A Guide to Being Born: Stories
Page 5
“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.
After a lot of afternoon walking Hazel wanted a break and a snack or a soda with a straw. She went to the 7-11, where she always sat out back on a nice bit of grass that was close enough to the dumpsters so no one else came, but far enough away that she didn’t smell anything except when there was a big gust or a bad bag.
• • •
JOHNNY WAS TO BE HER FIRST. He came out of the store on his lunch break, his uniform button-down untucked, planning to piss on the trash bins because they were cleaner than the toilets. He was clearly surprised to see a girl there, but he just said hello and paused for a second before going on with his plan anyway. Johnny stood with his back to her, a plastic bag in his left hand and his right hidden. She could hear two things: him whistling “Strangers in the Night,” and a delicate stream hitting the green metal of the dumpster. After, he sat down next to Hazel and took a large package of teriyaki beef jerky and a six-pack of Miller Lite out of his bag.
He started right in about the horse races in Deerfield and the off-track betting down in Green Springs. He told her about Million Dollar Mama and Sweet Sixteen, both winners. But not Johnny, he’d lost fifty. “Just not my lucky day,” he said. When he said “lucky day,” he looked right into Hazel’s eyes and winked, and it looked as if he’d been practicing for years in his rearview. She sucked her lemon-lime fizzy and noticed his arms, skinny and brown like hungry snakes.
Just a few feet behind where Hazel and Johnny had talked, they lay down on their young backs. There was a muddle of bushes there, hiding them from the road and the midday gassers and snackers. Johnny didn’t have a line, had just asked, “Wanna go lie down behind those bushes?”
“OK,” Hazel said, because she did not have a better answer, and because, having decided the hour before to say yes to growing, she could hardly say no.
He carried her soda for her, left his two empties where they were. When she sat, he said, “Nice hair.”
“Thanks.”
He leaned over and kissed her, putting his tongue right into the center of her mouth and moving it around in whirling circles. It tasted like beef jerky and beer. She decided she was supposed to do the same—two tongues spinning now. But then she wanted a rest, pulled her head back. Johnny took the pause to mean: OK, next step. He rolled on top. He moved his hips the same way he’d moved his mouth. She could feel him pressed into her bladder.
Hazel had had one close call before, in eighth grade with a pimply boy named Derek who was the brother of the girl having the slumber party. Everyone else had fallen asleep and they had made out in the laundry room while the other girls slept to the sound of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Screaming sounds masked the washing machine’s rattle as Hazel and Derek pressed themselves together on top of a pile of mateless socks.
Johnny got the courage to grab her breasts. He sat up, straddling her, and put one big hand on each B-cup. Squeezed, pumped like udders. He did not softly caress and he did not pinch. Just squeezed and released, squeezed and released. She could tell this was making him happy because his closed eyes were squinting and his mouth was pursed up. Mmmmmm, he said. Mmmmm, she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long, dark distances.
Johnny took his shirt off and her shirt off. He had a few scratchy little hairs. Then pants and pants. He looked at her and said, “OK?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but she nodded. She found out right away that it meant underwear, and in a second they were both off—his first, then hers. He rolled on top, ungraceful and floppy, bit his lower lip and pushed. Hazel started out making her noise but then realized he didn’t notice either way, so she stopped and instead watched his big head lit up by the sun. This is it? she thought. This is the whole entire thing?
Hazel went home that night and ate salad with her mother on the screened-in porch while the mosquitoes tapped audibly to get in. Hazel lived alone with her mother, though she had three sisters, all much older, all living in their own houses with their own dishwashers, lists of emergency phone numbers, and husbands who had good jobs, good values and well-shaped eyebrows. This family had been symmetrical, a family of plans and lists and decisions made years in advance into which Hazel was a very late, very surprising accident followed almost immediately by her father’s diagnosis. While Mother grew fatter, Father grew smaller, and everyone felt certain that they were watching a direct transfer of life from one body to another.
The two of them were never in the world together—by the time Hazel entered, her father had already closed the door behind him. Her mother was still wearing black in the delivery room, surrounded by a ring of grieving daughters. The final shock came when the baby was a not a boy but a girl, looking nothing like the man she was meant to replace.
“How was your afternoon?” Hazel’s mother asked.
“Fine,” Hazel said, considering if this was a true answer and deciding it was. “Yours?”
“Just the usual disasters. The club has the red, white and blue flowers ordered in time for the Fourth, and what is the city out there planting in every median? Marigolds.”
Hazel did not tell her mother that she had had sex with a convenience-store clerk and that it was disappointing but harmless—she felt no ache to see the boy again, no real change in her own body, no broken heart. She had done this grown-up thing, yet she knew her mother would find her even more childish for it.
