Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Cricket made sure shoes were tightly tied. She brushed her hair and styled it in the youngest way she knew how — two braids tied with navy blue ribbons — wanting not to be grown today. If she could look like a child maybe someone would take care of her. These were small illusions — the three little orphans would go unnoticed. The decision had to be made about whether to go inside again and get fresh clothes or if they should wear last week’s uniforms. It was hard to be near the old version of life because it made it obvious how far away they had drifted. Once, their mother had worried for a week over a decision about the upholstery for the new sofa and whether red sent the wrong message. Once, their father had paged the many subscribed-to but rarely read magazines while drinking weak coffee in the rocker by the window. Maggie had slept there, and there and there. The house was full of ghosts. Cricket went in alone and fast, gathered what she needed and ran back out to the safety of the yard.

This morning, they did not bother to light a fire in order to warm their bread. The need for ritual had not quieted, but it had thickened. It was the only medicine and they were worried about using it up. Cricket held the hose while her brothers drank. They looked at the fawn’s hill, the now wilted petals, the demonstration of their love looking smaller the next day. There would be no one here to keep watch. No one to befriend the mother if she came.

When it was time, the boys waited at the gate in their blue-and-whites, little ties hanging around their necks, and Cricket checked their cheeks and hair to make sure they would pass. She slipped the latch and out they went onto the sidewalk with their bookbags and their finished homework as if they were the same as all the other kids, alarm-clock grumpy, cheeks pillow-creased. Cricket still stepped over the cracks like she had always done, and she still noticed the difference between smells as they passed houses — bacon, woodfire, cold brick. The boys were slack. Their bags seemed too heavy, but as they came closer, as other children appeared like wild game on the horizon, the boys stood taller. Cricket could see them get their boyness back, remember that there were balls to kick and sticks to swing and girls to tease. She could see the blood return. They would be scratched up and happy by the end of the day, beaten back into their bodies by wind and the speed of their own legs, running towards base.

Cricket herself doubted that she would be so easily restored. Her head felt heavy, her brain. But it was a good sight, the flapping red and white of the flag and the gathered mass of young bodies, supervised. She knew her brothers would shuck her off when they got there, assert their independence, so before it was too late, she grabbed their hands, one in each of hers, and she squeezed tight. She wanted to cause enough pain to last them.

—

The classroom smelled like melted crayons. The fourth graders yowled and bittered at being back, stuffed their backpacks into cubbies, found their seats. No one except Cricket noticed that there was no Miss Nolan at the front of the room. They did sense a lack of balance: the room was a boat on which all the passengers were astern. The chatter continued, weekends were remembered, the near-loss of a softball team against the dreaded Somerville Pirates was recounted. Some kids had been taken back to the beach for the weekend, which was almost cruel, giving them summer in such a tiny sliver. They started to sense that someone, by now, ought to be forcing them into quiet. Someone ought to be civilizing them. Ladies and gentlemen , they were always being called when they were at their scrappiest, as if the name alone could cure them.

“Where is Miss Nolan?” the girls asked.

“This is excellent!” the boys yelled. “No teacher! Guys! No teacher!”

“Is she all right?” the girls asked.

The room hummed. Cricket wanted not to cry in front of friends and enemies, but she had already been abandoned enough this week. It was her. She was repellent to grown-ups. Wherever she went, the person taking care of her evaporated. She got up and went, as calmly as she could fake it, out the door and down the hall. In the other classrooms the children were quiet at their desks, following instructions from an adult with a lesson plan.

Someone else was standing in the stall next to Cricket, someone with big feet. Someone who was crying too. Cricket knew the shoes. They were the shoes of her beloved. She said, “Can I come over?” and wriggled under the wall. Miss Nolan looked at her like Cricket was a puppy and she sat down on the lidded toilet and Cricket crawled up into her teacher’s lap. Miss Nolan received Cricket like she had been expecting her, like this had always been the plan. They held on tight. They soaked each other’s shoulders.

“My mother died,” Miss Nolan said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Cricket thought of an early snow on the Great Plains, a small woman out gathering berries, lost in the whiteout. She thought of a gathered flock of mourners in the teepee, a good fire, food available but uneaten, the wind through the seams. “How?” she asked. “What happened?”

“A car accident on the expressway.”

“The expressway?” Cricket tried to add the long strip of pavement, the rushing cars, toll plazas, to her idea of the plains. “I didn’t know they had those.”

Miss Nolan looked the girl over, swiped a tear away from each of their cheeks. “In New Jersey? Of course they do.”

New Jersey was a brick and it hit Cricket hard. She said, “You aren’t an Indian.” She felt terribly stupid and terribly small. No one was from Montana, no one was from Oklahoma. They were all city kids. They were all part of the same tidy, boring tribe.

Miss Nolan kissed Cricket on the forehead. “You are sweet and good,” she said.

Cricket wanted to ask about the lip-kiss last week, but she could not risk another loss. “Of course I knew that,” she said, reinhabiting maturity. “I’m sorry about your mother. I actually kind of understand because my parents are gone too. They’ve been gone since Wednesday. We’re orphans now.”

Miss Nolan tried to conceal her panic. The girl looked clean and fed but probably in shock. Cricket did not see the effort it took for her teacher to keep a steady voice as she asked a lot of practical questions. Hospitals: not called due to fear of orphanage. Police: not called due to fear of orphanage. Relatives: not called due to fear of orphanage. Food: eaten. Sleep: slept. Safety: managed.

“You’ll be so disappointed in me but a fawn died in our yard, and I tried to skin it but I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I really tried. We buried her,” Cricket said, wanting to prove that they were good survivors, that they could take care of something else even when they themselves were broken.

“I didn’t expect you to know how to skin a deer . You poor ducklings,” the good teacher said, and Cricket had never felt so grateful or stupid in her life. “You should have told me what was going on. We’ll find them. I’m sure they’re all right.” Miss Nolan was relieved to have a situation to manage, to turn, for a moment, away from the inkbloom of her mother’s death.

“They could be not all right,” Cricket said. She had allowed the possibility that her parents had left on purpose for a trip or to start a new life and the possibility that they had gotten lost or hurt, but to say out loud the fact that they could be dead carved her out.

“I’m going to help you,” Miss Nolan said. “You are being taken care of.” The woman took Cricket close and hugged her and it was this touch that Cricket understood she needed, not a hot-mouth kiss, not the kind of close that she would look for later but the kind she needed now, had always needed: her small head against someone’s chest, a heartbeat dull but steady beneath the bones.