Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  Fern wanted to kneel too, to beckon, but she was no one’s mother here. She was no one’s aunt or step-. It did not seem right to promise friendship this close to the end. So she sat there in the freezing dark room and watched the giant try to make himself small, watched him shuffle across the dirty floor towards his son, his hands empty but open. She had to pace to survive the thirst for her own children.

  The boy came through the door. The mother tinked ice into a glass in the kitchen and said something about golf. The boy, seeing his father, knelt down too and, on the pink carpet, under a painting of a Jesus so pale he was nearly translucent, the two looked each other over. They did not say a word. They did not shake hands. They just looked.

  —

  The boy was hungry, frantically hungry. Sitting on the hotel bed, he ate a whole chicken and a loaf of white bread and a bag of individually wrapped chocolates. He seemed more dog, more stray, than boy. But he said his pleases and thank-yous, and his fingers were delicate, carefully working the meat off a bone without getting dirty.

  Fern and Mac sat in the pink paisley chairs by the window watching. “More?” they asked, handing him bread.

  Before they’d left, his mother had given him a packed suitcase and an extra pair of sneakers. “You can’t imagine how fast he goes through these things,” she had said. “How he does it, that’s beyond me.” She had stood on her tip-toes and flicked him on the nose with her thumb. “Honey pot,” she had said. “Don’t get any bigger.” She had opened her wallet and taken out a scroll of paper on which was written several columns of numbers. “If you want to measure him, you can,” she said to the giant. “But I guess you don’t care one way or the other. He’s not getting any smaller, so he’s yours now.” The boy had bent down low and given his mother a hug. She had been lost in his frame. “How did I raise up something like you?” she had asked. “Something so sweet.” The twang in her voice was unconvincing. She wore it like heels she did not know how to walk in.

  The boy brushed his teeth for fifteen minutes, making tiny circles over each tooth, studying himself in the mirror. From behind he looked like a man. Fern wanted him to be all right. She wanted to hug him. She wanted the son of him, and her the pretend mother. She had not meant to actually do it. She had meant to admire from the other end of the room. There she was, next thing, squeezing him hard, her head on his wingbone, no stopping now. He was softly sweated in the day’s shirt, and all the heat she had hoped for. Fern could hear the boy’s breath inside his body, inside the papery folds of his lungs, inside the rattle of bones. She could hear his heart too, gathering and sending back. It seemed fast to her.

  The boy, gentle or afraid, did not move. They stayed there, and Fern did not know how to let go.

  Mac, on the other side of the room, also waited. Everyone needed everything. The woman needed to hug the boy and imagine her brother, her sons, her daughter; the boy needed to be hugged but then to be freed. Mac would have liked someone to come up from behind and wrap her arms around him, and to mean it, beyond the dare she had made for herself, beyond the attempt at revenge. If only he could meet a huge woman, he thought. In a huge house, with a huge car, and so much land for them to drive on, and herds of only the largest animals: elephants and giraffes, the stamp of rhinoceros feet in the mud after a rain. They would put off going to town for supplies, put off relativity. You can’t be too big unless someone else is small. Mac looked at his son. He looked like he still had growing to do. He would get bigger every day with chicken and bread and pie and steak and all the things for sale in restaurants and grocery stores across the great land. They would order four meals for two people, and Mac would watch his boy eating. A match, finally. More and more a match by the day.

  There was Fern, at his son’s back, and neither one his.

  Mac said, “There’s dessert. There could be. Does anyone want pie?”

  Outside: wind, sirens.

  —

  That night, the boy slept hard in one bed and Fern and Mac, fully clothed, shared the other. They passed a cigarette back and forth. The room echoed with Matthew’s rattling breath. He hardly even shifted in his young sleep. The giant hugged Fern. There is such a thing as love in this room, he wanted to say. We are capable. Even though we feel too tired or too big or too old or too young or too quiet or too loud or too formed or too unformed.

  “What do you think will happen when you get home?” Mac whispered.

  “I don’t know. It has never been easy to be a wife or a mother or a woman or a man or a child,” she said. “But we are each other’s family.” He understood this. In the bed nearby was a stranger, but it was also a son.

  Things could go all different ways and this was one of them: two drivers, on the other side of the country about to head home. The next day, a father and son would get into the car to begin another kind of family. A wife would get on a plane and go home to the family that she belonged to.

  * * *

  MISS NOLAN TOOK CRICKET DOWN to the office where the secretary said, “Your father just called to see if you were in school. Are you getting into trouble, young lady?”

  “Is he home? Did he say if he was home?”

  “He said he had been away.”

  Cricket did not wait for more information or to explain herself or to ask for permission. She ran to the boys’ classroom and grabbed their hands and together they sprinted the ten blocks to their house. Miss Nolan did not chase them and she did not allow the secretary to call the principal. “They’re all right,” she said. “Let them go.”

  The air hurt the children’s lungs and they did not slow down.

  They found Edgar standing in the light of the refrigerator. The house was clean. It looked the way it used to before the children were alone. They fell on him like prey. He sat down on the floor and they crawled onto him and they smelled like the outdoors. He kissed them five thousand times, it felt like, and it was not nearly enough. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you all okay?”

