Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  And maybe watching his mother come up from below and holler with joy at the sight of her son like a mirage would have had the same effect on Edgar that his faded eyesight did: a skeletal want for his wife, for the person who loved him like that. The tack-sharp feeling that he was at sea with the wrong woman, that there was a story without his family but not a life.

  But the two boats grew farther apart instead of nearer. None of them would ever know that they had brushed so close.

  —

  Edgar knew there would be a storm before the clouds or the wind or the rain. The air changed. The water hummed. Edgar kept the sheet tight, trying to make time before they couldn’t anymore. Maybe they would die out there, he thought. Maybe that was the design of this trip—to quietly extinguish them, the dangerous flames of them, in the saltsea. Hero or villain or slave, the lungs fill with water, the body falls deeper, the fish come. On another day there might have been a small part of Edgar that wanted this. To fall not to the small, suburban unhappiness of a particular decade, a particular generation, but to nature.

  The storm battered. Glory, finally, got sick. She didn’t want or not want; she couldn’t. She said, “This is the worst feeling I have ever felt,” hung, like laundry, over the edge, a rope around her waist so the whole of her did not pour overboard. Edgar never would have found her again in all this seafoam.

  “This is not a terrible storm,” he said. “It will be over in a few hours.” She looked at him with contempt.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I hate you.”

  “Do you want to smoke?” he asked.

  “I want to die,” she said.

  Edgar knew they had to ride the storm out. There was no way to flee. To be tossed was their job.

  They went belowdecks when Glory could. The cabin was dark and musky and Edgar was aware of the press of that small space. Right then floating and tossing, he was a husband, he was a father, he was a son. He felt the distance, the terrible miles and miles he had gone. His life was too far. Even the horizon was unclear.

  When the storm died down, Glory reported that there were two silver fish swimming in the caught water. “We should eat them,” he said. Glory netted and Edgar held them down on deck while she bashed. He could help bail, but first he would heat the grill and they would eat. That, at least. He remembered playing by the river as a boy, catching frogs. One spring, there were babies, weightless but sticky in the hand. Edgar, once, needing to know the feeling, crushed one of the tiny creatures in his fist. It went so easily. Not even the bones held.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Glory, who was washing her face, running freshwater through her hair.

  “Some days I do believe in God. I want to,” she said.

  “You want someone powerful who can release you,” he said, understanding perfectly.

  “Maybe that’s who He will turn out to be. Or else the other kind.”

  They grilled the fish and there was even a lemon. When cut, the fragrance was so earthly, so terrestrial, it made Edgar ache. It was the kindest feeling, this homesickness, this desire for the very thing that actually belonged to him. It was good to be a land creature in love with the land.

  “Are you getting used to not being able to see?” Glory asked. She rubbed her hands together to warm them, and reached out to Edgar’s face.

  “Not at all.”

  “Luckily there’s nothing actually wrong.”

  “Sure.” He paused. “Tell me something about yourself. Tell me something you have done that you like,” he said. As if they’d only just met, as if they had not already saved and ruined each other’s lives.

  “In junior high school, I tried out for the cheerleading team. I had these bangs. I was not well-liked. The only reason anyone was nice to me was because my parents were unspeakably rich. I thought, what if? I made up a routine and practiced in my room. I can’t imagine what it looked like, I actually cannot imagine. I was not chosen. I’m sort of proud of myself for doing that. For being so oblivious as to think I might make it.”

  “You could have been good.”

  “I was not good.”

  There was a pause. “Will he take you back?” Edgar asked.

  They had nothing to offer each other after this journey was over. Neither of them, Edgar realized, had ever thought so.

  “He’ll take me back and he’ll forgive me eventually. That will probably be my project for a while.” This was Edgar’s first leaving but not Glory’s. Like an experienced doctor, she knew what wounds to expect from this particular kind of explosion. She knew how to sew them closed and keep them clean, how to pour tonic over. She also knew that the scars were worse, and permanent.

