Edgar’s parents sent gifts, Fern’s parents sent short letters detailing the repairs that had been required on the house, the sculptures that had sold, the number of headache-free days Paul had had each month. Fern replied with news of the children, news of the summerhouse they had purchased on the island, the sailboat to go with it. She had to give her parents something because she was their daughter, but she wanted their reach to be shallow, surface-level, since everything they had touched before had been left aching.
Fern bought furniture and clothes and art and then spent time taking care of those objects. Edgar teased her for the purchases and then forgot about them. When the twins were two years old, she enrolled in one class—Archaeology—and imagined digging up bones of ancient people on the banks of the Nile, in the deserts of Syria, the mountains of Central Asia. At dinner she explained the methods to Edgar and the children: the way the area of a dig must be marked off in squares with flags and pegs. “The earth is like a layer cake,” she explained. “The deeper you go, the older the soil. It’s your first information about how old your find is.” Fern promised that they could conduct a dig at their summerhouse. She imagined wearing a bandana and sitting on the ground, brushing away the dirt from an Indian femur with a toothbrush. The children imagined bigger beasts: mammoths, pterodactyls.
Fern liked taking the class but she was afraid of a full schedule and afraid of failing again and afraid of being told just how small she was. “I have three children to raise,” she said when Edgar pressed her. “My mother had two nannies to help her. One of the kids is always waking up in the middle of the night. Everyone is always hungry. I’m doing all I can.” She kept picturing that professor and his nose hair and the humiliation that had bloomed in her. Learning to be a mother of three was hard enough and she had not slept a full night in all these years and no one gave grades for it and there was no end-of-the-year party or vacation and school sounded lonely and surrounded with teenagers and tests she did not have time to study for, old professors looking at her like she was already overripe.
“When they’re bigger,” she said, trying to smile. Edgar let it be. He did not want to tell his wife that he thought she could amount to more, though he did, because he loved her and because she was smart and because he was blind to so much of the work she did in their home, the invisible structure she built to support five lives.
—
Six cats were adopted and six cats were hit by cars or eaten by wild animals. Flower did not come home one night and Cricket quit eating for two days. The dog was replaced by a beagle, which could not be housebroken and was soon given away and replaced by a golden retriever whose blind enthusiasm even Cricket did not have the strength to match. Later there was a turtle, a rat and a series of fish. Maggie appeared on the doorstep and the children immediately made her family.
The house was all noise and then quiet, noise and quiet. Edgar’s parents came to visit with ever-larger gifts. In Chicago, the world’s tallest skyscraper was built using Edgar’s father’s steel. Fern’s parents sent a letter saying that the First Lady had purchased one of Evelyn’s sculptures to put in the White House garden and she had gone to see it settled, reported a long conversation at dinner with the wife of the Spanish Ambassador about the difference between American aphids and European ones. Fern replied with basic facts about the children—Cricket was growing a garden and could cook her own eggs and was reading books about fragile young British women, the twins were obsessed with building great block towers and crashing them down. In every conversation with her parents, Ben was a dark maw that would not close. Fern knew blame had no purpose but she hoarded it all the same.
The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight—that was the truth of motherhood. Birthdays accumulated under everyone. Each year Edgar said, “Would you consider finishing your degree?” and each year she said, “Later.”
The rest of the world came into Fern and Edgar’s house on television: the Ohio National Guard shot unarmed students at Kent State, the Weather Underground bombed the US capital, abortion became legal. The first American space station was launched into orbit, people all across the country lined up in their cars to fill up during a gas shortage. The President resigned in scandal. The daughter of a rich newspaperman was kidnapped. North Vietnamese troops encircled Saigon. The last American soldiers were lifted by helicopter to an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. Nearby, the Cambodian dictator forcibly emptied his capital city and began killing thousands of people, but the world was war-weary and it would be a long time before anyone intervened.
A serial killer began and completed a spree. The economy was slow, inflation was high, people were stabbed and robbed in the subways in New York. There were gays in the streets and performance artists and cocaine; the music changed again and men grew long sideburns and everyone young was always taking their clothes off.
Edgar had a chapter of his novel published. Then on a winter Saturday, he sat at the kitchen table and held a thick stack of typed pages in his hands. They were heavy and felt warm. Almost like a living thing. Edgar looked at the title page: LUCKY by Edgar Keating. He found a large envelope, sealed the manuscript inside, wrote the name and address of an agent, and kissed the flap. Fern and the children were outside stomping snow into paths and chasing each other. Edgar was too nervous to say where he was going. “I’m taking the dog out,” he said. His whole body felt electrified. It would have been easy to talk himself out of mailing the package: the potential embarrassment, the concern that he had wasted his time, that he would have to find something else to do with his life. The day was deeply grey. A snowplow had created dirty piles on the sidewalk. It was not as bitter as it had been and Edgar was without gloves for the first time in weeks. On a busy corner he saw a thin man his own age wearing pressed plaid pants and jacket, a nice wool coat and sneakers. It took him a minute, but then Edgar knew. “Runner?” he said to the man.
