Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (7 page)

—

The house was a tall Victorian, dinner was pork chops, conversation was weather, American apathy and political unrest in Guatemala where Glory and John Jefferson had recently been. Why were they in this particular house with this particular couple? Fern wondered. Nothing good came of a dinner party, she thought. She wanted to be alone with her husband, to talk about Chicago and money and all the years they had ahead. Edgar was too happy to be here. Manic. The hostess had the big, frilled hair that everyone wanted and her eyelashes were long and she wore, to great effect, a jumpsuit like the one Fern had been unable to figure out. Fern asked after the washroom and John Jefferson walked her there, down a hallway that seemed very long. Instead of gesturing to the end and letting her make the journey alone, he was behind her the whole way.

“We redid this place when we bought,” he said. “You should have seen the roof. You should have seen the foundation.”

“It looks nice now,” Fern said, wishing for a light switch. The walls were papered in avocado green. The runner was patterned with oversize orange and red flowers.

“
You
look nice,” he said.

Finally, a door.

“Here we are,” John said, proud. He turned the knob, flipped the light on, smelled the room. “Clean and fresh.” He smiled.

“Thank you, John. Thanks. All right.”

The man waited for Fern to enter and then he closed the door for her. She listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, but heard none. He could not possibly be waiting for her. Everything was orange—the tile, the sink, the toilet—except the towels, which were white with rainbows arcing across their corners. Fern used up time looking in the mirror. Her hair was old-fashioned, too neat. The red dress was unconvincing on her. There was a photograph on the wall of Glory wearing a wreath of flowers and standing between two bare-chested Polynesian women.

Fern pulled up her dress but could not pee.

She went to the door, put her ear against the cool wood and listened for John’s breathing. Maybe he was pressed there too, trying to find her sounds in the small room.

Fern flushed for no reason. Washed her hands. She did not have the shopgirl’s red lipstick, but she applied a coat of the old pink that was always in the bottom of her purse.

John was halfway down the hall, holding a framed photograph of his sister as a baby. “God,” he said, “I remember exactly what she felt like in my arms at this age.” He hung it back up, then, with his big, warm fingers, he straightened Fern’s dress strap. “Where would you like to go?”

“I was going to finish my dinner,” she said.

“Well,” John said. “I thought . . . I was told. You and I were supposed to . . . I thought that was the idea. Glory told me. Your dress,” he said gesturing at the evidence. He looked distraught. Not threatening but punctured.

“Are you crying?” Fern asked. John could not seem to find a place to put his hands. Fern felt sorry for him and sorry for herself but was afraid to risk touching him. She went back to the bathroom and got a length of toilet paper, which she brought to John. She put one finger on his shoulder, the smallest touch she could think of, while he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He found his cigarettes in his back pocket and lit one.

“I’m so embarrassed,” he said.

“It’s already forgotten. Come on,” she told him. The rest of the house began to lend its light.

What she saw was one body and not two, at first. It was just Edgar’s back until it was not anymore, until Glory’s hands were also there, wrapped around him. Ten red gashes of fingernail polish. “Oh,” she said out loud, and the attempted kiss in the hall made a different kind of sense.
He’s trying to give me away
, she thought.

Fern knew that her husband had felt worried and helpless. She had been trying to be good enough to carry him through—his patient wife, loving him in the circumstances. Now she understood that she was stupid, that he was lost, that they were, for the first time, not each other’s immediate salve. Edgar and Glory Jefferson looked familiar with one another and Fern watched because she had to. Fern had wondered what Edgar would do to survive this part of life, to survive his family’s needs, now unmet. The answer was here in a stranger’s dining room, between soup and entrée, the centerpiece an autumnal bouquet surrounded by small pumpkins, the smell of scarred pig flesh in the air. Fern had never seen her husband kiss before. He moved jerkily. From behind, he looked like a bird, pecking at garbage in the grass.

The woman was liquid in his arms. Slipping and grabbing and looking very warmed up. Fern could practically hear the race their heartbeats were in.

“Sweetheart,” John said. He stubbed his cigarette out in a red ashtray already half full of butts.

