“What?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t have kissed me if you had had a better day.” His voice was deep and slightly electronic sounding. Like it had been prerecorded. She had to bend her head back to see his face.
It was too bright. Here she was in a wedding dress with a huge groom in the middle of a real day, in the middle of her very own city surrounded by a hundred people she had never seen before who all thought they cared about her. All that money she had spent. “You are not my husband, but I do have a husband,” she said.
“Of course you do.”
Louise was wrangling. She could have used a lasso. Grey-haireds spiraled off like wind-caught dust, going eastward, westward, purposeless and searching. They drifted towards Fern and the giant and offered their congratulations.
“Your mother must be so proud,” they said and Fern thought of her mother’s little body, gone from the world. She had no idea if her mother had ever been proud of her.
“The most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen,” they said, and they seemed to believe it.
“You make a fine couple.”
“The last time I saw you, you were this big.” A hand flattened at hip-level, a head shaking in disbelief. “I hardly recognize you.” Fern gave a kiss to this woman, on the cheek, and told her that she looked beautiful and thanks for coming, it means so much. “To have someone who’s known me all my life,” she added. This lie was an easy gift to give.
Each of the forgetters had a plastic champagne glass with fizzy that was too gold to be the real thing. There was a terrible cake, a foot tall and bright white with blobs that were meant to be flowers along the seams. The couple on top had the wrong plastic hair color and neither of them was a giant. Fern and her groom took hold, together, of the plastic knife and, with it, split the white mountain. Inside there was yet more frosting. Just looking at it made Fern’s teeth hurt. Fern and the giant each gathered a forkful, reached across to the other’s mouth and placed, as if it were a sealant for this new endeavor, a glob of white on the opposite tongue.
An old man came up nose-hair close and breathed on Fern for a moment while he mustered the energy to speak. “Never,” he wheezed, “fight with clothes on. My advice.”
Fern felt slightly sick. She looked at her two feet on the ground, the new white shoes already scuffed. She looked out at the sea of guests. The forgetters were, as a rule, short. Their spines must have compacted throughout all their years on an earth ruled by gravity. Their fingers were thin but fat-knuckled, holding cake plates and enjoying the white slop. Most likely they had been advised by their doctors to cut fat and cholesterol, to make smart choices about nutrition in these, their late years. But they did not keep track of this information any more than they kept track of anything anymore. What was in front of them was all that mattered. There would be grey string beans on their plates later, and for the ones with no teeth, grey string bean puree. The cake was a treat: creamed fat and sugar, spread thick. Fern went for a piece herself, wanting to feel the celebration.
Edgar, the fact of Edgar, the idea of what he had done, stood beside Fern like a shadow. She tried to imagine him after she had left in her white dress. Did he sit down on the sofa? Turn on the television? Did he cry or scream or fall asleep on her side of the bed or call his mother or look for the dog or fix the dripping sink or root around in the basement freezer for an ice cream sandwich or order something from a catalogue, or did he simply sit on the floor with a glass of cold white wine and listen to the emptiness he had begun to create there?
Fern had never considered losing Edgar any other way except a heart attack. That was how it was meant to happen: struck while playing tennis, while walking in the sudden fire of fall leaves. They were bound together, magnets that were just rocks without the other. The idea that the marriage could fail had not been in consideration.
The giant had a circle of old ladies laughing. His big face was lit by the story, whatever it was. Fern heard the word shoemaker, the word rustic and the word Chevrolet. The women cracked up. Who knew if they could even hear what he was saying. One of them had frosting on her cheek, and this fact nicked at the nerve endings in Fern’s chest. She looked away.
Louise came around, insisting they needed to stick to her schedule. These folks were born in the olden days and they had an early bedtime. After cake, the bouquet.
The women gathered on command, their short hairdos dyed or white. They wore plastic beaded necklaces strung by grandchildren who were at least a little bit afraid to come visit. They wore lavender, petal-pink, dove grey. Maybe they did not remember that they were old and empty of mind. Maybe they felt light and full of perhaps. Maybe they were humoring this younger woman, thick with good intention. It should have cheered Fern to see these happy elders enjoying a few good hours, but all she could think about was them later in dark rooms, a lone body in each one, a sad photograph in a frame, everything good already passed. Here it is, Fern thought. Here is the worst case. Perhaps her mother had been right to leave early.
Fern turned her back. These were her flowers, she remembered. Edgar’s gift. She considered not throwing them, considered running away. She imagined the flowers in her dining room, in her car, in her trash and found no surface on which they made sense.
Fern gave a hard toss and Edgar’s flowers were in the air. There was a shuffling sound and then a tiny woman emerged with her prize in the air. She could not have been more than four feet tall. She was joyous, frenzied.
Throwing, Fern found, was the very thing she wanted to do. She would have liked to throw the cake, the plates, the champagne flutes.
The giant came over and he picked Fern up in his arms. The crowd went wild. He lowered his big head and his lips were fat and warm.
“Consider where else you could go,” he told her. “Consider the mountains. How tall they are, and full of caves. Or out West, where some places it never snows.”
“We’re broke. The dog is old. My husband might be having an affair. It feels like I have so many children. I’m very tired.”
