Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (9 page)

—

Edgar, in Alaska, was a misplaced toy soldier. He had been flown to Fairbanks then Nome and then driven in a jeep by a logger with a black beard and no eyebrows to an expanse of white tundra that seemed to be edgeless. There were no roads, just snow and snow and snow, and in the middle, a tiny log cabin with a curl of smoke coming from its chimney. Edgar could not have conjured a scene less reminiscent of war. The jeep stopped and the driver said, “Welcome home, soldier.” He threw Edgar’s rucksack on the snow and drove away. Edgar stood there and the wind kicked snow onto
his face. He was wearing the same clothes that the boys going to the hot jungle wore. He had no hat, no coat, no gloves. His boots, as he walked to the little cabin, began to soak through.

Inside: a single room with four bunk beds along one wall, a metal table and chairs, a sink, hooks with parkas and snowboots below. A young man, fat and pale, was sitting in front of the fire with a sketchpad. Edgar could see the drawing—a naked girl lying on her side, a kitten curled up in front of her. “Nice,” Edgar said, gesturing towards the drawing. The man looked up at him and said, “Welcome to nowhere.”

Another man came in later, spit blood into a cup, his lungs wracked from running for hours in the cold. He did three hundred push-ups, four hundred sit-ups, then went outside naked and stood there in the arctic evening, the sunlight hardly more than a grey fog. Edgar, from the window, looked at the man’s body, imagined his sweat turning to a crust of ice. It got dark and Edgar checked his watch: 4:00 p.m.

“We call him Runner,” the fat kid said. “By ‘we’ I mean ‘I.’”

“Is there anyone else here?”

“Nope.”

“What are we supposed to be doing?”

“Fuck if I know, brother. I’m drawing fucking kittens. Best job in the Army. Better than getting my legs blown off.”

They had a radio, which Runner knew how to use, but no one ever called them on it. Runner ran every day and hardly spoke. The other boy, who Runner called Fatty, kept a series of jam jars filled with urine under his bunk. They had rations in crates in the corner. The sink didn’t run so they melted snow in a pot over the fire. There was a pit latrine out back and Runner had built a wooden platform on which to stand while he poured a pot of boiled snowmelt over his head.

Edgar figured that both of the others were also rich, that they had the kind of fathers who knew whom to call to move the game pieces of their children into safe territory. He hung on to the thread of anger at Fern for rendering him so useless at the very same time that he was eaten up by gratitude for not being imminently dead in a rice paddy. Next he hated himself for ever having thought he might serve a purpose in the world, that he might ever have been anything but a rich kid. Edgar wrote to Fern and described the whiteness, described the silence. For three weeks no one came or went.

Then, across the ice came a sled pulled by dogs. Runner was out but Edgar and Fatty sat at the window, watching the approach. “Who the fuck is that?” Fatty whispered. He seemed terrified. He was sweating. They had their guns at their sides.

The sled stopped and a person stepped off, yelled at the dogs, which all lay down in the snow. The person, almost child-size, was wearing a fur coat and fur boots and carried a leather bag. The voice at the door was high and then whoever it was came inside, and Fatty pointed his gun until the hood came off and it was a girl, dark-haired, pretty, her cheeks red with cold.

“Put those things away,” she said. “And make me some coffee.”

The two men scurried like mice. The girl sat down on the floor by the fire, opened her bag and took out a stack of newspapers, magazines and books. She worked for the library, she explained, and had the assignment of bringing materials to the far-flung villages, mines and outposts. She drank her coffee and said, “Here’s your fucked-up war,” and shoved the newspapers towards Edgar.

“Are you an Eskimo?” Fatty asked, as if he had encountered a unicorn. Edgar could see him imagining undressing this girl in an igloo carpeted with otter pelts.

“I’m Inupiat,” she said. “But I’m also American. I’m here to make you feel guilty about your job.” She drank her coffee, left the cup and shut the door hard. Edgar jumped up, got the letters out from under his pillow and chased the girl. It had started to snow.

“Will you mail these for me?” He explained that they were for his wife, because having such a person made him feel credible, worth saving.

“Are you grateful or angry?” the girl asked.

“Angry,” he admitted. “And grateful.” He thought of Fern. Her absence was a bee sting that had suddenly ceased to be numb. He could have scratched his skin off with want for her.

“You should be,” she said and took the letters.

