Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Edgar, the fact of Edgar, the idea of what he had done, stood beside Fern like a shadow. She tried to imagine him after she had left in her white dress. Did he sit down on the sofa? Turn on the television? Did he cry or scream or fall asleep on her side of the bed or call his mother or look for the dog or fix the dripping sink or root around in the basement freezer for an ice cream sandwich or order something from a catalogue, or did he simply sit on the floor with a glass of cold white wine and listen to the emptiness he had begun to create there?

Fern had never considered losing Edgar any other way except a heart attack. That was how it was meant to happen: struck while playing tennis, while walking in the sudden fire of fall leaves. They were bound together, magnets that were just rocks without the other. The idea that the marriage could fail had not been in consideration.

The giant had a circle of old ladies laughing. His big face was lit by the story, whatever it was. Fern heard the word shoemaker , the word rustic and the word Chevrolet . The women cracked up. Who knew if they could even hear what he was saying. One of them had frosting on her cheek, and this fact nicked at the nerve endings in Fern’s chest. She looked away.

Louise came around, insisting they needed to stick to her schedule. These folks were born in the olden days and they had an early bedtime. After cake, the bouquet.

The women gathered on command, their short hairdos dyed or white. They wore plastic beaded necklaces strung by grandchildren who were at least a little bit afraid to come visit. They wore lavender, petal-pink, dove grey. Maybe they did not remember that they were old and empty of mind. Maybe they felt light and full of perhaps. Maybe they were humoring this younger woman, thick with good intention. It should have cheered Fern to see these happy elders enjoying a few good hours, but all she could think about was them later in dark rooms, a lone body in each one, a sad photograph in a frame, everything good already passed. Here it is , Fern thought. Here is the worst case. Perhaps her mother had been right to leave early.

Fern turned her back. These were her flowers, she remembered. Edgar’s gift. She considered not throwing them, considered running away. She imagined the flowers in her dining room, in her car, in her trash and found no surface on which they made sense.

Fern gave a hard toss and Edgar’s flowers were in the air. There was a shuffling sound and then a tiny woman emerged with her prize in the air. She could not have been more than four feet tall. She was joyous, frenzied.

Throwing, Fern found, was the very thing she wanted to do. She would have liked to throw the cake, the plates, the champagne flutes.

The giant came over and he picked Fern up in his arms. The crowd went wild. He lowered his big head and his lips were fat and warm.

“Consider where else you could go,” he told her. “Consider the mountains. How tall they are, and full of caves. Or out West, where some places it never snows.”

“We’re broke. The dog is old. My husband might be having an affair. It feels like I have so many children. I’m very tired.”

“They’ll be fine for a few weeks. Come with me. I’m leaving this afternoon. There are roads from here to everywhere else,” he said. “Paved roads, and food along the way.”

* * *

THE CHILDREN WALKED HOME at the end of the day as usual. They kicked the newness off their shoes and said, “Fine,” and “Boring,” and “Slow,” about school and then, wistfully, “Sand,” and “Water,” and “Sleep,” about summer.

Mother was nowhere to be found. Her reading glasses were on the table and the newspaper was open to the funnies. There were two cans of soup on the counter, unopened. Father was never home at this time so his absence caused no alarm. Cricket told her brothers to do their homework. “No homework in kindergarten,” they told her. “Well, then learn something about the American West. Do you even know where that is? Do you even know anything?” Cricket was annoyed that she could not make her voice sound older, more Miss Nolan. To grow up to be anyone else seemed like a waste of time. Her brothers looked up at her with their big brown eyes. They were sweet boys but boys and so necessarily less smart, but Cricket would do what she could to teach them. She found a can of beans in the cupboard and a bag of frozen corn and explained that these were the main foods of the natives. “Also meat,” she said. “But you have to hunt it if you want any. Berries in summer, and squash.” The boys said, “Okay,” and “Wow,” and “I see.” Then they wanted to know if it was all right to watch television. “No TV,” said Cricket. “No TV until you understand our country’s history.”

All three children had hoped Maggie would greet them, at least. Welcome them home with her cheer and chuff, to make them kids again. But she too was absent, so the children went looking. They tossed her name out and out and out. They looked over the neighbors’ fences and in the shade of the maples; they looked in their own yard and in their bedrooms and under the kitchen sink. “Where is that hound?” they said. “Where has she gotten off to?”

Neither parents nor dog came home for the second night in a row. Last night they had gone to sleep watching television but tonight, because Cricket wanted her parents, when they returned, to see how capable she was, how very worth caring for, she put the boys to sleep in their beds and then read under her blankets with a flashlight even though no one was there to scold her. She dreamed about math, though she tried, even in sleep, to will her brain to conjure a cartoon-flat mesa, a herd of elk and her arms pulling taut the spring of a bow and arrow.

THE DECEMBER AFTER Edgar left for his post in the great north, Fern was much too pregnant. She stood in the shower watching the water roll over her belly. The baby pressed a heel out, deformed her further. No one ever had said anything to her about how strange pregnancy would be, how aggressively strange. None of the mothers she had grown up around had talked about it. All the questions she asked her doctor ended with the same answer: if your mother was very late giving birth, you could be too; if your mother gained a lot of weight, you might too; the length of your mother’s labor is the best indicator for the length of your own. But Fern called and her mother claimed she had no memory of what her pregnancy was like, what her birth was like. She preferred to create children out of clay.

All during her childhood Fern had thought about the time when she would be a mother and how generous she would be to her children, and how she would play with them all the time and run with them and imagine monsters and fairies and winged horses with them and buy them giant stuffed toys. Now that she was on the threshold of motherhood, the feeling Fern had was of being eaten alive from the inside, this creature taking the food and water, taking the blood to grow her own bones, her own skin, her own nails and hair and eyeballs and intestines and lungs and the meat of a heart.

—

Fern’s mother called to tell her that Ben was still exhibiting signs of insanity, that was the word she used, but they had spoken to his doctor who had a new solution to offer. They could put him into a new facility and start a heavy regimen of electric shock treatments. The doctor, Evelyn said, proposed the idea and the start date at the same time, having already taken the liberty of penciling Ben in, seeing so much promise in the therapy. “I can’t offer this to everyone. The procedure is expensive,” the doctor had told Fern’s parents. “We want to be very aggressive.”