Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (17 page)

“Did the protestors say anything to you today?” he asked.

“Protestors?” she lied.

“I spit on one of them because I wanted him to spit on me,” Edgar said. “Because I deserved it. He didn’t, though. He was too polite.” Edgar took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt.

“Did anyone see you do it?”

“No. I was at the back of the line. I apologized after. I felt so stupid. He looked like he was about to cry.”

“I’m glad you want to keep writing,” she said. “I’d love to read it someday.”

Cricket, on Edgar’s lap, made a noise like a caught bird. All three of them fell asleep on the couch, ice still whining in their cocktail glasses.

—

Edgar played on the floor with Cricket who had acquired the words
pulp
,
fish
and
want
. She said
butter
,
dog
,
hello-hello
,
enough
. She woke screaming for no good reason and Fern held her in the rocking chair, so tired, hating and loving the warm knot of a girl. Edgar went into his study and thwacked at the typewriter. All he had was the need to articulate his own wrongness, his existence thanks to the profound suffering of others.

He read books about coal miners who died deep underground, the earth caving in around them. He read books about manufacturing and pollution and wage-slavery. He read about workers who lost limbs to the heavy equipment and were fired for being useless. He read about the children of those men who stopped going to school so they could earn money. He read books about the cotton that had earned Fern’s family their fortune and the dark hands that had picked that cotton, the dark breasts that had wet-nursed Fern’s ancestors from babies into children, the dark bodies that had driven the white bodies in wide, comfortable cars through the green ache of the South, fields bursting with soft, white money. She knew and Edgar knew that eventually one of her relatives had become a famous abolitionist, that the story went in the right direction. She also knew and so did Edgar that while the family had embraced new values, the dollars they carried with them were old and plenty dirty.

He came home and watched the news. American forces burned
Vietnamese villages. An offensive began in a city on the edge of the South China Sea that would last for weeks.

—

They did not know yet that Ben would die a few weeks later when the doctors attempted to perform a partial lobotomy, as if they could simply remove the troubled part of him. Slice and eliminate. That, in what would turn out to be the last moments of his life, he would sit in the dawn light preparing for the operation and jot down a note to Fern:
Thanks for the sweets
. Over all their years on earth together, all the ways she had betrayed him and cared for him, this was the tiny kindness that had risen to the top of his memory. She would lock the note in a metal box along with a sprig of Cricket’s hair and a photo of her and Edgar the summer they had fallen in love. Of all the objects in the world, these were the only three she could not risk losing. Fern would blame her parents always for Ben’s death. Her parents, who had not been able to leave her brother alone, who had continued to write checks to the doctors who promised that money equaled treatment equaled health. Her father would never recover from the twin loss of his son’s body and his daughter’s heart, and her mother, though heartbroken in her own way, would appear to continue her calm, cold walk through life. Evelyn would think of Fern’s anger towards her as one gift she could actually give to her daughter: she would take the blame.

Fern, young and sleepless, had once sat on the bottom step and listened to her mother and a group of friends in the kitchen, teacups and spoons tinking. The conversation had gone from tennis to golf to shoes, and then it had grown a little later, and they were drinking, and one woman said, “I was driving today, and I couldn’t hear anything because the boys were screaming at each other. I
thought about driving off the bridge. I thought about how quiet it would be underwater.” Fern’s mother had confirmed: normal. To think of killing your littles, to think of dropping them from great heights, to think of the gentle or terrible demise.

The Tennessee house, after Ben’s death, had a new temperature. Cricket toddled around tugging at curtains and pressing anything that looked like a button while Fern washed the dishes and swept the floor. The motions were a memory in her muscles. All of it felt bloodless now.

Edgar closed his eyes but could not fall asleep. He saw the white sheet of the north, the sky sparking green and purple. He saw Runner at the door that dawn, walking steadily out. He had no idea where Runner had ended up. He might have died in the cold. He might have been eaten by wolves. He might have walked all the way to the edge of the ice to the place where the cold grey sea began. Edgar imagined him undressing there and jumping in. He imagined that the cold would have been violent, impossible for Runner to fight.

Or maybe he had gone to town, gotten a job. Maybe he lived in a house just like Edgar did. Maybe he was warm and happy. Maybe he was grateful.

—

On the third day after Ben died, Edgar convinced Fern to leave the house. They went to a department store where all of them, pretending there was such a thing as comfort, bought things. They chose two matching oak dressers, new plates, water glasses, wine glasses, juice glasses, champagne glasses, whisky glasses. Edgar bought a wooden rack for his nice shoes, and then he bought nice shoes to put on it.