His wife turned around. She looked frustrated more than sorry, like she had been woken up before she needed to be. “I thought you’d gone,” she said.

“Fern,” Edgar said. He inspected his wife for signs of rumple or muss. He looked deeply sad.

“We’re all done,” Fern told them. “We’re all finished.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Jefferson smiled. “Of course.” Her husband received the volley of contempt she tossed his way: ten or fifteen years of marriage, two or three minutes each time, and then he was ready for something sweet and sleep.

Edgar came over to his wife and squeezed her hand and she could not tell if it was with sorrow or pride or terror or regret. He leaned towards her and he smelled tinny with spit. She jerked away. “We are not even,” she said.

“Well, then, I expect you’re hungry,” Glory said to the group. “Shall we have our pork chops?”

“I’ll be in the car,” Fern said. “Eat if you want, but I’ll be in the car.”

—

Edgar followed Fern out and they both got into the car and he backed out of the driveway onto the night street. Fern wanted the dress off. She wanted a door to slam and hide behind, but she did not want to drive home because that felt too much like an act of forgiveness. She told him to pull over, shut the engine. She slapped the dashboard.

“When did this start?” she shouted.

“Tonight. This is all that’s happened,” he lied.

“Was this Glory Jefferson’s bright idea?” Fern had read about
swingers and key parties and some magazine article was always proclaiming the end of monogamy, but none of it had seemed real or possible in her world.

Edgar felt so much and yet none of it was enough. “I don’t want to retract my novel,” he said, “and I don’t fucking want to be a steel man.”

“Are you going to live on her money instead?”

“My life walked out on me and then she showed up. I guess I just wanted to look away.” He realized that in the fog of his head it seemed almost as if the question of what they were willing to sell in order to survive—Edgar or everything else—could be overpowered with the noise of a shared affair. When Glory had called him in the morning and made the invitation, she had sounded so clear-headed, so sure that what Edgar had done in column A could be easily balanced by what Fern could do in column B. She had said, “If everyone’s kissing then kissing’s not a problem.”

“I don’t know what to do. I do not know. I do not.” She was yelling by the end.

They sat there on the side of the road, houses dinner-lit, silent beyond silent. Edgar polished his glasses and put them back on, blinked at the seen world.

Edgar thought of the first thing he had had published, an excerpt from his novel in a glossy magazine. Fern, proud, relieved, had gone to the store and bought every celebratory food she could find: caviar, cake, champagne, lobster, but when she had come home Edgar had said, “What I really want is to go out for pizza.” She might have been hurt on another day, felt stupid because she should have known, but that day happiness could not be undone. Fern had put the expensives in the refrigerator, scrubbed the children’s yard-scummy cheeks and said, “Pizza it is.” The adults had drunk beer and the kids had sipped Shirley Temples and then they
all had ice cream dessert. “To the author,” they had said, clinking. There had been other celebrations to come but this one had been the purest. Edgar had worked at his book for years and he had finally been able to call himself a writer. It had felt like coloring in the last years of his life—yes, those were real. Yes, it had counted.

Fern now sat beside him, willing to erase everything. She said as much.

“At the risk of sending you into her arms, you are not welcome at our house tonight.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Walk to a hotel. I don’t know. That is your problem to solve.”

—

Fern stepped into the house and there were the children, mounded up on the floor like left laundry, asleep. The children always fought sleep with all their strength but once they were down they went so deep that they could remain unconscious through hurricanes, fights.

“Where is the sitter?” Fern asked, trying to rouse them. “Sweethearts? Wake up and go to bed.” She knelt beside her bunch, began to untangle them. There were so many arms and legs. The bodies grumbled and snuffed. “Mother?” Cricket said. “Where is Father?” The boys opened their eyes and Fern wanted to hug them all but her arms were insufficient. She was well outnumbered.

Fern tried to replay the day, tried to find the memory of calling Miss Audrey to babysit. She had meant to, she had thought about it, but she could not remember hearing the woman’s voice over the telephone.

“Where is Maggie?” Cricket asked. “We lost Maggie.”

