Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (12 page)

Edgar awoke one morning to find Runner sitting on the floor with a steaming cup. He was wearing his parka and boots. “Are you going someplace?” Edgar asked. As if there was someplace to go. As if they would ever leave this sheet of ice.

“I can’t do it anymore, man,” Runner said. “I can’t be part of this fucked-up machine.” It was the most he had talked since Edgar had arrived.

Edgar sat up in bed. “And?”

“I’m leaving.”

“There’s no place to go.”

“They’ll assume I’m dead.”

They would, because how else would it end? A single man in the sharp cold, wind and ice, a roadless expanse.

“The sled tracks from yesterday are still visible. I’ll either die or I’ll live. I can accept both possibilities.” Runner stuffed his pockets with food rations. He said, “You want to come?”

Edgar wanted to say yes to escape, but what he really wanted was home and he would not be allowed back if he ran.

Runner knew that Fern was pregnant. He knew Edgar had ties
connecting him to a world he could not walk away from. He shook Edgar’s hand and said, “Tell Fatty I said goodbye and good luck.” Edgar wrote his home address down and stuffed it in Runner’s pocket. “If you ever need help . . .” he said. And then Runner opened the door and started walking. The dawn was a shell, opening. Edgar watched the figure recede along thin sled tracks. He watched until Runner was a dot, then nothing, gone beyond the curvature of the earth.

—

On the day that Fern went into labor, she circled her house for hours. She drank cold water through a straw and she paced.

Fern remembered a day: she and Ben had been running, racing, sprinting. It was not lunchtime yet but they were ravenous. They picked blackberries in the garden and shared a fleshy, sunwarm tomato. The kitchen seemed terribly far away, and the province of grown-ups, and they did not want to break the seal. All afternoon they played and picked what was growing: rhubarb stalks, currants, raspberries, unripe pears.

Fern’s mother walked through the garden from her sculpture studio at dusk and found the two lying on their backs under the apple tree, counting its coming fruit.

“We could live a week, at least,” Ben said.

“A week’s not long,” said Fern.

Her mother looked at the fruit cores, the discarded stalks. “My god,” she said, “Fern, you do nothing but
eat
.” No mention of Ben whose boy-body deserved the nourishment, needed the fuel. That night at dinner, Fern served herself the smallest of portions. A spoonful of peas, one small potato, two bites of fish. She wanted to show her mother that she was not an animal. That she was a lady, and in so being, could survive on hardly anything at all.

There came a moment where the laboring Fern took her clothes off and turned on the hose, drank from it. Stars shot and fizzled, her body was hot with pain and then at rest. Then red and white lights spun on the leaf backs and she looked up to see her neighbor peering over the fence and an ambulance in the driveway. She tried to explain that she was fine, she was good, she was doing the work, but the men’s arms were strong around her back, and they carried her, naked and enormously round, into the back of the van like a wild animal that had wandered into the neighborhood and threatened to disturb the peace. They covered her in a scratchy blanket.
Hush up, little woman
, their arms seemed to say,
we’re here to contain you
.

—

Fern studied her newborn, fresh and ripe. “She has your eyes,” the nurse said, but Fern thought the girl looked just like Edgar, as if she were a container for the overflow of his person. She had planned on another name—Edgar’s grandmother’s—but when the nurse brought the birth certificate for her to fill out, she thought of that old woman in the bakery who had come into her life at the end, as they each prepared to cross the border. Fern said a small prayer that the woman had gotten the bread just right, eaten the last piece on the day she died, had nothing left over that needed to be thrown out. She wrote the name down:
Ruth
.

Fern stood in front of the big mirror, and though her belly was still soft and misshapen, she felt lightened. There she was—her same hair and her same legs, her same face. Out loud to her reflection she said, “I’m still here,” and she knelt on the floor and wept.

—

The first morning at home, the phone rang. “Fern,” said a voice.

“Edgar.” She thought it couldn’t be. Her breath was warm
against the plastic telephone. “How are you calling me?” He told her that he had walked for seven hours and hitchhiked for four to get to a phone where he could make the long-distance call. He did not waste their few minutes describing the way his legs felt after walking that long in the snow, how he had nearly lost the sled tracks and been sure he would die, that his body would only be found in summer. He did not tell her how strange it felt to be in a place where there were other humans, where things were for sale, about the chocolate bar softening in his pocket. The connection was heavy with static. “Did you have the baby?” Edgar asked. “I had a dream last night that you had.” That he did not know if his baby existed on earth yet, that he did not know that it was a girl made Fern feel like she had been caught in a lie. She had gone on ahead without him. “It’s a girl. She looks just like you, Edgar,” she said. The fuzz between them thickened. “Can you hear me? Are you there?” she asked. “I named her Ruth.” She was embarrassed by the name. By the decision made on her own without good reason.

