Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“Yes, I imagine there is,” your father had agreed.

“Of course, we’ll have to convince an ethics committee that this is for Poppy’s comfort less than our own.” I noticed that he was a part of We, part of the fight now, part of the family.

“Are they wrong?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The concerned.”

“No. There is a history of euthanasia and medical experimentation. They are not wrong.”

“But are they right then?”

He clicked his pen and stood. “I think we in this room know what’s good for Poppy,” he said, opening the door of his office and standing at it, his arm extended in a polite request for us to leave.

“I don’t think we know anything,” I said to a fat man stepping on the scale in the hallway.

“We don’t know shit,” he smiled, shaking his head.

I put the letter on Roger’s desk. You and I sat at the kitchen table and I tried to tell you again about what we are saving you from. The horrible cramps. The bleeding. You smiled up at the ceiling. I have stuck a constellation of glow stars above the table because we spend a lot of time here. “And you’d probably inherit my large breasts, which are not even close to what they’re cracked up to be.”

You shrieked and flapped your flightless arms.

On surgery day, Laura made pancakes before I went to work for the morning. I bathed Poppy like I do on weekends. I turned on the water and got in bed with her while it was running. “How’s my girl today?” She cooed and kicked her legs. “You’re going to do great, my darling. You are so good, so good, so good.” I nuzzled my face into her belly and she approximated a laugh. I think she has a sense of humor.

When the tub was full, I undressed her on her bed and carried her pale form into the bathroom. She loves the water. She goes completely limp. It is as if she is back in the womb, back to try another time, develop better, be born better. I held her head in one hand and washed her with the other. I saw the short hairs that had started us worrying. They could easily have been plucked out and we could have gone on pretending. I saw the tiniest rise in her nipples, standing up now slightly. “Do you wish you could outgrow us? Well, we won’t let you.” I washed her face with a soapy cloth, moving in careful strokes to avoid her eyes. She blinked and almost looked at me.

Laura had pancakes on the table when we got downstairs. Poppy cannot eat pancakes, as she cannot eat most things. We ate them in her honor though, assuming that an eight-year-old would like them if she could. I poured extra syrup on mine and thought every bite into her mouth.

I went through the tour route turning on the lights and the fog machines and the strobes. When I got to the pool room, I saw Madeleine sitting next to a lying-down man. I moved closer. A rough beard stuck up.

“What the fuck,” I whispered.

“His eyes were open but I closed them.”

I kneeled down next to them and looked at the man. His skin was blue and his beard was red. His hair poked out in greasy strips.

“Is this a dead person?” I asked, dumb.

“You think?” Madeleine said, mocking. She put his head in her lap. She touched his forehead with her fingertips.

“Don’t do that,” I said, reaching out to stop her. She pushed my hands away.

“I think his name is Steven. He doesn’t like it though and always wished his name was Rupert. His mother was a seamstress and his father died when he was very young.” She kept smoothing her hands over his face.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Of course not. You can be a real jerk. I am telling a story to this guy.” Just then, my boss came into the room, laughing.

“You like him?” He smiled. “I had him made. We can rig it so the body floats up in the pool or something. My first idea was to get real bodies in here and try to haunt the place, but the lawyers are assholes.”

“You made him?”

“I had him made. He’s good, right?” I felt stupid for thinking he was real, stupid for being caught at it.

“This is a ghost tour, not a morgue tour.”

“Can I do my job?” Peterson told me. “Can I do that? Your job is to make up a good story about the things I put in front of you. I’d like to introduce you to George, the new fake dead guy. Go find him a nice suit and a pocket watch and give him a life story. Maybe he ended it himself? Maybe his wife held him under so she could run off with some gentleman with not one, but two yachts?”

I stood there quiet.

“You were really scared! Ha! This is going to be a real moneymaker.” He walked back out again, clicking his pen and humming the theme to an old TV show.

“This doesn’t scare you?” I asked Madeleine.

“He’s not real. He’s a doll.”

I watched her talk. I watched her move her fully functioning hands and adjust her legs and push the hair out of her face.

“What the hell is it like to be a little girl?” I asked her.

“I don’t have a lot to compare it to.”

“I will give you ten dollars to describe being an eight-year-old.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Tell me every single thing,” I said, holding a bill out to her.

Dear Poppy,

At the hospital you lay across our laps. You were longer than the bed we made together. Your feet hung. You looked up at my face, reached to it, scratched the bottom of my chin like I was a cat. I purred for you. Roger was reading a magazine with a picture of an actress I’ve never heard of on the cover. I doubt he had heard of her either. Roger was hunched over to be closer to her, his coat falling off his shoulder and his scarf on the floor. You and I were neighboring planets.

I had my hand on your belly where your womb will not be. You wriggled like a snake. I had this thought: You and I leave, your whole body in my arms. Your father does not notice us go and your stroller stays there too, its various straps hanging toward the floor. We get into the car and drive away. We get pregnant together. Not by men but by sperm. We grow matching stomachs, globes, entire earths of our own. We measure them against each other. We eat the whole aisle of candy and watch movies in bed. Everyone leaves us alone.

When the babies are born, they join us in our bed. We nurse them together. We hold hands under the covers. The babies learn words. They put the fleshy bundles of their feet on the ground and move over it. They go between us: you on the bed to me on the chair; you on the bed to me standing in the lit doorway; you on the bed to me at the top of the stairs. I feed all three of you with blended foods carried to your mouths on rubber-coated spoons. It is the talking I look forward to most. If you had a child and she could speak to me, then I would be almost speaking to you. If she came from your body, I could ask her, at least, what it was like in there. The slip and bubble, the churning.

We took you into the surgery room and kissed you and kissed you and kissed you before going back to our waiting chairs. In the doorway I turned back and said, “Could we see the breast buds? When you take them out?”

“They look like almonds,” the surgeon answered.

“But they aren’t almonds. You don’t have to show me the uterus. I would please like to see them. Please.” He looked at me and shook his head in disbelief.

“Margie will bring them out.”

Laura and I crossed half the street to the grass-fuzzy median in front of the hospital. We lay next to each other, the lanes on either side of us quiet, trickling riverbeds.

“Being a kid is OK,” I said. “She avoids a lot.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be her mother.”

“Is this a new sweater? It looks nice on you.”

“I sort of wish the hormones could shrink her, not just stop her here. I wish she could get so she could fit in my hand. Or smaller.”