The other boys went to bed and Edgar stayed up. He had read the papers before he left but now, in this quiet, the stories hit him. There was a sound outside the cabin and Edgar sat up. He took a flashlight and cracked the door. Two reindeer pawed at the ground. They looked up at Edgar’s light, their eyes bright marbles, and then they turned and ran.

—

After Edgar had been in Alaska for six weeks, the jeep returned with more food and also a box of stationery and three typewriters. “The guys down in Nome sent these,” the logger said.

“They couldn’t be bothered to come themselves?”

“I’m the only one who knows how to get here.”

There was a list of names and no one had to tell the boys that this was a catalogue of the dead. Just to see them laid out like that—all men, their rank, two dates. The driver said, “Guess they need more letter-writers.” There were mothers upon mothers upon mothers who needed to be told that their sons were dead.

The man said he would be back every day. Right now, today,
there were thousands of living bodies in the war but everyone knew that a certain number of them would die by nightfall, by morning. The question was which ones.

The three men put matches to the wicks of their kerosene lanterns that night and began to type.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kingsly,

Please let me be the first to tell you how bravely Private First Class Kingsly fought and how respected he was. He died the way he lived. You should be proud. We thank you for your service and patriotism and offer our sincere condolences.

Dear Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Abbot,

I cannot imagine the loss you feel at this time. First Sergeant Abbot was a generous fighter and a good friend. He was one of the finest men we had. Our hearts go out to you.

Edgar tried to make each letter unique even though he knew nothing of the boys he was writing about. These were whole lives, or had been. He tried to say the same thing a new way dozens of times a day. Later there would be a handwritten note stapled to the newest list:
Lieutenants, Just follow the script. Please and thank you.

At night Edgar used the typewriter to write to Fern. He told her that he had started to write a novel. He described a plot: a young man with money that he didn’t earn or necessarily want, a father who did nothing but acquire, a question of how to create a meaningful life of one’s own. In the letter, Edgar wrote that he was working on a few pages a day, between work orders.
It’s really cold. There’s nothing else to do.
He tried to describe the place where he was, the way ice gave way to ice and how the line between sky
and land was just a smudge. That was it. There was nothing else to look at or see. Just white and white and white. Privilege was a kind of nothingness, suspending him outside of the lived world. Not even color joined him there.

Fern did not ask where the character of the wife was in this novel. Instead of asking, she wrote,
I wish you were here.

And then:
Edgar, my love, I’m pregnant. We’re going to be parents. We are going to be a
family.

1976

T
HE
NIGHT
AFTER
the dinner party at which he had failed to pair his wife with John Jefferson and thereby even out all wrongs, Edgar stood with Glory at the milks in the health food store, looking for her brand and fat percentage. She liked the farmed stuff, something that still had a faint cow scent. Edgar never shopped with Fern. He was used to the items in their cupboard. He thought of them as the foods that were available to the American family—he had not ever considered Fern as a choice-maker, rumbling down the aisles, editing what her family would be made of. Glory, holding the basket against her bright, smooth legs, had a different list: dark bread, black grapes, yogurt and a shining ham for her husband. While they walked the sugars, the cereals, she played with the hair on the back of Edgar’s neck, which he had meant to trim but now felt grateful that he hadn’t.

The night before, he had begun to walk towards Harvard Square where there was a hotel, but Glory had run after him. “She’s going to forgive you,” she had said. “Yours is a good marriage and it’ll survive this. But in the meantime there’s no sense
in being alone.” Edgar had slept in the guest room that night while John’s snores had rattled the walls. Edgar had felt displaced, distant. He had thought about the day they had received the keys to their new house in Cambridge. How he, Fern and Cricket had sat on the polished floor of the big empty living room, the bay windows a clean view into the thick green of a summer maple. It had smelled like fresh paint. Cricket had said, “Can this be my room?” and Edgar had laughed and said, “Maybe.” They had walked through the house: the kitchen with its views of the roses in the backyard and the lawn, the long creaky stairway to the huge basement, the winding staircase up one, two, three stories, with bedrooms everywhere. The bathrooms with their claw-foot tubs and leaded windows that made the leaves outside go slightly out of focus. Cricket had said, “Do we really get to live here?” She had only known the Army base. She had not realized that she was a child of privilege, that houses like this for people like her were supposed to be perfectly normal.

