Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (11 page)

Throwing, Fern found, was the very thing she wanted to do. She would have liked to throw the cake, the plates, the champagne flutes.

The giant came over and he picked Fern up in his arms. The crowd went wild. He lowered his big head and his lips were fat and warm.

“Consider where else you could go,” he told her. “Consider the mountains. How tall they are, and full of caves. Or out West, where some places it never snows.”

“We’re broke. The dog is old. My husband might be having an affair. It feels like I have so many children. I’m very tired.”

“They’ll be fine for a few weeks. Come with me. I’m leaving this afternoon. There are roads from here to everywhere else,” he said. “Paved roads, and food along the way.”

*   *   *

T
HE
CHILDREN
WALKED
HOME
at the end of the day as usual. They kicked the newness off their shoes and said, “Fine,” and
“Boring,” and “Slow,” about school and then, wistfully, “Sand,” and “Water,” and “Sleep,” about summer.

Mother was nowhere to be found. Her reading glasses were on the table and the newspaper was open to the funnies. There were two cans of soup on the counter, unopened. Father was never home at this time so his absence caused no alarm. Cricket told her brothers to do their homework. “No homework in kindergarten,” they told her. “Well, then learn something about the American West. Do you even know where that is? Do you even know anything?” Cricket was annoyed that she could not make her voice sound older, more Miss Nolan. To grow up to be anyone else seemed like a waste of time. Her brothers looked up at her with their big brown eyes. They were sweet boys but boys and so necessarily less smart, but Cricket would do what she could to teach them. She found a can of beans in the cupboard and a bag of frozen corn and explained that these were the main foods of the natives. “Also meat,” she said. “But you have to hunt it if you want any. Berries in summer, and squash.” The boys said, “Okay,” and “Wow,” and “I see.” Then they wanted to know if it was all right to watch television. “No TV,” said Cricket. “No TV until you understand our country’s history.”

All three children had hoped Maggie would greet them, at least. Welcome them home with her cheer and chuff, to make them kids again. But she too was absent, so the children went looking. They tossed her name out and out and out. They looked over the neighbors’ fences and in the shade of the maples; they looked in their own yard and in their bedrooms and under the kitchen sink. “Where is that hound?” they said. “Where has she gotten off to?”

Neither parents nor dog came home for the second night in a row. Last night they had gone to sleep watching television but tonight, because Cricket wanted her parents, when they returned, to see how capable she was, how very worth caring for, she put
the boys to sleep in their beds and then read under her blankets with a flashlight even though no one was there to scold her. She dreamed about math, though she tried, even in sleep, to will her brain to conjure a cartoon-flat mesa, a herd of elk and her arms pulling taut the spring of a bow and arrow.

1967

T
HE
DECEMBER
AFTER
Edgar left for his post in the great north, Fern was much too pregnant. She stood in the shower watching the water roll over her belly. The baby pressed a heel out, deformed her further. No one ever had said anything to her about how strange pregnancy would be, how aggressively strange. None of the mothers she had grown up around had talked about it. All the questions she asked her doctor ended with the same answer: if your mother was very late giving birth, you could be too; if your mother gained a lot of weight, you might too; the length of your mother’s labor is the best indicator for the length of your own. But Fern called and her mother claimed she had no memory of what her pregnancy was like, what her birth was like. She preferred to create children out of clay.

All during her childhood Fern had thought about the time when she would be a mother and how generous she would be to her children, and how she would play with them all the time and run with them and imagine monsters and fairies and winged horses with them and buy them giant stuffed toys. Now that she was on the threshold of motherhood, the feeling Fern had was of
being eaten alive from the inside, this creature taking the food and water, taking the blood to grow her own bones, her own skin, her own nails and hair and eyeballs and intestines and lungs and the meat of a heart.

—

Fern’s mother called to tell her that Ben was still exhibiting signs of insanity, that was the word she used, but they had spoken to his doctor who had a new solution to offer. They could put him into a new facility and start a heavy regimen of electric shock treatments. The doctor, Evelyn said, proposed the idea and the start date at the same time, having already taken the liberty of penciling Ben in, seeing so much promise in the therapy. “I can’t offer this to everyone. The procedure is expensive,” the doctor had told Fern’s parents. “We want to be very aggressive.”

