Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

* * *

THEY WERE STILL A LONG DAY’S DRIVE from Mac’s son. Neither of them knew what to say about what they had done together. Fern had not realized that the desert was so big. Cows in the distance, horses sometimes, once a herd of elk, their wide racks up against the sky. “They look fake,” Fern said. “They look too much like elk to be elk.”

“You make no sense,” Mac told her. The animals lowered their necks towards the ground.

“There’s nothing to eat here,” Fern said. The ground was brittle with sage.

“They spend their lives looking for food,” Mac said. “They have to search all the time to get enough.”

Even the sky was greenish and dry. Low mountains were a stripe between pale and pale.

Sex had been a mistake, of course, but Mac had also meant to make it. He had never expected Fern to love him in a realer world. He had taken advantage of her distance, of her strained marriage. He knew that escape, at this point, was starting to wear at Fern like a blister. The generous thing would have been to brush her off, to hold her hand and talk about the river, go for ice cream, keep things safe. He was not sorry, though. He too deserved to be touched. He wanted it, even if it would cost them both. And anyway, he told himself, her husband had surely slept with the other woman by now, and it would be fairer for Fern to come home with her own secret.

Fern, on her side of the car, was afraid of the wreckage a body could cause. Edgar’s body, her body, Glory’s, the giant’s. She was afraid that she would never be able to stop causing damage, now that she had started.

They drove through mesquite and red dust. The sky was bluer at the edges and then purpled with rainclouds. They watched for an hour as the storm came towards them. The diagonal lines of rain, darkening the ground beneath. It was dry, dry, dry until the smell of the air changed and the windshield turned milky with rain. Fern looked at her companion, the bigness of his face and chest. They had come all this way together, and the rain and the butterflies and all that new air in her bloodstream. She did not know if she should hold his hand and pretend to love him. They stopped and got out this time, and the rainwater was warm and the air was warm and it all smelled plant-bitter and grateful.

In all this space it felt safe to admit that a marriage, her marriage, could end. She imagined it this way: her on the sidewalk in front of the big house, mounds of belongings beside her. She would have chosen things to bring with her into the next life. The huge Swedish desk, a blond dresser. The headboard, which she knew was the very thing you were meant to get rid of in a divorce — keep the silver, but relieve yourself of the bed on which your marriage succeeded and failed. The past years belonged to her, even if the future did not.

Her parents, though dead, would be nonetheless ashamed.

She told Mac about going to the institution after Ben died. How in his room she had found children’s books, the same ones they had read in the nooks by the fireplace when they were small. In the bottom corners there were grease stains from fingers, turning. It was a sour-smelling room, and the walls were soft blue, the color a sane person would choose for a crazy one. There was a small television, and a box of letters from Fern, which she took but did not read, not ever. She remembered writing them about the hugeness of motherhood, what it was like to live after your heart had been born out into the world and was at risk every second of every day. How Cricket liked to ride her bike too fast and play with animals, sharp-toothed dogs, possibly rabid, their mouths foaming while the child petted them and loved them and curled up against them. Little lion-tamer, ready to put her head into the mouths of beasts.

“I should have stopped them from performing the lobotomy,” Fern said.

“It wasn’t your job.”

“That’s why I always stood to the side. But my mother should not have been in charge and my father was too sick to be. Ben should never even have gone to basic training. I wish Edgar and I had brought him with us.” She looked out at the desert, swooshing past. “I thought when you fell in love with someone you had to give your whole self over to them. I wish I had known that there was enough of me to share. I wish I hadn’t left my brother behind.” A vulture stood over the remains of something unrecognizable. “This might be a weird thing to say considering what happened last night, but when I first saw you I thought you were Ben.”

Mac was glad that he could think of his big form at the end of the aisle as a gift. Not a gift for himself, but nice all the same.

Fern reached out and put her hand on Mac’s leg.

He knew she wanted him to be an ax, swung against the wall to see if the house would stand. It wouldn’t, he thought, if she was lucky. Not the house. But what was inside might.

“I’m not what you’re looking for,” he said, without turning towards her.

“What am I looking for?” Fern thought about the day with Ben after they had begun to cook his brain with electricity and drugs when he had shown her her own reflected face in her patent leather shoe. The answer was too easy. Love, home, herself — what else did people go searching for?

A herd of cows stood in the middle of the road ahead of them. Some of the cows had lain down. Some were looking, slack-eyed, at the cars. All were chewing. Mac slowed and stopped. The earth was pale, bleached by the sun. The plants were spiny and unwelcoming and the horizon was a long way off. The pickup truck in front of them veered off the road through the cactus and scrub until it had passed the herd. It would take an hour for the air to clear of its dust. Fern got out. She walked over to the cows and could smell them as she approached. Hay and urine and mud and shit. From the car they seemed stupid, from up close they seemed big. “Cows!” she said. “Shoo!” Flies, like a thick black aura, rose off the animals and resettled.

From the other direction came an old red van. It stopped and out stepped two young women with lots of eyeliner and shaggy hair and big sunglasses. They smelled of smoke and one of them was holding a kitten. They looked to Fern like they had just woken up after a long decade in California.

“Cows in the road,” Fern said. The girls looked bored. “They don’t seem to want to move.”

“Have you been to Houston?” one of the girls asked. “Her brother lives there. He’s cool. We’re going to become airline stewardesses. In the sky you don’t have to deal with this kind of shit.”

One cow let the weight of her body fall back with a deep groan — Fern knew it was a she because her teats rested in front of her, engorged.

Mac got out but stayed close to the car. It’s what her brother would have done too. How afraid a person could be, how big and how afraid. She stood close to him as she would have with Ben.

Thunder clapped. From where? — the sky was clean. The cows stood and ran awkwardly into the desert. Hooves rang hard against the dirt. Dust rose out and up, and it glinted.

“Mica,” Mac said, without Fern asking. They were standing in a glittering fog.

—

Mac went into a restaurant and Fern stood at the payphone in the shade, leaned against the stucco wall. She would ask the question even if there was no answer. She wanted to make noise occur in her own home, to create the specific sound of the phones in the big living room and the kitchen, like a pair of birds calling to each other. She dialed collect and held the phone away from her ear so that she could imagine that she was hearing the real ringing in the real house, the real life. Not this faraway tone in the hotel telephone.

And then: “Hello?” It was Edgar’s voice.