Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

In the morning Fern took the train to Indiana and stood in the hospital room with the pale yellow walls where her brother lay in bed, his arms and legs encased and strung up from the ceiling. She asked him what happened and he told her that he had only meant to fly a short distance, just to the grassy place outside his room. He said, “I really thought I could do it. I never meant to hurt myself.”

The nurse came with fish sticks and a pool of corn pudding and a slice of white bread. Ben, broken Ben, was so calm. He ate and they turned on the television and he laughed at places where a person was meant to laugh. Fern understood that he had indeed flown himself away. He had broken six bones to do it, but tonight Ben was not going to sleep in the Army barracks where he would be spit on from the upper bunk. He was not going to wake up to a hundred push-ups or the names, over breakfast, of the soldiers who had died in the war the day before. Fern was proud of her brother. Before she left she found a marker and drew a cluster of stars in the crook of his elbow.

—

On the day Edgar was to leave, Fern put on the green sheath dress she wanted him to remember her in and she melted the last-day-butter in the last-day-pan, and flipped his eggs without breaking them.

He said, “My girl, what a girl I have.”

Fern said, “I’m about to get a lot better in your mind,” and smiled. “When you come home, you might be disappointed.” She did not want to say everything — she did not want it to be complete so that some god would think they had said goodbye so well that when someone needed to die, he would direct the bullet or the mortar in Edgar’s direction.

“No matter what happens—” Edgar started, but Fern cut him off.

“You’re going on a journey, an adventure. Your whole regular life will be here when you return. It’ll be just as plain as ever.”

Fern wanted to sit on his lap and kiss him all over his tanned face and give him the store of good-luck charms she had been gathering — the red-to-grey feather from a cardinal, her father’s watch, a lock of her hair, a square of satin from her wedding dress. Instead, she let the silence settle in. She let Edgar mop the yolks and drink his coffee.

As they waited on the platform, a higher-up approached Edgar and said, “Change of plans, son,” and handed him a folded piece of paper. “When you get to St. Louis, you’ll be taken to the airport.” Edgar looked at the typewritten page.

“Alaska?” he asked. “What do they need me to do in Alaska?” He looked at the paper again. “Because of my eyes? They didn’t seem worried about that before.”

Edgar looked like something shaken out, wet fabric in the wind. Fern stared at the ground. She did not explain that she had called his father after Edgar had gone to sleep the night before and asked for help. That she had begged him to find someone who knew someone.

“Oh, sugar,” Hugh had said, “I already have.”

It had been easier even than Fern could have dreamed. Edgar’s father had had to make only one phone call to a college buddy, a General, and in his conversation he had not even had to ask for the favor — just in mentioning that his son was bound for the central highlands of Vietnam, Edgar had been rescued. The two men had spent the rest of the conversation talking about football, and within an hour, Edgar’s assignment had been changed from the frontlines in the jungle to a post in the icy north where the only threat was an impossibly unlikely attempt by the Russians to cross the frozen churn of the Bering Strait.

“Thank you,” Fern had whispered into the phone.

“Don’t worry — I’ll never tell him that you called.”

When Fern had woken up in the morning and there had been no messenger at the door to tell Edgar that his post had changed, she had thought they had forgotten or that the message would be too late to save him or that she had dreamed the whole thing.

“Did you do this?” he asked. Was he angry? His face was red.

Here was money, rafting Edgar northward, alone again.

—

The base was a tatter of lonely women. The black women must have gathered in a different house because the luncheons Fern was invited to were populated with girls as pale as her. When they gathered, the sound of them was shrill and made Fern nervous. It was as if they had all grown up together in the same house, were all sisters.

“What would you like to drink, Fern?”

“Water? Please,” Fern said. The next person wanted punch, and the person after her.

“Sure, punch would be nice.”

“I’d love punch, if you have it.”

“Punch, punch, punch,” they all said with the same cheerful smile.

A tray came out of the kitchen with twelve glasses of bright red and one clear. Fern lowered her head. She had no problem with being just like everyone, but here she wasn’t.

One of the girls asked Fern where she was from.

“Chicago,” she said.

“Me too! Whereabouts?”

“North Shore,” she said.

“Oh, fancy,” the girl said. “What are you doing here? I thought people like you got out of situations like this.” Indeed they did — all of Fern’s and Edgar’s classmates were in medical school, working towards PhDs in Russian Literature or already employed by law firms. They were secure in the idea that they were more valuable at home than in the jungle. Fern did not mention that while all the girls from the city, the girls from the town and farms had boyfriends and husbands who had been deployed to the jungle, her love was in Alaska. She was on an unknown planet, the only one of her kind. Fern wished for her brother. She was a person who had a match in the world — someone who had been born beside her, grown up beside her, who knew the particular nick and burn of their family and home.

The girl pressed for more details. Town, street. She kept knowing the places Fern described right down to the fence, the meandering drive at the end of which was a perfectly calculated view of a big house. “It’s white with blue shutters, right? Aren’t there some kind of pink flowers in window boxes?”

“Geraniums,” Fern said. She felt as if someone had removed her skin.

“We used to go for Sunday drives up there. Papa liked to look at the big houses and pretend we were going to buy one.” She turned to the group. “We should be nice to Fern,” she said. “She lives in a mansion.”

“It’s not a mansion,” Fern said.

“You should be happy. Aren’t you happy? Don’t you wake up every morning and think how lucky you are?”

—

When Fern got home, there was something in her mailbox. It said only, Miss you. He did not sign his name but she knew the writing: Ben. She called the rehabilitation facility and asked for his room.

“Am I crazy?” Ben asked.

“You are you. The world is what’s crazy.”

—

Edgar, in Alaska, was a misplaced toy soldier. He had been flown to Fairbanks then Nome and then driven in a jeep by a logger with a black beard and no eyebrows to an expanse of white tundra that seemed to be edgeless. There were no roads, just snow and snow and snow, and in the middle, a tiny log cabin with a curl of smoke coming from its chimney. Edgar could not have conjured a scene less reminiscent of war. The jeep stopped and the driver said, “Welcome home, soldier.” He threw Edgar’s rucksack on the snow and drove away. Edgar stood there and the wind kicked snow onto his face. He was wearing the same clothes that the boys going to the hot jungle wore. He had no hat, no coat, no gloves. His boots, as he walked to the little cabin, began to soak through.

Inside: a single room with four bunk beds along one wall, a metal table and chairs, a sink, hooks with parkas and snowboots below. A young man, fat and pale, was sitting in front of the fire with a sketchpad. Edgar could see the drawing — a naked girl lying on her side, a kitten curled up in front of her. “Nice,” Edgar said, gesturing towards the drawing. The man looked up at him and said, “Welcome to nowhere.”