A Guide to Being Born: Stories (9 page)

When Annie and Ben went to the video store or the bank together, people placed their hands on Annie’s stomach whether they knew her or not and asked the same set of questions: “When are you due? Do you know the sex? Any names picked out?” She answered politely while her husband stood by, ignored completely. Once, after an old lady had gotten her questions answered, Ben patted the protrusion and said, “Good sperm I’ve got. Good strong sperm, swam right up there and tunneled into that egg. Y chromosomes all over the place.”

The next morning Ben went to the toy store. He picked out a soft doll for his daughter, one wearing a flowered dress with her string hair in two braids. At the register he said, “I’ll also take one scoop of those tiny babies.”

“You want the white ones or the black ones?” the woman asked.

“Well, maybe half a scoop of each.”

The woman pushed her silver shovel into a basket and drew out a pile of bright pink bodies, and then into another basket, this time culling brown bodies. She poured them into a paper bag, tied it up with a twisty and handed it to him. Sitting in the car with the windows up, he took his shirt off and dropped babies into every drawer of his chest.

“Will you all need names?” he asked. “Each and every one?” He looked at the plastic bodies, who did not answer him. “Let’s take it slow,” Ben suggested. He decided to name one baby Archie after his first dog and placed Archie in Aaron’s drawer, introducing them. To the rest he said, “Everyone can have a name who wants one. Just hang in while I think of some.”

Even Annie adapted to the new feature. On their way to a party, she told him, “I’d rather not take a purse—could you carry my lipstick?”

Ben started to put the silver tube in his pants pocket, but she shook her head. “I’m not good enough to get inside?” she asked.

“I don’t like to think of them as a convenience,” he mumbled.

“Ben,” she said, “I’m carrying our baby around for nine months.”

He felt the weight of the tube in the drawer all evening, like a bullet lodged there. They chatted with separate islands of people about politics and giving birth and new restaurants. Ben watched his wife across the room, resting her hand on her stuck-out body, laughing. He watched her make her way to the dessert table and the drink table. She was lovely, drifting like a boat around the bay of this room. He would happily have blown into her sails, but they billowed already. When she wanted to touch up her lips though, she took Ben by the hand and slipped him into the bathroom. She unbuttoned his shirt.

“Kiss me now if you want to,” she told him. Her finger was hooked over the lip of his open drawer.

He put his hands on her belly. “Look what we do to each other,” he said.

She smiled, big and warm. “There turn out to be rewards, after all, to the empty spaces in our bodies.”

“So do I always end up half-naked when you want to powder your nose?”

“See? It’s not so bad to be my husband,” she said. He put his lips against hers and held as long as she would let him, then sat on the closed toilet while she turned her lips, a wide expectant O, red. For the rest of the night, the tube was not a bullet but a hook, a hook with a long, shimmering line to Annie’s mouth.

•   •   •

BEN’S
ONLY
REAL
COMPLAINT
was that the drawers were difficult to open. They limited his movements, too, but that ended up being a plus since his posture was suddenly perfect. But the opening and closing of the drawers was an issue. In the second month of the drawers, while Annie was out, Ben went to the hardware store and bought ten (in case some got lost) matching brass knobs, the smallest ones they carried. He threw in a chocolate bar and a bag of cotton candy with a picture of a clown on it, even though he knew that it was gross to buy cotton candy in a bag at the hardware store.

In the car on the way home, he took Aaron out and placed him on the passenger seat. “These knobs are going to be great,” he explained. “We’ll be able to use the drawers better now, open them and close them. They’re attractive, too. These are nice-looking knobs.” Aaron did not respond, but Ben was sure that he was behind the project one hundred percent.

Ben got his tools from the garage and made himself a cup of coffee and drank it while he ate the cotton candy. He laid the brass knobs out in a circle on the kitchen table in front of him. The truth was, he was nervous. He didn’t know if the process was going to hurt. After his snack, he took some deep breaths and got out his drill. He took his shirt off. It was an awkward position, looking down at his chest with a power drill facing into him. He couldn’t get a good angle on it, so he went to the mirror by the front door, where his wife always took final stock of her outfit and hair, one last check before she entered the world. He tried to line the bit up centered in one of the middle drawers, second row from the top. He went for it. It did not hurt in any measurable way, except he was aware that he was making a hole from the outside of his body to the inside. He winced as he worked, saying
ouch
out of habit and ritual, out of respect for his body, although he felt almost nothing. He screwed the knob on. It looked nice and shiny against the white bone.

