Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (30 page)

Mac was glad that he could think of his big form at the end of the aisle as a gift. Not a gift for himself, but nice all the same.

Fern reached out and put her hand on Mac’s leg.

He knew she wanted him to be an ax, swung against the wall to see if the house would stand. It wouldn’t, he thought, if she was lucky. Not the house. But what was inside might.

“I’m not what you’re looking for,” he said, without turning towards her.

“What am I looking for?” Fern thought about the day with Ben after they had begun to cook his brain with electricity and drugs when he had shown her her own reflected face in her patent leather shoe. The answer was too easy. Love, home, herself—what else did people go searching for?

A herd of cows stood in the middle of the road ahead of them. Some of the cows had lain down. Some were looking, slack-eyed, at the cars. All were chewing. Mac slowed and stopped. The earth was pale, bleached by the sun. The plants were spiny and unwelcoming and the horizon was a long way off. The pickup truck in front of them veered off the road through the cactus and scrub until it had passed the herd. It would take an hour for the air to
clear of its dust. Fern got out. She walked over to the cows and could smell them as she approached. Hay and urine and mud and shit. From the car they seemed stupid, from up close they seemed big. “Cows!” she said. “Shoo!” Flies, like a thick black aura, rose off the animals and resettled.

From the other direction came an old red van. It stopped and out stepped two young women with lots of eyeliner and shaggy hair and big sunglasses. They smelled of smoke and one of them was holding a kitten. They looked to Fern like they had just woken up after a long decade in California.

“Cows in the road,” Fern said. The girls looked bored. “They don’t seem to want to move.”

“Have you been to Houston?” one of the girls asked. “Her brother lives there. He’s cool. We’re going to become airline stewardesses. In the sky you don’t have to deal with this kind of shit.”

One cow let the weight of her body fall back with a deep groan—Fern knew it was a she because her teats rested in front of her, engorged.

Mac got out but stayed close to the car. It’s what her brother would have done too. How afraid a person could be, how big and how afraid. She stood close to him as she would have with Ben.

Thunder clapped. From where?—the sky was clean. The cows stood and ran awkwardly into the desert. Hooves rang hard against the dirt. Dust rose out and up, and it glinted.

“Mica,” Mac said, without Fern asking. They were standing in a glittering fog.

—

Mac went into a restaurant and Fern stood at the payphone in the shade, leaned against the stucco wall. She would ask the question
even if there was no answer. She wanted to make noise occur in her own home, to create the specific sound of the phones in the big living room and the kitchen, like a pair of birds calling to each other. She dialed collect and held the phone away from her ear so that she could imagine that she was hearing the real ringing in the real house, the real life. Not this faraway tone in the hotel telephone.

And then: “Hello?” It was Edgar’s voice.

*   *   *

T
HE
TAXI
DROVE
to Edgar’s house the same way he would have gone, the way his hands knew and his feet knew, drawing back at the reds and pressing down at the greens. Stop signs and straightaways all mapped in Edgar’s reflexes.

He had had the keys in his pocket all this time. The house smelled its old smell. It was empty, was all. He thought of the agreement made all those long agos, sickness and health. He had not considered that Fern might be anywhere but in this house when he returned. Edgar walked around, looking. Though his vision was weak he could tell that the house was a mess, especially the kitchen, and something was in the backyard, that, upon closer examination turned out to be the boys’ teepee with bean cans strewn all around. Edgar had never known Fern to live with a mess like this, even for a day. Upstairs, he found her note on his dresser. He had to hold it two inches from his face to see it. “No,” he said to himself. His hands began to shake. He imagined his children kidnapped, jailed, dead.

He called the school. “Are my children there?” he asked, finding no way to sound like anything but a horrible father.

“You don’t know if your children are in school?” the secretary asked.

“I’ve been away. Can you just tell me please?” She took the names.

She put the phone down and he heard her clomp across the room and yell to someone. Moments passed before she came back on the line. “All present,” she said. He cried when he hung up and thought about going to get them early just to have their little bodies in his arms, but he was half blind and dirty and he did not want to fumble into the school and try to explain.

