Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (25 page)

“Thank you,” Mac said.

“Two conditions: I don’t want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee and I need to use the phone.”

Fern stood outside the movie theater and dialed, collect, her own number. Each ring seemed longer than the ring before it. “Hello?” she kept practicing. But no one was there to answer. They’re all fine, she told herself. They’re probably out drinking a milkshake. She pictured James and Will building a tower designed especially so that it could be collapsed while Cricket strung a series of tiny glass beads on a silk thread. They were probably having the best time, now that boring old Mother was gone.

Mac was standing at the car when she returned, his face bright, and he was holding a bucket of movie theater popcorn. “Come on,” he said, laughing.

They sailed through the day. They ate the buttered kernels and watched the world in front of them open up. It was so quiet, just
the sound of the wheels on the road, the wind. They did not talk or listen to music. They just drove and ate and watched the world appear and pass. The road turned and new scenery revealed itself. A raccoon lumbered out of the way and fled into the bushes.

“The first time I came to the South was when I visited my great-grandmother here as a kid. My parents sent me alone on the train,” Fern said.

“What was she like?”

“My great-grandmother? Tiny and terrifying. She washed her face with old-fashioned laundry powder and then put petroleum jelly on after. For a week we were driven around to museums and parks by Mr. Collins, her chauffeur, who was very dark-skinned and never spoke. ‘Why won’t he say hello to me?’ I remember asking. Great-grandmother was angry. She said, ‘Talking is not his job. I keep him because he knows how to be quiet.’ She looked at me and must have seen that I was upset. ‘Don’t worry, I doubt he’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘Not all black men are.’”

“Were your parents like that too?” Mac asked.

“They knew Great-grandmother was racist and they would have told you they disagreed. But my father also forbade our cook from using garlic or onions because he thought it was too Italian and therefore low-class.”

Mac knew what it meant to live as an outsider. He was a minority of one, and not part of a group anyone was fighting for.

“Minds are hard to change,” he said.

She thought of the palm reader, her own expectations. “Yes,” she said.

Fern took his hand. It was buttery. This was not an answer or a question. Outside the window, anything green overgrew itself.

“If you could go anywhere?” she asked.

“India,” he said. “For the elephants.”

The bucket of popcorn was generous, meant to occupy two sets of hands through two hours of horrors and delights, and Fern and Mac went back and forth between eating and twisting their fingers back up together. They never got tired that day and they never rested. “Tell me more of your story,” Fern said, and he began.

—

Mac met his future wife during a high school summer when they had nothing to do all day. The teenagers all gathered in the park under a shade tree and fanned themselves with fat leaves or books or their own sticky hands. It was too hot to think or act. The girls put their heads on the laps of the boys until they could not stand the extra heat. They whined like puppies.

Claire was not a pretty girl, but she was a girl. Her sister brought her into the group, otherwise she never would have been tolerated. Little sisters could come if they were worshipful enough. Giants could come if they brought treats.

Claire took the giant’s cold drink, held it until her palms hurt. Her hair was unsmooth and unfixed. Mac knew that he had earned no right to be choosy. It was within this conciliatory fog, the day too bright to ask questions that Mac and Claire first kissed. His lips were fat as fingers on her little mouth, and she was salty and grassy-tasting.

The month passed. Behind the widest trees, the not-very-pretty girl with a not-very-pretty bow in her hair on his huge lap; in her parents’ house, in the basement, both of them shirtless on the concrete, which was almost, almost cool.

She said, “I don’t deserve you,” and Mac thought that maybe she was right, maybe he was just one notch better than she, wrongly sized but good-looking otherwise. He was thankful, so
thankful not to be the less loved party, to have a hold on the ropes keeping his heart in.

“You are so good to me,” he said, and that part was true.

Claire braved the oven and baked blondies for her giant. She delivered them to his door in an antique tin with a red ribbon around it. Mac’s mother answered. She brought the girl in and asked her to kneel down at her altar so that they might pray together. Claire would hear the story, as all visitors had, and she would say, “Wow,” because she was polite and wanted the mother of her love to approve of her. Every teenage girl has within her a lurking gene to make the parents think of her as a daughter, no matter if she loves the boy or hates him, expects to marry him or leaves him by midnight.

