“I threw them away. People don’t give you things for free unless they are poisoned or spoiled.” She studied Fern’s protrusion. “You should have that baby. There’s no sense in keeping it in.” Around the woman’s neck was a small gold Star of David. It made Fern feel charitable. Poor old thing.
Fern looked at the woman’s wiry eyebrows and considered reaching out and plucking one out. Would it be so terrible to run into someone kind? “Waiting is hard,” she said.
“You think waiting for life is hard, try waiting for death. Any day now,” the woman said and she checked her watch.
Again, she had the baker show her the underbelly of each loaf, asked what time they came out of the oven. She chose a rye this time. “Just give me half, in case I don’t make it past Thursday.”
Fern said the same thing to the baker, taking the remainder of the woman’s loaf.
It was the old woman who moved on first. The Sunday loaves were out, studded with raisins, and Fern waited outside smelling the bread, planning her order. She waited fifteen minutes, thirty, her feet fat and the ligaments in her hips pulling. Fern said a little prayer for the old woman and wished her good rest. Ruth, she said to herself, good luck wherever you are, Ruth.
* * *
EDGAR HAD NO OTHER JOB but to administrate the deaths of his generation, sign the thousands of condolence letters. So sorry for your loss, your loss, your loss too. These letters were not addressed to people where he grew up—they went to Bakersfield, Omaha, Tampa.
Edgar had written to these mothers each day, over and over to say that he was sorry because the dead were not strangers. The dead were theirs. Edgar knew that the letters would arrive with some artifact of the absent—shoes, a watch, the green shirt. He did not know whether these artifacts had actually belonged to the ones they were said to have belonged to. That jungle. The ants and snakes and vines. What if nothing was saved? But you could not tell a woman her son was gone and not give her fingers something to hold on to.
He longed for any number of unremarkable mornings. He thought about the novel he had started and the few good pages were a tiny, hopeful island but not enough to soften the bite of missing his wife’s pregnancy, of not being there to cup her swollen feet at the end of the day, to put his ear to the doctor’s fetoscope and hear that new heart. At night he lay on his back and he could feel his entire skeleton. The hard parts that would remain after the soft parts had gone.
Edgar awoke one morning to find Runner sitting on the floor with a steaming cup. He was wearing his parka and boots. “Are you going someplace?” Edgar asked. As if there was someplace to go. As if they would ever leave this sheet of ice.
“I can’t do it anymore, man,” Runner said. “I can’t be part of this fucked-up machine.” It was the most he had talked since Edgar had arrived.
Edgar sat up in bed. “And?”
“I’m leaving.”
“There’s no place to go.”
“They’ll assume I’m dead.”
They would, because how else would it end? A single man in the sharp cold, wind and ice, a roadless expanse.
“The sled tracks from yesterday are still visible. I’ll either die or I’ll live. I can accept both possibilities.” Runner stuffed his pockets with food rations. He said, “You want to come?”
Edgar wanted to say yes to escape, but what he really wanted was home and he would not be allowed back if he ran.
Runner knew that Fern was pregnant. He knew Edgar had ties connecting him to a world he could not walk away from. He shook Edgar’s hand and said, “Tell Fatty I said goodbye and good luck.” Edgar wrote his home address down and stuffed it in Runner’s pocket. “If you ever need help . . .” he said. And then Runner opened the door and started walking. The dawn was a shell, opening. Edgar watched the figure recede along thin sled tracks. He watched until Runner was a dot, then nothing, gone beyond the curvature of the earth.
—
On the day that Fern went into labor, she circled her house for hours. She drank cold water through a straw and she paced.
Fern remembered a day: she and Ben had been running, racing, sprinting. It was not lunchtime yet but they were ravenous. They picked blackberries in the garden and shared a fleshy, sunwarm tomato. The kitchen seemed terribly far away, and the province of grown-ups, and they did not want to break the seal. All afternoon they played and picked what was growing: rhubarb stalks, currants, raspberries, unripe pears.
Fern’s mother walked through the garden from her sculpture studio at dusk and found the two lying on their backs under the apple tree, counting its coming fruit.
“We could live a week, at least,” Ben said.
“A week’s not long,” said Fern.
Her mother looked at the fruit cores, the discarded stalks. “My god,” she said, “Fern, you do nothing but eat.” No mention of Ben whose boy-body deserved the nourishment, needed the fuel. That night at dinner, Fern served herself the smallest of portions. A spoonful of peas, one small potato, two bites of fish. She wanted to show her mother that she was not an animal. That she was a lady, and in so being, could survive on hardly anything at all.
There came a moment where the laboring Fern took her clothes off and turned on the hose, drank from it. Stars shot and fizzled, her body was hot with pain and then at rest. Then red and white lights spun on the leaf backs and she looked up to see her neighbor peering over the fence and an ambulance in the driveway. She tried to explain that she was fine, she was good, she was doing the work, but the men’s arms were strong around her back, and they carried her, naked and enormously round, into the back of the van like a wild animal that had wandered into the neighborhood and threatened to disturb the peace. They covered her in a scratchy blanket. Hush up, little woman, their arms seemed to say, we’re here to contain you.
