But Edgar had not seen the note because he had left just after Fern in her white dress and he had not written his own note to say that he was going away because the whole purpose of a mother was that she was always there without having been asked. Because Edgar could not imagine the absence of Fern. He had driven the now familiar route, knocked on Glory’s door and she had let him in and asked him how it had gone with Fern, with the flowers and the news that he was going away for a while. “I gave her the flowers,” he had said.
“Did you tell her you were leaving?”
“Not exactly. She was wearing a wedding dress.”
“A wedding dress?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to tell her. You can’t help that she’ll be angry, but you can keep her from worrying. Call right now.” Edgar had tried but Fern had not answered. He had lied to Glory and said she had, sensing that Glory, in order to set out on this journey, needed to hear that he had done at least this small thing. Whenever doubt tickled at the back of Edgar’s throat, which it did every fifteen or twenty minutes, he reminded himself that his wife had easily chosen comfort over love, objects over him. He could not imagine his future without Fern, but she was going to have to be willing to sacrifice. A few weeks apart would make clear how much he was worth to her.
And the children? Edgar remembered a day on the island, sailing with them across the cove to the harbor where they ate half-shelled clams with cocktail sauce on the dock while they watched the old rusted fishing boats unload crate after crate of lobsters. Cricket slurped raw clams and Will wished for a lobster pot so they could feast every night and James said, “Maybe we should buy a boat big enough to live on forever.” They were such brave and wild and perfect little people. He wished they could have been with him, though he knew this made no sense. Wasn’t he trying to run away?
—
The giant and Fern drove in silence. She looked into the backseat of Mac’s big brick-red station wagon to check on her children and the backseat kept being empty. She knew they were not there but the timer in her body still went off—Cricket must be hungry, Will must be thirsty, James is getting tired. She had never left them for more than a few hours and the thrill of it would carry her for a while, the sheer idea of a single body, responsible for only itself. But already she could tell that this idea was a lie. Their little ghosts had followed her and always would. They had been born into the bigger world yet here, still in their mother’s body, was the shadow of each. Fern understood only hours into her journey that no matter how far she traveled she would never be alone again. It was half comfort and half terror.
Fern looked over at the giant, his huge hand on the steering wheel, the air conditioning blowing his hair. She wished he was Ben but he was not. She resented him for it.
Fern said, “Who are you anyway? What do you do?”
“I work as a security guard at a bank. Basically I just read novels all day and chat with the tellers and eat snacks. It’s a good job.”
He sounded sincere but Fern still felt sorry for him. She had been bred to believe that menial work was meant only for those who were not smart or fortunate enough to do better. “Has anyone ever tried to rob the bank?”
“Never. We’re a small bank and I’m a big man. My hope is that between those two things we will avoid it.”
It got dark. Mac said, “Would you mind getting us a room?” and handed her cash.
Inside the motel room the giant sat down on the king-size bed—the motel had had only one room left—which sank beneath him. There were actual rats in the walls. The rats sounded as if they were carrying out a great overturning of their society, a revolution of claw and tooth. Fern had almost always stayed in real hotels with bellhops and concierges there to offer a suggestion for good steak, good booze. If Edgar refused the job, refused Chicago, this would be their life. She had done the calculations while driving: they could sell the house and buy something tiny, use the difference to pay for the basics. At least she thought this seemed possible. Fern had never had to keep track of money and she had no sense of what they spent and when, no sense of the difference between what was needed and what was only desired. Maybe, ten years from now, she would come to think of a room like this as a great luxury. Or else Edgar would give in and they would buy their own island, their own jet. That those were the two most likely scenarios made her life seem unreal.
Fern opened the well-worn leather suitcase monogrammed with her mother’s initials. The gathering had been rushed and she wanted to neaten. The ironing board was tucked into the wall and Fern unfolded it and heated the iron. She set it to steam and listened for the bubbles. No part of her body felt true or real, no part of her head. She called her own house and the phone rang and rang. She imagined her family out for pizza, Edgar trying to disguise her absence with food and soda. She hoped Cricket had done her homework. She wished she had included a reminder about the special soap Will needed to use to clear the rash on his back and the old freedom songs James had recently begun to love.
Mac turned the little silver knob on the television and the thing came to life. He lay down, put his shoe-feet on the bed, the volume on too high. The newsman, his hair pasted to his head, his mustache thick, said, “One wonders—could such a crime have been prevented, if only someone had spoken up?” Fern could not see the screen, but she knew there was a picture of a little girl who had washed up on the bank of the Charles. She had seen the news already. The girl’s hair would have been full of crabs, her skin grey, but all they showed was the yellow tape.
Fern gave herself the time it took to pee and wash her hands to cry.
The mother of the dead girl came on screen and said, “She was going to be a fairy for Halloween,” and her whole body collapsed, as if everything within it had been liquefied. Fern thought of the long list of things she knew would undo this woman: favorite doll, too-small bathing suit, baby shoes, stack of thumb-worn books, hair in the shower drain, hair in the bed, hair twisted in the weave of the rug.
