Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (31 page)

With sudden breathlessness, Mac said, “Do you think she warned him?”

Fern knew what he was asking, but she pretended she did not.

“Does he know what I look like?”

She wanted to tell him that it would not matter. That the boy would not notice, used to being smaller than everyone, anyway. It could be true. But she remembered her children once. “Mother, we saw a midget. Not just a small man but a real midget.” They crouched low to demonstrate the size. Children knew how to do certain things without having been taught. Climbing. Meanness.

“He was absolutely tiny,” the one had said.

“Tinier than tiny,” added the other.

“And his voice was strange.”

In the car Fern said to Mac, “Your son is going to think you are marvelous.”

—

They stopped at the service station and Fern went inside to pay. There was a thin old woman at the register, her hair long and black with grey strands. Maybe she was Indian. Maybe not. Fern only knew what cartoon Indians looked like. On the rack next to the counter was a tray of arrowheads carved from obsidian. They looked like the one Cricket had found on their dig on the island. Fern thought of her children in the teepee in the backyard of their Cambridge house. Resourceful little creatures. She did not know the story yet, but she was proud of them. She bought three arrowheads and put them in her pocket.

“You seen the dinosaur bones?” the woman with the long hair asked.

“No,” said Fern.

“They’re real old. You ought to go. White people always like to see real living Indians and real dead dinosaur bones.”

Fern reported the detour to Mac and they took the dirt roads like the woman told them to. Dust kicked up. It looked like they
were headed into nowhere and they were. Then, a hand-painted sign on plywood:
Dinosaur Fossil, 1.2 Miles.

In the bush-scrub, there was a hill and as they approached they saw a near-perfect skeleton. As if the great animal had only recently lain down there for a rest. Fern had seen them in museums, these bones, and understood that such creatures had existed, but it was different to see it here in the dirt and bush, unmined. She knelt down at the skull and carefully brushed sand off the snout. The wide openness, the amount of space, made more sense when populated with huge animals.

“Plesiosaur,” Mac said. “You can tell because of the little fin bones.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was a five-year-old boy and a
giant
. All I thought about for years was dinosaurs.”

“Did you say fins?” She looked at the endless dry land. They both pictured water covering the desert, land as ocean floor, mountains as islands. The entire world, utterly changed.

There were flies and ants and a stink bug. A crow landed, pecked, took off. “It’s nice to feel small for once,” the giant said.

For Fern it was good to kneel in the dirt, her hands uncovering something.

She said, “Can I tell you a secret? I took a figure drawing class last year. I didn’t tell anyone because Edgar had been nagging me to go back to school and it felt like he was as disappointed in me as my mother had been. I didn’t want him to win.”

“What was it like?”

“The first day of figure drawing the teacher said, ‘Leave if you are afraid of nudity.’ No one had left. At the second meeting there had been four fewer people in the room. The teacher had said, ‘Good, I’m glad they left. There’s no room in art for fear.’”

One day, Fern said, the students had walked into the room and there was a black man on the platform. He was tall and muscular and very dark, his hair short and neat. Fern had been taken aback by her own discomfort. Most of the women kept their eyes locked on their papers. “At one point the man looked right at me and we just stared at each other for maybe three seconds. A hundred years ago there were plenty of times when a black man stood naked in front of a room of dressed whites because he was
for
sale
. People in my family were in those rooms. I didn’t deserve to look at this man, but he did deserve to be seen.”

“There are some things that can’t be righted,” Mac said. “It’s good to name them.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m sort of relieved that that money is gone. We’ll find a better way to earn our living.” There were so many questions for her at home—money, love, lies, three children who had been abandoned for nearly a week. She looked out at the desert where there was so much room in which to get lost. She wanted something to press up against. She wanted her own confines.

“What about the steel company?”

“No.” It had been hanging in the back of her mind, the image of Edgar calling his editor to say that he had to retract the book. The image of him at a huge oval table in the teetering tip of a skyscraper and a dozen investors who wanted to know how he had cut production costs. “I think I’d rather live with nothing.” She could have used another shirt and pants, but otherwise what she had in her suitcase was sufficient. She wanted her people and she wanted water and wind. Enough—just enough.