• • •
HAZEL WALKED the northern quadrant of town and, since it was a Saturday, there were a lot of folks out in their yards trimming bushes and pulling dandelions out of the ground with flowered-canvas hands. The day after that, it was the same thing, only the western quadrant, where she watched the first few innings of a family softball game and petted some dogs in the dog park. She walked past a flower shop where the dyed-blue carnations were the best thing going. She walked through the church parking lot. Father O’Donnel’s Honda was the only car there. She peeked into the backseat: an open gym bag, one ratty gray running shoe out, one in.
“Hi,” someone said roughly. Hazel turned around fast. It was a tall man and big, too. He had a fat face and a comb-over; his shirt buttons were barely holding. He was close.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said again. She edged to her right, her back pressed up against the car.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“No. Thanks.” Hazel tried to smile.
“Oh. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I have to go.”
“Actually, you have to stay.” He put his hand on her arm, but didn’t grab hard. She didn’t say anything, wanted to play it smart. “Look,” he said, “don’t scream. I won’t hurt you if you don’t scream.” Hazel did not scream. Later she thought she might have been better off if she had. But at that moment everything was underwater and she was underwater and there was a strong current pulling her deeper.
The big-faced man took her hand, almost gently. His round fingers interlaced with her skinny ones. Her heart took over her entire body. She was a drum. Did she ask the obvious questions? Why am I walking? Why am I not drinking a Shirley Temple and ad
justing my bikini top over and over at the country-club pool like all the other girls? Why did I agree to grow up? Her body asked the questions for her, that terrified, slamming heart spoke them so loud that she could not breathe fast enough to fuel it, but the drumbeat was empty of answers. They walked behind the church, under the dark of the steeple-shaped shadow and into the maples covered in the new green of summer leaves. The man stopped walking and smiled at her.
“I just want to have some sex with you,” he said. “I won’t hurt you if you have some sex with me.” She was barely breathing, the trees were barely breathing, and the turned earth from their footsteps smelled cold. Hazel thought about running or screaming or kicking, but she just looked up at him and said, “Please. Wait. Help.”
He pulled her down to the ground and he kissed her neck. He undid pants and pants. His breath, strong and bitter with alcohol, was boiling water on her face. His mouth was right up next to her mouth but he didn’t kiss her, just breathed into her. She turned her head but he followed. She could not avoid his lungy air. His weight was everywhere. Two words kept pinging in her mind, though she did not know what they meant. And yet, and yet, and yet.
• • •
A TINY WHITE SPINE began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. Hazel sat on the closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright blue plus sign on one end. She put her hands in her hair, tried to hold her head up.
She thought of the men that could have created this. “How could you be a real living thing?” she asked her growing baby. “How could you be a person?” She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.
• • •
“MOTHER,” Hazel said in the kitchen in early fall where the difficult process of roasting a duck was under way. Hazel’s mother was holding it by the neck over a large pan, searing.
“Yes, darling,” her mother said.
“I need to tell you something.”
“My wallet is in the front hall. I, for one, would like to see you in a pair of decent shoes.”
“I am very pregnant.” Hazel’s fear had so far been sitting, quietly twirling his cane and reading how-to manuals, waiting for Hazel to acknowledge him there.
The duck dropped to the pan.
Hazel omitted Johnny and the 7-11 from her story. She omitted her own fault from the story, she omitted any possibility of a father. Hazel’s mother looked up at her with every kind of lost in her eyes. She lifted up the baggy sweatshirt Hazel had on and looked at her belly and started to cry. “Who was he? How could he do that to you?” And then quickly, “I will take care of everything.” The cane twirler twirled his cane and tapped his shiny shoes together. He winked at Hazel from under a top hat, saying with his big eyes, There is so much now that you have to hold on to.
Hazel’s mother began her crusade. The police came and took a description, drew a man who looked nothing like anyone Hazel had ever seen. The drawing was pinned to each lamppost in town until it rained and the posters shredded and bled, leaving torn bits of paper all over the sidewalk. A women’s self-defense class got started up at the gym. The mayor proposed a citywide emergency phone system in Hazel’s name. But Hazel herself was not meant to benefit from any of these activities. Too late now for self-defense, too late to find a bright yellow phone with a direct line to the police. School started back up and she went, stared at and eyed and gossiped about, and then she walked home, where her sisters came over in shifts, bringing her movies and trays of Poor-Hazel Cookies.
• • •
FOR THE TOWN, in a way, it was exciting to have an Illegitimate Bastard Baby from a Rape, because people had plenty to talk about and plenty of sympathy to dispatch. People whispered in the grocery store aisles, “Did you hear about that poor Whiting girl behind the church? And to think the Lord was right next door. I’m going to drop off a casserole later.”