“Yes, we lost her and we need her,” said the twins.

“I’m sure she’s fine, my loves.”

What Fern had thought of as a gift to the animal early in the
evening had turned into something that she could not utter to her children. She did not try to explain aging or love and how much harder it was to keep trusting beauty the later it got. How, though she was only twenty-eight years old, she seemed to have passed into the long slide during which time a woman became less and less valuable, and to keep her around became an act of charity rather than pleasure. Fern turned on a lamp, unearthed the markers and paper and laid them out on the living room floor for her flock. She said, “Let’s make some signs and hang them up in the neighborhood tomorrow.”
Lost Dog, Reward
.

“How much reward?” Will asked. Fern, knowing exactly where the dog was, could be generous.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said. “No, a thousand.” Everyone was cheered. Such a good mother, so devoted.

“Where is Father?” Will asked.

“He’ll be home later,” she said, arranging them at the kitchen table.

Beloved
, they wrote.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie
. There was a stone of something in Fern’s chest so heavy it felt like it might fall through her, tearing everything soft on its way down. Hatred. For Glory, for Edgar, for the fact of the kiss, the fact that he had wished to lend her to John Jefferson, the fact that she did not have a good or fair solution to their survival either, the fact of everything they stood to lose.

Cricket said, “Couldn’t we put them up now? The sooner the better?” It felt good to Fern to be taking care of someone. It felt good to be acting out the saving of a lost love. It felt good to be part of a mission that did not involve Edgar. She hoped he was sitting on the edge of a sagging hotel bed, stale smoke in the drapes and a sad glass of beer on the table. She hoped he was wrung out. Fern found and distributed sweaters and flashlights and walked
with her flock up the neighborhood streets, down the neighborhood streets, all the station wagons parked in a line, and they tacked a sign to each lamppost. Inside the houses, people were cleaning up from their day, drinking a nightcap, rubbing their eyes, bidding goodnight. The children called and called.
Maaa-ggieee!
The name stretched out and turned musical. It was a whole song. Fern sang it too. She sang and she believed it. She tried to trust what she had done. Maggie would always be young enough now. No one would remember her stalking away from a mess on the floor, too weak to lift her back legs completely.
Maaa-ggieee!
went the song. She could be—she was—
anywhere.

1966

A
FTER
THEY
WERE
MARRIED
, Fern and Edgar had driven to Kentucky and rented a little house for the summer. He was twenty-two and she was eighteen. Other young people were going to San Francisco and New York, sloughing off the idea of marriage like it was a pair of handcuffs. These were the same people whom Edgar had seen at protests and who had showed up on the news. At twenty-two, Edgar already felt too old to join them. It was almost as if he was not part of that generation. He was married now, an adult, and it was too late to move into an apartment in California with ten other people, smoke joints and stay up until dawn. Fern and Edgar agreed with the values, the politics, but they were relieved to feel these feelings in a warm house. And they were just as happy not to share one another.

Anyway, the hippies seemed indulgent. It was all hedonism and music and too much sunshine. Edgar and Fern were seeking something much more real. To them, it felt good to cultivate discomfort, to live in coal country with people who had no luxuries, to push their young bodies and minds up against the grit and truth of danger and hardship, heat and sweat. Edgar had pictured miners
with soot-faces and wrecked hands. He had decided that he wanted to write about their lives, the deep earthen dives they made for the sake of carbon, for the sake of fire, for the sake of metal. He imagined himself telling their story, the newspapers printing the truth, shaming the owners, his father declaring the miners heroes. He knew this was idealistic and stupid, but he thought: maybe. Weren’t good works always completed against the odds?

It was not only saving that Edgar wanted to do. He saw in the workaday lives a kind of relief and salvation. The daily job, the weekly pay, beans in the pot and freshly picked blackberries in the bowl, hands scabbed from the thorns. There was honor in this. Honor he envied.

Fern wanted to play house with her new husband. She wanted the little cottage with just enough windows for which to sew curtains. Just enough space in the kitchen to make an omelet. She’d knit something. She and Edgar would sit at the table and read aloud to each other. Marriage was a jailbreak. Fern was free from the slow and steady drip of dislike that was her parents’ experience of the world.

