Here Fern was, a small person in a big house, quite alone. There were decades of need ahead of her and three children and she was just a woman with no money. Edgar could save them or he could let them starve—she did not get to decide. The dog looked up, pan-eyed. There were grey patches in her fur and her back paws twitched under her efforts. She seemed very old suddenly, helpless and sad, and Fern was a woman with nothing extra. Fern checked her watch to see that she had time for an errand before the dinner. Still wearing the first-date dress, she scooped the animal up into her arms and carried her out of the room, down the stairs, through the hall, out the front door and down the steps and into the brown station wagon. Maggie whined all the way to the vet.
In the orange-walled office smelling of animal pee, Fern put Maggie up on the stainless table. She had dinner-party makeup on and wished for a way to hide. Her hands in the animal’s fur were disorganized. She could see that the vet was as worried about the woman as the dog. “I think she’s suffering. Is she suffering?” Fern said.
The vet listened to the dog’s heart and felt her soft belly. He shined a light into her eyes and ears. “She’s definitely aging,” he said. “Everyone has a different tolerance for decline.” He had bread crumbs in his thick blond mustache—he was not the person to ask about saving oneself from the small humiliations.
“Is it awful for her? Look at her. Maybe it would be kinder to let her go.” Fern fought the need to cry. It seemed terribly dangerous to be a living creature, a body in need of nourishment and love for the duration of its existence.
“She’s slowing down. Tired. Possibly sore in the joints. She probably has more time, though, if you aren’t ready to let her go.” Maggie looked confused and sad to Fern. Or maybe it was only her own reflection in the animal’s eyes.
“Will you keep her overnight for observation? I don’t know what to do.”
The vet agreed to watch the animal for twenty-four hours and had Fern fill out the intake forms. Maggie was crated in the back with the barkers and whiners and sleepers and Fern bent down to reassure her. “Let’s just see what happens, okay?” she said, touching the dog’s wet nose through the grate. “You’re a good dog. A good girl. A sweet and good girl.”
On the way home, the car was silent. The city slipped by. Fern drove along the Charles where a dozen white triangles of sails tried to find wind. Fern tried to believe in generosity. She tried to believe in reprieve.
—
Fern stood on the curb feeling too old to stand on curbs. Edgar finally pulled up from his day in his dark green sports car and she straightened up to greet him. She put her thumb up but he did not smile at the joke.
“You can’t wear that,” he said. Discomfort ticked in his eyes.
“I couldn’t decide.” She already regretted the reminder of their beginning. Their young selves joined them in the car but they were not entirely welcome. Too much was not the same. It seemed unfair, to love that hard with your heartmuscle still so wet and new.
They had a little time, Edgar said, patting her knee. The sound of their takeoff rattled up Fern’s spine to her brainstem. She put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry that my father gave everything away. I never wanted you to have to do something you hate.”
“Clearly money will find me and trap me no matter what I do,” he said. Edgar did not feel like less of a stranger than he had the past four days, to himself or to Fern.
He parked near Harvard Square where everyone was young and unpressed and lovely and encumbered with books. Inside the shop, a girl put dresses in a line. Edgar said, “Let’s see you get beautiful.” He was a different person than she was used to. He had opened his top button and deepened the part in his hair and wore his low brown boots and jeans and he hadn’t shaved in four days. He was twitchy and nervous.
Fern had to be zipped and unzipped every time so that even the unflattering dresses were seen by the girl. “No, no, no,” the girl said about one. “Don’t let him see you in that.” And then, “This one does a lot for you.”
Each time Fern did the walk from the silk-draped dressing room to the center of the store where Edgar was sitting on a sofa. He gave a thumbs-up or -down. He asked her to turn around so he could see the back. Sometimes she saw in his face a jag of pleasure, sometimes she was a question he did not have the answer for.
“Just tell me which one you want me to wear,” Fern said. She did not want to keep trying, to keep being naked in front of this young maiden who tugged at the seams, trying to get them to lay flat against a too-deep curve.
“The long red one,” he said. “She’ll wear it out.” It had a plunging V, draped over her shoulders, shushed across the carpet.
After they paid and left, the shopgirl ran outside after them. She came up close to Fern and Fern thought she was about to be kissed. The girl’s breath was mintsweet; she had thought of every single manipulation of her little body. Out of her hand came a small tube, and she said, “Open your lips,” and in three sweeps, she lipsticked Fern. Top, top, bottom. “Now,” she said, “press.”
—
The house was a tall Victorian, dinner was pork chops, conversation was weather, American apathy and political unrest in Guatemala where Glory and John Jefferson had recently been. Why were they in this particular house with this particular couple? Fern wondered. Nothing good came of a dinner party, she thought. She wanted to be alone with her husband, to talk about Chicago and money and all the years they had ahead. Edgar was too happy to be here. Manic. The hostess had the big, frilled hair that everyone wanted and her eyelashes were long and she wore, to great effect, a jumpsuit like the one Fern had been unable to figure out. Fern asked after the washroom and John Jefferson walked her there, down a hallway that seemed very long. Instead of gesturing to the end and letting her make the journey alone, he was behind her the whole way.
