Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

She took a deep breath. “I’m sort of relieved that that money is gone. We’ll find a better way to earn our living.” There were so many questions for her at home — money, love, lies, three children who had been abandoned for nearly a week. She looked out at the desert where there was so much room in which to get lost. She wanted something to press up against. She wanted her own confines.

“What about the steel company?”

“No.” It had been hanging in the back of her mind, the image of Edgar calling his editor to say that he had to retract the book. The image of him at a huge oval table in the teetering tip of a skyscraper and a dozen investors who wanted to know how he had cut production costs. “I think I’d rather live with nothing.” She could have used another shirt and pants, but otherwise what she had in her suitcase was sufficient. She wanted her people and she wanted water and wind. Enough — just enough.

Fern took the giant’s hand.

“I like you,” she said.

He did not squeeze her hand, but he let it sit there in his big palm, salt-wet on this hot day. He said, “We came a long way.”

“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

He smiled his big smile. “I knew you were trouble from the moment I married you.” He looked down at her. “I like you too, Fern. I think you’re going to have a really good life. You are not only a rich housewife.”

“Not anymore. I’ll need to get a job.” She was joking but she was also serious.

“Life is effortful,” said Mac. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”

Fern thought of hiding in the tall grass outside her mother’s prairie studio to watch her work. Evelyn was a different woman with clay than she was with people — it was as if the rest of her body was only there to support the existence of her hands. She thought of Edgar, up late all those years at the typewriter, his fingers banging out a reason for his being. She thought of Ben in the earth, the misunderstood parts long since rotted away. So many bones in the ground.

This dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.

—

Fern walked with Mac up to the house where the boy lived because it was a nice thing to do and she could not think of the giant standing at the door alone, his too-big finger finding the bell. She could not think of him waiting alone for someone to let him in.

The house was split-level, brown on the outside, gravel instead of grass. A group of tall green-brown cacti kept watch. There were bird holes — even in those spiny stalks, a home.

A woman opened the door, short and blond and overtan. She said, “It’s my old man,” and laughed hard. She punched him in the stomach, which was nearly eye-level and Fern thought of them as husband and wife, trying to consummate. She would have been lost in it all. Those rigid, manic little arms, looking for purchase on his hills. Poor girl. Poor boy.

“Lovely home,” Fern said. It was not. There was almost no furniture and the windows were covered in heavy curtains. The organ-pink carpet could not possibly have been an intentional color. This was the kind of house you holed up in after the murder, the body buried in some dry wash nearby.

“I have cold coffee or I have gin,” the lady said.

“Just some water for me,” Fern said.

“No water. Sorry.”

The air conditioner was on so high Fern could feel her pores closing to keep the heat in. Mac rubbed his arms.

“Nothing then?” Claire asked.

They sat on the couch and Mac asked after her months and years. She answered him like a daughter swatting away her father’s concerns. “Doing great! I love living here! It’s warm all year! We have a pool! Desert people are nicer than city people! My guy’s name is Dale and he’s a real sweetheart!”

“And the boy?” he asked finally, after he had waited long enough for her to bring him up.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s lost some of the weight.”

From a cracked door down the hall, Fern caught sight of a pair of eyes high off the ground.

“I’m parched,” Claire said. “Neither of you wants any coffee at all? It’s nice and cold. I made it up this morning.”

Fern wanted to ask for a blanket or a scarf instead. Claire left the room and she nudged Mac, motioned to the hallway and the cracked door.

Mac, without a pause, knelt on the floor like someone trying to befriend a cat. He put his hands out towards the eyes, peering. He scooted closer, his palms up. “Hey there,” he loud-whispered. “Hello, hello.”

Fern wanted to kneel too, to beckon, but she was no one’s mother here. She was no one’s aunt or step-. It did not seem right to promise friendship this close to the end. So she sat there in the freezing dark room and watched the giant try to make himself small, watched him shuffle across the dirty floor towards his son, his hands empty but open. She had to pace to survive the thirst for her own children.

The boy came through the door. The mother tinked ice into a glass in the kitchen and said something about golf. The boy, seeing his father, knelt down too and, on the pink carpet, under a painting of a Jesus so pale he was nearly translucent, the two looked each other over. They did not say a word. They did not shake hands. They just looked.

—

The boy was hungry, frantically hungry. Sitting on the hotel bed, he ate a whole chicken and a loaf of white bread and a bag of individually wrapped chocolates. He seemed more dog, more stray, than boy. But he said his pleases and thank-yous, and his fingers were delicate, carefully working the meat off a bone without getting dirty.

Fern and Mac sat in the pink paisley chairs by the window watching. “More?” they asked, handing him bread.

Before they’d left, his mother had given him a packed suitcase and an extra pair of sneakers. “You can’t imagine how fast he goes through these things,” she had said. “How he does it, that’s beyond me.” She had stood on her tip-toes and flicked him on the nose with her thumb. “Honey pot,” she had said. “Don’t get any bigger.” She had opened her wallet and taken out a scroll of paper on which was written several columns of numbers. “If you want to measure him, you can,” she said to the giant. “But I guess you don’t care one way or the other. He’s not getting any smaller, so he’s yours now.” The boy had bent down low and given his mother a hug. She had been lost in his frame. “How did I raise up something like you?” she had asked. “Something so sweet.” The twang in her voice was unconvincing. She wore it like heels she did not know how to walk in.

The boy brushed his teeth for fifteen minutes, making tiny circles over each tooth, studying himself in the mirror. From behind he looked like a man. Fern wanted him to be all right. She wanted to hug him. She wanted the son of him, and her the pretend mother. She had not meant to actually do it. She had meant to admire from the other end of the room. There she was, next thing, squeezing him hard, her head on his wingbone, no stopping now. He was softly sweated in the day’s shirt, and all the heat she had hoped for. Fern could hear the boy’s breath inside his body, inside the papery folds of his lungs, inside the rattle of bones. She could hear his heart too, gathering and sending back. It seemed fast to her.

The boy, gentle or afraid, did not move. They stayed there, and Fern did not know how to let go.

Mac, on the other side of the room, also waited. Everyone needed everything. The woman needed to hug the boy and imagine her brother, her sons, her daughter; the boy needed to be hugged but then to be freed. Mac would have liked someone to come up from behind and wrap her arms around him, and to mean it, beyond the dare she had made for herself, beyond the attempt at revenge. If only he could meet a huge woman, he thought. In a huge house, with a huge car, and so much land for them to drive on, and herds of only the largest animals: elephants and giraffes, the stamp of rhinoceros feet in the mud after a rain. They would put off going to town for supplies, put off relativity. You can’t be too big unless someone else is small. Mac looked at his son. He looked like he still had growing to do. He would get bigger every day with chicken and bread and pie and steak and all the things for sale in restaurants and grocery stores across the great land. They would order four meals for two people, and Mac would watch his boy eating. A match, finally. More and more a match by the day.