“Ruth?” he repeated back. “Are you okay? Fern, are you okay?”

“You’re alive,” Fern said out loud. She had been holding a place for death, for disappearance.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“I really need you.” She wanted to swat the static away. She wanted a clear connection to her husband more than she wanted anything.

“I know. So many people are dead. All there is is nothing here. Whiteness. I know I’ve told you before but it’s so cold and so dark. I can’t believe you gave birth. I can’t believe I missed it.” Not knowing if she could hear everything he said, he repeated the most important thing. “Fern, I love you. I love you. Hello?”

“I’m here. I know it sounds stupid to say but I was shocked by how much labor hurt.”

Edgar, on the far end of the line, was envious of a body that could feel unrivaled pain and produce an unrivaled prize. He wanted to ask what the baby looked like, what she felt like to hold, how she smelled. “She’s delicate,” Fern said. “She’s tiny. I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was hard not to imagine the path this poor creature would have to walk, the world so tumbled with pain.

“I wish I could be there,” he said.

She said, “I don’t belong here without you.”

He wanted to say
Thank you
but the words seemed much too small for what she had done.

—

Edgar stood at the phone and ate his chocolate bar. The sugar hit his tongue hard. His back was sweaty. He said his parents’ number to the operator.

The next voice was his father’s: “Yes?”

“It’s me, Edgar. I just wanted to tell you—”

“Edgar, Edgar! Where are you? Mary! Edgar’s on the phone. Edgar? Are you there? Are you all right?”

“Dad. I’m fine. I wanted to tell you that you’re a grandfather.”

“Yes, Fern called yesterday. Congratulations, my boy.” It was this that hurt: he had not been the first to know. His parents had already celebrated, had already lived a whole day knowing that the baby had been born. He answered their questions about his safety, promised that he was fine, but he could hear pain in his mother’s voice. There was too much to say so they said little and hung up, all of them missing each other more than they had before they had spoken.

Edgar bought a can of condensed milk and a box of crackers and sat on the bench out front drinking and eating and saying to himself:
I have a daughter. I have a baby girl. I am somebody’s father.
The road in town was mud and rock. A stray dog nipped at a dead bird. That night Edgar slept in a boarding house where he ate a giant steak, took three showers and two baths before beginning the journey back to nowhere.

In Tennessee, Fern ate steamed green beans and nursed the baby. In Chicago, Edgar’s father called the same General who had saved Edgar once and said, “Edgar’s a father now,” and his attempts to keep his voice calm were thin. Mary was beside him, trying to listen in on the conversation. “Congratulations,” the General said, and then to clarify, “Doesn’t it seem to you that families as nice as yours should be together?”

“Yes,” Hugh said. “Yes, yes.” He managed to keep his breathing steady until he had hung up.

—

It was two weeks before Fern made it to the bakery again. And when she walked in, there, inspecting the crumb on a loaf of wheat, was the old woman.

“Oh!” Fern said. “You’re alive!” She was relieved and she was strangely annoyed. She had prayed for the old woman in heaven, she had mourned her. Now she would have to return to the state of waiting and do it all again.

“Do I know you?” the woman asked. On two of her fingers were giant, fire-bright diamonds, unmistakably real. Fern looked at her to make sure it was the same person. She had always assumed the woman was poor.

“I was pregnant last time we met.”

The woman studied her and seemed not to find anyone she had ever seen.

“This may seem peculiar but I actually named my baby after you,” Fern said. “Ruth.” She wanted delight. She wanted thanks.
She had given a dead woman an eternal gift, except that the woman was alive again.

“I’m not Ruth. I’ve never been Ruth.”

“What?”

The woman turned away from Fern, asked to see the bread bellies and found nothing to her liking. She said, “If I’m going to die with something uneaten, it should at least be top quality.” She looked at Fern. “I once knew a Ruth. She lived in sin in the state of California.”

The bell rung her out.

1976

T
HE
DINER
WAITRESS
seemed to know and love the giant the moment he appeared at her table. She was short and wore a little fabric cap and frilled apron and Fern figured she would have been a pretty girl before the bacon and patty melts had started to add up. The waitress tousled his hair when he ordered dinner off the all-day breakfast menu: six eggs scrambled well and dry. She nicked his ear between thumb and forefinger when he asked for a coffee warm-up. Little Fern had vanished in his shadow. Her hamburger order was written down without eye contact, without a smile.

The giant had told Fern that his name was Malachy, Mac for short, but she still thought of him as “the giant” because no name seemed name enough for such a person.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked him. He had not and he did not see why she was asking. She was afraid to ask him what it was that made the waitress so nice—terror or nervousness or feeling sorry or the thrill of a man who made the woman feel tiny, a man who could pick a little lady up like a leaf.

