1967

THE DECEMBER AFTER Edgar left for his post in the great north, Fern was much too pregnant. She stood in the shower watching the water roll over her belly. The baby pressed a heel out, deformed her further. No one ever had said anything to her about how strange pregnancy would be, how aggressively strange. None of the mothers she had grown up around had talked about it. All the questions she asked her doctor ended with the same answer: if your mother was very late giving birth, you could be too; if your mother gained a lot of weight, you might too; the length of your mother’s labor is the best indicator for the length of your own. But Fern called and her mother claimed she had no memory of what her pregnancy was like, what her birth was like. She preferred to create children out of clay.

All during her childhood Fern had thought about the time when she would be a mother and how generous she would be to her children, and how she would play with them all the time and run with them and imagine monsters and fairies and winged horses with them and buy them giant stuffed toys. Now that she was on the threshold of motherhood, the feeling Fern had was of being eaten alive from the inside, this creature taking the food and water, taking the blood to grow her own bones, her own skin, her own nails and hair and eyeballs and intestines and lungs and the meat of a heart.

—

Fern’s mother called to tell her that Ben was still exhibiting signs of insanity, that was the word she used, but they had spoken to his doctor who had a new solution to offer. They could put him into a new facility and start a heavy regimen of electric shock treatments. The doctor, Evelyn said, proposed the idea and the start date at the same time, having already taken the liberty of penciling Ben in, seeing so much promise in the therapy. “I can’t offer this to everyone. The procedure is expensive,” the doctor had told Fern’s parents. “We want to be very aggressive.”

Evelyn did not have the instincts other mothers did and she was aware of that, but the idea that one should do everything they could for their children seemed obvious. Here they were, lucky in wealth, with a doctor who considered himself an expert and a son who thought he could fly, a son who needed help. It would be a shame to do nothing when a person had the means to do something.

Fern’s parents were not asking her opinion on the treatment. “We have to try everything,” her father said. They were not able to answer her questions and neither of them wanted to talk about how uncertain Fern was.

Ben sent Fern a letter afterward.

Dear Fern,

I saw The Sound of Music. Yesterday we had Chicken Marengo. They are going to fix me with electricity. I miss you.

Ben

Her parents had decided to alter Ben. Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other. Fern found the place on the map, bought a basketful of treats—marshmallows, chocolates, gummies—and drove the distance to her twin, listening to the radio. Blacks were marching in Chicago, in Mississippi. Whites were burning their draft cards. Hours later she parked in front of a huge ivied building. Brookridge Home, read the ironwork over the door. It was a mental hospital, she realized. An institution.

She found Ben sitting alone at a table, dealing three hands of bridge. Beside him she saw six cans of soda and an empty bowl with pink milk at the bottom and there was a moment where Ben looked at her and neither of them was familiar to the other.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice was thin.

She put her hands on her huge round belly. “I know. I’m enormous.” She had imagined keeping the tears away until after. She had pictured herself collapsing in the car, but here she was, crying immediately. It was all a story—doctors and currents and promises—until she saw Ben, and his light was dim.

On a stand, a television showed a helicopter hovering above a thick pelt of green, all the leaves blown aside, a body being raised up. Ben said, “I was supposed to die that way,” and Fern said, “No, not you. You are safe.” She touched Ben’s forehead.

“It’s spaghetti night. Did we use to have an angel?” He said this without emotion. His voice was murky water.

“I don’t know. Did we?”

“In the prairie.”

“We had a statue of the archangel Michael.”

When Fern and Ben were in ninth grade, the family had gone to Europe for the summer. It was Fern who had discovered the statue of the angel in a huge antiques store. That night she had dreamed that the angel flew in her window and lifted her up, pulled her nightdress off and kissed her hard all over her body. She had woken up sweating, and had begged her father to buy her the statue. He had assumed, as she knew he would, that her interest was in the artistry, the story of the angel’s protection of children, his defeat of Satan.

The statue had been purchased for a large sum and sent home by crate. Weeks after she had first fallen in love with him and on the other side of the ocean, Fern had pried the nails out and found her angel in twenty-nine pieces. Dust was everywhere. His body had crumbled on his journey to her. It was the first time she had felt defeated by love.

“Is that the angel you mean?” Fern asked Ben.

“People say they aren’t real.”

“Oh, I see.” She saw no reason for a sharp point. “This one was real.”

Fern stayed and watched the rest of a show about crocodiles, offered sweets every five minutes. In the flash of the television she looked at Ben’s living body. His old skin and eyes and the flush in his neck. The shell had not changed, except for a long scar across his scalp, marking his loss.

