Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

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Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 9

by Ramona Ausubel


  Glory had come in in the middle of the night wearing a sheer mint-green nighty and undressed Edgar without asking first. She did what she wanted with him and then lay there smoking. It felt less than half as good as it had on the island. He knew Fern deserved to be angry, but here he stood in a doorway that she herself had cracked. From the slushes of his mind had sprung a question: Where else am I supposed to go? What other choice do I have?

  In the grocery store Glory chose a box of black licorice. She said, “Have you thought about my idea? I really think we should go away. We won’t be able to enjoy each other properly if we stay home. This,” she said, sweeping her arm over the foodstuffs gathering in her cart, “is a waste of a good affair.” Love was not her ambition, escape was.

  She had pitched this idea in the same hushed telephone conversation as the dinner party.

  “Where?” he had asked.

  “Mexico. Sunshine and revolution. Alcohol at sunset. You know how to sail, don’t you? We’ll sail.” Edgar had only had to hear that word. He had thought about the possibility of a storm or the chance that he was unprepared to travel all that way. He had thought about his wife and the damage those weeks could do. He knew he would miss his children. Then he had thought of the slice Chicago and duty were about to cut across his life. He was in the last weeks of his own time. The pretty girl was fine but he was in it for the saltwater, for the wind. In the health food store, the whole big room smelling like turmeric and curry powder and tea, he said yes to Glory as if this fact—his ambition sea more than sex—would protect him against the resulting damage.

  “I knew you would come around,” she said.

  Glory wheeled them to the flowers, which were cheap and themed for the season. Everywhere they looked, the men and women of retail had turned things orange, brown and yellow. She chose two bouquets, opened them and tore out the carnations. She said, “You have to be kind if you want her to be here when you get back.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL was a tightening for Cricket and the twins. Uniforms—navy and white, pleats—were new and stiff. The boys had neckties and the girls had headbands that pressed on their skullbones. Summer’s spaciousness, the salt of it, evaporated so fast. The children stood outside school kicking dirt for five more minutes before someone shooed them in. They tried to ruin their shiny shoes. They asked who was in which class and chewed the teacher’s names like unripe fruit. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Lumpkins, Miss Studenberger, Miss Nolan. Escape was on everyone’s minds, though Cricket did take pleasure in her new backpack filled with sharp pencils, the perfect square of an eraser, unscratched paper. Her lunchbox, which did not yet smell like old peanut butter.

  Cricket walked her brothers to their classroom and helped them find their cubbies. She knelt and said, “I’m just upstairs. Be good. Eat your lunch. Be nice to each other.” Their little desks made her sorry. All summer, they had been moat-diggers, clam-gatherers, sailors, tree-climbers. Now she watched the boys tuck themselves into the chairs, look ahead at the big blackboard. They would learn to read. They would learn to add small numbers together. Reprieve was a short break in the middle of the day to blast from one end of the playground to the other, a scummy orange ball in front of them.

  Cricket, like all the fourth graders, was given a social studies textbook: The Building of America: Class, Race and Society. None of the children knew what that meant. Miss Nolan, wearing plaid pants and a sweater vest, her long black hair parted in the center, said, “This is high school level but by Christmas you’ll be ready. Our first unit is on Indians.” She looked around the room. “You will learn to become Americans this year. What does that mean to you?”

  Hands shot up. “Fireworks. Freedom. The best country in the world. Number one in baseball.”

  “Sure,” Miss Nolan said. “Pie is also good. But have you thought about the gas crisis or the recession? Have you thought about the Black Panthers or the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War? Have you thought about the Gold Rush or the Robber Barons? Have you thought about the Navajo? Have you thought about the Conquistadors or the Front Range mountains or the Great Plains?” Cricket had not. The less studious among the children began to worry about their upcoming homework. Cricket felt her temples warm up. She wanted to know all of this.

  On the big table by the window there were art supplies. Miss Nolan walked over to them like they were treasure.

  “When the first white men arrived in America,” she said, “they got sick and died because of Indian germs and the Indians got sick from the white men’s germs.” Cricket looked up at her, waiting to understand. “The Indians were sometimes kind and generous, and other times they weren’t. They did something called scalping, which is when you cut the skin off someone’s head. But the white men were cruel too. They killed many Indians and stole their wives. They forced the Indians to believe in God.”

  The teacher handed out feathers and clothespins. She handed out scissors and glue. She stood in front of the room, which smelled like art projects come and gone—clay and paper and paint and paste. The school floors, no matter how hard or how often they were cleaned, were always speckled with tiny flecks of cut construction paper.

  “Imagine that,” Miss Nolan said. “You are foreigners in a strange land. It’s vast and beautiful and you do not ever, ever want to go home.” Cricket was quiet; she was attentive and she was somewhat afraid. These were good kids, obedient kids. They had rules at home and they followed them. These children lived in fear of having a note sent home from the principal. The teacher looked at their idle hands, the supplies untouched.

  “Are we supposed to be the Indians or the white men?” a fat boy asked.

