Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The bird fell. It was still breathing when Ben brought it outside and set it at the base of a fall-bright maple tree, encouraged it gently with a red, red leaf.

Ben did not tell Fern about his assignment. Shame and fear had knitted everything in him shut. He wrote to Fern and called once a week but all he reported were the meals, the exercises, the weather. He sounded farther away than he really was. His voice was mostly air, just a whisper. Each week she wished the same wish, “Just try to go unnoticed.” And then he went back to learning how to film without flinching and she went back to the game of husband and wife in the little house with the little pots and pans and a table just the size for two.

Fern and Edgar went to the market together and chose jam and bread, which they ate in bed, naked and too hot for sheets. They went dancing at the hotel ballroom on a Friday night, all the men clean-shaven and the women in gingham dresses. Fern’s blond hair was teased and set and she had on a short, straight dress and white pumps. She was delighted by the banjo and mandolin, instruments her parents would not have been able to name. There were two fast songs and then a slow one, the music growing soft enough that the overwhelming sound was of feet shuffling over wooden planks. Sliding together, landing together, everyone’s arms around a neck or a waist, each a scented pair: aftershave and rose.

—

There was pleasure in pleasure and Fern and Edgar had plenty of that, newlyweds that they were. There was also pleasure in bearing witness to the life of this unknown place. The miners really did come up from below with their faces black. Edgar felt validated in both his belief in good, regular work — these people were grateful, honest — and also his belief that what his father did for a living was possible because of the suffering of poorer people. All summer, Edgar picked the scab of guilt. It felt good to feel bad. Someone in the family had to.

Ben stopped sending letters but he still called on the phone. He was quiet while Fern skimmed over her everydays, not wanting to say too much about how happy she was, despite missing him. Ben said, “I don’t want to talk, Fern, but don’t hang up. Just hold the line.” She leaned against the wall until her knees ached and then she slid down and sat on the floor. She knew he was there from his breathing. More than an hour later Ben said, “Thank you. I have to go.” She heard his end of the phone find its cradle and then the line went quiet. She imagined him taking a deep breath before straightening his body into a pole, looking at the far horizon and saluting. This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love.

—

Fern and Edgar became friends with a black miner and his wife. They did not say aloud that they were proud of this fact, yet they were. They wanted to transcend the legacy, to be the generation that made it right. The couple, in their fifties with children already grown and gone, invited them over for hamburgers and beer. They talked about summer and weather and winter and parents and food and it seemed like skin was just skin. They got a little drunk. The men stood on the porch smoking and the stars were just beginning to pop and a few fireflies drew lines in the dusk and there was no moon and it was perfect, a perfect night.

The man said, “I wonder if I could ask you for a favor.” He admitted to Edgar that he was illiterate and asked for help writing a letter to his family at home.

The man produced an oily piece of paper from his pocket and Edgar understood how much it cost the man to make this admission, to hand the blank sheet over. The paper was slightly wobbly in front of Edgar and he wanted to go home with his wife and drink water and bite her neck and sleep. He rubbed his eyes and used the railing as a hard surface on which to write.

He wanted Edgar to describe a particular lake with a rope swing. He wanted to say how much he missed his mother.

Fern and the miner’s wife walked outside with a plate of cookies. Fern said, “You might have to take me home now, my love.” It was very dark by then, all stars. The miner and his wife drew close together and he kissed her on the top of her head.

“We forgot a flashlight,” Edgar said.

“No trouble,” the miner told him and sent his wife inside. She returned with a laundry basket full of headlights, flashlights and lanterns, a man well prepared to move through unlit places. He insisted that Fern and Edgar each have their own. “Better to have too much light,” he said.

“Wait. We have to finish your letter,” Edgar said.

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “I can sign my own name.” It was a joke; it was not a joke.

Fern chose an old-fashioned kerosene lantern and Edgar took a flashlight with batteries. They went out into the rich blackness, making halos of yellow and white. Fern pressed away a thought of boys like her brother in a night yet darker than this, the only bright spots explosions that might kill them. She took Edgar’s hand. With less vision they noticed sound: their feet on the grass, mosquitos, the pop of a firecracker a few miles away.

—

They stayed on into winter. Edgar kept writing letters for the black miner. They went to the Friday dances and ate pancakes on Sundays at the diner. They adopted a stray tabby cat. Edgar’s parents kept asking if they were finished yet, ready to come back to the regular world, and Fern and Edgar kept trying to tell them that they had it wrong: this was real. The other life was the one full of falseness. Fern’s parents had no such question. Fern and her father talked only about Ben, though there was little to say. She and her mother talked only about the cherry tree in the house orchard that had been overpruned and the gardener who now had to be fired.

It was already cold outside by November. “Gin and tonic?” Edgar asked and she smiled for him. She heard the tink of the ice but not its hiss. He hummed to himself while he poured.

“You know where I’d like to go is Egypt,” she said.

“Because it’s warm there?”

“Because of all the old things they have. And because it’s warm.”

The snow had fallen for the last week. It had rounded out the corners on everything — the tables, the wooden chair Fern knew she ought to have brought in. She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.

“Add another log to the fire, would you?” she asked. This was a beloved job of his. If he tended his fire as completely as he would have liked, they would have gone through their season’s supply of wood in a few days.

“I’ll wait a few more minutes.”

“We can get more wood,” she said.

“This is a winter’s worth,” he said, gesturing to the pile under the eaves. “This is enough for everybody else.”

Whether to buy their way out would be a constant question. To be like everyone, to be regular, a constant dream. For him it tasted sour because he failed at it and for her it tasted sweet because occasionally she succeeded.

Edgar whittled, turning something rough over in his hands, imagining a way to smooth it. Reflected in his thick glasses: the bald trees outside, grey-gold. A siren sounded.

Fern untangled a length of yarn, which was orange and scratchy. The cat was at the other end. For the cat, this ball was its own celebration. Fern carried the one end carefully through each knot, loosening as she went.

Another siren and another. “I wonder what’s going on,” Edgar said.

Edgar turned on the radio but it wasn’t music that came out. A man’s deep voice said the second half of a sentence, “… no known survivors.”