If you could have lopped off all the pointed roofs of all the yellow-white houses and watched from above, you would have seen the top of a blond head in each kitchen, pulling hot pans out of the oven, steam rising off meat loaves and lasagnas, the counter covered in empty tuna cans, the severed heads of zucchini lying in heaps. A line of station wagons streamed past the Whitings’, reheatables meant to make their way from Ford and Dodge right into the stomachs of the grieving. Hazel’s mother stopped answering their door after a while. Their freezer was full, their refrigerator and mini garage refrigerator were full. Casserole dishes started to pile up on the front steps. Baked ziti baked again in the sun. Beth Berther, who could not cook even one thing, left a grocery-store cake—chocolate with chocolate frosting and the word Condolences! scrawled in orange cursive on top.
People also started to deliver diaper bags and bouncy swings and little hats made to look like various vegetables. Hazel wrote thank-you notes and felt bad that her strange fur baby would be unable to wear the woolen gifts. She saved them in a box under her bed, the bed where she stayed most of the time when she was not in school. Where she was when her mother came in every morning with lemon tea and a biscuit. Where her mother sat, her big reddish-blond hair full of light, singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain” until the breakfast tray was empty and she’d leave singing “Jesus Christ is born,” as she closed the door behind her.
• • •
BY MONTH SIX, the glowing ball-baby had turned itself into a large bird of prey. It spread and curled its wings. Hazel felt them strong and tickling. The nest it was building was a round of borrowed organs, her small intestine twisted up in a pink knot, the bird’s sharp claws resting in the center. Then the bird started to lay eggs, white and the size of a fist. Hazel bought yarn and began to knit three-pronged booties, which she had to invent a pattern for. She planned sweaters with wing holes. She hummed the blues.
Soon Hazel felt the eggs starting to hatch. They cracked and tiny beaks worked to break the surface of the shell, milky eyes and wet feathers emerging into the warm pinkness. The mother bird cuddled them under her wings. She fed them Hazel’s digested meals through her beak. The babies twittered and grew. There were too many though, and as their bodies got larger they couldn’t move anymore. They were packed in, their famously good eyes useless now, pressed up against the walls of the cave.
Meanwhile, school was exactly as boring as it had always been. Hazel was smiled at more because she was frowned at more. “My mother says God is glad you are keeping the innocent baby,” a senior said to Hazel at her locker. “And I don’t agree that being raped makes you a slut.” The girl handed her a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it. In the girl column: Grace, Honor, Constance, Mary, Faith. And in the boy column: Peter, Adam, David, Axl Rose.
Hazel thought about a giant bird of prey with the name Constance.
The birds couldn’t open their womb-smashed beaks to eat and they began to starve to death. Hazel could feel them getting weaker. They made no noise; they didn’t twitch or flutter. One morning she woke up and knew they were dead. Knew their bodies had given up and were now just a mess of needle-bones and feathers. Hazel cried in the shower while she washed herself with Dove. For weeks she could feel the empty weight of them in her. She tucked the booties in the back of her underwear drawer. Through the end of fall and into winter, the avian bodies stayed. Snow was outside on the ground and storms were inside Hazel as the bodies started to flake like ash, layer after layer turned gray and fell. The pile was frozen inside the windless space.
Before Thanksgiving break, the girls and boys were separated and shown charts of each other’s bodies. They learned that chlamydia was not a pretty blossom to add to a floral arrangement. The girls, not the boys, were e
ach given a sack of flour with a smiley face drawn on it that they had to carry around and feed with a dry bottle. “Hazel doesn’t have to do this assignment,” the teacher said to the class. “We all know why.” The girls gathered in the bathroom and changed the white-dusted diapers. Some bought little outfits for their flour babies—cute dresses and hats and bows. The teacher pulled them all back into the classroom, where a large penis sat erect on her desk, and said, “These are not dolls, ladies. You aren’t supposed to be having fun with this exercise.”
The pile of ashes turned into something else. Hazel couldn’t tell what it was at first, but knew that it had little round hooves. Night by night it got clearer. The body and the long legs, and then it started to grow three heads, distinctly giraffelike. The necks lengthened, limp poles loosely twisted together like bread dough, with heads bobbing at their skinny ends.
Hazel spent the weekend in bed. She pulled her yellow-and-orange-flowered quilt up to her chin and lay on her back.
Mother said, “Maybe Father will finally come back,” patting her daughter’s rounded belly.
“If I’m not him, I don’t think my baby will be either,” Hazel said. Her mother’s eyes looked desperate, so Hazel added, “Maybe he will.” Her sisters came to sit with her, circled their hands over her pregnantness. One did Hazel’s toenails in pink polish, and one rubbed her hands with rose oil. One washed her hair in the sink, braided it into two damp plaits.
One night, the giraffe flipped itself upside down just like that, a perfect blue-mat somersault. Two short ears flicked, and head number one began to emerge. Hazel was so surprised she didn’t figure out what was going on until the head was already out. The neck though, she felt all of that, not painful but strange and slithery. Inch by inch by inch, it came. It unfurled. The giraffe blinked and smiled right at her. It bent its head around and came nose to nose with Hazel and sniffed her. Necks number two and three also exited her body.