“Ben,” Fern said to the silent shape of her brother. “I feel lost. I don’t know what I’m becoming.” She put her hands on her belly. He looked at her. He gave a half-smile, like he had caught sight of something and then lost it again. It was hard to tell what was missing from him, if it was cognition or feeling. Whatever was left felt like all she had. “I was in high school and then I was a wife. I’m still a wife but without a husband to take care of. And I’m about to be a mother but I have no idea what that means. I am completely alone and I feel like I am waiting to die.”

Fern thought of the people who were supposed to be the ones to love her. Her husband was far away. She had called her parents and they had flooded the conversation, flushed her voice out with news of the house’s rotting foundation, the charity ball, the cast her mother had made of a dead fawn she had found in the prairie. Evelyn had said, “I assume you don’t want me to come for the birth.” The last word was spit out as if it were something rotten. Fern certainly would have wanted a different mother to be there since her husband was not, but no, Fern did not want Evelyn. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Fern had said. “I’ll be in good hands.”

Fern had called Edgar’s mother and admitted more than she wanted to about how carrying the child of someone absent made her angry. How she missed Edgar so hard she was a bruise, but Mary had not offered to come. Two days later a box had arrived filled with silk stockings, a nightgown with an intricate lace bodice and a jewelry box containing a sapphire pendant as big as Fern’s thumbnail. The note had said, Chin up! and had her mother-in-law’s perfect signature. The necklace had been cold on Fern’s chest. It had felt half alive.

Ben knelt down on the floor in front of his sister. It looked like he was going to ask her to marry him. “Benny,” she said, trying to save him from embarrassment. But he stayed and took her foot out of her patent leather pump. Ben gave her toes a squeeze and then sat back in his chair. He picked up his napkin and spit on it and began to polish Fern’s shoe. “Here,” said Ben. “See?” And there, in the black shine, was his proof that she was alive: the pink smudge of her face, reflected.

—

Fern grew larger, hid behind her clothes and kept her head low. It seemed inappropriate to go out in her condition, to be seen in such a physically exaggerated form, and with her husband away too. Much more intimate than being naked in public was to be pregnant in public. It was as if her whole life was visible—sex and fear and hope and the coming unknown. Everywhere she went people warned her that the next part would be so hard. “Enjoy this time,” an old woman in the bakery said. “When the baby comes, you’ll never be the same again.”

She said, “I’m already not the same. Look at me.” The old woman smiled back, deaf and happy.

“My name is a good name,” the woman said. “Ruth. You should use it if it’s a girl.” The woman was wire-thin, her collarbone a sharp edge beneath an old dress. It was the woman’s turn to order bread and she asked a question about each loaf, pointing her bony finger, bidding the baker to turn it over so she could inspect the underside. “Looks a little overdone, that one,” the woman said. Fern could feel the blood pooling in her ankles and fattening them. She knew when she got home that they would be thick and sore.

Finally, the baker took out the pumpernickel, which was already overbrown and could not be faulted for such a color. The old woman seemed unsure. The risk seemed to weigh on her, the whole week counting on this bread for sustenance and comfort. Fern softened for her. She said to the baker, “Would you throw some scones in her bag, from me?” The woman did not notice the gift as she counted, in coins, her total. Her fingertips were stained with nicotine.

—

The next time at the bakery, the same old woman was there. She was wearing the same dress and the same shoes. “Did you enjoy the scones?” Fern asked.

“I threw them away. People don’t give you things for free unless they are poisoned or spoiled.” She studied Fern’s protrusion. “You should have that baby. There’s no sense in keeping it in.” Around the woman’s neck was a small gold Star of David. It made Fern feel charitable. Poor old thing.

Fern looked at the woman’s wiry eyebrows and considered reaching out and plucking one out. Would it be so terrible to run into someone kind? “Waiting is hard,” she said.

“You think waiting for life is hard, try waiting for death. Any day now,” the woman said and she checked her watch.

Again, she had the baker show her the underbelly of each loaf, asked what time they came out of the oven. She chose a rye this time. “Just give me half, in case I don’t make it past Thursday.”

Fern said the same thing to the baker, taking the remainder of the woman’s loaf.

It was the old woman who moved on first. The Sunday loaves were out, studded with raisins, and Fern waited outside smelling the bread, planning her order. She waited fifteen minutes, thirty, her feet fat and the ligaments in her hips pulling. Fern said a little prayer for the old woman and wished her good rest. Ruth, she said to herself, good luck wherever you are, Ruth.

*   *   *

EDGAR HAD NO OTHER JOB but to administrate the deaths of his generation, sign the thousands of condolence letters. So sorry for your loss, your loss, your loss too. These letters were not addressed to people where he grew up—they went to Bakersfield, Omaha, Tampa.

