Kinflicks (61 page)

Just then Ira whisked up with an aunt in tow — a large old woman in an aqua lace suit. ‘This is Ginny, Aunt Bernice. She used to live back on the Stockwell farm,' he explained before racing away.

She said, ‘So
you're
the one.'

‘How do you do? I don't think we've met before.'

‘You don't, huh?' Her steely eyes glinted.

‘No, but I've seen you in the store some.'

‘Could be. Could be.' She stared at me, waiting to see what I wanted from her.

‘Well!' I said in cheery desperation. ‘I think I'll just have another piece of this lovely cake, if you'll excuse me.' I'd used this excuse four times. I had wedding cake crumbling out my ears.

I stood all alone munching. It wasn't that the Women's Friendly Circle was unfriendly. It was just that we had nothing much in common other than Ira. And unlike southerners, who were reared to chat amiably for hours with total strangers, Vermonters weren't bred for volubility. If Ira hadn't kept dragging people over, I could have stood alone all evening and left without exchanging a word with anyone. Making the best of bad material, I chose to think of this trait as ‘tolerance.'

But then Rodney came sauntering over. He looked almost human in his suit and tie. ‘Enjoying yourself,
Mrs.
Bliss?' he asked with an evil grin.

‘Sure. Why not?'

‘Well, live it up while you can.'

I looked at him questioningly.

‘Look, let's not play games. Ira's my best friend, and he's made a bad mistake. You treat him good, or you'll have
me
to answer to. He's been hurt enough by women.'

‘Why don't you mind your own business, Rodney?' I gasped as he slithered away.

Ira rushed over. ‘Are you having a good time?' he demanded, studying my face for clues.

‘Yes, of course. Marvelous!' I said, laughing gaily.

‘I know it's difficult for you — an outsider among all my people.'

‘Yes, but they're wonderful,' I assured him, too brightly. Could this marriage be saved?

‘These things take time. I just
know
once they get to know you they'll love you as much as I do.' He leaned down and kissed my cheek. I smiled bravely, as he wandered off in search of introducible friends.

Uncle Lou came up again and asked, “Now what church did you say you attend?'

‘I don't attend
any
church.' I sighed.

‘Well, then,' he said, businesslike, ‘look me right in the eye, and people will think we're just talking.'

Aren't
we, I wondered as I stared into the watery blue behind his thick lenses.

‘Dear Lord, help this Thy servant who has strayed to recognize her arrogance in casting off Thy church. Bless her union with Ira Bliss, and if it be Thy will, grace it with children. Guide her, Father, in setting up a fine Christian household that will be a haven of peace and goodness in a heathen world. Help her to pursue works that will make her a credit to her community and an aid and comfort to her husband and children. Amen.'

‘Amen,' I said fervently. This was in fact my wish: to win over the Stark's Boggers and become a credit to their community, to provide as much aid and comfort to Ira as he had been supplying to me. ‘But don't you think it's possible to have a good marriage without going to church?'

‘Possible,' he conceded, closing his eyes and shaking his head sadly. ‘But doubtful. Doubtful.'

Much more crucial to the health of our marriage than our ensuing record of church attendance was the fact that our next 172 attempts at intercourse were dismal, from Ira's point of view. They were easy to count because we made love every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night. Ira had read in the
Reader's Digest
that the average American couple had sex twice a week. Hence we would have it three times a week. Tuesday night was his volunteer fire department meeting, at which he drank Genesee beer and played poker into the early morning. Thursday was our square dancing night with the Stark's Bog Wheelers ‘n' Reelers. Saturday night we went on his Sno Cat back to the beaver pond with everyone else in town. Sunday night was his Cemetery Commission meeting. That left Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for sex. He wrote it in on the kitchen calendar in red pencil each week so that we would be sure not to forget. I had wanted order in my life, and order was what I was getting.

Each morning we got up at seven. While Ira did fifteen minutes of chin-ups and push-ups and running in place, while he showered and shaved, I cooked his breakfast: two fried eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, two slices of buttered toast with jam, orange juice, and coffee. He proudly remarked that he had eaten the exact same breakfast every morning for fifteen years. At 7:50 he was out the door and into his red fire chief's car on his way to his office on Main Street. Here he spent the morning selling either Sno Cats or Honda trail bikes, depending on the season. He also investigated insurance claims and discussed convertible versus renewable policies. Like a lung surgeon who owns a tobacco farm as a tax write-off, Ira got his customers both coming and going — sold them his machines, then sold them insurance policies covering what could happen on these machines.

