Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (14 page)

“What should we write?” a scrawny boy asked.

“Write what you want to write. The point of writing is to say something, so say it.”

The children were displeased or elated or terrified. It was quiet and pencils tapped. Cricket made a title page. “An Index of My Life.” She wrote down the names of her childhood dogs and the ways in which they died. Car, mystery disappearance, rabies. No dog had survived more than a few years in their house. Something terrible always got to it.

Cricket thought about Maggie. Her breath was always buttery. In the summer evenings on the island, once the light had loosened up, they had all gone outside to love her. A big heap of boys and girl and dog in the grass. “Let’s say Maggie is our mother,” one had said.

“Let’s say Maggie can talk.”

“Let’s say Maggie can lead us to the treasure.” They had tied scarves around their heads and then they were pirates and the island was fringy with palms and the cove was full of mermaids who had sharp fangs and hated all humans except these three littles and their dog whose fur they combed with fishbones. It had been safe because Maggie was there. Maggie the protector, Maggie the kindhearted leader and follower.

Cricket remembered months earlier on a night on the island when their mother had seemed too tired to say no to anything and they had begged, “Please, can we sleep outside with Maggie? Pretty, pretty please?” They had dragged blankets out, made a big mat over the grass and then slept in a heap in one corner, kids and dog
breathing the same night in and out, and the stars fizzy above them, and the soft ears and warm black legs of their pet. They had hardly slept, it was that good. If only they could always live like this, they thought. They had schemed dragging one of the family’s old steamer trunks outside and filling it with supplies, maybe planting a garden, harvesting fruit from the long snarl of raspberry bushes. Cricket knew how to sew, which had seemed important. The boys had a compass, though they had no plans to leave the yard.

Cricket looked around her classroom at the boys and girls scratching pencils on heads through bowl cuts and long bangs. That neither parent nor the dog had come home the night before made the memory greyer. That Cricket had been the one to make sure her brothers were dressed for this school day, their lunches packed, their hair combed, her own bookbag repacked with homework. It was as if the wish for orphandom that they had made at another time had just now come true. Cricket did not write that down in her journal. She moved on.

She listed the names of her teachers up until then and put a star next to Miss Nolan’s name, knowing already that she was and would forever be the favorite. She wrote down people’s birthdays and the years in which she learned what: the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse. She wrote down alternate names for her brothers: Boris, Stuart, Nighthawk, Mark. She made a list of good jobs (pilot, copilot, horsewrangler, queen) and bad jobs (ambulance driver, mortician, housewife). Too soon, Miss Nolan said, “Close your notebooks.” But then she went to the windows and drew the curtains. She told the children to circle up on the floor.

She took out a satchel and went around to each student, tied a strip of leather around their heads. She said nothing. The children hardly breathed. Miss Nolan passed out watercolor paint and brushes and instructed them to pair up and paint a stripe of color
under their partner’s eye. The wet brush was cold and soft. She set up a fake campfire made of crumpled red cellophane.

She said, “This is part of America.” She said, “Imagine we are Indians. Imagine we’re on the plains. We hunt for our food, which is rabbit, buffalo and deer, skinned with a piece of flint and hung up by their legs to dry. The women pick berries and gather herbs and leaves for medicinal purposes. The children,” she whispered, “are given the bones to play with.

“Imagine that there are sandy mesas farther to the south and peaks to the north and that there is so much grass that it looks never-ending. We Indians are good at choosing where to set up our teepees, and we move around depending on the season. Before the white man came, we had no horses and used dogs as pack animals. But we learned to ride easily and quickly. We are excellent horsemen. Imagine how good it feels to cover ground on such a fine animal.” Miss Nolan looked out at her new tribe. Cricket listened like these were the instructions she would need to survive a great storm. Miss Nolan said, “There always has to be a love story. Otherwise what’s the point? Imagine a young brave, setting out to scout for a new pasture for the animals. Imagine he sees a small encampment of settlers with their wagons and their log cabins. Imagine he sees a beautiful girl out hanging wet dresses on a line. She is pale and red-haired and she must be from so very far away. Imagine the instant they look at each other and a tap of electricity hits them both in the heart. He goes back to his people, she goes back to hers and they can never, ever touch each other because they will make each other sick with foreign diseases and their families would have them hung and scalped, and despite how much they love each other, they would be miserable their entire lives.” The children were dumbstruck.