He called the eye doctor to ask for new glasses. He was nervous, apologetic. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Keating. We’ll have a brand-new pair for you tomorrow afternoon,” the singsong receptionist said. Two lenses cut to the right thickness and Edgar would get the world back.

His hands would not still. He needed to move around.

Edgar took out the almost forty watches in the case on the dresser beneath which Fern’s note had been tucked. They were gifts from his father. Time had always felt as if it was collecting against him, but now it seemed like the only true treasure.

He looked at the jewelry his parents had sent Fern. Some of the pieces had never been worn: a diamond brooch in the shape of a stag, a pair of emerald earrings that would have dusted her shoulders.

Edgar leaned into his wife’s closet and remembered only a few of the clothes. He should have paid closer attention. He found the blue dress she had worn when they first danced and again on the night he had tried to give Fern away to John Jefferson. He put his face into it. The silk was stiff and almost cold. He remembered the feel of her body inside and the promise of it. That was a day to keep, exactly as it had been lived then.

He looked for the red dress he had bought for her and when he could not find it he guessed that Fern had already thrown it away, which was what he wanted to do too.

Here was the accumulation of years and things. The needlepoint cover his grandmother had made for the rocking chair with a picture of a sailboat and his name. The good table linens he and Fern never ever used because they were too nice.

Edgar, his fingers shaking, picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed his parents. No one answered. What he needed to say was not meant to be left on a machine, but he was half grateful for the gift of a blank tape instead of a person and he told himself that he had no idea where they were or how long it would be before they came home. “Mom,” he said, “Dad.” The air was static. “I’m ready to take over the business. I don’t know if you’ll still want me. Thank you for everything.” He waited for an answer he knew was not coming. “I hope you’re having fun wherever you are.” There was more to say: that he still wanted his children to be seen for who they were instead of what they had, that he wanted them to know what it felt like to earn their own way, that he was glad he had written the novel he had, that he was sorry it would go unread. But Edgar could say those things later. He had time now. The click of the phone in the cradle marked the end of years of waiting to make this decision. It was not the ending he had imagined it would be.

The telephone rang, the exact ring it had always rung. It would be his father full of congratulations.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello?”

“Fern?”

She had the same question he did.

“Ferny,” he said. “Where are you? I love you. I miss you and I love you. I think the children have been living in the backyard.” He sounded relieved. He sounded like another version of himself.

“Did you say the children have been living in the backyard?”

“I’m sorry I left,” he said. “I wish I had never left.”

“But you didn’t leave.
I
left.” There was no answer. “You left too. Oh my God.”

“I called the school and they’re all there. There’s a teepee in the backyard and a lot of bean cans. I think they are all right. I went sailing. I was sailing to Bermuda but now I’m home. I lost my glasses. You were right about everything.”

Too many things required an explanation. “I’m in California with a man, but I don’t love him and I never did.”

“Are you leaving me?”

She imagined their life disassembled. No wealth, the remaining family disowning them when the novel was published. Again, she imagined standing on the curb surrounded by belongings, but this time Edgar was with her and the children. They would get an apartment or a small house. They would have less of everything, but they would need less too.

“I’m ready to take over the company,” he said.

“What about your book?” she asked.

“It’s my job to support you.”

“It’s your job to love me.”

When she hung up the phone, Fern thought of her mother’s decision to give half the pills to her father. Fern had always assumed this was done because her mother did not think Paul could make it alone. But maybe it had simply been impossible to imagine crossing whatever it was she was about to cross without her person.

—

When Fern met Mac, he had eaten his eggs and bacon and ordered a second round of toast. He said, “I got you a muffin, and look.” A piece of cream pie was sitting on the table, leaning slightly to one side. “No charge,” he said. He was smiling.

Five days ago already felt ancient. The miles they had covered
made the days seem bigger. At home, a loop between the house, school and the grocery store took a whole day. Fern and the giant had crossed mountain ranges, threaded mesas, traced a river bend for bend.