Fern took the giant’s hand.

“I like you,” she said.

He did not squeeze her hand, but he let it sit there in his big palm, salt-wet on this hot day. He said, “We came a long way.”

“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

He smiled his big smile. “I knew you were trouble from the moment I married you.” He looked down at her. “I like you too, Fern. I think you’re going to have a really good life. You are not only a rich housewife.”

“Not anymore. I’ll need to get a job.” She was joking but she was also serious.

“Life is effortful,” said Mac. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”

Fern thought of hiding in the tall grass outside her mother’s prairie studio to watch her work. Evelyn was a different woman with clay than she was with people—it was as if the rest of her body was only there to support the existence of her hands. She thought of Edgar, up late all those years at the typewriter, his fingers banging out a reason for his being. She thought of Ben in the earth, the misunderstood parts long since rotted away. So many bones in the ground.

This dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.

—

Fern walked with Mac up to the house where the boy lived because it was a nice thing to do and she could not think of the giant standing at the door alone, his too-big finger finding the bell. She could not think of him waiting alone for someone to let him in.

The house was split-level, brown on the outside, gravel instead of grass. A group of tall green-brown cacti kept watch. There were bird holes—even in those spiny stalks, a home.

A woman opened the door, short and blond and overtan. She said, “It’s my old man,” and laughed hard. She punched him in the stomach, which was nearly eye-level and Fern thought of them as husband and wife, trying to consummate. She would have been lost in it all. Those rigid, manic little arms, looking for purchase on his hills. Poor girl. Poor boy.

“Lovely home,” Fern said. It was not. There was almost no furniture and the windows were covered in heavy curtains. The organ-pink carpet could not possibly have been an intentional color. This was the kind of house you holed up in after the murder, the body buried in some dry wash nearby.

“I have cold coffee or I have gin,” the lady said.

“Just some water for me,” Fern said.

“No water. Sorry.”

The air conditioner was on so high Fern could feel her pores closing to keep the heat in. Mac rubbed his arms.

“Nothing then?” Claire asked.

They sat on the couch and Mac asked after her months and years. She answered him like a daughter swatting away her father’s concerns. “Doing great! I love living here! It’s warm all year! We have a pool! Desert people are nicer than city people! My guy’s name is Dale and he’s a real sweetheart!”

“And the boy?” he asked finally, after he had waited long enough for her to bring him up.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s lost some of the weight.”

From a cracked door down the hall, Fern caught sight of a pair of eyes high off the ground.

“I’m parched,” Claire said. “Neither of you wants any coffee at all? It’s nice and cold. I made it up this morning.”

Fern wanted to ask for a blanket or a scarf instead. Claire left
the room and she nudged Mac, motioned to the hallway and the cracked door.

Mac, without a pause, knelt on the floor like someone trying to befriend a cat. He put his hands out towards the eyes, peering. He scooted closer, his palms up. “Hey there,” he loud-whispered. “Hello, hello.”

Fern wanted to kneel too, to beckon, but she was no one’s mother here. She was no one’s aunt or step-. It did not seem right to promise friendship this close to the end. So she sat there in the freezing dark room and watched the giant try to make himself small, watched him shuffle across the dirty floor towards his son, his hands empty but open. She had to pace to survive the thirst for her own children.

The boy came through the door. The mother tinked ice into a glass in the kitchen and said something about golf. The boy, seeing his father, knelt down too and, on the pink carpet, under a painting of a Jesus so pale he was nearly translucent, the two looked each other over. They did not say a word. They did not shake hands. They just looked.

—

The boy was hungry, frantically hungry. Sitting on the hotel bed, he ate a whole chicken and a loaf of white bread and a bag of individually wrapped chocolates. He seemed more dog, more stray, than boy. But he said his pleases and thank-yous, and his fingers were delicate, carefully working the meat off a bone without getting dirty.

