Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

Before Thanksgiving break, the girls and boys were separated and shown charts of each other’s bodies. They learned that chlamydia was not a pretty blossom to add to a floral arrangement. The girls, not the boys, were each given a sack of flour with a smiley face drawn on it that they had to carry around and feed with a dry bottle. “Hazel doesn’t have to do this assignment,” the teacher said to the class. “We all know why.” The girls gathered in the bathroom and changed the white-dusted diapers. Some bought little outfits for their flour babies—cute dresses and hats and bows. The teacher pulled them all back into the classroom, where a large penis sat erect on her desk, and said, “These are not dolls, ladies. You aren’t supposed to be having fun with this exercise.”

The pile of ashes turned into something else. Hazel couldn’t tell what it was at first, but knew that it had little round hooves. Night by night it got clearer. The body and the long legs, and then it started to grow three heads, distinctly giraffelike. The necks lengthened, limp poles loosely twisted together like bread dough, with heads bobbing at their skinny ends.

Hazel spent the weekend in bed. She pulled her yellow-and-orange-flowered quilt up to her chin and lay on her back.

Mother said, “Maybe Father will finally come back,” patting her daughter’s rounded belly.

“If I’m not him, I don’t think my baby will be either,” Hazel said. Her mother’s eyes looked desperate, so Hazel added, “Maybe he will.” Her sisters came to sit with her, circled their hands over her pregnantness. One did Hazel’s toenails in pink polish, and one rubbed her hands with rose oil. One washed her hair in the sink, braided it into two damp plaits.

One night, the giraffe flipped itself upside down just like that, a perfect blue-mat somersault. Two short ears flicked, and head number one began to emerge. Hazel was so surprised she didn’t figure out what was going on until the head was already out. The neck though, she felt all of that, not painful but strange and slithery. Inch by inch by inch, it came. It unfurled. The giraffe blinked and smiled right at her. It bent its head around and came nose to nose with Hazel and sniffed her. Necks number two and three also exited her body.

The giraffe heads rolled out their three long purple tongues and licked Hazel’s chest. Cleaned her arms and her face. The tongues were rough and ragged and she shone with their spit, her chest paint-white and glistening. They slept there, breathing softly, their lips quivering. The giraffe’s body never came out. It stayed curled up, rising and falling with the inhales of its own three heads and the inhales of its beautiful host.

In the morning, Hazel still had the markings on her breasts from fur pressed down. She could still smell their warm skin like hay and cheese.

HAZEL WENT TO THE DOCTOR for her usual checkup.

“You have a beautiful cervix,” he said. Hazel, staring up at the poster on the ceiling of a coral reef, said, “Thank you. I get that all the time.” Dr. F laughed so long, all the time still staring into her, that she wished she hadn’t said anything at all.

The doctor retrieved Hazel’s mother for the dressed part of the exam. He had the picture from the ultrasound in his hand, a gray, curled blob. Hazel didn’t want to see it, and didn’t believe it when she did. What a good disguise my baby has on , she thought. Dr. F rubbed goo on her belly and listened. Her skin was stretched so far it was unrecognizable, not forgiving and soft but stiff and hard.

Hazel’s mother stood up from her plastic chair and took a listen. She immediately started to cry and stood there, eyes wide and slippery, her hand on her chest. While her mother witnessed the miracle of life, Hazel rolled the corner of her paper gown in her fingers.

HAZEL’S MOTHER TALKED about cribs and carriages and binkies and diapers. She insisted on stopping at Babies“R”Us to stock up. Hazel waited in the car and listened to the Soft Rock Less Talk station but turned it off when the host started making jokes about his wife’s credit card bill. She watched people pull into the parking lot in minivans and unload kid after kid crying, screaming or jumping around. Mothers struggled to strap them into strollers, to get shoes on and tied. One mother, after a long fight to get her son into his sweatshirt, spit into her delicate, diamond-glittering hand and smoothed it over his parted blond hair.

Hazel’s mother thundered back with her full cart, its metal vibrating loudly over the asphalt. She unloaded boxes and bags into the backseat, tossed Hazel a pair of miniature soft orange booties that looked like tennis shoes complete with plush tread and real laces. Hazel stuck her first two fingers into each one, walked them across the dashboard. “If it has four legs, I guess we can just get another pair,” she said quietly.

Her mother was busy stuffing the full bags in and shaking the right key out. “It’s not twins—we would have seen it in the pictures.”

“I never said it was twins.”

WITH HER MOTHER OUT one weekend morning, Hazel walked very slowly and heavily to the 7-11. She picked out a six-pack of Miller and a bag of beef jerky. Johnny, behind the counter, said, “I heard what happened.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“People are being helpful. Do you sell ribbon?”

“I don’t really know, but I think you’re not supposed to be drinking. You know, in your condition,” Johnny said, pulling out a roll of red. Hazel paid for her items and then, standing there with Johnny, she tied the beer and jerky together with the ribbon.

“Here,” she said, “it’s for you. I hope you understand.” She went out the door, which rang its bell to say, Goodbye, whoever you are.

With one week to go till due date, Hazel stopped sleeping. She couldn’t keep her eyes shut or her mind shut. Her brain bled a list of worries, ongoing and impossible to ignore. All the things she had to remember to do as a mother. She started lists, animal by animal.

Lion: lie under a tree together with its tail wrapped around my leg, learn to cook its caught rabbits, braid its mane. Koala: grow eucalyptus, watch it climb trees, lie underneath looking up at it through the branches. She had stacks and stacks of these lists. Some animals were blank. She didn’t know yet how to care for a sloth or a platypus. Almost as an afterthought, she made a list called Human Baby: hire a math tutor, record enough home video but not too much, bake lemon meringue pies, move to a remote unpopulated island when he/she turns thirteen, sled.

THEY NUMBED HAZEL from the waist down for the birth. It took a few minutes before it started to work, but then Hazel felt the warm emptiness creep over her. She could feel her body melting away. She held her mother’s hand. Her sisters wore sweat suits and ponytails and looked ready for action, but there wasn’t much to do except hope, which they did while they drank thin, fake-creamer coffee out of styrofoam cups.

Hazel’s mother fell asleep for a few minutes, her black shirt rolling up to reveal the loose skin of her midriff. The sisters talked of their own offspring and partners. They discussed a spinach salad recipe from a magazine and a new kind of tea that began in pearls and unfolded into flowers. Hazel could hardly hear them over the sound of her body working to release the creature. All the animals she’d prepared for began to run together. She saw the hooves of a cow and the head of a mouse and the body of a kangaroo. She felt the long teeth of a hyena and the soft fur of an alpaca. Hazel almost felt her own body turn into something else. Something capable of stalking prey and of tearing flesh.