Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Fern had lost all her babies too. They were not dead, not sick, not kidnapped, yet each was gone. The crawler, the just-upright teetler, the question-asker, the new reader, the daring ocean-swimmers, the shark enthusiast, the midnight bed-crawler. At each stage Fern had been invested entirely in this person, their universe of games and questions and fits and laughter swelling to replace everything else. Then that stage had gone, completely. The children did not even remember huge swaths of the time she spent with them while Edgar was writing — songs they had sung five hundred times, stories Fern had told at bedtime, bodies of water in which they had splashed. Fern was the lonely keeper of these memories, and it made her feel almost crazy, insisting all the time on moments recollected by no one else.

Fern remembered being pregnant, then holding those little imps. In what seemed like a moment, they were climbing trees. James punched someone at school. Cricket asked what dying felt like. Will broke his leg. For a whole year the twins had gotten up for the day at 4:30 in the morning and Fern would have done anything to change the habit but then the phase had ended and Fern had remembered those early hours like a dream — she and her boys on the sofa with tea and a stack of books, the night still dark around them, a fire if it was cold. Fern had lost something every day as a parent.

Maybe, she thought now, her flight would make her children more grateful, slow their growing a little.

Fern lay down on the bed next to the giant and felt the heat of his big body. She was not touching him, and still, the heat. The bed was big enough for both of them but he weighed so much more that she had to work to keep from rolling towards him. The bedspread was scratchy and cheap. The ceiling was stained. She listened to the rats in the wall. The sensation of lying on the same surface as a man who was not her husband was a tingle in Fern’s feet. She had not done anything wrong, yet she was certainly out beyond the territory of a good wife.

“Where are we going?” she asked, realizing that they might have a destination and not just a point of departure.

“All the way across,” he told her.

—

They gassed up before starting their next day’s journey. He pumped, she paid.

“Where y’all coming from?” asked the woman at the register. The room was filled with smoke. Her eyeshadow matched the coffee stain on her paisley dress. She used the butt of her current cigarette to light the next one.

“East,” said Fern.

“And you’re going west.” That was not a question. You had to be going the opposite way as you were coming from. Only one road, and that’s the direction it went.

“When you get to Clayton,” the woman said, “stop for potpies. They’re better than the ones here, and you won’t want to wait for Stonesville.”

While Mac wet and cleaned the windshield, Fern tied a scarf around her hair and felt like her mother who had had a driving outfit. Evelyn had worn special moccasins and calfskin gloves that Fern had always wanted her mother to touch her with. Fern used to take her mother’s gloved hands and press them to her own cheeks. Her mother’s real heat through another animal’s skin.

Driving again, she told her companion this story. It had been years since she would have bothered Edgar with such a small memory, especially about her mother, whom he did not like. Mac asked the color of the gloves. “Green,” Fern said. “They were very light green. Sort of key lime.”

“That’s a good pie,” he said. “That is one of the best pies.”

They were driving fast and the oaks had softened into maples. It began to smell like manure.

“Apparently we are supposed to stop for potpies in Clayton,” she said.

“That’s a good goal. Let’s make that our goal.”

The earth was flat around them, tamed by prehistoric glaciers. There was land and there was sky, both nearly featureless. Things made by people — houses, barns, roads, crops — were the only features to rise up.

All along the road out of town there were signs congratulating the 1976 high school class on their graduation. The signs were plastic, made to last, and months out of date. As if such an achievement deserved permanent recognition.

Dilapidated houses ran along the edge, tracks and stations, ice cold beer, dirt lots with the swirl of tire tracks, that giveaway sign of teenagers, late at night, building speed, spinning out, hiding in a momentary dust storm of their own making. Fern was sure that there existed here the girl who cut everything at home: coupons, bangs, jean shorts. Her boyfriend would have a good arm and bad skin. Maybe they would even stay together a few years, despite her mother, who had aged poorly, dryly, her hair a crackle of overdyed frizz, her skin undone and beginning to drape. Girls like that loved their mothers and did not think to hide them from their boyfriends. They themselves would look better at fifty, surely. Someone by then would have invented a cream, an elixir. The girls counted on this — basked sunnyside up at the pool with nothing between them and the heat but a slick of baby oil and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Mac rolled his window down, just to remember real air, and in a second, the whole cab was hot and dusty. “Thanks for coming along,” he said. “I should have said that already. It’s nice to have company.”

“Would you be doing this if not for me?”

“I’ve got business in California. Someone I need to see.”

“Business business or personal business?”

He seemed reluctant to say. He smoothed his hair, curls that had been gelled downwards. He ran the windshield wipers, flicked the lights on and off, licked his thumb and cleaned a spot off the lacquered wooden steering wheel. “I have a son,” he finally said. “But I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.”

“Does he know you’re coming?”

“Yes. I’m going to pick him up and bring him home. It’s finally my turn.”

Fern pretended that it was reasonable to be driving at high speed away from her family. Motherhood, money, marriage — these were all suspended behind her. And with each mile they crossed they drew closer to the giant’s son. One family stretching apart and one pulling together. Fern was still fooled by her own story of escape.

—

Clayton came along. Fern and Mac were hungry, having waited all afternoon. The sign for the town told them that there were eight hundred souls present, but everything was closed up. The gas station advertised old-fashioned prices and had no pumps. There was a real estate office that looked like it had been closed for years. Sidewalk weeds were thick. The giant pulled into a lot and parked, and their footfalls were the only sound. Fern looked for evidence of a fire, a flood. “Let’s go,” she said.

“We just got here. I want my potpie.”

“There is no potpie. There is nothing.”

The giant had already set off. He made big prints on the dirty sidewalk. In the beauty parlor window, two brown wigs, styled for the previous decade, had wilted and a pair of scissors was set out on the table in preparation for a haircut that might never be. There was a newspaper on the counter, more than a year out of date: CEASE FIRE: All GIs Out of Viet in 60 Days.

The coffee shop had a few forks out and the ashtrays were all full. The hardware store was still getting ready for another year’s Thanksgiving.

“I’m starving,” the giant said.

Which is when a woman appeared. She might have been eighty or a hundred or she might have been a deadwoman up from below. Everything she wore was brown and she walked with two canes. “Hungry?” she said. “I have potpie. Follow me.”

Fern would have walked the other way, leaving a polite refusal behind her. Mac followed the specter of a woman as easily as if she had been his own mother.