Fern had lost all her babies too. They were not dead, not sick, not kidnapped, yet each was gone. The crawler, the just-upright teetler, the question-asker, the new reader, the daring ocean-swimmers, the shark enthusiast, the midnight bed-crawler. At each stage Fern had been invested entirely in this person, their universe of games and questions and fits and laughter swelling to replace everything else. Then that stage had gone, completely. The children did not even remember huge swaths of the time she spent with them while Edgar was writing—songs they had sung five hundred times, stories Fern had told at bedtime, bodies of water in which they had splashed. Fern was the lonely keeper of these memories, and it made her feel almost crazy, insisting all the time on moments recollected by no one else.
Fern remembered being pregnant, then holding those little imps. In what seemed like a moment, they were climbing trees. James punched someone at school. Cricket asked what dying felt like. Will broke his leg. For a whole year the twins had gotten up for the day at 4:30 in the morning and Fern would have done anything to change the habit but then the phase had ended and Fern had remembered those early hours like a dream—she and her boys on the sofa with tea and a stack of books, the night still dark around them, a fire if it was cold. Fern had lost something every day as a parent.
Maybe, she thought now, her flight would make her children more grateful, slow their growing a little.
Fern lay down on the bed next to the giant and felt the heat of his big body. She was not touching him, and still, the heat. The bed was big enough for both of them but he weighed so much more that she had to work to keep from rolling towards him. The bedspread was scratchy and cheap. The ceiling was stained. She listened to the rats in the wall. The sensation of lying on the same surface as a man who was not her husband was a tingle in Fern’s feet. She had not done anything wrong, yet she was certainly out beyond the territory of a good wife.
“Where
are we going?” she asked, realizing that they might have a destination and not just a point of departure.
“All the way across,” he told her.
—
They gassed up before starting their next day’s journey. He pumped, she paid.
“Where y’all coming from?” asked the woman at the register. The room was filled with smoke. Her eyeshadow matched the coffee stain on her paisley dress. She used the butt of her current cigarette to light the next one.
“East,” said Fern.
“And you’re going west.” That was not a question. You had to be going the opposite way as you were coming from. Only one road, and that’s the direction it went.
“When you get to Clayton,” the woman said, “stop for potpies. They’re better than the ones here, and you won’t want to wait for Stonesville.”
While Mac wet and cleaned the windshield, Fern tied a scarf around her hair and felt like her mother who had had a driving outfit. Evelyn had worn special moccasins and calfskin gloves that Fern had always wanted her mother to touch her with. Fern used to take her mother’s gloved hands and press them to her own cheeks. Her mother’s real heat through another animal’s skin.
Driving again, she told her companion this story. It had been years since she would have bothered Edgar with such a small memory, especially about her mother, whom he did not like. Mac asked the color of the gloves. “Green,” Fern said. “They were very light green. Sort of key lime.”
“That’s a good pie,” he said. “That is one of the best pies.”
They were driving fast and the oaks had softened into maples. It began to smell like manure.
“Apparently we are supposed to stop for potpies in Clayton,” she said.
“That’s a good goal. Let’s make that our goal.”
The earth was flat around them, tamed by prehistoric glaciers. There was land and there was sky, both nearly featureless. Things made by people—houses, barns, roads, crops—were the only features to rise up.
All along the road out of town there were signs congratulating the 1976 high school class on their graduation. The signs were plastic, made to last, and months out of date. As if such an achievement deserved permanent recognition.
Dilapidated houses ran along the edge, tracks and stations, ice cold beer, dirt lots with the swirl of tire tracks, that giveaway sign of teenagers, late at night, building speed, spinning out, hiding in a momentary dust storm of their own making. Fern was sure that there existed here the girl who cut everything at home: coupons, bangs, jean shorts. Her boyfriend would have a good arm and bad skin. Maybe they would even stay together a few years, despite her mother, who had aged poorly, dryly, her hair a crackle of overdyed frizz, her skin undone and beginning to drape. Girls like that loved their mothers and did not think to hide them from their boyfriends. They themselves would look better at fifty, surely. Someone by then would have invented a cream, an elixir. The girls counted on this—basked sunnyside up at the pool with nothing between them and the heat but a slick of baby oil and a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Mac rolled his window down, just to remember real air, and in a second, the whole cab was hot and dusty. “Thanks for coming along,” he said. “I should have said that already. It’s nice to have company.”
“Would you be doing this if not for me?”
“I’ve got business in California. Someone I need to see.”
“Business business or personal business?”
He seemed reluctant to say. He smoothed his hair, curls that had been gelled downwards. He ran the windshield wipers, flicked the lights on and off, licked his thumb and cleaned a spot off the lacquered wooden steering wheel. “I have a son,” he finally said. “But I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.”
“Does he know you’re coming?”
“Yes. I’m going to pick him up and bring him home. It’s finally my turn.”
