Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“Sometimes I think we should take her to the healer,” Kayla told Hersh. “What if she has some kind of problem?” She served herself a new glob of potatoes.

I bounced in my chair, trying to look like a baby who was, at this very instant, growing a little. I wiggled my patent leather shoes. If nothing else, I felt I had earned some acclaim for my performance. Disappointment was so pervasive in my life that I could hardly sort it from any other feeling. Yet I had not considered that Kayla could ever be disappointed in me . Was there something I had forgotten to give up? Some sacrifice I had missed the opportunity to make?

“She doesn’t have any problems. She’s learning,” Hersh said.

I bounced and shook my fists. I tried to make my face sweet and unknowing.

Kayla frowned. I bounced. Kayla rolled her eyes. “That’s all she does all day.”

I looked Kayla straight in the eye and said, “Mother!” Kayla’s hand flew to her heart. She wiped the tears from her cheek, replacing them with a delicate smear of potato. She looked at Hersh and shook her head. That Kayla had food on her cheek and did not know it made me strangely sad. Growing up saves a person none of the tiny humiliations. Forgetting my supposed age, I reached out with my napkin to clean it, but she slapped my hand, as if I were a fly.

“Yes!” she cried. “Yes! That’s me! Mother! Me!” Then, not wanting to perform unless it was going to be a standing ovation, I turned to Hersh and smiled my big, toothy smile and said, “Father!” Hersh in turn put his hand on his heart and wiped the tear from his eye and shook his head and said, “Yes! That’s me! Father! I’m your father!” I bounced in my chair, receiving the accolades.

“Bullfight!” I yelled. “Fire! River! Hunger!”

“Oh, she is learning so much!” Hersh exclaimed.

“Too much! Too much!” Kayla yelled, covering her ears. “I want to be the only words she knows for now. Where did she learn all those other horrible words?”

I cast my eyes to the ground and stopped talking. “She’s sorry,” Hersh said. “She’s too smart for her own good. That’s what happens when we don’t teach her ourselves. She’ll learn all the wrong things.”

“Mother! Mother! Father! Mother!” I tried.

“She’s so sorry,” Hersh said again.

Kayla cried that she wanted my world to be small so that they could keep track of it. “I can protect her from six or ten things. I don’t know if I can protect her from seven hundred or four million things.”

“We teach her to protect herself ,” he tried. “That is our only job in the world.”

“Mother,” I said quietly. “Father.”

Kayla sobbed as if her daughter had died. Hersh whispered to her what a privilege it was to get to pass the world down, the world as they saw it. In any order, with any particular meaning. “We could teach her that the trash can is the most beautiful of things — or the sapling or the butter knives. She will always live in the world we give her.”

Kayla blew her nose into Hersh’s sleeve. “It’s so hard to be a mother,” she told him. “I had no idea how much I would be asked to give away. Just as I have gotten to know her one way, I have to see her grow into something else. How much am I supposed to bear?”

Hersh’s chair squeaked when he pushed it out to rest a hand on the broad expanse of his wife’s back. “A few minutes ago you were telling me she was too slow.”

“Being a mother is impossible,” Kayla cried. “ Impossible . Every single part breaks my heart.” Being a daughter was so hard that I had not considered anything in the future could match it. If I made it through this, I had expected to be safe. But the world was busy inventing new ways to sacrifice every day. A lifetime of them. A heavy stone sank to the bottom of my stomach.

Hersh said to his wife, “Come with me into the day. Let’s show our beautiful girl where she lives. Just us, her mother and her father, her very own parents. One thing at a time.”

My uncle took me into his spidery arms. Kayla popped open her big black umbrella, which turned the rain into a percussion instrument, a drumbeat building up to the revelation of the world. On the street, Hersh said, “This is a street. You have seen it before but you wouldn’t have known what to think of it. We use it to get from one place to another. We carry the rocks from the mountains and we lay them down to walk on. The horses walk on them, the bugs walk on them, the people.”

“A bug, a mountain, a rock, a person — you’re naming things that she does not know. She can’t understand anything you’re saying,” Kayla scolded.

“A rock,” he started, and knelt down, put his hands on the street. “This is a rock. My hand is touching a rock. This is a hand. Fingers, these are fingers. To touch is when you put one thing against another thing.” He touched me on the arm. “This is touching,” he said.

I nodded. “Touching,” I repeated obediently.

We had made it no farther than the first corner of the first street closest to our home, and still we were surrounded by so much that it was almost impossible to know where to begin.

“You haven’t said about the mountains or the horses,” Kayla prodded.

“The mountains are huge mounds of the earth. The earth is everything, the earth is the earth. The horses are what make us a living, because people, that’s us, we like to ride on the horses to get places. We go on the horses on the streets and end up somewhere new. I make the saddles so that it’s easier to ride. The saddle is made of leather, which is the skin of another animal. Not the skin of a horse, because that would be cruel, but the skin of a cow.”

“Where do people go on the horses?” Kayla asked.

“The mountains maybe, the sea. The sea is where the rivers go, the rivers are what feed the sea. The sea is hungry for the rivers. The people do not live in the sea. We like to visit it, to go inside, but cannot live there. It’s because of air. Air is what we breathe.” He breathed loudly to demonstrate. “Like that. That is breathing. We have to do it or we die. Dying is the end, maybe. It’s either the end or the beginning. It always happens, even if you are very good.”

“Hersh?” Kayla asked. “I think it’s too much. We don’t have to tell her the bad things yet.” But he kept on, he could not keep anything a secret anymore.

“When you die you do not breathe. When you do not breathe you die. If you were to jump into the river and swim for a very long time until you got tired, you would start to sink down, and when you could not keep your head up in the air anymore, you would take water into your body and that would be the end of the breathing. You would sink to the bottom. The bottom, the dirt, is the last place to go.”

I nodded at Hersh in understanding. “The bottom,” I said. This was something I felt I understood. It felt good to be given back the words with which to describe my world. Like being paid. I imagined all the conversations I would be able to have with my new words.

“Please stop,” Kayla begged.

“But flowers and trees grow out of the dirt. It’s what makes all other life possible. It’s the earth, the earth which is everything.”

As Hersh talked we all slumped lower. We did not stand straight, but felt the weight of all the words, of all the things, of the ways all the things were the same and different from all the other things. Nothing was safe. Nothing was free from a name or a place in the world. If we wanted to start naming, we would have to never stop.

“When you say Mother it means Kayla. When I say Mother it means a woman who is dead. She died but I did not die yet. I have to keep living, to take care of you. No one has a choice about this. We do not decide when we die.”