Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  He broke the news to Glory over spaghetti on deck, the boat still tied to the pilings, after he had tried the house again and let the phone ring ten times before hanging up. He explained, trying to convince himself as much as Glory, that Bermuda was a good stopover, partway. He explained the possibility that the island was at the brink of declaring independence from the British crown, though he had no actual reason to believe this. He said you never knew with these things, they could happen so quickly. One small incident and a new country could be born, a new flag flying glorious over the electric turquoise water. They might get lucky and be there for the moment itself, Edgar said, trying. He imagined his ideal scenario—a quiet revolution of a few thousand people on a beautiful island, the friendly natives celebrating with rum by sundown, the defeated colonizer setting sail for the homeshore with a hold full of lobsters and limes.

  Glory said, “Huh.”

  Edgar said, “Picture pirates. Picture a prison camp where unfaithful citizens were sent to starve until they pledged allegiance to the crown. Hurricanes are a constant risk.”

  “Yes, I am still a little worried about that.” Of course she should have been worried. Of course this was not the time to embark in an easterly direction by pleasure boat with a crew of two.

  Edgar had no reasonable response.

  “We’ll be fine,” Glory said, for him. They needed this now. Their landward lives were already upturned and they could not go back, gently ask their families to play normal for six months while the jailbirds waited for better weather conditions.

  The Ever Land rocked slightly, and Glory felt lopsided but not sick. There was no longer a solid world beneath them.

  1968

  FERN HAD PUT gathers of daisies by the bed in preparation for her husband’s return from the cold north. She wrapped up the baby and set off for the bus station to wait. Outside it was early morning, dewy and anxious.

  Fern did not know what she would say to her husband. What she would report from days of walking without purpose, of her slow evenings sitting at the window with a bowl of cooling soup, watching the insects take over the skies. She had cooked a certain number of eggs, thrown away the rotting vegetables, dug a hole for an oak seedling that she never planted. That her daughter did not seem like enough of an accomplishment would strike her as sad only later.

  The strangest thing was when that mythic person, that impossible, imagined soul was supposed to step off of an oil-sweated, slack-muscled bus. Fern stood there, shoes on and dress pressed, the baby in white linen, and the bus pulled in and sighed, and the engine settled into a worried rumble. Boys in uniforms held their hats to their chests, stooped in the doorway and then unfurled. There they were: just bodies. The same size as when they left.

  As Fern waited for her particular counterpart to emerge, she studied the other boys for scars on their necks. She imagined their wives and girlfriends undressing them for the first time, touring the hash marks of war, running their fingers over those oversmooth patches where feeling-skin had been erased. Those were just the physical reminders—what of the heart’s tissue?

  And just like that, the last off the bus, Edgar stooped, stepped and stood up straight. His smile was a white heat. He put his bag down and scooped Fern up. That warm chest, that warm breath and she felt very small. “It’s you,” he said.

  They knelt together at Ruth’s side, each of them taking one of her small fists. Edgar did not move or breathe. The moment was a sheet of ice, thin and perfect and Fern wanted badly not to crack it. “You are already so big,” he said to the baby he did not know.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  A cricket landed on the baby’s chest, green and an inch long.

  “Hello, Cricket,” he said. Edgar would never call his daughter anything else. Soon, neither would anyone.

  The other couples began to retreat, arm in arm, hand in hand, to their cars. They rumbled home to lunches already prepared, to houses scrubbed for the occasion. These boys had survived the war; some of them would also survive coming home from it.

  —

  There had been a third phone call to the General, this one made while Edgar’s father drank a bottle and a half of champagne himself and watched the news—dozens of soldiers had died that day in a raid a few miles from the blue glare of the South China Sea. Behind the newscaster in the mud there was a hand and wrist, the familiar green cuff, but no arm was attached. Hugh had not been calling for another favor but to offer thanks for what his son had avoided. The General had a son who was studying business, who would soon graduate from college. He said this to Hugh and, again, they chatted a friendly circle. After they hung up, Hugh called his secretary and told her to schedule an interview with the young businessman and the General nominated Edgar for a medal of bravery. It had become a reflex, the doing of favors.

  Both sets of parents came to see Edgar and watch the ceremony in which he would receive the medal he had not earned, only a few hours after he had come home. Edgar had gone on early to line up while Fern and the parents stood around in the yard drinking lemonade. Fern’s mother wore a black lace dress from the 1920s that had belonged to her great-aunt and had been mended by the same tailor fifty times. Her hair was short and grey and her face free of makeup. Paul wore pale linen and a thin striped tie and a fedora. On the way, Evelyn had snapped at him for buying a new suit.

  “I’ve had this for five years,” he had said.

  “Exactly. There are perfectly good things in the attic.”

  If Edgar’s parents, on the other hand, could have worn clothes sewn from money itself they would have. Everything they had on was the most expensive version available: Mary wore a silk shift minidress with palm fronds printed in dark green, white stockings to cover her varicose veins and a mink stole even though it was summer, and yellow heels that had been made for her very feet by an ancient Italian cobbler whose hands had cupped the heels of every movie star to set foot in Rome. Hugh’s suit had cost as much as any of the war-widows would receive as compensation for their husband’s lives.