“I need to go home. Edgar tried to sail to Bermuda. My children were orphaned.”

The vinyl of the seat was red, and it stuck to Fern’s thighs. She peeled a leg up and sat on her hand. The waitress freshened Mac’s coffee cup, and recommended the ham to Fern. She was wearing a white jumpsuit under her apron and she had redrawn her eyebrows with black pencil. The pot of black coffee was the same shape as her hair. “It’s good today. Sometimes it isn’t, but today it’s good ham.” Fern did not want to be hungry. She hated to need anything on a day like this, hated to be reminded of her mortal skin and bones, the nonnegotiables.

“Just some cereal with milk,” she said.

“I don’t recommend that today,” the waitress said. “It’s not what I’m recommending.” She patted the puff of hair on her forehead that she probably thought of as bangs.

“Then I guess I’ll have the ham. And toast, if you think the toast today is all right.”

There was brewing disaster in the grey of the waitress’s eyes. A bad storm, high winds. There was a crease in her fake eyebrows. “Toast is toast.”

Mac said, “Are the kids okay?”

“They must have been terrified. Their family splintered and they were all that was left.”

The ham arrived, a fat pink slap. Fern asked the waitress for an ashtray. She buttered the toast, which was already soaked in the stuff, and she spread strawberry jam on it. She cut the ham into
the shape of a heart, putting the scraps on the table. It was foamy under her knife, lost water as she cut. And this was a good ham day.

Fern had stood below maple trees while James climbed the branches, waiting to catch him; she had held Cricket’s cold-puckered body in the ocean and tried not to imagine her going under and being lost to a wave; she had watched Will sled down a street and hit the tree at the bottom, had run to him sure that she would find a pool of blood. Every tenth word out of her mouth for nine years had been one of caution. It was as if she had not completely let her breath out since Cricket was born. And yet they had survived on their own for five days. They had gotten themselves to school. They had eaten. Cricket, amazing and brave Cricket, Fern thought. Maybe she did not need to be so afraid. Maybe none of them did.

Mac carved the last imperfection from her ham heart. “There,” he said, trying to cheer her. “A masterpiece.”

—

A few hours away waited a valley of palms up against a mountain range, where it was warm all year and everyone wore white shorts and stayed outside and let their skin turn brown. Even in old age people moved to this valley to get too much sun. The giant’s son was there and so was the airport from which Fern could fly home.

Mac worried that his boy would be leather-skinned and reptilian, no good for snow. He was worried that the boy would become pallid and malnourished if he could not eat citrus picked directly from trees in the yard, fragrant and intoxicating with their blossoms.

Fern and Mac drove, and the desert was drier and drier still. The earth felt like a bone, brittle, tired out. What grew was scrabble and cactus. Even the mountains were brown.

“It’s not a smart plan,” Mac said. There must have been bugs in the air because there were yellow splashes on the windshield.

“What’s not?”

“I’m nobody’s father.”

Fern knew this feeling. The disbelonging, the nonmatch. Except that she was sure the giant would be ever tender and patient. He and the boy would talk the whole drive home, those long black stripes through the country, and all the pie. They would swim in the hotel pools and sit outside after, their skin chlorinated and warming back up. They would stop to see the snakepits and dinosaur skeletons, admire the neon signs, the roadside of their great country. The hours would be enough to become familiar to one another. What they each liked to eat. What they did to get ready for bed. Behaviors while dreaming.

Fern was sure that by the time they hit colder weather, they would be related. Maybe not father and son yet, but family.

She said, “There is every kind of father.”

There were actual tumbleweeds, tumbling. As if the West had been ordered up and delivered.

They passed the Wigwam Motel, six concrete teepees scattered along the highway. There was a neon sign in the shape of a woman in a bathing cap, diving.

“We should stop for gas,” Mac said. Fern knew he was stalling, but she also understood why. On every day after this one, he would have to reconquer a small heart. He would have to persuade him that algebra was important, that the essay deserved writing. Friends would need to be made, played with, dropped back off at their better houses.