. Somehow she usually managed to render them edible as well. Remembering Mother and her compulsive kindness sent pangs of remorse through me: I hadn't written or phoned in almost a year; I had thrown her letters unread into the trash in Cambridge; I had departed without leaving a forwarding address, so that her current letters were being returned stamped ‘Addressee Unknown.' She deserved better.

Having finally recognized the rough log wall as belonging to our Vermont cabin, I dragged myself out of bed and across the cold plank floor to the window. There were more shots, and a flock of ducks lifted off the pond in a flurry of feathers. A couple fell lifeless into the water. By straining my eyes in the gray dawn, I could barely pick out two human figures (one of them Ira, as it turned out) peering over the edge of the blind.

Then I saw Eddie marching down the meadow, her braid flicking and lashing behind her like the tail of an enraged lion. Atheliah, Mona and Laverne, dressed identically in lumberjack shirts and fatigues and boots, trailed in Eddie's outraged wake like dinghies behind an ocean liner.

Atheliah, of course, could never be said to ‘trail' anywhere. She barreled along like a diesel truck on a downgrade, carrying her ax. Laverne came next, stalking lithely through the timothy. If Laverne had fallen from the roof yesterday when she and Atheliah had been up there caulking, she would have managed to twist around in mid-air and land lightly on all fours. Whereas Atheliah would have crashed to the ground and left a crater like a giant meteorite. Atheliah was round-shouldered from years of playing down what she considered merely two absurd mounds of woefully misplaced flesh. But Laverne led with her chest at all times.

Bringing up the rear was Mona. If Laverne exuded an aura of invitation, Mona exuded one of confrontation. Behind her purple-tinted goggle lenses, her wide eyes periodically became squinty and sinister. She looked like the Gestapo interrogator in spy movies who had lines like, ‘Ve haff ways off makingk you talk.'

Eddie halted abruptly at the pond edge, the others almost colliding with her. She nodded at the dark green rowboat. Atheliah turned it upright with a flick of her wrist and pushed it into the water with her foot. Eddie climbed in, her weight immediately grounding it. The other three finally freed it by pushing in unison and tripping and splashing in the cold slimy water. Then they hopped in too.

Atheliah rowed them through the open water toward the blind, the oars moving in great swooping strokes like the wings of a giant bird. The heads in the blind stared as the boat slipped through the dead gray trees like a skier down a slalom course. Eddie, in a grand gesture, stood on the front seat and placed a rubber-booted foot on the prow, like Washington crossing the Delaware. The little rowboat, sunk already to its gunwales, listed dangerously. I gritted my teeth. Just in time, they arrived at the blind, and Eddie grabbed hold and righted the tilting craft.

She yelled up in her most authoritative voice. The heads yelled back. Atheliah reached over and shook the post nearest her like a puppy shaking a rag in its teeth. The blind trembled and swayed as though it were made of weathered toothpicks. The heads yelled down at her. Eddie turned around and said something to Atheliah; Atheliah lowered an oar, blade first, into the water. Then, holding onto the blind, she climbed into the knee-deep water, leading with one hip-booted leg. Mona handed her the ax. Reverently, Atheliah removed its leather case. Then, taking the handle in both hands, she raised it above her head. The honed blade flashed red in the rising sun. With one powerful swing, she buried it in the post. The little boat quaked and pitched in the tidal wave produced by the lurching of the blind. Atheliah pulled the ax loose and, just as she was poised for another stroke, the two men scrambled down with their rifles into their inflatable canvas boat. They rowed quickly to shore and disappeared into the woods, carrying the boat.