Edgar had written to these mothers each day, over and over to say that he was sorry because the dead were not strangers. The dead were theirs. Edgar knew that the letters would arrive with some artifact of the absent—shoes, a watch, the green shirt. He did not know whether these artifacts had actually belonged to the ones they were said to have belonged to. That jungle. The ants and snakes and vines. What if nothing was saved? But you could not tell a woman her son was gone and not give her fingers something to hold on to.

He longed for any number of unremarkable mornings. He thought about the novel he had started and the few good pages were a tiny, hopeful island but not enough to soften the bite of missing his wife’s pregnancy, of not being there to cup her swollen feet at the end of the day, to put his ear to the doctor’s fetoscope and hear that new heart. At night he lay on his back and he could feel his entire skeleton. The hard parts that would remain after the soft parts had gone.

Edgar awoke one morning to find Runner sitting on the floor with a steaming cup. He was wearing his parka and boots. “Are you going someplace?” Edgar asked. As if there was someplace to go. As if they would ever leave this sheet of ice.

“I can’t do it anymore, man,” Runner said. “I can’t be part of this fucked-up machine.” It was the most he had talked since Edgar had arrived.

Edgar sat up in bed. “And?”

“I’m leaving.”

“There’s no place to go.”

“They’ll assume I’m dead.”

They would, because how else would it end? A single man in the sharp cold, wind and ice, a roadless expanse.

“The sled tracks from yesterday are still visible. I’ll either die or I’ll live. I can accept both possibilities.” Runner stuffed his pockets with food rations. He said, “You want to come?”

Edgar wanted to say yes to escape, but what he really wanted was home and he would not be allowed back if he ran.

Runner knew that Fern was pregnant. He knew Edgar had ties connecting him to a world he could not walk away from. He shook Edgar’s hand and said, “Tell Fatty I said goodbye and good luck.” Edgar wrote his home address down and stuffed it in Runner’s pocket. “If you ever need help . . .” he said. And then Runner opened the door and started walking. The dawn was a shell, opening. Edgar watched the figure recede along thin sled tracks. He watched until Runner was a dot, then nothing, gone beyond the curvature of the earth.

—

On the day that Fern went into labor, she circled her house for hours. She drank cold water through a straw and she paced.

Fern remembered a day: she and Ben had been running, racing, sprinting. It was not lunchtime yet but they were ravenous. They picked blackberries in the garden and shared a fleshy, sunwarm tomato. The kitchen seemed terribly far away, and the province of grown-ups, and they did not want to break the seal. All afternoon they played and picked what was growing: rhubarb stalks, currants, raspberries, unripe pears.

Fern’s mother walked through the garden from her sculpture studio at dusk and found the two lying on their backs under the apple tree, counting its coming fruit.

“We could live a week, at least,” Ben said.

“A week’s not long,” said Fern.

Her mother looked at the fruit cores, the discarded stalks. “My god,” she said, “Fern, you do nothing but eat.” No mention of Ben whose boy-body deserved the nourishment, needed the fuel. That night at dinner, Fern served herself the smallest of portions. A spoonful of peas, one small potato, two bites of fish. She wanted to show her mother that she was not an animal. That she was a lady, and in so being, could survive on hardly anything at all.

There came a moment where the laboring Fern took her clothes off and turned on the hose, drank from it. Stars shot and fizzled, her body was hot with pain and then at rest. Then red and white lights spun on the leaf backs and she looked up to see her neighbor peering over the fence and an ambulance in the driveway. She tried to explain that she was fine, she was good, she was doing the work, but the men’s arms were strong around her back, and they carried her, naked and enormously round, into the back of the van like a wild animal that had wandered into the neighborhood and threatened to disturb the peace. They covered her in a scratchy blanket. Hush up, little woman, their arms seemed to say, we’re here to contain you.

—

Fern studied her newborn, fresh and ripe. “She has your eyes,” the nurse said, but Fern thought the girl looked just like Edgar, as if she were a container for the overflow of his person. She had planned on another name—Edgar’s grandmother’s—but when the nurse brought the birth certificate for her to fill out, she thought of that old woman in the bakery who had come into her life at the end, as they each prepared to cross the border. Fern said a small prayer that the woman had gotten the bread just right, eaten the last piece on the day she died, had nothing left over that needed to be thrown out. She wrote the name down: Ruth.

Fern stood in front of the big mirror, and though her belly was still soft and misshapen, she felt lightened. There she was—her same hair and her same legs, her same face. Out loud to her reflection she said, “I’m still here,” and she knelt on the floor and wept.

—

The first morning at home, the phone rang. “Fern,” said a voice.

