Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (10 page)

Fern went to the beauty parlor and had her girl curl her hair into big feathery layers, Glory Jefferson layers. She sat in the chair watching her head turn prettier, thumbing a fashion magazine two seasons out of date. Fern had not said she was getting fake-married and she did not mention what her real husband had done or the fact that she might be poor.

Fern thought of her real wedding, which had been covered in the local paper and reported, as all weddings joining two good families, as perfectly charming. In the pictures: the older ladies in wide skirts puffed with tulle, beehives and cat-eye glasses. The younger ladies in shift dresses and pumps and heavy black eyeliner. It had seemed peculiar to Fern that the grown-ups all condoned this event, which would mean the end of their ownership of her and Edgar. It seemed like they ought to have put up more of a fight to keep the children whom they had birthed and raised. Just like that? Married and gone? But everyone had seemed so pleased.

It had been warm in the sun. The guests were all parent-friends, not Fern’s or Edgar’s. To Fern’s parents the guests had said,
Congratulations
and
Good match
and
Such a beautiful day
. To the
bartender they had said,
Gin and plenty of lime.
To each other they had said,
Tell me more about that gorgeous pheasant-shaped brooch you’re wearing
, and,
Where are you having Bill’s trousers hemmed now that Henning’s is closed?
and
I should think that the coloreds would rather join a country club of their own making.
Glasses had been drained, noses had been powdered, the day had grown a little hotter.

To the music, Fern, in a dress with an empire waist and a huge skirt, white gloves up to her elbows, her hair frozen in place and a bouquet of primroses, had walked with her father down the grass aisle. Everyone had smiled at her, predicting her future: four children, a lifetime of parties, the yearly vacation, a long retirement and a quiet death, announced in the same newspaper as the wedding would be (a good woman saw her name in the paper three times: when she was born, when she was married and when she died; she should otherwise make no news). All according to plan, the guests’ smiles had said. Fern had felt something turn in her stomach. She had wanted those things, most likely. She had wanted Edgar and babies and the feeling of summer returning each year, the smell, and setting up the hose for the children to spray each other, and then autumn and the trees turning riotous and orange and she would bake something for everyone to have after supper. The rotations, everything returning again and again, each time just enough the same to feel like coming home, but so different too.

There Edgar had stood, waiting for her, his posture his own and his thick glasses clean and reflecting light. Promises had been promised, dances danced, toasts sealed with clinking flutes. Every time Fern had seen Edgar’s parents, they had been laughing. Her own mother smiled, but Fern knew she was disappointed—wifedom was not something Evelyn held in regard. Paul had
seemed truly happy, but he had gone inside with a migraine before the ceremony was over.

To Fern, Edgar had said, “Now that we’re married we never have to go to a party like this again.”

The bride and groom had been released finally into their life. His parents had rented a car for them to drive away in, a white convertible Rolls-Royce with a huge chrome grill and whitewall tires and white leather seats. The car had been packed, the chauffeur was at the ready, the hotel had been paid for by one father or another, and the couple had kept looking at each other but then looking away again. They had held hands in the backseat as they were driven out into their future. Fern had felt the very specific warmth of Edgar’s skin, different from anyone else’s. Suddenly, the car had slowed and they had both jolted forward. The road ahead of them had turned all silver, shimmering and slippery, like mercury had spilled over it. It had smelled like the sea.

“What is it?” Edgar had asked. The driver had stepped out and walked towards the strange flood. He had bent down and continued walking until he had come around the curve where a fish truck sat. Edgar had stepped out too.

“Careful,” Fern remembered saying. Her first wifely worry, and it had made her throat feel warm.

When he returned to the car, Edgar had said, “Herring. Hundreds of thousands of herring.” Once she had known what they were, she could not see them any other way. Fern had gotten out too, and they had stood there watching the creatures slip and settle. The fish were dead, but their round eyes had looked afraid.