Ben, though. Fern thought about him all the time, how they had built a fort in the skirt of a pine tree in the prairie when they were ten where he had asked her to promise that they would die at the same time. He explained that it seemed like an important detail—they had entered as a pair and lived as a pair. She had said yes and meant it, but how quickly she had abandoned him when love sparked a few years later. She told herself that she was a good sister—she was doing what women did. Even twins were meant to go their separate ways. She sent care packages with cookies and candies and each time she enclosed a letter from the invented girlfriend, though Ben never told her if he used this story.

In the central highlands of Vietnam, American B-52s dropped
seventy-six bombs. They counted more than a thousand Vietnamese bodies in the jungle after the battle. The news crew sent footage home, the reporter in his helmet crouched behind a tree, yelling over the chop of a helicopter, and right then, something exploded and the boy to his right, so dirty that it didn’t matter if he was blond or dark, flew off camera, and the reporter looked into the lens and his face was shock-flat, and he just sat there because he was not allowed to intervene. He was only there to observe.

And in Indiana, on an Army base that had trained and lost 59 Benjamins, 314 Johns, 211 Davids and enough other boys that they had ceased to track them by name, Ben sat on the edge of his bunk bed and watched a bird that had flown inside. He knew that he could not catch it so he waited for it to fly against the window hard enough that it fell to the ground. Maybe the bird would still be alive, he hoped, only stunned, and then he could carry it outside. He should have been in the mess hall. He would get in trouble but he didn’t care. Ben was suffering his own stun. That morning he had received his assignment: he was to be trained as a motion picture photographer, part of a four-man team that would film the war for military archives. Not an office job. Not safe. He would be deployed in four weeks, but instead of a gun, Ben would stand in front of the war holding nothing but a camera.

The bird fell. It was still breathing when Ben brought it outside and set it at the base of a fall-bright maple tree, encouraged it gently with a red, red leaf.

Ben did not tell Fern about his assignment. Shame and fear had knitted everything in him shut. He wrote to Fern and called once a week but all he reported were the meals, the exercises, the weather. He sounded farther away than he really was. His voice was mostly air, just a whisper. Each week she wished the same wish, “Just try to go unnoticed.” And then he went back to learning how to film
without flinching and she went back to the game of husband and wife in the little house with the little pots and pans and a table just the size for two.

Fern and Edgar went to the market together and chose jam and bread, which they ate in bed, naked and too hot for sheets. They went dancing at the hotel ballroom on a Friday night, all the men clean-shaven and the women in gingham dresses. Fern’s blond hair was teased and set and she had on a short, straight dress and white pumps. She was delighted by the banjo and mandolin, instruments her parents would not have been able to name. There were two fast songs and then a slow one, the music growing soft enough that the overwhelming sound was of feet shuffling over wooden planks. Sliding together, landing together, everyone’s arms around a neck or a waist, each a scented pair: aftershave and rose.

—

There was pleasure in pleasure and Fern and Edgar had plenty of that, newlyweds that they were. There was also pleasure in bearing witness to the life of this unknown place. The miners really did come up from below with their faces black. Edgar felt validated in both his belief in good, regular work—these people were grateful, honest—and also his belief that what his father did for a living was possible because of the suffering of poorer people. All summer, Edgar picked the scab of guilt. It felt good to feel bad. Someone in the family had to.

Ben stopped sending letters but he still called on the phone. He was quiet while Fern skimmed over her everydays, not wanting to say too much about how happy she was, despite missing him. Ben said, “I don’t want to talk, Fern, but don’t hang up. Just hold the line.” She leaned against the wall until her knees ached and then she slid down and sat on the floor. She knew he was there from his
breathing. More than an hour later Ben said, “Thank you. I have to go.” She heard his end of the phone find its cradle and then the line went quiet. She imagined him taking a deep breath before straightening his body into a pole, looking at the far horizon and saluting. This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love.

