Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The next thing Edgar knew he was in the water and Glory was throwing the life preserver in and diving in after him and he was fine, spitting but fine, and he took the ring but pushed the woman away. “Don’t fucking push me, you asshole, you fucking asshole. Were you trying to drown yourself? What the fuck is this? I come out here for a few weeks of fun and you won’t even fuck me anymore and then I have to save your life? I don’t know how to fucking sail. What the fuck am I supposed to do if you die?”

Edgar said, “I didn’t mean to. I think I fell.” He was pale.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, but fuck.”

“It’s time to turn back,” Edgar said, holding on to the ring. He was still dizzy and he still couldn’t see and he still felt cored out.

“Which shore are we closer to?” she asked. “I’m sure they have optometrists in Bermuda.”

“We’re about halfway. But I want to go home.”

Glory would have preferred to keep sailing east. Her skin was thirsty for the pale blue water they had been traveling towards. An unreached island was a special kind of disappointment. “Fine. Can you do it?” It was the question they had both been asking themselves. They were surrounded by many miles of water and the only sailor on board was hardly sighted.

“You’ll have to help,” Edgar said.

They swam to the ladder and pulled themselves up. Glory settled Edgar in a deck chair with water and a sliced apple and bread and butter. He breathed in and he breathed out, and none of it made it less scary to be nearly blind. She smoked. Edgar and Glory floated. They were anchored, unmoving, and far.

—

Edgar began to unfasten and untie. Glory listened to his instructions and did as he asked. He could sail, sailing was known in his body, and he could still see colors and vague shapes, but he felt better knowing that there was one good set of eyes on board. They were a quiet and unaffectionate team. He had wanted sun and distance and she had wanted the knots two bodies can make of each other. Disability was a third party. How quickly the pull could weaken.

—

Though the view was the same, it felt entirely different to travel in the opposite direction. Bermuda receded. The powder sand, the gin-clear water, the tiny satellite islands believed to hold both pirate treasure and the ghosts of the crew that had been killed to haunt that treasure. There was no fantasy ahead of Edgar and Glory. The only unknown was the future, the damage they had done to their own lives.

Edgar did not realize it, but his parents were also sailing, and not far away. Hugh and Mary had wanted the same thing Edgar did: away. Theirs was a weekend excursion. At the moment that Edgar and Glory turned towards home, Mary was squeezing limes to put into their cocktails. She was marinating the meat they would grill. Hugh was reading a magazine article about the upcoming elections and smoking a cigar. He looked up every few minutes to survey the horizon, to admire the taut mainsail, sweeping them outward.

The two boats might have crossed paths if Edgar and Glory had continued on, if the wind had pushed them a few degrees southwest, if they had caught up to a particular current that a school of striped bass was also riding, if Mary had insisted on an after-lunch swim. It could have happened that Edgar and his parents would have found themselves in the exact same spot on the Atlantic Ocean. Edgar would either have had to explain Glory or hide her, both of which would have made something go flat in him. He would have seen his shirtless father, his neck just beginning to show the sunburn that would keep him awake all night, his legs shimmering with dry salt just as Edgar’s legs were, his hands ready to tie or release or tighten a rope just as Edgar’s hands were, and maybe seeing that would have felt like proof of the thought that had entered Edgar’s mind — that he could take over his father’s life. That it was worth it. He had written his book just like he had said he wanted to and he knew that it was good enough to be published and maybe those things were enough. Maybe the doing was what mattered. He had people to care for. He had a lived life and maybe that was bigger than the imagined one, bigger than the one he led in his head.

And maybe watching his mother come up from below and holler with joy at the sight of her son like a mirage would have had the same effect on Edgar that his faded eyesight did: a skeletal want for his wife, for the person who loved him like that. The tack-sharp feeling that he was at sea with the wrong woman, that there was a story without his family but not a life.

But the two boats grew farther apart instead of nearer. None of them would ever know that they had brushed so close.

—

Edgar knew there would be a storm before the clouds or the wind or the rain. The air changed. The water hummed. Edgar kept the sheet tight, trying to make time before they couldn’t anymore. Maybe they would die out there, he thought. Maybe that was the design of this trip — to quietly extinguish them, the dangerous flames of them, in the saltsea. Hero or villain or slave, the lungs fill with water, the body falls deeper, the fish come. On another day there might have been a small part of Edgar that wanted this. To fall not to the small, suburban unhappiness of a particular decade, a particular generation, but to nature.

The storm battered. Glory, finally, got sick. She didn’t want or not want; she couldn’t. She said, “This is the worst feeling I have ever felt,” hung, like laundry, over the edge, a rope around her waist so the whole of her did not pour overboard. Edgar never would have found her again in all this seafoam.

“This is not a terrible storm,” he said. “It will be over in a few hours.” She looked at him with contempt.

“Who are you?” she asked. “I hate you.”

“Do you want to smoke?” he asked.

“I want to die,” she said.

Edgar knew they had to ride the storm out. There was no way to flee. To be tossed was their job.

They went belowdecks when Glory could. The cabin was dark and musky and Edgar was aware of the press of that small space. Right then floating and tossing, he was a husband, he was a father, he was a son. He felt the distance, the terrible miles and miles he had gone. His life was too far. Even the horizon was unclear.

When the storm died down, Glory reported that there were two silver fish swimming in the caught water. “We should eat them,” he said. Glory netted and Edgar held them down on deck while she bashed. He could help bail, but first he would heat the grill and they would eat. That, at least. He remembered playing by the river as a boy, catching frogs. One spring, there were babies, weightless but sticky in the hand. Edgar, once, needing to know the feeling, crushed one of the tiny creatures in his fist. It went so easily. Not even the bones held.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Glory, who was washing her face, running freshwater through her hair.

“Some days I do believe in God. I want to,” she said.

“You want someone powerful who can release you,” he said, understanding perfectly.

“Maybe that’s who He will turn out to be. Or else the other kind.”

They grilled the fish and there was even a lemon. When cut, the fragrance was so earthly, so terrestrial, it made Edgar ache. It was the kindest feeling, this homesickness, this desire for the very thing that actually belonged to him. It was good to be a land creature in love with the land.

“Are you getting used to not being able to see?” Glory asked. She rubbed her hands together to warm them, and reached out to Edgar’s face.

“Not at all.”

“Luckily there’s nothing actually wrong.”

“Sure.” He paused. “Tell me something about yourself. Tell me something you have done that you like,” he said. As if they’d only just met, as if they had not already saved and ruined each other’s lives.