Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“You’re tall,” she said to him.

“I’m actually a giant,” he said.

“Good for you.”

Her house was purple with purple everything and there was a black motorcycle out front. She sat them at a table and brought, hot out of a gold-colored oven, two deep pies and two forks and an ashtray with a picture of an ace of hearts on the bottom.

“You smoke?” the woman asked.

“Only on special occasions,” Mac told her. She poured a red drink into their lavender glasses, placed a pack of cigarettes on the table and then the woman, who did not say her name and did not ask theirs, began to climb upstairs. The giant dug into his pie. Fern peeled the crust back and looked for obvious signs of mice.

“They were right about Clayton,” Mac said.

“That cashier can’t possibly have meant to send us here.”

“Where else? This is Clayton. This is where the potpie is. You’re not eating yours?”

This felt like a test. You want an adventure, little woman? She was starving and the giant was showing no obvious signs of having been poisoned so she took a bite. It was silken and delicious. She could taste fresh thyme.

The woman did not reemerge. They sat awhile, waiting. Mac called up to her, “Great pie!” and there was no answer. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and tried again, climbed until he had ascended out of Fern’s sight. She heard his footsteps above her. A house this old was not meant to hold a man that size. She heard the creak of doors.

“She’s not here,” he said, coming back down. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

“How can that be? Should we call someone?”

“There’s no one to call.” The empty town, the empty businesses.

Before they left, the giant slopped up the last juice off his plate with his thumb. They found a pencil and a notepad with the logo of a bank and offered their thanks. Fern looked in her wallet and found only a stack of hundred-dollar bills taken from the emergency envelope in the kitchen. She took one out.

“What are you doing?”

“I feel guilty not leaving something.”

He smiled at Fern. If Edgar had been there, Fern knew the two of them would have debated whether the money would have made the woman feel cheap, condescended to, or if it would have struck her as terrifically kind. They would have suffered over it, no matter what their decision. Mac only smiled. “That’s a big tip for someone that might turn out to have been a ghost,” he teased.

No matter how hard Fern slammed, the latch on the door would not hold.

—

They drove on. The road had its own rhythm — meals, filling stations, whatever town came next when they got tired was the town they slept in. It was soothing, the non-event, the repetition, the open space ahead. The hope that her journey would cause Edgar pain made Mac into an accomplice. It made him Fern’s friend.

Mac had little short hairs growing out of his earlobe that Fern had the urge to pluck. She could almost forgive him for not being her brother now. Ben, she thought, who had never had a chance to grow into himself. He had jumped out the window when he was eighteen years old and the doctors had begun their work on him just after. Who knows what kind of adult Ben would have been, who he would have loved. Maybe he would have been like Mac — unusual and happy, comfortable in his own form. She was glad there was such a person. “We have so much time,” Fern said. “Tell me everything, from the beginning.” The country was generous ahead of them — a seemingly endless stretch of land, of space.

“In the beginning,” the giant started, and then paused. “I was born premature, six weeks, and in those days they did not expect the best.”

He told the story of his mother who decided not to send birth announcements until she could send the bad news along with. Her husband had left her when she was six months pregnant so she had already gotten used to being a source of collective sadness and discomfort. Now she would spread a new set of bad news: a baby was born, but. The giant’s own mother had been one of six, only three of whom had made it. People used to be better at death.

Priests and nuns stopped in to dispense a little easy charity, performed baptisms without celebration. Here, tiny angels, sinless and suffering, just probable days or weeks until they returned to God’s blue kingdom.

But Mac did not die. He began to gain weight — several ounces a day — passing the full-term babies, swelling into clothes for toddlers. When his mother was packing the miniature diaper the boy had worn when he was first born, doll-size, she discovered a note in its white folds.

Dear God,

It’s Father O’Brien. Please, I want to believe in you so terribly. I hope this note finds you soon. Please send a sign.

This was the sign, she thought. My child, grown like a sudden weed, is God’s sign. The giant’s mother spent good money to have the note framed. She hung it above a small bronze cross that her own mother had worn around her delicate neck, the chain much too short for any woman who was eating sufficiently. The note, to her, was proof.

Mac grew. He was mistaken for a six-year-old at three, an adolescent at six.

His mother had vowed to find Father O’Brien and show him the good news. But there were so many, all over Boston, and every Sunday for years, Mac and his mother went on Father O’Brien missions, attending Mass and then approaching the priest after with the framed note. Each time, the man would apologize for not recognizing the note and offer his uneasy congratulations on the healthy boy — they always used the word “healthy” after struggling to describe him.

Leaving, the young giant’s hair smelled of incense. Pigeons bothered the stone steps, their neck feathers puffing and flattening in the search for food. His mother kicked one hard enough that it flipped over on its side for a moment and struggled its little orange legs before getting right.

“Beggars,” she said. “Beggars are beggars.”

—

Every part of the giant’s story was exotic to Fern. There were people in her world who believed in God — Protestants and Quakers — but they did so quietly. The incense-rich sanctuaries, the spindly woman marching her huge son from church to church as if she could prove, with one oily little piece of paper, the existence of the higher power.

“Did you think you were a miracle?” she asked.

“I just wanted to be a kid. God seemed a little overzealous.”

“And now?”

“And now I think that the genetic lottery is complicated. But I still pray sometimes even though I doubt there’s anyone listening.”

—

The waitress at the next place brought a slice of banana cream and said, “This is the last piece and no one likes an orphan. Can I interest you? No charge.” The pie had fallen in the middle as if in defeat. The giant cut the point off. “Wishing bite,” he said. When they had finished the rest, they came back to this little triangle; each took some onto their fork and hoped, eyes closed, while the custard gave way to their hot mouth.

* * *

MISS NOLAN SAID, “Journals out,” and all the students reached into their backpacks and waited to be told what to do. Direct instruction was the format of childhood: add or subtract; write the letter A sixteen times, then write the letter B sixteen times; name three US Presidents; name the order, genus, species. The children waited, pencils ready, for their assignment. Miss Nolan looked at them. “Well,” she said, “start writing.”

“What should we write?” a scrawny boy asked.

“Write what you want to write. The point of writing is to say something, so say it.”

The children were displeased or elated or terrified. It was quiet and pencils tapped. Cricket made a title page. “An Index of My Life.” She wrote down the names of her childhood dogs and the ways in which they died. Car, mystery disappearance, rabies. No dog had survived more than a few years in their house. Something terrible always got to it.