Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

When he comes to the end of the story, one he has told more than once to everyone he has ever met, he manually straightens the jointed wooden fingers and brushes them against each of his secretary’s right cheeks. “The hand burned,” he muses, “but the arm resisted. The arm did not even singe.”

FEW OF PRINCIPAL KEVIN’S STUDENTS, his daughter Genevieve among them, have any love-arm development. The girls check constantly in the bathroom between classes, inviting each other to inspect the soft skin of their side-body for bumps. They say they are falling in love, not with the specifics of one boy, but with the idea that such a thing is possible—that they belong to a species built to snap together in everlasting pairs. They feel themselves falling in love with the entirety of the opposite gender, with their own blooming selves, but their bodies do nothing to corroborate. Their skeletons are stubborn and unchanged.

For the boys, any new protrusions would be bad for their social standing. Unless they are extremely religious and plan on a just-legal wedding, an unmoved form is an asset. Certain other anatomical parts have made some very favorable changes, but love can’t break the seal. After high school this changes. Older brothers are proud of their arms. They sit on thrift store couches, where girlfriends rub lotion onto the new branches and kiss them and want to make love so often because there is proof that what they have is real, that something has changed because of it. They lie close in a twin bed afterward and put their extra arms side by side. They let the unfinished appendages warm each other up just by pressing.

DURING AFTER-SCHOOL DETENTION, Miss C lectures about Amelia Earhart because she wants to and the audience can’t go anywhere. She zooms herself around the room like an airplane making swooping turns between desks. She is a two-armer, but that’s not the whole story. From the waist up, she is covered in hands. Dozens. Under the cover of clothing, their fingers move and stretch and wriggle. Sixteen sixteen-year-olds keep out of her way until she drops suddenly and kneels under a desk. “Blammo,” she says in a loud whisper. “I’m gone, disappeared, just like that.” She does not move for a long moment. Chairs squeak. Students hiss. Miss C remains disappeared at a pair of sneakered feet. The boy reaches down like it is an accident and touches her head. He can feel her skybound heat.

When she stands up, she is rippling, the fingers twitter beneath her blouse. After the bell, in the hall, the boy sticks his chest out and imitates with his two original hands. “Oh, Amelia Earhart, I want to jump your bones,” he squawks.

Miss C sticks her head out the door. “You’ve got a poker face now,” she tells him, “but your body will give you away soon enough.”

THE HIGH SCHOOL BOYS keep rubber gloves in their wallets and inflate them when they want to try to win a girl over. They tuck them under their shirts and let the bulging, breath-warm air-fingers reach out at their dates, indicating what could be.

Of course, the girls know the hands are stand-ins. But when the boys say , I could really develop feelings , and they have the visual aid, and when the music pumping out of the speakers has someone singing a harmony and someone singing a melody, the drapery of their clothing is easily removed, and their desperately hopeful limbs cross and twist and hold.

EVEN PRINCIPAL KEVIN’S HOME MAIL comes addressed to Principal Kevin. On this Friday, while he waits for his wife to come home and remove his arm so that he can enjoy the evening unencumbered, he spreads the envelopes out on the table until the whole surface is covered with his name. They ask, Please, if you could spare some money for the children . Say, Do you have any idea what kind of excellent interest rate you deserve? They report the therms used to keep the house warm, the wife’s desires made known to him by her spending on the platinum credit card. A note from his daughter: Dad, I love you and I’m at Pheenie’s for the night.—Genevieve . He is alone with the facts of his existence and it makes him tired. Just looking at the debts and balances.

His wife comes in from her exercise class and she finds him here, wilted. He looks at her and picks the prosthetic up with his good left hand like a bone. Look what I found, take this from me, I have been waiting.

“You could have done it yourself,” she says.

“It’s yours. I want you to do it.”

“We have the PTA meeting tonight,” she reminds him, kissing the arm as if it were real. As if it does not whisper to her that her eyes to him are tiny emptiness and her hair a strangle of ropes and her heart a flicked, rolling marble.

“Will you go in my place? Tell them it’s a headache. I just want a nap and a break.” She kneels on the floor in front of him and takes his shirt off, then twists the arm to the left. The elbow bends as she unscrews, so the arm faces in all the wrong directions.

She puts the arm down on a chair, brushing the hair so it faces in one direction like windblown wheat. She kisses his cheek and returns him to his kingdom of bills. She comes back a moment later with a cloth to wipe clean the metal threads of the attachment, both innie and outtie. They get sweat-damp throughout the day. A shimmer of salt crusts the edges. She dries. She oils and dries again.

She does not take care of his fake love-arm with her real one. She lets that sit against her side, the fingers spread out against her, quiet and still. It is her born-on hands she tends to him with, just as he tends to her with his.

PRINCIPAL KEVIN’S ARM needs caring for like leather does. Cleaning and mink oil. While he sits with his mail, his wife takes it with her into the bathtub and lets it float there while she washes herself, her triangles and spheres and nubs, and her own third arm, this one very real. She cleans both authentic and created with extra-gentle baby shampoo. The wooden hand is heavily waxed, and water beads, then scrambles off, as if afraid. She closes her eyes and leans back against her twisted-up hair, the prosthetic floating limp on the surface of the water, a ship stuck in a tiny, unleavable sea.

“Good bath?” he asks, naked, from the bed when she comes out. The sun shoots off the metal hole in his chest and blinds her. She tightens her robe and turns away, places his arm on a stand by his dresser, where it stretches straight, pointing out the window at the bug-buzzing evening.

“You know you are my peach,” he says to her. “Come and sit.” He strokes what she has grown for him. It is elbow length but unjointed and has a hand, always carefully manicured. He pushes the cuticles back. “My love is bigger than any limb,” he tells her.

“What is mine then?”

THE BOYS LIKE TO WATCH Miss C walk down the hall, all those hands and fingers moving together under her clothes, beckoning. This evening, when she makes a trip back and forth to her car, the football team turns from the field where the lowering winter sun skates the grass pink. They watch her search in her bag for keys, which come out glinting. Her hair picks up the light the usual way, but it is her body that receives it in waves, like she is the surface of the ocean and all the water inside is angling for a peek at the great open space of the sky.

Miss C is really named Claribel. She goes into her office alone with the blinds down, door locked, grading papers shirtless before the PTA gets started. Her hands hold things for her: red, blue, green pens. Paper clips and sticky notes. Her breasts are surrounded by a ring of four hands each and look like lakes in a forest, calm, quiet, protected. While she scratches at the paper, the hands clean each other’s nails. They hook fingers.