Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The journey had been worth it already. Any other life seemed foolish. Edgar would gladly have lived this day a thousand times more. Edgar thought about Fern and he felt kindness towards her. If he could have, he would have told her that it was not the other woman so much as the other life, the other Edgar. If he could have extracted Fern from the particulars of their marriage — their parents, their house, their losses, their years, he thought he would have been just as happy to have her body instead of Glory’s on this deck — happier even.

Edgar and Glory felt far away, but in fact, on the big chart, the boat was bobbing just offshore. It was deep water and very blue, and though the sailors could not see land, they were well within their nation’s borders.

After a nap Edgar raised the sheet and they rolled over the small waves. A pod of dolphins finned the surface and surfed the wake. Their grey brightened the water. Glory said, “Are we lucky or are there always so many animals out?” Edgar thought it was both. Glory hung her legs over, her graceful legs, and laughed with the sprinting dolphins who came in close to play.

“They say dolphins are the spirits of dead sailors,” Edgar said.

“That’s cheery.”

“It’s supposed to be a nice thought.”

“I like them better as fish.”

Above the wreckage, Glory and Edgar set up the charcoal grill on deck and charred the flying fish, which were sweet and bony. They ate apple slices and drank cold gin from a bottle Glory had dropped overboard with a rope around its neck.

Sunset filled the entire sky. Fire at all the edges. There was no wind, not even enough to shake the sails. “Doldrums,” Glory said. “Isn’t that something bad?”

“Nothing else to do now,” Edgar said, and she started to unbutton his shirt, but he held her hand. He did not want to break the surface of this perfect moment. He said, “Let’s not.”

“What do you mean?” she hissed. Why else were they there?

“I just want to be quiet. I just want to listen.” Glory rolled her eyes and poured another drink. She found a joint and fumbled for her lighter.

They slept on deck under a sky ferocious with stars. Edgar looked up at all the universe and he felt what people always feel: the sudden truth that he was a speck. He was an air-breather with only a few feet of deckspace and two triangles of fabric keeping him from fathoms and fathoms of water. He had chosen this. He had needed to walk out of his life for a time, even to walk out of himself. The experience he wanted was to be nowhere, no future, no history. Not the father of a girl whose pockets were always full of stones and feathers or two boys who were born a minute apart and stayed that close. Not the husband of a woman who had seen the shards of his sadness. Edgar wanted to be reduced to his own small self. The water rocked the hull. Edgar felt pleasure, which was what he wanted to feel. He took his glasses off and rested them on his chest. He was nearly blind without them, everything reduced to a smear of color. At his wish, the world quietly erased itself.

FERN WAS NEVER SURE where Edgar had gotten the magic mushrooms. He had taken the car someplace, been gone all day, showed up later at their little house on the Army base with the first smile of its kind she had seen on him in a year. He said, “I want to do something together. Don’t freak out.” When Cricket had been bathed and read to and her warm, three-year-old head had been kissed by both of her parents, Fern and Edgar each chewed two small mushrooms that tasted half-rotten and metallic and stuck in their teeth, and thirty minutes later the room took on a purple-green hue and Edgar started singing a song from a musical he had seen as a child and had not thought of since and Fern sat on the floor with an apple for an hour without taking a bite.

He said, “Did it really happen that we put a man on the moon?” and Fern said, “I think so. We watched it.” Later they went outside and said, “Outside!” like they had never really been there before, and they hadn’t, not this way, not with the grass this sharp and the leaves on the trees so individual and the sky — the sky! — dark and rich and flush with stars because they were on a tiny planet currently facing away from the sun and the universe actually might have been endless — endless! — and here they were, two bodies, maybe three hundred pounds of human between them, and they were both alive and they had made a child who was beautifully asleep. “I miss your brother,” Edgar said. It was a risk to bring this up and they rarely did but tonight Fern felt alive enough to talk about the dead. “Thank you for loving him,” she said. “I miss him too, but I’m glad he’s free of it all. He didn’t need to live in that place.” She looked at Edgar and his skin shimmered with color. “I do not forgive my mother,” Fern said. “I feel sorry for her, but I don’t forgive her.” Edgar nodded. They stood at the fenceline and looked up into the peach tree that was about to explode into blossom any day and they held hands — hands! — and they did not let go even when dawn flushed them with so much light that they felt overexposed.

—

The next day they took turns playing with Cricket, eyes sandy and burning, drinking glass after glass of water while the other slept. It felt good to be thankful.

That afternoon in the mail there was a letter for Fern. “Radcliffe?” Edgar asked, reading the address in the top left corner.

“Oh,” said Fern. There had been a fight, like a dozen others they had had in the year after Ben had died. Edgar had just received a postcard from Runner in Alaska who said he had married the Inupiat librarian and they were living off the land near Nome and that he had just killed his first seal. Edgar had said, “People are living communally and growing their own food and hunting or fighting for civil rights and we’re sitting here on an Army base in fucking Tennessee,” and she had said, “You were the one who insisted on this life. We have a three-year-old. I don’t know how to be a mother on a commune,” and he had said, “You know, women don’t have to be only mothers anymore. Don’t you want more for your daughter?” Fern had shut herself in the bathroom, furious. He was right and he was terrible. That night she had sent away for an application to Radcliffe because it was the best college she knew of and she thought she would never get in, thus proving to Edgar, to her mother, that she was nothing but a housewife. In the months while she had waited for the answer, the possibility that she could be accepted was a thin but bright crack. She had counseled herself not to want it, but she had.

Fern took the envelope. We are pleased to offer you a place in the incoming class, the letter read. “Oh,” she said again. She expected Edgar to be angry that she had sent the application without talking to him but instead he grabbed the letter and whooped. “This is amazing! This is exactly what we need!”

She wanted to be a mother and a wife but maybe she could also be her own self, separate from the needs of others. This possibility kicked at her from the inside. Just like that? Send one stack of pages to Cambridge and a door to yourself opens?

With the mushrooms still a vague fizz in their veins, Edgar and Fern hugged. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “I’ll finish my book, you’ll study, Cricket will grow up near the ocean.”

Out there on the edge of the country, new soil was a promise.

—

They had rented a cottage to begin with and when they drove onto their new street they found big trees and beautiful old houses all freshly painted and all the children in the yards were clean and white. They also found that Edgar’s mother was already in residence in a fancy hotel nearby. Road weary, the family sat at the table while Mary, wearing a red pantsuit with a huge collar, her hair trimmed into a new blond bob, served martinis. She said, “The good news is that I have already done a lot of research on houses.”