Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  The third and most important source of Miss Nolan’s information was her imagination.

  While her father sold knives door-to-door and her mother ran a cake shop, Miss Nolan, who was then only called Anna, revised the family history. Her teacher had assigned a family tree and Anna drew hers on archival paper that included, at its bottommost branch, a fake name: Helen Fighting Water. Anna was nine years old. She wrote an essay for class about this long-ago relation from Montana and how she had lived in a teepee and tanned the hides of buffalo with the mashed brains and internal organs of the animals and how she had fallen in love with a white trapper who was kind and respectful of her culture and how, for a time, they had lived with the tribe instead of in town, but then there came a terrible winter and half the Indians died and the trapper convinced his bride to move with him into a cabin near a doctor and better sources of food and water and heat. They raised sixteen children, Anna wrote, and each of them was smart and kind. When Anna’s parents looked at her assignment they said, “That’s nice, sweetheart,” because they did not know or care where they had come from. Because where they had come from—West Virginia, North Carolina—was poor and probably dirty and most of the relations had had too many children and died of the flu and it was not a story they had wished to drag with them. They had enough to drag with the house and the daughter and the three-legged dog she had insisted on adopting. They had enough to drag with a marriage, two station wagons, alternating Christmases in the nursing homes where their parents lived, a few good days on the shore in summer, maybe a trip to Florida sometime when it was too cold to breathe in New Jersey. If they wanted to get someplace better, the less they took with them, the easier the passage.

  Anna fell in love four times in her life. First with the relative who did not exist, second with a mute boy in third grade who drew pictures for her of castles with moats thick with dragons, third with a college professor who taught her about endangered species, and fourth with the man she eventually married. He was a doctoral student in Post-Colonial Literature. He was proud of his beard and his Mustang and the time he had spent in Senegal, Peru, Burma. He collected antique glass bottles, which he lined on his windowsill above the place where he and Anna lay naked while he told her that he knew it was ironic that he was a white man studying the danger of the white man studying the brown man. Because the truth was both absent and boring and because she could sense this man’s hunger for an exotic story, Anna told him that she was descended from a Salish brown-skinned woman who had, ten hours into a forty-hour labor in the coldest winter in a hundred years, walked to the rural Montana hospital in snowshoes. The lie worked. The man fell in love with Anna for her stolen stories. When she went to school to become a teacher, she got good grades because of her stolen stories. Without them, Miss Nolan might not even exist.

  —

  When Cricket went to get the boys at the end of the day, she was told by their teacher that they had painted their faces with ketchup and mustard, trying to look like the Indians Cricket had told them about. Because the boys were not in a Social Studies unit about the American West, they had gotten into some trouble for this, but they seemed happy about it. The teacher asked Cricket about their mother, and when she could have a little chat with her about the behavior of the boys. She said the phrase, “Nip this Savage thing in the bud,” a phrase with which Cricket was unfamiliar.

  “My mother is away. We have a sitter. I’ll be sure to relay the message.”

  The question, as they walked, was whether anyone would be at the house. A mother, a father, a dog.

  Cricket would not tell her mother about the kiss, whether she was home when they arrived or not. She might want to confess to a mother, someone else’s, one she imagined to be beautiful and always baking, but not her own. Still, it would have been nice to have someone to avoid telling, someone to hate a little bit over the course of an evening, from pot roast to homework to dessert to television.

  The boys Indian-danced home, or did a dance they had invented that they thought of as Indian. They patted their mouths. Cricket was fairly sure this was inaccurate but they were her pair, and she was in charge of loving them and it was sunny out and they had been indoors all day.

  Cricket and the boys unlocked the big red door, put the mail on the small table where the mail was meant to be put.

  “Hello?” she called, hopeful. The house made whatever sound a house made, which was not the same sound a waiting parent made.

  Evening thickened and the children let the feeling of unrest gather at their feet. They let worry in, a rising tide, ankles, knees, thighs. They swam in it and what struck them was that it felt kind of good. Something noteworthy was happening to them. They were in a situation. You could become an orphan at any moment. You could be motherless, fatherless, alone with nothing but your brothers and sister and your wits. The seconds and minutes meant something, suddenly. How long would they survive on the food left over in the house? How long until someone picked them up and took them to an orphanage? They imagined this place—rows of cots and angry old women and a kindly, powerless man who swept the fallen hairs and dust from below them. The brothers took an inventory of the cupboards. Crackers, cereal, soup. The refrigerator: cheese, eggs, milk, butter. There was a huge freezer in the basement, and though they knew that much ice cream was inside, it was dark and very far and the steps creaked and the light was a bare bulb with a string that snuck up on the back of your neck.