She wanted a map to spread across the Formica table. She
wanted to trace a route like her father would have done, bent over with his strong reading glasses. They had threaded their way out of Boston, through the dense treescape of western Massachusetts.

“Onward,” said the giant. “Westward, ho.”

They were still within the magnetic pull of home, still on recognizable highways, the usual greenery. She could have gotten on a big chrome bus and been back at her own doorstep in time to sleep near her family. In those few hours she knew she could justify forgiveness, construct a self that believed more in her marriage than in the specifics of faithfulness, honor her children’s need for an intact home, begin the discussion with Edgar about what each of them was willing to give up.

“Don’t think about going home,” the giant said. “You have to punish him more. You have to have your own journey. Missing you will be good for him. It’ll make him realize what he has.” If the marriage ended Fern knew it would not matter what the lawyers drew up: Edgar would get out with dignity, she would get out with children. That’s how it broke down for men and women. She wanted to throw everything in sight, to break things, to cause pain.

“Let him miss me,” she said. “I think I’ll feel better when we cross some state lines, Malachy. Mac.”

The frizz-haired waitress came by with a plate. “On the house,” she said, sliding a piece of chocolate cream pie in front of the giant. “Come back at breakfast and you can have another,” she said.

“She likes you,” Fern said.

The giant cut a bite.

“Pie is my favorite,” he said. Fern still was not used to the depth of his voice. She still was not used to the amount of space he took up, his big head always far above hers.

“How would she know?”

He shrugged. “She’s good at her job.” Fern wondered what it
would be like to proceed through a world where someone already knew what made your heart beat faster.

“By the way, I don’t expect you to have sex with me,” he said.

Fern poured the last of the cream into her coffee. She was surprised by the flicker of disappointment she felt. She had thought of sex as something she could store up. Not because she wanted it herself, not because it was warm and sweet, but because it was desirable to others and she was the one who possessed it. It was easier, more comfortable, to be a person in possession of something. It was also a way to hurt her husband. In the thick hours of her escape she had wondered if and when. She was afraid of his size. She had pictured succumbing, as in a flood. But it was Edgar she had hoped would suffocate if she had had sex with the giant. Thinking of Edgar kissing that woman made her want to do it now, to throw the giant on the table and climb on and end up in the paper and get arrested for it and be marked, for her marriage to Edgar to be marked forever by something she had done.

“I hadn’t even thought about it,” Fern said. She helped herself to the pie. The sugar was smooth on her tongue. She pictured the children in Edgar’s care. Fern took pleasure in the thought that he would screw things up, that a note would be sent home from school reminding him of whatever he had neglected. The children would be fine, though, she told herself. They were not babies anymore and could ask for what they needed. Edgar’s mistakes would not be deadly. He could figure out how to make the lunches, the dinners. Anyone could survive a few weeks without a mother.

—

After the wedding, Fern and the giant had driven to her house, empty and quiet, and she had run inside, changed out of her wedding gown and gathered some clothes and creams, made up her
children’s beds. She had also found herself taking some clothes from each of the children’s drawers, a shirt from Edgar’s. It was not habit that had made her pack for the family she was leaving behind but it felt more practical than nostalgic. To mend the tear, she would need both pieces of torn cloth. Fern had written a note.
Edgar, I have to go away for a few weeks. Whatever else you’re doing, I need you to take care of the children. The boys like peanut butter for lunch and Cricket likes tuna fish. Please get everyone to bed on time. I hate you right now. Love
, she wrote. Fern did not leave this note on the refrigerator or the kitchen table or the bed, or any of the other places her children might have found it. She was not leaving it for them, after all. She left it under the lip of Edgar’s box of watches, on his high dresser, well out of reach of small hands.

But Edgar had not seen the note because he had left just after Fern in her white dress and he had not written his own note to say that he was going away because the whole purpose of a mother was that she was always there without having been asked. Because Edgar could not imagine the absence of Fern. He had driven the now familiar route, knocked on Glory’s door and she had let him in and asked him how it had gone with Fern, with the flowers and the news that he was going away for a while. “I gave her the flowers,” he had said.

“Did you tell her you were leaving?”

“Not exactly. She was wearing a wedding dress.”

“A wedding dress?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to tell her. You can’t help that she’ll be angry, but you can keep her from worrying. Call right now.” Edgar had tried but Fern had not answered. He had lied to Glory and said she had, sensing that Glory, in order to set out on this journey, needed to hear that he had done at least this small thing.
Whenever doubt tickled at the back of Edgar’s throat, which it did every fifteen or twenty minutes, he reminded himself that his wife had easily chosen comfort over love, objects over him. He could not imagine his future without Fern, but she was going to have to be willing to sacrifice. A few weeks apart would make clear how much he was worth to her.