Fern and Edgar had stood together in the silver sea. They had felt as if they were walking on water. As if all the fish in the depths had swum upwards in order to lift these lovers. As if to deliver them ashore.

—

Fern checked her watch. She peed. She took the dress out of the closet and stripped to nothing, starting again in all white lace. The dress had a string of tiny silk buttons down the back, meant for a sister or best friend to fasten. Fern, alone, struggled a few closed. She would have to wait for Louise to help. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her big waves of dark blond hair, her lashes fat with black mascara, all that white fabric. She was too old for this, but with the hair and makeup she looked almost right.

Fern the fake bride was in the kitchen drinking water when Edgar came in the front door. He had flowers.

“What?” he said.

She chose not to explain.

He looked her up and down.

“Button me,” she said, relieving none of his questions. She wanted to push him to the ground, to break him, and she also wanted his familiar hands on her skin and for his touch to be what it once was: a reassurance.

Edgar put the flowers down on the counter and tried to take his wife’s hands. Fern felt the prickles of being caught at something stupid start at the back of her eyes. Edgar did not say, “Let it fall off,” and devour her. He did not press for an explanation for the outfit. He did not ask her about money spent. She refused his hands. He turned her around and, button by button, closed her up. The dress was tight and hard to breathe in. He did not tell her how sorry he was or what she meant to him. He said, “You look nice.”

She said, “Screw you.” At least she could wield the small weapon of confusion.

Fern took the flowers—one thing she had not prepared for her costume—and walked out of the house with hot, dry eyes. She
drove to the sad, avocado-green-walled community center, waited for the organ music and walked down the aisle surrounded by withered but happy forgetters. Under the fake-flower arbor, an actual giant. He reminded her of Ben. His pants were polyester, brown, a little too short and he had a red carnation in his lapel. His huge face. His hair was dark and straight, deeply parted, his sideburns long. Her brother had been gone for eight years. What would Ben have looked like now? His death was not all absence—it sometimes felt to Fern that her twin brother’s body had merged with her own. As if they were never meant to have divided in the first place. When she approached the altar, the giant took her hands, her little pale hands, into his big calloused ones and smiled at her, wide and true.

There was also a man dressed as a priest—surely he could not have been a real priest?—who asked all the usual questions. Fern and the giant said yes to them. They promised. Fern pictured Edgar in the back of the room. Imagined that he had followed her and now looked on while she married someone else. And when it was time for the last part, she reached her hand around the giant’s huge neck, bent him towards her and she kissed him as hard as she could. He tasted like ash. He was generating so much heat.

—

The forgetters grew misty for the newlyweds, reached into their pockets for hankies, clapped and whooped when the pair walked back down that aisle, big hand, small hand. Fern could not tell in their faces if they truly thought that two people had been married that day or if they were simply enjoying the theater. They seemed happy, sincerely happy, and their faces were bright.

Only after the two had opened the door to the world,
reentered the day, did they realize how dark it had been inside. They stood in the courtyard where the grass was green and the fountain was dry. They squinted against the light, against the summer’s end. It was as if the sun was emptying itself out now before winter. Above them were white streamers and little plastic silver bells.

“It’ll pass,” the giant said. Fern could feel her lipstick drying. She wet it with her tongue.

“What?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t have kissed me if you had had a better day.” His voice was deep and slightly electronic sounding. Like it had been prerecorded. She had to bend her head back to see his face.

It was too bright. Here she was in a wedding dress with a huge groom in the middle of a real day, in the middle of her very own city surrounded by a hundred people she had never seen before who all thought they cared about her. All that money she had spent. “You are not my husband, but I do have a husband,” she said.

“Of course you do.”

Louise was wrangling. She could have used a lasso. Grey-haireds spiraled off like wind-caught dust, going eastward, westward, purposeless and searching. They drifted towards Fern and the giant and offered their congratulations.

“Your mother must be so proud,” they said and Fern thought of her mother’s little body, gone from the world. She had no idea if her mother had ever been proud of her.

“The most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen,” they said, and they seemed to believe it.

