Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  He looked at the jewelry his parents had sent Fern. Some of the pieces had never been worn: a diamond brooch in the shape of a stag, a pair of emerald earrings that would have dusted her shoulders.

  Edgar leaned into his wife’s closet and remembered only a few of the clothes. He should have paid closer attention. He found the blue dress she had worn when they first danced and again on the night he had tried to give Fern away to John Jefferson. He put his face into it. The silk was stiff and almost cold. He remembered the feel of her body inside and the promise of it. That was a day to keep, exactly as it had been lived then.

  He looked for the red dress he had bought for her and when he could not find it he guessed that Fern had already thrown it away, which was what he wanted to do too.

  Here was the accumulation of years and things. The needlepoint cover his grandmother had made for the rocking chair with a picture of a sailboat and his name. The good table linens he and Fern never ever used because they were too nice.

  Edgar, his fingers shaking, picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed his parents. No one answered. What he needed to say was not meant to be left on a machine, but he was half grateful for the gift of a blank tape instead of a person and he told himself that he had no idea where they were or how long it would be before they came home. “Mom,” he said, “Dad.” The air was static. “I’m ready to take over the business. I don’t know if you’ll still want me. Thank you for everything.” He waited for an answer he knew was not coming. “I hope you’re having fun wherever you are.” There was more to say: that he still wanted his children to be seen for who they were instead of what they had, that he wanted them to know what it felt like to earn their own way, that he was glad he had written the novel he had, that he was sorry it would go unread. But Edgar could say those things later. He had time now. The click of the phone in the cradle marked the end of years of waiting to make this decision. It was not the ending he had imagined it would be.

  The telephone rang, the exact ring it had always rung. It would be his father full of congratulations.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello?”

  “Fern?”

  She had the same question he did.

  “Ferny,” he said. “Where are you? I love you. I miss you and I love you. I think the children have been living in the backyard.” He sounded relieved. He sounded like another version of himself.

  “Did you say the children have been living in the backyard?”

  “I’m sorry I left,” he said. “I wish I had never left.”

  “But you didn’t leave. I left.” There was no answer. “You left too. Oh my God.”

  “I called the school and they’re all there. There’s a teepee in the backyard and a lot of bean cans. I think they are all right. I went sailing. I was sailing to Bermuda but now I’m home. I lost my glasses. You were right about everything.”

  Too many things required an explanation. “I’m in California with a man, but I don’t love him and I never did.”

  “Are you leaving me?”

  She imagined their life disassembled. No wealth, the remaining family disowning them when the novel was published. Again, she imagined standing on the curb surrounded by belongings, but this time Edgar was with her and the children. They would get an apartment or a small house. They would have less of everything, but they would need less too.

  “I’m ready to take over the company,” he said.

  “What about your book?” she asked.

  “It’s my job to support you.”

  “It’s your job to love me.”

  When she hung up the phone, Fern thought of her mother’s decision to give half the pills to her father. Fern had always assumed this was done because her mother did not think Paul could make it alone. But maybe it had simply been impossible to imagine crossing whatever it was she was about to cross without her person.

  —

  When Fern met Mac, he had eaten his eggs and bacon and ordered a second round of toast. He said, “I got you a muffin, and look.” A piece of cream pie was sitting on the table, leaning slightly to one side. “No charge,” he said. He was smiling.

  Five days ago already felt ancient. The miles they had covered made the days seem bigger. At home, a loop between the house, school and the grocery store took a whole day. Fern and the giant had crossed mountain ranges, threaded mesas, traced a river bend for bend.

  “I need to go home. Edgar tried to sail to Bermuda. My children were orphaned.”

  The vinyl of the seat was red, and it stuck to Fern’s thighs. She peeled a leg up and sat on her hand. The waitress freshened Mac’s coffee cup, and recommended the ham to Fern. She was wearing a white jumpsuit under her apron and she had redrawn her eyebrows with black pencil. The pot of black coffee was the same shape as her hair. “It’s good today. Sometimes it isn’t, but today it’s good ham.” Fern did not want to be hungry. She hated to need anything on a day like this, hated to be reminded of her mortal skin and bones, the nonnegotiables.

  “Just some cereal with milk,” she said.

  “I don’t recommend that today,” the waitress said. “It’s not what I’m recommending.” She patted the puff of hair on her forehead that she probably thought of as bangs.

  “Then I guess I’ll have the ham. And toast, if you think the toast today is all right.”

  There was brewing disaster in the grey of the waitress’s eyes. A bad storm, high winds. There was a crease in her fake eyebrows. “Toast is toast.”

  Mac said, “Are the kids okay?”

  “They must have been terrified. Their family splintered and they were all that was left.”

  The ham arrived, a fat pink slap. Fern asked the waitress for an ashtray. She buttered the toast, which was already soaked in the stuff, and she spread strawberry jam on it. She cut the ham into the shape of a heart, putting the scraps on the table. It was foamy under her knife, lost water as she cut. And this was a good ham day.

