A Guide to Being Born: Stories
Page 6
The giraffe heads rolled out their three long purple tongues and licked Hazel’s chest. Cleaned her arms and her face. The tongues were rough and ragged and she shone with their spit, her chest paint-white and glistening. They slept there, breathing softly, their lips quivering. The giraffe’s body never came out. It stayed curled up, rising and falling with the inhales of its own three heads and the inhales of its beautiful host.
In the morning, Hazel still had the markings on her breasts from fur pressed down. She could still smell their warm skin like hay and cheese.
• • •
HAZEL WENT TO THE DOCTOR for her usual checkup.
“You have a beautiful cervix,” he said. Hazel, staring up at the poster on the ceiling of a coral reef, said, “Thank you. I get that all the time.” Dr. F laughed so long, all the time still staring into her, that she wished she hadn’t said anything at all.
The doctor retrieved Hazel’s mother for the dressed part of the exam. He had the picture from the ultrasound in his hand, a gray, curled blob. Hazel didn’t want to see it, and didn’t believe it when she did. What a good disguise my baby has on, she thought. Dr. F rubbed goo on her belly and listened. Her skin was stretched so far it was unrecognizable, not forgiving and soft but stiff and hard.
Hazel’s mother stood up from her plastic chair and took a listen. She immediately started to cry and stood there, eyes wide and slippery, her hand on her chest. While her mother witnessed the miracle of life, Hazel rolled the corner of her paper gown in her fingers.
• • •
HAZEL’S MOTHER TALKED about cribs and carriages and binkies and diapers. She insisted on stopping at Babies“R”Us to stock up. Hazel waited in the car and listened to the Soft Rock Less Talk station but turned it off when the host started making jokes about his wife’s credit card bill. She watched people pull into the parking lot in minivans and unload kid after kid crying, screaming or jumping around. Mothers struggled to strap them into strollers, to get shoes on and tied. One mother, after a long fight to get her son into his sweatshirt, spit into her delicate, diamond-glittering hand and smoothed it over his parted blond hair.
Hazel’s mother thundered back with her full cart, its metal vibrating loudly over the asphalt. She unloaded boxes and bags into the backseat, tossed Hazel a pair of miniature soft orange booties that looked like tennis shoes complete with plush tread and real laces. Hazel stuck her first two fingers into each one, walked them across the dashboard. “If it has four legs, I guess we can just get another pair,” she said quietly.
Her mother was busy stuffing the full bags in and shaking the right key out. “It’s not twins—we would have seen it in the pictures.”
“I never said it was twins.”
• • •
WITH HER MOTHER OUT one weekend morning, Hazel walked very slowly and heavily to the 7-11. She picked out a six-pack of Miller and a bag of beef jerky. Johnny, behind the counter, said, “I heard what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Do you need anything?” he asked.
“People are being helpful. Do you sell ribbon?”
“I don’t really know, but I think you’re not supposed to be drinking. You know, in your condition,” Johnny said, pulling out a roll of red. Hazel paid for her items and then, standing there with Johnny, she tied the beer and jerky together with the ribbon.
“Here,” she said, “it’s for you. I hope you understand.” She went out the door, which rang its bell to say, Goodbye, whoever you are.
With one week to go till due date, Hazel stopped sleeping. She couldn’t keep her eyes shut or her mind shut. Her brain bled a list of worries, ongoing and impossible to ignore. All the things she had to remember to do as a mother. She started lists, animal by animal.
Lion: lie under a tree together with its tail wrapped around my leg, learn to cook its caught rabbits, braid its mane. Koala: grow eucalyptus, watch it climb trees, lie underneath looking up at it through the branches. She had stacks and stacks of these lists. Some animals were blank. She didn’t know yet how to care for a sloth or a platypus. Almost as an afterthought, she made a list called Human Baby: hire a math tutor, record enough home video but not too much, bake lemon meringue pies, move to a remote unpopulated island when he/she turns thirteen, sled.
