Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

He followed along with the Miracle of Life by reading books, day-by-day updates of exactly what the spine was doing, what mucus was gathering where. The sacks of air and fluid and the creation of the liver, the urinary tract, the brain. Ben taped pictures of developing fetuses up all over the house. They were on the bulletin board over the dining room table, where receipts and coupons used to go. The black-and-white photographs of soft new heads and still-webbed feet covered the refrigerator. Soon they occupied frames beside the bed, replacing the pictures of friends and parents and vacations. Annie watched her husband remove the evidence of their lived lives in favor of the ghost of their future child. The only remaining photograph of fully formed human beings was of Ben and Annie on their honeymoon, lying in the exact shade of a palm tree, hot white sun inches away from them on every side. Annie would tell herself the story of that day—how they had to move every few minutes to keep up with the shade.

“We are still a family of two,” Annie said in the dark while they waited for sleep.

“How else can I prepare for being a father?” Ben asked. “You get to prepare quite literally. You are growing her for us.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Annie joked, tugging at the elastic of his underwear. “And I can’t still. Let’s be in-love parents. Let’s be parents who kiss all the time.” Ben let her feather his neck with her lips, and he put his hands on her belly.

“Not in front of the baby,” he said.

“You still love me?”

“Unequivocally.”

Annie woke up early in the morning and wrote her dreams down, a thing she had never done before. She addressed them to the baby, like letters. Dear Baby , they went. Over on his side of the bed, Ben pretended to sleep, listening to her shuffling pen and thinking of writing letters to the uninspired mess in his abdomen. Dear Guts, another day, another day.

Ben went to work assembling a crib. He was sorry when he was done that the place his daughter would sleep came off a shelf with a hundred others like it. He was sorry that her view would be of bars.

“I want to build something myself for the baby,” he said to Annie, as she sat with her feet on an upturned bucket in the yard. “What will she need?”

“She’ll just need us at first. I don’t think she’ll be that into furniture.”

“Annie. I need a job to do.”

She smiled. “Why don’t you build her a little table,” she said. “I think little girls like to have little tea parties at little tables.”

Ben liked the idea of a table where his daughter could put teacups if she wanted, or if she was another kind of kid—dirty socks or eagle feathers or stones. She could lay a cloth down and hide underneath. So he went to the beach and gathered driftwood. He imagined that it had come to him all the way from Asia, or floated up from a ship, sunk into the deep muck someplace. He hugged it to his chest, wet and salty.

THE TABLE WAS UNEVEN AND TIPPY, but Ben liked it and he called his wife in to see. Her face colored up. “That thing is practically made of splinters,” she said. And then, leaning hopeless against the wall, “Do you have any idea how delicate her skin will be?”

Ben brushed his hand over the rough wood. He walked over to Annie, lifted her red sweater up and touched the side of her rib cage, recorded the texture of the skin in his mind. “Two thousand times more delicate than that,” she told him. He pulled her sweater back down and nodded. He turned the table upside down and kicked the legs off one by one.

Ben threw the wood back into the ocean. He took his shirt off and threw it into the wind. He took his pants off and threw them too. It was cold out, windy spring, but he jumped into the bubbling waves and floated on his back with the dead table parts, hoping the ocean might continue to churn them all smooth until they were splinterless and appropriate for new skin. The gray sky fell toward them.

When Ben got out of the water and retrieved his clothing—his pants were spread out on the sand like they were trying to run away and his shirt stuck on a pile of seaweed—he noticed that, along with the tiny raised bumps of cold, the skin on his chest looked like a checkerboard or a grid.

He called Annie. He was shivering and his breaths were short. He explained the problem and they met in the hospital parking lot. He wore a winter coat and a pair of pajama pants he found in the trunk. She sat him on the hood of his old Datsun and he pulled his shirt up to reveal six perfect squares separated by half-inch-deep channels.

“Well,” Annie said carefully, “there does not appear to be any redness or irritation.” This was a practiced voice, a parenthood-ready voice. “It doesn’t look broken,” she added, optimistically.

“Nope, it doesn’t look broken,” he agreed. She swished her hand up and back, feeling the ridges.

THEY WAITED FOR TWO HOURS in the emergency room, where they read all the homemaking magazines.

“What did you eat?” Annie wanted to know.

“You think this is food related? You think this is from some bad chicken?” Ben snapped.

“It’s from something.” She opened her magazine and paged loudly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She nodded. “You look like someone’s ready to build a city on you. Property lines all set to go.”

The nurse who finally called them in gave the battery of tests very slowly, glancing up at Ben’s new feature every second or so, nervously. She fetched the doctor without bothering to make cheerful small talk. They could hear her on the other side of the curtain: “He has moats… He has squares.”

The doctor had the nurse take a picture of him posing with the couple. In it, he made a serious face. A magazine-cover face. But he had no advice, only a tall pile of referrals. In the coming weeks, Ben and Annie scheduled appointments with the heart doctor, the dermatologist, the orthopedist, the cancer specialist, even the ear, nose and throat guy.

Annie woke up the following morning with her arm over her husband’s side and she felt, extending out from his body, a warm, hollow box that seemed to be attached to Ben’s chest. She screamed. She probably woke the baby, swimming in her pool of warm body fluid. She definitely woke her husband, who looked down at his chest and saw a section of it sticking out, a drawer. He sat up. He was barely awake, right out of a dream about an escape from a pack of dogs. He closed the skinless bone drawer with some difficulty, as it was quite stiff. In order to open it again, Ben needed his nails since it had no knob. None of these actions hurt. Ben looked up at his wife in her blue flannel nightgown. She was staring at him with wet eyes. “Look” was all he said.

BEN AND ANNIE packed up for a medical appointment in the afternoon, but it was one they already had: the ob-gyn, for Annie. While her feet were up in the stirrups, she asked the doctor if she had ever happened to see someone with a drawer coming out of his chest. The doctor did not answer, because she thought it was the beginning of a joke.

“Have you?” Annie asked again.

“No, why?” the doctor said, waiting for the punch line. But Annie just started to cry.

The waiting room was empty except for Ben, who had unbuttoned his shirt and sat there opening and closing his drawer. He had a small butter knife, taken from the dish rack this morning, to help him get it started until his fingers could fit inside and pull. He was smiling, running his fingers around the rim of his polished new cavern.

Ben reached over to the magazine table and picked up a pamphlet about STDs. He read through it and tore out a picture of a happy couple who were STD-free since they had been careful and followed the pamphlet’s directions. In the picture, the man was wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater and was giving the girl a piggyback ride. Her brown hair streamed behind her and they were both laughing in a clean, sexually responsible way. Ben folded the picture up into a little square and put it in his drawer. He closed it most of the way, leaving enough space to get his fingertips in. He grinned and looked around the room. He opened the drawer a little and peeked in at the paper square. All that was visible in the dark of his own body were the man’s white teeth.