  Glory smoked and imagined that John had felt it the moment the sloop on which his beloved sailed had turned back towards the homeshore. She pictured him sweeping his mother’s floor and kissing her on the forehead and getting into his car. As Glory made her way, so did John. The forests, which they had driven through together dozens of times, were maple, oak. He would listen to cello concertos and leave the windows open when he went into the diner for a tuna sandwich and a coffee. He too would know what work was ahead—the understanding that would come quickly and the understanding that would never come.

  John would be at home when Glory arrived. He would be sitting in his armchair not reading, not watching television, just waiting. She would look at him and he would be just as boring as ever, but he would be hers.

  “Do you want to go to Mexico?” she would ask. “On anything other than a boat?”

  Both of them were still packed from their journeys so all they would have to do was turn off the lights and lock the door behind them. On the airplane, Glory would take John’s hand and put her head on his shoulder while they waited to rise.

  —

  Edgar slept on deck that night and let Glory have the berth. Her sympathy and touch would have cost him something. A well man could wake up in another woman’s bed, but a helpless man was too sad to. The tug towards home was as strong as a thick line, woven through his ribs and tied tight. He thought of the sights he had to look forward to: the twins at nineteen years old, their faces longer, a shadow of beard on their cheeks, about to turn into the people they would always be. He thought of Cricket at thirty, married to someone of her own choosing. He thought of Fern. He wanted his wife to see him get old and for him to know all the versions of her face. That night, lying on the deck of the Ever Land, Edgar looked up at the dark. Above him, the blurred scuff of the Milky Way.

  “Land ho,” Glory said in the morning. Edgar looked out but the shape was inexact. He squinted, and it did not come clear.

  “Do you have glasses at your house? Do you need a ride?”

  “No. I’ll take a taxi. You should go home.”

  “It was fun. At least it started out being fun,” Glory said.

  “Should we say goodbye here?” Edgar asked, wanting some space in which to seal this opening they had made. The water churned below them. Their arms around each other were cool and they did not hold long.

  For Edgar, the city in which he lived, the coastline that he had sailed towards for the last several years of his life, disappeared the closer they got.

  * * *

  LATER THAT NIGHT Fern and Mac stopped alongside the big river, muddy and roping inside its banks. M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, she said in her head. They looked out at it and tried to hear the water there, but it was too slow, too constant. There were ghosts of white shorebirds on the bank of a small island, and some in the air, and the trees were so thick with leaves they looked trunkless. Fern and Mac were standing on a hill above the water and there was a path down to it and many small footprints. Fern wanted the children who left them to have been carrying homemade fishing poles, wearing half-crushed hats, chewing a piece of hay in the sides of their mouths. There should be places that stay the same. Museum-of-life places, preserve
d for remembering.

  Fern was tired from a long drive and her body still vibrated from the car and it was a warm night, and the birds and the water and the clouded night. Fern let herself fall into the generous pillar of the giant. She rested her head back and let it settle against the top of his belly. She could hear the process within: air and liquid, moving through.

  It was more than they had touched since their wedding. Fern’s skin was still used to Edgar only. It made her want to go home. The craving for the twins’ weight in her lap came at her fast. Fern thought of a feverish Cricket asleep, her face red and the dreams making the pale pulse of her eyelids go, the way Fern had knelt at the bedside and put her head down against the child to try to absorb some heat, for both of their sakes. Fern remembered bringing Cricket an apple to eat when she was finally hungry. She had taken a few bites and left it on the bed when she fell asleep. Fern had picked it up and bitten the uneaten half and what she had tasted, strongly, was not the fruit’s flesh but the taste of her daughter’s palmsweat. Soon, the child would be up again, and running, and hungry and doing something sweet or dangerous that Fern would have to put a stop to. But Fern had kept that fever day like a gem.

  In that want for her real family, she leaned against Mac, and the giant put his big arms around her and they watched the river, which was a moving body, yet also so still.

