Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“Like a doll.”

“No chairs, no tubes. Just the two of us.”

“The three of us?”

“OK.”

She sat up and her spine was a mountain range in her shirt.

“That’s what happens when someone dies,” I said. “That’s when you get to have them everywhere.” She nodded, tipped her head to rest on one shoulder.

“There’s a lot to look forward to,” she said, and began to lie down.

“Wait,” I told her, “your hair is full of leaves.”

I sat up and started to pull the dry brown pieces out one at a time. They fell apart in my fingers.

Dear Poppy,

We held hands and turned the pages of magazines. We said little. She’s going to do great and She’s so brave and I love you. I drank more coffee than I should have. It felt like something was about to change, but it wasn’t. That was the whole point. We were sending you in there so that nothing would ever change. Your brain has elected to stop where it is, and now your body will be eight years old until one day when you die. Will you get old? Will your hair turn lighter? Will your skin fall wrinkled over your little-girl body?

There was an old man in the waiting room with a cane and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that he’d probably had since 1950. He was reading the newspaper and I could see, even from across the room, the sprigs of hair growing out of his ears. I liked him for this. He seemed to be turning into earth, growing grass. I wondered who he was there for. No one joined him all morning and he did not fidget. At around 11:30 a nurse came out and told him, “Your wife did perfectly.” He carefully folded the paper up, smoothing it out, and said, “Of course she did.”

Another nurse came out holding a small dish with two bloody little beans on it. “These are the breast buds,” she told us, sounding bored. “As promised.” Before she could stop me, I picked one up and put it in my mouth. “Holy shit,” the nurse said, “what the fuck are you doing?” Roger was completely silent. He looked at me, huge eyed and flat faced. “Lady!” the nurse said. “You have to spit that out! That’s biohazard! That’s not something you can eat!”

I felt the thing in my mouth. It was perfectly smooth. It slipped over the skin of my cheek and my tongue. I could feel the threads of veins.

“Ma’am. Lady. You have to spit that out immediately.” She turned and looked around for someone who could help her. The desk was nurseless. No blue-scrubbed person in sight.

Roger put his hand on my back. “Maybe you should spit it out, Laura.”

“Too late. I swallowed it.”

“Holy shit!” the nurse says, “Jesus. Lady.”

But, Poppy, as the nurse was turning, spinning on her heels, looking for a kind of help she had never needed before, your father plucked the other bud out of the dish and held it in his hand. He looked at me and his lips spread out in a smile. The nurse looked into the glass dish smeared with a little pink blood. She shook her head and then suddenly she went quiet. She stopped her search and whispered to us, “You all are fucking nuts. Please don’t tell anyone this happened.” And off she went with her empty dish.

We ran outside holding hands. I spit the breast bud out into my palm.

“I thought you swallowed it,” he said.

I shook my head. “I had to lie so she’d let me go. Come on.” In the median I knelt down and began to dig a hole. Your father understood right away and helped, his left hand a protective fist, his right a shovel. In a few minutes, we had come to darker soil and we both put the seeds of you inside, covered them in earth. “To growing,” I said. “Whatever that might mean.” We sat down and held hands. We did not look at each other, but we squeezed our fingers tight together. Both of our cheeks were streaked from crying.

Inside, the doctors sewed the openings up with thread, your chest safely sealed in immaturity. The two of us held on to each other while, in the darkness of the earth, your unbloomed seeds were at rest.

HAZEL WHITING had finished her freshman year at Mountain Hills High, where there were a lot of ponytails and a lot of clanging metal lockers with pictures of hotties taped inside. She had some friends there but not too many and would usually rather be by herself than discussing other people’s haircuts or dreamed-of love lives. The truth of those love lives—a glance in the dingy hallway from a crushable boy, a dark tangled session on an out-of-town parent’s couch—was like a tiny, yellowed lost tooth, hidden under a pillow, which the high-schoolers believed, prayed, would be soon replaced by gorgeous, naked, adoring treasure.

Hazel, of course, wanted love some day too, and she did admit to feeling a whir in her chest when she thought about a bed shared with a boy—or a man, by then. Still, when she looked at Bobbie Cauligan’s gelled-back hair and calculated leather jackets, or the white, always-new sneakers and tennis-club polos strutted by Archer Tate, or the billowing, too-big flannel shirts of the shy boys like Russel Fieldberg-Morris and Duncan Story as they tried to dart from the safety of one classroom to another, Hazel did not see the possibility of love. Will these people look more like humans when they are grown? she thought. Now they looked to Hazel like children, like beasts, like helpless, hairless baby rats. Do I look like that to them too? she wondered. Whatever it was, high school was a soggy thing, being a teenager was a soggy thing, and Hazel had decided early on in each of these endeavors that she would survive by not becoming invested.

Hazel chose not to follow the troupes of other girls toward endless slumber parties and pictures of models torn from magazines stuck to mirrors in order that they would be reminded every morning, while popping a pimple or switching the part in their hair, of the distance between beauty and their own unfinished faces. Instead, Hazel wanted to walk and observe the day as it revealed itself unspectacularly around her. She wanted the feeling that her life was a small thread in the huge tangle of the world and that nothing she did one way or another mattered all that much.

The last week of May, while her mother held meetings about the potholes and the winter food-drive, Hazel walked all over town, street by street. She upped one block and downed the next while ladies watered their white roses and the few men home during the day—retired or sick or broke—sat in the window reading the paper. When Hazel returned for a sandwich in the middle of the day, she found her mother in their newly renovated blue and yellow kitchen, bent over the construction of a low-this high-that salad, trying feverishly to grate an almond. “Why are you doing that?” Hazel asked.

“The body has an easier time breaking down foods that aren’t whole,” her mother answered, scraping the single nut.

“What’s the point of breaking something if it isn’t whole?” Hazel asked. Her mother looked up at her and narrowed her eyes in a comic-book glare.

“You are such a teenager,” she said. “I felt done with this stage after your sisters went through it, and that was ages ago. Now I’m right back where I started. Couldn’t you just skip ahead?”

“Gladly.”

While she kicked a rock down the oak-lined streets, Hazel considered her mother’s wish. Perhaps, if she opened her arms to whatever came, stopped turning it all away, she might arrive at adulthood earlier. Adulthood was a place Hazel always pictured as a small apartment kitchen far away from anyone to whom she was related, furnished with upturned milk crates and exactly one full place setting.