• • •
THEY NUMBED HAZEL from the waist down for the birth. It took a few minutes before it started to work, but then Hazel felt the warm emptiness creep over her. She could feel her body melting away. She held her mother’s hand. Her sisters wore sweat suits and ponytails and looked ready for action, but there wasn’t much to do except hope, which they did while they drank thin, fake-creamer coffee out of styrofoam cups.
Hazel’s mother fell asleep for a few minutes, her black shirt rolling up to reveal the loose skin of her midriff. The sisters talked of their own offspring and partners. They discussed a spinach salad recipe from a magazine and a new kind of tea that began in pearls and unfolded into flowers. Hazel could hardly hear them over the sound of her body working to release the creature. All the animals she’d prepared for began to run together. She saw the hooves of a cow and the head of a mouse and the body of a kangaroo. She felt the long teeth of a hyena and the soft fur of an alpaca. Hazel almost felt her own body turn into something else. Something capable of stalking prey and of tearing flesh.
By the time the doctor made the bittersweet announcement that this healthy baby was a girl, and all the women in the room gave up hope that their husband and father’s sharp features and smarts would live again, Hazel was lost in her menagerie of beasts. She looked right at the bald skin and didn’t see it. Didn’t believe that the puffy-limbed crier, all pink with bright blue eyes, could be the thing she had been carrying around. Hazel did not reach out when the doctor handed it to her but kept her arms flat by her sides. The baby’s body seemed impossible to her, as if she had given birth to a chair or a bicycle.
“It’s a nice little girl,” the doctor said.
“Whose is it?” Hazel replied. They all laughed warm and low as if she were joking. Her mother took the child from the doctor and rocked her, wrapped her in a pink blanket with big ducks on it. In the growing darkness, Hazel thought a duck’s bill might be attached to her child. She fell asleep thinking about it quack quacking around the house with its tail bobbing.
While Hazel was sleeping, Johnny stopped by with three gas-station cloth roses, pink with plastic dew.
“I’m just a friend of Hazel’s,” he said, leaving the flowers with one of her sisters, who was reading a magazine in the bright hallway.
“You shouldn’t bother her,” the sister said. “But I’ll let her know you stopped by.”
“Tell her if she needs anything from the store . . . snacks or whatever. Candy. Smokes. Not that, but you know, I think we sell diapers.” The sister brought her eyebrows together and rattled the roses. Johnny’s feet were heavy on the floor all the way back down the long corridor. He might have become a father that day, or he might not have. He craved the floating feeling of a moment when everything changes. He wanted to call his mother, tell her the figures: pounds and ounces, inches, exact time of birth, first, middle and last names. None of these were known to him, and his mother would not have understood why she was supposed to care.
• • •
FOUR IN THE MORNING and Hazel was awake. It was raining outside and no one was in the room. Water sheeted and Hazel felt around under the blanket to inspect her body, which was still swollen—a tight, empty globe. What had been growing there was done and out and growing someplace else now. It didn’t need her blood or her air.
The room was a dark kind of yellow with a lot of moon and a little hall-light coming under the door. The blinds on the windows chopped the glow into slices and divided Hazel’s covered body into slats. She looked around the room at the machines, which breathed back at her. A small red light went on and off. Hoses hung and the shadows of hoses hung lower. A mop and mop bucket. Hazel
felt suddenly stuck in a laboratory, caught and studied. She thought she might be left there forever, that her mother had taken her baby and introduced it to the human babies. It would assimilate. It would be accepted into their tribe and given a flowered diaper cover and fed smashed peas. It would never learn to hunt or peck or make its mating call. Hazel sat up and then stood up but got dizzy and sat again. She hit the pillow with her fist.
