Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Mac’s mother took over the planning of the event without asking for opinions. She took the girl shopping for a dress and insisted upon the one with the widest, most dramatic skirt. She wanted bows, fat white bows on the chairs, and she wanted red roses on every surface.

Meanwhile, the temperature dropped slowly. Fall changed the air from half-water back to all air, and everyone felt as if they had just woken up. September passed, but the change grew noticeable in October, when Claire began to look different. Her hair seemed soothed by the new weather, her skin was not rashy any longer. Her eyes looked clearer. Mac said, “You look so nice,” before they went into the school building.

November, and she was prettier still. She started smoking. Had she grown taller? Mac wondered. Her legs were very long and lustrous, and somehow tanned, despite the season. She wore skirts that were tight in the waist and silk blouses, shoes with a small heel, lipstick.

The other boys started to congratulate the giant on his good work. How did he know, they wondered, that the barely-okay girl was about to get so beautiful? Mac, though, grew more and more uneasy. He was notching down, his inferiority to his fiancée increasing by the day.

Mac and Claire did soon stand in a church presided over by one of the city’s many Father O’Briens and make their lifelong promises. They ruined the sheets in the hotel room, took a weekend up north and walked in the woods after the season’s first snow.

Six months after his wedding, Mac visited his mother. He passed her slumped on her chair, seemingly asleep, carried the bags of groceries he had brought to the kitchen and unpacked them. He poured the beans and flour and sugar into the correct jars on the shelf. He cleaned the last of the butter from the dish and placed a new stick there. He rearranged the fruit in the drawer and took out the piece of greening cheese. How quiet it was. How nice to be in his mother’s house without her telling him what to do.

He sat in the living room opposite his mother for half an hour, waiting for her to wake. Finally, he grew worried that she would upset her bedtime if she continued to sleep. He got close and began to sense a wrongness. Her knee beneath his hand was cold. The giant picked his mother up and held her like a child, and she was nearly that small in his arms.

Claire came to him a few days later with a piece of paper in her hand. Condition: pregnancy. A doctor had signed it at the bottom. As if she was trying to get out of school, out of work. An excuse to stay in bed. “How dare you trap me like this?” she said. She had a faceful of makeup on, and a plaid skirt he had not seen her wear before. She looked like someone trying to turn famous.

He had had a plan, to raise children without worrying about raising giants. An easy sperm donation. No one had to know. He had not expected her to get pregnant so easily. Mac looked at her fair belly, in which resided a tangle of cells. He wanted to kneel down and press his ear to that wall of skin, listen for deformations. “Can they tell if it’s normal?” he asked.

“It’s a sin not to have the baby,” she said. “But if it’s a giant, you can keep it; if it’s normal, it’s mine.”

“But we’re married. I assume that means we’ll raise our children together.”

“Look,” said Claire. “When we met, you were the best I was going to get. Now I think I have a chance at a better life.”

Claire then produced a second set of papers from her purse. They were legal-size and covered in writing. This time, the signature at the bottom was his mother’s. “Little squirrel,” Claire said. There was a number at the bottom with a dollar sign preceding it.

“She played the lottery every week for twenty years,” Mac said, “but I didn’t know she had won anything.” The number seemed impossible: $927,000.13. Claire explained that her half of the money would support her for the rest of her life if she was careful.

“You’re already leaving me?” he asked.

“Now I’m pretty and I have money in the bank. I have to look out for my future.”

“And our baby’s future?”

“Your baby or my baby, not ours.” Claire said, “If the baby is yours, you’ll have to make your own nursery. I wouldn’t recommend buying the smallest sized clothes, either.”

He went to a store full of pinks and blues and felt larger than he had ever felt in his life among the tiny objects. Shoes that he could have worn on his fingers, miniature hats, pants no more than a few inches long. There were little tables and little chairs and little toilets and little fake telephones. The giant crouched down and picked up a pair of socks from a low shelf. For a doll? he wondered. And he put them in his basket because he wanted to rescue them.

The salesgirls avoided him at first, but got braver the longer he stayed. “I just need the very basics,” he said. He did not explain that there was only a fifty-fifty chance of him getting to be a father after all. The brunette said, “Bathtub, towel, christening dress, pram, crib.”

“I can do that,” he said.

“I wasn’t done. Sheets, bassinet, spit-up rags, diapers, pins, wipes, rash cream, books, mobile, teddy bear, pants, dresses, shirts, pajamas, socks, hats, blankets for summer, blankets for winter, first aid kit, gauze for the umbilical cord, bottles, bottle brush, soft spoons, plastic plates, high chair, rubber ducky, a book about colors, a book about seasons, a book about Mommy and Daddy.”

“Stop,” said Mac.

He bought everything she said he should and it felt like insurance. Here was this room, all ready, drawing the baby towards it.

The day came when Claire stopped in the middle of painting her fingernails and said, “Get over here,” and she slapped Mac hard across the face. “Are you kidding me? It already hurts this much and I’m just getting going. What have you done to me?” Her belly was massive, much bigger than average, and Mac pretended to be neutral, but he thought the win was his.

The doctor stood between her legs and received the head, the shoulders, the body. He declared, “A boy!” and Mac and Claire both yelled, “How big?” before he could even congratulate them.

“It’s perfect. He’s perfect. Not a bone too large.”

The doctor wiped his brow as if he had been the one to labor the creature out. The baby looked to Mac like a human heart, purple and beating, and when Mac went to reach for him, Claire pushed his hand away. “We made a deal,” she said. “Giant baby: yours; normal baby: mine.”

“I wasn’t always giant,” he said, but she was not listening.

She let him hold the baby that night, and he was as light as a kitten. He was still belly-rounded and yet to unfurl.

When Claire fell asleep, he whispered things: “I am your father and I love you no matter how far away you get.” Again and again: “I am your father and you are my son. My son, my son, my son.”

Mac never got rid of the baby’s things. He did find other uses for them — pots and pans in the crib, his own clothes in the dresser, laundry in the small bathtub. He always felt that his boy, who Claire named Matthew, lived there with him a little bit.

Years passed with no news of the pair. He did not know where they were. Each year, on Matthew’s birthday, Mac baked a small yellow cake, frosted it and sunk the correct plus-one-to-grow-on number of candles. Each year, he put one slice of the cake in the freezer for Matthew to eat when he finally came home. The rest, he forked into his big red mouth.

And then, thirteen years later, a pink envelope arrived, marked Palm Springs, USA . Within it were these sentences: It’s your wife here. I preferred the baby and little kid years. The boy is getting too large. An address followed.