Just as he was beginning the second one, Annie came blasting in the front door with no evidence of the groceries she had gone to get. She went straight for the bathroom, where she threw up. Ben tried to go in and help her but she cursed at him, and he waited quietly outside the slammed door.

“There is nothing you can do to help me!” she yelled. He tried the door and tentatively pushed it open when the handle twisted.

“Are you OK?” he asked with his eyebrows tight together. She was on the floor with her head on the closed toilet lid.

“Do I the fuck look like I’m OK?” she panted. And then right away: “I’m sorry. But also, fuck you.”

“Can I get you something? I thought we were done with the morning sickness.” His voice was eggshell thin. She looked up at him for the first time. Her face fell flat. She looked desperate.

“I must have eaten something. What did you do to your chest? What is that
thing
?” He was happy for the change of subject and proud to show off his work.

“It’s a knob! It’s going to make it much easier to get them open and closed.”

She thought about it and then shook her head decisively. “No. It won’t work. It’s going to look like you have a disease. Everyone will be able to see the balls.”

He smiled. “You don’t want everyone seeing my balls?” When she did not laugh, he considered her point. He kicked his left foot with his right foot. “Shit!” he yelled. “Why does it matter? Can’t I have things sticking out? What are you so worried about?” He knew he was going to lose this one. She knew it too, so her response was measured.

“There’s nothing we can do about the drawers. The drawers seem to be there for good. But we can control how obvious they are, and I’m sorry, Ben, but you can’t have little balls sticking out. You’re going to look like a robot with all sorts of buttons and toggles. No. Just, no.” He looked like he had lost something important. She got off her knees slowly and moved closer to him, leaned against the sink. She put her hand on his face. “We’ll figure something out. To make opening and closing easier.”

Ben took the travel toothbrush out of his chest and prepared it for her, wetted and pasted. While she brushed, he sat on the edge of the sink and held his hands silently on the hidden baby. “You are still the only miracle here,” he whispered, though it was his wife he wanted to say it to.

•   •   •

BEN
EMPTIED
OUT
the contents of his chest.

“Look what you’ve got in there.” Annie smiled. “Look at all those babies. Diversity, I like that,” she said, laughing.

Ben was embarrassed. “I bought them. I haven’t named them all yet,” he said.

“I’m sure you have time. What if we make little half-moon-shaped holes at the top of each drawer. Enough to put a fingertip in?” Annie asked.

Ben smiled. “I like that you called them half-moons.”

“I’ll need a lot of light. Go and gather lamps.”

Ben sat on the dining room table, shirtless under the light of every lamp in the house placed around them on chairs, on the floor and the oval table. Everything in the room was made important by all that light: the dining table inherited from a grandmother though not well liked; the chairs, cheap and unmatching; the bulletin board with the collection of fetal images, those beans of babies in various stages of growth. The rest of the house was heavy, dark.

“How can this not hurt?” she asked. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I promise it won’t. What if I read a story to you while you work?”

“No, I want you to watch me, to make sure I do it right.”

Ben watched while Annie made the first cuts. He talked to her to keep her calm. “The baby has all of her toes already,” he said, “teensy little nails even. She has her fingers and hands.” His voice was deep compared with the high tink of the chipping bone. The pieces landed around Annie’s feet like gathering snow.

Ben’s neck became sore from watching his wife work. “The baby would like to know if she can have a pony,” he said.

“Don’t make me laugh,” she said, smiling.

“The baby would like to know if she can stay over at her best friend’s house and if she can have twenty dollars and if she can have a little brother or sister.”

“Yes, on all counts,” Annie said, and stood to kiss her husband, his chest wide open.

After she had made rough notches, she sanded them down. Even though Ben had no feeling in his chest, the vibration of the sandpaper went all the way though him, making his organs itch. They took breaks for this reason. Annie sat up on the table next to him, both of them kicking their feet like children on a tall bench. He pressed his hands on the baby. “What do you think about this strange family you’ll belong to?” he asked her. She did not kick back.