—

When it was time for Claire to leave, the giant ducked under the doorjamb to kiss her. Mac’s mother was standing there when he closed the door, her face pink. “Oh, oh,” she squealed. “She’s just perfect. And she’s not too good for you.” It was the same thought Mac himself had had, but hearing it did not feel good.

“Yes, she’s very nice. And not very pretty.” He tried to celebrate this fact with a smile.

“You’ll ask her, then?” Mac’s mother asked.

“For?”

“For her hand, you idiot. No one ever expected this. No one ever thought it was possible.”

He knew it was true. That night, he looked in the mirror, which was really three mirrors that he had nailed to the wall in a tall line so that he could see his whole self at once. He looked good when he stood alone. His belly was flat and his arms were muscled and his
neck had a mannish character to it. Good proportions, good hair. The trouble came when a normal-size body stood beside him.

The proposal took place under the original kissing tree. He drew a ring out of his pocket, the ring his great-great-grandmother had worn. The size of his palm did nothing to make the tiny diamond look bigger, but Claire wrapped her arms around as much of Mac as she could and pressed her face into his chest and wept, saying over and over again, “Yes, darling, yes, darling, yes, take me as your loving wife.”

Mac’s mother took over the planning of the event without asking for opinions. She took the girl shopping for a dress and insisted upon the one with the widest, most dramatic skirt. She wanted bows, fat white bows on the chairs, and she wanted red roses on every surface.

Meanwhile, the temperature dropped slowly. Fall changed the air from half-water back to all air, and everyone felt as if they had just woken up. September passed, but the change grew noticeable in October, when Claire began to look different. Her hair seemed soothed by the new weather, her skin was not rashy any longer. Her eyes looked clearer. Mac said, “You look so nice,” before they went into the school building.

November, and she was prettier still. She started smoking. Had she grown taller? Mac wondered. Her legs were very long and lustrous, and somehow tanned, despite the season. She wore skirts that were tight in the waist and silk blouses, shoes with a small heel, lipstick.

The other boys started to congratulate the giant on his good work. How did he know, they wondered, that the barely-okay girl was about to get so beautiful? Mac, though, grew more and more uneasy. He was notching down, his inferiority to his fiancée increasing by the day.

Mac and Claire did soon stand in a church presided over by one of the city’s many Father O’Briens and make their lifelong promises. They ruined the sheets in the hotel room, took a weekend up north and walked in the woods after the season’s first snow.

Six months after his wedding, Mac visited his mother. He passed her slumped on her chair, seemingly asleep, carried the bags of groceries he had brought to the kitchen and unpacked them. He poured the beans and flour and sugar into the correct jars on the shelf. He cleaned the last of the butter from the dish and placed a new stick there. He rearranged the fruit in the drawer and took out the piece of greening cheese. How quiet it was. How nice to be in his mother’s house without her telling him what to do.

He sat in the living room opposite his mother for half an hour, waiting for her to wake. Finally, he grew worried that she would upset her bedtime if she continued to sleep. He got close and began to sense a wrongness. Her knee beneath his hand was cold. The giant picked his mother up and held her like a child, and she was nearly that small in his arms.

Claire came to him a few days later with a piece of paper in her hand. Condition: pregnancy. A doctor had signed it at the bottom. As if she was trying to get out of school, out of work. An excuse to stay in bed. “How dare you trap me like this?” she said. She had a faceful of makeup on, and a plaid skirt he had not seen her wear before. She looked like someone trying to turn famous.

He had had a plan, to raise children without worrying about raising giants. An easy sperm donation. No one had to know. He had not expected her to get pregnant so easily. Mac looked at her fair belly, in which resided a tangle of cells. He wanted to kneel down and press his ear to that wall of skin, listen for deformations. “Can they tell if it’s normal?” he asked.

“It’s a sin not to have the baby,” she said. “But if it’s a giant, you can keep it; if it’s normal, it’s mine.”

