Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“Kerralyn!” Junior yelled, walking to the closed bathroom door. “Kerralyn!” He heard drops of water fall off a lifted leg back into the tub.

“What the hell do you want?” she asked from inside.

“Do you think Mom can see us all the time?”

“How the fuck should I know?!”

“But do you think so?”

“Do you mean like, can Mom see my naked-ass body right now from heaven or something?”

“Yeah, do you think she can?”

“Maybe. But I would rather not think about that. It’s not my damn fault if she looks.”

Junior considered this. “Can I come in?” He heard the metal slide of the shower curtain and then he opened the door and sat down on the closed toilet and said to his sister, hidden behind the undersea-themed plastic, “OK, then, how would you describe a boob?”

“One boob?”

“Boobs, however many.”

Kerralyn waited a second, then said, “Like a round globe of milk.”

Junior nodded. “What’s holding the milk in?”

“Who cares? You asked me to describe a boob and I did.”

“What’s the nipple then?”

“A fucking huge chocolate chip. I don’t know.”

“Fine. What else. Tell me about your stomach,” Junior said. “What’s it like?”

“It’s like a feast,” Kerralyn replied, “of smooth whipped cream.”

Leonard Senior slammed the front door behind him. “It’s a verifiable blizzard out there!” he yelled up the stairs. “It’s three days to Christmas and the snow won’t stop coming down!” His laughter rose up to them, through the floorboards and the carpet, where Junior was clothed and Kerralyn was not, their bodies, whatever they were like, hidden from all mortal eyes.

When Leonard Senior was younger, not yet a Senior, just a Leonard, not even young anymore really, after what could not have been described as a prime was over, he met a woman. She was younger than he but also not young. He met her at an all-night diner, where he bought her a piece of strawberry pie and a plate of onion rings.

He said: “You look lonely like how I feel.”

She said: “I have no idea how you feel.”

But she let him sit and watch her eat. Leonard revealed details of his loneliness—the proximity of television to bed, the white space of the refrigerator, the phone sitting quietly by the front door, and the light on the answering machine holding steady, never blinking. The woman did not look at him when he talked but moved the heavy strawberries around on her plate, mixed them with the whipped cream to make pink slop, which she placed carefully on her tongue with the tip of her first finger.

“You know where I want to go?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, “Jamaica.” She began to sway as if to slow reggae music. “I think I would like to live there for the rest of my life.”

“What would you do for money?” he wanted to know.

“Fuck it, whatever. Sell shell necklaces. I’d be good at that—I like to make things.” Leonard pictured her sitting on a white beach with coconut palms reaching high above her head and water playing at her toes. He said, “That sounds good.”

“I hear you don’t even need a passport to go there. Just a bikini and some damn flip-flops.”

“And some sunscreen,” he added. “And I bet they have bad mosquitoes.”

“Some fantasy you’ve got.”

Leonard Senior took the woman home with him. She got into his car and after that she got into his bed. He turned the television on and they made love to The Golden Girls . Love was not precisely what they made, but they did make something. A thing that later, Leonard Senior, with his eyes red and his hand squeezing her hand, the two of them sitting back in that diner, this time with only coffees for a meeting she had called, first begged and then paid her to keep. “I will give you one thousand dollars, I will give you one thousand two hundred dollars, I will give you fifteen hundred dollars.” She sat there, eyes down, looking into her cup while the money in her invisible bank account went up and up.

“Will you give me fifteen hundred dollars, plus all medical expenses, plus a ticket to Jamaica?” she finally said.

“Yes, yes, I will do that.”

“OK. But I want nothing to do with this little sucker,” she said, holding thumb and forefinger in the measurement of one inch. Leonard did not know if this signified the size of the baby or the size of her love for it. He got the idea though, and he sat back with his feet crossed at the ankle and smiled up at the stained ceiling. He ordered up two pieces of strawberry pie when the waitress came.

He did not know yet that there would be two babies instead of one. That the boy would be named for him, the girl named for a woman who did not exist. He did not know yet the lie he would make up to explain the absence of a mother. He did not know yet about the trip he would make to the crematorium, where he would manage to purchase an urn, empty, and fill it with the ashes from his own fireplace, or how he would place it on the mantel of that same fireplace with a story about a beautiful wedding on the beach and another about a car accident.

KERRALYN SAT ON THE CURB waiting for Reggie Lazzarino, Leonard Senior stood at his post and Leonard Junior poured a tall glass of milk and sat down by the telephone upstairs. He watched his sister and his father not talk. He watched his father point at the light display and his sister not look where he pointed. Then he watched a car pull up and Kerralyn get into it and close the door. He watched his father watch her do this. He watched his father send them off in a single flurry of snow, hardly enough to celebrate by.

Junior thought about Bess in her apartment with her roommates watching television. In his picture they were eating baked potatoes, a thing that seemed adult and womanish to him. The potatoes would have a little butter and some broccoli florets and a single slice of white, never orange, cheese melted on top. Junior was nearly certain of this. He picked up and held the body-warmed phone in his hand until it began its noisy reminder that no one was on the other end.

In the street his father got lucky. A large group gathered around him. The snow machine was in the crook of the roof, just outside where Junior sat. When the button was pushed, his entire view was snowed out for a few seconds and he couldn’t see the reactions of the group until the storm had fallen below his line of sight.

Leonard Senior waved up at his son, a strong salute. The room was quiet. The phone did not ring and later it did not ring some more. Junior gave himself a second pedicure and manicure and finished his milk. He plucked the hairs that bridged the distance between his eyebrows with his sister’s tweezers like she had shown him. In a sudden moment of bravery, he picked up the phone again.

Bess said, “What type of shit was that?”

“I want to tell you about your boobies and your stomach.”

“I’m on the other line, Leonard. It’s going to be a long call.”

He started to say, “I’d like to take you to every place I’ve ever been,” but somewhere in the middle, she was gone, replaced by the phone’s over and over cry that its job was over, it had endured his wet breath and stupid words and wanted to be replaced now in its blue cradle.

Junior wrapped his arms around his own chest like they were someone else’s arms. He rubbed his hands on his back like they were someone else’s hands on his back. He imagined that his fingers were tipped with painted nails and that they were slender and long and so soft he would have to comment on it to the owner. “Your hands are so soft,” he would have to say, because it would be true, and Junior believed in telling the truth. In this room though, there was only him, his upper body twisted up into a neat knot.