And the children? Edgar remembered a day on the island, sailing with them across the cove to the harbor where they ate half-shelled clams with cocktail sauce on the dock while they watched the old rusted fishing boats unload crate after crate of lobsters. Cricket slurped raw clams and Will wished for a lobster pot so they could feast every night and James said, “Maybe we should buy a boat big enough to live on forever.” They were such brave and wild and perfect little people. He wished they could have been with him, though he knew this made no sense. Wasn’t he trying to run away?

—

The giant and Fern drove in silence. She looked into the backseat of Mac’s big brick-red station wagon to check on her children and the backseat kept being empty. She knew they were not there but the timer in her body still went off—Cricket must be hungry, Will must be thirsty, James is getting tired. She had never left them for more than a few hours and the thrill of it would carry her for a while, the sheer idea of a single body, responsible for only itself. But already she could tell that this idea was a lie. Their little ghosts had followed her and always would. They had been born into the bigger world yet here, still in their mother’s body, was the shadow of each. Fern understood only hours into her journey that no matter how far she traveled she would never be alone again. It was half comfort and half terror.

Fern looked over at the giant, his huge hand on the steering
wheel, the air conditioning blowing his hair. She wished he was Ben but he was not. She resented him for it.

Fern said, “Who are you anyway? What do you do?”

“I work as a security guard at a bank. Basically I just read novels all day and chat with the tellers and eat snacks. It’s a good job.”

He sounded sincere but Fern still felt sorry for him. She had been bred to believe that menial work was meant only for those who were not smart or fortunate enough to do better. “Has anyone ever tried to rob the bank?”

“Never. We’re a small bank and I’m a big man. My hope is that between those two things we will avoid it.”

It got dark. Mac said, “Would you mind getting us a room?” and handed her cash.

Inside the motel room the giant sat down on the king-size bed—the motel had had only one room left—which sank beneath him. There were actual rats in the walls. The rats sounded as if they were carrying out a great overturning of their society, a revolution of claw and tooth. Fern had almost always stayed in real hotels with bellhops and concierges there to offer a suggestion for good steak, good booze. If Edgar refused the job, refused Chicago, this would be their life. She had done the calculations while driving: they could sell the house and buy something tiny, use the difference to pay for the basics. At least she thought this seemed possible. Fern had never had to keep track of money and she had no sense of what they spent and when, no sense of the difference between what was needed and what was only desired. Maybe, ten years from now, she would come to think of a room like this as a great luxury. Or else Edgar would give in and they would buy their own island, their own jet. That those were the two most likely scenarios made her life seem unreal.

Fern opened the well-worn leather suitcase monogrammed with her mother’s initials. The gathering had been rushed and she wanted to neaten. The ironing board was tucked into the wall and Fern unfolded it and heated the iron. She set it to steam and listened for the bubbles. No part of her body felt true or real, no part of her head. She called her own house and the phone rang and rang. She imagined her family out for pizza, Edgar trying to disguise her absence with food and soda. She hoped Cricket had done her homework. She wished she had included a reminder about the special soap Will needed to use to clear the rash on his back and the old freedom songs James had recently begun to love.

Mac turned the little silver knob on the television and the thing came to life. He lay down, put his shoe-feet on the bed, the volume on too high. The newsman, his hair pasted to his head, his mustache thick, said, “One wonders—could such a crime have been prevented, if only someone had spoken up?” Fern could not see the screen, but she knew there was a picture of a little girl who had washed up on the bank of the Charles. She had seen the news already. The girl’s hair would have been full of crabs, her skin grey, but all they showed was the yellow tape.

Fern gave herself the time it took to pee and wash her hands to cry.

The mother of the dead girl came on screen and said, “She was going to be a fairy for Halloween,” and her whole body collapsed, as if everything within it had been liquefied. Fern thought of the long list of things she knew would undo this woman: favorite doll, too-small bathing suit, baby shoes, stack of thumb-worn books, hair in the shower drain, hair in the bed, hair twisted in the weave of the rug.

Fern had lost all her babies too. They were not dead, not sick,
not kidnapped, yet each was gone. The crawler, the just-upright teetler, the question-asker, the new reader, the daring ocean-swimmers, the shark enthusiast, the midnight bed-crawler. At each stage Fern had been invested entirely in this person, their universe of games and questions and fits and laughter swelling to replace everything else. Then that stage had gone, completely. The children did not even remember huge swaths of the time she spent with them while Edgar was writing—songs they had sung five hundred times, stories Fern had told at bedtime, bodies of water in which they had splashed. Fern was the lonely keeper of these memories, and it made her feel almost crazy, insisting all the time on moments recollected by no one else.