Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

A serial killer began and completed a spree. The economy was slow, inflation was high, people were stabbed and robbed in the subways in New York. There were gays in the streets and performance artists and cocaine; the music changed again and men grew long sideburns and everyone young was always taking their clothes off.

Edgar had a chapter of his novel published. Then on a winter Saturday, he sat at the kitchen table and held a thick stack of typed pages in his hands. They were heavy and felt warm. Almost like a living thing. Edgar looked at the title page: LUCKY by Edgar Keating . He found a large envelope, sealed the manuscript inside, wrote the name and address of an agent, and kissed the flap. Fern and the children were outside stomping snow into paths and chasing each other. Edgar was too nervous to say where he was going. “I’m taking the dog out,” he said. His whole body felt electrified. It would have been easy to talk himself out of mailing the package: the potential embarrassment, the concern that he had wasted his time, that he would have to find something else to do with his life. The day was deeply grey. A snowplow had created dirty piles on the sidewalk. It was not as bitter as it had been and Edgar was without gloves for the first time in weeks. On a busy corner he saw a thin man his own age wearing pressed plaid pants and jacket, a nice wool coat and sneakers. It took him a minute, but then Edgar knew. “Runner?” he said to the man.

“Holy shit, brother!” the man said. He had huge sideburns and curly hair that resisted the side-part it had been forced into. Edgar did not feel as grown up as Runner looked. Runner, whose wild and unapologetic life Edgar had sometimes wished for, a shadow of which formed the story in his novel.

The summary: he was there to close out his mother’s estate. He still lived in Alaska and was still married to the librarian but they had moved off the commune. “All we wanted was a real fucking toilet,” Runner said, “and we ended up with a big house, a couple of trucks, three kids and two law degrees.”

“You’re an attorney?” Edgar asked.

“I know. But I’m on the right side.” He told Edgar how he and his wife were working for the American Indian Movement. “There’s so much fucked-up shit in the past that it’s hard to know where to start,” he said. “Broken treaties, stolen objects, stolen land, stolen children, forced boarding schools, systematic rape. Mass murder. I could go on.” He looked Edgar up and down. “You seem happy,” he said.

Edgar squeezed the package in his hand. “Thanks. I am.”

Runner wrote down his address. He offered the guest room. He said, “We see the northern lights in winter and there’s almost no night in summertime. Come find me when you get tired of the city. I’ll take you salmon fishing. Bring the family.”

Runner, true to his name, held his briefcase up to his chest and jogged off. Edgar watched him until he turned the corner. For the first time, Edgar did not feel like he was living the worse life. Even the hippies were buying houses and having babies. They had all grown up.

Two weeks later the agent called with the news that Edgar’s novel would be published.

A few weeks after that Fern’s parents died.

Spring came, the roses bloomed, Fern dreamed about Ben. She talked to him in her head. Edgar waited impatiently for notes from his editor. Fern once again did not register for classes for the fall.

Fern thought of a hundred things she might have said to her parents about Ben, about herself, about being a woman, a mother, about love. She might have told her father that she didn’t blame him. She might have told her mother that she understood that it had not been fair for her either. Mostly though, their death was a quietness in Fern instead of an explosion. That her parents were no longer behind her on the path did not feel like an event; she had been walking away from them for a long time. Summer came again and the family packed for the island. They sailed, they swam. They plotted out a square of the cliff to dig up and followed the protocol Fern had learned in school — the grid, the logbook, the careful use of tools. Cricket discovered an arrowhead and toothbrushed it out of the soil and they found dozens of quahog shells with dark purple lips.

One afternoon Fern watched Will and James, the side-by-side of them, at work on a puzzle. She brought lemonade over and said, “You are so lucky to have each other. I hope you know that.” They did not even look up. They were years away from the treachery of adolescence, from the time they would turn to look for love elsewhere. She wanted them to always have each other, to never outgrow this perfect pairing. She imagined a corresponding set of girls for wives and a house big enough for everyone and one next door for Cricket — Cricket who did not have the luck to be a twin but also did not stand to lose her match.

The whole family went fishing and cooked chowder and sang sea songs on the lawn in the evening, slapping mosquitos under a sky that flashed with a coming lightning storm.

Then came August. Then came the call from the lawyer. The known world shook them off.

FERN HAD NOT NOTICED at first that the giant preferred to stay in the car when she paid for their motel rooms. “Mr. and Mrs.,” she always said, peering over the ledger to see the name. She was another woman, otherwise betrothed. She remembered the early days of her and Edgar, of walking around with her new last name like it was jewelry. This new version of herself would have a short life — a few weeks, sea to shining sea. Fern wanted to know if hunger was churning up in Edgar’s belly, hunger for her. Absence was the last tool she had and she had no way to see if it was working.

They had traveled over a thousand miles now, had eaten and slept, eaten and slept and the trip had developed its own life. The rooms were all cheap and often a little dirty and Fern found that she didn’t mind. She still startled sometimes when she looked in the backseat and saw three empty spots instead of three children and when, for a moment, she allowed herself to think of the distance between them and the speed with which she was driving farther away she had the feeling of having climbed to a high mountain where the air was thin. Fern was breaking a physical law, unbinding herself from the lives she had created. This feeling of airlessness also brought a high. She was a person responsible for no one else.

Fern hummed along to the pop station to songs she somehow knew even though was sure she had never heard them before. That was the genetics of this music — a virus, caught upon contact. “You can feel autumn in the air,” she said.

“Time to head south anyway,” said Mac. As they cloverleafed onto US 55 southbound they both laughed and simultaneously reached to crank the volume button to celebrate. It was that easy to solve the cold. The signs switched from Des Moines, Lincoln, Cheyenne to St. Louis, Jackson, New Orleans. The roadside was deep green and overgrown sooner than they would have expected. Vines worked their way across the land, tangling.

Fern thought of her ancestors, early settlers of this big country. They had spread out, moved a little farther west, seeded the Kentucky hills with their good name. They bought plantations bursting with cotton and they bought bodies with darker hands to gather the white bursts off the branch. Money accumulated. The houses grew bigger, and the purebred Americans owned ever more stable-hands, maids, nannies, ever more darker hands to tend the fields. Their wives were more beautiful with each generation, bound into shape by corsets made from the bones of whales.

The sons of the sons of the sons took over their fathers’ plantations, ran for government under their fathers’ trusted names. But soon when some of the young men came home they had a harder time watching the darker hands in the fields knowing that the people, the men and women — whole bodies, selves, the sons of sons could now admit were attached to the hands — were a line item in their lists of holdings. This many acres, this many bushels, this many males, this many females.