Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (21 page)

1970

F
ERN
WAS
NEVER
SURE
where Edgar had gotten the magic mushrooms. He had taken the car someplace, been gone all day, showed up later at their little house on the Army base with the first smile of its kind she had seen on him in a year. He said, “I want to do something together. Don’t freak out.” When Cricket had been bathed and read to and her warm, three-year-old head had been kissed by both of her parents, Fern and Edgar each chewed two small mushrooms that tasted half-rotten and metallic and stuck in their teeth, and thirty minutes later the room took on a purple-green hue and Edgar started singing a song from a musical he had seen as a child and had not thought of since and Fern sat on the floor with an apple for an hour without taking a bite.

He said, “Did it really happen that we put a man on the moon?” and Fern said, “I think so. We watched it.” Later they went outside and said, “Outside!” like they had never really been there before, and they hadn’t, not this way, not with the grass this sharp and the leaves on the trees so individual and the sky—the sky!—dark and rich and flush with stars because they were on a tiny planet currently facing away from the sun and the universe actually might have
been endless—endless!—and here they were, two bodies, maybe three hundred pounds of human between them, and they were both alive and they had made a child who was beautifully asleep. “I miss your brother,” Edgar said. It was a risk to bring this up and they rarely did but tonight Fern felt alive enough to talk about the dead. “Thank you for loving him,” she said. “I miss him too, but I’m glad he’s free of it all. He didn’t need to live in that place.” She looked at Edgar and his skin shimmered with color. “I do not forgive my mother,” Fern said. “I feel sorry for her, but I don’t forgive her.” Edgar nodded. They stood at the fenceline and looked up into the peach tree that was about to explode into blossom any day and they held hands—hands!—and they did not let go even when dawn flushed them with so much light that they felt overexposed.

—

The next day they took turns playing with Cricket, eyes sandy and burning, drinking glass after glass of water while the other slept. It felt good to be thankful.

That afternoon in the mail there was a letter for Fern. “Radcliffe?” Edgar asked, reading the address in the top left corner.

“Oh,” said Fern. There had been a fight, like a dozen others they had had in the year after Ben had died. Edgar had just received a postcard from Runner in Alaska who said he had married the Inupiat librarian and they were living off the land near Nome and that he had just killed his first seal. Edgar had said, “People are living communally and growing their own food and hunting or fighting for civil rights and we’re sitting here on an Army base in fucking Tennessee,” and she had said, “You were the one who insisted on this life. We have a three-year-old. I don’t know how to be a mother on a commune,” and he had said, “You know, women don’t have to be only mothers anymore.
Don’t you want more for your daughter?” Fern had shut herself in the bathroom, furious. He was right and he was terrible. That night she had sent away for an application to Radcliffe because it was the best college she knew of and she thought she would never get in, thus proving to Edgar, to her mother, that she was nothing but a housewife. In the months while she had waited for the answer, the possibility that she could be accepted was a thin but bright crack. She had counseled herself not to want it, but she had.

Fern took the envelope.
We are pleased to offer you a place in the incoming class,
the letter read. “Oh,” she said again. She expected Edgar to be angry that she had sent the application without talking to him but instead he grabbed the letter and whooped. “This is amazing! This is exactly what we need!”

She wanted to be a mother and a wife but maybe she could also be her own self, separate from the needs of others. This possibility kicked at her from the inside. Just like that? Send one stack of pages to Cambridge and a door to yourself opens?

With the mushrooms still a vague fizz in their veins, Edgar and Fern hugged. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “I’ll finish my book, you’ll study, Cricket will grow up near the ocean.”

Out there on the edge of the country, new soil was a promise.

—

They had rented a cottage to begin with and when they drove onto their new street they found big trees and beautiful old houses all freshly painted and all the children in the yards were clean and white. They also found that Edgar’s mother was already in residence in a fancy hotel nearby. Road weary, the family sat at the table while Mary, wearing a red pantsuit with a huge collar, her hair trimmed into a new blond bob, served martinis. She said, “The good news is that I have already done a lot of research on houses.”

“Houses?” Edgar asked.

“I know you don’t care about these things, Edgar, so Ferny and I will take care of it.”

Over the next weeks, Edgar took Cricket to watch the Red Sox lose three games, to the museum where they stayed all morning in the ancient art collection and discussed philosophy with the sculpted heads of Roman noblemen. Another day he took her to the harbor so she could learn the names of different sailboats. “Gaff-rig, cat-boat, Herreshoff,” she said in her little voice.

Mary and Fern spent every day with a real estate agent who wore pink from head to toe every time they saw her. She drove them all over Cambridge in her big bronze sedan, which sighed over every bump. They drove along the edge of the Charles, sparkling blue and dotted with boats, the Boston skyline on the other side. They went to neighborhoods made of brick and neighborhoods filled with Victorians, neighborhoods around Harvard Square where they stopped for lunch in a sandwich shop filled with students with round glasses and long hair and jeans and leather jackets. They did not go to the neighborhoods where Irish people lived, where black people lived. The agent offered an edited version of the city.

Mary fell for a huge brick colonial with white trim and columns holding up the porch. It had six bedrooms, four baths, inlaid floors, three fireplaces and a garden thick with roses. “You can’t fake an old lawn,” the agent said, tapping her pink pump on the grass. “The younger stuff simply isn’t as dense.”

