Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (29 page)

*   *   *

L
ATER
THAT
NIGHT
Fern and Mac stopped alongside the big river, muddy and roping inside its banks.
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
,
she said in her head. They looked out at it and tried to hear the water there, but it was too slow, too constant. There were ghosts of white shorebirds on the bank of a small island, and some in the air, and the trees were so thick with leaves they looked trunkless. Fern and Mac were standing on a hill above the water and there was a path down to it and many small footprints. Fern wanted the children who left them to have been carrying homemade fishing poles, wearing half-crushed hats, chewing a piece of hay in the sides of their mouths. There should be places that stay the same. Museum-of-life places, preserved for remembering.

Fern was tired from a long drive and her body still vibrated from the car and it was a warm night, and the birds and the water and the clouded night. Fern let herself fall into the generous pillar of the giant. She rested her head back and let it settle against the top of his belly. She could hear the process within: air and liquid, moving through.

It was more than they had touched since their wedding. Fern’s skin was still used to Edgar only. It made her want to go home. The craving for the twins’ weight in her lap came at her fast. Fern thought of a feverish Cricket asleep, her face red and the dreams making the pale pulse of her eyelids go, the way Fern had knelt at the bedside and put her head down against the child to try to absorb some heat, for both of their sakes. Fern remembered bringing Cricket an apple to eat when she was finally hungry. She had taken a few bites and left it on the bed when she fell asleep. Fern had picked it up and bitten the uneaten half and what she had tasted, strongly, was not the fruit’s flesh but the taste of her daughter’s palmsweat. Soon, the child would be up again, and running, and hungry and doing something sweet or dangerous that Fern would have to put a stop to. But Fern had kept that fever day like a gem.

In that want for her real family, she leaned against Mac, and
the giant put his big arms around her and they watched the river, which was a moving body, yet also so still.

Their heartbeats changed pace. Something new came to the surface. Fern felt a kindness flare up in her. She felt the gift that her body might be. Both of them were at a deficit. Charity made her warm, and she turned then, and she looked up into Mac’s face, which the moon was whitening, and he looked back at her, the big black eyes, the bright teeth. He was her friend and she told herself that she could give him that missing thing, though later she would be able to admit that what she really wanted was the wound. She wanted it for herself for what she had done wrong and she wanted it for Edgar. Fern closed her eyes, and stood on tip-toes and waited to be kissed.

Fern half expected the scene around them to change, to take notice: birds lifting from the trees, the clouds breaking for a moment. She was winning something, is how it felt. She was the victor. Her tongue and his tongue, his cheeks a scrabble on hers. They had earned this honeymoon, finally, by the famous river, deep in the moss and muck of this country, far away from everything that was true about their past and everything that was not.

All the way to the hotel, she leaned into him, and his chest heaved a little too much, and she wanted more of that. More longing, more pain from it.

The only hotel was called the Locust Tree and it was half-fallen. The sign was neon, blinking to say that there were rooms to let. Fern went inside as always, and the lobby was a tiny room with a counter with a full ashtray and a small bell, like a churchbell, which Fern picked up and shook so that the tongue clanged.

A very fat, very old man came in. He had a few strands of hair, combed over, and a pair of large square wire-rimmed glasses. He
said, “Cheapest room is six dollars.” It was too little and it made Fern nervous. She was used to being better taken care of than that. After the rat room, they had avoided the worst places.

“What’s the most expensive room?” she asked. It was one of the things she liked about traveling with someone who hid in the car—she could overspend and no one had to know.

“Ten. That one’s got a closet.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“I’ll take your money, young girl,” the man said. He coughed into his hands then, hard and long and when he pulled them away, he cupped within them a small, golden ball of mucus, which he held as carefully as a robin’s egg. He showed it to Fern, the slippery jewel, the dug-up treasure. “You’re not a nurse, are you?” he asked.

“Ten. We’ll take it,” she said. “There are two of us.” She wrote the last name in the greasy book and counted her money. The fat man continued to examine his hands, and to smile, and he yelled his thanks after Fern.

