Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Both sets of parents came to see Edgar and watch the ceremony in which he would receive the medal he had not earned, only a few hours after he had come home. Edgar had gone on early to line up while Fern and the parents stood around in the yard drinking lemonade. Fern’s mother wore a black lace dress from the 1920s that had belonged to her great-aunt and had been mended by the same tailor fifty times. Her hair was short and grey and her face free of makeup. Paul wore pale linen and a thin striped tie and a fedora. On the way, Evelyn had snapped at him for buying a new suit.

“I’ve had this for five years,” he had said.

“Exactly. There are perfectly good things in the attic.”

If Edgar’s parents, on the other hand, could have worn clothes sewn from money itself they would have. Everything they had on was the most expensive version available: Mary wore a silk shift minidress with palm fronds printed in dark green, white stockings to cover her varicose veins and a mink stole even though it was summer, and yellow heels that had been made for her very feet by an ancient Italian cobbler whose hands had cupped the heels of every movie star to set foot in Rome. Hugh’s suit had cost as much as any of the war-widows would receive as compensation for their husband’s lives.

“Maybe Cricket will grow up to be an artist, like you,” Mary said to Evelyn. She swished her lemonade, took a big sip.

“Maybe. As long as she can avoid having children of her own.”

“Mother,” Fern said.

Evelyn apologized but she did not see the statement as unfair: unless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door.

“How’s Ben?” Mary asked.

“They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong,” Evelyn said.

“What’s wrong is that you sent him to war and are now frying his brain,” said Fern.

Evelyn looked at her daughter and narrowed her eyes. “He didn’t go to war, dear. He went to Indiana. People have survived much worse things.”

—

Outside the stadium there were at least a hundred protesters. They had signs with skulls wearing Uncle Sam hats and signs with flowers that read War Is Not Healthy for Children or Other Living Things . They were young but not much younger than Fern, who felt all wrong in her tailored dress with her fresh, clean baby in the pram. To them she looked like the enemy. Maybe she was.

The family sat in the high bleachers of the football stadium and fanned themselves. Cricket screamed and Fern bounced her, whispered in her ear, promised her anything in the world. The brass band played so loud that Fern covered the baby’s ears and the instruments caught the sun and made her temporarily blind. Cricket settled, as if she was finally satisfied that the world could make its own noise.

Down below, the boys sweated in their wool uniforms. All the commanding officers, the Generals, the top brass, their foreheads beading and their lapels as flat as cadavers, looked stoic but proud. They announced the names of the heroes, and the boys climbed the stage stairs in their overpolished shoes and accepted, graciously, the honors. There were three soldiers in a row on crutches, each missing their right leg, as if they had been grouped by loss. Another was missing an arm. Four were in wheelchairs, two were wearing eye patches.

When it was Edgar’s turn, he walked on stage on his intact legs and stood board-straight while his name was read, his two good arms at his sides. He had lost nothing more than a few months of his life and gained no more than sadness.

Like everyone else, Fern and Edgar and Cricket and their parents went out for lunch after the ceremony. They slid into a booth in the diner, and Fern felt better the moment she was pressed up against her husband. His new medal was bright and sharp-edged.

“Are you okay?” she whispered into his ear.

“I’m ready for this day to be over,” he said back.

She smiled and took his hand. “Me too.”

All the other couples looked like they were having a day to remember. Edgar felt as if this celebration was designed to distract them from the question of who they would be after they had done whatever they did. His parents ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes with plenty of gravy while Fern’s parents ate plain dinner rolls with a thin smear of butter. All the town’s old women had been up all night baking pies and cakes, which were served to the overfull couples and their squalling babies. “Apple pie without cheese is like a hug without a squeeze,” the waitress said, so each piece came out with bubbling orange on top, and there was vanilla ice cream on the side too because, why not, they had earned it.

“I’m going to be in the car,” Paul said after a cup of black coffee. “My head.”

Evelyn asked the waitress for some ice and when it arrived, she took out a hand-sewn bag from her purse and filled it with cubes. “That’s so nice, Mother,” Fern said.

“It’s a mess because I made it. I’m no seamstress.” But this bag of ice was the warmest thing Fern had ever seen her mother create. She imagined her parents behind the closed bedroom door, him blind with pain, her lying beside, holding the cold to his forehead while she read an art magazine. Fern almost thanked her mother for giving her this gentle image. She knew she would come back to it.

Before the parents left, Edgar’s mother brought out a bag of gifts: a tiny silver spoon with a gem in the handle, a watch for Edgar, a tennis bracelet for Fern, all in pale blue boxes. The other families were spending more than they could afford on lunch while her mother-in-law insisted on clasping to Fern’s wrist a slither of cold diamonds.

—

Finally, the family of three went home and Fern gave the baby milk at the kitchen table while Edgar had a glass of whisky. He was home, finally home. Fern opened the windows now that it was cooling off outside. Cicadas started to saw, and the stars came out. Cricket went to sleep, and Fern came and poured herself a drink too, sat down with her husband. Fern and Edgar fell into each other, hands in hair, hands on skin, eyes open for a glance to check if this was true and real, then closed again. Fern felt like a weed growing crazily over Edgar’s body, vining him up, suffocating him. She felt green and vital, her arms thick and ropey. They swapped air, breathing the hot wind of the other, lightheaded and oxygen deprived.

Fern’s skin was still prickly from lack of touch. She was used to the feel of her own hands washing with soap, shaving, holding the arch of her foot while she trimmed her toenails. Edgar’s touch was so soft on her belly it almost hurt. When he slipped her dress over her head, she saw her body and it looked like something undone. Her skin was loose where it had stretched and shimmered with lines.

Edgar said, “God, look at how beautiful you are.”

“What?” she blurted out, truly shocked. Couldn’t he see how incomplete she was? He traced a line from the top of her forehead, over the jump of her nose, lips, chin and right down the middle of her. Fern would not have been surprised if he had split her right in half. He told her, “I’ve been wearing six layers of clothing for months.”

“Then let’s see it,” she said, and together they took his clothes off, buttons and undershirts and zippers and shorts and socks until he was nakeder than she. He looked down at himself. He really was pale. Moonlit.

“I remember,” she told him, and she did. Fern palmed his chest, his neck, his arms. She felt the topography of his back, pressed her fingers into the riverbed of his spine.

—

At the other houses, the boys took out special frames for their medals and measured to make sure they were hanging perfectly straight. Their pride would never be big enough to spend.