Fern and Mac sat in the pink paisley chairs by the window watching. “More?” they asked, handing him bread.

Before they’d left, his mother had given him a packed suitcase and an extra pair of sneakers. “You can’t imagine how fast he goes through these things,” she had said. “How he does it, that’s beyond
me.” She had stood on her tip-toes and flicked him on the nose with her thumb. “Honey pot,” she had said. “Don’t get any bigger.” She had opened her wallet and taken out a scroll of paper on which was written several columns of numbers. “If you want to measure him, you can,” she said to the giant. “But I guess you don’t care one way or the other. He’s not getting any smaller, so he’s yours now.” The boy had bent down low and given his mother a hug. She had been lost in his frame. “How did I raise up something like you?” she had asked. “Something so sweet.” The twang in her voice was unconvincing. She wore it like heels she did not know how to walk in.

The boy brushed his teeth for fifteen minutes, making tiny circles over each tooth, studying himself in the mirror. From behind he looked like a man. Fern wanted him to be all right. She wanted to hug him. She wanted the son of him, and her the pretend mother. She had not meant to actually do it. She had meant to admire from the other end of the room. There she was, next thing, squeezing him hard, her head on his wingbone, no stopping now. He was softly sweated in the day’s shirt, and all the heat she had hoped for. Fern could hear the boy’s breath inside his body, inside the papery folds of his lungs, inside the rattle of bones. She could hear his heart too, gathering and sending back. It seemed fast to her.

The boy, gentle or afraid, did not move. They stayed there, and Fern did not know how to let go.

Mac, on the other side of the room, also waited. Everyone needed everything. The woman needed to hug the boy and imagine her brother, her sons, her daughter; the boy needed to be hugged but then to be freed. Mac would have liked someone to come up from behind and wrap her arms around him, and to mean it, beyond the dare she had made for herself, beyond the attempt at revenge. If only he could meet a huge woman, he thought. In a huge house, with a huge car, and so much land for them to drive
on, and herds of only the largest animals: elephants and giraffes, the stamp of rhinoceros feet in the mud after a rain. They would put off going to town for supplies, put off relativity. You can’t be too big unless someone else is small. Mac looked at his son. He looked like he still had growing to do. He would get bigger every day with chicken and bread and pie and steak and all the things for sale in restaurants and grocery stores across the great land. They would order four meals for two people, and Mac would watch his boy eating. A match, finally. More and more a match by the day.

There was Fern, at his son’s back, and neither one his.

Mac said, “There’s dessert. There could be. Does anyone want pie?”

Outside: wind, sirens.

—

That night, the boy slept hard in one bed and Fern and Mac, fully clothed, shared the other. They passed a cigarette back and forth. The room echoed with Matthew’s rattling breath. He hardly even shifted in his young sleep. The giant hugged Fern. There is such a thing as love in this room, he wanted to say. We are capable. Even though we feel too tired or too big or too old or too young or too quiet or too loud or too formed or too unformed.

“What do you think will happen when you get home?” Mac whispered.

“I don’t know. It has never been easy to be a wife or a mother or a woman or a man or a child,” she said. “But we are each other’s family.” He understood this. In the bed nearby was a stranger, but it was also a son.

Things could go all different ways and this was one of them: two drivers, on the other side of the country about to head home. The next day, a father and son would get into the car to begin
another kind of family. A wife would get on a plane and go home to the family that she belonged to.

*   *   *

M
ISS
NOLAN
TOOK
CRICKET
DOWN
to the office where the secretary said, “Your father just called to see if you were in school. Are you getting into trouble, young lady?”

“Is he home? Did he say if he was home?”

“He said he had been away.”

Cricket did not wait for more information or to explain herself or to ask for permission. She ran to the boys’ classroom and grabbed their hands and together they sprinted the ten blocks to their house. Miss Nolan did not chase them and she did not allow the secretary to call the principal. “They’re all right,” she said. “Let them go.”