“Edgar.” She thought it couldn’t be. Her breath was warm against the plastic telephone. “How are you calling me?” He told her that he had walked for seven hours and hitchhiked for four to get to a phone where he could make the long-distance call. He did not waste their few minutes describing the way his legs felt after walking that long in the snow, how he had nearly lost the sled tracks and been sure he would die, that his body would only be found in summer. He did not tell her how strange it felt to be in a place where there were other humans, where things were for sale, about the chocolate bar softening in his pocket. The connection was heavy with static. “Did you have the baby?” Edgar asked. “I had a dream last night that you had.” That he did not know if his baby existed on earth yet, that he did not know that it was a girl made Fern feel like she had been caught in a lie. She had gone on ahead without him. “It’s a girl. She looks just like you, Edgar,” she said. The fuzz between them thickened. “Can you hear me? Are you there?” she asked. “I named her Ruth.” She was embarrassed by the name. By the decision made on her own without good reason.

“Ruth?” he repeated back. “Are you okay? Fern, are you okay?”

“You’re alive,” Fern said out loud. She had been holding a place for death, for disappearance.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“I really need you.” She wanted to swat the static away. She wanted a clear connection to her husband more than she wanted anything.

“I know. So many people are dead. All there is is nothing here. Whiteness. I know I’ve told you before but it’s so cold and so dark. I can’t believe you gave birth. I can’t believe I missed it.” Not knowing if she could hear everything he said, he repeated the most important thing. “Fern, I love you. I love you. Hello?”

“I’m here. I know it sounds stupid to say but I was shocked by how much labor hurt.”

Edgar, on the far end of the line, was envious of a body that could feel unrivaled pain and produce an unrivaled prize. He wanted to ask what the baby looked like, what she felt like to hold, how she smelled. “She’s delicate,” Fern said. “She’s tiny. I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was hard not to imagine the path this poor creature would have to walk, the world so tumbled with pain.

“I wish I could be there,” he said.

She said, “I don’t belong here without you.”

He wanted to say Thank you but the words seemed much too small for what she had done.

—

Edgar stood at the phone and ate his chocolate bar. The sugar hit his tongue hard. His back was sweaty. He said his parents’ number to the operator.

The next voice was his father’s: “Yes?”

“It’s me, Edgar. I just wanted to tell you—”

“Edgar, Edgar! Where are you? Mary! Edgar’s on the phone. Edgar? Are you there? Are you all right?”

“Dad. I’m fine. I wanted to tell you that you’re a grandfather.”

“Yes, Fern called yesterday. Congratulations, my boy.” It was this that hurt: he had not been the first to know. His parents had already celebrated, had already lived a whole day knowing that the baby had been born. He answered their questions about his safety, promised that he was fine, but he could hear pain in his mother’s voice. There was too much to say so they said little and hung up, all of them missing each other more than they had before they had spoken.

Edgar bought a can of condensed milk and a box of crackers and sat on the bench out front drinking and eating and saying to himself: I have a daughter. I have a baby girl. I am somebody’s father. The road in town was mud and rock. A stray dog nipped at a dead bird. That night Edgar slept in a boarding house where he ate a giant steak, took three showers and two baths before beginning the journey back to nowhere.

In Tennessee, Fern ate steamed green beans and nursed the baby. In Chicago, Edgar’s father called the same General who had saved Edgar once and said, “Edgar’s a father now,” and his attempts to keep his voice calm were thin. Mary was beside him, trying to listen in on the conversation. “Congratulations,” the General said, and then to clarify, “Doesn’t it seem to you that families as nice as yours should be together?”

“Yes,” Hugh said. “Yes, yes.” He managed to keep his breathing steady until he had hung up.

—

It was two weeks before Fern made it to the bakery again. And when she walked in, there, inspecting the crumb on a loaf of wheat, was the old woman.

“Oh!” Fern said. “You’re alive!” She was relieved and she was strangely annoyed. She had prayed for the old woman in heaven, she had mourned her. Now she would have to return to the state of waiting and do it all again.

“Do I know you?” the woman asked. On two of her fingers were giant, fire-bright diamonds, unmistakably real. Fern looked at her to make sure it was the same person. She had always assumed the woman was poor.

“I was pregnant last time we met.”

The woman studied her and seemed not to find anyone she had ever seen.

“This may seem peculiar but I actually named my baby after you,” Fern said. “Ruth.” She wanted delight. She wanted thanks. She had given a dead woman an eternal gift, except that the woman was alive again.

“I’m not Ruth. I’ve never been Ruth.”

“What?”

The woman turned away from Fern, asked to see the bread bellies and found nothing to her liking. She said, “If I’m going to die with something uneaten, it should at least be top quality.” She looked at Fern. “I once knew a Ruth. She lived in sin in the state of California.”

The bell rung her out.