  “Both. The truth lies in between. Now make art,” she said. She picked up a piece of orange paper and scissors, cut it into the shape of an indistinguishable animal. “Art,” she proclaimed. She must have seen the questions in the children’s faces because her neck reddened. “Anything is art,” she said. “Don’t you get it? Everything in the world is art.”

  Cricket picked up a piece of paper and held the scissors to its edge. Miss Nolan walked over to a record player on her desk and laid the needle down. Relentless harpsichord music filled the room. For an hour, the teacher stood above her pupils silently, while they tried their very best to make art. They were afraid. They cut and glued and pressed and glued again. They did not understand what they were making, or why. It was not the paper-plate turkeys they were used to, the holiday cards, the steps one through four. Cricket was just as confused but she loved the feeling, her fingers tacky and feather-stuck. The children ended up with crazed messes: a clothespin covered in pink fabric, a rat’s nest of construction paper, everything glue-soaked. At the end of the hour, the children let go of the breath they had all been holding. The teacher lifted the needle and the room fell silent. She laid the messes out in a line with a sign that said, “Pilgrims, Indians.”

  “See,” she said. “You actually made something. You.” She pointed to Jack Bishop, who was good at football. She turned to Birdie Breyer who was small for her age, whose front teeth were bigger than her eyes, who must have weighed hardly more than a fawn, and Miss Nolan picked her up and brought her to her own briny face. “Even you, little girl. Art.” Cricket was in love.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE NEIGHBORS, Louise, had called Fern in the morning with a request. “I need a bride. Today,” she said. She explained that she volunteered at the old folks’ home where the Alzheimer’s patients had forgotten almost everything. They no longer remembered the faces of their own children and everyone had given up trying to make them happy. So, Louise said, she had had an idea: a wedding. White dress, tuxedo, half the room for the bride’s side and half for the groom. An altar. It would not matter that no one in the congregation knew these people; they did not know anyone. They would feel good, and maybe they would even see something familiar in the bride or groom, maybe they would have
the sensation of being in a room full of family. No one invited them anywhere anymore because they might wander off, might walk into traffic, might say something unfortunate. Yet Louise felt that they deserved a celebration, deserved to go to bed with feet sore from dancing. Fiction, in this case, made it possible. “My original bride got the stomach flu,” she said. “It’s at one o’clock today. You’ll be done before your kids are out of school. Can you do it?”

  “Edgar isn’t in town,” Fern said, not ready to admit what was happening.

  “No, no, not Edgar. I have a different groom. Someone cheerier.”

  The instructions were: attain a cheap dress (the other bride was three sizes smaller than Fern), whatever hair and makeup she could manage in time. After last night, Fern was glad to seek out this small revenge. Edgar had been the one to kiss another woman but now she was the one to be someone else’s bride. Fern looked in the phone book for dress shops and it was a young feeling to run her finger down the listings, to dial, to say, “I need a wedding dress right away. Do you have any sample sizes available now?” At the dress shop she tried on the options, chose the most expensive. It had long sleeves and a high neck, a ruffle around the collar. The silk was heavy and cool on her body. Fern wrote a check so that Edgar would see what she had done. She wanted to punish him by spending everything that was left.

  Fern went to the beauty parlor and had her girl curl her hair into big feathery layers, Glory Jefferson layers. She sat in the chair watching her head turn prettier, thumbing a fashion magazine two seasons out of date. Fern had not said she was getting fake-married and she did not mention what her real husband had done or the fact that she might be poor.

  Fern thought of her real wedding, which had been covered in the local paper and reported, as all weddings joining two good families, as perfectly charming. In the pictures: the older ladies in wide skirts puffed with tulle, beehives and cat-eye glasses. The younger ladies in shift dresses and pumps and heavy black eyeliner. It had seemed peculiar to Fern that the grown-ups all condoned this event, which would mean the end of their ownership of her and Edgar. It seemed like they ought to have put up more of a fight to keep the children whom they had birthed and raised. Just like that? Married and gone? But everyone had seemed so pleased.

  It had been warm in the sun. The guests were all parent-friends, not Fern’s or Edgar’s. To Fern’s parents the guests had said, Congratulations and Good match and Such a beautiful day. To the bartender they had said, Gin and plenty of lime. To each other they had said, Tell me more about that gorgeous pheasant-shaped brooch you’re wearing, and, Where are you having Bill’s trousers hemmed now that Henning’s is closed? and I should think that the coloreds would rather join a country club of their own making. Glasses had been drained, noses had been powdered, the day had grown a little hotter.

  To the music, Fern, in a dress with an empire waist and a huge skirt, white gloves up to her elbows, her hair frozen in place and a bouquet of primroses, had walked with her father down the grass aisle. Everyone had smiled at her, predicting her future: four children, a lifetime of parties, the yearly vacation, a long retirement and a quiet death, announced in the same newspaper as the wedding would be (a good woman saw her name in the paper three times: when she was born, when she was married and when she died; she should otherwise make no news). All according to plan, the guests’ smiles had said. Fern had felt something turn in her stomach. She had wanted those things, most likely. She had wanted Edgar and babies and the feeling of summer returning each year, the smell, and setting up the hose for the children to spray each other, and then autumn and the trees turning riotous and orange and she would bake something for everyone to have after supper. The rotations, everything returning again and again, each time just enough the same to feel like coming home, but so different too.

