Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Cricket thought about Maggie. Her breath was always buttery. In the summer evenings on the island, once the light had loosened up, they had all gone outside to love her. A big heap of boys and girl and dog in the grass. “Let’s say Maggie is our mother,” one had said.

“Let’s say Maggie can talk.”

“Let’s say Maggie can lead us to the treasure.” They had tied scarves around their heads and then they were pirates and the island was fringy with palms and the cove was full of mermaids who had sharp fangs and hated all humans except these three littles and their dog whose fur they combed with fishbones. It had been safe because Maggie was there. Maggie the protector, Maggie the kindhearted leader and follower.

Cricket remembered months earlier on a night on the island when their mother had seemed too tired to say no to anything and they had begged, “Please, can we sleep outside with Maggie? Pretty, pretty please?” They had dragged blankets out, made a big mat over the grass and then slept in a heap in one corner, kids and dog breathing the same night in and out, and the stars fizzy above them, and the soft ears and warm black legs of their pet. They had hardly slept, it was that good. If only they could always live like this, they thought. They had schemed dragging one of the family’s old steamer trunks outside and filling it with supplies, maybe planting a garden, harvesting fruit from the long snarl of raspberry bushes. Cricket knew how to sew, which had seemed important. The boys had a compass, though they had no plans to leave the yard.

Cricket looked around her classroom at the boys and girls scratching pencils on heads through bowl cuts and long bangs. That neither parent nor the dog had come home the night before made the memory greyer. That Cricket had been the one to make sure her brothers were dressed for this school day, their lunches packed, their hair combed, her own bookbag repacked with homework. It was as if the wish for orphandom that they had made at another time had just now come true. Cricket did not write that down in her journal. She moved on.

She listed the names of her teachers up until then and put a star next to Miss Nolan’s name, knowing already that she was and would forever be the favorite. She wrote down people’s birthdays and the years in which she learned what: the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse. She wrote down alternate names for her brothers: Boris, Stuart, Nighthawk, Mark. She made a list of good jobs (pilot, copilot, horsewrangler, queen) and bad jobs (ambulance driver, mortician, housewife). Too soon, Miss Nolan said, “Close your notebooks.” But then she went to the windows and drew the curtains. She told the children to circle up on the floor.

She took out a satchel and went around to each student, tied a strip of leather around their heads. She said nothing. The children hardly breathed. Miss Nolan passed out watercolor paint and brushes and instructed them to pair up and paint a stripe of color under their partner’s eye. The wet brush was cold and soft. She set up a fake campfire made of crumpled red cellophane.

She said, “This is part of America.” She said, “Imagine we are Indians. Imagine we’re on the plains. We hunt for our food, which is rabbit, buffalo and deer, skinned with a piece of flint and hung up by their legs to dry. The women pick berries and gather herbs and leaves for medicinal purposes. The children,” she whispered, “are given the bones to play with.

“Imagine that there are sandy mesas farther to the south and peaks to the north and that there is so much grass that it looks never-ending. We Indians are good at choosing where to set up our teepees, and we move around depending on the season. Before the white man came, we had no horses and used dogs as pack animals. But we learned to ride easily and quickly. We are excellent horsemen. Imagine how good it feels to cover ground on such a fine animal.” Miss Nolan looked out at her new tribe. Cricket listened like these were the instructions she would need to survive a great storm. Miss Nolan said, “There always has to be a love story. Otherwise what’s the point? Imagine a young brave, setting out to scout for a new pasture for the animals. Imagine he sees a small encampment of settlers with their wagons and their log cabins. Imagine he sees a beautiful girl out hanging wet dresses on a line. She is pale and red-haired and she must be from so very far away. Imagine the instant they look at each other and a tap of electricity hits them both in the heart. He goes back to his people, she goes back to hers and they can never, ever touch each other because they will make each other sick with foreign diseases and their families would have them hung and scalped, and despite how much they love each other, they would be miserable their entire lives.” The children were dumbstruck.

“But…” said a girl with pigtails.

“But,” Miss Nolan said. “But. They can write letters and they do. They write letters and they leave them under a particular rock. It gets so that touching the rock feels like touching the other person. It gets so that the letters and the rock are the only thing keeping the brave and the frontier girl alive.” Cricket wanted to know everything that every letter said and she could feel for absolute certain that a lot of what was contained therein would be very unsuitable for her young eyes and this made her want it yet more. All the answers to all the questions of every adolescent and preadolescent must be contained in those letters.

“Your homework,” Miss Nolan said, “is to write a letter as if you were the frontier girl or the young brave.”

“Except we don’t know…” one of the football-playing boys said.

“Hush. The human condition is universal. Just put yourself in their shoes. Put yourself in their moccasins.”

Outside the covered windows, the trampled lawn collected maple leaves one by one from the big climbing tree. But inside, it was the West, it was all emptiness, and the troop of Indians made fire, ate beef jerky that they said was rabbit, learned to whittle sticks into sharp spears to be used later for the hunt. They were braves and they were girl-braves. No one wanted to be a squaw except Muffy Tapscott who had torn out her ribboned ponytail and was already braiding her hair. At the end of the day, each boy and girl who had been good — and they were all good because this was serious, this was the reason to live the rest of the week, the rest of the school year — got to choose a feather from Miss Nolan’s leather satchel.

—

Like yesterday, there were no parents at home after school. Cricket stood in the living room, so quiet, and remembered her father, two days earlier. How he had taken the telephone from its cradle, sat on the stairs leading to the basement and closed the door. No light through the crack; Father was talking in the pitch dark.

“Just us, alone?” he had asked, and Cricket had heard because she was crouched on the floor, her ear against the cold wood. There had been another noise — the same ocean heard in shells, in cupped secret-telling hands. Then there had been a long silence, and the conversation had turned to hurricane season. “I’m a good sailor,” Edgar said. Already, they had come to L and it was only September. Lisa. Next it would be a boy’s name beginning with M. Cricket knew this because she and her brothers had always played a game of naming hurricanes. Bets were placed in July. Each child got an A-to-Z and if they guessed right, Father promised to buy them any toy. Each year the children said, “Any toy?” And Father said most seriously, “Any toy, sweetlings. Any toy you can find.” They discussed this after lights-out in the freedom of the night. “Is a submarine a toy? Is an airplane? A horse is something you play with.” But none of them had ever won. There were too many names.