1976
MONDAY CAME and Cricket fell into its arms. There was a time by which all three must be dressed and human, having eaten bread and butter, having cleaned the tribe-paint from their faces so they looked like nice little white children. She watched the colors run from her brothers’ wet cheeks like blood and silt. They were giving up their orphaned selves and acting like all the other parented boys with alive dogs and selves that had not recently come up bruised.
Cricket made sure shoes were tightly tied. She brushed her hair and styled it in the youngest way she knew how—two braids tied with navy blue ribbons—wanting not to be grown today. If she could look like a child maybe someone would take care of her. These were small illusions—the three little orphans would go unnoticed. The decision had to be made about whether to go inside again and get fresh clothes or if they should wear last week’s uniforms. It was hard to be near the old version of life because it made it obvious how far away they had drifted. Once, their mother had worried for a week over a decision about the upholstery for the new sofa and whether red sent the wrong message. Once, their father had paged the many subscribed-to but rarely read magazines while drinking weak coffee in the rocker by the window. Maggie had slept there, and there and there. The house was full of ghosts. Cricket went in alone and fast, gathered what she needed and ran back out to the safety of the yard.
This morning, they did not bother to light a fire in order to warm their bread. The need for ritual had not quieted, but it had thickened. It was the only medicine and they were worried about using it up. Cricket held the hose while her brothers drank. They looked at the fawn’s hill, the now wilted petals, the demonstration of their love looking smaller the next day. There would be no one here to keep watch. No one to befriend the mother if she came.
When it was time, the boys waited at the gate in their blue-and-whites, little ties hanging around their necks, and Cricket checked their cheeks and hair to make sure they would pass. She slipped the latch and out they went onto the sidewalk with their bookbags and their finished homework as if they were the same as all the other kids, alarm-clock grumpy, cheeks pillow-creased. Cricket still stepped over the cracks like she had always done, and she still noticed the difference between smells as they passed houses—bacon, woodfire, cold brick. The boys were slack. Their bags seemed too heavy, but as they came closer, as other children appeared like wild game on the horizon, the boys stood taller. Cricket could see them get their boyness back, remember that there were balls to kick and sticks to swing and girls to tease. She could see the blood return. They would be scratched up and happy by the end of the day, beaten back into their bodies by wind and the speed of their own legs, running towards base.
Cricket herself doubted that she would be so easily restored. Her head felt heavy, her brain. But it was a good sight, the flapping red and white of the flag and the gathered mass of young bodies, supervised. She knew her brothers would shuck her off when they got there, assert their independence, so before it was too late, she grabbed their hands, one in each of hers, and she squeezed tight. She wanted to cause enough pain to last them.
—
The classroom smelled like melted crayons. The fourth graders yowled and bittered at being back, stuffed their backpacks into cubbies, found their seats. No one except Cricket noticed that there was no Miss Nolan at the front of the room. They did sense a lack of balance: the room was a boat on which all the passengers were astern. The chatter continued, weekends were remembered, the near-loss of a softball team against the dreaded Somerville Pirates was recounted. Some kids had been taken back to the beach for the weekend, which was almost cruel, giving them summer in such a tiny sliver. They started to sense that someone, by now, ought to be forcing them into quiet. Someone ought to be civilizing them. Ladies and gentlemen, they were always being called when they were at their scrappiest, as if the name alone could cure them.
“Where is Miss Nolan?” the girls asked.
“This is excellent!” the boys yelled. “No teacher! Guys! No teacher!”
“Is she all right?” the girls asked.
The room hummed. Cricket wanted not to cry in front of friends and enemies, but she had already been abandoned enough this week. It was her. She was repellent to grown-ups. Wherever she went, the person taking care of her evaporated. She got up and went, as calmly as she could fake it, out the door and down the hall. In the other classrooms the children were quiet at their desks, following instructions from an adult with a lesson plan.
Someone else was standing in the stall next to Cricket, someone with big feet. Someone who was crying too. Cricket knew the shoes. They were the shoes of her beloved. She said, “Can I come over?” and wriggled under the wall. Miss Nolan looked at her like Cricket was a puppy and she sat down on the lidded toilet and Cricket crawled up into her teacher’s lap. Miss Nolan received Cricket like she had been expecting her, like this had always been the plan. They held on tight. They soaked each other’s shoulders.
“My mother died,” Miss Nolan said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
Cricket thought of an early snow on the Great Plains, a small woman out gathering berries, lost in the whiteout. She thought of a gathered flock of mourners in the teepee, a good fire, food available but uneaten, the wind through the seams. “How?” she asked. “What happened?”
“A car accident on the expressway.”
“The expressway?” Cricket tried to add the long strip of pavement, the rushing cars, toll plazas, to her idea of the plains. “I didn’t know they had those.”
Miss Nolan looked the girl over, swiped a tear away from each of their cheeks. “In New Jersey? Of course they do.”
New Jersey was a brick and it hit Cricket hard. She said, “You aren’t an Indian.” She felt terribly stupid and terribly small. No one was from Montana, no one was from Oklahoma. They were all city kids. They were all part of the same tidy, boring tribe.