  Fern had stood below maple trees while James climbed the branches, waiting to catch him; she had held Cricket’s cold-puckered body in the ocean and tried not to imagine her going under and being lost to a wave; she had watched Will sled down a street and hit the tree at the bottom, had run to him sure that she would find a pool of blood. Every tenth word out of her mouth for nine years had been one of caution. It was as if she had not completely let her breath out since Cricket was born. And yet they had survived on their own for five days. They had gotten themselves to school. They had eaten. Cricket, amazing and brave Cricket, Fern thought. Maybe she did not need to be so afraid. Maybe none of them did.

  Mac carved the last imperfection from her ham heart. “There,” he said, trying to cheer her. “A masterpiece.”

  —

  A few hours away waited a valley of palms up against a mountain range, where it was warm all year and everyone wore white shorts and stayed outside and let their skin turn brown. Even in old age people moved to this valley to get too much sun. The giant’s son was there and so was the airport from which Fern could fly home.

  Mac worried that his boy would be leather-skinned and reptilian, no good for snow. He was worried that the boy would become pallid and malnourished if he could not eat citrus picked directly from trees in the yard, fragrant and intoxicating with their blossoms.

  Fern and Mac drove, and the desert was drier and drier still. The earth felt like a bone, brittle, tired out. What grew was scrabble and cactus. Even the mountains were brown.

  “It’s not a smart plan,” Mac said. There must have been bugs in the air because there were yellow splashes on the windshield.

  “What’s not?”

  “I’m nobody’s father.”

  Fern knew this feeling. The disbelonging, the nonmatch. Except that she was sure the giant would be ever tender and patient. He and the boy would talk the whole drive home, tho
se long black stripes through the country, and all the pie. They would swim in the hotel pools and sit outside after, their skin chlorinated and warming back up. They would stop to see the snakepits and dinosaur skeletons, admire the neon signs, the roadside of their great country. The hours would be enough to become familiar to one another. What they each liked to eat. What they did to get ready for bed. Behaviors while dreaming.

  Fern was sure that by the time they hit colder weather, they would be related. Maybe not father and son yet, but family.

  She said, “There is every kind of father.”

  There were actual tumbleweeds, tumbling. As if the West had been ordered up and delivered.

  They passed the Wigwam Motel, six concrete teepees scattered along the highway. There was a neon sign in the shape of a woman in a bathing cap, diving.

  “We should stop for gas,” Mac said. Fern knew he was stalling, but she also understood why. On every day after this one, he would have to reconquer a small heart. He would have to persuade him that algebra was important, that the essay deserved writing. Friends would need to be made, played with, dropped back off at their better houses.

  With sudden breathlessness, Mac said, “Do you think she warned him?”

  Fern knew what he was asking, but she pretended she did not.

  “Does he know what I look like?”

  She wanted to tell him that it would not matter. That the boy would not notice, used to being smaller than everyone, anyway. It could be true. But she remembered her children once. “Mother, we saw a midget. Not just a small man but a real midget.” They crouched low to demonstrate the size. Children knew how to do certain things without having been taught. Climbing. Meanness.

  “He was absolutely tiny,” the one had said.

  “Tinier than tiny,” added the other.

  “And his voice was strange.”

  In the car Fern said to Mac, “Your son is going to think you are marvelous.”

  —

  They stopped at the service station and Fern went inside to pay. There was a thin old woman at the register, her hair long and black with grey strands. Maybe she was Indian. Maybe not. Fern only knew what cartoon Indians looked like. On the rack next to the counter was a tray of arrowheads carved from obsidian. They looked like the one Cricket had found on their dig on the island. Fern thought of her children in the teepee in the backyard of their Cambridge house. Resourceful little creatures. She did not know the story yet, but she was proud of them. She bought three arrowheads and put them in her pocket.

  “You seen the dinosaur bones?” the woman with the long hair asked.

  “No,” said Fern.

  “They’re real old. You ought to go. White people always like to see real living Indians and real dead dinosaur bones.”

  Fern reported the detour to Mac and they took the dirt roads like the woman told them to. Dust kicked up. It looked like they were headed into nowhere and they were. Then, a hand-painted sign on plywood: Dinosaur Fossil, 1.2 Miles.

  In the bush-scrub, there was a hill and as they approached they saw a near-perfect skeleton. As if the great animal had only recently lain down there for a rest. Fern had seen them in museums, these bones, and understood that such creatures had existed, but it was different to see it here in the dirt and bush, unmined. She knelt down at the skull and carefully brushed sand off the snout. The wide openness, the amount of space, made more sense when populated with huge animals.

  “Plesiosaur,” Mac said. “You can tell because of the little fin bones.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was a five-year-old boy and a giant. All I thought about for years was dinosaurs.”

  “Did you say fins?” She looked at the endless dry land. They both pictured water covering the desert, land as ocean floor, mountains as islands. The entire world, utterly changed.