Fern pretended that it was reasonable to be driving at high speed away from her family. Motherhood, money, marriage—these were all suspended behind her. And with each mile they crossed they drew closer to the giant’s son. One family stretching apart and one pulling together. Fern was still fooled by her own story of escape.
—
Clayton came along. Fern and Mac were hungry, having waited all afternoon. The sign for the town told them that there were eight hundred souls present, but everything was closed up. The gas station advertised old-fashioned prices and had no pumps. There was a real estate office that looked like it had been closed for years. Sidewalk weeds were thick. The giant pulled into a lot and parked, and their footfalls were the only sound. Fern looked for evidence of a fire, a flood. “Let’s go,” she said.
“We just got here. I want my potpie.”
“There is no potpie. There is nothing.”
The giant had already set off. He made big prints on the dirty sidewalk. In the beauty parlor window, two brown wigs, styled for the previous decade, had wilted and a pair of scissors was set out on the table in preparation for a haircut that might never be. There was a newspaper on the counter, more than a year out of date: CEASE FIRE: All GIs Out of Viet in 60 Days.
The coffee shop had a few forks out and the ashtrays were all full. The hardware store was still getting ready for another year’s Thanksgiving.
“I’m starving,” the giant said.
Which is when a woman appeared. She might have been eighty or a hundred or she might have been a deadwoman up from below. Everything she wore was brown and she walked with two canes. “Hungry?” she said. “I have potpie. Follow me.”
Fern would have walked the other way, leaving a polite refusal behind her. Mac followed the specter of a woman as easily as if she had been his own mother.
“You’re tall,” she said to him.
“I’m actually a giant,” he said.
“Good for you.”
Her house was purple with purple everything and there was a black motorcycle out front. She sat them at a table and brought, hot out of a gold-colored oven, two deep pies and two forks and an ashtray with a picture of an ace of hearts on the bottom.
“You smoke?” the woman asked.
“Only on special occasions,” Mac told her. She poured a red drink into their lavender glasses, placed a pack of cigarettes on the table and then the woman, who did not say her name and did not ask theirs, began to climb upstairs. The giant dug into his pie. Fern peeled the crust back and looked for obvious signs of mice.
“They were right about Clayton,” Mac said.
“That cashier can’t possibly have meant to send us here.”
“Where else? This is Clayton. This is where the potpie is. You’re not eating yours?”
This felt like a test. You want an adventure, little woman? She was starving and the giant was showing no obvious signs of having been poisoned so she took a bite. It was silken and delicious. She could taste fresh thyme.
The woman did not reemerge. They sat awhile, waiting. Mac called up to her, “Great pie!” and there was no answer. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and tried again, climbed until he had ascended out of Fern’s sight. She heard his footsteps above her. A house this old was not meant to hold a man that size. She heard the creak of doors.
“She’s not here,” he said, coming back down. “I can’t find her anywhere.”
“How can that be? Should we call someone?”
“There’s no one to call.” The empty town, the empty businesses.
Before they left, the giant slopped up the last juice off his plate with his thumb. They found a pencil and a notepad with the logo of a bank and offered their thanks. Fern looked in her wallet and found only a stack of hundred-dollar bills taken from the emergency envelope in the kitchen. She took one out.
“What are you doing?”
“I feel guilty not leaving something.”
He smiled at Fern. If Edgar had been there, Fern knew the two of them would have debated whether the money would have made the woman feel cheap, condescended to, or if it would have struck her as terrifically kind. They would have suffered over it, no matter what their decision. Mac only smiled. “That’s a big tip for someone that might turn out to have been a ghost,” he teased.
No matter how hard Fern slammed, the latch on the door would not hold.
—
They drove on. The road had its own rhythm—meals, filling stations, whatever town came next when they got tired was the town they slept in. It was soothing, the non-event, the repetition, the open space ahead. The hope that her journey would cause Edgar pain made Mac into an accomplice. It made him Fern’s friend.
Mac had little short hairs growing out of his earlobe that Fern had the urge to pluck. She could almost forgive him for not being her brother now. Ben, she thought, who had never had a chance to grow into himself. He had jumped out the window when he was eighteen years old and the doctors had begun their work on him just after. Who knows what kind of adult Ben would have been, who he would have loved. Maybe he would have been like Mac—unusual and happy, comfortable in his own form. She was glad there was such a person. “We have so much time,” Fern said. “Tell me everything, from the beginning.” The country was generous ahead of them—a seemingly endless stretch of land, of space.
“In the beginning,” the giant started, and then paused. “I was born premature, six weeks, and in those days they did not expect the best.”
He told the story of his mother who decided not to send birth announcements until she could send the bad news along with. Her husband had left her when she was six months pregnant so she had already gotten used to being a source of collective sadness and discomfort. Now she would spread a new set of bad news: a baby was born, but. The giant’s own mother had been one of six, only three of whom had made it. People used to be better at death.
Priests and nuns stopped in to dispense a little easy charity, performed baptisms without celebration. Here, tiny angels, sinless and suffering, just probable days or weeks until they returned to God’s blue kingdom.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 12