Edgar had known his daughter would adapt and come to think of this as regular. He had seen that they stood at a junction and a part of him had wanted to put the house back on the market and move into an apartment, but there were his girls at the window, and everything outside had been bright, bright green. “We do really get to live here,” he had said. Fern had kissed him on the back of the neck and laughed when the short hairs had pricked her lips. What would it be like not to fight against himself? Edgar had wondered. What would it be like to say yes instead of no? He had tried, he told himself. See?

Glory had come in in the middle of the night wearing a sheer mint-green nighty and undressed Edgar without asking first. She did what she wanted with him and then lay there smoking. It felt
less than half as good as it had on the island. He knew Fern deserved to be angry, but here he stood in a doorway that she herself had cracked. From the slushes of his mind had sprung a question: Where else am I supposed to go? What other choice do I have?

In the grocery store Glory chose a box of black licorice. She said, “Have you thought about my idea? I really think we should go away. We won’t be able to enjoy each other properly if we stay home. This,” she said, sweeping her arm over the foodstuffs gathering in her cart, “is a waste of a good affair.” Love was not her ambition, escape was.

She had pitched this idea in the same hushed telephone conversation as the dinner party.

“Where?” he had asked.

“Mexico. Sunshine and revolution. Alcohol at sunset. You know how to sail, don’t you? We’ll sail.” Edgar had only had to hear that word. He had thought about the possibility of a storm or the chance that he was unprepared to travel all that way. He had thought about his wife and the damage those weeks could do. He knew he would miss his children. Then he had thought of the slice Chicago and duty were about to cut across his life. He was in the last weeks of his own time. The pretty girl was fine but he was in it for the saltwater, for the wind. In the health food store, the whole big room smelling like turmeric and curry powder and tea, he said yes to Glory as if this fact—his ambition sea more than sex—would protect him against the resulting damage.

“I knew you would come around,” she said.

Glory wheeled them to the flowers, which were cheap and themed for the season. Everywhere they looked, the men and women of retail had turned things orange, brown and yellow. She chose two bouquets, opened them and tore out the carnations.
She said, “You have to be kind if you want her to be here when you get back.”

*   *   *

T
HE
FIRST
DAY
OF
SCHOOL
was a tightening for Cricket and the twins. Uniforms—navy and white, pleats—were new and stiff. The boys had neckties and the girls had headbands that pressed on their skullbones. Summer’s spaciousness, the salt of it, evaporated so fast. The children stood outside school kicking dirt for five more minutes before someone shooed them in. They tried to ruin their shiny shoes. They asked who was in which class and chewed the teacher’s names like unripe fruit. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Lumpkins, Miss Studenberger, Miss Nolan. Escape was on everyone’s minds, though Cricket did take pleasure in her new backpack filled with sharp pencils, the perfect square of an eraser, unscratched paper. Her lunchbox, which did not yet smell like old peanut butter.

Cricket walked her brothers to their classroom and helped them find their cubbies. She knelt and said, “I’m just upstairs. Be good. Eat your lunch. Be nice to each other.” Their little desks made her sorry. All summer, they had been moat-diggers, clam-gatherers, sailors, tree-climbers. Now she watched the boys tuck themselves into the chairs, look ahead at the big blackboard. They would learn to read. They would learn to add small numbers together. Reprieve was a short break in the middle of the day to blast from one end of the playground to the other, a scummy orange ball in front of them.

Cricket, like all the fourth graders, was given a social studies textbook:
The Building of America: Class, Race and Society
. None of the children knew what that meant. Miss Nolan, wearing plaid pants
and a sweater vest, her long black hair parted in the center, said, “This is high school level but by Christmas you’ll be ready. Our first unit is on Indians.” She looked around the room. “You will learn to become Americans this year. What does that mean to you?”

Hands shot up. “Fireworks. Freedom. The best country in the world. Number one in baseball.”

“Sure,” Miss Nolan said. “Pie is also good. But have you thought about the gas crisis or the recession? Have you thought about the Black Panthers or the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War? Have you thought about the Gold Rush or the Robber Barons? Have you thought about the Navajo? Have you thought about the Conquistadors or the Front Range mountains or the Great Plains?” Cricket had not. The less studious among the children began to worry about their upcoming homework. Cricket felt her temples warm up. She wanted to know all of this.

On the big table by the window there were art supplies. Miss Nolan walked over to them like they were treasure.

