Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

To Mac, Fern said, “I didn’t realize until my wedding night that nothing had happened. I remember feeling so much more ashamed for how little I knew than I ever had for the indiscretion.”

“Did Edgar know the rumors?”

“I’m sure he did. Maybe part of what made me fall in love with him was that he forgave me for something without ever bringing it up.” She paused. “I wonder if my parents would have let me marry Edgar if not for that story. I’m sure they were already talking with other, better families before. Without Frederick Dawson my whole life might have been different.”

Mac leaned against the doorframe. His silence was always warm, an invitation rather than a wall.

Fern said, “My parents and my twin brother are dead and my husband and I have each done a terrible thing to the other and when I think about my children I feel like I’ve left body parts behind.”

“We can be back tomorrow if we drive all night.”

“We have to find your son.”

“I have to. You don’t have to.”

The giant’s big head touched the top of the car and static electricity pulled his hair upward. “I don’t have any real friends,” Fern said. She thought of the black miner and his wife, the other women on base, the crisp, perfect Cambridge neighbors. Everyone had either been too different or too similar. Fern and Edgar had lost them because they were poor or hated them because they were rich. She thought of Ben, to whom she wished she had been more loyal. He might have been all right if he had stayed near her. “You are my friend,” Fern said. “I’m coming with you to find your son. We’re already halfway.”

“Thank you,” Mac said.

“Two conditions: I don’t want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee and I need to use the phone.”

Fern stood outside the movie theater and dialed, collect, her own number. Each ring seemed longer than the ring before it. “Hello?” she kept practicing. But no one was there to answer. They’re all fine, she told herself. They’re probably out drinking a milkshake. She pictured James and Will building a tower designed especially so that it could be collapsed while Cricket strung a series of tiny glass beads on a silk thread. They were probably having the best time, now that boring old Mother was gone.

Mac was standing at the car when she returned, his face bright, and he was holding a bucket of movie theater popcorn. “Come on,” he said, laughing.

They sailed through the day. They ate the buttered kernels and watched the world in front of them open up. It was so quiet, just the sound of the wheels on the road, the wind. They did not talk or listen to music. They just drove and ate and watched the world appear and pass. The road turned and new scenery revealed itself. A raccoon lumbered out of the way and fled into the bushes.

“The first time I came to the South was when I visited my great-grandmother here as a kid. My parents sent me alone on the train,” Fern said.

“What was she like?”

“My great-grandmother? Tiny and terrifying. She washed her face with old-fashioned laundry powder and then put petroleum jelly on after. For a week we were driven around to museums and parks by Mr. Collins, her chauffeur, who was very dark-skinned and never spoke. ‘Why won’t he say hello to me?’ I remember asking. Great-grandmother was angry. She said, ‘Talking is not his job. I keep him because he knows how to be quiet.’ She looked at me and must have seen that I was upset. ‘Don’t worry, I doubt he’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘Not all black men are.’”

“Were your parents like that too?” Mac asked.

“They knew Great-grandmother was racist and they would have told you they disagreed. But my father also forbade our cook from using garlic or onions because he thought it was too Italian and therefore low-class.”

Mac knew what it meant to live as an outsider. He was a minority of one, and not part of a group anyone was fighting for.

“Minds are hard to change,” he said.

She thought of the palm reader, her own expectations. “Yes,” she said.

Fern took his hand. It was buttery. This was not an answer or a question. Outside the window, anything green overgrew itself.

“If you could go anywhere?” she asked.

“India,” he said. “For the elephants.”

The bucket of popcorn was generous, meant to occupy two sets of hands through two hours of horrors and delights, and Fern and Mac went back and forth between eating and twisting their fingers back up together. They never got tired that day and they never rested. “Tell me more of your story,” Fern said, and he began.

—

Mac met his future wife during a high school summer when they had nothing to do all day. The teenagers all gathered in the park under a shade tree and fanned themselves with fat leaves or books or their own sticky hands. It was too hot to think or act. The girls put their heads on the laps of the boys until they could not stand the extra heat. They whined like puppies.

Claire was not a pretty girl, but she was a girl. Her sister brought her into the group, otherwise she never would have been tolerated. Little sisters could come if they were worshipful enough. Giants could come if they brought treats.

Claire took the giant’s cold drink, held it until her palms hurt. Her hair was unsmooth and unfixed. Mac knew that he had earned no right to be choosy. It was within this conciliatory fog, the day too bright to ask questions that Mac and Claire first kissed. His lips were fat as fingers on her little mouth, and she was salty and grassy-tasting.

The month passed. Behind the widest trees, the not-very-pretty girl with a not-very-pretty bow in her hair on his huge lap; in her parents’ house, in the basement, both of them shirtless on the concrete, which was almost, almost cool.

She said, “I don’t deserve you,” and Mac thought that maybe she was right, maybe he was just one notch better than she, wrongly sized but good-looking otherwise. He was thankful, so thankful not to be the less loved party, to have a hold on the ropes keeping his heart in.

“You are so good to me,” he said, and that part was true.

Claire braved the oven and baked blondies for her giant. She delivered them to his door in an antique tin with a red ribbon around it. Mac’s mother answered. She brought the girl in and asked her to kneel down at her altar so that they might pray together. Claire would hear the story, as all visitors had, and she would say, “Wow,” because she was polite and wanted the mother of her love to approve of her. Every teenage girl has within her a lurking gene to make the parents think of her as a daughter, no matter if she loves the boy or hates him, expects to marry him or leaves him by midnight.

—

When it was time for Claire to leave, the giant ducked under the doorjamb to kiss her. Mac’s mother was standing there when he closed the door, her face pink. “Oh, oh,” she squealed. “She’s just perfect. And she’s not too good for you.” It was the same thought Mac himself had had, but hearing it did not feel good.

“Yes, she’s very nice. And not very pretty.” He tried to celebrate this fact with a smile.

“You’ll ask her, then?” Mac’s mother asked.

“For?”

“For her hand, you idiot. No one ever expected this. No one ever thought it was possible.”

He knew it was true. That night, he looked in the mirror, which was really three mirrors that he had nailed to the wall in a tall line so that he could see his whole self at once. He looked good when he stood alone. His belly was flat and his arms were muscled and his neck had a mannish character to it. Good proportions, good hair. The trouble came when a normal-size body stood beside him.

The proposal took place under the original kissing tree. He drew a ring out of his pocket, the ring his great-great-grandmother had worn. The size of his palm did nothing to make the tiny diamond look bigger, but Claire wrapped her arms around as much of Mac as she could and pressed her face into his chest and wept, saying over and over again, “Yes, darling, yes, darling, yes, take me as your loving wife.”