Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“No! Here! What are you doing here?” Buck called.

“Being dead!” the General returned, along with the ball that Buck held on to while deciding whether to peel out and run for home or act natural. She was not a fast runner.

“Oh!” she tried out.

“I don’t happen to be alive anymore!” the General explained.

“I see!” Buck yelled back, not really assured. They pitched and caught, pitched and caught, moving together slowly until they were in better talking distance. “Are you going to explain yourself?”

“When I was first killed,” he explained, “I felt very dead. Blank. I could feel that my heart was still and that my spine was shut down. All around me there were other bodies, some in blue and some in gray, but all of them dead too. All of them blank and still. At one point, I stood up before I even realized it didn’t make sense for me to try something like that, and, looking down at my bug-sucked body, I wanted to but could not throw up.”

“Are you a ghost?” Buck asked.

“I’m a man who died. Whatever else that makes me, I don’t know.”

“All right, go on.”

“I kicked and identified my men. Some of them had their arms out as if trying to fly, some faces down, noses smashed into the dirt, some faces up, eyes open, wind scavenging them. Oxygenating. Decomposing.” The General looked at Buck’s face and changed the subject. “I’m sorry. You know much about the game of baseball?” he asked.

“I know my favorite pitcher is Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown because he lost one and a half fingers to a corn shredder.”

“I saw him play a game, as a matter of fact. Chicago, 1908, against the New York Giants. They couldn’t hardly get a hit.”

“You saw him pitch a baseball game in 1908?” Buck asked.

“I have had to keep myself busy. I tried going home to my wife when I was first dead. She couldn’t see me. I sat at our kitchen table and watched her make a pot of soup. I watched her cut up a turnip and three potatoes. I watched her eat the soup alone while I was right next to her.” The General stopped talking and let his head fall back. The trees were a frame for a flat circle of sky whose blue was sharp. “I left. I left before she even knew I was dead.”

“But I can see you.”

“Over time I learned how to toughen up my edges. By then, my Rosie was gone and there wasn’t a home for me to be seen in,” the General explained. “My wife was going to mourn me whether I was in her bed or not, and I couldn’t stand to see it happen. I hoped Rosie and I would get to be dead together someday, and while I was waiting, I went for a walk. For a while it was a fresh sense of freedom every day. I didn’t need to eat or sleep and I didn’t get tired. I went to some ballparks and watched the game of baseball grow up. It was just coming around when I was alive. I found myself some nice spots by the ocean, which I had never seen before, and pretty much just looked out at it.”

“You got bored and lonely,” Buck said.

“I cannot tell you how bored I got. I have been dead for one hundred twenty-two years. My wife never showed up on the other side.” They sat there in silence while Buck tried to imagine that length of time. She was already bored and lonely and she wasn’t even thirteen yet. She stared into the woods, where the trees had their hands up to the sun, their tall noses in as much air as they could reach.

“You know what? No one in my family goes by their real name,” Buck said, a cheerful offering.

“Is that a fact?” The General smiled, grateful.

“That is.”

“If you tell me the story, I’ll keep throwing this ball with you,” he said.

“Better still, we can trade, one of mine for one of yours.” Buck began to tell him the story exactly as it had been told to her. A family history so well memorized she didn’t pause once.

“POPS, THAT’S MY DAD, who was previously known as Dale, took to the road when he was sixteen on his motorcycle back in the Seventies, not because he was a hippie but because he had gotten wind of the whole free-love aspect and decided he was through hiding his naked magazines in three nested shoe boxes otherwise full of insect, rock and lost-tooth collections. His mother was a cleaner and a duster and he counted himself lucky that she hadn’t stumbled on them yet. The motorcycle had been his own father’s before his own father wasn’t able to ride one anymore due to the loss of his legs in a war that was minor on the books.

“Pops had given himself that name the very minute he got out of his parents’ driveway on his bike. He thought it would make him sound older and like more of an established lover.

“He never made it all the way to San Francisco, but he did talk a lot of long-haired girls out of their clothes, sometimes more than one at a time, and as far as he was concerned, that was all the success a man ever needed. He could conjure up every single one of those girls: name, date and length of leg, perfectly, without missing one. The only thing he added later was a mustache for himself, a nice thick one, when in fact at sixteen he had been little able to get three or four hairs to jut out at the same time from his soft upper lip.”

“This is an awfully racy story for a kid,” the General said.

“There is only one version of this story and I’m telling it to you.”

“Is that the end?”

“That’s the first part. Your turn,” Buck said.

“I thought I might like to be a schoolteacher,” the General started. He said he figured he liked children and he had some time but the whole thing fell through when he needed to produce a valid identity.

“I had no birth certificate or Social Security card or address. I went to the old folks’ home instead, where people were much less concerned with safety. I befriended a few old people who needed someone to reach or water or sort for them, and what I got was company. It was good company too, because the old people had been around for a lot of the time I had. I pretended my knowledge of wars and economic highs and lows was from a healthy appetite for books. I kept them up late. We sat around Formica tables.

“Money came up all the time. What things were worth back then and how much you pay now. A hammer, a newspaper, a case of beer. We also talked about dying, which I had done but they hadn’t yet. I couldn’t warn them about it, though. They’d talk about being afraid to go or who had recently made the move. There was always somebody. I tried to be helpful, saying things like ‘There’s much more ahead,’ but really this thought made me very sad. I would have liked to tell them that they were almost finished.”

Buck spat on the ball and threw it high and hard, but the General was fast and caught it.

“The minute they removed the bodies,” the General remembered, “the manager came and took the plants. She kept the good ones for herself. Her office was a jungle of dead people’s greenery. They wound their leaves around her desk legs and up and out the window. The walls were hardly even visible through the foliage. The rest of the plants, the ones she didn’t want, she lined up outside the dining room. Those were usually the first sign the old people got that someone among them was gone. They guessed by the plant who it might be, tried to remember each other’s apartments: who had a ficus in the corner, who a plot of sweet peas in that window box painted with dancing elephants.”

The General paused.

“We only have what’s growing outside,” Buck said. “Nothing alive in the house but us girls.” She dove for a ground ball.

“Turns out you’ve got hands like magnets,” the General said, at which Buck grinned. It’s possible to pitch without a catcher but you can’t do the opposite, so Buck hadn’t known she was playing the wrong position all along. Here she was jumping and sliding, getting the ball every time.