There was a cockroach on the bathroom floor, and nothing was whole. The headboard veneer was molting, the blanket was losing its fill, the mattress was concave. The water in the toilet was mineral yellow. Who knows how long it had been stagnant, what kinds of small creatures were growing within.

Mac and Fern fell into the pits of the bed. Fern removed the giant’s clothes and he covered himself with the blanket. Batting fell out, banked up on the floor like fake snow. He begged for her, and unrolled her pants. The bed sank below them. They did not worry about their noises in such an establishment.
Let them hear us
, they both thought. Fern imagined the fat man and his bad lungs. It hurt a little bit, the giant’s size.

The old question was still unanswered: Did it feel good? There was pleasure, definitely, in a job well done. A man on his back, the covers kicked off, sweating with his eyes closed and thankful.

After, Fern had the urge to walk to the bathroom so he could admire her from behind. Ridiculous, the thought—she was not that young, and when she had been, she would have been careful to keep covered up in the light. She felt small next to the giant, was that it? But she did not get up and walk, covered or bare, because she remembered the roach and the dirty toilet.
I just had sex with a giant
, she thought.

Mac asked for a cigarette, which they split, and after he fell too quickly asleep. He did not pull her into his chest, or trace her collarbone, or spread her hair across the pillow. Somewhere, these ideas had been seeded in her brain. She was the gift and the giver. Thanks ought to have been next.

The room grew more disgusting the later it got. The bugs were audible on the tile, and worse, inaudible on the carpet. Fern checked the chain lock on the door and it fell off into her hand. She dressed and lay back down on the farthest edge of the bed, away from the canyon Mac’s body made, and Fern waited, eyes closed, for the infestation.

1966

T
HE
FIRST
TIME
Fern and Edgar had touched was at her Junior Dance. He was back from college and had agreed, as a favor to his mother, to take a neighbor girl who was as uninterested in Edgar as he was in her. Fern was in a sleeveless dress, the color of a vague star. She had spread butter on her shoulders, just a thin slick of it because it made her skin bright. It was not an idea she had learned in a magazine or from a friend, but something she had thought of that eager night before, while she tried to seed her dreams with the smell of a boy’s cheek against hers. Her mother would not have approved, would probably have issued a warning about some rabid dog that would be attracted to her scent. At the country club? Fern would have asked. A rabid dog? So she kept it to herself. Her hair she twisted up, the points of pins poking into her scalp when she turned her head.

The night would be good, that was decided, voted upon. All the mothers had worked hard to ensure it. The mothers remembered falling in love as if it were a sudden amusement ride drop. Hands in the air, wind burning their eyeballs, down. All of it made Fern feel prematurely sad for her older self: she did not like
the idea that this was the best part of her life. Could it really be that tight skin and blond hair defined the potential for happiness? Or was it just that when you got older, everyone started to die around you?

Fern, buttered shoulders and doubts, went to the dance on her own, having turned down all the invitations for dates from boys she did not want to feel obliged to kiss. It was not so different from any day at school, except for dresses. Boys hunched and punched, girls pattered and giggled and pointed. The boys’ suits fit them sadly and seemed to be standing on their own, a little distance between fabric and skin. Inside the suits, the boys looked like boys. Scrawny and a little butchered by the process of growing as quickly as they were. The girls, at least some of them, managed the disguise. The girls seemed to want it more too. This was the prize of womanhood: looking angelic in a gown and someone asked you to dance and everyone in the room noticed you. The prize of manhood came slowly and later: earn something, put it away, buy yourself a car, flirt with the child’s teacher, get a raise. Fern wondered where these two axes crossed—what single moment in the life of a man and woman, their lives joined forever, felt exactly the same amount of great to them both?

Edgar was there in handsome glasses with thick lenses. His date was with her friends and Edgar talked to the younger brother of a classmate. Fern appeared at the punchbowl and Edgar stopped short. They had seen each other plenty of times at school, said congenial hellos, but never more than that. She saw him see her. He looked less dumbed by the slow music and intention of romance than some of the other boys. She caught his eye, and as practiced, looked demurely away. It was all that was needed and he came over, raised her gloved hand and kissed it. She regretted the gloves, regretted the missed opportunity to have lips on her skin. They
danced, parted, drank punch separately, danced again. So many rules followed by all the young ladies and gentlemen. Somewhere along the way, between being swaddled, nannied babies, they had been infused with the knowledge of how to behave and could not help mimicking their mothers and fathers. Fern wondered if it was cellular—would an adopted daughter from some faraway, charity-deserving country wake up at seventeen knowing how to spear an olive and spit the pit into her napkin without anyone seeing it?