“When the first white men arrived in America,” she said, “they got sick and died because of Indian germs and the Indians got sick from the white men’s germs.” Cricket looked up at her, waiting to understand. “The Indians were sometimes kind and generous, and other times they weren’t. They did something called scalping, which is when you cut the skin off someone’s head. But the white men were cruel too. They killed many Indians and stole their wives. They forced the Indians to believe in God.”

The teacher handed out feathers and clothespins. She handed out scissors and glue. She stood in front of the room, which smelled like art projects come and gone—clay and paper and paint and paste. The school floors, no matter how hard or how often they were cleaned, were always speckled with tiny flecks of cut construction paper.

“Imagine that,” Miss Nolan said. “You are foreigners in a strange land. It’s vast and beautiful and you do not ever, ever want to go home.” Cricket was quiet; she was attentive and she was somewhat afraid. These were good kids, obedient kids. They had rules at home and they followed them. These children lived in fear of having a note sent home from the principal. The teacher looked at their idle hands, the supplies untouched.

“Are we supposed to be the Indians or the white men?” a fat boy asked.

“Both. The truth lies in between. Now make art,” she said. She picked up a piece of orange paper and scissors, cut it into the shape of an indistinguishable animal. “Art,” she proclaimed. She must have seen the questions in the children’s faces because her neck reddened. “Anything is art,” she said. “Don’t you get it? Everything in the world is art.”

Cricket picked up a piece of paper and held the scissors to its edge. Miss Nolan walked over to a record player on her desk and laid the needle down. Relentless harpsichord music filled the room. For an hour, the teacher stood above her pupils silently, while they tried their very best to make art. They were afraid. They cut and glued and pressed and glued again. They did not understand what they were making, or why. It was not the paper-plate turkeys they were used to, the holiday cards, the steps one through four. Cricket was just as confused but she loved the feeling, her fingers tacky and feather-stuck. The children ended up with crazed messes: a clothespin covered in pink fabric, a rat’s nest of construction paper, everything glue-soaked. At the end of the hour, the children let go of the breath they had all been holding. The teacher lifted the needle and the room fell silent. She laid the messes out in a line with a sign that said, “Pilgrims, Indians.”

“See,” she said. “You actually made something. You.” She
pointed to Jack Bishop, who was good at football. She turned to Birdie Breyer who was small for her age, whose front teeth were bigger than her eyes, who must have weighed hardly more than a fawn, and Miss Nolan picked her up and brought her to her own briny face. “Even you, little girl. Art.” Cricket was in love.

*   *   *

O
NE
OF
THE
NEIGHBORS
, Louise, had called Fern in the morning with a request. “I need a bride. Today,” she said. She explained that she volunteered at the old folks’ home where the Alzheimer’s patients had forgotten almost everything. They no longer remembered the faces of their own children and everyone had given up trying to make them happy. So, Louise said, she had had an idea: a wedding. White dress, tuxedo, half the room for the bride’s side and half for the groom. An altar. It would not matter that no one in the congregation knew these people; they did not know anyone. They would feel good, and maybe they would even see something familiar in the bride or groom, maybe they would have the sensation of being in a room full of family. No one invited them anywhere anymore because they might wander off, might walk into traffic, might say something unfortunate. Yet Louise felt that they deserved a celebration, deserved to go to bed with feet sore from dancing. Fiction, in this case, made it possible. “My original bride got the stomach flu,” she said. “It’s at one o’clock today. You’ll be done before your kids are out of school. Can you do it?”

“Edgar isn’t in town,” Fern said, not ready to admit what was happening.

“No, no, not Edgar. I have a different groom. Someone cheerier.”

The instructions were: attain a cheap dress (the other bride was three sizes smaller than Fern), whatever hair and makeup she
could manage in time. After last night, Fern was glad to seek out this small revenge. Edgar had been the one to kiss another woman but now she was the one to be someone else’s bride. Fern looked in the phone book for dress shops and it was a young feeling to run her finger down the listings, to dial, to say, “I need a wedding dress right away. Do you have any sample sizes available now?” At the dress shop she tried on the options, chose the most expensive. It had long sleeves and a high neck, a ruffle around the collar. The silk was heavy and cool on her body. Fern wrote a check so that Edgar would see what she had done. She wanted to punish him by spending everything that was left.