Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Glory packed layers as instructed but she only took real care with the most underneath of these. Much lace was considered. She packed jean shorts and thin T-shirts and sundresses and a poncho. Mexico, she said to herself, and the word was all X, a spot marked.

Edgar intended to go home for clothes. He drove there, sat in the car out front and looked at the house, so familiar, so un-. He let the engine run, his hand on the key, about to turn it off. He needed a few more shirts and a better sweater, his slicker. He could have used the right pairs of shoes. The trouble, of course, was the wife who lived in that house. He thought of Fern on the bow of his boat, pole and line dangling. Occasionally, she had caught a tiny fish, big-eyed with surprise in the strange air. In the pictures, she was always smiling, her hair in a bandana. Glory was untested, possibly sick on the water, but Edgar wanted the trip enough that he was willing to risk her suffering. Edgar needed a good thing. He needed to go east, away from whatever fate awaited him. He needed the salt.

The lightless windows made him almost, almost sneak inside. Five minutes and he could be out again. It was not that he worried about being caught and stopped — he had already made the decision to wriggle free — but that some residue of the house, of the family, would stick to him and he would be unable to wash it off. He did not want their smell or their tears or their questions to join him on his journey.

Instead, Edgar went to the department store to buy everything new. The whole place was sweet with perfume and women reaching out to him with flowered bottles they swore his love would love. They had pale pink lips and sprayed-stiff hairdos. They could not know what journey he was preparing for but he resisted looking them in the eye anyway. Shoes, jacket, slicker, sweater, shirts, he kept repeating to himself as he navigated the sea of pretties.

“Think how good she will smell,” they said to him. “Later and so very, very close.”

—

They drove through Boston to the harbor and found the boat, one of several Edgar’s father kept there (they didn’t want to go all the way to the Vineyard where Edgar’s own boat was dry-docked for the winter). Edgar was fast with the lines. Glory had no place to stand, in the way no matter where she went. Eventually, she sat down cross-legged on the dock and watched her new man thread and pull. Glory read the boat’s name in dark blue: Ever Land . “So you’re not the only one in your family who doesn’t want to grow up,” she said. Edgar reached high and then ducked under the boom. He found himself a little angry with her for looking so right in the fancy harbor.

“You should know that I don’t really believe in money,” Edgar said. The yacht, the freshly bought clothes, the southerly escape, counted as evidence against his argument and Edgar knew this.

“You don’t believe that it exists or you don’t believe that it matters?” She said this like he was a highschooler in his first Philosophy class. He was quiet. He thought about his father, who was probably also standing on a dock, half-wet ropes in his hands. He would be dressed in whatever you were supposed to be dressed in that season, linens probably, and crisp white canvas shoes, while back inside the yacht club, Edgar’s mother would be midway through a story she was good at telling about the time the sleigh-horses lost the road in the snow and they spent Christmas Eve out in the woods while the maids waited, worried sick, the shine of a roast goose cooling on the table.

“In Chicago? A horse-drawn sleigh?” the astonished listener would ask.

“It’s an antique. From Lapland. We have a lot of land,” she would say, aiming for maximum jealousy. The people might have been all right, but the lives were deplorable. The spending, the charity events, the art collection, the jewelry. He thought of his future, the twin possibilities of struggle and riches.

“I don’t believe it matters,” he said. He had always wanted this to be true; now his life had offered him a chance to test it.

“That’s the most obvious thing in the world, sweetheart. But I don’t know anyone dumb or brave enough to give it up.” She stood to kiss him but they both remembered in time that they were in public and nothing was safe yet. They had to wait for the open ocean to touch in daylight.

Even though Edgar’s family had once been poor, poverty for Edgar was impossible to imagine. Money was both disgusting and ever-present. He hated it but he did not know how to live without it. The puritanical New Englanders around him in Cambridge were just as rich but spent very little, watched the accumulating numbers in the bank account. They saved, drove older cars, wore their clothes for twenty years, the children only seeing the spoils of their family’s wealth when someone died. To them, Edgar probably looked frivolous, garish, but Edgar would have explained his purchases differently — he thought of spending as getting rid of money. The things he acquired had been secondary. He had an expensive English car, but look at those thousands of dollars he had spread out into the winds. He had managed to turn his money back into metal, back into mineral. And anyway, he hated expensive things so owning them was a kind of punishment. To him, his parents were the frivolous ones — not only owning but enjoying their spoils. He disbelieved in everything they loved. Edgar’s intentions were entirely different from his parents’, though to someone on the outside, his life was nearly indistinguishable from theirs.

Like many of Edgar’s things, the sailboat that he and Glory would run away in had been custom-built by his father. It was wooden and her hull was painted bright red. She was built exactly like the boat of a famous seaman and family hero who had sailed alone around the world. She was thirty-six feet long, fourteen feet wide, four feet deep in the hold and weighed nine tons. These dimensions were known by everyone in the family, as important as everyone’s own height and weight. The deck was Georgia pine and the mast New Hampshire spruce.

Edgar’s father had thought of himself as a counterpart to the famous captain, the same spirit, only he had to stay home and have a job. The ship was a lien on his future, a holding place for the yearlong voyages he planned once he could pass the business on. Edgar’s mother was a fine sailor herself, kept pretty even in a gale, always found a way to have a proper supper on the table, and when they came into port, she was always the one to tell the tale so that the men with their cold gin laughed hardest. They were different from the other rich people in this way. They showed up at resorts, but they did so on their own airplane, flown the long way around, or by sea on their own vessel with no crew, or they rode horses for six days over the mountains first. The privilege of money, as Edgar’s parents saw it, was that you could get yourself into the great wild beauty — the thousand-meter-deep sea, the wide open West, an island inhabited mostly by dangerous animals, and feel alive and real — and then come over the crest of the hill and have someone meet you with a silver tray containing fresh fruit, aged scotch, a cold towel for your hands, and show you to a seat with a perfect view from which to tell the story of your adventure.

Edgar’s father would have been proud of his son and happy enough about the voyage to keep the affair a secret. Edgar had not told his father that he was sailing south exactly because his father would have slapped him on the back and offered advice about whether to take the Intracoastal or stay farther offshore for speed. But Edgar wanted to believe that this was a different kind of trip. He wanted to believe that this was not a holiday, though in fact he had made every decision exactly the way his parents would have. It made Edgar feel better that he would be very dirty soon, that his hair would be crisp, his clothes thick with salt with little freshwater to spare for cleaning.