Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

There was Fern, at his son’s back, and neither one his.

Mac said, “There’s dessert. There could be. Does anyone want pie?”

Outside: wind, sirens.

—

That night, the boy slept hard in one bed and Fern and Mac, fully clothed, shared the other. They passed a cigarette back and forth. The room echoed with Matthew’s rattling breath. He hardly even shifted in his young sleep. The giant hugged Fern. There is such a thing as love in this room, he wanted to say. We are capable. Even though we feel too tired or too big or too old or too young or too quiet or too loud or too formed or too unformed.

“What do you think will happen when you get home?” Mac whispered.

“I don’t know. It has never been easy to be a wife or a mother or a woman or a man or a child,” she said. “But we are each other’s family.” He understood this. In the bed nearby was a stranger, but it was also a son.

Things could go all different ways and this was one of them: two drivers, on the other side of the country about to head home. The next day, a father and son would get into the car to begin another kind of family. A wife would get on a plane and go home to the family that she belonged to.

* * *

MISS NOLAN TOOK CRICKET DOWN to the office where the secretary said, “Your father just called to see if you were in school. Are you getting into trouble, young lady?”

“Is he home? Did he say if he was home?”

“He said he had been away.”

Cricket did not wait for more information or to explain herself or to ask for permission. She ran to the boys’ classroom and grabbed their hands and together they sprinted the ten blocks to their house. Miss Nolan did not chase them and she did not allow the secretary to call the principal. “They’re all right,” she said. “Let them go.”

The air hurt the children’s lungs and they did not slow down.

They found Edgar standing in the light of the refrigerator. The house was clean. It looked the way it used to before the children were alone. They fell on him like prey. He sat down on the floor and they crawled onto him and they smelled like the outdoors. He kissed them five thousand times, it felt like, and it was not nearly enough. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you all okay?”

They said, “We buried a fawn and lived in the yard and we didn’t know if you were ever coming back and where is Mother and we’re hungry for something other than beans and we’re sorry if we did something to make you go away and is Maggie here too and we don’t want to be orphans and where have you been and please stay.”

“I’m staying,” Edgar said. “I’m staying, I’m staying. Mother is coming home too. And the vet called and Maggie is there. Weren’t you answering the phone?”

“We were afraid of orphanages,” Cricket said.

“What if it had been Mother or me?”

“Take us to get Maggie,” the boys shouted.

“I can’t drive right now. I lost my glasses and I can’t really see.” Edgar looked at Cricket hard, and in the blur, she was herself. “Do you remember once when I sent your mother flowers and they came in a vase full of marbles that you thought were treasure and for months you always had a marble in your hand, even when you went to bed?”

Cricket did not remember but that did not matter because someone else did. She was not the only one carrying the story of her life. That’s what she needed her parents to be, more than caregivers: keepers of the selves she had grown out of.

“I missed you so much,” he said. “I’m sorry if it sounds stupid to say.”

“Not stupid,” she told him.

“We could walk to the vet if you want.”

“We want,” the boys said.

The children would be angry later, but now it was too good to be home and not alone. For the rest of the afternoon and evening they all moved as a clump. Edgar needed Cricket to read the labels on everything and the children needed to be close to the person whose job it was to care for them. Together they went down into the basement and found pork chops in the big freezer and together they cooked them in the pan with onion and white wine and together they steamed frozen peas and together they buttered them and together they walked to pick up the dog who licked and jumped and yelped with the fevered joy they all felt and together, children, father and dog all went to sleep on Fern and Edgar’s bed, legs over legs, arms over arms, faces pressed into the soft pillows. The burden of Edgar’s family was beautiful. Heavy and beautiful.

THE AIRPLANE TOOK A FEW HOURS to cover what had taken five days in the car. Beneath Fern passed the desert, ridges of dinosaur remains in the hillside, cows, weather. The earth looked painted — red jags of canyons rimmed with gold. An hour later the earth was covered in trees. From this high up, time too felt condensed: in those green swaths was coal, steel, money. In those green swaths her people had owned other people; black boys had been hung from the trees; her people had freed their slaves, fought for the freeing of all slaves; her people had moved north, and as privilege allowed them, the memory of what they had done receded; Fern had lived on that same soil on a base where American bodies were taught to kill Vietnamese bodies; the black boys and brown boys went to the jungle and some of the white boys did too. Her twin was down there someplace in the thick green swath, buried in a box. But that was only his bones, and by now those hardly felt true: he was here, always here. Life and love had separated Fern and Ben, but they could not be unjoined.

The clouds had thickened beneath the plane and Fern could not see that they flew right over the sharp jut of the Chicago skyline. Above the prairie where Evelyn had failed at motherhood, a job she had never asked for, and succeeded at art, the job she was meant to do; above the porch swing where her father had rocked through the last headache of his life, through the dazzle of the aura, the beat of pain and the feeling of near weightlessness hours later when he finally opened his eyes, released; above the spot at the base of the stone angel where Ben had sat on the morning before he went away for basic training, wings blocking the wind and a view of the grass grown summer-tall; above the wooded lanes where Edgar’s parents’ house was empty after the summer season, where Mary and Hugh would return over Christmas, the whole landscape transformed by a heavy snowfall, where they would drink hot toddies and let go, for the last time, of the idea of the son they had meant to have. Fern was high above that life, those lives — would always be — and asleep by then, her head on a balled-up sweater. Outside, ice had formed on the window and the sky was white and jagged with light.

—

Fern stood outside her own house. From a distance it looked like a replica. A model of a gracious family home on a nighttime street, the light from within unnaturally warm. Figures inside. A man, sitting at the table, and his children moving around him, bringing dishes. There was no wife in the scene yet. A wife could be upstairs with a headache. Maybe her husband would go to her after he ate, bring her a plate on a tray, a folded napkin, a fork and knife and a glass of water. Maybe he would sit with her while she ate, rub her feet, keep his voice low. A wife could be out for the evening with a friend taking Italian lessons and drinking wine after, pretending to be in Tuscany, in a sundress, in summer. A wife could be in the kitchen taking a pie out of the oven. A wife could be at school, studying the particulars of a dinosaur knuckle. A wife could be at work.

Fern stood on the street. She smoked two cigarettes in a row and then crushed the rest of the pack under foot and put it back in her bag. With her she carried a suitcase within which were pieces of clothing that belonged to the family inside. They were ironed and neatly folded. She also had her own roadworn clothes, dirty and familiar and full of the big country’s dust and grit. Plains dirt and swamp water, desert. She was whole, which she had not understood before. She wanted those others in her arms — when they were it would not be completion but addition. Each of them entire.