  They sat down at their familiar kitchen table and everything around them felt new and strange and they each took a spoon and ate one soup can cold, gathered around it like it was a source of heat. The room sounded different now that they knew for sure they were orphans. So many more noises than any of them had noticed before: the refrigerator working to keep cold, the clock tracking time, time that felt quite endless. Without a mother, there was no suppertime, there was no bedtime. No one would make them brush up and wash up and kneel down to pray. They could, if they wanted, become nocturnal, walk the streets at night with the skunks and raccoons, get into trash and trouble and shine flashlight bulbs into the downstairs windows of every house, examine the leftovers from the day. Probably there were unlocked doors, and Cricket imagined slipping inside, rearranging other people’s books, eating their food, reading the letters on the kitchen table, living a whole life in their house while they slept so that the house would have two families: day family and night.

  She thought then of efficiency, which was a word her third-grade teacher had often used. The old woman had valued this thing above other things, commented on how well or badly the world was managing at it.

  Once, Cricket had taken note of the concept and decided to leave her bookbag in the car, so she would not have to remember it in the morning. But the next day the teacher had sent home a note: Cricket did not do her homework. She had explained to her father the reason, that she was being as efficient as possible, and her father had both patted her and scolded her and Cricket had not known whether she was smart or dumb. That night she had decided to sleep in her clothes so that she would not have to get dressed in the morning, and when she had woken up, she had begun to think up a system. She called it Efficient Life. The main idea was to do each type of thing all at the same time rather than switching around: eat all the butter for the year at once, all the peas, all the rice, all the toast. One week is egg week and you eat eggs until you can’t stand to anymore. Then it’s time for bread. School should be twenty-four hours a day for however many weeks and then you take a long break. One month you do nothing but swim. One month you do nothing but dig.

  Her own empty house now made her think of the downstairs of all the houses quiet and empty at night while the families slept upstairs, and she thought of the poor, whom she had only ever seen once, on Thanksgiving years ago when her mother had taken them all to the soup kitchen where they had tied kerchiefs around their heads and sawed at turkey carcasses for two hours until their palms
had been blistered and their clothes meaty. The poor had come by in a line like a dirty river and the volunteers put a slop of cranberry next to a slop of stuffing on their white, white plates, and the poor had looked grateful, but not as grateful as Cricket thought they might have. She had looked forward to this day, to being charitable, but now the poor had just walked on down the line and sometimes even turned down one offering or another.

  No gravy for me.

  I can’t stand sweet potatoes.

  Stuffing looks like it’s already been digested.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Cricket had said to one old woman with teeth like chinks of pearl in her head. Her father had said it to her at many dinners before while she rearranged the peas on her plate.

  Mother had smacked her on the cheek. “They aren’t beggars,” she had said. Cricket had apologized but she was confused. Weren’t they, though?

  Anyway, now she had an idea that the poor could live in the downstairs of the houses while the other people slept upstairs. The owners would never even notice. The poor would have to get used to being awake at night, but that seemed like a small enough task. Father would be proud.

  —

  The three orphans ate their soup without slurping, even though no one was there to notice. They were still very hungry afterward and ate bread and butter, but they did not enjoy it because these were their reserves and they were being depleted.

  They went to the living room and turned on the television. The newsman in his maroon jacket and fat tie came on to tell them that Mao Tse-tung was dead and five white journalists were killed in rioting in Cape Town and it was flooding in Mississippi. They showed a picture of a house floating away and another of a lot of men in overalls building a wall out of bags of sand. M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, all the children said in their heads. They wished their state had a little song you sang every time you thought of it.

  How long had it been? Cricket looked at the watch she had been given for her tenth birthday. One hour. One more small hour, of one more small day. There was so much time left to fill. It was a darkness, dragging at the children. If only Maggie was there, they thought. Mother and Father, yes, maybe, but Maggie, for sure. No one should have to be an orphan and dogless too. Cricket imagined gathering around the warm, furry body, petting and handfulling the extra folds of skin. The heat of her. The encouraging repetition of her breathing.

  The children lay down in a huddle on the floor. They felt very tired. The house sounds ticked along, as if it were not a small lonesome island. The children fell asleep in the dusking dark, alone on the earth.

  * * *

  THE TROUBLE WITH CHICAGO had always been history and now it was the future too. The whole point of Fern’s endeavor was away, not home. The city approached on the horizon, skyscrapers looking out over the wind-howled flatness of the prairies and lake. Fern had sprouted here; all the strange fruit bearing up across her life was planted in this land. Outside the car the corn should have been a city itself, stalking and spawning and smelling the way it did, but it was fall and someone had just razed it for the winter. Miles of chopped-down, miles of spiny want.

  “This portion of the trip is not helping your mood,” Mac said.

  “I grew up over that way. And Edgar’s parents are probably switching out the wicker furniture and summer décor accents for a lot of gourds and leaf garlands. No doubt there is one last pitcher of fresh lemonade on the counter and a cleaning staff of ten.”

  “We should confront this, get it out of your head.”