  There were flies and ants and a stink bug. A crow landed, pecked, took off. “It’s nice to feel small for once,” the giant said.

  For Fern it was good to kneel in the dirt, her hands uncovering something.

  She said, “Can I tell you a secret? I took a figure drawing class last year. I didn’t tell anyone because Edgar had been nagging me to go back to school and it felt like he was as disappointed in me as my mother had been. I didn’t want him to win.”

  “What was it like?”

  “The first day of figure drawing the teacher said, ‘Leave if you are afraid of nudity.’ No one had left. At the second meeting there had been four fewer people in the room. The teacher had said, ‘Good, I’m glad they left. There’s no room in art for fear.’”

  One day, Fern said, the students had walked into the room and there was a black man on the platform. He was tall and muscular and very dark, his hair short and neat. Fern had been taken aback by her own discomfort. Most of the women kept their eyes locked on their papers. “At one point the man looked right at me and we just stared at each other for maybe three seconds. A hundred years ago there were plenty of times when a black man stood naked in front of a room of dressed whites because he was for sale. People in my family were in those rooms. I didn’t deserve to look at this man, but he did deserve to be seen.”

  “There are some things that can’t be righted,” Mac said. “It’s good to name them.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m sort of relieved that that money is gone. We’ll find a better way to earn our living.” There were so many questions for her at home—money, love, lies, three children who had been abandoned for nearly a week. She looked out at the desert where there was so much room in which to get lost. She wanted something to press up against. She wanted her own confines.

  “What about the steel company?”

  “No.” It had been hanging in the back of her mind, the image of Edgar calling his editor to say that he had to retract the book. The image of him at a huge oval table in the teetering tip of a skyscraper and a dozen investors who wanted to know how he had cut production costs. “I think I’d rather live with nothing.” She could have used another shirt and pants, but otherwise what she had in her suitcase was sufficient. She wanted her people and she wanted water and wind. Enough—just enough.

  Fern took the giant’s hand.

  “I like you,” she said.

  He did not squeeze her hand, but he let it sit there in his big palm, salt-wet on this hot day. He said, “We came a long way.”

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

  He smiled his big smile. “I knew you were trouble from the moment I married you.” He looked down at her. “I like you too, Fern. I think you’re going to have a really good life. You are not only a rich housewife.”

  “Not anymore. I’ll need to get a job.” She was joking but she was also serious.

  “Life is effortful,” said Mac. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”

  Fern thought of hiding in the tall grass outside her mother’s prairie studio to watch her work. Evelyn was a different woman with clay than she was with people—it was as if the rest of her body was only there to support the existence of her hands. She thought of Edgar, up late all those years at the typewriter, his fingers banging out a reason for his being. She thought of Ben in the earth, the misunderstood parts long since rotted away. So many bones in the ground.

  This dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.

  —

  Fern walked with Mac up to the house where the boy lived because it was a nice thing to do and she could not think of the giant standing at the door alone, his too-big finger finding the bell. She could not think of him waiting alone for someone to let him in.

  The house was split-level, brown on the outside, gravel instead of grass. A group of tall green-brown cacti kept watch.
There were bird holes—even in those spiny stalks, a home.

  A woman opened the door, short and blond and overtan. She said, “It’s my old man,” and laughed hard. She punched him in the stomach, which was nearly eye-level and Fern thought of them as husband and wife, trying to consummate. She would have been lost in it all. Those rigid, manic little arms, looking for purchase on his hills. Poor girl. Poor boy.

  “Lovely home,” Fern said. It was not. There was almost no furniture and the windows were covered in heavy curtains. The organ-pink carpet could not possibly have been an intentional color. This was the kind of house you holed up in after the murder, the body buried in some dry wash nearby.

  “I have cold coffee or I have gin,” the lady said.

  “Just some water for me,” Fern said.

  “No water. Sorry.”

  The air conditioner was on so high Fern could feel her pores closing to keep the heat in. Mac rubbed his arms.

  “Nothing then?” Claire asked.

  They sat on the couch and Mac asked after her months and years. She answered him like a daughter swatting away her father’s concerns. “Doing great! I love living here! It’s warm all year! We have a pool! Desert people are nicer than city people! My guy’s name is Dale and he’s a real sweetheart!”

  “And the boy?” he asked finally, after he had waited long enough for her to bring him up.

  “He’s fine,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s lost some of the weight.”

  From a cracked door down the hall, Fern caught sight of a pair of eyes high off the ground.

  “I’m parched,” Claire said. “Neither of you wants any coffee at all? It’s nice and cold. I made it up this morning.”

  Fern wanted to ask for a blanket or a scarf instead. Claire left the room and she nudged Mac, motioned to the hallway and the cracked door.

  Mac, without a pause, knelt on the floor like someone trying to befriend a cat. He put his hands out towards the eyes, peering. He scooted closer, his palms up. “Hey there,” he loud-whispered. “Hello, hello.”