Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“In junior high school, I tried out for the cheerleading team. I had these bangs. I was not well-liked. The only reason anyone was nice to me was because my parents were unspeakably rich. I thought, what if? I made up a routine and practiced in my room. I can’t imagine what it looked like, I actually cannot imagine. I was not chosen. I’m sort of proud of myself for doing that. For being so oblivious as to think I might make it.”

“You could have been good.”

“I was not good.”

There was a pause. “Will he take you back?” Edgar asked.

They had nothing to offer each other after this journey was over. Neither of them, Edgar realized, had ever thought so.

“He’ll take me back and he’ll forgive me eventually. That will probably be my project for a while.” This was Edgar’s first leaving but not Glory’s. Like an experienced doctor, she knew what wounds to expect from this particular kind of explosion. She knew how to sew them closed and keep them clean, how to pour tonic over. She also knew that the scars were worse, and permanent.

Glory smoked and imagined that John had felt it the moment the sloop on which his beloved sailed had turned back towards the homeshore. She pictured him sweeping his mother’s floor and kissing her on the forehead and getting into his car. As Glory made her way, so did John. The forests, which they had driven through together dozens of times, were maple, oak. He would listen to cello concertos and leave the windows open when he went into the diner for a tuna sandwich and a coffee. He too would know what work was ahead — the understanding that would come quickly and the understanding that would never come.

John would be at home when Glory arrived. He would be sitting in his armchair not reading, not watching television, just waiting. She would look at him and he would be just as boring as ever, but he would be hers.

“Do you want to go to Mexico?” she would ask. “On anything other than a boat?”

Both of them were still packed from their journeys so all they would have to do was turn off the lights and lock the door behind them. On the airplane, Glory would take John’s hand and put her head on his shoulder while they waited to rise.

—

Edgar slept on deck that night and let Glory have the berth. Her sympathy and touch would have cost him something. A well man could wake up in another woman’s bed, but a helpless man was too sad to. The tug towards home was as strong as a thick line, woven through his ribs and tied tight. He thought of the sights he had to look forward to: the twins at nineteen years old, their faces longer, a shadow of beard on their cheeks, about to turn into the people they would always be. He thought of Cricket at thirty, married to someone of her own choosing. He thought of Fern. He wanted his wife to see him get old and for him to know all the versions of her face. That night, lying on the deck of the Ever Land , Edgar looked up at the dark. Above him, the blurred scuff of the Milky Way.

“Land ho,” Glory said in the morning. Edgar looked out but the shape was inexact. He squinted, and it did not come clear.

“Do you have glasses at your house? Do you need a ride?”

“No. I’ll take a taxi. You should go home.”

“It was fun. At least it started out being fun,” Glory said.

“Should we say goodbye here?” Edgar asked, wanting some space in which to seal this opening they had made. The water churned below them. Their arms around each other were cool and they did not hold long.

For Edgar, the city in which he lived, the coastline that he had sailed towards for the last several years of his life, disappeared the closer they got.

* * *

LATER THAT NIGHT Fern and Mac stopped alongside the big river, muddy and roping inside its banks. M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I , she said in her head. They looked out at it and tried to hear the water there, but it was too slow, too constant. There were ghosts of white shorebirds on the bank of a small island, and some in the air, and the trees were so thick with leaves they looked trunkless. Fern and Mac were standing on a hill above the water and there was a path down to it and many small footprints. Fern wanted the children who left them to have been carrying homemade fishing poles, wearing half-crushed hats, chewing a piece of hay in the sides of their mouths. There should be places that stay the same. Museum-of-life places, preserved for remembering.

Fern was tired from a long drive and her body still vibrated from the car and it was a warm night, and the birds and the water and the clouded night. Fern let herself fall into the generous pillar of the giant. She rested her head back and let it settle against the top of his belly. She could hear the process within: air and liquid, moving through.

It was more than they had touched since their wedding. Fern’s skin was still used to Edgar only. It made her want to go home. The craving for the twins’ weight in her lap came at her fast. Fern thought of a feverish Cricket asleep, her face red and the dreams making the pale pulse of her eyelids go, the way Fern had knelt at the bedside and put her head down against the child to try to absorb some heat, for both of their sakes. Fern remembered bringing Cricket an apple to eat when she was finally hungry. She had taken a few bites and left it on the bed when she fell asleep. Fern had picked it up and bitten the uneaten half and what she had tasted, strongly, was not the fruit’s flesh but the taste of her daughter’s palmsweat. Soon, the child would be up again, and running, and hungry and doing something sweet or dangerous that Fern would have to put a stop to. But Fern had kept that fever day like a gem.

In that want for her real family, she leaned against Mac, and the giant put his big arms around her and they watched the river, which was a moving body, yet also so still.

Their heartbeats changed pace. Something new came to the surface. Fern felt a kindness flare up in her. She felt the gift that her body might be. Both of them were at a deficit. Charity made her warm, and she turned then, and she looked up into Mac’s face, which the moon was whitening, and he looked back at her, the big black eyes, the bright teeth. He was her friend and she told herself that she could give him that missing thing, though later she would be able to admit that what she really wanted was the wound. She wanted it for herself for what she had done wrong and she wanted it for Edgar. Fern closed her eyes, and stood on tip-toes and waited to be kissed.

Fern half expected the scene around them to change, to take notice: birds lifting from the trees, the clouds breaking for a moment. She was winning something, is how it felt. She was the victor. Her tongue and his tongue, his cheeks a scrabble on hers. They had earned this honeymoon, finally, by the famous river, deep in the moss and muck of this country, far away from everything that was true about their past and everything that was not.

All the way to the hotel, she leaned into him, and his chest heaved a little too much, and she wanted more of that. More longing, more pain from it.

The only hotel was called the Locust Tree and it was half-fallen. The sign was neon, blinking to say that there were rooms to let. Fern went inside as always, and the lobby was a tiny room with a counter with a full ashtray and a small bell, like a churchbell, which Fern picked up and shook so that the tongue clanged.

A very fat, very old man came in. He had a few strands of hair, combed over, and a pair of large square wire-rimmed glasses. He said, “Cheapest room is six dollars.” It was too little and it made Fern nervous. She was used to being better taken care of than that. After the rat room, they had avoided the worst places.

“What’s the most expensive room?” she asked. It was one of the things she liked about traveling with someone who hid in the car — she could overspend and no one had to know.