Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (24 page)

Then came August. Then came the call from the lawyer. The known world shook them off.

1976

F
ERN
HAD
NOT
NOTICED
at first that the giant preferred to stay in the car when she paid for their motel rooms. “Mr. and Mrs.,” she always said, peering over the ledger to see the name. She was another woman, otherwise betrothed. She remembered the early days of her and Edgar, of walking around with her new last name like it was jewelry. This new version of herself would have a short life—a few weeks, sea to shining sea. Fern wanted to know if hunger was churning up in Edgar’s belly, hunger for her. Absence was the last tool she had and she had no way to see if it was working.

They had traveled over a thousand miles now, had eaten and slept, eaten and slept and the trip had developed its own life. The rooms were all cheap and often a little dirty and Fern found that she didn’t mind. She still startled sometimes when she looked in the backseat and saw three empty spots instead of three children and when, for a moment, she allowed herself to think of the distance between them and the speed with which she was driving farther away she had the feeling of having climbed to a high mountain where the air was thin. Fern was breaking a physical law, unbinding
herself from the lives she had created. This feeling of airlessness also brought a high. She was a person responsible for no one else.

Fern hummed along to the pop station to songs she somehow knew even though was sure she had never heard them before. That was the genetics of this music—a virus, caught upon contact. “You can feel autumn in the air,” she said.

“Time to head south anyway,” said Mac. As they cloverleafed onto US 55 southbound they both laughed and simultaneously reached to crank the volume button to celebrate. It was that easy to solve the cold. The signs switched from Des Moines, Lincoln, Cheyenne to St. Louis, Jackson, New Orleans. The roadside was deep green and overgrown sooner than they would have expected. Vines worked their way across the land, tangling.

Fern thought of her ancestors, early settlers of this big country. They had spread out, moved a little farther west, seeded the Kentucky hills with their good name. They bought plantations bursting with cotton and they bought bodies with darker hands to gather the white bursts off the branch. Money accumulated. The houses grew bigger, and the purebred Americans owned ever more stable-hands, maids, nannies, ever more darker hands to tend the fields. Their wives were more beautiful with each generation, bound into shape by corsets made from the bones of whales.

The sons of the sons of the sons took over their fathers’ plantations, ran for government under their fathers’ trusted names. But soon when some of the young men came home they had a harder time watching the darker hands in the fields knowing that the people, the men and women—whole bodies, selves, the sons of sons could now admit were attached to the hands—were a line item in their lists of holdings. This many acres, this many bushels, this many males, this many females.

One son freed his father’s slaves while his father was in the
hospital with pneumonia. The boy’s father, who might otherwise have recovered, died surrounded by white-capped nurses who had no remedy for anger or shame. The boy’s mother hanged herself in the parlor. When he found her, he cut her down with a pair of silver scissors and lay beside her on the floor until evening, fireflies sketching lines across the dark.

To their friends and children both, generations to come told the story of the abolitionist over the story of his father, proud of the relatives who had fought on the side of right. They did not speak of the fact that in order for a family to free their slaves they must first have owned them. They did not stop spending the money that had been earned with the help of bodies, bought and sold. It was that money that furnished every single thing in their good American lives.

—

After lunch, Fern and Mac walked a small town’s main streets. He could not help himself from imagining for a moment that a woman like Fern could fall in love with him and how they would move in, buy a little farmhouse, get the garden going, bake pies in its kitchen. No one would know about their lives before this. He was not falling in love with Fern—he knew that she belonged to someone and he was unreasonably huge and they each had real lives to which they would return. Mac still let himself have the fantasy. He had been alive long enough to know that this was one of the safer pleasures.

She said, “I like that little blue house with the picket fence.”

“It’s cute. I’d never even fit in the door.”

“What size is your house at home?”

“It’s a two-bedroom apartment downtown. But the ceilings are high and I paid a lot of money to have everything redone with big doors and tall counters.”

“And here I am this small woman in a huge house.”

“You know goldfish grow relative to the size of their habitat?”

“Maybe we should switch,” Fern said. “Make our habitats relative to the size of our bodies. Edgar would love to live in a two-bedroom apartment, even if he couldn’t reach the sinks.”

Next to the Laundromat was a pink slice of a building with a purple sign that said
Astrology, Spices, Travel Arrangements, Notary Public
. There was a bell, and Mac walked right up and rang it. Fern hung back, but the door opened and there stood a middle-aged black man in a tight T-shirt advertising a team called the Bay City Chargers.

“How can I help you?” he asked. He looked the giant up and down, as if he was trying to see the step the man must be standing on. The man said, “Tarot, tea leaves, palm reading, astrology. Every reading gets a free cup of tea or a beer.” He looked like a Little League dad, not like a seer.

All the lamps had purple scarves hung over them and there were piles of cigarettes in ashtrays all over and a stack of magazines at the top of which was a glossy for teens with a blond cover model. On the wall was a picture of a topless black Madonna nursing her baby and the room smelled of cardamom. Fern realized that the only other time she had been inside the home of a black person was in Kentucky. She wondered what had become of the miner’s wife. That house had not surprised her—here, nothing was as she would have expected.