Edgar would hate it, Fern knew, but she liked it. It was beautiful—the big brass knocker, the long path to the door, the porch-swing. Mary was buying and Fern could let her mother-in-law take the fall for the choice. She had spent the last years in a box of a house on a base in the South where she was too unlike
anyone else to have even one friend—a little comfort did not seem unearned.

To Fern, Mary explained that she would need at least four sofas and eight armchairs. All-new appliances. Fifteen good Persian carpets minimum, six chandeliers. “Teak is best for outdoors,” she said. “Inside I would recommend something warm.”

Fern said, “Edgar is going to hate this house. You know that, right?”

“The poor baby,” Mary said, frowning an exaggerated frown. “I wonder how he’ll ever survive such a sacrifice.”

—

Edgar did hate the house and he also didn’t care. He was thinking about his book and about sailing and about starting over.

The first night in the house, Fern sat up in bed in the blue hours and tore the blanket off. Her heart was racing. She jumped up, looked on the floor, under the bed, in the closet. “Where is he?” she yelled. “Edgar, where is he?” Edgar woke up and ran to his wife. “Where is Ben?” she said. “Where the hell is Ben?”

Edgar pinched her earlobe to wake her up. “Ferny, Fern. Ben isn’t here. We’re in Cambridge in our new house. It’s 1970.” He did not say the word
dead
.

Fern sat down on the floor of their big empty house and shook hard enough that Edgar felt it in the floorboards. He held on to her hands but said nothing. He had learned this from her brother: sometimes the only comfort is the fact of another person. Not a dam, but a surface to wash across.

Fern did not know that her father also woke sometimes and went looking for Ben. She did not know that her mother dreamed about him three nights a week, that in each dream, Evelyn and Ben were running side by side and they were lost and tired and it
was on the brink of twilight and they had to keep going until they found the path home. Fern did not know that in her mother’s dream Evelyn held Ben’s hand, coaxed him gently forward, spoke to him the whole, hopeless way.

In the morning, the family went to the pet store and Cricket picked out a sloppy Lab that she named Flower. The dog and the girl followed each other around, each revering the other more. Before bed Fern went to pull Cricket’s blankets up and found them curled together like they were part of the same litter, legs and tail, fur and skin. She could almost feel her brother’s warm kid-back against her belly, the way they had folded together at bedtime after their daylong separation.

—

Summer’s torch fizzled down quickly. Fern suffered over clothes for an hour in the morning of her first classes. Everything she put on made her look too old to be a college student but too young to be a mother. She settled on a pleated skirt and blouse and oxfords not because she felt good in the outfit but because it was time to go. She dropped Cricket off with a sitter around the corner and drove to campus. Her first two classes were Modernism and Introduction to Sociology. Both professors were ancient men in ancient suits who could hardly hear and Fern was years older than the other girls, all in minis or bell-bottom jeans, their hair long and pooling behind them in the chairs. Fern’s hand hurt from taking notes and she felt incomplete away from Cricket, but also good, she noted. It also felt good. Since high school, Fern had been oriented towards another person. This was the first time in her adult life that her efforts were her own. She did not have to drag a child to the bathroom every hour. She did not have to carry snacks. To
sit still in a chair and listen for a full hour and a half was luxury. She almost cried, to think that she might actually belong there.

—

Edgar rented a studio near campus in which to work on his book. It was small and run down and he loved it. He leaned out the window onto the fire escape and watched the students with their big hair and big glasses and he smoked cigarettes and read Tolstoy and worked to get the specter of a novel to emerge out of him.

At night Edgar knelt on the floor and put his ear to Cricket’s chest. Fern could not hear what he heard, but she knew what it sounded like because she did this too.

“How was writing?” she asked.

“Hard,” he said. “Today was hard. I think I figured something out about the structure though. How was school?”

“It was good. Everyone is so young,” she said.

Edgar was twenty-six years old. He still did not want to run a steel company. He still did not want his only contribution to the world to be suffering on one side and profit on the other with a thin column of vacations between. Edgar still did not want to turn into his father. Everyone would have to continue to wait for him to grow out of his own mind.

Edgar brought his lips down to Fern’s and held them there while a spark passed between them.

—

Fern recognized the symptoms immediately: she was so tired that her legs felt leaded; she was starving yet no food seemed edible. She called her doctor but already knew what the test would say: for the second time, she was not alone in her body.

The leaves changed to red by mid-September and it snowed a week later. It was as if the earth had been wobbled off her axis, as if the memory of however many tens of thousands of years of summer, fall, winter, spring had been undone. Fern fell asleep in class and woke up to the professor saying to her, “Missy? I’m terribly sorry to bore you.” She bent her head, stared hard at her notebook, which was blank except for the time and date of Cricket’s next dentist appointment. She could feel the snickers and the glances of the other students like pinpricks. They were scholars; Fern was a mother.

She stood in the line of girls waiting to talk to him after class. The other girls all had questions about selfhood and the public sphere. She heard a tall black girl with big eyes say the words
the off-modern condition
, and suddenly Fern, pregnant and tired and nauseated Fern, understood clearly that she had been mistaken: there was no place for her here.