Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s all bullshit. The entire thing is bullshit.”

He kissed her on the forehead, the second most important kiss of his life and both in the same night. But she would not relinquish her worldly possessions and join the movement to unionize the workers. She was not going to rage against private property or call for socialized medicine. By morning, by the time the Christmas sun rose over the pale pink bricks of their home, Mary had made a different kind of upending.

There was French toast on the table and Edgar and Hugh each had an envelope on his plate. They sat down, poured orange juice. “Open them,” Mary said. “Those are your presents from me.”

Hugh went first. In his envelope was a hand-drawn map of an island with little palm trees and arrows pointing to various features including a mermaid lagoon and a harbor. “We still have to work out the details,” Mary said.

“A map?” he asked.

“It’s an island. It’s in the Caribbean. I’m buying it for you. For Christmas.” Mary’s voice was flash-bright.

“This is not real.”

“I don’t care anymore,” she said. “I don’t care what all these people think. We have so much money. We should be having fun. From now on, fun.”

Hugh could not get to his wife fast enough. He picked her up in his arms and kissed her hard on the neck. “What else will we buy?” he asked.

“Cars,” she said. “Boats. A plane. We can go anywhere we want.”

“An island?” Edgar was disgusted. “Have you thought about the people who already live there?”

But no one was listening to him. His parents were kissing in a way he had never seen them kiss. In a way that made him feel extra, unwanted, in the way. Quietly he opened his own envelope. In it was a piece of paper that read Ticket at the top. Below it said: Your Freedom. Go be a communist. Travel to Africa. Learn to play the flute. No questions asked.

“What is this?” Edgar asked.

Mary broke from her embrace, her face pink and full. “When you’re ready, you can come back and earn a living with us. I’ll put enough in your account to hold you and Fern for a few years. You don’t have to keep the money if you don’t want to. Give it to the natives. Or you can keep it but believe it’s evil. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

“What if I don’t come back?”

“You’ll come back. You’ll see.”

The room sounded different. The whole house. They ate too much for breakfast and too much for lunch too. It was a good day to be a family, freedom sudden as a drug in their veins. They walked outside and admired the dry, solemn tendrils of a weeping willow and the steady green of a pine.

“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” Hugh said. “Tomorrow, we shop.”

“You know I really disagree with what you’re about to do,” Edgar said.

“I know you do, sweetheart. And we think your ideas are nonsense.”

None of them could remember having been happier.

FRESH SCHOOL SUPPLIES were a small consolation for Cricket, but neither of her brothers was comforted by a bouquet of sharp pencils. On the last day of summer, the lurk of school at their doorstep, Cricket and the boys put their bathing suits on and spread towels all over the yard. The Boston heat was a blanket over everything. They brought magazines outside. Cricket had her first beauty magazine, found on the beach on the island. Everything she had not known to worry about yet was contained within — pimples and periods and hand-holding and a flatter tummy and shaving and dancing with boys. Her body was still little-girl and would be for several years — she was nine — but she could feel the presence of that cliff in the distance. The twins at six were still deep in childhood’s safe hold.

She studied the shapes of the teenagers in the pages and the spread of five girls in bikinis. How could she ever make that transformation? The magazine was not a map or a comfort — only a catalogue of concerns. When she opened it each time it was with anticipation, but by the time she closed it the only feeling left was shame.

The twins dog-eared a catalogue of baseball cards with nothing but delight and hope in their voices. “The Hank Aaron in pristine condition is worth like eighty dollars,” Will said. “Just think what we could buy. Pogo sticks, new bikes, a model ship.” James looked at Cricket’s page, which was a color wheel used to decide one’s clothing palette. He didn’t get it. Being a girl seemed like a choice Cricket could make or unmake. Why not always build and dig and explode and collect? Cricket pulled her long braid around and studied the color of her hair in the sun. It was dirty blond but in the light there was red. She looked at the color wheel. She was in the blues and greys, never the greens or reds.

The boys suggested they play in the hose, but Cricket shushed them. “We don’t need the hose. We’re pretending we’re at the beach.”

“But,” they said.

“Like it or lump it,” she told them, repeating her mother. When the twins went to the yard’s edge to pluck ladybugs from the tiger lilies, Cricket told them to watch out for jellyfish. The boys dug up dirt and tried to build a sandcastle. It was full of threads of roots and earthworms. They hung towels from the laundry line and pretended they were the sails of a ship with which to tack and jibe against the wind. Eventually they all fell asleep in the sun and their backs turned pink, which they secretly loved. That night, in the bathroom, they would brush and wash and then sit on the floor, pressing a finger into the burn of a shoulder to watch the white print turn red. They would take their sunburns to school with them, and their skin would hurt under the blue and white uniforms. At least there was that, at least there was proof that they had once been free.

—

Since they had come home from the island the day before, Edgar had not wanted to look Fern in the eye. He had gone out early and come back late. Then he had called from his writing studio to tell Fern that he had made a dinner date for them with another couple. “A double date?” she had asked, and it sounded like high school.

“Sort of,” he had said. “Wear something nice.” He had told her he would pick her up at seven o’clock.

She dressed and redressed: wide-leg red pants and matching vest, a long daisy-print dress, a jumpsuit she had never figured out how to wear and the pale blue dress, now so old-fashioned-looking, she had been wearing when she first danced with her husband when she was seventeen. She remembered the feeling of floating inside her own body. She had been the sea and the swimmer both, and the water was saltsoft and in it she was buoyant.

At Fern’s feet, the dog searched around for anything dropped to eat. She bent her front paws and muzzled under the dresser.

“Stupid dog,” Fern said, “there’s nothing for you here.” Fern felt unfastened. She was getting dressed for a man who had suddenly taken the place of her husband and all her resources were scarce. Everything around her — the house, the furniture, the manner of life — was poised to evaporate. She was a soft body trying to prepare herself for the unknowable future.

Fern looked out the window at her brood, three bathing-suit nappers in the yard. She could almost feel their sunwarm skin on her palm. The sweat on their scalps. Fern could see Cricket’s magazine, could almost hear the clink of a lock as her girl entered the room of self-doubt. She wished hard that there was a world in which Cricket would not have to pass through this stage, or ever enter the next.

Fern knew that the children would stumble in soon, slow and happy, looking for something to eat. She should scold them for being uncareful about the sun, but the school year would start in the morning and that seemed like punishment enough.