Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Ruth?” he repeated back. “Are you okay? Fern, are you okay?”

“You’re alive,” Fern said out loud. She had been holding a place for death, for disappearance.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“I really need you.” She wanted to swat the static away. She wanted a clear connection to her husband more than she wanted anything.

“I know. So many people are dead. All there is is nothing here. Whiteness. I know I’ve told you before but it’s so cold and so dark. I can’t believe you gave birth. I can’t believe I missed it.” Not knowing if she could hear everything he said, he repeated the most important thing. “Fern, I love you. I love you. Hello?”

“I’m here. I know it sounds stupid to say but I was shocked by how much labor hurt.”

Edgar, on the far end of the line, was envious of a body that could feel unrivaled pain and produce an unrivaled prize. He wanted to ask what the baby looked like, what she felt like to hold, how she smelled. “She’s delicate,” Fern said. “She’s tiny. I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was hard not to imagine the path this poor creature would have to walk, the world so tumbled with pain.

“I wish I could be there,” he said.

She said, “I don’t belong here without you.”

He wanted to say Thank you but the words seemed much too small for what she had done.

—

Edgar stood at the phone and ate his chocolate bar. The sugar hit his tongue hard. His back was sweaty. He said his parents’ number to the operator.

The next voice was his father’s: “Yes?”

“It’s me, Edgar. I just wanted to tell you—”

“Edgar, Edgar! Where are you? Mary! Edgar’s on the phone. Edgar? Are you there? Are you all right?”

“Dad. I’m fine. I wanted to tell you that you’re a grandfather.”

“Yes, Fern called yesterday. Congratulations, my boy.” It was this that hurt: he had not been the first to know. His parents had already celebrated, had already lived a whole day knowing that the baby had been born. He answered their questions about his safety, promised that he was fine, but he could hear pain in his mother’s voice. There was too much to say so they said little and hung up, all of them missing each other more than they had before they had spoken.

Edgar bought a can of condensed milk and a box of crackers and sat on the bench out front drinking and eating and saying to himself: I have a daughter. I have a baby girl. I am somebody’s father. The road in town was mud and rock. A stray dog nipped at a dead bird. That night Edgar slept in a boarding house where he ate a giant steak, took three showers and two baths before beginning the journey back to nowhere.

In Tennessee, Fern ate steamed green beans and nursed the baby. In Chicago, Edgar’s father called the same General who had saved Edgar once and said, “Edgar’s a father now,” and his attempts to keep his voice calm were thin. Mary was beside him, trying to listen in on the conversation. “Congratulations,” the General said, and then to clarify, “Doesn’t it seem to you that families as nice as yours should be together?”

“Yes,” Hugh said. “Yes, yes.” He managed to keep his breathing steady until he had hung up.

—

It was two weeks before Fern made it to the bakery again. And when she walked in, there, inspecting the crumb on a loaf of wheat, was the old woman.

“Oh!” Fern said. “You’re alive!” She was relieved and she was strangely annoyed. She had prayed for the old woman in heaven, she had mourned her. Now she would have to return to the state of waiting and do it all again.

“Do I know you?” the woman asked. On two of her fingers were giant, fire-bright diamonds, unmistakably real. Fern looked at her to make sure it was the same person. She had always assumed the woman was poor.

“I was pregnant last time we met.”

The woman studied her and seemed not to find anyone she had ever seen.

“This may seem peculiar but I actually named my baby after you,” Fern said. “Ruth.” She wanted delight. She wanted thanks. She had given a dead woman an eternal gift, except that the woman was alive again.

“I’m not Ruth. I’ve never been Ruth.”

“What?”

The woman turned away from Fern, asked to see the bread bellies and found nothing to her liking. She said, “If I’m going to die with something uneaten, it should at least be top quality.” She looked at Fern. “I once knew a Ruth. She lived in sin in the state of California.”

The bell rung her out.

THE DINER WAITRESS seemed to know and love the giant the moment he appeared at her table. She was short and wore a little fabric cap and frilled apron and Fern figured she would have been a pretty girl before the bacon and patty melts had started to add up. The waitress tousled his hair when he ordered dinner off the all-day breakfast menu: six eggs scrambled well and dry. She nicked his ear between thumb and forefinger when he asked for a coffee warm-up. Little Fern had vanished in his shadow. Her hamburger order was written down without eye contact, without a smile.

The giant had told Fern that his name was Malachy, Mac for short, but she still thought of him as “the giant” because no name seemed name enough for such a person.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked him. He had not and he did not see why she was asking. She was afraid to ask him what it was that made the waitress so nice — terror or nervousness or feeling sorry or the thrill of a man who made the woman feel tiny, a man who could pick a little lady up like a leaf.

She wanted a map to spread across the Formica table. She wanted to trace a route like her father would have done, bent over with his strong reading glasses. They had threaded their way out of Boston, through the dense treescape of western Massachusetts.

“Onward,” said the giant. “Westward, ho.”

They were still within the magnetic pull of home, still on recognizable highways, the usual greenery. She could have gotten on a big chrome bus and been back at her own doorstep in time to sleep near her family. In those few hours she knew she could justify forgiveness, construct a self that believed more in her marriage than in the specifics of faithfulness, honor her children’s need for an intact home, begin the discussion with Edgar about what each of them was willing to give up.

“Don’t think about going home,” the giant said. “You have to punish him more. You have to have your own journey. Missing you will be good for him. It’ll make him realize what he has.” If the marriage ended Fern knew it would not matter what the lawyers drew up: Edgar would get out with dignity, she would get out with children. That’s how it broke down for men and women. She wanted to throw everything in sight, to break things, to cause pain.

“Let him miss me,” she said. “I think I’ll feel better when we cross some state lines, Malachy. Mac.”

The frizz-haired waitress came by with a plate. “On the house,” she said, sliding a piece of chocolate cream pie in front of the giant. “Come back at breakfast and you can have another,” she said.

“She likes you,” Fern said.

The giant cut a bite.

“Pie is my favorite,” he said. Fern still was not used to the depth of his voice. She still was not used to the amount of space he took up, his big head always far above hers.

“How would she know?”

He shrugged. “She’s good at her job.” Fern wondered what it would be like to proceed through a world where someone already knew what made your heart beat faster.

“By the way, I don’t expect you to have sex with me,” he said.

Fern poured the last of the cream into her coffee. She was surprised by the flicker of disappointment she felt. She had thought of sex as something she could store up. Not because she wanted it herself, not because it was warm and sweet, but because it was desirable to others and she was the one who possessed it. It was easier, more comfortable, to be a person in possession of something. It was also a way to hurt her husband. In the thick hours of her escape she had wondered if and when. She was afraid of his size. She had pictured succumbing, as in a flood. But it was Edgar she had hoped would suffocate if she had had sex with the giant. Thinking of Edgar kissing that woman made her want to do it now, to throw the giant on the table and climb on and end up in the paper and get arrested for it and be marked, for her marriage to Edgar to be marked forever by something she had done.