Miss Nolan kissed Cricket on the forehead. “You are sweet and good,” she said.
Cricket wanted to ask about the lip-kiss last week, but she could not risk another loss. “Of course I knew that,” she said, reinhabiting maturity. “I’m sorry about your mother. I actually kind of understand because my parents are gone too. They’ve been gone since Wednesday. We’re orphans now.”
Miss Nolan tried to conceal her panic. The girl looked clean and fed but probably in shock. Cricket did not see the effort it took for her teacher to keep a steady voice as she asked a lot of practical questions. Hospitals: not called due to fear of orphanage. Police: not called due to fear of orphanage. Relatives: not called due to fear of orphanage. Food: eaten. Sleep: slept. Safety: managed.
“You’ll be so disappointed in me but a fawn died in our yard, and I tried to skin it but I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I really tried. We buried her,” Cricket said, wanting to prove that they were good survivors, that they could take care of something else even when they themselves were broken.
“I didn’t expect you to know how to skin a deer. You poor ducklings,” the good teacher said, and Cricket had never felt so grateful or stupid in her life. “You should have told me what was going on. We’ll find them. I’m sure they’re all right.” Miss Nolan was relieved to have a situation to manage, to turn, for a moment, away from the inkbloom of her mother’s death.
“They could be not all right,” Cricket said. She had allowed the possibility that her parents had left on purpose for a trip or to start a new life and the possibility that they had gotten lost or hurt, but to say out loud the fact that they could be dead carved her out.
“I’m going to help you,” Miss Nolan said. “You are being taken care of.” The woman took Cricket close and hugged her and it was this touch that Cricket understood she needed, not a hot-mouth kiss, not the kind of close that she would look for later but the kind she needed now, had always needed: her small head against someone’s chest, a heartbeat dull but steady
beneath the bones.
* * *
THEY WERE STILL A LONG DAY’S DRIVE from Mac’s son. Neither of them knew what to say about what they had done together. Fern had not realized that the desert was so big. Cows in the distance, horses sometimes, once a herd of elk, their wide racks up against the sky. “They look fake,” Fern said. “They look too much like elk to be elk.”
“You make no sense,” Mac told her. The animals lowered their necks towards the ground.
“There’s nothing to eat here,” Fern said. The ground was brittle with sage.
“They spend their lives looking for food,” Mac said. “They have to search all the time to get enough.”
Even the sky was greenish and dry. Low mountains were a stripe between pale and pale.
Sex had been a mistake, of course, but Mac had also meant to make it. He had never expected Fern to love him in a realer world. He had taken advantage of her distance, of her strained marriage. He knew that escape, at this point, was starting to wear at Fern like a blister. The generous thing would have been to brush her off, to hold her hand and talk about the river, go for ice cream, keep things safe. He was not sorry, though. He too deserved to be touched. He wanted it, even if it would cost them both. And anyway, he told himself, her husband had surely slept with the other woman by now, and it would be fairer for Fern to come home with her own secret.
Fern, on her side of the car, was afraid of the wreckage a body could cause. Edgar’s body, her body, Glory’s, the giant’s. She was afraid that she would never be able to stop causing damage, now that she had started.
They drove through mesquite and red dust. The sky was bluer at the edges and then purpled with rainclouds. They watched for an hour as the storm came towards them. The diagonal lines of rain, darkening the ground beneath. It was dry, dry, dry until the smell of the air changed and the windshield turned milky with rain. Fern looked at her companion, the bigness of his face and chest. They had come all this way together, and the rain and the butterflies and all that new air in her bloodstream. She did not know if she should hold his hand and pretend to love him. They stopped and got out this time, and the rainwater was warm and the air was warm and it all smelled plant-bitter and grateful.
In all this space it felt safe to admit that a marriage, her marriage, could end. She imagined it this way: her on the sidewalk in front of the big house, mounds of belongings beside her. She would have chosen things to bring with her into the next life. The huge Swedish desk, a blond dresser. The headboard, which she knew was the very thing you were meant to get rid of in a divorce—keep the silver, but relieve yourself of the bed on which your marriage succeeded and failed. The past years belonged to her, even if the future did not.
Her parents, though dead, would be nonetheless ashamed.
She told Mac about going to the institution after Ben died. How in his room she had found children’s books, the same ones they had read in the nooks by the fireplace when they were small. In the bottom corners there were grease stains from fingers, turning. It was a sour-smelling room, and the walls were soft blue, the color a sane person would choose for a crazy one. There was a small television, and a box of letters from Fern, which she took but did not read, not ever. She remembered writing them about the hugeness of motherhood, what it was like to live after your heart had been born out into the world and was at risk every second of every day. How Cricket liked to ride her bike too fast and play with animals, sharp-toothed dogs, possibly rabid, their mouths foaming while the child petted them and loved them and curled up against them. Little lion-tamer, ready to put her head into the mouths of beasts.
“I should have stopped them from performing the lobotomy,” Fern said.
