Kinflicks Read Online Free Page B

Yancy’s note had said. “They’ve got their own lives. Sons aren’t like daughters.”
    â€œIndeed,” Ginny said to herself in imitation of Miss Head, her mentor at Worthley College, who used to warble the word with a pained grimace on similar occasions.
    As they taxied up to the wind-socked cow shed that masqueraded as a terminal, Ginny was reminded of the many times she’d landed there in the past. Her mother had always been addicted to home movie-making and had choreographed the upbringing of Ginny and her brothers through the eyepiece of a camera, eternally poised to capture on Celluloid those golden moments — the first smile, the first step, the first tooth in, the first tooth out, the first day of school, the first dance, year after tedious year. Mother’s Kinflicks, Ginny and her brothers had called them. A preview of the Kinflicks of Ginny’s arrivals at and departures from this airport would have shown her descending or ascending the steps of neglected DC-7s in a dizzying succession of disguises — a black cardigan buttoned up the back and a too-tight straight skirt and Clem Cloyd’s red silk Korean windbreaker when she left home for college in Boston; a smart tweed suit and horn-rim Ben Franklin glasses and a severe bun after a year at Worthley; wheat jeans and a black turtleneck and Goliath sandals after she became Eddie Holzer’s lover and dropped out of Worthley; a red Stark’s Bog Volunteer Fire Department Women’s Auxiliary blazer after her marriage to Ira Bliss. In a restaurant after ordering, she always ended up hoping that the kitchen would be out of her original selection so that she could switch to what her neighbor had. That was the kind of person she was. Panhandlers asking for bus fare to visit dying mothers, bald saffron-robed Hare Krishna devotees with finger cymbals, Jesus freaks carrying signs reading “Come to the Rock and You Won’t Have to Get Stoned Anymore” — all these people had invariably sought her out on the crowded Common when she had lived in Boston with Eddie. She had to admit that she was an easy lay, spiritually speaking. Apparently she looked lost and in need, anxious and dazed and vulnerable, a ready convert. And in this case, appearances weren’t deceiving. It was quite true. Normally she was prepared to believe in anything. At least for a while.
    Ginny remembered, upon each descent to this airport, spotting her mother and the Major from the plane window — each time unchanged, braced to see what form their protean daughter would have assumed for this trip home. When Ginny thought of them, it was as a unit, invincible and invulnerable, halves of a whole, silhouettes, shape and bulk only, with features blurred. She decided it was a holdover from early infancy, when they probably hung over her crib and doted, as parents tended to do before they really got to know their offspring. But this trip home there was no one standing by the fence to film her arrival — in a patchwork peasant dress and combat boots and a frizzy Anglo-Afro hairdo, with a knapsack on her back and a Peruvian llama wool poncho over the pack so that she looked like a hunched crone, the thirteenth witch at Sleeping Beauty’s christening. Her mother was lying in a hospital bed; and the Major had “gone beyond,” as the undertaker with the waxen yellow hands had optimistically put it a year ago.
    Apparently she was on her own now.
    Her homecoming was less than festive. There were no drill teams in the driveway, no family retainers doing Virginia reels on the front lawn as she got out of the airport limousine. She struggled up the quartz gravel driveway, almost losing her balance because her knapsack straps were forcing her to stand up straighter than usual. She noticed that the lawn was overgrown and the tufts of coarse crabgrass were beginning to poke up among the gravel. She looked with pleasure at the graceful