“Have you ever tried to take one of the drawers out?” Annie asked carefully.

Ben shook his head no. “I do wonder what’s in there. Same as you, I’d guess, and we don’t propose to take you apart.”

“No, we don’t. Let’s leave them in.”

“I would rather. If it’s all right with you.”

When they were finished, Annie had made six holes in her husband’s chest. He tested them out, one at a time, until all his drawers were open and his chest looked puffed out. “You look like a peacock,” Annie said. “A proud peacock.” Annie put Ben’s collection back into his body. The piles of babies, the mustard, the tiny toothbrush, all of it. The two of them stayed in the dining room under all the lights and talked about baby names. She suggested mostly old-fashioned names like Annabelle and he suggested mostly names beginning with
C,
like Clarice.

Ben brushed Annie’s hair with his fingers, which came away wrapped in a few golden strands. Annie pulled them off and laid them in a drawer already populated by brown and pink babies. The glisten of her hair disappeared into the dark of Ben’s body.

“Can I keep those?” he asked.

“Those are yours,” she said.

Annie stuck the tips of her fingers into Ben’s new moons. Her arms hung like two sturdy bridges across the space between them.

I
DO
NOT
FIND
HOUDINI
downstairs. Upstairs, my room smells like cat but has no cat in it. My bed is covered in the soft gray hairs. My parents’ bed is also ashy-gray, the fur hovering and landing when I sweep my hand over it. I find my father and mother lying on the slanted roof outside their window, what they call the Veranda. They are squinting against the sun, shielding their faces. Their shirts are pulled up to make way for the darkening of skin. They glisten with sweat.

“Did you sell your lunch ticket?” my father wants to know.

“Fifty cents.”

“What were they serving?”

“Sloppy Joes.”

“You could have gotten a dollar.”

“Have you seen Houdini?”

“You could have gotten seventy-five at least.”

My mother says, “We aren’t any fun up here. Why don’t you go and play with Belbog, next door? He’s come all the way from the continent of Europe.”

“And can’t you see we are tanning?” my father adds.

“I’m already nice to him on the bus,” I tell my mother, and sit down on the roof’s slanted face. I pull my shirt up too and reveal the stunning whiteness of my stomach.

“You can blame your father for that skin tone,” my mother says. “Good luck getting any dates with any babes.” She reaches out and takes my father’s hand. She rubs each finger individually, gets her own into the crevices between them. Those canyons are completely explored.

Were the roof not covered in something like sandpaper, if it were slick—say, metal—we would all three slide to our probable deaths.

My mother lights a cigarette from the pack at her side and my father picks up his constant companions: a knife and stick. He whittles. My father is making another letter opener to be added to the drawers already filled with them. My mother’s cigarette ashes get caught in the wind and circle all our heads.

“The best thing,” my father says, “will be for you to save up for a trip to a country where they have beautiful women and you can marry one.”

“What if I don’t love any of the beautiful women when I get there?” I ask.

“By the time you got there, you’d see. The hard thing would be knowing which one you loved best. The world is just waiting for you, son,” he tells me, looking up at the expansive heavens, shaking their rattles of sunlight down on us.

My mother says, “It doesn’t have to wait—you’re already here. Welcome to your life.”

I see flat-faced Belbog, all the way from the continent of Europe, walk out of his house and set up a card table and a chair on the sidewalk. He makes another trip and returns with three mugs and a pitcher of something red. He tapes a sign to his table,
Beverage For Sale
. He sits, his hands folded on his lap and his legs crossed, wearing a pair of large white women’s sunglasses very long out of fashion.

Cars pass, not slowing for refreshment. They send wind Belbog’s way, spread his hair out in the gusts. It is at this moment and from this incredible vantage point that I see Belbog’s hair blowing, and in front of him I see Houdini cross the street toward home, looking like a ghost in the white light. And then I see a car, a red car, come around the corner and not even slow down for my cat, and not even stop after the noise that we all hear.

“Houdini?” I ask of the air. The cat is a pile in the street. Belbog jumps up and knocks the pitcher off the table, covers himself, soaks himself red. My parents jump inside through the window first, pushing me aside. And the long journey down from the roof begins. There are stairs I must go down. I must go through the living room and the dining room and the back hall and the front hall before I can emerge from the door, screaming the name of my cat. When I get down to the street, Belbog has the cat in his arms, legs loose and swinging, and says, “The car! The cat! The car!”