“We redid this place when we bought,” he said. “You should have seen the roof. You should have seen the foundation.”
“It looks nice now,” Fern said, wishing for a light switch. The walls were papered in avocado green. The runner was patterned with oversize orange and red flowers.
“You look nice,” he said.
Finally, a door.
“Here we are,” John said, proud. He turned the knob, flipped the light on, smelled the room. “Clean and fresh.” He smiled.
“Thank you, John. Thanks. All right.”
The man waited for Fern to enter and then he closed the door for her. She listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, but heard none. He could not possibly be waiting for her. Everything was orange—the tile, the sink, the toilet—except the towels, which were white with rainbows arcing across their corners. Fern used up time looking in the mirror. Her hair was old-fashioned, too neat. The red dress was unconvincing on her. There was a photograph on the wall of Glory wearing a wreath of flowers and standing between two bare-chested Polynesian women.
Fern pulled up her dress but could not pee.
She went to the door, put her ear against the cool wood and listened for John’s breathing. Maybe he was pressed there too, trying to find her sounds in the small room.
Fern flushed for no reason. Washed her hands. She did not have the shopgirl’s red lipstick, but she applied a coat of the old pink that was always in the bottom of her purse.
John was halfway down the hall, holding a framed photograph of his sister as a baby. “God,” he said, “I remember exactly what she felt like in my arms at this age.” He hung it back up, then, with his big, warm fingers, he straightened Fern’s dress strap. “Where would you like to go?”
“I was going to finish my dinner,” she said.
“Well,” John said. “I thought . . . I was told. You and I were supposed to . . . I thought that was the idea. Glory told me. Your dress,” he said gesturing at the evidence. He looked distr
aught. Not threatening but punctured.
“Are you crying?” Fern asked. John could not seem to find a place to put his hands. Fern felt sorry for him and sorry for herself but was afraid to risk touching him. She went back to the bathroom and got a length of toilet paper, which she brought to John. She put one finger on his shoulder, the smallest touch she could think of, while he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He found his cigarettes in his back pocket and lit one.
“I’m so embarrassed,” he said.
“It’s already forgotten. Come on,” she told him. The rest of the house began to lend its light.
What she saw was one body and not two, at first. It was just Edgar’s back until it was not anymore, until Glory’s hands were also there, wrapped around him. Ten red gashes of fingernail polish. “Oh,” she said out loud, and the attempted kiss in the hall made a different kind of sense. He’s trying to give me away, she thought.
Fern knew that her husband had felt worried and helpless. She had been trying to be good enough to carry him through—his patient wife, loving him in the circumstances. Now she understood that she was stupid, that he was lost, that they were, for the first time, not each other’s immediate salve. Edgar and Glory Jefferson looked familiar with one another and Fern watched because she had to. Fern had wondered what Edgar would do to survive this part of life, to survive his family’s needs, now unmet. The answer was here in a stranger’s dining room, between soup and entrée, the centerpiece an autumnal bouquet surrounded by small pumpkins, the smell of scarred pig flesh in the air. Fern had never seen her husband kiss before. He moved jerkily. From behind, he looked like a bird, pecking at garbage in the grass.
The woman was liquid in his arms. Slipping and grabbing and looking very warmed up. Fern could practically hear the race their heartbeats were in.
“Sweetheart,” John said. He stubbed his cigarette out in a red ashtray already half full of butts.
His wife turned around. She looked frustrated more than sorry, like she had been woken up before she needed to be. “I thought you’d gone,” she said.
“Fern,” Edgar said. He inspected his wife for signs of rumple or muss. He looked deeply sad.
“We’re all done,” Fern told them. “We’re all finished.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Jefferson smiled. “Of course.” Her husband received the volley of contempt she tossed his way: ten or fifteen years of marriage, two or three minutes each time, and then he was ready for something sweet and sleep.
Edgar came over to his wife and squeezed her hand and she could not tell if it was with sorrow or pride or terror or regret. He leaned towards her and he smelled tinny with spit. She jerked away. “We are not even,” she said.
“Well, then, I expect you’re hungry,” Glory said to the group. “Shall we have our pork chops?”
“I’ll be in the car,” Fern said. “Eat if you want, but I’ll be in the car.”
—
Edgar followed Fern out and they both got into the car and he backed out of the driveway onto the night street. Fern wanted the dress off. She wanted a door to slam and hide behind, but she did not want to drive home because that felt too much like an act of forgiveness. She told him to pull over, shut the engine. She slapped the dashboard.
“When did this start?” she shouted.
“Tonight. This is all that’s happened,” he lied.
“Was this Glory Jefferson’s bright idea?” Fern had read about swingers and key parties and some magazine article was always proclaiming the end of monogamy, but none of it had seemed real or possible in her world.
Edgar felt so much and yet none of it was enough. “I don’t want to retract my novel,” he said, “and I don’t fucking want to be a steel man.”
“Are you going to live on her money instead?”
