Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

In the elevator, the dentist used a rubber gum pick and Booker stood still with his hands clasped behind his back. He wished he had some instrument to prove how orally hygienic he was.

Out of the corner of his eye, Booker noticed that there was something drawn on the velvety wall of the elevator. He turned to look and saw a picture of a penis and the word Shit . He did not want the good dentist to see something obscene—especially since it didn’t even make sense—on his nice elevator, so Booker quickly rubbed his hand over it back and forth to erase it. The dentist looked at him quizzically. “I wanted to check and see if the wall was as soft as it looked,” Booker explained quickly. The dentist squinted his eyes and continued picking his gums for a moment. Then he turned to his right and rubbed his hand over the wall.

“That is soft!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never touched it before. All these years and I’ve never touched it before!” He said it like he had just discovered that there was a bright blue lake right behind his house, hidden in the trees, full of trout, with a pier and a nice little red rowboat. He put his hand on Booker’s shoulder and smiled like he was staring out at this most beautiful vista. Like there were cranes in the sky above the turquoise water, and snowy peaks, and naked ladies lying on a cluster of warm boulders.

“Do you have one of these? A Gum Explorer?” the dentist asked.

“No, sir. But I’d like to get one,” Booker said. “I’d like to get one right away.”

MABEL HAD ONLY BEEN WORKING Canned Foods since mid-morning. She used to be in Produce, which she preferred. She would rather eat it and she would rather stock it.

It was during her break that things changed. “You look sexy when you eat that carrot,” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers III, Manager, said while they sat in folding chairs in the back of the supermarket amongst boxes of discontinueds and damageds. He leaned down and kissed her forehead with his warm, horrible lips.

Mabel kneed him in the groin and watched him curl up on the floor like a bug.

She got moved to Aisle Nine and told to keep her mouth shut.

Now she had to go through the things that had been long unsold and “refresh” them. The unpopular and dusty hearts of palm and cocktail franks. There were a lot more cans in that aisle than she would have guessed a few days ago, back when her primary concerns were weeding out soft limes and fluffing the Swiss chard.

“Does this suit you?” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers asked, looking at her with greasy eyes.

“Get out of my aisle,” she said.

In the afternoon, while she was doing the garbanzo beans, a woman came into Aisle Nine and started pulling cans off shelves at an unusual rate. She was wearing tight zebra-print pants and a black blazer with most of her breasts sticking out. She noticed Mabel looking at her and smiled a big, glowingly white smile. She put her hand out, offering a shake. “Jessie McFleece,” she said, “Can Opener Gourmet Cookbooks.” Before Mabel could even respond, Jessie McFleece went into what was obviously a well-rehearsed PR speech. “Truth is, I’m lazy,” she began. “I’m always cooking up a new way to save time.” She winked and said, “Pun intended! I’m going to try a lasagna tonight.” Mabel looked into the cart. Nothing but cans: mushroom soup, carrot spears, bright green peas, and stewed tomatoes. Tuna, meatballs, spinach.

“Yum,” Mabel said.

“You betcha. My kids L-O-V-E it. Husband doesn’t mind it so much either. We are just a regular old American dream.” They both looked at her chest.

“You know what? I need a better reason to live,” Mabel said. “If anyone asks, tell them I quit.”

In the parking lot, Mabel came upon a fellow employee. She untied her green apron with the words Saver! The name says it all! embroidered across the front. She stepped on it. “You can step on it too, Booker,” Mabel said to the boy. He was humming and shifting back and forth on his feet as if he was warming up for a waltz. “You look like you’re in a good mood.”

He leaned in close and whispered, “Actually, I started a new job today. As a dental assistant! I’m just here to get my last check.”

“Congratulations. We both have something to celebrate, because I just quit. Good luck at the new job.” She paused for a second. “I hope you like teeth.” He smiled and offered her a stick of gum. She put it in her mouth and saved it up in her cheek, feeling the sting of its spiciness against that soft flesh. Booker tore the plastic cover off a rubber toothpick and began to run it along his gum line. Mabel tried to smile. “I can see you’re committed,” she said.

“Look, I live across the street and I have a friendly cockatoo. Come over and eat dinner with us. I’m a harmless dental assistant.”

“Have I just ruined my life?” Mabel asked. “My father is going to be furious.”

“Are you allergic to anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then come on.”

BOOKER CYRANOWSKI had worked at the Saver for years, since the day he graduated from high school and took his old Cadillac, which was the nicest color green he’d ever seen on a piece of metal, down the very familiar farm road, out the highway and on up the coast.

“Bye, rabbits,” he yelled out the window to the rabbits. “Bye, tree,” he yelled to the scrubby little pine in the middle of the sage and matted grass. “Bye, birds!” That one he screamed at the top of his skinny little lungs so they would hear it. He turned up the radio and swooped his hand in the wind.

Behind him he knew his seven brothers and sisters and his mother and father still stood out front with their hands on their hips. They’d go back to the strawberry field later, they’d pick since it was the end of picking season. Booker’s Polish father, Bruno, and Mexican mother, Estrella, would take turns reading to the whole team, as they were called, stories of revolutionaries for whom the children had been named. Cesar, Rosa, Martin, Che, Coretta, Zapata, Booker, and the youngest, Andrej, named for Bruno’s grandfather who had, as family legend went, carried all four of his children on his back all during the First World War.

Booker imagined them together in the little living room, over a pot of beans and kale. He was the oldest and the first to leave. His parents were proud to see him head out, to fight the good fight. They were sorry, too, that he wouldn’t be working the earth with them. But in his mind he saw the symmetry: his family grew food to sell that was chewed by the teeth of the people, the very same teeth he would someday be cleaning. As he drove, he thought of all those teeth, healthy in their nests of pink gums.

Booker bought himself a toaster at the big department store, and a cockatoo at the small pet shop. He had always wanted a bird, and without his family he figured he would get lonely. In the pet store, he put his finger through the cage bars and asked her in a quiet and high-pitched voice if she liked to be read to. She was pink and he named her Sue, after no one in particular.

IN HIS APARTMENT, Mabel found that Booker had books. Most of them were about birds, lots about the Civil Rights Movement and the Mexican Revolution, and a few about the state of Arizona, where he confessed he’d never been. Booker pressed Play on his answering machine and a man’s voice came out.

“Dear Booker,” it said. Booker talked over it to tell Mabel that it was his dad.

“He always leaves messages like he’s writing a letter,” he explained. “He comes from another time and place.”

The message went on. “Dear Booker, it’s your dad and your mom and everyone, and we know it was your first day of work at your new job there, and we are very proud of you for going out and doing it, like you always wanted to. The team loves you. Yours, Dad.”