“Holy shit, brother!” the man said. He had huge sideburns and curly hair that resisted the side-part it had been forced into. Edgar did not feel as grown up as Runner looked. Runner, whose wild and unapologetic life Edgar had sometimes wished for, a shadow of which formed the story in his novel.
The summary: he was there to close out his mother’s estate. He still lived in Alaska and was still married to the librarian but they had moved off the commune. “All we wanted was a real fucking toilet,” Runner said, “and we ended up with a big house, a couple of trucks, three kids and two law degrees.”
“You’re an attorney?” Edgar asked.
“I know. But I’m on the right side.” He told Edgar how he and his wife were working for the American Indian Movement. “There’s so much fucked-up shit in the past that it’s hard to know where to start,” he said. “Broken treaties, stolen objects, stolen land, stolen children, forced boarding schools, systematic rape. Mass murder. I could go on.” He looked Edgar up and down. “You seem happy,” he said.
Edgar squeezed the package in his hand. “Thanks. I am.”
Runner wrote down his address. He offered the guest room. He said, “We see the northern lights in winter and there’s almost no night in summertime. Come find me when you get tired of the city. I’ll take you salmon fishing. Bring the family.”
Runner, true to his name, held his briefcase up to his chest and jogged off. Edgar watched him until he turned the corner. For the first time, Edgar did not feel like he was living the worse life. Even the hippies were buying houses and having babies. They had all grown up.
Two weeks later the agent called with the news that Edgar’s novel would be published.
A few weeks after that Fern’s parents died.
Spring came, the roses bloomed, Fern dreamed about Ben. She talked to him in her head. Edgar waited impatiently for notes f
rom his editor. Fern once again did not register for classes for the fall.
Fern thought of a hundred things she might have said to her parents about Ben, about herself, about being a woman, a mother, about love. She might have told her father that she didn’t blame him. She might have told her mother that she understood that it had not been fair for her either. Mostly though, their death was a quietness in Fern instead of an explosion. That her parents were no longer behind her on the path did not feel like an event; she had been walking away from them for a long time. Summer came again and the family packed for the island. They sailed, they swam. They plotted out a square of the cliff to dig up and followed the protocol Fern had learned in school—the grid, the logbook, the careful use of tools. Cricket discovered an arrowhead and toothbrushed it out of the soil and they found dozens of quahog shells with dark purple lips.
One afternoon Fern watched Will and James, the side-by-side of them, at work on a puzzle. She brought lemonade over and said, “You are so lucky to have each other. I hope you know that.” They did not even look up. They were years away from the treachery of adolescence, from the time they would turn to look for love elsewhere. She wanted them to always have each other, to never outgrow this perfect pairing. She imagined a corresponding set of girls for wives and a house big enough for everyone and one next door for Cricket—Cricket who did not have the luck to be a twin but also did not stand to lose her match.
The whole family went fishing and cooked chowder and sang sea songs on the lawn in the evening, slapping mosquitos under a sky that flashed with a coming lightning storm.
Then came August. Then came the call from the lawyer. The known world shook them off.
1976
FERN HAD NOT NOTICED at first that the giant preferred to stay in the car when she paid for their motel rooms. “Mr. and Mrs.,” she always said, peering over the ledger to see the name. She was another woman, otherwise betrothed. She remembered the early days of her and Edgar, of walking around with her new last name like it was jewelry. This new version of herself would have a short life—a few weeks, sea to shining sea. Fern wanted to know if hunger was churning up in Edgar’s belly, hunger for her. Absence was the last tool she had and she had no way to see if it was working.
They had traveled over a thousand miles now, had eaten and slept, eaten and slept and the trip had developed its own life. The rooms were all cheap and often a little dirty and Fern found that she didn’t mind. She still startled sometimes when she looked in the backseat and saw three empty spots instead of three children and when, for a moment, she allowed herself to think of the distance between them and the speed with which she was driving farther away she had the feeling of having climbed to a high mountain where the air was thin. Fern was breaking a physical law, unbinding herself from the lives she had created. This feeling of airlessness also brought a high. She was a person responsible for no one else.
Fern hummed along to the pop station to songs she somehow knew even though was sure she had never heard them before. That was the genetics of this music—a virus, caught upon contact. “You can feel autumn in the air,” she said.
“Time to head south anyway,” said Mac. As they cloverleafed onto US 55 southbound they both laughed and simultaneously reached to crank the volume button to celebrate. It was that easy to solve the cold. The signs switched from Des Moines, Lincoln, Cheyenne to St. Louis, Jackson, New Orleans. The roadside was deep green and overgrown sooner than they would have expected. Vines worked their way across the land, tangling.
