Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Evelyn did not have the instincts other mothers did and she was aware of that, but the idea that one should do everything they could for their children seemed obvious. Here they were, lucky in wealth, with a doctor who considered himself an expert and a son who thought he could fly, a son who needed help. It would be a shame to do nothing when a person had the means to do something.

Fern’s parents were not asking her opinion on the treatment. “We have to try everything,” her father said. They were not able to answer her questions and neither of them wanted to talk about how uncertain Fern was.

Ben sent Fern a letter afterward.

Dear Fern,

I saw The Sound of Music . Yesterday we had Chicken Marengo. They are going to fix me with electricity. I miss you.

Ben

Her parents had decided to alter Ben. Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other. Fern found the place on the map, bought a basketful of treats — marshmallows, chocolates, gummies — and drove the distance to her twin, listening to the radio. Blacks were marching in Chicago, in Mississippi. Whites were burning their draft cards. Hours later she parked in front of a huge ivied building. Brookridge Home , read the ironwork over the door. It was a mental hospital, she realized. An institution.

She found Ben sitting alone at a table, dealing three hands of bridge. Beside him she saw six cans of soda and an empty bowl with pink milk at the bottom and there was a moment where Ben looked at her and neither of them was familiar to the other.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice was thin.

She put her hands on her huge round belly. “I know. I’m enormous.” She had imagined keeping the tears away until after. She had pictured herself collapsing in the car, but here she was, crying immediately. It was all a story — doctors and currents and promises — until she saw Ben, and his light was dim.

On a stand, a television showed a helicopter hovering above a thick pelt of green, all the leaves blown aside, a body being raised up. Ben said, “I was supposed to die that way,” and Fern said, “No, not you. You are safe.” She touched Ben’s forehead.

“It’s spaghetti night. Did we use to have an angel?” He said this without emotion. His voice was murky water.

“I don’t know. Did we?”

“In the prairie.”

“We had a statue of the archangel Michael.”

When Fern and Ben were in ninth grade, the family had gone to Europe for the summer. It was Fern who had discovered the statue of the angel in a huge antiques store. That night she had dreamed that the angel flew in her window and lifted her up, pulled her nightdress off and kissed her hard all over her body. She had woken up sweating, and had begged her father to buy her the statue. He had assumed, as she knew he would, that her interest was in the artistry, the story of the angel’s protection of children, his defeat of Satan.

The statue had been purchased for a large sum and sent home by crate. Weeks after she had first fallen in love with him and on the other side of the ocean, Fern had pried the nails out and found her angel in twenty-nine pieces. Dust was everywhere. His body had crumbled on his journey to her. It was the first time she had felt defeated by love.

“Is that the angel you mean?” Fern asked Ben.

“People say they aren’t real.”

“Oh, I see.” She saw no reason for a sharp point. “This one was real.”

Fern stayed and watched the rest of a show about crocodiles, offered sweets every five minutes. In the flash of the television she looked at Ben’s living body. His old skin and eyes and the flush in his neck. The shell had not changed, except for a long scar across his scalp, marking his loss.

“Ben,” Fern said to the silent shape of her brother. “I feel lost. I don’t know what I’m becoming.” She put her hands on her belly. He looked at her. He gave a half-smile, like he had caught sight of something and then lost it again. It was hard to tell what was missing from him, if it was cognition or feeling. Whatever was left felt like all she had. “I was in high school and then I was a wife. I’m still a wife but without a husband to take care of. And I’m about to be a mother but I have no idea what that means. I am completely alone and I feel like I am waiting to die.”

Fern thought of the people who were supposed to be the ones to love her. Her husband was far away. She had called her parents and they had flooded the conversation, flushed her voice out with news of the house’s rotting foundation, the charity ball, the cast her mother had made of a dead fawn she had found in the prairie. Evelyn had said, “I assume you don’t want me to come for the birth.” The last word was spit out as if it were something rotten. Fern certainly would have wanted a different mother to be there since her husband was not, but no, Fern did not want Evelyn. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Fern had said. “I’ll be in good hands.”

Fern had called Edgar’s mother and admitted more than she wanted to about how carrying the child of someone absent made her angry. How she missed Edgar so hard she was a bruise, but Mary had not offered to come. Two days later a box had arrived filled with silk stockings, a nightgown with an intricate lace bodice and a jewelry box containing a sapphire pendant as big as Fern’s thumbnail. The note had said, Chin up! and had her mother-in-law’s perfect signature. The necklace had been cold on Fern’s chest. It had felt half alive.

Ben knelt down on the floor in front of his sister. It looked like he was going to ask her to marry him. “Benny,” she said, trying to save him from embarrassment. But he stayed and took her foot out of her patent leather pump. Ben gave her toes a squeeze and then sat back in his chair. He picked up his napkin and spit on it and began to polish Fern’s shoe. “Here,” said Ben. “See?” And there, in the black shine, was his proof that she was alive: the pink smudge of her face, reflected.

—

Fern grew larger, hid behind her clothes and kept her head low. It seemed inappropriate to go out in her condition, to be seen in such a physically exaggerated form, and with her husband away too. Much more intimate than being naked in public was to be pregnant in public. It was as if her whole life was visible — sex and fear and hope and the coming unknown. Everywhere she went people warned her that the next part would be so hard. “Enjoy this time,” an old woman in the bakery said. “When the baby comes, you’ll never be the same again.”

She said, “I’m already not the same. Look at me.” The old woman smiled back, deaf and happy.

“My name is a good name,” the woman said. “Ruth. You should use it if it’s a girl.” The woman was wire-thin, her collarbone a sharp edge beneath an old dress. It was the woman’s turn to order bread and she asked a question about each loaf, pointing her bony finger, bidding the baker to turn it over so she could inspect the underside. “Looks a little overdone, that one,” the woman said. Fern could feel the blood pooling in her ankles and fattening them. She knew when she got home that they would be thick and sore.

Finally, the baker took out the pumpernickel, which was already overbrown and could not be faulted for such a color. The old woman seemed unsure. The risk seemed to weigh on her, the whole week counting on this bread for sustenance and comfort. Fern softened for her. She said to the baker, “Would you throw some scones in her bag, from me?” The woman did not notice the gift as she counted, in coins, her total. Her fingertips were stained with nicotine.

—

The next time at the bakery, the same old woman was there. She was wearing the same dress and the same shoes. “Did you enjoy the scones?” Fern asked.