“But . . .” said a girl with pigtails.

“But,” Miss Nolan said. “But. They can write letters and they do. They write letters and they leave them under a particular rock. It gets so that touching the rock feels like touching the other person. It gets so that the letters and the rock are the only thing keeping the brave and the frontier girl alive.” Cricket wanted to know everything that every letter said and she could feel for absolute certain that a lot of what was contained therein would be very unsuitable for her young eyes and this made her want it yet more. All the answers to all the questions of every adolescent and preadolescent must be contained in those letters.

“Your homework,” Miss Nolan said, “is to write a letter as if you were the frontier girl or the young brave.”

“Except we don’t know . . .” one of the football-playing boys said.

“Hush. The human condition is universal. Just put yourself in their shoes. Put yourself in their moccasins.”

Outside the covered windows, the trampled lawn collected maple leaves one by one from the big climbing tree. But inside, it was the West, it was all emptiness, and the troop of Indians made fire, ate beef jerky that they said was rabbit, learned to whittle sticks into sharp spears to be used later for the hunt. They were braves and they were girl-braves. No one wanted to be a squaw except Muffy Tapscott who had torn out her ribboned ponytail and was already braiding her hair. At the end of the day, each boy and girl who had been good—and they were all good because this was serious, this was the reason to live the rest of the week, the rest of the school year—got to choose a feather from Miss Nolan’s leather satchel.

—

Like yesterday, there were no parents at home after school. Cricket stood in the living room, so quiet, and remembered her father,
two days earlier. How he had taken the telephone from its cradle, sat on the stairs leading to the basement and closed the door. No light through the crack; Father was talking in the pitch dark.

“Just us, alone?” he had asked, and Cricket had heard because she was crouched on the floor, her ear against the cold wood. There had been another noise—the same ocean heard in shells, in cupped secret-telling hands. Then there had been a long silence, and the conversation had turned to hurricane season. “I’m a good sailor,” Edgar said. Already, they had come to L and it was only September. Lisa. Next it would be a boy’s name beginning with M. Cricket knew this because she and her brothers had always played a game of naming hurricanes. Bets were placed in July. Each child got an A-to-Z and if they guessed right, Father promised to buy them any toy. Each year the children said, “Any toy?” And Father said most seriously, “Any toy, sweetlings. Any toy you can find.” They discussed this after lights-out in the freedom of the night. “Is a submarine a toy? Is an airplane? A horse is something you play with.” But none of them had ever won. There were too many names.

Cricket, ear to the door, had listened to the ocean in the wood. Her father had said, “They can manage without me. One parent is enough for now.” He had waited for the person on the other end to talk. “Kids this smart can handle themselves if they have to. They could use more space to roam.” Cricket had agreed about space. There was less air in this house than they needed and it was either too hot or too cold, and she was tired of having to ask first about everything.

Before she had tried to explain her parents’ absence away, but remembering the overheard conversation, now Cricket thought that Father could be someplace where hurricanes were a concern and that Mother might not be with him, though she certainly wasn’t here. What Cricket knew was that no one was in charge. Her brothers
were eating crackers at the kitchen table and playing checkers. They had unbuttoned their white school shirts and their little-boy chests were all rib and sinew. There was no mark of their parents’ departure on the air, no ghost of them. The silence was clean. At least until the red rotary phone began to ring and all three of them looked up. The boys ran to answer but Cricket yelled at them. “Wait!!” she said. She was sure that if it was known that they were alone, uncared for, they would be taken to an orphanage. Cricket imagined a dog-catcher’s van filled with sickly children. She explained to her brothers the danger they were in and they all stood there over the ringing phone like it was the most dangerous thing in the house. “You must promise never to answer,” she said. Finally, the thing quieted.

