Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Lucky for you, it’s Saturday,” she said. Cricket turned on the hose and they wetted the shirts they had worn the day before and sponged themselves down. Their skin puckered in the cold water. Their scalps ached when Cricket doused them.

The children ranged around the yard gathering wood. They wore their headbands and painted slashes of color under their eyes with their mother’s lipstick. They discussed new names: Windfeather, said James. Deerpaw, said Will. Cricket already had an Indian name, they agreed. She was the lucky one, born better.

—

In another version of their house and yard before anything had been built there, before there was such a thing as the city, a non-imaginary Native family had lived in this same spot. When the ships began to arrive from the Old World, these people were the first to make contact. An anthropologist had gathered the family together and drawn pictures of them with their long braids, their leather clothes, their New World faces. The anthropologist told the Indians that they were beautiful savages, so much closer to nature. To him, their beauty was like that of the tiger, the peacock. The anthropologist’s painting traveled with him like a treasure until America was America. It was presented, along with a portfolio of others like it, to the young country’s President as a gift, but he refused to hang them. “The Indians are an obstacle to expansion,” he said, “and nothing more.”

By then, the tribe that had covered the land around the bay had mostly died off. First, from foreign fever, next from foreign slaughter. A few members remained, adopted some of the new religion, went to the new schools, most lost their language. Their descendants still lived nearby, though Cricket never thought of Boston as a place where Indians could be. The whole idea of them was too storybook, too long-distance. People like that, she thought, needed the huge expanse of a western desert. People like that could not live in this kind of density. Where there would have been fishermen out in a canoe at night, stirring the phosphorescent sea with their oars, Cricket thought only of lean men running long, dry distances to catch up to a herd of antelope. Where there would have been roundhouses made of birch bark, Cricket only imagined teepees.

Of course she knew the story of the first Thanksgiving with its benign savages and needy settlers, and had made the construction paper pilgrim hats and Indian feather headbands each year at school, had even visited the site where the colonists came ashore, but the story was so diluted by the modern city that she could not hold on to it. If the ghosts of that long-ago family still circled this backyard, Cricket did not sense them. If their Massachusetts descendants lived in the neighborhood, some strain of that old blood in one of the brick houses, she would have been sorry to know it. She would have been sorry to know that her version was an invention, the truth infected with hundreds of years of tragedy.

—

After breakfast, the children, in their plaid pants and T-shirts and headbands, took to the neighborhood but did so under cover of hedges, hid behind parked cars. Likely, they were seen but written off as kids at play. Their Lost Dog posters were still up and the corners were sagging. They missed Maggie more and not less than ever. They needed her. Cricket asked the same question she had been asking every few hours: When should we assume no one is coming back? The answer had been recalculated each time and pushed farther back. At first she had told herself not to worry until bedtime. The next day she had decided her parents would be home by the time school let out. Then it was the next morning. Now she was giving the world the rest of the weekend to return to sense-making.

The three braves sneaked into the backyard belonging to the boys’ friend Tommy because Will remembered a raspberry bush there. Tommy’s parents were unfashionably in love for their stage of marriage. The children would not have been able to articulate the problem, but they picked up on their parents’ discomfort around the couple. By that time, husband-and-wifedom should be transactional, functional, domestic duties divided up, a weekly date to the movies, monthly love-making in a completely darkened room after each partner had showered. Without anyone having explained it, the other couples all understood this. Tommy Smith was an only child to boot, which made all the sex the adults knew his parents were having utterly indulgent, producing no concrete result. Enjoyment was not the work of the upper class. To prove that they were worthy of their wealth, they had all silently agreed to remain in the upper margins of unhappiness. Some had fun in private, in secret, but the volume was kept low in public. No one deserved fortune and joy both.

Cricket and the boys crouched, feathers in their hair and leather strips around their foreheads, looking into the Smiths’ kitchen window where a pile of dishes sat in the sink and the woman of the house, in cutoff shorts and a blouse, cut a fat slice of butter for her bread. She was reading a paperback. They imagined that she was listening to the radio, something jazzy with a throaty singer who certainly dressed in sequins. And then, as if scripted, Mr. Smith walked into the room with his long hair wet, wearing nothing but a towel, which he dropped. Cricket wanted to cover her brothers’ eyes but did not manage it in time.

“Don’t look,” she said, looking.

“Sure,” they said back, looking. There was a lot of smashed-mouth kissing before the locked pair fumbled away and left a buzz in the children’s ears. Tommy, poor Tommy, the boys thought. Was he hiding out in his room? Had he been sent away to a wretched aunt for the morning so that his parents could be alone and awful? This proved it: civilization was no good. The boys wanted the big grassy plains more than ever. Animals and meat, tribes and fire. Cricket, if she had been alone and unwatched, would have climbed dangerously high in the big maple in order to peer through the upstairs window. In her life, she had never seen love happen this way and she wanted it not to end. She wanted, someday, to be on the inside of that kiss.

“Come on,” Will said. “That was disgusting.”

“Yes,” said Cricket because they would never trust her again if she said how she really felt.

At the next house a man sat at a big wooden desk with reading glasses and a stack of bills. The thick brown carpet had vacuum marks in it. The walls were painted beige and were undecorated. The hand on the grandfather clock ticked along. Nothing mattered in there, the children were sure of it. This was every Saturday and would continue to be, and the weather did not matter and the happenings of the world did not matter. Adults worked hard to shave down the inconvenient and difficult edges — love smoothed over, war and death sanded out — until all that remained was a midline. A routine. Cricket was old enough to know that she was meant to inherit this same equator, to resist the pull of her own north and south. She was meant to find a good-enough life and settle into its quiet.

Cricket, surprising herself, backed up, picked up a big rock and threw it through the window. Her brothers looked at her in shock and reverence. They would never not love her, no matter what she did for the rest of her life. This was why she was their leader. In the long second that followed, the man looked up and the kids ducked down, and then they ran as fast as a herd of deer, ducking and dodging and taking cover. Maybe he had seen them, their backs, just a flash. Maybe they would be caught and dragged to the police. Regret arrived reflexively, then subsided.

In the park, the three hid behind an ancient maple. A small dog pooped in the dead grass and its owner looked the other way. No one seemed to be hunting them. What was actually in front of them were well-kept Victorian houses, rutless sidewalks, streets with yellow dividing lines. What they saw: elk, buffalo, a ring of mountains dark as a bruise, snow already dusting their tops. They could smell their campfire, they could smell the bears that lived nearby, their oily hides. The wish was to run, fast and unyielding, and they climbed out of the tree and took off, crossing their city as outsiders until their lungs burst and their eyes watered and they collapsed in their own backyard, a heap. Other days had mattered, other days had been good, but these three children were in no way untrue, this day. They were absolutely themselves.