Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“I threw them away. People don’t give you things for free unless they are poisoned or spoiled.” She studied Fern’s protrusion. “You should have that baby. There’s no sense in keeping it in.” Around the woman’s neck was a small gold Star of David. It made Fern feel charitable. Poor old thing.

Fern looked at the woman’s wiry eyebrows and considered reaching out and plucking one out. Would it be so terrible to run into someone kind? “Waiting is hard,” she said.

“You think waiting for life is hard, try waiting for death. Any day now,” the woman said and she checked her watch.

Again, she had the baker show her the underbelly of each loaf, asked what time they came out of the oven. She chose a rye this time. “Just give me half, in case I don’t make it past Thursday.”

Fern said the same thing to the baker, taking the remainder of the woman’s loaf.

It was the old woman who moved on first. The Sunday loaves were out, studded with raisins, and Fern waited outside smelling the bread, planning her order. She waited fifteen minutes, thirty, her feet fat and the ligaments in her hips pulling. Fern said a little prayer for the old woman and wished her good rest. Ruth , she said to herself, good luck wherever you are, Ruth.

* * *

EDGAR HAD NO OTHER JOB but to administrate the deaths of his generation, sign the thousands of condolence letters. So sorry for your loss, your loss, your loss too. These letters were not addressed to people where he grew up — they went to Bakersfield, Omaha, Tampa.

Edgar had written to these mothers each day, over and over to say that he was sorry because the dead were not strangers. The dead were theirs. Edgar knew that the letters would arrive with some artifact of the absent — shoes, a watch, the green shirt. He did not know whether these artifacts had actually belonged to the ones they were said to have belonged to. That jungle. The ants and snakes and vines. What if nothing was saved? But you could not tell a woman her son was gone and not give her fingers something to hold on to.

He longed for any number of unremarkable mornings. He thought about the novel he had started and the few good pages were a tiny, hopeful island but not enough to soften the bite of missing his wife’s pregnancy, of not being there to cup her swollen feet at the end of the day, to put his ear to the doctor’s fetoscope and hear that new heart. At night he lay on his back and he could feel his entire skeleton. The hard parts that would remain after the soft parts had gone.

Edgar awoke one morning to find Runner sitting on the floor with a steaming cup. He was wearing his parka and boots. “Are you going someplace?” Edgar asked. As if there was someplace to go. As if they would ever leave this sheet of ice.

“I can’t do it anymore, man,” Runner said. “I can’t be part of this fucked-up machine.” It was the most he had talked since Edgar had arrived.

Edgar sat up in bed. “And?”

“I’m leaving.”

“There’s no place to go.”

“They’ll assume I’m dead.”

They would, because how else would it end? A single man in the sharp cold, wind and ice, a roadless expanse.

“The sled tracks from yesterday are still visible. I’ll either die or I’ll live. I can accept both possibilities.” Runner stuffed his pockets with food rations. He said, “You want to come?”

Edgar wanted to say yes to escape, but what he really wanted was home and he would not be allowed back if he ran.

Runner knew that Fern was pregnant. He knew Edgar had ties connecting him to a world he could not walk away from. He shook Edgar’s hand and said, “Tell Fatty I said goodbye and good luck.” Edgar wrote his home address down and stuffed it in Runner’s pocket. “If you ever need help…” he said. And then Runner opened the door and started walking. The dawn was a shell, opening. Edgar watched the figure recede along thin sled tracks. He watched until Runner was a dot, then nothing, gone beyond the curvature of the earth.

—

On the day that Fern went into labor, she circled her house for hours. She drank cold water through a straw and she paced.

Fern remembered a day: she and Ben had been running, racing, sprinting. It was not lunchtime yet but they were ravenous. They picked blackberries in the garden and shared a fleshy, sunwarm tomato. The kitchen seemed terribly far away, and the province of grown-ups, and they did not want to break the seal. All afternoon they played and picked what was growing: rhubarb stalks, currants, raspberries, unripe pears.

Fern’s mother walked through the garden from her sculpture studio at dusk and found the two lying on their backs under the apple tree, counting its coming fruit.

“We could live a week, at least,” Ben said.

“A week’s not long,” said Fern.

Her mother looked at the fruit cores, the discarded stalks. “My god,” she said, “Fern, you do nothing but eat .” No mention of Ben whose boy-body deserved the nourishment, needed the fuel. That night at dinner, Fern served herself the smallest of portions. A spoonful of peas, one small potato, two bites of fish. She wanted to show her mother that she was not an animal. That she was a lady, and in so being, could survive on hardly anything at all.

There came a moment where the laboring Fern took her clothes off and turned on the hose, drank from it. Stars shot and fizzled, her body was hot with pain and then at rest. Then red and white lights spun on the leaf backs and she looked up to see her neighbor peering over the fence and an ambulance in the driveway. She tried to explain that she was fine, she was good, she was doing the work, but the men’s arms were strong around her back, and they carried her, naked and enormously round, into the back of the van like a wild animal that had wandered into the neighborhood and threatened to disturb the peace. They covered her in a scratchy blanket. Hush up, little woman , their arms seemed to say, we’re here to contain you .

—

Fern studied her newborn, fresh and ripe. “She has your eyes,” the nurse said, but Fern thought the girl looked just like Edgar, as if she were a container for the overflow of his person. She had planned on another name — Edgar’s grandmother’s — but when the nurse brought the birth certificate for her to fill out, she thought of that old woman in the bakery who had come into her life at the end, as they each prepared to cross the border. Fern said a small prayer that the woman had gotten the bread just right, eaten the last piece on the day she died, had nothing left over that needed to be thrown out. She wrote the name down: Ruth .

Fern stood in front of the big mirror, and though her belly was still soft and misshapen, she felt lightened. There she was — her same hair and her same legs, her same face. Out loud to her reflection she said, “I’m still here,” and she knelt on the floor and wept.

—

The first morning at home, the phone rang. “Fern,” said a voice.

“Edgar.” She thought it couldn’t be. Her breath was warm against the plastic telephone. “How are you calling me?” He told her that he had walked for seven hours and hitchhiked for four to get to a phone where he could make the long-distance call. He did not waste their few minutes describing the way his legs felt after walking that long in the snow, how he had nearly lost the sled tracks and been sure he would die, that his body would only be found in summer. He did not tell her how strange it felt to be in a place where there were other humans, where things were for sale, about the chocolate bar softening in his pocket. The connection was heavy with static. “Did you have the baby?” Edgar asked. “I had a dream last night that you had.” That he did not know if his baby existed on earth yet, that he did not know that it was a girl made Fern feel like she had been caught in a lie. She had gone on ahead without him. “It’s a girl. She looks just like you, Edgar,” she said. The fuzz between them thickened. “Can you hear me? Are you there?” she asked. “I named her Ruth.” She was embarrassed by the name. By the decision made on her own without good reason.