Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The wives, meanwhile, what of them? They had no commemorative anything to hang on their walls. No one acknowledged the thousands of times they’d swept the floors, the window trim they had repainted themselves, perched on ladders, their hair tied back in a kerchief and something quiet on the radio. Their babies were supposed to be the prize. The reupholstered sofa and chair sets, the matching rug, the place for everything and everything in its place. That was supposed to have been enough.

—

Edgar poured himself another drink. He fogged his glasses and cleaned them on a washcloth. He looked out the living room window at the sloppy world, so grey. The baby woke and nursed. “Cricket,” Edgar said, offering his pinky for her to grasp. He wanted to see his own face in hers and almost could, but then she looked creaturely again. “You are my daughter,” he said, and neither of them was convinced.

To Fern he said, “I want to keep writing. These things take a long time but I think I can do it. It feels good to get this stuff down.” He felt a separateness from his surroundings. Like he carried his own slightly poisonous atmosphere.

“Sure,” she said. She was glad he wanted to write — he was smart and big-of-heart and she wanted the world to have his thoughts — yet she wished he wanted only her. They had already missed so much of each other. She would have her own work, she told herself: the house would need to be cleaned, the wash would need to be hung on the line; the baby, the baby. Edgar, drinking his drink, looked like an unfinished drawing of himself. He was home but he was not necessarily whole. Fern had suffered corrosion too. Loneliness did that to a person. She would continue to find rust from this year’s hard weather. And life put holes in things, Fern knew.

“Did the protestors say anything to you today?” he asked.

“Protestors?” she lied.

“I spit on one of them because I wanted him to spit on me,” Edgar said. “Because I deserved it. He didn’t, though. He was too polite.” Edgar took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt.

“Did anyone see you do it?”

“No. I was at the back of the line. I apologized after. I felt so stupid. He looked like he was about to cry.”

“I’m glad you want to keep writing,” she said. “I’d love to read it someday.”

Cricket, on Edgar’s lap, made a noise like a caught bird. All three of them fell asleep on the couch, ice still whining in their cocktail glasses.

—

Edgar played on the floor with Cricket who had acquired the words pulp, fish and want . She said butter, dog, hello-hello, enough . She woke screaming for no good reason and Fern held her in the rocking chair, so tired, hating and loving the warm knot of a girl. Edgar went into his study and thwacked at the typewriter. All he had was the need to articulate his own wrongness, his existence thanks to the profound suffering of others.

He read books about coal miners who died deep underground, the earth caving in around them. He read books about manufacturing and pollution and wage-slavery. He read about workers who lost limbs to the heavy equipment and were fired for being useless. He read about the children of those men who stopped going to school so they could earn money. He read books about the cotton that had earned Fern’s family their fortune and the dark hands that had picked that cotton, the dark breasts that had wet-nursed Fern’s ancestors from babies into children, the dark bodies that had driven the white bodies in wide, comfortable cars through the green ache of the South, fields bursting with soft, white money. She knew and Edgar knew that eventually one of her relatives had become a famous abolitionist, that the story went in the right direction. She also knew and so did Edgar that while the family had embraced new values, the dollars they carried with them were old and plenty dirty.

He came home and watched the news. American forces burned Vietnamese villages. An offensive began in a city on the edge of the South China Sea that would last for weeks.

—

They did not know yet that Ben would die a few weeks later when the doctors attempted to perform a partial lobotomy, as if they could simply remove the troubled part of him. Slice and eliminate. That, in what would turn out to be the last moments of his life, he would sit in the dawn light preparing for the operation and jot down a note to Fern: Thanks for the sweets . Over all their years on earth together, all the ways she had betrayed him and cared for him, this was the tiny kindness that had risen to the top of his memory. She would lock the note in a metal box along with a sprig of Cricket’s hair and a photo of her and Edgar the summer they had fallen in love. Of all the objects in the world, these were the only three she could not risk losing. Fern would blame her parents always for Ben’s death. Her parents, who had not been able to leave her brother alone, who had continued to write checks to the doctors who promised that money equaled treatment equaled health. Her father would never recover from the twin loss of his son’s body and his daughter’s heart, and her mother, though heartbroken in her own way, would appear to continue her calm, cold walk through life. Evelyn would think of Fern’s anger towards her as one gift she could actually give to her daughter: she would take the blame.

Fern, young and sleepless, had once sat on the bottom step and listened to her mother and a group of friends in the kitchen, teacups and spoons tinking. The conversation had gone from tennis to golf to shoes, and then it had grown a little later, and they were drinking, and one woman said, “I was driving today, and I couldn’t hear anything because the boys were screaming at each other. I thought about driving off the bridge. I thought about how quiet it would be underwater.” Fern’s mother had confirmed: normal. To think of killing your littles, to think of dropping them from great heights, to think of the gentle or terrible demise.

The Tennessee house, after Ben’s death, had a new temperature. Cricket toddled around tugging at curtains and pressing anything that looked like a button while Fern washed the dishes and swept the floor. The motions were a memory in her muscles. All of it felt bloodless now.

Edgar closed his eyes but could not fall asleep. He saw the white sheet of the north, the sky sparking green and purple. He saw Runner at the door that dawn, walking steadily out. He had no idea where Runner had ended up. He might have died in the cold. He might have been eaten by wolves. He might have walked all the way to the edge of the ice to the place where the cold grey sea began. Edgar imagined him undressing there and jumping in. He imagined that the cold would have been violent, impossible for Runner to fight.

Or maybe he had gone to town, gotten a job. Maybe he lived in a house just like Edgar did. Maybe he was warm and happy. Maybe he was grateful.

—

On the third day after Ben died, Edgar convinced Fern to leave the house. They went to a department store where all of them, pretending there was such a thing as comfort, bought things. They chose two matching oak dressers, new plates, water glasses, wine glasses, juice glasses, champagne glasses, whisky glasses. Edgar bought a wooden rack for his nice shoes, and then he bought nice shoes to put on it.

Edgar bought and bought and bought and it had the desired effect: he hated shopping, he hated owning, he hated money, and each transaction hurt him. He wanted this surface hurt, this material hurt, which was a cut, a sting, a bruise. Fern usually liked new things, pretty things. She liked surface comfort and material comfort but today she was grief-battered and everything made her sorry: silverware, hats, eyeglasses, the chime of the perfume girls’ voices.