Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“It’s a girl, Pops,” Annie said, her eyes sharp.

“Even worse,” he growled as he marched out to his bike, revving it outside the tiny hospital so that it made the baby’s head vibrate ever so slightly on her mother’s chest.

The dollar bill hadn’t floated more than three inches from the place Pops had stood, and it stayed there for exactly one hour while Pops sat on the side of the road throwing stones at the carcass of a smashed cat. He hadn’t expected the baby to look so vulnerable and for Annie to look so beautiful holding it. Truth be told, he hadn’t even gotten around to thinking it might be a real actual living thing, since he’d been busy all nine months stewing about the damper it would put on his excursions. Not that there were really so many excursions anymore. The fact was that Pops had been staying with Annie for months anyway and had tried only once to pull another girl’s skirt up, and up it went, but he, sadly, could not get himself to do the same, so he dropped the girl off at home, having apologized and bought her an ice-cream cone.

But he didn’t go back. He rode on, left his things in the drawer, left the baby with milk passing into her open mouth while her mother dozed. The doctor came and after checking some boxes on a chart, he noticed and took the dollar bill on the floor, stuffed it into his breast pocket, where it traveled all day until it was taken out in the cafeteria in exchange for a bag of unsalted peanuts.

Annie called Buck “Buck” as if it were an apology and a tribute to Pops, as if it were the least she could do. But she never told her daughter the truth of her name. In the family legend, Pops had been a fan of cowboys and had gone off to find a ranch for his own lovely daughter to raise horses on, her hair shining in the dry, red sunset.

GRANDMA PETE was in the kitchen playing solitaire with the picture of Grandpa Pete propped on the chair next to her. “Hi, Petes,” Buck managed. Her body was buzzing like it was full of a new substance: not blood anymore but something rattling and dry.

“All right, line up,” Mother Mom commanded, and handed out tools. She gave Buck her mallet and Grandma Pete her cleaver, got herself a wastebasket and put a large cutting board in front of each of them. In the center of the table, she put down a platter and a bowl of marinade. Theirs was a well-practiced assembly line.

Buck reached her hand into the cage, where it was scratched and pecked until she caught a bird, and then held it on her cutting board and knocked it on the head with the mallet. There was a delicate crack like a blown eggshell. She passed it on to Grandma Pete, who took its head off and gutted it, her hands slick with red and the bowl in front of her a squirm of guts. Mother Mom plucked it naked, while her own blood-sticky fingers became covered in feathers.

“Do you ever see Grandfather Pete?” Buck asked her grandmother.

“What’s not to see, dear?”

Mother Mom started humming against the noise of wings constantly crashing against the cage bars, striking them so they sang like guitar strings.

As they passed their work around, the women’s hands met for split seconds, the skin at varying levels of elasticity, varying levels of heat. Their fingers were slippery and eager to touch one another. Slowly the room quieted down until there were no more screeching birds in the cage and the plate in the center of the table was a hill of slumped pink bodies soaking in butter and homemade wine.

BEFORE THE LONG RITUAL of sucking tiny morsels of meat off needle-thin bones began, and while the smells of cooking rose out of the oven, the most delicate underfeathers, having escaped the broom, were airborne again and again with even the smallest human movements.

The women went outside, where Mother Mom and Grandma Pete cheered for Buck, who threw the beaked heads, pitch by pitch by pitch, into the usual place.

“That must have been ninety miles an hour, that one,” Mother Mom hollered, and Grandma Pete said better than that. The woods offered up the many-legged creatures from deep within the bramblebush to catch everything Buck threw. Life crawled over other life, devoured it, opened itself up to whatever it had been given. The whole world squirmed with hunger and desire, in the thick and thin places, in the trees and in the clearings.

MABEL LADY FINCH lived with her dad in a one-bedroom apartment (the living room was hers) in a complex with a pool and weight room that neither of them had ever used. She could have afforded to move out, but she didn’t want to leave her dad alone. He wasn’t really completely alone—he had a girlfriend who, Mabel expected, would hang around for the usual month of romancing, then she’d split just like the others. It was like Charlie, which was what Mabel called him, had been given the first volume of a two-volume set on love. At this particular moment, he was still in the first course of a relationship with a woman named June August.

“They figured, no reason you can’t have two months in your name. No law against that!” she explained, while Mabel did their spaghetti dishes. She tossed her stringy blond hair. Charlie put his hand over her knee in a cup, carefully, like she was a firefly he did not want to damage. Mabel left the kitchen and sat down on her pullout that was not pulled out and read some of her City College psychology textbook, which surprisingly had a picture of a skier on the cover.

Mabel looked at the picture of Lady holding her when she was just born, the picture her father had asked her to keep to herself since it made him too sad to see his lady love holding, tenderly, the cause of her death in her arms. June and Charlie, in his bedroom, made very little sound. So little that Mabel knew exactly what they were doing.

Later, in the late dark with her one little lamp on and the room dressed as a sleeping place, Mabel heard her father knock on the wall dividing them.

“Baby?” he loud-whispered. She knocked back, tap, tippety tap.

“Hi,” she said.

“She’s no good, is she? June August?”

“She’s fine,” Mabel returned.

“Should I tell you about your mother?” The two of them did not read books together; Charlie did not sing. What he did, had always done, was tell Mabel stories about Lady.

“You know the one about when she adopted the puppy without consulting with me?”

“I know that one.”

“What about when we tried to go camping and ended up stranded in the snow with nothing but a butane stove to keep warm?”

“I want to know the one about when she learned she was going to die.”

“What about the one where the old woman mistook her for Audrey Hepburn?”

“That’s not the one I want to hear.”

“She didn’t want to leave us.”

“Do you think about her when you’re with June August?”

“I think about her when I’m with everyone.”

Mabel waited for more. There was just quiet and house noises though, the refrigerator keeping cold, the very low buzz of the lightbulb that you really had to want to hear.

THE DENTIST in whose office Booker Cyranowski was a new hygienist was so nice and his teeth were so perfectly white there was no way not to trust him. He even bought Booker a ham-and-cheese croissant on this, his first day, which was delicious.

They talked about the business. The dentist gave Booker some tips on how to keep nervous people from biting. He told a few dentist jokes that would otherwise probably not have been funny, but in this case Booker laughed so hard a little bit of ham went flying out of his mouth and landed right on the dentist’s collar. The dentist just brushed it off with a napkin, patted Booker, whose eyes were huge and terrified, on the hand and said, “Son, I’d rather have that on my shirt than stuck in your teeth.” The way he said it made Booker want to curl up in the crook of the dentist’s armpit and fall asleep. He thought of drifting off to the sound of the dentist flossing carefully in the dark. The squeak of the string on his teeth.