  They said, “We buried a fawn and lived in the yard and we didn’t know if you were ever coming back and where is Mother and we’re hungry for something other than beans and we’re sorry if we did something to make you go away and is Maggie here too and we don’t want to be orphans and where have you been and please stay.”

  “I’m staying,” Edgar said. “I’m staying, I’m staying. Mother is coming home too. And the vet called and Maggie is there. Weren’t you answering the phone?”

  “We were afraid of orphanages,” Cricket said.

  “What if it had been Mother or me?”

  “Take us to get Maggie,” the boys shouted.

  “I can’t drive right now. I lost my glasses and I can’t really see.” Edgar looked at Cricket hard, and in the blur, she was herself. “Do you remember once when I sent your mother flowers and they came in a vase full of marbles that you thought were treasure and for months you always had a marble in your hand, even when you went to bed?”

  Cricket did not remember but that did not matter because someone else did. She was not the only one carrying the story of her life. That’s what she needed her parents to be, more than caregivers: keepers of the selves she had grown out of.

  “I missed you so much,” he said. “I’m sorry if it sounds stupid to say.”

  “Not stupid,” she told him.

  “We could walk to the vet if you want.”

  “We want,” the boys said.

  The children would be angry later, but now it was too good to be home and not alone. For the rest of the afternoon and evening they all moved as a clump. Edgar needed Cricket to read the labels on everything and the children needed to be close to the person whose job it was to care for them. Together they went down into the basement and found pork chops in the big freezer and together they cooked them in the pan with onion and white wine and together they steamed frozen peas and together they buttered them a
nd together they walked to pick up the dog who licked and jumped and yelped with the fevered joy they all felt and together, children, father and dog all went to sleep on Fern and Edgar’s bed, legs over legs, arms over arms, faces pressed into the soft pillows. The burden of Edgar’s family was beautiful. Heavy and beautiful.

  1976

  THE AIRPLANE TOOK A FEW HOURS to cover what had taken five days in the car. Beneath Fern passed the desert, ridges of dinosaur remains in the hillside, cows, weather. The earth looked painted—red jags of canyons rimmed with gold. An hour later the earth was covered in trees. From this high up, time too felt condensed: in those green swaths was coal, steel, money. In those green swaths her people had owned other people; black boys had been hung from the trees; her people had freed their slaves, fought for the freeing of all slaves; her people had moved north, and as privilege allowed them, the memory of what they had done receded; Fern had lived on that same soil on a base where American bodies were taught to kill Vietnamese bodies; the black boys and brown boys went to the jungle and some of the white boys did too. Her twin was down there someplace in the thick green swath, buried in a box. But that was only his bones, and by now those hardly felt true: he was here, always here. Life and love had separated Fern and Ben, but they could not be unjoined.

  The clouds had thickened beneath the plane and Fern could not see that they flew right over the sharp jut of the Chicago skyline. Above the prairie where Evelyn had failed at motherhood, a job she had never asked for, and succeeded at art, the job she was meant to do; above the porch swing where her father had rocked through the last headache of his life, through the dazzle of the aura, the beat of pain and the feeling of near weightlessness hours later when he finally opened his eyes, released; above the spot at the base of the stone angel where Ben had sat on the morning before he went away for basic training, wings blocking the wind and a view of the grass grown summer-tall; above the wooded lanes where Edgar’s parents’ house was empty after the summer season, where Mary and Hugh would return over Christmas, the whole landscape transformed by a heavy snowfall, where they would drink hot toddies and let go, for the last time, of the idea of the son they had meant to have. Fern was high above that life, those lives—would always be—and asleep by then, her head on a balled-up sweater. Outside, ice had formed on the window and the sky was white and jagged with light.

  —

  Fern stood outside her own house. From a distance it looked like a replica. A model of a gracious family home on a nighttime street, the light from within unnaturally warm. Figures inside. A man, sitting at the table, and his children moving around him, bringing dishes. There was no wife in the scene yet. A wife could be upstairs with a headache. Maybe her husband would go to her after he ate, bring her a plate on a tray, a folded napkin, a fork and knife and a glass of water. Maybe he would sit with her while she ate, rub her feet, keep his voice low. A wife could be out for the evening with a friend taking Italian lessons and drinking wine after, pretending to be in Tuscany, in a sundress, in summer. A wife could be in the kitchen taking a pie out of the oven. A wife could be at school, studying the particulars of a dinosaur knuckle. A wife could be at work.

  Fern stood on the street. She smoked two cigarettes in a row and then crushed the rest of the pack under foot and put it back in her bag. With her she carried a suitcase within which were pieces of clothing that belonged to the family inside. They were ironed and neatly folded. She also had her own roadworn clothes, dirty and familiar and full of the big country’s dust and grit. Plains dirt and swamp water, desert. She was whole, which she had not understood before. She wanted those others in her arms—when they were it would not be completion but addition. Each of them entire.

  Fern waited to go inside. It was such a beautiful family and she wanted to hold the picture still.