I try to hug Houdini away from him, to take him to my chest. But Belbog has him tight, so I hug both of them, Houdini pressed between the two of us, all our lungs pumping together.

“That cat’s not going to make it,” my father says. My mother has the portable phone and starts to dial, but he stops her. “That cat’s not going to make it,” he repeats.

“Call the vet! Call 9-1-1! Call the vet!” I yell.

“We shouldn’t try?” my mother asks.

“It is hit!” Belbog says.

“He’s old,” my father says. “It would cost a fortune. It’s better to let him die.” The phone in my mother’s hand is quiet and no numbers are pushed. I go for it but she holds it tight and I cannot get it free. “Let’s take him inside,” my father says, already walking, “where we can say goodbye properly.”

“The cat will be dead from us?” Belbog asks, following behind the three of us until we reach the front door and I close it in his face. He stands there on the stoop, dripping onto the threshold of my home.

•   •   •

MY
MOTHER
PUTS
a cookie sheet out on the kitchen table and I turn on the lamp above it, a spotlight. Houdini is matted with blood. He is not a gray cat anymore, he is a red cat.

“You have had him longer than you have had me,” I say.

“We have had each other longer than either of you,” my mother says, looking at my father. “The cat just showed up one day and I fed him.”

“It would cost thousands of dollars, and even then,” my father answers, “a new cat doesn’t cost anything. The price of a ball-chopping, or not. If we don’t chop the balls, we’d get kittens maybe. You’d like kittens, wouldn’t you?”

“Honey,” she scolds, “please.” My mother holds the cat’s two front paws in her own, she tips her head down to wipe her cheeks on her shoulder. “We would have kept putting food out for you. Milk. Leftovers.”

“I have my savings,” I offer.

“No amount of savings would be enough. He is going to go sooner or later. Sooner,” my father says. The light swings just slightly, its halo shifting over the cat, who is less and less alive. I put my ear to his chest and listen.

“Hush-a-hush-a-hush-a,” I whisper to him. When I come up, I can feel that my cheek is sticky wet. I rub the blood around. Rub it all over my face. This makes my mother cry harder. Flat-faced Belbog has his flat face pressed against the window, watching us. His snot drips out of his nose and down the glass.

“That’s enough,” my father says. “You are upsetting your mother. Goodbye, cat. Now is the time.” He holds Houdini up above his head, and again the four legs swing and hang. “A freezer bag, honey,” he says to my mother. Both of us follow him down the basement stairs. “Everybody needs to keep it together,” he says. “If you try anything, I will kick you out of the ceremony.”

“Can we at least sit?” my mother asks.

“Get comfortable,” he tells her. We lower ourselves onto the bottom stair. She takes my head onto her chest. I can hear her heart going through its beats. My snot drips down out of my nose, it seeps into my mother’s shirt, and I make no motion to stop it. My tears too drain from my eyes and soak through to her skin. Houdini’s blood rubs from my cheek onto her chest. My face is stuck to her shirt is stuck to her skin. She says, “Hush-a-hush-a-hush-a,” while I try to drench her, to soak her through, to drown her.

Houdini is still alive when he goes in the freezer. My father says he figures zipping the plastic bag plus the cold will do it. He does not want to hit the cat with a hard object. He does not own any guns, and a knife is out of the question. When he zips the bag, he says, “I’m sorry, cat. You are about to feel less air in your lungs. The cold will work to numb you.”

My father sits on the floor with the freezer door open in the otherwise dark room. The only other things in there are some tubs of ground beef marinara sauce and the wool baby blanket my mother knit for me when I was born. She won a prize for it at the county fair and now it lives here to keep from getting eaten by moths. It is also zip-locked and its hair, like the cat’s, is pressed against the plastic, smashed flat.

My father, his tools still upstairs, pretends to whittle—one index finger shaving the other index finger down. He looks like he is preparing to survive in the wilderness. The blue light from inside the freezer cleans him up and makes him shine.

“Should we say something?” my mother asks.

“Houdini was a good cat,” my father tries.

“Houdini is in cat heaven, where there are rivers of milk and mountains of cheese,” my mother adds, looking at me, watching for the happiness she hopes I feel.