Fern thought of her ancestors, early settlers of this big country. They had spread out, moved a little farther west, seeded the Kentucky hills with their good name. They bought plantations bursting with cotton and they bought bodies with darker hands to gather the white bursts off the branch. Money accumulated. The houses grew bigger, and the purebred Americans owned ever more stable-hands, maids, nannies, ever more darker hands to tend the fields. Their wives were more beautiful with each generation, bound into shape by corsets made from the bones of whales.
The sons of the sons of the sons took over their fathers’ plantations, ran for government under their fathers’ trusted names. But soon when some of the young men came home they had a harder time watching the darker hands in the fields knowing that the people, the men and women—whole bodies, selves, the sons of sons could now admit were attached to the hands—were a line item in their lists of holdings. This many acres, this many bushels, this many males, this many females.
One son freed his father’s slaves while his father was in the hospital with pneumonia. The boy’s father, who might otherwise have recovered, died surrounded by white-capped nurses who had no remedy for anger or shame. The boy’s mother hanged herself in the parlor. When he found her, he cut her down with a pair of silver scissors and lay beside her on the floor until evening, fireflies sketching lines across the dark.
To their friends and children both, generations to come told the story of the abolitionist over the story of his father, proud of the relatives who had fought on the side of right. They did not speak of the fact that in order for a family to free their slaves they must first have owned them. They did not stop spending the money that had been earned with the help of bodies, bought and sold. It was that money that furnished every single thing in their good American lives.
—
After lunch, Fern and Mac walked a small town’s main streets. He could not help himself from imagining for a moment that a woman like Fern could fall in love with him and how they would move in, buy a little farmhouse, get the garden going, bake pies in its kitchen. No one would know about their lives before this. He was not falling in love with Fern—he knew that she belonged to someone and he was unreasonably huge and they each had real lives to which they would return. Mac still let himself have the fantasy. He had been alive long enough to know that this was one of the safer pleasures.
She said, “I like that little blue house with the picket fence.”
“It’s cute. I’d never even fit in the door.”
“What size is your house at home?”
“It’s a two-bedroom apartment downtown. But the ceilings are high and I paid a lot of money to have everything redone with big doors and tall counters.”
“And here I am this small woman in a huge house.”
“You know goldfish grow relative to the size of their habitat?”
“Maybe we should switch,” Fern said. “Make our habitats relative to the size of our bodies. Edgar would love to live in a two-bedroom apartment, even if he couldn’t reach the sinks.”
Next to the Laundromat was a pink slice of a building with a purple sign that said Astrology, Spices, Travel Arrangements, Notary Public. There was a bell, and Mac walked right up and rang it. Fern hung back, but the door opened and there stood a middle-aged black man in a tight T-shirt advertising a team called the Bay City Chargers.
“How can I help you?” he asked. He looked the giant up and down, as if he was trying to see the step the man must be standing on. The man said, “Tarot, tea leaves, palm reading, astrology. Every reading gets a free cup of tea or a beer.” He looked like a Little League dad, not like a seer.
All the lamps had purple scarves hung over them and there were piles of cigarettes in ashtrays all over and a stack of magazines at the top of which was a glossy for teens with a blond cover model. On the wall was a picture of a topless black Madonna nursing her baby and the room smelled of cardamom. Fern realized that the only other time she had been inside the home of a black person was in Kentucky. She wondered what had become of the miner’s wife. That house had not surprised her—here, nothing was as she would have expected.
“Who’s up first?” the man asked. He sat them at a table. Mac gave him his birthday, the place, the time. The man put on a pair of reading glasses and thumbed through some papers and said, “In ten years’ time, you’ll find a home you don’t want to leave.
You won’t struggle for money. You need to eat more fats. If we were in India, I would tell you to light a candle and send it down the Ganges.”
“Have you been there?” Fern asked.
“We were hippies. When we were younger. Now we’re adults with kids and a mortgage,” the man said, seeing a question in Fern’s eyes. She looked down at her feet.
The giant softened his voice. “And love?” he asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “Absolutely. The best kind.”
Then the man traced his soft, brown finger across Fern’s pale palm lines and made small noises of recognition. Do not tell me the bad news, she thought. Do not show me to my horrible self. Because there were her children again, real and actual and far, and her life that she had walked out of. There was her husband whose happiness she had tried to trade for material comfort. There was her twin brother whom she had failed to protect. Due south was coal country and below that the Army base. To the east was the town where Ben had jumped out the window and to the north was the ivied building where he had spent the rest of his life. Fern felt as though she was standing in the center of her entire life, all those points of departure. If one thing had changed along the way, who knows who they would have become. If the mine had not collapsed, if Ben had not been drafted, if Edgar had been sent to the jungle instead of the ice. Would they have been happier or sadder or wiser or gentler or better or less afraid people? Would she have had to run away?
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 21