Evelyn did not have the instincts other mothers did and she was aware of that, but the idea that one should do everything they could for their children seemed obvious. Here they were, lucky in wealth, with a doctor who considered himself an expert and a son who thought he could fly, a son who needed help. It would be a shame to do nothing when a person had the means to do something.

Fern’s parents were not asking her opinion on the treatment. “We have to try everything,” her father said. They were not able to answer her questions and neither of them wanted to talk about how uncertain Fern was.

Ben sent Fern a letter afterward.

Dear Fern,

I saw
The Sound of Music
. Yesterday we had Chicken Marengo. They are going to fix me with electricity. I miss you.

Ben

Her parents had decided to alter Ben. Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other. Fern found the place on the map, bought a basketful of treats—marshmallows, chocolates, gummies—and drove the distance to her twin, listening to the radio. Blacks were marching in Chicago, in Mississippi. Whites were burning their draft cards. Hours later she parked in front of a huge ivied building.
Brookridge Home
, read the ironwork over the door. It was a mental hospital, she realized. An institution.

She found Ben sitting alone at a table, dealing three hands of bridge. Beside him she saw six cans of soda and an empty bowl with pink milk at the bottom and there was a moment where Ben looked at her and neither of them was familiar to the other.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice was thin.

She put her hands on her huge round belly. “I know. I’m enormous.” She had imagined keeping the tears away until after. She had pictured herself collapsing in the car, but here she was, crying immediately. It was all a story—doctors and currents and promises—until she saw Ben, and his light was dim.

On a stand, a television showed a helicopter hovering above a thick pelt of green, all the leaves blown aside, a body being raised up. Ben said, “I was supposed to die that way,” and Fern said, “No, not you. You are safe.” She touched Ben’s forehead.

“It’s spaghetti night. Did we use to have an angel?” He said this without emotion. His voice was murky water.

“I don’t know. Did we?”

“In the prairie.”

“We had a statue of the archangel Michael.”

When Fern and Ben were in ninth grade, the family had gone to Europe for the summer. It was Fern who had discovered the statue of the angel in a huge antiques store. That night she had dreamed that the angel flew in her window and lifted her up,
pulled her nightdress off and kissed her hard all over her body. She had woken up sweating, and had begged her father to buy her the statue. He had assumed, as she knew he would, that her interest was in the artistry, the story of the angel’s protection of children, his defeat of Satan.

The statue had been purchased for a large sum and sent home by crate. Weeks after she had first fallen in love with him and on the other side of the ocean, Fern had pried the nails out and found her angel in twenty-nine pieces. Dust was everywhere. His body had crumbled on his journey to her. It was the first time she had felt defeated by love.

“Is that the angel you mean?” Fern asked Ben.

“People say they aren’t real.”

“Oh, I see.” She saw no reason for a sharp point. “This one was real.”

Fern stayed and watched the rest of a show about crocodiles, offered sweets every five minutes. In the flash of the television she looked at Ben’s living body. His old skin and eyes and the flush in his neck. The shell had not changed, except for a long scar across his scalp, marking his loss.

“Ben,” Fern said to the silent shape of her brother. “I feel lost. I don’t know what I’m becoming.” She put her hands on her belly. He looked at her. He gave a half-smile, like he had caught sight of something and then lost it again. It was hard to tell what was missing from him, if it was cognition or feeling. Whatever was left felt like all she had. “I was in high school and then I was a wife. I’m still a wife but without a husband to take care of. And I’m about to be a mother but I have no idea what that means. I am completely alone and I feel like I am waiting to die.”

Fern thought of the people who were supposed to be the ones to love her. Her husband was far away. She had called her parents
and they had flooded the conversation, flushed her voice out with news of the house’s rotting foundation, the charity ball, the cast her mother had made of a dead fawn she had found in the prairie. Evelyn had said, “I assume you don’t want me to come for the birth.” The last word was spit out as if it were something rotten. Fern certainly would have wanted a different mother to be there since her husband was not, but no, Fern did not want Evelyn. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Fern had said. “I’ll be in good hands.”

Fern had called Edgar’s mother and admitted more than she wanted to about how carrying the child of someone absent made her angry. How she missed Edgar so hard she was a bruise, but Mary had not offered to come. Two days later a box had arrived filled with silk stockings, a nightgown with an intricate lace bodice and a jewelry box containing a sapphire pendant as big as Fern’s thumbnail. The note had said,
Chin up!
and had her mother-in-law’s perfect signature. The necklace had been cold on Fern’s chest. It had felt half alive.

