Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Fern now sat beside him, willing to erase everything. She said as much.

“At the risk of sending you into her arms, you are not welcome at our house tonight.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Walk to a hotel. I don’t know. That is your problem to solve.”

—

Fern stepped into the house and there were the children, mounded up on the floor like left laundry, asleep. The children always fought sleep with all their strength but once they were down they went so deep that they could remain unconscious through hurricanes, fights.

“Where is the sitter?” Fern asked, trying to rouse them. “Sweethearts? Wake up and go to bed.” She knelt beside her bunch, began to untangle them. There were so many arms and legs. The bodies grumbled and snuffed. “Mother?” Cricket said. “Where is Father?” The boys opened their eyes and Fern wanted to hug them all but her arms were insufficient. She was well outnumbered.

Fern tried to replay the day, tried to find the memory of calling Miss Audrey to babysit. She had meant to, she had thought about it, but she could not remember hearing the woman’s voice over the telephone.

“Where is Maggie?” Cricket asked. “We lost Maggie.”

“Yes, we lost her and we need her,” said the twins.

“I’m sure she’s fine, my loves.”

What Fern had thought of as a gift to the animal early in the evening had turned into something that she could not utter to her children. She did not try to explain aging or love and how much harder it was to keep trusting beauty the later it got. How, though she was only twenty-eight years old, she seemed to have passed into the long slide during which time a woman became less and less valuable, and to keep her around became an act of charity rather than pleasure. Fern turned on a lamp, unearthed the markers and paper and laid them out on the living room floor for her flock. She said, “Let’s make some signs and hang them up in the neighborhood tomorrow.” Lost Dog, Reward .

“How much reward?” Will asked. Fern, knowing exactly where the dog was, could be generous.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said. “No, a thousand.” Everyone was cheered. Such a good mother, so devoted.

“Where is Father?” Will asked.

“He’ll be home later,” she said, arranging them at the kitchen table.

Beloved , they wrote. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie . There was a stone of something in Fern’s chest so heavy it felt like it might fall through her, tearing everything soft on its way down. Hatred. For Glory, for Edgar, for the fact of the kiss, the fact that he had wished to lend her to John Jefferson, the fact that she did not have a good or fair solution to their survival either, the fact of everything they stood to lose.

Cricket said, “Couldn’t we put them up now? The sooner the better?” It felt good to Fern to be taking care of someone. It felt good to be acting out the saving of a lost love. It felt good to be part of a mission that did not involve Edgar. She hoped he was sitting on the edge of a sagging hotel bed, stale smoke in the drapes and a sad glass of beer on the table. She hoped he was wrung out. Fern found and distributed sweaters and flashlights and walked with her flock up the neighborhood streets, down the neighborhood streets, all the station wagons parked in a line, and they tacked a sign to each lamppost. Inside the houses, people were cleaning up from their day, drinking a nightcap, rubbing their eyes, bidding goodnight. The children called and called. Maaa-ggieee! The name stretched out and turned musical. It was a whole song. Fern sang it too. She sang and she believed it. She tried to trust what she had done. Maggie would always be young enough now. No one would remember her stalking away from a mess on the floor, too weak to lift her back legs completely. Maaa-ggieee! went the song. She could be — she was — anywhere.

AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, Fern and Edgar had driven to Kentucky and rented a little house for the summer. He was twenty-two and she was eighteen. Other young people were going to San Francisco and New York, sloughing off the idea of marriage like it was a pair of handcuffs. These were the same people whom Edgar had seen at protests and who had showed up on the news. At twenty-two, Edgar already felt too old to join them. It was almost as if he was not part of that generation. He was married now, an adult, and it was too late to move into an apartment in California with ten other people, smoke joints and stay up until dawn. Fern and Edgar agreed with the values, the politics, but they were relieved to feel these feelings in a warm house. And they were just as happy not to share one another.

Anyway, the hippies seemed indulgent. It was all hedonism and music and too much sunshine. Edgar and Fern were seeking something much more real. To them, it felt good to cultivate discomfort, to live in coal country with people who had no luxuries, to push their young bodies and minds up against the grit and truth of danger and hardship, heat and sweat. Edgar had pictured miners with soot-faces and wrecked hands. He had decided that he wanted to write about their lives, the deep earthen dives they made for the sake of carbon, for the sake of fire, for the sake of metal. He imagined himself telling their story, the newspapers printing the truth, shaming the owners, his father declaring the miners heroes. He knew this was idealistic and stupid, but he thought: maybe. Weren’t good works always completed against the odds?

It was not only saving that Edgar wanted to do. He saw in the workaday lives a kind of relief and salvation. The daily job, the weekly pay, beans in the pot and freshly picked blackberries in the bowl, hands scabbed from the thorns. There was honor in this. Honor he envied.

Fern wanted to play house with her new husband. She wanted the little cottage with just enough windows for which to sew curtains. Just enough space in the kitchen to make an omelet. She’d knit something. She and Edgar would sit at the table and read aloud to each other. Marriage was a jailbreak. Fern was free from the slow and steady drip of dislike that was her parents’ experience of the world.

Ben, though. Fern thought about him all the time, how they had built a fort in the skirt of a pine tree in the prairie when they were ten where he had asked her to promise that they would die at the same time. He explained that it seemed like an important detail — they had entered as a pair and lived as a pair. She had said yes and meant it, but how quickly she had abandoned him when love sparked a few years later. She told herself that she was a good sister — she was doing what women did. Even twins were meant to go their separate ways. She sent care packages with cookies and candies and each time she enclosed a letter from the invented girlfriend, though Ben never told her if he used this story.

In the central highlands of Vietnam, American B-52s dropped seventy-six bombs. They counted more than a thousand Vietnamese bodies in the jungle after the battle. The news crew sent footage home, the reporter in his helmet crouched behind a tree, yelling over the chop of a helicopter, and right then, something exploded and the boy to his right, so dirty that it didn’t matter if he was blond or dark, flew off camera, and the reporter looked into the lens and his face was shock-flat, and he just sat there because he was not allowed to intervene. He was only there to observe.

And in Indiana, on an Army base that had trained and lost 59 Benjamins, 314 Johns, 211 Davids and enough other boys that they had ceased to track them by name, Ben sat on the edge of his bunk bed and watched a bird that had flown inside. He knew that he could not catch it so he waited for it to fly against the window hard enough that it fell to the ground. Maybe the bird would still be alive, he hoped, only stunned, and then he could carry it outside. He should have been in the mess hall. He would get in trouble but he didn’t care. Ben was suffering his own stun. That morning he had received his assignment: he was to be trained as a motion picture photographer, part of a four-man team that would film the war for military archives. Not an office job. Not safe. He would be deployed in four weeks, but instead of a gun, Ben would stand in front of the war holding nothing but a camera.