“My life walked out on me and then she showed up. I guess I just wanted to look away.” He realized that in the fog of his head it seemed almost as if the question of what they were willing to sell in order to survive—Edgar or everything else—could be overpowered with the noise of a shared affair. When Glory had called him in the morning and made the invitation, she had sounded so clear-headed, so sure that what Edgar had done in column A could be easily balanced by what Fern could do in column B. She had said, “If everyone’s kissing then kissing’s not a problem.”
“I don’t know what to do. I do not know. I do not.” She was yelling by the end.
They sat there on the side of the road, houses dinner-lit, silent beyond silent. Edgar polished his glasses and put them back on, blinked at the seen world.
Edgar thought of the first thing he had had published, an excerpt from his novel in a glossy magazine. Fern, proud, relieved, had gone to the store and bought every celebratory food she could find: caviar, cake, champagne, lobster, but when she had come home Edgar had said, “What I really want is to go out for pizza.” She might have been hurt on another day, felt stupid because she should have known, but that day happiness could not be undone. Fern had put the expensives in the refrigerator, scrubbed the children’s yard-scummy cheeks and said, “Pizza it is.” The adults had drunk beer and the kids had sipped Shirley Temples and then they all had ice cream dessert. “To the author,” they had said, clinking. There had been other celebrations to come but this one had been the purest. Edgar had worked at his book for years and he had finally been able to call himself a writer. It had felt like coloring in the last years of his life—yes, those were real. Yes, it had counted.
Fern now sat beside him, willing to erase everything. She said as much.
“At the risk of sending you into her arms, you are not welcome at our house tonight.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Walk to a hotel. I don’t know. That is your problem to solve.”
—
Fern stepped into the house and there were the children, mounded up on the floor like left laundry, asleep. The children always fought sleep with all their strength but once they were down they went so deep that they could remain unconscious through hurricanes, fights.
“Where is the sitter?” Fern asked, trying to rouse them. “Sweethearts? Wake up and go to bed.” She knelt beside her bunch, began to untangle them. There were so many arms and legs. The bodies grumbled and snuffed. “Mother?” Cricket said. “Where is Father?” The boys opened their eyes and Fern wanted to hug them all but her arms were insufficient. She was well outnumbered.
Fern tried to replay the day, tried to find the memory of calling Miss Audrey to babysit. She had meant to, she had thought about it, but she could not remember hearing the woman’s voice over the telephone.
“Where is Maggie?” Cricket asked. “We lost Maggie.”
“Yes, we lost her and we need her,” said the twins.
“I’m sure she’s fine, my loves.”
What Fern had thought of as a gift to the animal early in the evening had turned into something that she could not utter to her children. She did not try to explain aging or love and how much harder it was to keep trusting beauty the later it got. How, though she was only twenty-eight years old, she seemed to have passed into the long slide during which time a woman became less and less valuable, and to keep her around became an act of charity rather than pleasure. Fern turned on a lamp, unearthed the markers and paper and laid them out on the living room floor for her flock. She said, “Let’s make some signs and hang them up in the neighborhood tomorrow.” Lost Dog, Reward.
“How much reward?” Will asked. Fern, knowing exactly where the dog was, could be generous.
“Five hundred dollars,” she said. “No, a thousand.” Everyone was cheered. Such a good mother, so devoted.
“Where is Father?” Will asked.
“He’ll be home later,” she said, arranging them at the kitchen table.
Beloved, they wrote. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. There was a stone of something i
n Fern’s chest so heavy it felt like it might fall through her, tearing everything soft on its way down. Hatred. For Glory, for Edgar, for the fact of the kiss, the fact that he had wished to lend her to John Jefferson, the fact that she did not have a good or fair solution to their survival either, the fact of everything they stood to lose.
Cricket said, “Couldn’t we put them up now? The sooner the better?” It felt good to Fern to be taking care of someone. It felt good to be acting out the saving of a lost love. It felt good to be part of a mission that did not involve Edgar. She hoped he was sitting on the edge of a sagging hotel bed, stale smoke in the drapes and a sad glass of beer on the table. She hoped he was wrung out. Fern found and distributed sweaters and flashlights and walked with her flock up the neighborhood streets, down the neighborhood streets, all the station wagons parked in a line, and they tacked a sign to each lamppost. Inside the houses, people were cleaning up from their day, drinking a nightcap, rubbing their eyes, bidding goodnight. The children called and called. Maaa-ggieee! The name stretched out and turned musical. It was a whole song. Fern sang it too. She sang and she believed it. She tried to trust what she had done. Maggie would always be young enough now. No one would remember her stalking away from a mess on the floor, too weak to lift her back legs completely. Maaa-ggieee! went the song. She could be—she was—anywhere.
1966
AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, Fern and Edgar had driven to Kentucky and rented a little house for the summer. He was twenty-two and she was eighteen. Other young people were going to San Francisco and New York, sloughing off the idea of marriage like it was a pair of handcuffs. These were the same people whom Edgar had seen at protests and who had showed up on the news. At twenty-two, Edgar already felt too old to join them. It was almost as if he was not part of that generation. He was married now, an adult, and it was too late to move into an apartment in California with ten other people, smoke joints and stay up until dawn. Fern and Edgar agreed with the values, the politics, but they were relieved to feel these feelings in a warm house. And they were just as happy not to share one another.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 6
