Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

—

The house was a tall Victorian, dinner was pork chops, conversation was weather, American apathy and political unrest in Guatemala where Glory and John Jefferson had recently been. Why were they in this particular house with this particular couple? Fern wondered. Nothing good came of a dinner party, she thought. She wanted to be alone with her husband, to talk about Chicago and money and all the years they had ahead. Edgar was too happy to be here. Manic. The hostess had the big, frilled hair that everyone wanted and her eyelashes were long and she wore, to great effect, a jumpsuit like the one Fern had been unable to figure out. Fern asked after the washroom and John Jefferson walked her there, down a hallway that seemed very long. Instead of gesturing to the end and letting her make the journey alone, he was behind her the whole way.

“We redid this place when we bought,” he said. “You should have seen the roof. You should have seen the foundation.”

“It looks nice now,” Fern said, wishing for a light switch. The walls were papered in avocado green. The runner was patterned with oversize orange and red flowers.

“ You look nice,” he said.

Finally, a door.

“Here we are,” John said, proud. He turned the knob, flipped the light on, smelled the room. “Clean and fresh.” He smiled.

“Thank you, John. Thanks. All right.”

The man waited for Fern to enter and then he closed the door for her. She listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, but heard none. He could not possibly be waiting for her. Everything was orange — the tile, the sink, the toilet — except the towels, which were white with rainbows arcing across their corners. Fern used up time looking in the mirror. Her hair was old-fashioned, too neat. The red dress was unconvincing on her. There was a photograph on the wall of Glory wearing a wreath of flowers and standing between two bare-chested Polynesian women.

Fern pulled up her dress but could not pee.

She went to the door, put her ear against the cool wood and listened for John’s breathing. Maybe he was pressed there too, trying to find her sounds in the small room.

Fern flushed for no reason. Washed her hands. She did not have the shopgirl’s red lipstick, but she applied a coat of the old pink that was always in the bottom of her purse.

John was halfway down the hall, holding a framed photograph of his sister as a baby. “God,” he said, “I remember exactly what she felt like in my arms at this age.” He hung it back up, then, with his big, warm fingers, he straightened Fern’s dress strap. “Where would you like to go?”

“I was going to finish my dinner,” she said.

“Well,” John said. “I thought… I was told. You and I were supposed to… I thought that was the idea. Glory told me. Your dress,” he said gesturing at the evidence. He looked distraught. Not threatening but punctured.

“Are you crying?” Fern asked. John could not seem to find a place to put his hands. Fern felt sorry for him and sorry for herself but was afraid to risk touching him. She went back to the bathroom and got a length of toilet paper, which she brought to John. She put one finger on his shoulder, the smallest touch she could think of, while he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He found his cigarettes in his back pocket and lit one.

“I’m so embarrassed,” he said.

“It’s already forgotten. Come on,” she told him. The rest of the house began to lend its light.

What she saw was one body and not two, at first. It was just Edgar’s back until it was not anymore, until Glory’s hands were also there, wrapped around him. Ten red gashes of fingernail polish. “Oh,” she said out loud, and the attempted kiss in the hall made a different kind of sense. He’s trying to give me away , she thought.

Fern knew that her husband had felt worried and helpless. She had been trying to be good enough to carry him through — his patient wife, loving him in the circumstances. Now she understood that she was stupid, that he was lost, that they were, for the first time, not each other’s immediate salve. Edgar and Glory Jefferson looked familiar with one another and Fern watched because she had to. Fern had wondered what Edgar would do to survive this part of life, to survive his family’s needs, now unmet. The answer was here in a stranger’s dining room, between soup and entrée, the centerpiece an autumnal bouquet surrounded by small pumpkins, the smell of scarred pig flesh in the air. Fern had never seen her husband kiss before. He moved jerkily. From behind, he looked like a bird, pecking at garbage in the grass.

The woman was liquid in his arms. Slipping and grabbing and looking very warmed up. Fern could practically hear the race their heartbeats were in.

“Sweetheart,” John said. He stubbed his cigarette out in a red ashtray already half full of butts.

His wife turned around. She looked frustrated more than sorry, like she had been woken up before she needed to be. “I thought you’d gone,” she said.

“Fern,” Edgar said. He inspected his wife for signs of rumple or muss. He looked deeply sad.

“We’re all done,” Fern told them. “We’re all finished.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Jefferson smiled. “Of course.” Her husband received the volley of contempt she tossed his way: ten or fifteen years of marriage, two or three minutes each time, and then he was ready for something sweet and sleep.

Edgar came over to his wife and squeezed her hand and she could not tell if it was with sorrow or pride or terror or regret. He leaned towards her and he smelled tinny with spit. She jerked away. “We are not even,” she said.

“Well, then, I expect you’re hungry,” Glory said to the group. “Shall we have our pork chops?”

“I’ll be in the car,” Fern said. “Eat if you want, but I’ll be in the car.”

—

Edgar followed Fern out and they both got into the car and he backed out of the driveway onto the night street. Fern wanted the dress off. She wanted a door to slam and hide behind, but she did not want to drive home because that felt too much like an act of forgiveness. She told him to pull over, shut the engine. She slapped the dashboard.

“When did this start?” she shouted.

“Tonight. This is all that’s happened,” he lied.

“Was this Glory Jefferson’s bright idea?” Fern had read about swingers and key parties and some magazine article was always proclaiming the end of monogamy, but none of it had seemed real or possible in her world.

Edgar felt so much and yet none of it was enough. “I don’t want to retract my novel,” he said, “and I don’t fucking want to be a steel man.”

“Are you going to live on her money instead?”

“My life walked out on me and then she showed up. I guess I just wanted to look away.” He realized that in the fog of his head it seemed almost as if the question of what they were willing to sell in order to survive — Edgar or everything else — could be overpowered with the noise of a shared affair. When Glory had called him in the morning and made the invitation, she had sounded so clear-headed, so sure that what Edgar had done in column A could be easily balanced by what Fern could do in column B. She had said, “If everyone’s kissing then kissing’s not a problem.”

“I don’t know what to do. I do not know. I do not.” She was yelling by the end.

They sat there on the side of the road, houses dinner-lit, silent beyond silent. Edgar polished his glasses and put them back on, blinked at the seen world.

Edgar thought of the first thing he had had published, an excerpt from his novel in a glossy magazine. Fern, proud, relieved, had gone to the store and bought every celebratory food she could find: caviar, cake, champagne, lobster, but when she had come home Edgar had said, “What I really want is to go out for pizza.” She might have been hurt on another day, felt stupid because she should have known, but that day happiness could not be undone. Fern had put the expensives in the refrigerator, scrubbed the children’s yard-scummy cheeks and said, “Pizza it is.” The adults had drunk beer and the kids had sipped Shirley Temples and then they all had ice cream dessert. “To the author,” they had said, clinking. There had been other celebrations to come but this one had been the purest. Edgar had worked at his book for years and he had finally been able to call himself a writer. It had felt like coloring in the last years of his life — yes, those were real. Yes, it had counted.