Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Cricket, ear to the door, had listened to the ocean in the wood. Her father had said, “They can manage without me. One parent is enough for now.” He had waited for the person on the other end to talk. “Kids this smart can handle themselves if they have to. They could use more space to roam.” Cricket had agreed about space. There was less air in this house than they needed and it was either too hot or too cold, and she was tired of having to ask first about everything.

Before she had tried to explain her parents’ absence away, but remembering the overheard conversation, now Cricket thought that Father could be someplace where hurricanes were a concern and that Mother might not be with him, though she certainly wasn’t here. What Cricket knew was that no one was in charge. Her brothers were eating crackers at the kitchen table and playing checkers. They had unbuttoned their white school shirts and their little-boy chests were all rib and sinew. There was no mark of their parents’ departure on the air, no ghost of them. The silence was clean. At least until the red rotary phone began to ring and all three of them looked up. The boys ran to answer but Cricket yelled at them. “Wait!!” she said. She was sure that if it was known that they were alone, uncared for, they would be taken to an orphanage. Cricket imagined a dog-catcher’s van filled with sickly children. She explained to her brothers the danger they were in and they all stood there over the ringing phone like it was the most dangerous thing in the house. “You must promise never to answer,” she said. Finally, the thing quieted.

Needing to admit that they may have been abandoned for good, Cricket led a search around the house for clues. They looked in every room and every room was neat and unlived in. Then they looked in drawers. The same things were missing that had been missing the day before: clothes, not just Mother’s. Things had been taken from each of their drawers. James was missing his overalls and two sweaters, Will was missing a handknit scarf that he always folded at the top of his underwear drawer and Cricket was without a stack of days-of-the-week underwear that had been there before her parents had vanished. This had led the boys to believe their parents would be back for them, that they had organized all the details of a trip and forgotten just one thing: their children. To be helpful and prepared, they each packed a duffel with all the necessaries for a number of different climate possibilities. They had grown up with the good counsel of dressing in layers and they applied this to the new, parentless state. Cricket was not as quick to believe that their being left here was a mere oversight, that, two days into whatever their parents were doing, neither of them had realized that the three smaller members of the family were not in the backseat or the ship’s cabin or the sleeper car. She played along, though, because she did not want to alarm the young boys. That’s what a caretaker did — faked okayness. Cricket tucked tights into her bag, light sweaters and heavy, scarves and matching double-soft cashmere gloves that she had always been too afraid of ruining to wear.

When they had packed and placed their bags by the front door, they bundled themselves on the living room sofa in front of the big windows where they could watch the path for rescuers. “Tell us about orphanages,” the little ones said, and Cricket lowered her voice to its most serious octave. “In orphanages,” she said, “there is a very old woman with a stick and everything is horribly clean. All day, the children, whose heads have been shaved because they all have lice, scrub the floors with bleach. They eat pig slop once a day and all night they are woken up each hour when the very old woman comes to stand next to each child’s bed and whispers into her ear, ‘You have no parents at all.’”

They had spent all their lives washing up, cleaning up, being quiet at parties, saying please and thank you and smiling when some old woman on the street touched them on the head. Now they were free of all of that, free but alone and in who knows what kind of danger. Cricket felt hungry and lawless and she went to the freezer for ice cream. Without discussion the children stood around the tub with spoons, scooping huge bites of chocolate, vanilla, strawberry into their mouths. They were lonesome and unstoppable.

* * *

EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, Edgar woke up in Glory’s house and put on his jeans, fastened his big brass belt buckle and looked in the mirror. He did not look like a person capable of destruction — he was just a thirty-two-year-old man, the first grey hairs, the first lines, a few days of beard and hair that his mother would say was much too long. What should he have done? Gone home, promised away his future? There it was again, the burn in his chest, fury. Not yet , he thought, she should suffer for this.

Freedom, first thing, was a foreign kitchen and too little for breakfast. Edgar had never cared about food the way his wife did. He wanted the utility, she wanted to discuss the butter and the spice. Without her, he could eat a small piece of bread and get on with things. Glory woke up and she slunk over to him in no clothes at all — she had thick brown hair between her legs, under her arms, on her head, and all that pale skin. She looked at him, this new man in her kitchen with tea and bread. Thank goodness for John with his carefully tuned gauge for unwantedness. He might have been good at other things, but scarcity seemed to be his most valuable skill. John had left a note. Going to Mother’s , and his signature, and nothing else. Glory knew all the elbows and S curves of the highway that led to that cottage on the cuff of a peninsula so far north it was snowbound from September to May. She could tell that John had packed almost nothing, probably not even wanting his wife’s handprints with him in this ache. What he did bring she imagined he had washed first in a Laundromat in an industrial washer with very hot water and too much soap. As if he could be free of every last of her skin cells. The residue. The scrim of his wife.

In situations of distressed marriage, the usual first step for the woman was to clean out all the closets and redo things. Have a guy in about new wallpaper, do something with the floors (everyone was carpeting these days, plushly, but Glory still preferred wood). She had money and no one to disagree. She could have bought the huge round lamps that had become popular, a set of white tulip chairs, covered a ceiling in mirrors. If John had been the one to stay, the walls would already have been scaled with paint-color cards. To Glory, the house was a shell, her current favorite item inside of which was Edgar. He had bought a toothbrush and left it in the cup. He had pajamas there. That was it. The house, if it was paying any attention, might not have noticed a difference. A woman and a man. A certain amount of warmth emitted from them.

“Let me make you some eggs,” Glory said.

“Nothing for me,” he said. “Just you.” There was kissing, and since she was naked, there was more. Edgar could not get used to a morning with no children around. It was both more fun and less — anything could happen on the floor, on the table, but with all possibilities available at all times, Edgar found it difficult to know when and where. For now the answer was always and here. It was exhausting and Edgar was used up.

Glory smoked a joint and ate fruit after. Strawberries. She began to cook eggs even though no one wanted them. Edgar was enjoying the slip into someone else’s life. His existence was momentarily unencumbered. He had locked the door on his own house, leaving on the heels of his wedding-dressed wife — that was a puzzle he still had not solved — whom he knew would be able to care for the children for a few weeks. In order to walk out of his own life, Edgar had driven less than two miles where a beautiful woman had laid out curried chicken salad on a plate. In those two miles, the whole world had changed.