  “Maybe Cricket will grow up to be an artist, like you,” Mary said to Evelyn. She swished her lemonade, took a big sip.

  “Maybe. As long as she can avoid having children of her own.”

  “Mother,” Fern said.

  Evelyn apologized but she did not see the statement as unfair: unless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door.

  “How’s Ben?” Mary asked.

  “They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong,” Evelyn said.

  “What’s wrong is that you sent him to war and are now frying his brain,” said Fern.

  Evelyn looked at her daughter and narrowed her eyes. “He didn’t go to war, dear. He went to Indiana. People have survived much worse things.”

  —

  Outside the stadium there were at least a hundred protesters. They had signs with skulls wearing Uncle Sam hats and signs with flowers that read War Is Not Healthy for Children or Other Living Things. They were young but not much younger than Fern, who felt all wrong in her tailored dress with her fresh, clean baby in the pram. To them she looked like the enemy. Maybe she was.

  The family sat in the high bleachers of the football stadium and fanned themselves. Cricket screamed and Fern bounced her, whispered in her ear, promised her anything in the world. The brass band played so loud that Fern covered the baby’s ears and the instruments caught the sun and made her temporarily blind. Cricket settled, as if she was finally satisfied that the world could make its own noise.

  Down below, the boys sweated in their wool uniforms. All the commanding officers, the Generals, the top brass, their foreheads beading and their lapels as flat as cadavers, looked stoic but proud. They announced the names of the heroes, and the boys climbed the stage stairs in their overpolished shoes and accepted, graciously, the honors. There were three soldiers in
a row on crutches, each missing their right leg, as if they had been grouped by loss. Another was missing an arm. Four were in wheelchairs, two were wearing eye patches.

  When it was Edgar’s turn, he walked on stage on his intact legs and stood board-straight while his name was read, his two good arms at his sides. He had lost nothing more than a few months of his life and gained no more than sadness.

  Like everyone else, Fern and Edgar and Cricket and their parents went out for lunch after the ceremony. They slid into a booth in the diner, and Fern felt better the moment she was pressed up against her husband. His new medal was bright and sharp-edged.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered into his ear.

  “I’m ready for this day to be over,” he said back.

  She smiled and took his hand. “Me too.”

  All the other couples looked like they were having a day to remember. Edgar felt as if this celebration was designed to distract them from the question of who they would be after they had done whatever they did. His parents ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes with plenty of gravy while Fern’s parents ate plain dinner rolls with a thin smear of butter. All the town’s old women had been up all night baking pies and cakes, which were served to the overfull couples and their squalling babies. “Apple pie without cheese is like a hug without a squeeze,” the waitress said, so each piece came out with bubbling orange on top, and there was vanilla ice cream on the side too because, why not, they had earned it.

  “I’m going to be in the car,” Paul said after a cup of black coffee. “My head.”

  Evelyn asked the waitress for some ice and when it arrived, she took out a hand-sewn bag from her purse and filled it with cubes. “That’s so nice, Mother,” Fern said.

  “It’s a mess because I made it. I’m no seamstress.” But this bag of ice was the warmest thing Fern had ever seen her mother create. She imagined her parents behind the closed bedroom door, him blind with pain, her lying beside, holding the cold to his forehead while she read an art magazine. Fern almost thanked her mother for giving her this gentle image. She knew she would come back to it.

  Before the parents left, Edgar’s mother brought out a bag of gifts: a tiny silver spoon with a gem in the handle, a watch for Edgar, a tennis bracelet for Fern, all in pale blue boxes. The other families were spending more than they could afford on lunch while her mother-in-law insisted on clasping to Fern’s wrist a slither of cold diamonds.

  —

  Finally, the family of three went home and Fern gave the baby milk at the kitchen table while Edgar had a glass of whisky. He was home, finally home. Fern opened the windows now that it was cooling off outside. Cicadas started to saw, and the stars came out. Cricket went to sleep, and Fern came and poured herself a drink too, sat down with her husband. Fern and Edgar fell into each other, hands in hair, hands on skin, eyes open for a glance to check if this was true and real, then closed again. Fern felt like a weed growing crazily over Edgar’s body, vining him up, suffocating him. She felt green and vital, her arms thick and ropey. They swapped air, breathing the hot wind of the other, lightheaded and oxygen deprived.

  Fern’s skin was still prickly from lack of touch. She was used to the feel of her own hands washing with soap, shaving, holding the arch of her foot while she trimmed her toenails. Edgar’s touch was so soft on her belly it almost hurt. When he slipped her dress over her head, she saw her body and it looked like something undone. Her skin was loose where it had stretched and shimmered with lines.

  Edgar said, “God, look at how beautiful you are.”