Edgar bought and bought and bought and it had the desired
effect: he hated shopping, he hated owning, he hated money, and each transaction hurt him. He wanted this surface hurt, this material hurt, which was a cut, a sting, a bruise. Fern usually liked new things, pretty things. She liked surface comfort and material comfort but today she was grief-battered and everything made her sorry: silverware, hats, eyeglasses, the chime of the perfume girls’ voices.

Cricket wilted at her mother’s feet, sat on the floor playing with a stuffed giraffe. She was too small to understand what it meant to die, but she seemed to know that she needed to be easy to love, that her parents would not find her otherwise.

—

On the third night after Ben died, Fern and Edgar and Cricket lay there in the big bed and Fern thought,
This is what it feels like to be married today.
Because the feeling was utterly different from being married the day before, the year before, the day they had made those vows. There had been a short stretch at the beginning when being married was a recognizable state—eggs were cooked, walks were taken, parties were attended, and in the dark, their bodies were two ropes, knotted and loosed, knotted and loosed.

Fern felt the shape of Edgar’s legs against the back of her own. The scratch of them, the temperature. She could feel his heart beating inside his chest, tapping out its music. “Tell me something about when you were away,” she finally said.

He thought for a moment. “By the end I got so used to cold so that I hardly even felt it.”

Fern knew that this was a prayer for her. A wish that she would learn to adapt to the new weather in her heart.

“On the night I was walking back home from calling you, I saw a huge figure approaching. The ice was blue that night and
this creature lumbered out. My gun was in my backpack, unloaded. I didn’t know if it was a person or an animal. And then the figure got closer and I realized that it was a polar bear. A huge white bear and he was coming straight towards me. He glowed in the moonlight and his eyes were completely black. I didn’t know if I should run or play dead. It was so beautiful and so terrifying and I couldn’t turn away. It felt like this was what I had been waiting for all that time. Like whatever he did to me was what I deserved.”

Fern knew that her husband must not have been eaten because here he lay. But her breath was caught in her throat. She squeezed Edgar’s hand.

“The bear came right up to me and stood there, and I could smell the sea on his breath. It felt like he had a question he wanted me to answer. I put my hands up in surrender and waited to be eaten or carried away. I told him that I had a baby, as if he could understand or care. He just looked at me and looked at me. I knew I was cold by watching the snow gather on his body. He scratched at the ground by my feet and then he stood up on his back legs, towering over me, and then he turned and lumbered away again.”

Fern could smell the sea and oil on that bear.

“I feel like he understood. Like Cricket saved me.”

There it was: that thick, slippery scar tissue Fern had known she would find on her husband. “I believe you,” Fern said. “I believe you that it was
beautiful.”

1976

M
ATH
WAS
MATH
and Cricket did not care which passengers would arrive first if two trains left Pittsburgh at 10:14 a.m. and 11:51 a.m. respectively, one going forty miles per hour and one going sixty-six. “Whichever one does,” she said. “Call the station and find out.” The math teacher did not appreciate this kind of attitude and she had a special look she gave to say so. It was all eyebrows—her whole face withdrew behind their shadow. The teacher said, “How are we ever supposed to get out of this recession if we have citizens like you?” Cricket scribbled on her paper and tried to seem like a person who cared about numeric facts. After a while she raised her hand and asked to go to the bathroom.

Cricket soaped her hands and wrists and rinsed until her skin squeaked. Her fingers were bright pink from the hot water. She looked in the mirror, checked her chin to inspect the progress of a bruise she did not remember getting. It was not better and not worse than it had been in the morning. Then the lights went off. Cricket held her breath. It was black-dark in the bathroom—she could see absolutely nothing. She imagined a knife murderer
standing in one of the stalls. And she thought she could hear breathing, now that she listened, but she could not tell where it was coming from. The space around her seemed vast and instinct made her stretch her arms wide, feel around in the air for a boundary. She found the wall and began to follow it towards the door. She wanted not to make noise but her body had weight and when she placed her feet, no matter how carefully, there was a sound. She imagined a trapdoor, a secret way out, a hiding place. The wall was cold and black. The air was warm and black. Her breath was hot and black.

Which is when someone came in close, body and arms, arms that slid around her waist. Lips were a surprise. Lips and tongue. It was only a short moment but it felt like a long one, that mouth hot and wet and her own against it and the arms keeping her. Cricket wrestled away, ducked under and out, and she ran from the room into the hallway, whitelit. Her eyes did not want to adjust. The floor was cleaned to a shine. Cricket could not see her face in the floor but she could see the reflection of her small form, the slight blue of her dress, black nicks of shoes on her feet. The reflection was fast moving, poured across the floor like liquid.

