Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Fern grew stickier with a certain group of especially rich, especially pretty girls and she started to ignore her brother even at home, left him to coast in her wake. Because Ben was almost part of her, because their bodies had invented themselves together and they could never be completely prized apart, Fern thought she could afford a little meanness. She would never have risked it if she had known she could lose Ben.

Then, when she was seventeen, came Edgar, Yale senior, thick glasses, whippet arms and storm of ideas, and there went Fern: any retaining walls that had been built around or inside her burst open. She was all shatter and splinter, all grateful wreckage. Through the summer it was Edgar at her side with no place behind her for Ben. Ben spun in the eddy while Fern went downstream fast.

Ben’s circuitry fizzled at the ends. He felt amputated. It was all right to be less than whole when his twin could stand in for the rest, but without her, all the missing pieces turned bright and burned. He tried to steady himself in his old books: butterflies, bats, stories of sailors and treasure and islands where the only drinking water was a brackish spring. Evelyn and Paul did not notice that Ben was a flickering bulb. Out of habit, Evelyn continued her blind attempt to make a man of him and signed Ben up for the crew team. He was never put in a boat because his oars always bit the water too early or too late, so while his sister spent the summer falling in love, he spent it sitting on the lakeshore beach littered with dead herring while he listened to the other boys work their bodies back and forth as one. Ben lay his huge body back on the sand, smelled the fishrot, while the coxswain’s voice blew over the water. “Catch! Drive! Finish! Recover!”

Meanwhile Fern and Edgar were driven the hour to downtown Chicago by her parents’ chauffeur where they sat in the park with a picnic of cold grapes and cucumber sandwiches and watched a play (parents felt entirely safe sending their teenaged children into the city alone if Shakespeare was involved). It was humid and hot and there was no shade and all around the park were glass skyscrapers reflecting the sun, but they noticed none of these discomforts. Neither did they remember the play or even really see it. What occurred for Fern and Edgar was this: they held hands. Sometimes they entwined their fingers, sometimes they rubbed the other hand softly with a thumb, and to the two of them it felt as if their entire lives, the history of every civilization, the smack of the universe being born, were all together in that hold. Their palms sweat and every once in a while they would break to wipe them on their thighs, laugh, then quickly rejoin. Until now, the fact that Fern was a girl had rendered her purposeless. Suddenly there was a reason for her. She knew that she was standing at the entrance to the express path that her mother so hated but to Fern it felt like she was about to be born. Love might make her, finally, visible.

Fern tried to talk to her parents about Edgar at dinner one night. She wanted to tell them that she was in love, that she could not contain the feeling within the bounds of her body. It was harder than expected to explain. “Edgar is amazing,” she said. Paul smiled at her. He was all the way at the head of the table, too far to put his hand on hers, which was what he would have liked to do.

“I’m happy for you,” Ben said. He was. But also endlessly sorry for himself. He was being replaced, and Fern, though she knew this too, could see her brother receding in the distance, yet was so happy that she couldn’t help but leave him behind.

Evelyn did not want to be cruel. Fern was so earnest at her seat, napkin in her lap, ankles crossed, cutting a green bean into bite-size thirds with a knife and fork, dabbing at the corners of her mouth — a lady. She was falling into the domestic void as happily as if it were a warm bath. Evelyn could see love like sweat on Fern’s skin. See? It was better that no one had expected Fern to do or know something — the flood of love would have washed it all away no matter what. “I don’t like his parents,” Evelyn said. It was the nicest statement she could muster.

“What’s wrong with his parents?” Fern asked.

To Evelyn it was obvious: they were a new family with new money and a new house and every movement they made was filled with effort. It hurt to watch all that trying — the endeavor was belonging yet every movement made them more obvious as outsiders. If his family stayed for three generations they might pick up the scent of the place, start to seem less like foreign animals. Evelyn did not have another nice thing to say and she knew the rule. “Pass the salt, would you, Fern?”

Ben harbored a selfish hope that his mother’s cruelty would puncture the balloon of love that was carrying his sister away. He would catch her if she fell.

Paul attempted to raft them out of the muck with a conversation about War and Peace , which he had been trying to read for months, but the women refused to be saved.

—

Fern and Edgar went for horseback rides in the prairie and walks by the lakeshore. They listened to the Beatles. They celebrated with root beer floats when the Civil Rights Act was passed. The war in Vietnam began, escalated. Fern and Edgar tried to articulate the feelings they had: like a quiet fusion, he said; like a meeting of two breezes or streams, she tried. Both agreed it was inevitable.

Then, a cut in the form of a letter. It was addressed to Ben. He had been drafted.

For people like these, people who lived aside from the scramble and burn of work and the city, it was easy to think of current events as happenings restricted to the news. These were stories, not real events, not real boys in a real war. At least not their boys.

But President Johnson had announced that he would double the monthly draft calls to thirty-five thousand. The war’s arms were getting longer, the fingers greedier. Young men departed for Vietnam and came home weeks later, sometimes days later, in body bags. The ones who survived described an invisible enemy — the people they were supposedly there to protect looked identical to the ones they were meant to kill. There were boys who believed they were helping. There were boys who did not trust the mission or the President but soon it didn’t matter anymore what they thought. They were all boys who slept in swamps, watched their wounds rot, dragged their maimed friends to reed beds where another teenager tried to sew closed whatever part had been ripped open. They were all boys who killed or watched while someone else killed. They were all boys who looked up while a helicopter reeled in the bodies of guys who had been alive the day before, guys who had love letters in their pockets and bullets in their stomachs. They were all boys who remembered home.

Evelyn and Paul had sat in their living room and watched while US Marines set fire to the grass roofs of a village and women and children wept at the edge of a rice paddy. They had watched while bodies were hit and fell. In cities across the country boys burned their draft cards and were arrested. Protesters gathered in Washington, New York, Chicago, and at the edges of these protests were people yelling at the ungrateful kids, people who believed that America was doing the right thing and hated these indulgent teenagers who were trying to take a flame to the needs of their great country.

Evelyn held her son’s draft card in her hand. She understood that so, so many young men were dead, but she had another thought, unbidden: Manhood, inevitable in war . Paul thought: I hope, I worry, I hope. Fern woke back up to the truth of her brother, thought: No . She told her mother that it was a mistake, that he would never make it out alive, even in the best of circumstances. “They’ll devour him,” she said.