  “What?” she blurted out, truly shocked. Couldn’t he see how incomplete she was? He traced a line from the top of her forehead, over the jump of her nose, lips, chin and right down the middle of her. Fern would not have been surprised if he had split her right in half. He told her, “I’ve been wearing six layers of clothing for months.”

  “Then let’s see it,” she said, and together they took his clothes off, buttons and undershirts and zippers and shorts and socks until he was nakeder than she. He looked down at himself. He really was pale. Moonlit.

  “I remember,” she told him, and she did. Fern palmed his chest, his neck, his arms. She felt the topography of his back, pressed her fingers into the riverbed of his spine.

  —

  At the other houses, the boys took out special frames for their medals and measured to make sure they were hanging perfectly straight. Their pride would never be big enough to spend.

  The wives, meanwhile, what of them? They had no commemorative anything to hang on their walls. No one acknowledged the thousands of times they’d swept the floors, the window trim they had repainted themselves, perched on ladders, their hair tied back in a kerchief and something quiet on the radio. Their babies were supposed to be the prize. The reupholstered sofa and chair sets, the matching rug, the place for everything and everything in its place. That was supposed to have been enough.

  —

  Edgar poured himself another drink. He fogged his glasses and cleaned them on a washcloth. He looked out the living room window at the sloppy world, so grey. The baby woke and nursed. “Cricket,” Edgar said, offering his pinky for her to grasp. He wanted to see his own face in hers and almost could, but then she looked creaturely again. “You are my daughter,” he said, and neither of them was convinced.

  To Fern he said, “I want to keep writing. These things take a long time but I think I can do it. It feels good to get this stuff down.” He felt a separateness from his surroundings. Like he carried his own slightly poisonous atmosphere.

  “Sure,” she said. She was glad he wanted to write—he was smart and big-of-heart and she wanted the world to have his thoughts—yet she wished he wanted only her. They had already missed so much of each other. She would have her own work, she told herself: the house would need to be cleaned, the wash would need to be hung on the line; the baby, the baby. Edgar, drinking his drink, looked like an unfinished drawing of himself. He was home but he was not necessarily whole. Fern had suffered corrosion too. Loneliness did that to a person. She would continue to find rust from this year’s hard weather. And life put holes in things, Fern knew.

  “Did the protestors say anything to you today?” he asked.

  “Protestors?” she lied.

  “I spit on one of them because I wanted him to spit on me,” Edgar said. “Because I deserved it. He didn’t, though. He was too polite.” Edgar took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt.

  “Did anyone see you do it?”

  “No. I was at the back of the line. I apologized after. I felt so stupid. He looked like he was about to cry.”

  “I’m glad you want to keep writing,” she said. “I’d love to read it someday.”

  Cricket, on Edgar’s lap, made a noise like a caught bird. All three of them fell asleep on the couch, ice still whining in their cocktail glasses.

  —

  Edgar played on the floor with Cricket who had acquired the words pulp, fish and want. She said butter, dog, hello-hello, enough. She woke screaming for no good reason and Fern held her in the rocking chair, so tired, hating and loving the warm knot of a girl. Edgar went into his study and thwacked at the typewriter. All he had was the need to articulate his own wrongness, his existence thanks to the profound suffering of others.

  He read books about coal miners who died deep underground, the earth caving in around them. He read books about manufacturing and pollution and wage-slavery. He read about workers who lost limbs to the heavy equipment and were fired for being useless. He read about the children of those men who stopped going to school so they could earn money. He read books about the cotton that had earned Fern’s family their fortune and the dark hands that had picked that cotton, the dark breasts that had wet-nursed Fern’s ancestors from babies into children, the dark bodies that had driven the white bodies in wide, comfortable cars through the green ache of th
e South, fields bursting with soft, white money. She knew and Edgar knew that eventually one of her relatives had become a famous abolitionist, that the story went in the right direction. She also knew and so did Edgar that while the family had embraced new values, the dollars they carried with them were old and plenty dirty.

  He came home and watched the news. American forces burned Vietnamese villages. An offensive began in a city on the edge of the South China Sea that would last for weeks.

  —

  They did not know yet that Ben would die a few weeks later when the doctors attempted to perform a partial lobotomy, as if they could simply remove the troubled part of him. Slice and eliminate. That, in what would turn out to be the last moments of his life, he would sit in the dawn light preparing for the operation and jot down a note to Fern: Thanks for the sweets. Over all their years on earth together, all the ways she had betrayed him and cared for him, this was the tiny kindness that had risen to the top of his memory. She would lock the note in a metal box along with a sprig of Cricket’s hair and a photo of her and Edgar the summer they had fallen in love. Of all the objects in the world, these were the only three she could not risk losing. Fern would blame her parents always for Ben’s death. Her parents, who had not been able to leave her brother alone, who had continued to write checks to the doctors who promised that money equaled treatment equaled health. Her father would never recover from the twin loss of his son’s body and his daughter’s heart, and her mother, though heartbroken in her own way, would appear to continue her calm, cold walk through life. Evelyn would think of Fern’s anger towards her as one gift she could actually give to her daughter: she would take the blame.