Cricket did not turn to see if anyone came out of the bathroom, and she did not hear a second pair of footsteps. The school looked just as it had—plain and organized and sad.

Cricket huddled at her desk in the safety of a set of fractions. Her insides were turning.

“Cricket, please,” the math teacher said. “This is not so horrible as you think.” The woman stood over her, turtleneck and shin-length skirt and large wire-rimmed glasses. Cricket tried to quiet her shaking feet and hands. The math teacher was certainly not going to be the person she went to. It was not the story the older girls told about kissing. Yet: her lips felt warmer from the kiss, her first. This had been a soft kiss, violent because it was
uninvited, because Cricket did not know who was on the other end, but gentle. Here were three-fourths plus one-fifth, one of one kind and one of another, and what did it equal? She tried to recall the details: the person was taller than she and did not have a kid smell. The person had a smooth face. The person was confident. It was a woman, she thought, which was embarrassing and awful and also not.

The math teacher came to stand above Cricket and waited until her pencil began to manipulate numbers on the page. Cricket’s hand attended to the integers and their additions and divisions, but her head was still in the dark of the girls’ bathroom. Cricket did not think she had been kissed by either of the Hancock brothers who were the sweethearts of other girls’ emergent fantasies, nor Adam or Stuart, the nerdy boys who might someday have wanted to be on the other end of her mouth. The person she imagined, whose lips had been on hers? Miss Nolan. Kind Miss Nolan, smart Miss Nolan. Too tall to match face-to-face, but maybe she had knelt on the cool tiles? Cricket imagined wrapping her arms around the woman’s waist, the cinch of her skirt, the tuck of her blouse, the long waves of dark hair. She would rest her head on Miss Nolan’s chest, listen for the beating heart. This story unmade the fear almost completely—the moment, which in fact had been terrifying, changed to a gift if Cricket told it the right way.

When math was over and Miss Nolan came back, she smelled like the outdoors. Her hair had been wind-tossed and her cheeks were pink. Cricket tried to meet her eye, to show recognition for what they had shared, because by now, Cricket was sure it had been her teacher in the dark. By now, no other pair of lips seemed possible. She knew it was inappropriate, and perhaps Miss Nolan was embarrassed. She would get fired if anyone knew. But love was unwieldy. Cricket already understood that.

When it was time to journal, Cricket started a love letter.
Dear Beautiful
, she wrote.

Dear Brown Eyes. I sit at the foot of the mesa as I write this under the blue skies. In the sand there is always silence. Human life can easily be forgotten. If you are quiet you will notice that there are animals burrowing into the sand and into the trees and cactus. Forget your own self and you will discover so much more. The Gods of the Skies and the Earth and the Water are always watching us and they know that I love you. I love you, Lady of the Crescent Moon with the ebony hair. I will bury a shard of turquoise in the sand two paces from the cliff’s edge, near the place where the cactus breaks through the earth. You will know the place because the lizard nests there in the first rains of the season. When you find the blue stone, then it is time for us to wed. I will be waiting, dreaming of your blood red lips.

Cricket had little to draw on but cartoons of the West. She wished she knew what it actually looked like. And all she knew about Indians was what Miss Nolan had told them already, plus whatever images of half-clothed Natives adorned common kitchen products: butter, baking soda, honey.

Before the end of the day, Miss Nolan gathered her flock in a circle and crinkled her red fire paper, and without being asked, all the children tied their leather strips around their heads. Miss Nolan said, “The buffalo supplied nearly all the needs of the Plains Indians. They were meat and their hides were made into clothing and teepees. The buffalo went away in winter but as soon as it started to thaw, the Indians put their ears to the ground to listen for the stampeding hooves.” Miss Nolan handed out sheets of paper, the edges of which she had burned so they looked old and mysterious.
There were little pots of ink and feathers to dip. The children laid their paper out on books and they drew buffalo, which they had never seen in real life. Miss Nolan described the big shoulders, the curly mane, the horns, the wide, square head. The children’s drawings looked like cows, like dogs. They drew smoke coming from the animals’ nostrils because that seemed fierce.