  Their heartbeats changed pace. Something new came to the surface. Fern felt a kindness flare up in her. She felt the gift that her body might be. Both of them were at a deficit. Charity made her warm, and she turned then, and she looked up into Mac’s face, which the moon was whitening, and he looked back at her, the big black eyes, the bright teeth. He was her friend and she told herself that she could give him that missing thing, though later she would be able to admit that what she really wanted was the wound. She wanted it for herself for what she had done wrong and she wanted it for Edgar. Fern closed her eyes, and stood on tip-toes and waited to be kissed.

  Fern half expected the scene around them to change, to take notice: birds lifting from the trees, the clouds breaking for a moment. She was winning something, is how it felt. She was the victor. Her tongue and his tongue, his cheeks a scrabble on hers. They had earned this honeymoon, finally, by the famous river, deep in the moss and muck of this country, far away from everything that was true about their past and everything that was not.

  All the way to the hotel, she leaned into him, and his chest heaved a little too much, and she wanted more of that. More longing, more pain from it.

  The only hotel was called the Locust Tree and it was half-fallen. The sign was neon, blinking to say that there were rooms to let. Fern went inside as always, and the lobby was a tiny room with a counter with a full ashtray and a small bell, like a churchbell, which Fern picked up and shook so that the tongue clanged.

  A very fat, very old man came in. He had a few strands of hair, combed over, and a pair of large square wire-rimmed glasses. He said, “Cheapest room is six dollars.” It was too little and it made Fern nervous. She was used to being better taken care of than that. After the rat room, they had avoided the worst places.

  “What’s the most expensive room?” she asked. It was one of the things she liked about traveling with someone who hid in the car—she could overspend and no one had to know.

  “Ten. That one’s got a closet.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “I’ll take your money, young girl,” the man said. He coughed into his hands then, hard and long and when he pulled them away, he cupped within them a small, golden ball of mucus, which he held as carefully as a robin’s egg. He showed it to Fern, the slippery jewel, the dug-up treasure. “You’re not a nurse, are you?” he asked.

  “Ten. We’ll take it,” she said. “There are two of us.” She wrote the last name in the greasy book and counted her money. The fat man continued to examine his hands, and to smile, and he yelled his thanks after Fern.

  There was a cockroach on the bathroom floor, and nothing was whole. The headboard veneer was molting, the blanket was losing its fill, the mattress was concave. The water in the toilet was mineral yellow. Who knows how long it had been stagnant, what kinds of small creatures were growing within.

  Mac and Fern fell into the pits of the bed. Fern removed the giant’s clothes and he covered himself with the blanket. Batting fell out, banked up on the floor like fake snow. He begged for her, and unrolled her pants. The bed sank below them. They did not worry about their noises in such an establishment. Let them hear us, they both thought. Fern imagined the fat man and his bad lungs. It hurt a little bit, the giant’s size.

  The old question was still unanswered: Did it feel good? There was pleasure, definitely, in a job well done. A man on his back, the covers kicked off, sweating with his eyes closed and thankful.

  After, Fern had the urge to walk to the bathroom so he could admire her from behind. Ridiculous, the thought—she was not that young, and when she had been, she would have been careful to keep covered up in the light. She felt small next to the giant, was that it? But she did not get up and walk, covered or bare, because she remembered the roach and the dirty toilet. I just had sex with a giant, she thought.

  Mac asked for a cigarette, which they split, and after he fell too quickly asleep. He did not pull her into his chest, or trace her collarbone, or spread her hair across the pillow. Somewhere, these ideas had been seeded in her brain. She was the gift and the giver. Thanks ought to have been next.

  The room grew more disgusting the later it got. The bugs were audible on the tile, and worse, inaudible on the carpet. Fern checked the chain lock on the door and it fell off into her hand. She dressed and lay back down on the farthest edge of the bed, away from the canyon Mac’s body made, and Fern waited, eyes closed, for the infestation.