“You make a fine couple.”

“The last time I saw you, you were this big.” A hand flattened at hip-level, a head shaking in disbelief. “I hardly recognize you.” Fern gave a kiss to this woman, on the cheek, and told her that she
looked beautiful and thanks for coming, it means so much. “To have someone who’s known me all my life,” she added. This lie was an easy gift to give.

Each of the forgetters had a plastic champagne glass with fizzy that was too gold to be the real thing. There was a terrible cake, a foot tall and bright white with blobs that were meant to be flowers along the seams. The couple on top had the wrong plastic hair color and neither of them was a giant. Fern and her groom took hold, together, of the plastic knife and, with it, split the white mountain. Inside there was yet more frosting. Just looking at it made Fern’s teeth hurt. Fern and the giant each gathered a forkful, reached across to the other’s mouth and placed, as if it were a sealant for this new endeavor, a glob of white on the opposite tongue.

An old man came up nose-hair close and breathed on Fern for a moment while he mustered the energy to speak. “Never,” he wheezed, “fight with clothes on. My advice.”

Fern felt slightly sick. She looked at her two feet on the ground, the new white shoes already scuffed. She looked out at the sea of guests. The forgetters were, as a rule, short. Their spines must have compacted throughout all their years on an earth ruled by gravity. Their fingers were thin but fat-knuckled, holding cake plates and enjoying the white slop. Most likely they had been advised by their doctors to cut fat and cholesterol, to make smart choices about nutrition in these, their late years. But they did not keep track of this information any more than they kept track of anything anymore. What was in front of them was all that mattered. There would be grey string beans on their plates later, and for the ones with no teeth, grey string bean puree. The cake was a treat: creamed fat and sugar, spread thick. Fern went for a piece herself, wanting to feel the celebration.

Edgar, the fact of Edgar, the idea of what he had done, stood
beside Fern like a shadow. She tried to imagine him after she had left in her white dress. Did he sit down on the sofa? Turn on the television? Did he cry or scream or fall asleep on her side of the bed or call his mother or look for the dog or fix the dripping sink or root around in the basement freezer for an ice cream sandwich or order something from a catalogue, or did he simply sit on the floor with a glass of cold white wine and listen to the emptiness he had begun to create there?

Fern had never considered losing Edgar any other way except a heart attack. That was how it was meant to happen: struck while playing tennis, while walking in the sudden fire of fall leaves. They were bound together, magnets that were just rocks without the other. The idea that the marriage could fail had not been in consideration.

The giant had a circle of old ladies laughing. His big face was lit by the story, whatever it was. Fern heard the word
shoemaker
, the word
rustic
and the word
Chevrolet
. The women cracked up. Who knew if they could even hear what he was saying. One of them had frosting on her cheek, and this fact nicked at the nerve endings in Fern’s chest. She looked away.

Louise came around, insisting they needed to stick to her schedule. These folks were born in the olden days and they had an early bedtime. After cake, the bouquet.

The women gathered on command, their short hairdos dyed or white. They wore plastic beaded necklaces strung by grandchildren who were at least a little bit afraid to come visit. They wore lavender, petal-pink, dove grey. Maybe they did not remember that they were old and empty of mind. Maybe they felt light and full of perhaps. Maybe they were humoring this younger woman, thick with good intention. It should have cheered Fern to see these happy elders enjoying a few good hours, but all she
could think about was them later in dark rooms, a lone body in each one, a sad photograph in a frame, everything good already passed.
Here it is
, Fern thought.
Here is the worst case.
Perhaps her mother had been right to leave early.

Fern turned her back. These were her flowers, she remembered. Edgar’s gift. She considered not throwing them, considered running away. She imagined the flowers in her dining room, in her car, in her trash and found no surface on which they made sense.

Fern gave a hard toss and Edgar’s flowers were in the air. There was a shuffling sound and then a tiny woman emerged with her prize in the air. She could not have been more than four feet tall. She was joyous, frenzied.