As the bell on the steeple of the Community Church chimed twelve, he walked in the door for his lunch of Campbell's tomato-rice soup and a bologna and cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread and coffee. At 12:50 he returned to his office for more discussions — of participating versus nonparticipating policies, of decreasing term and endowment policies, minimum deposit plans, variable-life plans, double indemnity, waiver of premiums, and guaranteed insurability riders.

While Ira was assisting the males of Stark's Bog with their financial planning, I ironed his shirts. He liked them ironed a certain way, folded just so. I patted them fondly as I folded. I scrubbed his toilet bowl. I waxed his floors. It was a huge house — a great hulking antique stone colonial, built by his forebear Father Bliss, whose brooding portrait hung over the parlor mantel. The family resemblance was appalling: Father Bliss had the same wide alarmed eyes, the same flaring nostrils, the same gleaming cheekbones and high forehead as Ira himself. Only the hair was different. Ira's was dark and curly and hung down over his forehead. Father Bliss's was tied back in a ponytail, a Colonial hippy. Father Bliss had been a Scottish stonemason, had come to Vermont because of the marble and granite quarries being opened up, had built stone houses around the state, including the one of which Ira and I were now custodians. He had also carved gravestones. Some of his remarkable productions stood in the small family plot out back — angels with round faces and hollow haunting eyes, enough to frighten anyone back from the shores of the Styx. Ira had grown up in this house. His father had been a farmer. Upon retirement he and Ira's mother had sold half their acreage to buy a luxury condominium in Boca Raton. The developers of the Bliss farm, Pots o' Gold, Inc., from Brooklyn, were building an Authentic Vermont Village in a nearby meadow, complete with prefab covered bridges and sugar shacks.

Ira's ancestral manse was so vast and rambling that there was no end to the housework. As soon as I had dusted and polished my way through the antique pine furniture to the end of the ell, it was time to return to the formal parlor and start all over again, under the stern gaze of Father Bliss. In short, my married lot was harsh and tediously predictable. I loved it. I adored knowing exactly what I would be doing for the entire upcoming month. I wallowed in the luxurious knowledge of where Ira was at each moment, whom he was with, what my assignments were. I had tasted freedom at the Free Farm. It had killed Eddie, had nearly killed us all. I preferred my new life in this antique stone cage.

As the church bell chimed five, Ira would stride in. We ate dinner at six on the nose — steak or chops or a roast, potatoes, bread, pie and coffee. After dinner, Ira would take a cigar from a silver box on the sideboard. He would pour a shot glass of brandy. With his penknife, he would carefully cut off the round tip of the cigar. Then he would place the other rounded end in his mouth and suck at it and twirl it for a while. Finally, he would dip this end in the brandy and then fit on a silver cigar holder. Lighting it, he would draw deeply and settle back in his rush-seated armchair.

‘Are you happy with me, Ginny?' he'd ask anxiously each evening. ‘Please tell me if you're not. How will I know if you don't?'

‘Ira, I couldn't be happier,' I'd reply. ‘I
love
our life together.' And I did.

‘So do I,' he'd assure me. ‘It's so wonderful having you here. I've been so lonely.'

At seven-thirty Ira left for his meeting for that evening. (I envied him all his meetings, begrudged them to him: He would have so many entries in his obituary, and I would have none.) If it were a night marked on the calendar for sex, Ira and I would watch an hour of television. Then we would march upstairs and get on with it.

‘What am I doing wrong?' he would ask, bewildered. ‘Believe me, Ginny, I've never had this problem before. As unhappy as my first wife must have been, I
know
I satisfied her sexually.'

‘It's my problem, not yours,' I'd comfort him, as he lay with his head on my chest. ‘But I really don't see why I have to have an orgasm. I mean, I'm perfectly happy just watching you have one.' The truth was, I was afraid of having an orgasm. With Eddie, I had lost all track of time on such occasions, had penetrated into a realm in which Eternal Present reigned. All sorts of weird things had gone on. I didn't want anything to do with that stuff anymore. I
loved
knowing exactly what time it was, what minute of what hour. I didn't
want
to make time stand still, or the earth move, or any of the rest of it. I wanted to stay firmly in touch with this world, fully in command of my senses.