—
Fern studied her newborn, fresh and ripe. “She has your eyes,” the nurse said, but Fern thought the girl looked just like Edgar, as if she were a container for the overflow of his person. She had planned on another name—Edgar’s grandmother’s—but when the nurse brought the birth certificate for her to fill out, she thought of that old woman in the bakery who had come into her life at the end, as they each prepared to cross the border. Fern said a small prayer that the woman had gotten the bread just right, eaten the last piece on the day she died, had nothing left over that needed to be thrown out. She wrote the name down: Ruth.
Fern stood in front of the big mirror, and though her belly was still soft and misshapen, she felt lightened. There she was—her same hair and her same legs, her same face. Out loud to her reflection she said, “I’m still here,” and she knelt on the floor and wept.
—
The first morning at home, the phone rang. “Fern,” said a voice.
“Edgar.” She thought it couldn’t be. Her breath was warm against the plastic telephone. “How are you calling me?” He told her that he had walked for seven hours and hitchhiked for four to get to a phone where he could make the long-distance call. He did not waste their few minutes describing the way his legs felt after walking that long in the snow, how he had nearly lost the sled tracks and been sure he would die, that his body would only be found in summer. He did not tell her how strange it felt to be in a place where there were other humans, where things were for sale, about the chocolate bar softening in his pocket. The connection was heavy with static. “Did you have the baby?” Edgar asked. “I had a dream last night that you had.” That he did not know if his baby existed on earth yet, that he did not know that it was a girl made Fern feel like she had been caught in a lie. She had gone on ahead without him. “It’s a girl. She looks just like you, Edgar,” she said. The fuzz between them thickened. “Can you hear me? Are you there?” she asked. “I named her Ruth.” She was embarrassed by the name. By the decision made on her own without good reason.
“Ruth?” he repeated back.
“Are you okay? Fern, are you okay?”
“You’re alive,” Fern said out loud. She had been holding a place for death, for disappearance.
“I’m alive,” he said.
“I really need you.” She wanted to swat the static away. She wanted a clear connection to her husband more than she wanted anything.
“I know. So many people are dead. All there is is nothing here. Whiteness. I know I’ve told you before but it’s so cold and so dark. I can’t believe you gave birth. I can’t believe I missed it.” Not knowing if she could hear everything he said, he repeated the most important thing. “Fern, I love you. I love you. Hello?”
“I’m here. I know it sounds stupid to say but I was shocked by how much labor hurt.”
Edgar, on the far end of the line, was envious of a body that could feel unrivaled pain and produce an unrivaled prize. He wanted to ask what the baby looked like, what she felt like to hold, how she smelled. “She’s delicate,” Fern said. “She’s tiny. I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was hard not to imagine the path this poor creature would have to walk, the world so tumbled with pain.
“I wish I could be there,” he said.
She said, “I don’t belong here without you.”
He wanted to say Thank you but the words seemed much too small for what she had done.
—
Edgar stood at the phone and ate his chocolate bar. The sugar hit his tongue hard. His back was sweaty. He said his parents’ number to the operator.
The next voice was his father’s: “Yes?”
“It’s me, Edgar. I just wanted to tell you—”
“Edgar, Edgar! Where are you? Mary! Edgar’s on the phone. Edgar? Are you there? Are you all right?”
“Dad. I’m fine. I wanted to tell you that you’re a grandfather.”
“Yes, Fern called yesterday. Congratulations, my boy.” It was this that hurt: he had not been the first to know. His parents had already celebrated, had already lived a whole day knowing that the baby had been born. He answered their questions about his safety, promised that he was fine, but he could hear pain in his mother’s voice. There was too much to say so they said little and hung up, all of them missing each other more than they had before they had spoken.
Edgar bought a can of condensed milk and a box of crackers and sat on the bench out front drinking and eating and saying to himself: I have a daughter. I have a baby girl. I am somebody’s father. The road in town was mud and rock. A stray dog nipped at a dead bird. That night Edgar slept in a boarding house where he ate a giant steak, took three showers and two baths before beginning the journey back to nowhere.
In Tennessee, Fern ate steamed green beans and nursed the baby. In Chicago, Edgar’s father called the same General who had saved Edgar once and said, “Edgar’s a father now,” and his attempts to keep his voice calm were thin. Mary was beside him, trying to listen in on the conversation. “Congratulations,” the General said, and then to clarify, “Doesn’t it seem to you that families as nice as yours should be together?”
“Yes,” Hugh said. “Yes, yes.” He managed to keep his breathing steady until he had hung up.
—
It was two weeks before Fern made it to the bakery again. And when she walked in, there, inspecting the crumb on a loaf of wheat, was the old woman.
“Oh!” Fern said. “You’re alive!” She was relieved and she was strangely annoyed. She had prayed for the old woman in heaven, she had mourned her. Now she would have to return to the state of waiting and do it all again.
“Do I know you?” the woman asked. On two of her fingers were giant, fire-bright diamonds, unmistakably real. Fern looked at her to make sure it was the same person. She had always assumed the woman was poor.
“I was pregnant last time we met.”