“But we’re married. I assume that means we’ll raise our children together.”

“Look,” said Claire. “When we met, you were the best I was going to get. Now I think I have a chance at a better life.”

Claire then produced a second set of papers from her purse. They were legal-size and covered in writing. This time, the signature at the bottom was his mother’s. “Little squirrel,” Claire said. There was a number at the bottom with a dollar sign preceding it.

“She played the lottery every week for twenty years,” Mac said, “but I didn’t know she had won anything.” The number seemed impossible: $927,000.13. Claire explained that her half of the money would support her for the rest of her life if she was careful.

“You’re already leaving me?” he asked.

“Now I’m pretty
and
I have money in the bank. I have to look out for my future.”

“And our baby’s future?”

“Your baby or my baby, not ours.” Claire said, “If the baby is yours, you’ll have to make your own nursery. I wouldn’t recommend buying the smallest sized clothes, either.”

He went to a store full of pinks and blues and felt larger than he had ever felt in his life among the tiny objects. Shoes that he could have worn on his fingers, miniature hats, pants no more than a few inches long. There were little tables and little chairs and little toilets and little fake telephones. The giant crouched down and picked up a pair of socks from a low shelf. For a doll? he wondered. And he put them in his basket because he wanted to rescue them.

The salesgirls avoided him at first, but got braver the longer he stayed. “I just need the very basics,” he said. He did not explain that there was only a fifty-fifty chance of him getting to be a
father after all. The brunette said, “Bathtub, towel, christening dress, pram, crib.”

“I can do that,” he said.

“I wasn’t done. Sheets, bassinet, spit-up rags, diapers, pins, wipes, rash cream, books, mobile, teddy bear, pants, dresses, shirts, pajamas, socks, hats, blankets for summer, blankets for winter, first aid kit, gauze for the umbilical cord, bottles, bottle brush, soft spoons, plastic plates, high chair, rubber ducky, a book about colors, a book about seasons, a book about Mommy and Daddy.”

“Stop,” said Mac.

He bought everything she said he should and it felt like insurance. Here was this room, all ready, drawing the baby towards it.

The day came when Claire stopped in the middle of painting her fingernails and said, “Get over here,” and she slapped Mac hard across the face. “Are you kidding me? It already hurts this much and I’m just getting going. What have you done to me?” Her belly was massive, much bigger than average, and Mac pretended to be neutral, but he thought the win was his.

The doctor stood between her legs and received the head, the shoulders, the body. He declared, “A boy!” and Mac and Claire both yelled, “How big?” before he could even congratulate them.

“It’s perfect. He’s perfect. Not a bone too large.”

The doctor wiped his brow as if he had been the one to labor the creature out. The baby looked to Mac like a human heart, purple and beating, and when Mac went to reach for him, Claire pushed his hand away. “We made a deal,” she said. “Giant baby: yours; normal baby: mine.”

“I wasn’t always giant,” he said, but she was not listening.

She let him hold the baby that night, and he was as light as a kitten. He was still belly-rounded and yet to unfurl.

When Claire fell asleep, he whispered things: “I am your father
and I love you no matter how far away you get.” Again and again: “I am your father and you are my son. My son, my son, my son.”

Mac never got rid of the baby’s things. He did find other uses for them—pots and pans in the crib, his own clothes in the dresser, laundry in the small bathtub. He always felt that his boy, who Claire named Matthew, lived there with him a little bit.

Years passed with no news of the pair. He did not know where they were. Each year, on Matthew’s birthday, Mac baked a small yellow cake, frosted it and sunk the correct plus-one-to-grow-on number of candles. Each year, he put one slice of the cake in the freezer for Matthew to eat when he finally came home. The rest, he forked into his big red mouth.

And then, thirteen years later, a pink envelope arrived, marked
Palm Springs, USA
. Within it were these sentences:
It’s your wife here. I preferred the baby and little kid years. The boy is getting too large.
An address followed.

—

Fern thought about the story. She thought about the way the poles change and draw people close, push them away. “Would she have left you if your mother hadn’t turned out to have money?”