‘But I feel inadequate just using you to come into. Men want women to experience the same joy they're experiencing.'

‘I don't see why. They've gotten along just fine for centuries without worrying about their women's joy quota. Why now?' I didn't see how I could explain that I was burnt-out emotionally, that I wanted only peace and quiet and an orderly life from him. After all, he was a modern male, believed in equal orgasm for equal effort. How could I persuade him just to use me and not fret about it?

But Ira was inconsolably distressed that I wasn't scaling the heights. ‘Ginny, I'm not making you happy,' he'd insist after dinner, drawing on his cigar and studying my face anxiously. I decided to try to accommodate him, as a gift on our first anniversary. So one Wednesday night in March, after fifty-eight minutes of excessively imaginative foreplay and approximately 212 thrusts, I faked it. I gasped and groaned and shuddered and heaved, like Olivia de Havilland in the last throes of doomed childbirth in
Gone With the Wind.

For good measure, I whispered fervently in his ear, ‘Oh Ira, I'm so happy. Thank you.'

He rolled over and switched on the light, beaming with delight. Then he leaned down and studied my chest, poking my flesh with his finger. He looked up, no longer beaming, his sensitive lips quivering. ‘You just
pretended,
Ginny. You
lied
to me.'

I opened one eye in the midst of my Academy Award-winning swoon and stared at him. How had he known? ‘How can you
say
that?' I asked, more as a genuine question than as a protest.

‘Your chest. Women have red rashes on their necks and chests after orgasm.'

Shit. “Not all of them do, I bet.' I would have to speak to my make-up man.

‘But you
did
fake it, didn't you?'

I nodded yes guiltily. ‘I was just trying to please you, Ira.'

‘Jesum Crow, Ginny, a man doesn't want to be defrauded into his pleasures!
Please
don't do that again.'

‘I won't. I'm sorry, Ira. And I
will
try harder to have a real orgasm.'

‘I should hope so.'

By now we were well into our second spring of connubial delights. Bulldozers had appeared in the field outside the kitchen window. They were grading roads for the chalet section of the Pots o' Gold Vermont Village. Ira was now playing golf and/or riding his trail bike on Saturdays during the time he had devoted to snowmobiling in the winter. Trout season was also upon us. I spent three days making sixteen apple pies for Ira to take to his family's fishing shack in the nearby mountains. He was going for the first week of the season with eight assorted male relatives. He confessed that he used up all his vacation time each year in this fashion — a week during trout season, a week during bird season, a week during buck season, and a week during ice fishing season. In addition, he went for two weeks each year with his National Guard unit to Camp Drum in upper New York State. If I should want to go on a trip, I'd have to go alone. But if I did, what would his family say? But I was perfectly content in Stark's Bog.

Because of Ira's meetings and sporting events and job, I was finding myself with free time on my hands, even with that mausoleum of a house to clean. Consequently, I made a momentous decision: I would join the surprise shower circuit.

I had tried very hard to switch from high profile to low profile, for Ira's sake. I had packed away my army fatigues, my lumberjack shirt, and my olive air force parka, my Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt, my combat boots. I had gone to St. Johnsbury and had bought some polyester pantsuits and jersey tops. I had unbraided my hair and now wore it pulled back and tied with a scarf. But people still crossed to the other side of the street when they saw me coming. At least they couldn't see the butterfly tattooed on my hip that Eddie had loved to nibble and kiss. Even so, only Ira's popularity prevented my being carried out of town on a rail.

At the weekly Wheelers ‘n' Reelers square dances in the school gym, I would wander blindly, tripping and stumbling, through the intricate figures in my crinolined skirt and puffy scoop-necked blouse. The other dancers would push and pull me into position. The men in their cowboy boots and western shirts and string ties seemed to me to seize my hands for a promenade with great reluctance. The women, their full skirts swirling as we performed our ‘Birds in a Cage' maneuvers in mid-circle eyed me with distaste. And each time Rodney was compelled to do-si-do with me, he would scowl back over his shoulder, his folded arms held high, and would snarl, ‘Don't forget: I'm onto you,
Mrs.
Bliss.'