Miss Nolan said, “Imagine that we are the tribe of the young brave, gathered for the hunt. It is windy and still cold, even though the worst of winter has gone. While we walk, the men explain that we will trap the herd by surrounding them and closing in with our sharp spears. The men explain that it will be hard and it could take all day and all night and all day again and we will not be able to sleep or eat. The buffalo could easily kill us by trampling. The young brave tries to find the strength of the ancestors in himself and tries to feel confident and sure of his feet and arms. We set out at dawn. The sound of the hooves is like a gathering storm, and the young brave wants to run away but he cannot. He has to follow the rest of us and get ever closer. He thinks of his sweetheart, who is in a house, a log house, in a settlement. She has a kettle of water on and a fire and bread dough rising on the table. She is wearing a dress with a hoop in the skirt. She is writing him a letter, right that very minute, describing the very ways in which she loves him.

“Slowly, we close in around the herd, a half-circle of bodies wearing leather and feathers. On the other side is a cliff. We press the herd on across the grasses. The noses of the buffalo are wet and their eyes are dark and afraid. They are so much bigger than us but the trap is working.”

Miss Nolan looked at the children who looked back at her from their inky drawings, and they wanted to say that they knew what it felt like to be both the dumb animal following along and the cruel human, pressing. They knew, and neither feeling was good.

“We come to the cliff and we spread out to make an opening for the animals, a doorway to their death. We keep walking, moving the herd onward, onward, until the first beasts fall. We howl then, a celebratory call and we thank the gods, and we beat at our chests. The huge animals continue to fall, thunderous, crashing against the cliff walls, making the exact sound you would expect from an animal falling a hundred feet through the air. The dust rises up around us and they die. Or they break their legs, in which case we kill them with arrows.”

The children, by this point, were not drawing. They had expected the heroes to slay one animal, one dignified, beautiful animal and perform a sacred ritual of thanks over its body. Mass murder had not been on the children’s minds. Miss Nolan either did not notice or did not care. She described the way the young brave killed those buffalo that remained alive, the way the group set about skinning. The sound of skin and muscle separating. The way the blood pooled. The way the brave thought of his love and the moccasins he would make for her out of this bloody skin. The way the flies began to gather, loud as a storm, and the blood smelled sweet and the animals were still warm, even as they were cut apart.

The men thanked the animals because Indians are grateful, everyone knows that. “No part left to rot, every organ used for something: water sacks, thread.” Cricket tried to draw this scene, an animal gutted, heat rising, a man and a boy and a girl kneeling there, giving thanks. She wanted Miss Nolan to see that she was not afraid of what must be done. She was brave beyond her years, beyond her race. In this tribe, she wanted to be chosen as a leader, to be taken into her teacher’s teepee where the fire would be especially warm, where the skin was painted beautifully and the fur mat on the floor was soft. Miss Nolan did not look at Cricket any more than she looked at the other children. She was fair, and
Cricket admired this, though she was jealous of the care her teacher gave to anyone else. She reminded herself that no one else was kissed today. How resourceful, Cricket thought, to use the dark that way. To make a wilderness out of a school bathroom.

Miss Nolan said, “Right there at the bottom of the cliff, we Indians feast on the fresh meat. We especially love the liver, which we eat raw immediately. The young brave slops it up with his hands. It is still warm from being in the animal’s body.”

One boy, at this, fainted into his drawing. Miss Nolan did not seem surprised or worried, but she crawled over, lowered her head to his and stroked his hair. She whispered something into his ear that no one else could hear and everyone was envious. When he woke up after a moment, he looked peaceful. He said, “I dreamed of the prairie,” and Miss Nolan kissed him on the palm of his hand.

A loud bell rang, which made the children jump, but it was only the bell that signaled the end of the school day. The places where they lived—the maple-lined streets, the crossing guards and sets of fractions, the after-school snacks—fell down on them like a rainstorm. They were not blood soaked on the plains. They had not killed anything on this day. Some of the children were grateful and could not wait to leap into their mothers’ station wagons. “Your homework over the weekend,” Miss Nolan said, “is to list as many uses as you can think of for a dead buffalo.” She told the children about how the skulls could be used for sleds, the manure for fire, the skin of bulls for moccasins, the thin skins of calves would be used to keep warm the yet thinner skins of Indian babies, hooves were melted and used to make glue.

Cricket, who did not have a mother yesterday and did not know if she would have one today, was in no hurry to go back to her life. She lingered behind, tried to think of questions about her homework—what did the Indians use for a needle? How did they
keep warm in the winter? What sorts of rituals did they perform when a person died? Miss Nolan answered in a teacherly way, as if the two of them had not shared something, as if they were not bound together for all of time.