Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

After a lot of afternoon walking Hazel wanted a break and a snack or a soda with a straw. She went to the 7-11, where she always sat out back on a nice bit of grass that was close enough to the dumpsters so no one else came, but far enough away that she didn’t smell anything except when there was a big gust or a bad bag.

JOHNNY WAS TO BE HER FIRST. He came out of the store on his lunch break, his uniform button-down untucked, planning to piss on the trash bins because they were cleaner than the toilets. He was clearly surprised to see a girl there, but he just said hello and paused for a second before going on with his plan anyway. Johnny stood with his back to her, a plastic bag in his left hand and his right hidden. She could hear two things: him whistling “Strangers in the Night,” and a delicate stream hitting the green metal of the dumpster. After, he sat down next to Hazel and took a large package of teriyaki beef jerky and a six-pack of Miller Lite out of his bag.

He started right in about the horse races in Deerfield and the off-track betting down in Green Springs. He told her about Million Dollar Mama and Sweet Sixteen, both winners. But not Johnny, he’d lost fifty. “Just not my lucky day,” he said. When he said “lucky day,” he looked right into Hazel’s eyes and winked, and it looked as if he’d been practicing for years in his rearview. She sucked her lemon-lime fizzy and noticed his arms, skinny and brown like hungry snakes.

Just a few feet behind where Hazel and Johnny had talked, they lay down on their young backs. There was a muddle of bushes there, hiding them from the road and the midday gassers and snackers. Johnny didn’t have a line, had just asked, “Wanna go lie down behind those bushes?”

“OK,” Hazel said, because she did not have a better answer, and because, having decided the hour before to say yes to growing, she could hardly say no.

He carried her soda for her, left his two empties where they were. When she sat, he said, “Nice hair.”

“Thanks.”

He leaned over and kissed her, putting his tongue right into the center of her mouth and moving it around in whirling circles. It tasted like beef jerky and beer. She decided she was supposed to do the same—two tongues spinning now. But then she wanted a rest, pulled her head back. Johnny took the pause to mean: OK, next step. He rolled on top. He moved his hips the same way he’d moved his mouth. She could feel him pressed into her bladder.

Hazel had had one close call before, in eighth grade with a pimply boy named Derek who was the brother of the girl having the slumber party. Everyone else had fallen asleep and they had made out in the laundry room while the other girls slept to the sound of Texas Chainsaw Massacre . Screaming sounds masked the washing machine’s rattle as Hazel and Derek pressed themselves together on top of a pile of mateless socks.

Johnny got the courage to grab her breasts. He sat up, straddling her, and put one big hand on each B-cup. Squeezed, pumped like udders. He did not softly caress and he did not pinch. Just squeezed and released, squeezed and released. She could tell this was making him happy because his closed eyes were squinting and his mouth was pursed up. Mmmmmm , he said. Mmmmm, she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long, dark distances.

Johnny took his shirt off and her shirt off. He had a few scratchy little hairs. Then pants and pants. He looked at her and said, “OK?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but she nodded. She found out right away that it meant underwear, and in a second they were both off—his first, then hers. He rolled on top, ungraceful and floppy, bit his lower lip and pushed. Hazel started out making her noise but then realized he didn’t notice either way, so she stopped and instead watched his big head lit up by the sun. This is it? she thought. This is the whole entire thing?

Hazel went home that night and ate salad with her mother on the screened-in porch while the mosquitoes tapped audibly to get in. Hazel lived alone with her mother, though she had three sisters, all much older, all living in their own houses with their own dishwashers, lists of emergency phone numbers, and husbands who had good jobs, good values and well-shaped eyebrows. This family had been symmetrical, a family of plans and lists and decisions made years in advance into which Hazel was a very late, very surprising accident followed almost immediately by her father’s diagnosis. While Mother grew fatter, Father grew smaller, and everyone felt certain that they were watching a direct transfer of life from one body to another.

The two of them were never in the world together—by the time Hazel entered, her father had already closed the door behind him. Her mother was still wearing black in the delivery room, surrounded by a ring of grieving daughters. The final shock came when the baby was a not a boy but a girl, looking nothing like the man she was meant to replace.

“How was your afternoon?” Hazel’s mother asked.

“Fine,” Hazel said, considering if this was a true answer and deciding it was. “Yours?”

“Just the usual disasters. The club has the red, white and blue flowers ordered in time for the Fourth, and what is the city out there planting in every median? Marigolds.”

Hazel did not tell her mother that she had had sex with a convenience-store clerk and that it was disappointing but harmless—she felt no ache to see the boy again, no real change in her own body, no broken heart. She had done this grown-up thing, yet she knew her mother would find her even more childish for it.

HAZEL WALKED the northern quadrant of town and, since it was a Saturday, there were a lot of folks out in their yards trimming bushes and pulling dandelions out of the ground with flowered-canvas hands. The day after that, it was the same thing, only the western quadrant, where she watched the first few innings of a family softball game and petted some dogs in the dog park. She walked past a flower shop where the dyed-blue carnations were the best thing going. She walked through the church parking lot. Father O’Donnel’s Honda was the only car there. She peeked into the backseat: an open gym bag, one ratty gray running shoe out, one in.

“Hi,” someone said roughly. Hazel turned around fast. It was a tall man and big, too. He had a fat face and a comb-over; his shirt buttons were barely holding. He was close.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said again. She edged to her right, her back pressed up against the car.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No. Thanks.” Hazel tried to smile.

“Oh. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I have to go.”

“Actually, you have to stay.” He put his hand on her arm, but didn’t grab hard. She didn’t say anything, wanted to play it smart. “Look,” he said, “don’t scream. I won’t hurt you if you don’t scream.” Hazel did not scream. Later she thought she might have been better off if she had. But at that moment everything was underwater and she was underwater and there was a strong current pulling her deeper.

The big-faced man took her hand, almost gently. His round fingers interlaced with her skinny ones. Her heart took over her entire body. She was a drum. Did she ask the obvious questions? Why am I walking? Why am I not drinking a Shirley Temple and adjusting my bikini top over and over at the country-club pool like all the other girls? Why did I agree to grow up? Her body asked the questions for her, that terrified, slamming heart spoke them so loud that she could not breathe fast enough to fuel it, but the drumbeat was empty of answers. They walked behind the church, under the dark of the steeple-shaped shadow and into the maples covered in the new green of summer leaves. The man stopped walking and smiled at her.