Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Ten. That one’s got a closet.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“I’ll take your money, young girl,” the man said. He coughed into his hands then, hard and long and when he pulled them away, he cupped within them a small, golden ball of mucus, which he held as carefully as a robin’s egg. He showed it to Fern, the slippery jewel, the dug-up treasure. “You’re not a nurse, are you?” he asked.

“Ten. We’ll take it,” she said. “There are two of us.” She wrote the last name in the greasy book and counted her money. The fat man continued to examine his hands, and to smile, and he yelled his thanks after Fern.

There was a cockroach on the bathroom floor, and nothing was whole. The headboard veneer was molting, the blanket was losing its fill, the mattress was concave. The water in the toilet was mineral yellow. Who knows how long it had been stagnant, what kinds of small creatures were growing within.

Mac and Fern fell into the pits of the bed. Fern removed the giant’s clothes and he covered himself with the blanket. Batting fell out, banked up on the floor like fake snow. He begged for her, and unrolled her pants. The bed sank below them. They did not worry about their noises in such an establishment. Let them hear us , they both thought. Fern imagined the fat man and his bad lungs. It hurt a little bit, the giant’s size.

The old question was still unanswered: Did it feel good? There was pleasure, definitely, in a job well done. A man on his back, the covers kicked off, sweating with his eyes closed and thankful.

After, Fern had the urge to walk to the bathroom so he could admire her from behind. Ridiculous, the thought — she was not that young, and when she had been, she would have been careful to keep covered up in the light. She felt small next to the giant, was that it? But she did not get up and walk, covered or bare, because she remembered the roach and the dirty toilet. I just had sex with a giant , she thought.

Mac asked for a cigarette, which they split, and after he fell too quickly asleep. He did not pull her into his chest, or trace her collarbone, or spread her hair across the pillow. Somewhere, these ideas had been seeded in her brain. She was the gift and the giver. Thanks ought to have been next.

The room grew more disgusting the later it got. The bugs were audible on the tile, and worse, inaudible on the carpet. Fern checked the chain lock on the door and it fell off into her hand. She dressed and lay back down on the farthest edge of the bed, away from the canyon Mac’s body made, and Fern waited, eyes closed, for the infestation.

THE FIRST TIME Fern and Edgar had touched was at her Junior Dance. He was back from college and had agreed, as a favor to his mother, to take a neighbor girl who was as uninterested in Edgar as he was in her. Fern was in a sleeveless dress, the color of a vague star. She had spread butter on her shoulders, just a thin slick of it because it made her skin bright. It was not an idea she had learned in a magazine or from a friend, but something she had thought of that eager night before, while she tried to seed her dreams with the smell of a boy’s cheek against hers. Her mother would not have approved, would probably have issued a warning about some rabid dog that would be attracted to her scent. At the country club? Fern would have asked. A rabid dog? So she kept it to herself. Her hair she twisted up, the points of pins poking into her scalp when she turned her head.

The night would be good, that was decided, voted upon. All the mothers had worked hard to ensure it. The mothers remembered falling in love as if it were a sudden amusement ride drop. Hands in the air, wind burning their eyeballs, down. All of it made Fern feel prematurely sad for her older self: she did not like the idea that this was the best part of her life. Could it really be that tight skin and blond hair defined the potential for happiness? Or was it just that when you got older, everyone started to die around you?

Fern, buttered shoulders and doubts, went to the dance on her own, having turned down all the invitations for dates from boys she did not want to feel obliged to kiss. It was not so different from any day at school, except for dresses. Boys hunched and punched, girls pattered and giggled and pointed. The boys’ suits fit them sadly and seemed to be standing on their own, a little distance between fabric and skin. Inside the suits, the boys looked like boys. Scrawny and a little butchered by the process of growing as quickly as they were. The girls, at least some of them, managed the disguise. The girls seemed to want it more too. This was the prize of womanhood: looking angelic in a gown and someone asked you to dance and everyone in the room noticed you. The prize of manhood came slowly and later: earn something, put it away, buy yourself a car, flirt with the child’s teacher, get a raise. Fern wondered where these two axes crossed — what single moment in the life of a man and woman, their lives joined forever, felt exactly the same amount of great to them both?

Edgar was there in handsome glasses with thick lenses. His date was with her friends and Edgar talked to the younger brother of a classmate. Fern appeared at the punchbowl and Edgar stopped short. They had seen each other plenty of times at school, said congenial hellos, but never more than that. She saw him see her. He looked less dumbed by the slow music and intention of romance than some of the other boys. She caught his eye, and as practiced, looked demurely away. It was all that was needed and he came over, raised her gloved hand and kissed it. She regretted the gloves, regretted the missed opportunity to have lips on her skin. They danced, parted, drank punch separately, danced again. So many rules followed by all the young ladies and gentlemen. Somewhere along the way, between being swaddled, nannied babies, they had been infused with the knowledge of how to behave and could not help mimicking their mothers and fathers. Fern wondered if it was cellular — would an adopted daughter from some faraway, charity-deserving country wake up at seventeen knowing how to spear an olive and spit the pit into her napkin without anyone seeing it?

Along the edges of the room, the non-dancing tried to appear unafraid. The popular girls and boys looked away. One of the important skills of being socialized seemed to be the ability to overlook other people’s unhappiness. Maybe the awkward ones would be pretty in college, or after, and if not, maybe they would be very successful, and if not that either, then they would be very giving, they would take care of the sick or the young or the old.

At the moment when Fern and Edgar had danced themselves into a corner, a huge wind slammed into the building and rattled the panes. They separated, the music stopped. The wind shrieked and pawed at the windows. The lights went out, girls screamed and huddled, boys just huddled. The teachers tried to act calm. Edgar looked at Fern and saw her hair shine in a flash of lightning. His hand gentled around her waist. In her ear he said, “It’s dark now,” and she knew just what he meant and turned to kiss him. It was the richest kind of darkness, the falling-into kind, and down they went, and they were holding on.

MONDAY CAME and Cricket fell into its arms. There was a time by which all three must be dressed and human, having eaten bread and butter, having cleaned the tribe-paint from their faces so they looked like nice little white children. She watched the colors run from her brothers’ wet cheeks like blood and silt. They were giving up their orphaned selves and acting like all the other parented boys with alive dogs and selves that had not recently come up bruised.