“It wasn’t your job.”
“That’s why I always stood to the side. But my mother should not have been in charge and my father was too sick to be. Ben should never even have gone to basic training. I wish Edgar and I had brought him with us.” She looked out at the desert, swooshing past. “I thought when you fell in love with someone you had to give your whole self over to them. I wish I had known that there was enough of me to share. I wish I hadn’t left my brother behind.” A vulture stood over the remains of something unrecognizable. “This might be a weird thing to say considering what happened last night, but when I first saw you I thought you were Ben.”
Mac was glad that he could think of his big form at the end of the aisle as a gift. Not a gift for himself, but nice all the same.
Fern reached out and put her hand on Mac’s leg.
He knew she wanted him to be an ax, swung against the wall to see if the house would stand. It wouldn’t, he thought, if she was lucky. Not the house. But what was inside might.
“I’m not what you’re looking for,” he said, without turning towards her.
“What am I looking for?” Fern thought about the day with Ben after they had begun to cook his brain with electricity and drugs when he had shown her her own reflected face in her patent leather shoe. The answer was too easy. Love, home, herself—what else did people go searching for?
A herd of cows stood in the middle of the road ahead of them. Some of the cows had lain down. Some were looking, slack-eyed, at the cars. All were chewing. Mac slowed and stopped. The earth was pale, bleached by the sun. The plants were spiny and unwelcoming and the horizon was a long way off. The pickup truck in front of them veered off the road through the cactus and scrub until it had passed the herd. It would take an hour for the air to clear of its dust. Fern got out. She walked over to the cows and could smell them as she approached. Hay and urine and mud and shit. From the car they seemed stupid, from up close they seemed big. “Cows!” she said. “Shoo!” Flies, like a thick black aura, rose off the animals and resettled.
From the other direction came an old red van. It stopped and out stepped two young women with lots of eyeliner and shaggy hair and big sunglasses. They smelled of smoke and one of them was holding a kitten. They looked to Fern like they had just woken up after a long decade in California.
“Cows in the road,” Fern said. The girls looked bored. “They don’t seem to want to move.”
“Have you been to Houston?” one of the girls asked. “Her brother lives there. He’s cool. We’re going to become airline stewardesses. In the sky you don’t have to deal with this kind of shit.”
One cow let the weight of her body fall back with a deep groan—Fern knew it was a she because her teats rested in front of her, engorged.
Mac got out but stayed close to the car. It’s what her brother would have done too. How afraid a person could be, how big and how afraid. She stood close to him as she would have with Ben.
Thunder clapped. From where?—the sky was clean. The cows stood and ran awkwardly into the desert. Hooves rang hard against the dirt. Dust rose out and up, and it glinted.
“Mica,” Mac said, without Fern asking. They were standing in a glittering fog.
—
Mac went into a restaurant and Fern stood at the payphone in the shade, leaned against the stucco wall. She would ask the question even if there was no answer. She wanted to make noise occur in her own home, to create the specific sound of the phones in the big living room and the kitchen, like a pair of birds calling to each other. She dialed collect and held the phone away from her ear so that she could imagine that she was hearing the real ringing in the real house, the real life. Not this faraway tone in the hotel telephone.
And then: “Hello?” It was Edgar’s voice.
* * *
THE TAXI DROVE to Edgar’s house the same way he would have gone, the way his hands knew and his feet knew, drawing back at the reds and pressing down at the greens. Stop signs and straightaways all mapped in Edgar’s reflexes.
He had had the keys in his pocket all this time. The house smelled its old smell. It was empty, was all. He thought of the agreement made all those long agos, sickness and heal
th. He had not considered that Fern might be anywhere but in this house when he returned. Edgar walked around, looking. Though his vision was weak he could tell that the house was a mess, especially the kitchen, and something was in the backyard, that, upon closer examination turned out to be the boys’ teepee with bean cans strewn all around. Edgar had never known Fern to live with a mess like this, even for a day. Upstairs, he found her note on his dresser. He had to hold it two inches from his face to see it. “No,” he said to himself. His hands began to shake. He imagined his children kidnapped, jailed, dead.
He called the school. “Are my children there?” he asked, finding no way to sound like anything but a horrible father.
“You don’t know if your children are in school?” the secretary asked.
“I’ve been away. Can you just tell me please?” She took the names.
She put the phone down and he heard her clomp across the room and yell to someone. Moments passed before she came back on the line. “All present,” she said. He cried when he hung up and thought about going to get them early just to have their little bodies in his arms, but he was half blind and dirty and he did not want to fumble into the school and try to explain.
He called the eye doctor to ask for new glasses. He was nervous, apologetic. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Keating. We’ll have a brand-new pair for you tomorrow afternoon,” the singsong receptionist said. Two lenses cut to the right thickness and Edgar would get the world back.
His hands would not still. He needed to move around.
Edgar took out the almost forty watches in the case on the dresser beneath which Fern’s note had been tucked. They were gifts from his father. Time had always felt as if it was collecting against him, but now it seemed like the only true treasure.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 26
