Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The dog fell asleep for a moment. She twitched in a dream almost immediately. Fern had been trained to distrust a faulty body. She had been kept at a distance from her grandparents the moment they showed their age, as if it was contagious. And when Evelyn had started to shake slightly — for each intended movement, dozens of tiny stowaway movements jangled in her body — she had begun to decline the invitations to parties as a courtesy to the other guests whose dinners she imagined her mortal body would ruin. She was fifty-eight. Not old, not sick. But her mother’s body had betrayed her, and she was sure that no one wanted a decrepit woman for a wife or a friend. And then Evelyn had called two years before, so happy, to report that her doctor had suggested she have pills that would end her life before her body gave way.

“Your doctor suggested this?” Fern had asked.

“This is good news, Fern. I wanted to tell you so that you knew it was a possibility for you too, down the line.”

“You aren’t going to do it, though,” Fern had said.

“When it’s time. It’s not suicide if it’s time.”

Her mother had had the pills for a year before Fern had received the call from her parents’ maid saying that both mother and father were tucked in bed and neither of them was alive. “Father too,” Fern said, coming to understand.

The maid had been hysterical. She thought it must either have been a divine act or a murder, but Fern knew that it was a little bit of both: her mother’s attempt to save them both with a benevolent boost into a lighter kingdom, and a killing. These deaths had taken place six months ago, at the coldest point in winter yet only weeks before crocuses split the earth. Fern remembered standing at the phone that day, the house still morning-cold, and saying out loud to the maid on the other end of the line, “I am an orphan.”

Today Fern understood her mother’s distrust of her own body better — she felt like the shell-less hermit crab Cricket had brought to her on the beach during the summer, the little pink spiral of a creature in the girl’s hand, the gulls already circling. She was young still but without the protection of wealth, she felt exposed, perched. The dog looked up with milky, cataract eyes and seemed not to recognize her own life. Maggie had shown up on their doorstep three years before and they did not know how old she was. Older than they thought, maybe. To Fern she looked like an animal that was about to fall apart.

Here Fern was, a small person in a big house, quite alone. There were decades of need ahead of her and three children and she was just a woman with no money. Edgar could save them or he could let them starve — she did not get to decide. The dog looked up, pan-eyed. There were grey patches in her fur and her back paws twitched under her efforts. She seemed very old suddenly, helpless and sad, and Fern was a woman with nothing extra. Fern checked her watch to see that she had time for an errand before the dinner. Still wearing the first-date dress, she scooped the animal up into her arms and carried her out of the room, down the stairs, through the hall, out the front door and down the steps and into the brown station wagon. Maggie whined all the way to the vet.

In the orange-walled office smelling of animal pee, Fern put Maggie up on the stainless table. She had dinner-party makeup on and wished for a way to hide. Her hands in the animal’s fur were disorganized. She could see that the vet was as worried about the woman as the dog. “I think she’s suffering. Is she suffering?” Fern said.

The vet listened to the dog’s heart and felt her soft belly. He shined a light into her eyes and ears. “She’s definitely aging,” he said. “Everyone has a different tolerance for decline.” He had bread crumbs in his thick blond mustache — he was not the person to ask about saving oneself from the small humiliations.

“Is it awful for her? Look at her. Maybe it would be kinder to let her go.” Fern fought the need to cry. It seemed terribly dangerous to be a living creature, a body in need of nourishment and love for the duration of its existence.

“She’s slowing down. Tired. Possibly sore in the joints. She probably has more time, though, if you aren’t ready to let her go.” Maggie looked confused and sad to Fern. Or maybe it was only her own reflection in the animal’s eyes.

“Will you keep her overnight for observation? I don’t know what to do.”

The vet agreed to watch the animal for twenty-four hours and had Fern fill out the intake forms. Maggie was crated in the back with the barkers and whiners and sleepers and Fern bent down to reassure her. “Let’s just see what happens, okay?” she said, touching the dog’s wet nose through the grate. “You’re a good dog. A good girl. A sweet and good girl.”

On the way home, the car was silent. The city slipped by. Fern drove along the Charles where a dozen white triangles of sails tried to find wind. Fern tried to believe in generosity. She tried to believe in reprieve.

—

Fern stood on the curb feeling too old to stand on curbs. Edgar finally pulled up from his day in his dark green sports car and she straightened up to greet him. She put her thumb up but he did not smile at the joke.

“You can’t wear that,” he said. Discomfort ticked in his eyes.

“I couldn’t decide.” She already regretted the reminder of their beginning. Their young selves joined them in the car but they were not entirely welcome. Too much was not the same. It seemed unfair, to love that hard with your heartmuscle still so wet and new.

They had a little time, Edgar said, patting her knee. The sound of their takeoff rattled up Fern’s spine to her brainstem. She put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry that my father gave everything away. I never wanted you to have to do something you hate.”

“Clearly money will find me and trap me no matter what I do,” he said. Edgar did not feel like less of a stranger than he had the past four days, to himself or to Fern.

He parked near Harvard Square where everyone was young and unpressed and lovely and encumbered with books. Inside the shop, a girl put dresses in a line. Edgar said, “Let’s see you get beautiful.” He was a different person than she was used to. He had opened his top button and deepened the part in his hair and wore his low brown boots and jeans and he hadn’t shaved in four days. He was twitchy and nervous.

Fern had to be zipped and unzipped every time so that even the unflattering dresses were seen by the girl. “No, no, no,” the girl said about one. “Don’t let him see you in that.” And then, “This one does a lot for you.”

Each time Fern did the walk from the silk-draped dressing room to the center of the store where Edgar was sitting on a sofa. He gave a thumbs-up or — down. He asked her to turn around so he could see the back. Sometimes she saw in his face a jag of pleasure, sometimes she was a question he did not have the answer for.

“Just tell me which one you want me to wear,” Fern said. She did not want to keep trying, to keep being naked in front of this young maiden who tugged at the seams, trying to get them to lay flat against a too-deep curve.

“The long red one,” he said. “She’ll wear it out.” It had a plunging V, draped over her shoulders, shushed across the carpet.

After they paid and left, the shopgirl ran outside after them. She came up close to Fern and Fern thought she was about to be kissed. The girl’s breath was mintsweet; she had thought of every single manipulation of her little body. Out of her hand came a small tube, and she said, “Open your lips,” and in three sweeps, she lipsticked Fern. Top, top, bottom. “Now,” she said, “press.”