  1966

  THE FIRST TIME Fern and Edgar had touched was at her Junior Dance. He was back from college and had agreed, as a favor to his mother, to take a neighbor girl who was as uninterested in Edgar as he was in her. Fern was in a sleeveless dress, the color of a vague star. She had spread butter on her shoulders, just a thin slick of it because it made her skin bright. It was not an idea she had learned in a magazine or from a friend, but something she had thought of that eager night before, while she tried to seed her dreams with the smell of a boy’s cheek against hers. Her mother would not have approved, would probably have issued a warning about some rabid dog that would be attracted to her scent. At the country club? Fern would have asked. A rabid dog? So she kept it to herself. Her hair she twisted up, the points of pins poking into her scalp when she turned her head.

  The night would be good, that was decided, voted upon. All the mothers had worked hard to ensure it. The mothers remembered falling in love as if it were a sudden amusement ride drop. Hands in the air, wind burning their eyeballs, down. All of it made Fern feel prematurely sad for her older self: she did not like the idea that this was the best part of her life. Could it really be that tight skin and blond hair defined the potential for happiness? Or was it just that when you got older, everyone started to die around you?

  Fern, buttered shoulders and doubts, went to the dance on her own, having turned down all the invitations for dates from boys she did not want to feel obliged to kiss. It was not so different from any day at school, except for dresses. Boys hunched and punched, girls pattered and giggled and pointed. The boys’ suits fit them sadly and seemed to be standing on their own, a little distance between fabric and skin. Inside the suits, the boys looked like boys. Scrawny and a little butchered by the process of growing as quickly as they were. The girls, at least some of them, managed the disguise. The girls seemed to want it more too. This was the prize of womanhood: looking angelic in a gown and someone asked you to dance and everyone in the room noticed you. The prize of manhood came slowly and later: earn something, put it away, buy yourself a car, flirt with the child’s teacher, get a raise. Fern
wondered where these two axes crossed—what single moment in the life of a man and woman, their lives joined forever, felt exactly the same amount of great to them both?

  Edgar was there in handsome glasses with thick lenses. His date was with her friends and Edgar talked to the younger brother of a classmate. Fern appeared at the punchbowl and Edgar stopped short. They had seen each other plenty of times at school, said congenial hellos, but never more than that. She saw him see her. He looked less dumbed by the slow music and intention of romance than some of the other boys. She caught his eye, and as practiced, looked demurely away. It was all that was needed and he came over, raised her gloved hand and kissed it. She regretted the gloves, regretted the missed opportunity to have lips on her skin. They danced, parted, drank punch separately, danced again. So many rules followed by all the young ladies and gentlemen. Somewhere along the way, between being swaddled, nannied babies, they had been infused with the knowledge of how to behave and could not help mimicking their mothers and fathers. Fern wondered if it was cellular—would an adopted daughter from some faraway, charity-deserving country wake up at seventeen knowing how to spear an olive and spit the pit into her napkin without anyone seeing it?

  Along the edges of the room, the non-dancing tried to appear unafraid. The popular girls and boys looked away. One of the important skills of being socialized seemed to be the ability to overlook other people’s unhappiness. Maybe the awkward ones would be pretty in college, or after, and if not, maybe they would be very successful, and if not that either, then they would be very giving, they would take care of the sick or the young or the old.

  At the moment when Fern and Edgar had danced themselves into a corner, a huge wind slammed into the building and rattled the panes. They separated, the music stopped. The wind shrieked and pawed at the windows. The lights went out, girls screamed and huddled, boys just huddled. The teachers tried to act calm. Edgar looked at Fern and saw her hair shine in a flash of lightning. His hand gentled around her waist. In her ear he said, “It’s dark now,” and she knew just what he meant and turned to kiss him. It was the richest kind of darkness, the falling-into kind, and down they went, and they were holding on.