“They’ll be fine for a few weeks. Come with me. I’m leaving this afternoon. There are roads from here to everywhere else,” he said. “Paved roads, and food along the way.”
* * *
THE CHILDREN WALKED HOME at the end of the day as usual. They kicked the newness off their shoes and said, “Fine,” and “Boring,” and “Slow,” about school and then, wistfully, “Sand,” and “Water,” and “Sleep,” about summer.
Mother was nowhere to be found. Her reading glasses were on the table and the newspaper was open to the funnies. There were two cans of soup on the counter, unopened. Father was never home at this time so his absence caused no alarm. Cricket told her brothers to do their homework. “No homework in kindergarten,” they told her. “Well, then learn something about the American West. Do you even know where that is? Do you even know anything?” Cricket was annoyed that she could not make her voice sound older, more Miss Nolan. To grow up to be anyone else seemed like a waste of time. Her brothers looked up at her with their big brown eyes. They were sweet boys but boys and so necessarily less smart, but Cricket would do what she could to teach them. She found a can of beans in the cupboard and a bag of frozen corn and explained that these were the main foods of the natives. “Also meat,” she said. “But you have to hunt it if you want any. Berries in summer, and squash.” The boys said, “Okay,” and “Wow,” and “I see.” Then they wanted to know if it was all right to watch television. “No TV,” said Cricket. “No TV until you understand our country’s history.”
All three children had hoped Maggie would greet them, at least. Welcome them home with her cheer and chuff, to make them kids again. But she too was absent, so the children went looking. They tossed her name out and out and out. They looked over the neighbors’ fences and in the shade of the maples; they looked in their own yard and in their bedrooms and under the kitchen sink. “
Where is that hound?” they said. “Where has she gotten off to?”
Neither parents nor dog came home for the second night in a row. Last night they had gone to sleep watching television but tonight, because Cricket wanted her parents, when they returned, to see how capable she was, how very worth caring for, she put the boys to sleep in their beds and then read under her blankets with a flashlight even though no one was there to scold her. She dreamed about math, though she tried, even in sleep, to will her brain to conjure a cartoon-flat mesa, a herd of elk and her arms pulling taut the spring of a bow and arrow.
1967
THE DECEMBER AFTER Edgar left for his post in the great north, Fern was much too pregnant. She stood in the shower watching the water roll over her belly. The baby pressed a heel out, deformed her further. No one ever had said anything to her about how strange pregnancy would be, how aggressively strange. None of the mothers she had grown up around had talked about it. All the questions she asked her doctor ended with the same answer: if your mother was very late giving birth, you could be too; if your mother gained a lot of weight, you might too; the length of your mother’s labor is the best indicator for the length of your own. But Fern called and her mother claimed she had no memory of what her pregnancy was like, what her birth was like. She preferred to create children out of clay.
All during her childhood Fern had thought about the time when she would be a mother and how generous she would be to her children, and how she would play with them all the time and run with them and imagine monsters and fairies and winged horses with them and buy them giant stuffed toys. Now that she was on the threshold of motherhood, the feeling Fern had was of being eaten alive from the inside, this creature taking the food and water, taking the blood to grow her own bones, her own skin, her own nails and hair and eyeballs and intestines and lungs and the meat of a heart.
—
Fern’s mother called to tell her that Ben was still exhibiting signs of insanity, that was the word she used, but they had spoken to his doctor who had a new solution to offer. They could put him into a new facility and start a heavy regimen of electric shock treatments. The doctor, Evelyn said, proposed the idea and the start date at the same time, having already taken the liberty of penciling Ben in, seeing so much promise in the therapy. “I can’t offer this to everyone. The procedure is expensive,” the doctor had told Fern’s parents. “We want to be very aggressive.”
Evelyn did not have the instincts other mothers did and she was aware of that, but the idea that one should do everything they could for their children seemed obvious. Here they were, lucky in wealth, with a doctor who considered himself an expert and a son who thought he could fly, a son who needed help. It would be a shame to do nothing when a person had the means to do something.
Fern’s parents were not asking her opinion on the treatment. “We have to try everything,” her father said. They were not able to answer her questions and neither of them wanted to talk about how uncertain Fern was.
Ben sent Fern a letter afterward.
Dear Fern,
I saw The Sound of Music. Yesterday we had Chicken Marengo. They are going to fix me with electricity. I miss you.
Ben
Her parents had decided to alter Ben. Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other. Fern found the place on the map, bought a basketful of treats—marshmallows, chocolates, gummies—and drove the distance to her twin, listening to the radio. Blacks were marching in Chicago, in Mississippi. Whites were burning their draft cards. Hours later she parked in front of a huge ivied building. Brookridge Home, read the ironwork over the door. It was a mental hospital, she realized. An institution.
She found Ben sitting alone at a table, dealing three hands of bridge. Beside him she saw six cans of soda and an empty bowl with pink milk at the bottom and there was a moment where Ben looked at her and neither of them was familiar to the other.
“Look at you,” he said. His voice was thin.