Along the edges of the room, the non-dancing tried to appear unafraid. The popular girls and boys looked away. One of the important skills of being socialized seemed to be the ability to overlook other people’s unhappiness. Maybe the awkward ones would be pretty in college, or after, and if not, maybe they would be very successful, and if not that either, then they would be very giving, they would take care of the sick or the young or the old.

At the moment when Fern and Edgar had danced themselves into a corner, a huge wind slammed into the building and rattled the panes. They separated, the music stopped. The wind shrieked and pawed at the windows. The lights went out, girls screamed and huddled, boys just huddled. The teachers tried to act calm. Edgar looked at Fern and saw her hair shine in a flash of lightning. His hand gentled around her waist. In her ear he said, “It’s dark now,” and she knew just what he meant and turned to kiss him. It was the richest kind of darkness, the falling-into kind, and down they went, and they were holding
on.

1976

M
ONDAY
CAME
and Cricket fell into its arms. There was a time by which all three must be dressed and human, having eaten bread and butter, having cleaned the tribe-paint from their faces so they looked like nice little white children. She watched the colors run from her brothers’ wet cheeks like blood and silt. They were giving up their orphaned selves and acting like all the other parented boys with alive dogs and selves that had not recently come up bruised.

Cricket made sure shoes were tightly tied. She brushed her hair and styled it in the youngest way she knew how—two braids tied with navy blue ribbons—wanting not to be grown today. If she could look like a child maybe someone would take care of her. These were small illusions—the three little orphans would go unnoticed. The decision had to be made about whether to go inside again and get fresh clothes or if they should wear last week’s uniforms. It was hard to be near the old version of life because it made it obvious how far away they had drifted. Once, their mother had worried for a week over a decision about the upholstery for the new sofa and whether red sent the wrong message.
Once, their father had paged the many subscribed-to but rarely read magazines while drinking weak coffee in the rocker by the window. Maggie had slept there, and there and there. The house was full of ghosts. Cricket went in alone and fast, gathered what she needed and ran back out to the safety of the yard.

This morning, they did not bother to light a fire in order to warm their bread. The need for ritual had not quieted, but it had thickened. It was the only medicine and they were worried about using it up. Cricket held the hose while her brothers drank. They looked at the fawn’s hill, the now wilted petals, the demonstration of their love looking smaller the next day. There would be no one here to keep watch. No one to befriend the mother if she came.

When it was time, the boys waited at the gate in their blue-and-whites, little ties hanging around their necks, and Cricket checked their cheeks and hair to make sure they would pass. She slipped the latch and out they went onto the sidewalk with their bookbags and their finished homework as if they were the same as all the other kids, alarm-clock grumpy, cheeks pillow-creased. Cricket still stepped over the cracks like she had always done, and she still noticed the difference between smells as they passed houses—bacon, woodfire, cold brick. The boys were slack. Their bags seemed too heavy, but as they came closer, as other children appeared like wild game on the horizon, the boys stood taller. Cricket could see them get their boyness back, remember that there were balls to kick and sticks to swing and girls to tease. She could see the blood return. They would be scratched up and happy by the end of the day, beaten back into their bodies by wind and the speed of their own legs, running towards base.

Cricket herself doubted that she would be so easily restored. Her head felt heavy, her brain. But it was a good sight, the flapping red and white of the flag and the gathered mass of young bodies,
supervised. She knew her brothers would shuck her off when they got there, assert their independence, so before it was too late, she grabbed their hands, one in each of hers, and she squeezed tight. She wanted to cause enough pain to last them.