The woman studied her and seemed not to find anyone she had ever seen.
“This may seem peculiar but I actually named my baby after you,” Fern said. “Ruth.” She wanted delight. She wanted thanks. She had given a dead woman an eternal gift, except that the woman was alive again.
“I’m not Ruth. I’ve never been Ruth.”
“What?”
The woman turned away from Fern, asked to see the bread bellies and found nothing to her liking. She said, “If I’m going to die with something uneaten, it should at least be top quality.” She looked at Fern. “I once knew a Ruth. She lived in sin in the state of California.”
The bell rung her out.
1976
THE DINER WAITRESS seemed to know and love the giant the moment he appeared at her table. She was short and wore a little fabric cap and frilled apron and Fern figured she would have been a pretty girl before the bacon and patty melts had started to add up. The waitress tousled his hair when he ordered dinner off the all-day breakfast menu: six eggs scrambled well and dry. She nicked his ear between thumb and forefinger when he asked for a coffee warm-up. Little Fern had vanished in his shadow. Her hamburger order was written down without eye contact, without a smile.
The giant had told Fern that his name was Malachy, Mac for short, but she still thought of him as “the giant” because no name seemed name enough for such a person.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked him. He had not and he did not see why she was asking. She was afraid to ask him what it was that made the waitress so nice—terror or nervousness or feeling sorry or the thrill of a man who made the woman feel tiny, a man who could pick a little lady up like a leaf.
She wanted a map to spread across the Formica table. She wanted to trace a route like her father would have done, bent over with his strong reading glasses. They had threaded their way out of Boston, through the dense treescape of western Massachusetts.
“Onward,” said the giant. “Westward, ho.”
They were still within the magnetic pull of home, still on recognizable highways, the usual greenery. She could have gotten on a big chrome bus and been back at her own doorstep in time to sleep near her family. In those few hours she knew she could justify forgiveness, construct a self that believed more in her marriage than in the specifics of faithfulness, honor her children’s need for an intact home, begin the discussion with Edgar about what each of them was willing to give up.
“Don’t think about going home,” the giant said. “You have to punish him more. You have to have your own journey. Missing you will be good for him. It’ll make him realize what he has.” If the marriage ended Fern knew it would not matter what the lawyers drew up: Edgar would get out with dignity, she would get out with children. That’s how it broke down for men and women. She wanted to throw everything in sight, to break things, to cause pain.
“Let him miss me,” she said. “I think I’ll feel better when we cross some state lines, Malachy. Mac.”
The frizz-haired waitress came by with a plate. “On the house,” she said, sliding a piece of chocolate cream pie in front of the giant. “Come back at breakfast and you can have another,” she said.
“She likes you,” Fern said.
The giant cut a bite.
“Pie is my favorite,” he said. Fern still was not used to the depth of his voice. She still was not used to the amount of space he took up, his big head always far above hers.
“How would she know?”
He shrugged. “She’s good at her job.” Fern wondered what it would be like to proceed through a world where someone already knew what made your heart beat faster.
“By the way, I don’t expect you to have sex with me,” he said.
Fern poured the last of the cream into her coffee. She was surprised by the flicker of disappointment she felt. She had thought of sex as something she could store up. Not because she wanted it herself, not because it was warm and sweet, but because it was desirable to others and she was the one who possessed it. It was easier, more comfortable, to be a person in possession
of something. It was also a way to hurt her husband. In the thick hours of her escape she had wondered if and when. She was afraid of his size. She had pictured succumbing, as in a flood. But it was Edgar she had hoped would suffocate if she had had sex with the giant. Thinking of Edgar kissing that woman made her want to do it now, to throw the giant on the table and climb on and end up in the paper and get arrested for it and be marked, for her marriage to Edgar to be marked forever by something she had done.
“I hadn’t even thought about it,” Fern said. She helped herself to the pie. The sugar was smooth on her tongue. She pictured the children in Edgar’s care. Fern took pleasure in the thought that he would screw things up, that a note would be sent home from school reminding him of whatever he had neglected. The children would be fine, though, she told herself. They were not babies anymore and could ask for what they needed. Edgar’s mistakes would not be deadly. He could figure out how to make the lunches, the dinners. Anyone could survive a few weeks without a mother.
—
After the wedding, Fern and the giant had driven to her house, empty and quiet, and she had run inside, changed out of her wedding gown and gathered some clothes and creams, made up her children’s beds. She had also found herself taking some clothes from each of the children’s drawers, a shirt from Edgar’s. It was not habit that had made her pack for the family she was leaving behind but it felt more practical than nostalgic. To mend the tear, she would need both pieces of torn cloth. Fern had written a note. Edgar, I have to go away for a few weeks. Whatever else you’re doing, I need you to take care of the children. The boys like peanut butter for lunch and Cricket likes tuna fish. Please get everyone to bed on time. I hate you right now. Love, she wrote. Fern did not leave this note on the refrigerator or the kitchen table or the bed, or any of the other places her children might have found it. She was not leaving it for them, after all. She left it under the lip of Edgar’s box of watches, on his high dresser, well out of reach of small hands.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 11