Needing to admit that they may have been abandoned for good, Cricket led a search around the house for clues. They looked in every room and every room was neat and unlived in. Then they looked in drawers. The same things were missing that had been missing the day before: clothes, not just Mother’s. Things had been taken from each of their drawers. James was missing his overalls and two sweaters, Will was missing a handknit scarf that he always folded at the top of his underwear drawer and Cricket was without a stack of days-of-the-week underwear that had been there before her parents had vanished. This had led the boys to believe their parents would be back for them, that they had organized all the details of a trip and forgotten just one thing: their children. To be helpful and prepared, they each packed a duffel with all the necessaries for a number of different climate possibilities. They had grown up with the good counsel of dressing in layers and they applied this to the new, parentless state. Cricket was not as quick to believe that their being left here was a mere oversight, that, two days into whatever their parents were doing, neither of them had realized that the three smaller members of the family were not in the backseat or
the ship’s cabin or the sleeper car. She played along, though, because she did not want to alarm the young boys. That’s what a caretaker did—faked okayness. Cricket tucked tights into her bag, light sweaters and heavy, scarves and matching double-soft cashmere gloves that she had always been too afraid of ruining to wear.

When they had packed and placed their bags by the front door, they bundled themselves on the living room sofa in front of the big windows where they could watch the path for rescuers. “Tell us about orphanages,” the little ones said, and Cricket lowered her voice to its most serious octave. “In orphanages,” she said, “there is a very old woman with a stick and everything is horribly clean. All day, the children, whose heads have been shaved because they all have lice, scrub the floors with bleach. They eat pig slop once a day and all night they are woken up each hour when the very old woman comes to stand next to each child’s bed and whispers into her ear, ‘You have no parents at all.’”

They had spent all their lives washing up, cleaning up, being quiet at parties, saying
please
and
thank you
and smiling when some old woman on the street touched them on the head. Now they were free of all of that, free but alone and in who knows what kind of danger. Cricket felt hungry and lawless and she went to the freezer for ice cream. Without discussion the children stood around the tub with spoons, scooping huge bites of chocolate, vanilla, strawberry into their mouths. They were lonesome and unstoppable.

*   *   *

E
ARLIER
THAT
SAME
DAY
, Edgar woke up in Glory’s house and put on his jeans, fastened his big brass belt buckle and looked in the mirror. He did not look like a person capable of destruction—he was just a thirty-two-year-old man, the first grey hairs, the
first lines, a few days of beard and hair that his mother would say was much too long. What should he have done? Gone home, promised away his future? There it was again, the burn in his chest, fury.
Not yet
, he thought,
she should suffer for this.

Freedom, first thing, was a foreign kitchen and too little for breakfast. Edgar had never cared about food the way his wife did. He wanted the utility, she wanted to discuss the butter and the spice. Without her, he could eat a small piece of bread and get on with things. Glory woke up and she slunk over to him in no clothes at all—she had thick brown hair between her legs, under her arms, on her head, and all that pale skin. She looked at him, this new man in her kitchen with tea and bread. Thank goodness for John with his carefully tuned gauge for unwantedness. He might have been good at other things, but scarcity seemed to be his most valuable skill. John had left a note.
Going to Mother’s
, and his signature, and nothing else. Glory knew all the elbows and S curves of the highway that led to that cottage on the cuff of a peninsula so far north it was snowbound from September to May. She could tell that John had packed almost nothing, probably not even wanting his wife’s handprints with him in this ache. What he did bring she imagined he had washed first in a Laundromat in an industrial washer with very hot water and too much soap. As if he could be free of every last of her skin cells. The residue. The scrim of his wife.

In situations of distressed marriage, the usual first step for the woman was to clean out all the closets and redo things. Have a guy in about new wallpaper, do something with the floors (everyone was carpeting these days, plushly, but Glory still preferred wood). She had money and no one to disagree. She could have bought the huge round lamps that had become popular, a set of white tulip chairs, covered a ceiling in mirrors. If John had been the one to
stay, the walls would already have been scaled with paint-color cards. To Glory, the house was a shell, her current favorite item inside of which was Edgar. He had bought a toothbrush and left it in the cup. He had pajamas there. That was it. The house, if it was paying any attention, might not have noticed a difference. A woman and a man. A certain amount of warmth emitted from them.