Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“Houdini is dead!” I say. “I love you and I hate you! Welcome to your life!” I throw the last of the smashed bones up in a cloud, a finale. I applaud.

Houdini surrounds us all. He is gritty on my parents’ sweaty bodies. The sun makes his particles look like sparks. My mother and father are statues, gray and frozen, made out of muddy earth, as if they were the ones who had been buried alive. When they breathe in, I can see gulps of Houdini sucked into the holes of their mouths, coating even their pink gullets. All of us breathe the same ashy air—Houdini fills us up, binds us all together. When we breathe out, we send him in gusts, flying over everything that stabs, everything that reaches.

AS BUCK AND HER SUPPLY BAG struck out through the side door, Mother Mom was lurking under the overhang waiting for her prey. She was a resourceful woman and always said she didn’t see any reason not to make use of their bountiful wooded surroundings. Mother Mom had bird feeders set up every foot along the eaves of the house, probably two hundred or more of them, mostly homemade, and she hung out in the shadows with a large green net, catching whatever winged creature landed on whichever seed-filled box.

Her hands were webs of scratches and cuts from transferring the terrified creatures into the large metal cages also swinging from the eaves. She tapped her wrist—the sign that Buck should be home in time to help cook dinner—and they blew noiseless kisses at each other.

Beyond Mother Mom’s bird terrain was Grandma Pete’s shed, where she sat on an old office chair with her cane in one hand and a picture of her dead husband in his military regalia in the other.

“Good morning, Grandma Pete,” Buck yelled.

“Good day, Lady Buck,” she grumbled back. Buck joined Grandma Pete on the porch for the last inning of a baseball game on the radio. Baseball had come into their lives recently, after Grandma Pete found a picture of her dear husband in his handsome youth at the pitcher’s mound. Listening to the game, Grandma Pete hit her cane against the floorboards at all the calls, good or bad, while Buck swung her pitching arm right along with the man on the mound.

“How’s that look, Grandma Pete?”

“Sure,” Grandma Pete answered, “looks like a pitch.” When the game ended, they turned the radio off and listened to the outside world get its noises back. Grandma Pete started up telling the same four stories she always told about her husband: the day he left for the war, the day their daughter was born, the day he brought home a Christmas goose and four dozen roses even though it wasn’t Christmas, and the day he died.

Buck didn’t stay long. She wasn’t in the mood for anything except tossing her ball around in practice for a major league baseball career in a future she hoped was extremely near in time and far in distance from here.

THERE WAS A THICKET in the woods with a soft grass floor and some low pine branches that made the whole place feel nestlike. There were blackberry bushes thorning their way over every other plant, and the smell of the dropped fruit rotting on the forest floor rose up warm and sweet. The thicket had a big clearing nearby that made a good place to toss the ball. Buck threw the ball one way and then ran over, found it and threw it back the other way. She had colonies of poison-oak blisters on her wrists from bad aim, so in order to improve, she set up targets where a pinecone was balanced on the stump of dead tree. She tried to hit the pinecone so it made a satisfying thwap and its scales detached and scattered like a firework.

When she got tired of going after the ball every time, she threw it up in the air and tried to get right beneath it, opening her hand so it had no place else to land. When she got hungry, she went into her supply bag for a pair of apples.

“You’re eating two apples?” someone’s voice said from out of the bushes. Buck stood up and looked.

“Who said that?” A man in an old gray military uniform came up to sitting. He had a black mustache full of dried mud. “You gonna kill me?” she asked.

“I won’t kill anybody. You’re eating two apples,” he said again.

“One apple makes me hungry and the other makes me full,” she answered.

“You can call me General,” he said, and he put his hand out.

“Buck,” she answered.

He told her, “It’s been lovely to make your acquaintance. If you need anything at all, I’ll be in this sunny spot making a list of what has been lost.”

“You are absolutely certain that you won’t kill me?” She thought about the promise teachers and parents always made her make about strangers. “Or kidnap me?”

“I swear.”

Buck ate the rest of the first apple and the second one too, then wound up and threw the cores. They sailed into the trees and she didn’t hear them land. “And it’s gone!” she said in an announcer voice. The General sat with his eyes squinched up, and Buck chased herself across the tall grass while the bugs rubbed their wings together in one collective grind.

“So is your daddy into cowboys or something? Buck Rogers?” the General asked out of the quiet.

“Yes, sir. Was. But my mom was into First Ladies and they had it out.” Buck’s main plan in life was acting normal no matter what. She tried never to show fear, to always appear as if she was well acquainted with the situation at hand. “My real name is Mamie, after Mrs. Eisenhower, but no one calls me that.”

The General nodded and stretched. “I suppose in this case they both won.”

“I guess,” Buck agreed, watching the General adjust his knee-high boots and his heavy coat, not at all suitable for this hot July day. “Have you figured out what’s lost?” Buck asked.

“Oh, many things. My men. I’m going through their names, trying to remember all of them, first, middle and last.”

“Where did they go?”

“Yanks got them.” The General sighed. “Every time. Yanks.” And this thought seemed to exhaust him in a way he hadn’t expected. His arms flopped out on top of crossed legs. Buck sat as well and studied the two rows of brass buttons and the golden tassels on his costume. The jacket looked sort of like a dress, if a short one, and the pants ended at the knee, where the boots took over. There were a good many holes.

“So anyway…” Buck said, hoping this might get them talking. The man only nodded and looked up at the trees. They sat there in the heavy air for a few minutes before Buck got up and walked to the edge of the clearing, where she took her white ball out of her pocket and threw it as far as she could. Then she ran over, retrieved the ball out of the brush and threw it again. She jogged to meet it. The General sat watching while the ball traveled back and forth and Buck after it. After a particularly long throw, the General said, “Excellent throw.”

Buck said, “Thanks. You think it’s good enough for the majors?”

Then the General stood up and moved into position on the opposite side of the grassy space from the girl, who paused, confused for a moment, before realizing that she was being offered a second set of hands. Someone to catch and return.

“Could be, except you’re a girl.” Buck aimed and the General caught. Now it was only the ball that traveled back and forth and, outside of a few steps this way or that and the very rare dive, Buck stayed still.

“So what are you doing here?” Buck yelled.

“Throwing this ball!” the General yelled back.