  There Edgar had stood, waiting for her, his posture his own and his thick glasses clean and reflecting light. Promises had been promised, dances danced, toasts sealed with clinking flutes. Every time Fern had seen Edgar’s parents, they had been laughing. Her own mother smiled, but Fern knew she was disappointed—wifedom was not something Evelyn held in regard. Paul had seemed truly happy, but he had gone inside with a migraine before the ceremony was over.

  To Fern, Edgar had said, “Now that we’re married we never have to go to a party like this again.”

  The bride and groom had been released finally into their life. His parents had rented a car for them to drive away in, a white convertible Rolls-Royce with a huge chrome grill and whitewall tires and white leather seats. The car had been packed, the chauffeur was at the ready, the hotel had been paid for by one father or another, and the couple had kept looking at each other but then looking away again. They had held hands in the backseat as they were driven out into their future. Fern had felt the very specific warmth of Edgar’s skin, different from anyone else’s. Suddenly, the car had slowed and they had both jolted forward. The road ahead of them had turned all silver, shimmering and slippery, like mercury had spilled over it. It had smelled like the sea.

  “What is it?” Edgar had asked. The driver had stepped out and walked towards the strange flood. He had bent down and continued walking until he had come around the curve where a fish truck sat. Edgar had stepped out too.

  “Careful,” Fern remembered saying. Her first wifely worry, and it had made her throat feel warm.

  When he returned to the car, Edgar had said, “Herring. Hundreds of thousands of herring.” Once she had known what they were, she could not see them any other way. Fern had gotten out too, and they had stood there watching the creatures slip and settle. The fish were dead, but their round eyes had looked afraid.

  Fern and Edgar had stood together in the silver sea. They had felt as if they were walking on water. As if all the fish in the depths had swum upwards in order to lift these lovers. As if to deliver them ashore.

  —

  Fern checked her watch. She peed. She took the dress out of the closet and stripped to nothing, starting again in all white lace. The dress had a string of tiny silk buttons down the back, meant for a sister or best friend to fasten. Fern, alone, struggled a few closed. She would have to wait for Louise to help. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her big waves of dark blond hair, her lashes fat with black mascara, all that white fabric. She was too old for this, but with the hair and makeup she looked almost right.

  Fern the fake bride was in the kitchen drinking water when Edgar came in the front door. He had flowers.

  “What?” he said.

  She chose not to explain.

  He looked her up and down.

  “Button me,” she said, relieving none of his questions. She wanted to push him to the ground, to break him, and she also wanted his familiar hands on her skin and for his touch to be what it once was: a reassurance.

  Edgar put the flowers down on the counter and tried to take his wife’s hands. Fern felt the prickles of being caught at something stupid start at the back of her eyes. Edgar did not say, “Let it fall off,” and devour her. He did not press for an explanation for the outfit. He did not ask her about money spent. She refused his hands. He turned her around and, button by button, closed her up. The dress was tight and hard to breathe in. He did not tell her how sorry he was or what she meant to him. He said, “You look nice.”

  She said, “Screw you.” At least she could wield the small weapon of confusion.

  Fern took the flowers—one thing she had not prepared for her costume—and walked out of the house with hot, dry eyes. She drove to the sad, avocado-green-walled community center, waited for the organ music and walked down the aisle surrounded by withered but happy forgetters. Under the fake-flower arbor, an actual giant. He reminded her of Ben. His pants were polyester, brown, a little too short and he had a red carnation in his lapel. His huge face. His hair was dark and straight, deeply parted, his sideburns long. Her brother had been gone for eight years. W
hat would Ben have looked like now? His death was not all absence—it sometimes felt to Fern that her twin brother’s body had merged with her own. As if they were never meant to have divided in the first place. When she approached the altar, the giant took her hands, her little pale hands, into his big calloused ones and smiled at her, wide and true.

  There was also a man dressed as a priest—surely he could not have been a real priest?—who asked all the usual questions. Fern and the giant said yes to them. They promised. Fern pictured Edgar in the back of the room. Imagined that he had followed her and now looked on while she married someone else. And when it was time for the last part, she reached her hand around the giant’s huge neck, bent him towards her and she kissed him as hard as she could. He tasted like ash. He was generating so much heat.

  —

  The forgetters grew misty for the newlyweds, reached into their pockets for hankies, clapped and whooped when the pair walked back down that aisle, big hand, small hand. Fern could not tell in their faces if they truly thought that two people had been married that day or if they were simply enjoying the theater. They seemed happy, sincerely happy, and their faces were bright.

  Only after the two had opened the door to the world, reentered the day, did they realize how dark it had been inside. They stood in the courtyard where the grass was green and the fountain was dry. They squinted against the light, against the summer’s end. It was as if the sun was emptying itself out now before winter. Above them were white streamers and little plastic silver bells.

  “It’ll pass,” the giant said. Fern could feel her lipstick drying. She wet it with her tongue.

 

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