“Houdini is in the freezer,” I say, “and he is still alive.”

My mother whispers to me, “We’ll bury him in the morning. It will be a beautiful ceremony. When he is dead.” She takes me by the arm, both of us crying, to the bathtub. I am too big to be washed this way and I say so.

“I want to be covered,” I tell her.

“You will be, by water.”

But it does not hide the few new hairs growing on my body. Even if I hunker down as low as I can, the water does nothing but magnify. Our falling tears cannot make this a sea deep enough for me to hide in.

“I wouldn’t fit in the freezer,” I say to her.

“You are not going anywhere,” she says, and pours a bowl of the blood-pinked water onto my head. It rushes down heavy over my eyes.

•   •   •

EARLY
IN
THE
MORNING
when the light doesn’t look like it is coming from anywhere in particular, my parents come to my door knocking. “Time to bury the cat,” they say, like what they mean is “Happy birthday.” In the kitchen there are scones, homemade. My mother must have been up for hours. They are browned and perfect, sitting in rows.

“Are those scones on Houdini’s cookie sheet?” I ask.

“Houdini doesn’t have his own cookie sheet,” my father says. He has the shovel and he has a brown grocery bag. When I look at it, he answers a question I do not have.

“He’s cold. I couldn’t hold him.”

“He’s frozen,” my mother reminds him.

•   •   •

THE
EARTH
IS
FULL
OF
STONES.
Every shovelful turns up more of them. They leave round crevices behind. When my father takes a break, resting his hands on the long wooden handle, I kneel down and put my fist into one of the stone’s old homes. It feels warmed, like a just-left chair. Who knows how long that rock was there, sneaked down into the dirt, covered on all its ragged sides.

“The earth will digest him,” my mother says. “He’s free of his body now.”

“That’s enough hole touching,” my father tells me. “Come on, son,” he says, “let’s get this show on the road.” He returns to work. A pinecone comes up. A shoelace. Dirt, heavy and dark and wormy, comes up. When there is enough room for Houdini plus some, my father leans the shovel against the tree and turns the brown sack over. The cat is still in the plastic bag.

“We have to take him out of the bag,” I say.

“It’s OK. He’s bloody,” my mother says.

“For one thing, he won’t disintegrate, for another thing, look at him.” I go down onto my knees. I open the zip and try to dump him out, but he is stuck by his own blood to the walls. My mother and father stand over me, watching. I jam a stick in, try to loose the fur. The stick breaks. My parents do not suggest anything. I tear the bag off. Even when it goes, Houdini is still in the shape of it. His fur is still smoothed flat like something is pushing against it. Houdini cannot push back.

While dirt goes back in, I remove the worms one by one.

“You know they are part of the cycle,” my mother says, and I do know, but it is too soon. For now I want to let my cat rest alone without being crawled upon, under the turned earth.

•   •   •

AFTER
THE
BURIAL
I find Belbog asleep under my kitchen windowsill. He is not wet anymore but is still red. I tap him, wake him up, walk him back to his house.

“Have you been here all night?” I ask.

“Is he?” he asks.

“It’s part of the cycle,” I say. Belbog stands in the doorway and watches me. I right his overturned table and sit at it. Look at the street, at the spot where Houdini landed. The street is steaming with heat, already, even this early in the day.

“My name means White God, did you know?” Belbog asks.

“The continent of Europe must be very far away. Are there beautiful women there?”

“The most beautiful anywhere, my father tells me. I hope we will be friends. Perhaps this summer you can come and together we can sell beverages on the side of the road,” Belbog says, and when he finally closes the door, I hear the lock slip, and then the other lock slip and a chain rattle itself into place.

•   •   •

WHEN
I
COME
INSIDE,
my parents are asleep on the couch, wrapped up in each other, the room full of morning light. I put a blanket over them. I take Houdini’s cookie sheet upstairs. I look out the window at the elm, at the unsmooth patch of ground. I eat scone after scone, hoping that some of the cat was left on the tray. The sun is still a colored sun, not like later when the light will be so bright the particulars of it disappear. I go to sleep too, taking the cookie sheet under the covers. I can hear my father snoring through the floor. The spears of sunlight hit my back. They drill slowly into me, warming up even the deepest insides, and I fall asleep.