Ben knelt down on the floor in front of his sister. It looked like he was going to ask her to marry him. “Benny,” she said, trying to save him from embarrassment. But he stayed and took her foot out of her patent leather pump. Ben gave her toes a squeeze and then sat back in his chair. He picked up his napkin and spit on it and began to polish Fern’s shoe. “Here,” said Ben. “See?” And there, in the black shine, was his proof that she was alive: the pink smudge of her face, reflected.

—

Fern grew larger, hid behind her clothes and kept her head low. It seemed inappropriate to go out in her condition, to be seen in such a physically exaggerated form, and with her husband away too. Much more intimate than being naked in public was to be pregnant
in public. It was as if her whole life was visible—sex and fear and hope and the coming unknown. Everywhere she went people warned her that the next part would be so hard. “Enjoy this time,” an old woman in the bakery said. “When the baby comes, you’ll never be the same again.”

She said, “I’m already not the same. Look at me.” The old woman smiled back, deaf and happy.

“My name is a good name,” the woman said. “Ruth. You should use it if it’s a girl.” The woman was wire-thin, her collarbone a sharp edge beneath an old dress. It was the woman’s turn to order bread and she asked a question about each loaf, pointing her bony finger, bidding the baker to turn it over so she could inspect the underside. “Looks a little overdone, that one,” the woman said. Fern could feel the blood pooling in her ankles and fattening them. She knew when she got home that they would be thick and sore.

Finally, the baker took out the pumpernickel, which was already overbrown and could not be faulted for such a color. The old woman seemed unsure. The risk seemed to weigh on her, the whole week counting on this bread for sustenance and comfort. Fern softened for her. She said to the baker, “Would you throw some scones in her bag, from me?” The woman did not notice the gift as she counted, in coins, her total. Her fingertips were stained with nicotine.

—

The next time at the bakery, the same old woman was there. She was wearing the same dress and the same shoes. “Did you enjoy the scones?” Fern asked.

“I threw them away. People don’t give you things for free unless they are poisoned or spoiled.” She studied Fern’s protrusion. “You should have that baby. There’s no sense in keeping it
in.” Around the woman’s neck was a small gold Star of David. It made Fern feel charitable. Poor old thing.

Fern looked at the woman’s wiry eyebrows and considered reaching out and plucking one out. Would it be so terrible to run into someone kind? “Waiting is hard,” she said.

“You think waiting for life is hard, try waiting for death. Any day now,” the woman said and she checked her watch.

Again, she had the baker show her the underbelly of each loaf, asked what time they came out of the oven. She chose a rye this time. “Just give me half, in case I don’t make it past Thursday.”

Fern said the same thing to the baker, taking the remainder of the woman’s loaf.

It was the old woman who moved on first. The Sunday loaves were out, studded with raisins, and Fern waited outside smelling the bread, planning her order. She waited fifteen minutes, thirty, her feet fat and the ligaments in her hips pulling. Fern said a little prayer for the old woman and wished her good rest.
Ruth
, she said to herself,
good luck wherever you are, Ruth.

*   *   *

E
DGAR
HAD
NO
OTHER
JOB
but to administrate the deaths of his generation, sign the thousands of condolence letters.
So sorry for your loss, your loss, your loss too.
These letters were not addressed to people where he grew up—they went to Bakersfield, Omaha, Tampa.

Edgar had written to these mothers each day, over and over to say that he was sorry because the dead were not strangers. The dead were theirs. Edgar knew that the letters would arrive with some artifact of the absent—shoes, a watch, the green shirt. He did not know whether these artifacts had actually belonged to the
ones they were said to have belonged to. That jungle. The ants and snakes and vines. What if nothing was saved? But you could not tell a woman her son was gone and not give her fingers something to hold on to.

He longed for any number of unremarkable mornings. He thought about the novel he had started and the few good pages were a tiny, hopeful island but not enough to soften the bite of missing his wife’s pregnancy, of not being there to cup her swollen feet at the end of the day, to put his ear to the doctor’s fetoscope and hear that new heart. At night he lay on his back and he could feel his entire skeleton. The hard parts that would remain after the soft parts had gone.