Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Cricket wilted at her mother’s feet, sat on the floor playing with a stuffed giraffe. She was too small to understand what it meant to die, but she seemed to know that she needed to be easy to love, that her parents would not find her otherwise.

—

On the third night after Ben died, Fern and Edgar and Cricket lay there in the big bed and Fern thought, This is what it feels like to be married today. Because the feeling was utterly different from being married the day before, the year before, the day they had made those vows. There had been a short stretch at the beginning when being married was a recognizable state — eggs were cooked, walks were taken, parties were attended, and in the dark, their bodies were two ropes, knotted and loosed, knotted and loosed.

Fern felt the shape of Edgar’s legs against the back of her own. The scratch of them, the temperature. She could feel his heart beating inside his chest, tapping out its music. “Tell me something about when you were away,” she finally said.

He thought for a moment. “By the end I got so used to cold so that I hardly even felt it.”

Fern knew that this was a prayer for her. A wish that she would learn to adapt to the new weather in her heart.

“On the night I was walking back home from calling you, I saw a huge figure approaching. The ice was blue that night and this creature lumbered out. My gun was in my backpack, unloaded. I didn’t know if it was a person or an animal. And then the figure got closer and I realized that it was a polar bear. A huge white bear and he was coming straight towards me. He glowed in the moonlight and his eyes were completely black. I didn’t know if I should run or play dead. It was so beautiful and so terrifying and I couldn’t turn away. It felt like this was what I had been waiting for all that time. Like whatever he did to me was what I deserved.”

Fern knew that her husband must not have been eaten because here he lay. But her breath was caught in her throat. She squeezed Edgar’s hand.

“The bear came right up to me and stood there, and I could smell the sea on his breath. It felt like he had a question he wanted me to answer. I put my hands up in surrender and waited to be eaten or carried away. I told him that I had a baby, as if he could understand or care. He just looked at me and looked at me. I knew I was cold by watching the snow gather on his body. He scratched at the ground by my feet and then he stood up on his back legs, towering over me, and then he turned and lumbered away again.”

Fern could smell the sea and oil on that bear.

“I feel like he understood. Like Cricket saved me.”

There it was: that thick, slippery scar tissue Fern had known she would find on her husband. “I believe you,” Fern said. “I believe you that it was beautiful.”

MATH WAS MATH and Cricket did not care which passengers would arrive first if two trains left Pittsburgh at 10:14 a.m. and 11:51 a.m. respectively, one going forty miles per hour and one going sixty-six. “Whichever one does,” she said. “Call the station and find out.” The math teacher did not appreciate this kind of attitude and she had a special look she gave to say so. It was all eyebrows — her whole face withdrew behind their shadow. The teacher said, “How are we ever supposed to get out of this recession if we have citizens like you?” Cricket scribbled on her paper and tried to seem like a person who cared about numeric facts. After a while she raised her hand and asked to go to the bathroom.

Cricket soaped her hands and wrists and rinsed until her skin squeaked. Her fingers were bright pink from the hot water. She looked in the mirror, checked her chin to inspect the progress of a bruise she did not remember getting. It was not better and not worse than it had been in the morning. Then the lights went off. Cricket held her breath. It was black-dark in the bathroom — she could see absolutely nothing. She imagined a knife murderer standing in one of the stalls. And she thought she could hear breathing, now that she listened, but she could not tell where it was coming from. The space around her seemed vast and instinct made her stretch her arms wide, feel around in the air for a boundary. She found the wall and began to follow it towards the door. She wanted not to make noise but her body had weight and when she placed her feet, no matter how carefully, there was a sound. She imagined a trapdoor, a secret way out, a hiding place. The wall was cold and black. The air was warm and black. Her breath was hot and black.

Which is when someone came in close, body and arms, arms that slid around her waist. Lips were a surprise. Lips and tongue. It was only a short moment but it felt like a long one, that mouth hot and wet and her own against it and the arms keeping her. Cricket wrestled away, ducked under and out, and she ran from the room into the hallway, whitelit. Her eyes did not want to adjust. The floor was cleaned to a shine. Cricket could not see her face in the floor but she could see the reflection of her small form, the slight blue of her dress, black nicks of shoes on her feet. The reflection was fast moving, poured across the floor like liquid.

Cricket did not turn to see if anyone came out of the bathroom, and she did not hear a second pair of footsteps. The school looked just as it had — plain and organized and sad.

Cricket huddled at her desk in the safety of a set of fractions. Her insides were turning.

“Cricket, please,” the math teacher said. “This is not so horrible as you think.” The woman stood over her, turtleneck and shin-length skirt and large wire-rimmed glasses. Cricket tried to quiet her shaking feet and hands. The math teacher was certainly not going to be the person she went to. It was not the story the older girls told about kissing. Yet: her lips felt warmer from the kiss, her first. This had been a soft kiss, violent because it was uninvited, because Cricket did not know who was on the other end, but gentle. Here were three-fourths plus one-fifth, one of one kind and one of another, and what did it equal? She tried to recall the details: the person was taller than she and did not have a kid smell. The person had a smooth face. The person was confident. It was a woman, she thought, which was embarrassing and awful and also not.

The math teacher came to stand above Cricket and waited until her pencil began to manipulate numbers on the page. Cricket’s hand attended to the integers and their additions and divisions, but her head was still in the dark of the girls’ bathroom. Cricket did not think she had been kissed by either of the Hancock brothers who were the sweethearts of other girls’ emergent fantasies, nor Adam or Stuart, the nerdy boys who might someday have wanted to be on the other end of her mouth. The person she imagined, whose lips had been on hers? Miss Nolan. Kind Miss Nolan, smart Miss Nolan. Too tall to match face-to-face, but maybe she had knelt on the cool tiles? Cricket imagined wrapping her arms around the woman’s waist, the cinch of her skirt, the tuck of her blouse, the long waves of dark hair. She would rest her head on Miss Nolan’s chest, listen for the beating heart. This story unmade the fear almost completely — the moment, which in fact had been terrifying, changed to a gift if Cricket told it the right way.

When math was over and Miss Nolan came back, she smelled like the outdoors. Her hair had been wind-tossed and her cheeks were pink. Cricket tried to meet her eye, to show recognition for what they had shared, because by now, Cricket was sure it had been her teacher in the dark. By now, no other pair of lips seemed possible. She knew it was inappropriate, and perhaps Miss Nolan was embarrassed. She would get fired if anyone knew. But love was unwieldy. Cricket already understood that.