Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Mac said, “Are the kids okay?”

“They must have been terrified. Their family splintered and they were all that was left.”

The ham arrived, a fat pink slap. Fern asked the waitress for an ashtray. She buttered the toast, which was already soaked in the stuff, and she spread strawberry jam on it. She cut the ham into the shape of a heart, putting the scraps on the table. It was foamy under her knife, lost water as she cut. And this was a good ham day.

Fern had stood below maple trees while James climbed the branches, waiting to catch him; she had held Cricket’s cold-puckered body in the ocean and tried not to imagine her going under and being lost to a wave; she had watched Will sled down a street and hit the tree at the bottom, had run to him sure that she would find a pool of blood. Every tenth word out of her mouth for nine years had been one of caution. It was as if she had not completely let her breath out since Cricket was born. And yet they had survived on their own for five days. They had gotten themselves to school. They had eaten. Cricket, amazing and brave Cricket, Fern thought. Maybe she did not need to be so afraid. Maybe none of them did.

Mac carved the last imperfection from her ham heart. “There,” he said, trying to cheer her. “A masterpiece.”

—

A few hours away waited a valley of palms up against a mountain range, where it was warm all year and everyone wore white shorts and stayed outside and let their skin turn brown. Even in old age people moved to this valley to get too much sun. The giant’s son was there and so was the airport from which Fern could fly home.

Mac worried that his boy would be leather-skinned and reptilian, no good for snow. He was worried that the boy would become pallid and malnourished if he could not eat citrus picked directly from trees in the yard, fragrant and intoxicating with their blossoms.

Fern and Mac drove, and the desert was drier and drier still. The earth felt like a bone, brittle, tired out. What grew was scrabble and cactus. Even the mountains were brown.

“It’s not a smart plan,” Mac said. There must have been bugs in the air because there were yellow splashes on the windshield.

“What’s not?”

“I’m nobody’s father.”

Fern knew this feeling. The disbelonging, the nonmatch. Except that she was sure the giant would be ever tender and patient. He and the boy would talk the whole drive home, those long black stripes through the country, and all the pie. They would swim in the hotel pools and sit outside after, their skin chlorinated and warming back up. They would stop to see the snakepits and dinosaur skeletons, admire the neon signs, the roadside of their great country. The hours would be enough to become familiar to one another. What they each liked to eat. What they did to get ready for bed. Behaviors while dreaming.

Fern was sure that by the time they hit colder weather, they would be related. Maybe not father and son yet, but family.

She said, “There is every kind of father.”

There were actual tumbleweeds, tumbling. As if the West had been ordered up and delivered.

They passed the Wigwam Motel, six concrete teepees scattered along the highway. There was a neon sign in the shape of a woman in a bathing cap, diving.

“We should stop for gas,” Mac said. Fern knew he was stalling, but she also understood why. On every day after this one, he would have to reconquer a small heart. He would have to persuade him that algebra was important, that the essay deserved writing. Friends would need to be made, played with, dropped back off at their better houses.

With sudden breathlessness, Mac said, “Do you think she warned him?”

Fern knew what he was asking, but she pretended she did not.

“Does he know what I look like?”

She wanted to tell him that it would not matter. That the boy would not notice, used to being smaller than everyone, anyway. It could be true. But she remembered her children once. “Mother, we saw a midget. Not just a small man but a real midget.” They crouched low to demonstrate the size. Children knew how to do certain things without having been taught. Climbing. Meanness.

“He was absolutely tiny,” the one had said.

“Tinier than tiny,” added the other.

“And his voice was strange.”

In the car Fern said to Mac, “Your son is going to think you are marvelous.”

—

They stopped at the service station and Fern went inside to pay. There was a thin old woman at the register, her hair long and black with grey strands. Maybe she was Indian. Maybe not. Fern only knew what cartoon Indians looked like. On the rack next to the counter was a tray of arrowheads carved from obsidian. They looked like the one Cricket had found on their dig on the island. Fern thought of her children in the teepee in the backyard of their Cambridge house. Resourceful little creatures. She did not know the story yet, but she was proud of them. She bought three arrowheads and put them in her pocket.

“You seen the dinosaur bones?” the woman with the long hair asked.

“No,” said Fern.

“They’re real old. You ought to go. White people always like to see real living Indians and real dead dinosaur bones.”

Fern reported the detour to Mac and they took the dirt roads like the woman told them to. Dust kicked up. It looked like they were headed into nowhere and they were. Then, a hand-painted sign on plywood: Dinosaur Fossil, 1.2 Miles.

In the bush-scrub, there was a hill and as they approached they saw a near-perfect skeleton. As if the great animal had only recently lain down there for a rest. Fern had seen them in museums, these bones, and understood that such creatures had existed, but it was different to see it here in the dirt and bush, unmined. She knelt down at the skull and carefully brushed sand off the snout. The wide openness, the amount of space, made more sense when populated with huge animals.

“Plesiosaur,” Mac said. “You can tell because of the little fin bones.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was a five-year-old boy and a giant . All I thought about for years was dinosaurs.”

“Did you say fins?” She looked at the endless dry land. They both pictured water covering the desert, land as ocean floor, mountains as islands. The entire world, utterly changed.

There were flies and ants and a stink bug. A crow landed, pecked, took off. “It’s nice to feel small for once,” the giant said.

For Fern it was good to kneel in the dirt, her hands uncovering something.

She said, “Can I tell you a secret? I took a figure drawing class last year. I didn’t tell anyone because Edgar had been nagging me to go back to school and it felt like he was as disappointed in me as my mother had been. I didn’t want him to win.”

“What was it like?”

“The first day of figure drawing the teacher said, ‘Leave if you are afraid of nudity.’ No one had left. At the second meeting there had been four fewer people in the room. The teacher had said, ‘Good, I’m glad they left. There’s no room in art for fear.’”

One day, Fern said, the students had walked into the room and there was a black man on the platform. He was tall and muscular and very dark, his hair short and neat. Fern had been taken aback by her own discomfort. Most of the women kept their eyes locked on their papers. “At one point the man looked right at me and we just stared at each other for maybe three seconds. A hundred years ago there were plenty of times when a black man stood naked in front of a room of dressed whites because he was for sale . People in my family were in those rooms. I didn’t deserve to look at this man, but he did deserve to be seen.”

“There are some things that can’t be righted,” Mac said. “It’s good to name them.”