Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

Ben got up and gathered items. A yellow plastic magnet of the letter N from the kids’ corner and a miniature lounge chair from the dollhouse. He tried a pen that said Women’s Center West and had a picture of a uterus, but it was much too long so he put it back. He went into the bathroom and found, inside a closet, extra supplies. He took three Q-tips, one tongue depressor and a square of gauze. The tongue depressor had to be broken into thirds. He put them all in his drawer, happily. He sat down on the closed toilet seat and arranged his inventory alphabetically, starting with the picture because he decided to name the man Aaron. So it went: Aaron, chair, gauze, N, Q-tips, tongue depressor parts one, two and three.

Annie walked out into the waiting room with the doctor and looked around. No husband. She called. No answer. Figured he was probably in the bathroom. “Ben,” she cooed. “Are you in there?” Ben buttoned his shirt, composed himself, opened the door.

“The doctor thought she might like to take a look at your chest,” she said.

“I think it’s fine. I think I just have a drawer now,” he replied.

In a voice sculpted for use on a three-year-old, Annie pleaded gently, “I’m sure you’re right. Would you let her just take a peek? Please?”

“I think it’s fine,” Ben repeated. “I think I just have a drawer now.”

Her face became a square of irritation. “Pull up your shirt, Ben.” She glared at him. And then sweeter: “We’ll go have a coffee after this. At that place you like.”

“I will pull up my shirt, Annie, but I think everything is fine. After this, I’m not showing my drawer to anybody else.”

She breathed slowly and put her hand on her belly. “I’m not going to yell at you. Not in front of the baby.”

The doctor rubbed her hands together, excited, when he began to unbutton.

“Oh, goodie,” Ben mimicked.

OVER THE NEXT THREE DAYS, the one drawer was joined by five more. They were small, about two inches square, and pulled out halfway, seeming to have mechanisms that stopped them there. They were stiff and did not slip open when Ben bent over to pick up a fallen napkin or clean the shower drain, but were not watertight, so it was important that he dry each cavity out to keep it from getting dank and moldy inside. He used a washcloth followed by a Q-tip for this job, and the process extended his morning routine by six minutes.

Annie bought some apricot exfoliant, which she used on both her face and his chest, to polish it. The bone was bright white. Ben asked her to rub some of her cocoa butter ointment onto him because he found it soothing, though he had no actual feeling there anymore.

“This stuff is for mommies who don’t want stretch marks,” she told him.

“As soon as they start making a product for me, I’ll switch.”

He just liked the act of it, watching her long fingers rub the yellow goo in circles. She tried to pretend that she was not worried. At night she laid her ear up to his back, hearing the same heartbeat that she used to listen to in his chest. “I need you. We all three need you,” she whispered. “Please don’t stop beating.”

In the evenings Annie still practiced Lamaze and did prenatal yoga with the women in her Mothers to Be group. She and Ben read through the shelves of books on child rearing, learned what to expect at each month of development post-birth. The cooing, the lifting of the head, the ability to wiggle on purpose—these were all things they could look forward to. Ben continued to attend birthing classes with her, but she caught him touching his own chest as often as the other dads touched their wives’ round bellies. She’d elbow him. “Ben. Pay attention to my deformity now.”

THOSE FIRST ITEMS from the doctor’s office stayed. Ben came to think of Aaron, smiling from his pamphlet, as a friend and unfolded the paper occasionally to whisper hello. He didn’t like the girlfriend as much and she never got a name. More things were stored in the drawers, too. He put a travel toothbrush and mini-paste in one and carried it around all day long, taking it out to use in the morning and before bed. His collection expanded to include loose change (useful, except that he didn’t want to open himself up in public, so he ended up running out to the car anyway); a miniature jar of good mustard they’d bought on a trip to Germany; his father’s pocket watch, which hadn’t run in years; the ring he had bought his wife when they were first together: a round piece of amber set in silver. This he had stolen out of her jewelry box, but so far she didn’t seem to miss it. He folded some paper towels up and lined the drawers with them so that the items inside did not roll around noisily.

When Annie and Ben went to the video store or the bank together, people placed their hands on Annie’s stomach whether they knew her or not and asked the same set of questions: “When are you due? Do you know the sex? Any names picked out?” She answered politely while her husband stood by, ignored completely. Once, after an old lady had gotten her questions answered, Ben patted the protrusion and said, “Good sperm I’ve got. Good strong sperm, swam right up there and tunneled into that egg. Y chromosomes all over the place.”

The next morning Ben went to the toy store. He picked out a soft doll for his daughter, one wearing a flowered dress with her string hair in two braids. At the register he said, “I’ll also take one scoop of those tiny babies.”

“You want the white ones or the black ones?” the woman asked.

“Well, maybe half a scoop of each.”

The woman pushed her silver shovel into a basket and drew out a pile of bright pink bodies, and then into another basket, this time culling brown bodies. She poured them into a paper bag, tied it up with a twisty and handed it to him. Sitting in the car with the windows up, he took his shirt off and dropped babies into every drawer of his chest.

“Will you all need names?” he asked. “Each and every one?” He looked at the plastic bodies, who did not answer him. “Let’s take it slow,” Ben suggested. He decided to name one baby Archie after his first dog and placed Archie in Aaron’s drawer, introducing them. To the rest he said, “Everyone can have a name who wants one. Just hang in while I think of some.”

Even Annie adapted to the new feature. On their way to a party, she told him, “I’d rather not take a purse—could you carry my lipstick?”

Ben started to put the silver tube in his pants pocket, but she shook her head. “I’m not good enough to get inside?” she asked.

“I don’t like to think of them as a convenience,” he mumbled.

“Ben,” she said, “I’m carrying our baby around for nine months.”

He felt the weight of the tube in the drawer all evening, like a bullet lodged there. They chatted with separate islands of people about politics and giving birth and new restaurants. Ben watched his wife across the room, resting her hand on her stuck-out body, laughing. He watched her make her way to the dessert table and the drink table. She was lovely, drifting like a boat around the bay of this room. He would happily have blown into her sails, but they billowed already. When she wanted to touch up her lips though, she took Ben by the hand and slipped him into the bathroom. She unbuttoned his shirt.

“Kiss me now if you want to,” she told him. Her finger was hooked over the lip of his open drawer.

He put his hands on her belly. “Look what we do to each other,” he said.

She smiled, big and warm. “There turn out to be rewards, after all, to the empty spaces in our bodies.”

“So do I always end up half-naked when you want to powder your nose?”