—

Fern and Edgar became friends with a black miner and his wife. They did not say aloud that they were proud of this fact, yet they were. They wanted to transcend the legacy, to be the generation that made it right. The couple, in their fifties with children already grown and gone, invited them over for hamburgers and beer. They talked about summer and weather and winter and parents and food and it seemed like skin was just skin. They got a little drunk. The men stood on the porch smoking and the stars were just beginning to pop and a few fireflies drew lines in the dusk and there was no moon and it was perfect, a perfect night.

The man said, “I wonder if I could ask you for a favor.” He admitted to Edgar that he was illiterate and asked for help writing a letter to his family at home.

The man produced an oily piece of paper from his pocket and Edgar understood how much it cost the man to make this admission, to hand the blank sheet over. The paper was slightly wobbly in front of Edgar and he wanted to go home with his wife and drink water and bite her neck and sleep. He rubbed his eyes and used the railing as a hard surface on which to write.

He wanted Edgar to describe a particular lake with a rope swing. He wanted to say how much he missed his mother.

Fern and the miner’s wife walked outside with a plate of
cookies. Fern said, “You might have to take me home now, my love.” It was very dark by then, all stars. The miner and his wife drew close together and he kissed her on the top of her head.

“We forgot a flashlight,” Edgar said.

“No trouble,” the miner told him and sent his wife inside. She returned with a laundry basket full of headlights, flashlights and lanterns, a man well prepared to move through unlit places. He insisted that Fern and Edgar each have their own. “Better to have too much light,” he said.

“Wait. We have to finish your letter,” Edgar said.

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “I can sign my own name.” It was a joke; it was not a joke.

Fern chose an old-fashioned kerosene lantern and Edgar took a flashlight with batteries. They went out into the rich blackness, making halos of yellow and white. Fern pressed away a thought of boys like her brother in a night yet darker than this, the only bright spots explosions that might kill them. She took Edgar’s hand. With less vision they noticed sound: their feet on the grass, mosquitos, the pop of a firecracker a few miles away.

—

They stayed on into winter. Edgar kept writing letters for the black miner. They went to the Friday dances and ate pancakes on Sundays at the diner. They adopted a stray tabby cat. Edgar’s parents kept asking if they were finished yet, ready to come back to the regular world, and Fern and Edgar kept trying to tell them that they had it wrong:
this
was real. The other life was the one full of falseness. Fern’s parents had no such question. Fern and her father talked only about Ben, though there was little to say. She and her mother talked only about the cherry tree in the house orchard that had been overpruned and the gardener who now had to be fired.

It was already cold outside by November. “Gin and tonic?” Edgar asked and she smiled for him. She heard the tink of the ice but not its hiss. He hummed to himself while he poured.

“You know where I’d like to go is Egypt,” she said.

“Because it’s warm there?”

“Because of all the old things they have. And because it’s warm.”

The snow had fallen for the last week. It had rounded out the corners on everything—the tables, the wooden chair Fern knew she ought to have brought in. She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.

“Add another log to the fire, would you?” she asked. This was a beloved job of his. If he tended his fire as completely as he would have liked, they would have gone through their season’s supply of wood in a few days.

“I’ll wait a few more minutes.”

“We can get more wood,” she said.

“This is a winter’s worth,” he said, gesturing to the pile under the eaves. “This is enough for everybody else.”

Whether to buy their way out would be a constant question. To be like everyone, to be regular, a constant dream. For him it tasted sour because he failed at it and for her it tasted sweet because occasionally she succeeded.

Edgar whittled, turning something rough over in his hands, imagining a way to smooth it. Reflected in his thick glasses: the bald trees outside, grey-gold. A siren sounded.

Fern untangled a length of yarn, which was orange and scratchy. The cat was at the other end. For the cat, this ball was its own celebration. Fern carried the one end carefully through each knot, loosening as she went.

Another siren and another. “I wonder what’s going on,” Edgar said.

Edgar turned on the radio but it wasn’t music that came out. A man’s deep voice said the second half of a sentence, “. . . no known survivors.”

The cat, at that exact instant, choked on the orange string. Fern dragged it, wet, from the cat’s throat.