She put her hands on her huge round belly. “I know. I’m enormous.” She had imagined keeping the tears away until after. She had pictured herself collapsing in the car, but here she was, crying immediately. It was all a story—doctors and currents and promises—until she saw Ben, and his light was dim.
On a stand, a television showed a helicopter hovering above a thick pelt of green, all the leaves blown aside, a body being raised up. Ben said, “I was supposed to die that way,” and Fern said, “No, not you. You are safe.” She touched Ben’s forehead.
“It’s spaghetti night. Did we use to have an angel?” He said this without emotion. His voice was murky water.
“I don’t know. Did we?”
“In the prairie.”
“We had a statue of the archangel Michael.”
When Fern and Ben were in ninth grade, the family had gone to Europe for the summer. It was Fern who had discovered the statue of the angel in a huge antiques store. That night she had dreamed that the angel flew in her window and lifted her up, pulled her nightdress off and kissed her hard all over her body. She had woken up sweating, and had begged her father to buy her the statue. He had assumed, as she knew he would, that her interest was in the artistry, the story of the angel’s protection of children, his defeat of Satan.
The statue had been purchased for a large sum and sent home by crate. Weeks after she had first fallen in love with him and on the other side of the ocean, Fern had pried the nails out and found her angel in twenty-nine pieces. Dust was everywhere. His body had crumbled on his journey to her. It was the first time she had felt defeated by love.
“Is that the angel you mean?” Fern asked Ben.
“People say they aren’t real.”
“Oh, I see.” She saw no reason for a sharp point. “This one was real.”
Fern stayed and watched the rest of a show about crocodiles, offered sweets every five minutes. In the flash of the television she looked at Ben’s living body. His old skin and eyes and the flush in his neck. The shell had not changed, except for a long scar across his scalp, marking his loss.
“Ben,” Fern said to the silent shape of her brother. “I feel lost. I don’t know what I’m becoming.” She put her hands on her belly. He looked at her. He gave a half-smile, like he had caught sight of something and then lost it again. It was hard to tell what was missing from him, if it was cognition or feeling. Whatever was left felt like all she had. “I was in high school and then I was a wife. I’m still a wife but without a husband to take care of. And I’m about to be a mother but I have no idea what that means. I am completely alone and I feel like I am waiting to die.”
Fern thought of the people who were supposed to be the ones to love her. Her husband was far away. She had called her parents and they had flooded the conversation, flushed her voice out with news of the house’s rotting foundation, the charity ball, the cast her mother had made of a dead fawn she had found in the prairie. Evelyn had said, “I assume you don’t want me to come for the birth.” The last word was spit out as if it were something rotten. Fern certainly would have wanted a different mother to be there since her husband was not, but no, Fern did not want Evelyn. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Fern had said. “I’ll be in good hands.”
Fern had called Edgar’s mother and admitted more than she wanted to about how carrying the child of someone absent made her angry. How she missed Edgar so hard she was a bruise, but Mary had not offered to come. Two days later a box had arrived filled with silk stockings, a nightgown with an intricate lace bodice and a jewelry box containing a sapphire pendant as big as Fern’s thumbnail. The note had said, Chin up! and had her mother-in-law’s perfect signature. The necklace had been cold on Fern’s chest. It had felt half alive.
Ben knelt down on the floor in front of his sister. It looked like he was going to ask her to marry him. “Benny,” she said, trying to save him from embarrassment. But he stayed and took h
er foot out of her patent leather pump. Ben gave her toes a squeeze and then sat back in his chair. He picked up his napkin and spit on it and began to polish Fern’s shoe. “Here,” said Ben. “See?” And there, in the black shine, was his proof that she was alive: the pink smudge of her face, reflected.
—
Fern grew larger, hid behind her clothes and kept her head low. It seemed inappropriate to go out in her condition, to be seen in such a physically exaggerated form, and with her husband away too. Much more intimate than being naked in public was to be pregnant in public. It was as if her whole life was visible—sex and fear and hope and the coming unknown. Everywhere she went people warned her that the next part would be so hard. “Enjoy this time,” an old woman in the bakery said. “When the baby comes, you’ll never be the same again.”
She said, “I’m already not the same. Look at me.” The old woman smiled back, deaf and happy.
“My name is a good name,” the woman said. “Ruth. You should use it if it’s a girl.” The woman was wire-thin, her collarbone a sharp edge beneath an old dress. It was the woman’s turn to order bread and she asked a question about each loaf, pointing her bony finger, bidding the baker to turn it over so she could inspect the underside. “Looks a little overdone, that one,” the woman said. Fern could feel the blood pooling in her ankles and fattening them. She knew when she got home that they would be thick and sore.
Finally, the baker took out the pumpernickel, which was already overbrown and could not be faulted for such a color. The old woman seemed unsure. The risk seemed to weigh on her, the whole week counting on this bread for sustenance and comfort. Fern softened for her. She said to the baker, “Would you throw some scones in her bag, from me?” The woman did not notice the gift as she counted, in coins, her total. Her fingertips were stained with nicotine.
—
The next time at the bakery, the same old woman was there. She was wearing the same dress and the same shoes. “Did you enjoy the scones?” Fern asked.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 10