—

The classroom smelled like melted crayons. The fourth graders yowled and bittered at being back, stuffed their backpacks into cubbies, found their seats. No one except Cricket noticed that there was no Miss Nolan at the front of the room. They did sense a lack of balance: the room was a boat on which all the passengers were astern. The chatter continued, weekends were remembered, the near-loss of a softball team against the dreaded Somerville Pirates was recounted. Some kids had been taken back to the beach for the weekend, which was almost cruel, giving them summer in such a tiny sliver. They started to sense that someone, by now, ought to be forcing them into quiet. Someone ought to be civilizing them.
Ladies and gentlemen
, they were always being called when they were at their scrappiest, as if the name alone could cure them.

“Where is Miss Nolan?” the girls asked.

“This is excellent!” the boys yelled. “No teacher! Guys! No teacher!”

“Is she all right?” the girls asked.

The room hummed. Cricket wanted not to cry in front of friends and enemies, but she had already been abandoned enough this week. It was her. She was repellent to grown-ups. Wherever she went, the person taking care of her evaporated. She got up and went, as calmly as she could fake it, out the door and down the hall. In the other classrooms the children were quiet at their desks, following instructions from an adult with a lesson plan.

Someone else was standing in the stall next to Cricket, someone
with big feet. Someone who was crying too. Cricket knew the shoes. They were the shoes of her beloved. She said, “Can I come over?” and wriggled under the wall. Miss Nolan looked at her like Cricket was a puppy and she sat down on the lidded toilet and Cricket crawled up into her teacher’s lap. Miss Nolan received Cricket like she had been expecting her, like this had always been the plan. They held on tight. They soaked each other’s shoulders.

“My mother died,” Miss Nolan said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Cricket thought of an early snow on the Great Plains, a small woman out gathering berries, lost in the whiteout. She thought of a gathered flock of mourners in the teepee, a good fire, food available but uneaten, the wind through the seams. “How?” she asked. “What happened?”

“A car accident on the expressway.”

“The expressway?” Cricket tried to add the long strip of pavement, the rushing cars, toll plazas, to her idea of the plains. “I didn’t know they had those.”

Miss Nolan looked the girl over, swiped a tear away from each of their cheeks. “In New Jersey? Of course they do.”

New Jersey was a brick and it hit Cricket hard. She said, “You aren’t an Indian.” She felt terribly stupid and terribly small. No one was from Montana, no one was from Oklahoma. They were all city kids. They were all part of the same tidy, boring tribe.

Miss Nolan kissed Cricket on the forehead. “You are sweet and good,” she said.

Cricket wanted to ask about the lip-kiss last week, but she could not risk another loss. “Of course I knew that,” she said, reinhabiting maturity. “I’m sorry about your mother. I actually kind of understand because my parents are gone too. They’ve been gone since Wednesday. We’re orphans now.”

Miss Nolan tried to conceal her panic. The girl looked clean
and fed but probably in shock. Cricket did not see the effort it took for her teacher to keep a steady voice as she asked a lot of practical questions. Hospitals: not called due to fear of orphanage. Police: not called due to fear of orphanage. Relatives: not called due to fear of orphanage. Food: eaten. Sleep: slept. Safety: managed.

“You’ll be so disappointed in me but a fawn died in our yard, and I tried to skin it but I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I really tried. We buried her,” Cricket said, wanting to prove that they were good survivors, that they could take care of something else even when they themselves were broken.

“I didn’t expect you to know how to skin a
deer
. You poor ducklings,” the good teacher said, and Cricket had never felt so grateful or stupid in her life. “You should have told me what was going on. We’ll find them. I’m sure they’re all right.” Miss Nolan was relieved to have a situation to manage, to turn, for a moment, away from the inkbloom of her mother’s death.

“They could be not all right,” Cricket said. She had allowed the possibility that her parents had left on purpose for a trip or to start a new life and the possibility that they had gotten lost or hurt, but to say out loud the fact that they could be dead carved her out.

“I’m going to help you,” Miss Nolan said. “You are being taken care of.” The woman took Cricket close and hugged her and it was this touch that Cricket understood she needed, not a hot-mouth kiss, not the kind of close that she would look for later but the kind she needed now, had always needed: her small head against someone’s chest, a heartbeat dull but steady beneath the bones.

*   *   *

T
HEY
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.”