“Who’s up first?” the man asked. He sat them at a table. Mac gave him his birthday, the place, the time. The man put on a pair of reading glasses and thumbed through some papers and said, “In ten years’ time, you’ll find a home you don’t want to leave. You won’t struggle for money. You need to eat more fats. If we were in India, I would tell you to light a candle and send it down the Ganges.”

“Have you been there?” Fern asked.

“We were hippies. When we were younger. Now we’re adults with kids and a mortgage,” the man said, seeing a question in Fern’s eyes. She looked down at her feet.

The giant softened his voice. “And love?” he asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “Absolutely. The best kind.”

Then the man traced his soft, brown finger across Fern’s pale palm lines and made small noises of recognition.
Do not tell me the bad news
, she thought.
Do not show me to my horrible self.
Because there were her children again, real and actual and far, and her life that she had walked out of. There was her husband whose happiness she had tried to trade for material comfort. There was her twin brother whom she had failed to protect. Due south was coal country and below that the Army base. To the east was the town where Ben had jumped out the window and to the north was the ivied building where he had spent the rest of his life. Fern felt as though she was standing in the center of her entire life, all those points of departure. If one thing had changed along the way, who knows who they would have become. If the mine had not collapsed, if Ben had not been drafted, if Edgar had been sent to the jungle instead of the ice. Would they have been happier or sadder or wiser or gentler or better or less afraid people? Would she have had to run away?

She closed her eyes. “You’ll have three children,” the man said. “Two boys and one girl.” She felt the presence of them so strongly that she snapped her eyes open, sure she would see them standing in the room.

She tore her hand away.

Fern heard rain in her ears and could not say anything, and the two men looked at her and then she was on the floor and they were offering her water and she saw in their faces that the storm was her own. Everyone else was dead dry.

—

They sat in the car, but Mac did not start the engine. “I’m sorry. I can take you home.”

Fern took a moment to answer. Her mouth was dry. “Do you remember being a teenager? Everyone feels so sorry for you and you can’t be saved.” Fern was dizzy still and she could not get out of a dream she had had of being lined up with all the other teenagers on stage in her high school auditorium. The fourteen-year-olds stood there, arms at their awkward sides, their faces broken out with pimples, their forms raggedy and disproportionate.

The giant said, “I grew two feet in the fall of eighth grade. They had to get a teacher’s desk for me to sit at. Pretty soon even that didn’t work. Everyone else just had bad hair and skin, but I turned into a mutant.”

“Cricket is nine. She still seems like a kid, but in a second she’ll fall down the waterfall. She’ll be a woman and probably a wife and a mother. I’m afraid for my boys to grow up and stop being alike. My brother didn’t survive that. The days are so long, but then it’s over.”

“At least you were there to watch your children grow up. I don’t know what my son looks like. I can’t even imagine the thousands of versions of him that I’ve missed.”

“Thank you for helping me in there. I don’t know what happened.”

“We’ve done too much too fast.”

Life seemed improbable. All the turns of fate it had taken for Fern to be the mother of three particular children and the wife of one particular man. How furiously she loved them and how heavy it was to carry that quantity of love, how perilous to care for those delicate bodies in the spinning world.

Fern told Mac a story: in ninth grade at a party the boys proposed to the girls that they “do it.” The other girls all turned quickly away, but Fern, because she wanted to seem brave, said, “I’ll do it.” She did not know what
it
meant, not exactly. She understood which parts were involved and the general idea, but the mechanics were foreign. Frederick Dawson drew the lucky card and led the way down into the basement where an old bed was stored. They both took off their pants but not their underwear. Frederick was no better informed than Fern. She lay down first and he lay down on top of her, still as a fallen tree. They stayed for several moments exchanging nothing more than air. He shook slightly with nerves. As they ascended the stairs, Frederick seemed to fill with confidence, like a balloon inflated. He told the other teenagers, “We did it.” And Fern assumed they had. At school the next day everyone said, “Frederick did it with Fern,” and when Fern went home that afternoon her mother was weeping on the sofa in the front hall. “You’re ruined,” she said to her daughter.

To Mac, Fern said, “I didn’t realize until my wedding night that nothing had happened. I remember feeling so much more ashamed for how little I knew than I ever had for the indiscretion.”

“Did Edgar know the rumors?”

“I’m sure he did. Maybe part of what made me fall in love with him was that he forgave me for something without ever bringing it up.” She paused. “I wonder if my parents would have let me marry Edgar if not for that story. I’m sure they were already talking with other, better families before. Without Frederick Dawson my whole life might have been different.”

Mac leaned against the doorframe. His silence was always warm, an invitation rather than a wall.

Fern said, “My parents and my twin brother are dead and my husband and I have each done a terrible thing to the other and
when I think about my children I feel like I’ve left body parts behind.”

“We can be back tomorrow if we drive all night.”

“We have to find your son.”

“I have to. You don’t have to.”

The giant’s big head touched the top of the car and static electricity pulled his hair upward. “I don’t have any real friends,” Fern said. She thought of the black miner and his wife, the other women on base, the crisp, perfect Cambridge neighbors. Everyone had either been too different or too similar. Fern and Edgar had lost them because they were poor or hated them because they were rich. She thought of Ben, to whom she wished she had been more loyal. He might have been all right if he had stayed near her. “You are my friend,” Fern said. “I’m coming with you to find your son. We’re already halfway.”