  The man stood up from the table after a while, and he was unsteady. The eldest child went to him, gave him her wrist to hold and walked him through the house. Though he was being led, this man did not look lost—maybe he never was.

  —

  Fern and Edgar, awake late that night, would begin to sort through their things to see what they could sell for money. Fern would walk him through the house, describing the offerings. “What about the oak bookshelf? It’s the one piece of furniture we kept from Tennessee.” They went to the kitchen. “I think your mother gave us this crystal bowl. We’ve never used it. Here is the cutting board with our wedding date on it, and the candlesticks. These ivory-handled scissors—careful, here is the safe end—belonged to someone in one of our families, but I don’t remember who.” Edgar could see if he held the objects close enough. In doing so, he looked ancient.

  In the yellow kitchen light, she handed him the tiny silver spoon his parents had sent when Cricket was a baby. Edgar pressed his thumb into the cool curve. He remembered that little mouth mashing at a banana, taking one more step towards humanness. On the handle was a small ruby. James’s spoon had a sapphire and Will’s an emerald. Edgar had hated these gifts for their grotesque indulgence: Shouldn’t the babies have been treasure enough?

  “I still think my parents were wrong about the objects, the things. But they were right about time. They were right about pleasure. We should go to the Caribbean with them. Before we have to sell the summerhouse we should stay for the year even if we never leave the bedroom with the woodstove in it.”

  Fern thought of their own big country, the way her pulse had changed the moment she was outside the range of home. “Are you afraid of losing your parents when your book comes out?”

  He was quiet for a long time. “It might not be worth it to publish the book,” he said. He was afraid that Fern would be angry—all those years she had taken care of their life so that he could write his novel. “They are my parents.”

  “You spent so long.” It was the last thing she expected him to give up.

  “There are more stories,” he said. “There is other work to do.”

  He opened a drawer and put his hand inside tentatively, unsure what it contained. It was full of collars. Together, they remembered each one. Rosie and Rufus, both hit by cars; Marty, given away when he could not be housebroken; Lucy, sweet, droop-eyed Lucy, the only one to get old before she died; Tex, Bessie, Flower.

  “Maggie did not get lost,” he said, offering her a chance to explain.

  Fern told him that she had thought Maggie had been miserable, aged. “Bad hips, bad eyes. I wanted to save her from that.”

  “Bad eyes,” he repeated.

  Edgar looked older too. His hair had the first grey in it and his eyebrows were longer. “Can I do something?” Fern asked.

  Edgar expected to feel her lips on his. He waited for it. His breath changed. They would kiss eventually, but she did not feel ready to give it yet. Instead, she put her hand on his cheek and said, “Careful. Don’t move.” She took something out of the drawer and he heard the high whine of a pair of small scissors, closing over his eyebrow. She blew on his forehead to clear the trimmed hairs and did the other side.

  “I thought I could solve everything difficult by loving you,” Fern said.

  “I thought I could solve everything difficult by trying to understand it.” They were both half right.

  From the back of her closet, Fern produced the small box in which she kept the things she had always been most afraid to lose: locks of her children’s hair, her brother’s last note to her, a photo of her and Edgar on the night they had first danced. He touched them. That was all she wanted from him—to take what mattered to her into his hands.

  The things that Edgar wanted to keep, Fern taped a note to. Edgar, the notes said. All over the house, his name. The bookshelf was Edgar, the glass vase—Fern was surprised by the things he cared about, by the resting places for his nostalgia. The bedside table was Edgar, the coatrack, the crystal bowl, two old milk-crates that they had stored magazines in. The collars.

 
“We can throw them away,” Fern said.

  “You don’t want them?”

  Fern did not. It was safe to be less loveable now. “The animals are for the children. You all are the ones I’m here to take care of. And myself.”

  She took a few steps away from him, let him stand there alone in the house in which they had lived, one of the many attempts they had made at their marriage. She watched her husband, her love, nearly sightless. He looked like a headless flower, just a stem. She forgave him and did not yet. She was more his and less than she had been. Ahead of them were years of pulling closer and years of pushing away and years of pulling closer again. The children would grow up and maybe they would talk every day or maybe years would pass between calls. Will and James would become two men and lead two lives and yet they would always be twins. That was what it was to love someone across the duration, for the entirety.

  “Fern?” Edgar asked. She had backed far enough away that he couldn’t see her.

  She did not answer him right away. She went to the light switch and flicked it off so that the two of them were standing in the same darkness. She let him ask the question again, until she could tell that it hurt him to say her name, so badly did he want her on the other end of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My boundless, heartswollen, jumping-up-and-down thanks to:

  My teachers, who are never not with me when I write: Michelle Latiolais, Ron Carlson, Geoffrey Wolff, Christine Schutt, Brad Watson, Amy Gerstler, Doug Anderson and Jackie Levering-Sullivan.

  My editor, Sarah McGrath, whose insights opened this novel up. Thank you for taking such ridiculously good care of my work.

  PJ Mark, who is always exactly the person I want on the other end of a draft (and a question and a joke and an idea, etc., etc.) and to Marya Spence for smarts and welcome.