Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The eggs that Edgar had not wanted needed salt but he let it be. This was a small point, and simple, and it was almost pleasurable to stand beside a bad cook and kiss her without suggesting any changes. Breakfast would be over soon whether he enjoyed it or not. The woman would be warmer if he asked no questions.

The sea, that fathomless beauty, stood waiting for them. They could almost hear the wash of it.

—

Who was this person with whom Edgar was about to sail away? She was all yes, all open door. She seemed less woman than invention.

Glory’s money came from textiles and because she was a girl it never occurred to anyone that she would play any role except to inherit and spend. She was always putting some African through medical school, sending a check to a repressed ethnic minority in the Russian Caucasus, funding the election campaign of a native son who might have won if trees had votes instead of people. Glory had taken peyote in a hogan in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. She had slept in a school bus at a music festival in Santa Cruz beside a lover who was wearing nothing but an Indian headdress and a pair of tube socks. She had nearly died of malaria while counting the last surviving members of a species of miniature bat in Brazil.

The world’s idea for a young woman of a certain class was to show her wealth only in her own form: hair, nails, clothes. Otherwise, modesty was the way. Shush yourself down to the quiet only one man at a time can hear. Become a kind of silence that the man has to get so close to notice, close enough to feel like no one’s ever heard this particular whisper, and probably they haven’t. This violet-scented whisper is your girl, she’s never been anything until now. Watch her bloom before you.

Not Glory.

It was her husband who was the whimper. He was an apology, his entire being begging for forgiveness for the space he occupied on earth. The air he did not deserve to breathe, the soggy elastic of his skin uncomfortable in anything but temperate shade. They were matchmade by their parents who looked only at the numbers. Grades, height, account balances, companies owned by their fathers (rubber, shipping). Love was not discussed at any point. Glory wore the hideous tulle of her ancestors for the ceremony but she snuck out to change into a crocheted dress and flower crown before dinner and once she had been seen, it was too late to force her back into the gown. She got drunk. She told old women that they looked old and young women that they weren’t hiding their flaws as well as they thought they were.

Glory’s mother, at the sight of her daughter’s unraveling, retreated to the bathroom where she ate three skinless chicken breasts while she cried, sure that Glory would ruin both of their lives. Her mother carried, like a beloved pet, a fat slice of cake into the car when the awful night was over. Her husband said, “Is it possible that I’ve never seen you eat dessert before?” He seemed excited. He pinched her thigh. “Get a little meat on those bones.” At a red light, Glory’s mother took a glob of frosting and applied it like lipstick, then kissed him hard with a lot of tongue. A car pulled up behind them and she did not stop when the horn began to blow, did not stop when the other driver screeched around them. She only let up when her husband began to pull over and tried to find his way through the clasps of her dress. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be crude. We’re on the street, Donald. Get your eyes on the road.” And she sat back in her seat as if she had never sugared her lips, never sugared his. She unrolled the window and threw the cake onto the street where it would be accepted with gratitude by a feral cat drowsy with unborn kittens.

Glory’s mother was never the same. Her only daughter had swiftly managed to undo all the social upkeep of her whole housewifely career. Glory’s mother spoke to her father only when others were around and at those times she feigned a happy marriage so well that Glory’s father went slowly crazy, believing and then disbelieving his own life in intermittent waves that left him seasick. He took up model airplanes, then real airplanes, then ballooning and, since money for him was plentiful, he built a hangar behind the summerhouse on the Vineyard and set to work on a life-size papier-mâché hot air balloon made from dollar bills. He gained a following over the years of similarly lonely men who would come from other cities and other states to discuss the mechanics and weight-bearing principles, the mix of flour and water. He meant to send the balloon up, knowing it would not last long, once the fire was lit. Knowing it would probably land in the sea where the saltwater would work as a solvent until the whole mass sank, soggy, to the bottom.

Glory’s mother, in fate’s usual torture, wanted what she did not want. She found a joint in Glory’s underwear drawer and smoked it to punish her daughter, fully expecting the evil drug to require her heroic rescue by a truckful of firemen breathing one after the other into her lungs, begging her to come to. She imagined the phone calls: emergency room to husband, husband to daughter, and what she saw in her mind was not a string of words and information flowing through those wires, but guilt, thirsty and bright as a weed. The surprise: she smoked and she felt good. She wanted to take her clothes off so she did. A bath sounded nice, and she took half an hour to make a peanut butter sandwich first, which she had never before realized was a perfect object, and she brought it upstairs to the bath and ate it and tasted it and ate it and tasted it and when she got thirsty she lowered her head into the bath and drank. Whatever her body was made of was exactly what it was supposed to be made of. On the same night, on the other side of town, Glory was also high in the bathtub only she had wine and slices of cold cantaloupe. It was the closest mother and daughter would ever be and they did not even know the moment had occurred.

After Glory’s wedding, she had to make decisions about the marital contract. She would consummate, because who knew, maybe the pallid skin concealed a workhorse of a lover (it did not); she would do some cooking because she liked to; she would certainly do her own cleaning because she did not believe in hiring poor people to get on their hands and knees for the sake of her hardwood (this decision meant that the house was always covered in a film of grey, as it turned out that Glory, who’d had a maid all her life, did not realize how long it took to dust a five-bedroom house); otherwise, John and Glory were two planets in the same orbit. They slept near but not close, ate the same thing for dinner but only one of them was enjoying the meal at a time. Glory liked the couscous and tabouli, John the sugared ham steaks.

They did both like to travel, so they went places with sand, hot springs, huts, natives in bright clothes, and they smoked weed and liked each other better. It was almost friendly. They ate mangos, they ate fried ants. Glory overpaid for things she did not even like, thinking of it as a donation, where John haggled hard for things he dearly wanted. They wore embroidered shirts and leather sandals, but John always changed into his loafers for the flight home. It felt like waking up from a good dream. She had understood the locals, she felt. She had seen, really seen, their baskets and their beadwork. She imagined disassembling her world and replacing it with something real.

—

By evening the boat was coming down from its dry dock and Edgar had made a list of needed supplies. Provisions, he called them. Water and beans and first aid and vegetables and suchlike. This was happier than Glory had seen him in the few days she had known him, his head over a list, checking. He fogged his glasses with his breath and polished them. Everything was a blur of faded color until he replaced the lenses over his eyes.