Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“I lost my glasses,” he told her.

“Do you have a spare pair?”

Edgar had never lost his glasses. The only time they were not on his face they were on the bedside table, safe. Edgar shook his head.

He got up, not wanting to admit how compromised he was. He cooked oatmeal but his eyes made things harder. He had to put his face directly over the drawer to find a big spoon. His feet were hungry for the old paths of his familiar house.

Glory sat down at the table, the slip of a silk robe hardly bothering to cover her.

She had plenty of pretty, even if Edgar could hardly see it. He was ashamed to tell her how blind he was. As if this woman would have to watch him turn decrepit and old right now, today. Their trip was a moment plucked out of real life, a moment in which two young-enough bodies tried to pretend that the future and the past did not exist, that there was nothing else but pleasure on the surface of the earth. Edgar did not speak during breakfast. Glory was a blur of skin, hair, the dark holes of eyes. Finally he said, “I really can’t see.”

“Shitty,” she said. “Do you want to smoke?” she said, taking a little green bud out of her metal cigarette case.

It was not the first thought, but it was not the last either, the thought that God had done this, taken the world away as punishment. Edgar did not say this out loud in case Glory was already thinking it. She worried something around her neck, the vague shape of her hand at her collarbone. He leaned close to see it: a gold cross on a chain. It was as if it had grown on Glory’s skin, seeded by uncertainty.

“Have you always had that?” Edgar asked.

“It was a gift from my husband or my father, I can’t remember which,” she said.

Men, landbound and restless for her return. Edgar wished it would go away again, leave them symbol-less and quiet.

“You don’t believe , do you?”

“It’s just jewelry,” she said, lighting a match.

Edgar did not want Glory so close to him. She smelled like dried sweat and her breath was smoke-stale. “Maybe I should take a nap,” he told her. He went below and curled in his bunk, which smelled of wet wool. It was dark and warm and too small and he tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edgar picked at a knot in the wood.

Fern came into his head. Her fingers, which had cooled him out of so many fevers. She who knew to bring hot lemon-water first, then cold juice, then a pot of boiling water with torn mint leaves and a towel for him to drape over his head to catch the steam. She who brought saltwater to gargle, lozenges to suck, pillows with fresh cases. She whom he had loved hardest when things were worst and when they were best.

Once, when Cricket was sick with a cough, Fern had gone into her room to help her back to sleep and come back to bed weeping. Edgar had panicked, sure that something was very wrong with his daughter.

“She’s okay,” Fern had said. “She’s going to be okay.” Somewhere in Africa people were dying of an incurable contagious disease and Fern admitted to Edgar that she had understood, holding her feverish girl in her arms, that she would take care of her daughter even if it meant that she herself would get sick and die. “And there’s no question. Just none,” she had said.

Edgar had not known if he would sacrifice himself. He felt terrible that he might hope to live beyond. He also thought that before the children were born Fern would have crawled in beside a sick Edgar and held a frozen washcloth on his forehead, prepared to die a few days after he did. Edgar remembered getting sick when the boys were two, a bad flu, and Fern had stood at the doorway, blown him a kiss. She had no longer been able to afford to infect herself. She had paid for every comfort — cold watermelon, cashmere socks, good books — and had delivered them on a tray, then scrubbed her hands and arms up to the elbow. Every part of her had been in his room except her body.

And his own mother? He tried to remember being cared for by her, but Mary took care of details and not people. For a party, she would sacrifice her own health and sanity. For sickness, she sent a nurse.

When Edgar’s cousin had died of a stroke at twenty-eight, Mary never once went to the hospital, but she did seek out every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever kissed, every teacher and coach, and when they all gathered for the funeral she had filled the room with fifty bouquets of white roses, platters and platters of roast turkey, pastas, sweating piles of vegetables, little mushroom pastries that waiters passed incessantly around, forcing everyone to take another and another. There were mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and a cream soup that was pale, mint green and went entirely uneaten. There were vegetable salads and fruit salads and seven different kinds of bread and pats of cold butter molded to look like daisies.

Edgar’s mother had set the roomful of people to the work of closure, that untrue moment. She watched the boy’s parents, her brother and sister-in-law, to see if the cure was working. Edgar’s mother’s makeup was right all day, no streaks, no smudges. The guests ate and ate and all of them cried when people stood to remember the dead boy. All except Mary. And in the morning, his mother had baked a breakfast cake, poured fresh juice from a frosted pitcher and sat down beneath the hum of a violin concerto to scrub clean the silver that had touched the lips of the grieving.

Edgar opened his eyes to the unfocus of the world and closed them again. Opened, closed. “I am basically blind,” he said. He had never thought this before, his eyesight so fixable in the modern world. He couldn’t see detail in anything more than a few inches from his face, and he was in the middle of the ocean. Edgar’s heart sped up and he did not have enough air and he wanted to sit but couldn’t in the tight space of the bunk. He jumped out, clambered upstairs and, dizzy, lay down on the deck of his boat.

The boat rocked. Beneath him was everything — the depths and depths, the cold blue a mile down and thousands of miles across. He could have rolled quietly off the Ever Land , let his body take water in, sunk or floated, and the sea would have made no sound. The birds would not have changed their pattern. Above him was the vast expanse of pale sky, the entire universe, now just a blue light. Land seemed very, very far away. His form was so small that it might as well not even have existed. Edgar, never seasick in his life, was seasick now. He reached his hands out and grabbed at the wood and what he wanted to find there was grass, leaves, soil. Fern — the earthen thing he wanted to find was Fern. “What have I done?” he said to the blue above and the blue below. There were things he wanted to see again: Cricket performing a dance in the living room, the boys trenching on the beach. All those elements he had gone seeking, all that wide-open, but what he needed was the landscape of his own life. What he felt could not be described as missing — one person wishing to be nearer to another. Instead, Edgar, sea-tossed and gripping the wooden deck with his fingertips to keep from throwing up — understood that his body, his self, was not individual but shared, that to put too much distance between himself and his wife, his children, was to disassemble something whole. He was sightless now, and what would go next if he stayed away? He was just a body, a million tiny mechanisms, any of which could go wrong. Water slapped at the hull of the tiny craft. Edgar could hear Glory washing dishes in the cabin. He imagined full black and then soundlessness too.

Edgar would have done anything to hold Fern’s hands over his closed eyes. Just for the feel of her particular palms. He knelt and then stood and that’s when darkness fell over him.