  “We should keep driving.”

  But, Mac reasoned, they were hungry and the food would be so much better here. All through pizza and soda Mac nibbed at Fern about her family, about coming up against the past so she could move on. He had once read a book on the subject. It was a question of killing off your demons by facing them down.

  “It sounds dramatic,” Fern said.

  “This is serious. You’ll never be free. Let’s start with Edgar. What does he do for a living?”

  “He hasn’t had to earn a living.”

  “Oh?”

  “Steel. It’s the family business. Only Edgar doesn’t believe in it. It’s complicated.”

  “He doesn’t believe in what?”

  “Industry. Making money on the backs of poor people who work in factories and mines and get paid hardly anything. Money in general.” She waited for Mac to scoff but he didn’t. “That doesn’t sound stupid to you? Hating money? Hating one’s good fortune?”

  “Of course not. We all need enough of the stuff and sometimes there’s fun to be had, but it’s not exactly a new idea, that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

  “Except everyone secretly believes that it would for them. Everyone wants a chance to try.”

  “And you? Do you hate money?”

  “Not as much as Edgar does. I hate that other people don’t have enough but if I was going to fight for something it might be for other people’s lives to be more like mine than mine to be more like theirs. I wish money didn’t exist but that doesn’t mean I want to be hungry and cold.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They just died. Last winter.”

  “Both of them? I’m sorry.”

  “Both of them.” She did not elaborate on the unusual double death. “And they turned out to have spent everything. My childhood home will be sold to pay the taxes. Which is why I think we have to move back here and why Edgar might have to become a steel man, which is why he kissed Glory Jefferson and why he thought I was going to screw John Jefferson and why I’m in this car with you.”

  The giant let this list hang in the air. “Wow. Okay. Do you have siblings?”

  She did not say that in addition to escaping and punishing her husband, the other reason she was in this car was that the giant reminded her of her brother. Fern pictured Ben, tender and strange, always more inclined to speak with birds than people. She thought of the shadow of him behind her in high school while she laughed with the pretty girls and boys. She thought of him in the expensive, ivy-crawled institution, looking more like a university than a mental hospital. If Fern ever wanted to make herself cry, she thought of Ben alone in that room, the quiet pressing him flat to the bed after a day of electroshock treatments.

  “I had a brother. He was not as big as you but he was big and possibly crazy but it wasn’t his fault and they killed him by trying to save him and you can’t fix it. Can we be finished?”

  “That all sounds so difficult.” He paused. “I think you should see the house,” he said finally.

  “If I agree to stand in front of the house where my parents died, will you stop questioning me?”

  —

  In the last years, Fern’s mother’s hips had started to click and ache. Evelyn’s knees had hurt. Her body had been out to get her all along, but aging had been the grand finale. At the country club the young women had all been smooth-skinned and tan in precisely the same way. They were beautiful for the purpose of enjoyment by men and envy by women while Evelyn had become invisible—someone to be politely moved aside.

  At the country club Evelyn had stopped a much younger woman, her skin luminous with tennis sweat. “I’d like to sculpt you,” she had said to the girl whose name was almost definitely either Sue or Betty, like all the others. “You’re so young and enchanting. Would you mind?”

  The girl pinked up and smiled and said, “I have actually done some modeling. For catalogues.”

  A few days later the Sue or Betty—Evelyn never bothered to sort out which—had arrived at the studio with her hair curled and her lips stung red. She had sat on the stool. Evelyn had taken out her clay and worked it into a twelve-inch person-shape quickly. “You know what would be really beautiful,” she had said, “is a nude. That’s the real art form.”

  The girl had hesitated. Her outfit had been carefully chosen and it
seemed a shame to lose it. Like everyone with a near-perfect body, she had had a catalogue of the tiniest faults.

  “It’ll be tasteful. Legs crossed. I won’t be specific about your nipples.” Evelyn had known that the gracious thing would have been to go outside to give the girl privacy to prepare herself—it was a smaller humiliation to be seen naked than to be seen undressing. Which is exactly why Evelyn had stayed and also why, once her subject had been bare, Evelyn had opened a window to let the cool air in. It had also been why she worked slowly, worrying curves she had known she would fix later, as the girl’s skin had puckered and she had struggled to sit still. The sculpture would never come to much. It had not been meant to. The real purpose of art had been to give beauty back its discomfort. To remind this girl that her body had ways of harming her.

  In the club, Fern’s father had tried to tell the stories of his ancestors and his wife’s ancestors but the young men had no idea when their relatives came to this fine land. The future was the thing, they said. “Time to look ahead, old man,” they had said. They had talked openly about money, earned and spent. They had talked about cars and boats and dance clubs, and they had talked about women. Not ladies, but women, and their parts and the things the young men had done to them, or wanted to. Fern’s father sometimes faked headaches even when he had none.