The baby, who had not been stolen away, but had instead been sleeping in her crib in the corner, began to cry. Hazel got up, slower this time, her pounded and squeezed body creaking as she slid her socks over the linoleum like a skier. There was almost no light in the crib, nothing to brighten the skin of the new life lying there. It cried, the new life. Hazel put her index finger into the crib and poked softly until she felt the warm mound. She touched the ears, the spirals of them. She touched the back of the neck and the front of the neck. She tried to find the mouth, which was still crying. She thought she felt whiskers and a wet nose. She felt soft fur just starting on the top of the head. Suddenly she knew the answer. It was a seal, fat and legless. She put her hands over the round eyes, which she knew were black but could not see. The seal barked into her palm and its breath was warm.
This was one animal Hazel hadn’t planned for. She thought of the twirling underwater torpedoes in the zoo. It was gill-less, an air breather the same way she was, but it must also like to be wet. She went to the window and opened it, put her hands out in a cup and waited while the air blew cold across her skin. Drops fell but dripped through her fingers and she couldn’t collect much. She returned to the flopping baby and rubbed her water-hands onto its face and then its back, which someone had tried to cover with a nightgown, a thing that seemed ridiculous to Hazel.
She remembered the mop bucket and slid her way to it. It was hard to bend down, but she was able to drag it to the crib using the mop as a handle. She pulled the mop up and water streamed down, splashing her feet and the floor. She ran the gray tendrils over the baby, smelling the soap and dirt in the water. It started to cry again. She made shushing sounds in her mouth and tried to hum “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The mop went back and forth, the baby cried, Hazel hummed. She took a deep breath and leaned down to grab the bucket. Sharp shots crossed back and forth in her stomach. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut but kept bending. She caught hold of the handle and lifted. It wasn’t as heavy as she had expected, and coming up was easier than going down.
Hazel started to sing the words of the song as she raised the mop bucket over the crib and poured. The water was cold and gray in the dark room. It ran out in ropes, twisting together and splashing into the crib, where the baby cried and threw her small weight back and forth. The blankets soaked through. The thin mattress soaked through. The sleeves of Hazel’s nightgown were wet and dripping. The baby’s cough was so small it didn’t even make it to the walls to bounce.
“Is that enough?” she asked.
No sound came after that, except a dripping plip plip plip on the floor. The baby was quiet and Hazel was quiet. The rain continued to be rain, the bed continued to be flat and rumpled. Nurses in other rooms still tried to move soundlessly while they adjusted feeding tubes and emptied bedpans. Hazel’s mother was still her mother. Hazel was still not her father and neither was her baby. The two of them would be fatherless together. They would be young together. “Now that I am a mother,” Hazel said to the baby, “I get to set the rules. And the rules are: swimming, sunning, playing. Everything else, we ignore.” She put the bucket down, empty now, and leaned into the crib to pick up the baby, blanket-wrapped and dripping.
The bundle coughed one beautiful polished river rock of a cough. Hazel put her ear right down against the lips and heard air, in and out. The eyes looked up at her, surprised and afraid. Hazel breathed her air into her baby’s mouth and then waited until the baby breathed out so she could inhale that sweetness.
Hazel walked with it around the room, careful and slow. The body was cool against her. Her clothes stuck to her breasts. She sat down at the edge of her bed. She put the baby down and removed her hospital gown, and then decided to remove the baby’s clothes too so their skin could touch. She held the baby to her chest, guided a nipple into the little mouth. Hazel had become aware of the baby’s arms and legs, but still saw the seal face, the slick black eyes. She could feel the whiskers brushing against her while it sucked, toothless and quiet.
Chest of Drawers
BEN FELT EMPTY, in the literal sense. He poked at his belly button, at the organs beneath, which were producing no new miracles. As he understood it, his liver was filtering; his gall bladder was storing bile the liver produced during the filtration process; his intestine was connecting the in and the out; and in between, things got broken down with acids. None of that was new. He was the very same machine he had always been.
He followed along with the Miracle of Life by reading books, day-by-day updates of exactly what the spine was doing, what mucus was gathering where. The sacks of air and fluid and the creation of the liver, the urinary tract, the brain. Ben taped pictures of developing fetuses up all over the house. They were on the bulletin board over the dining room table, where receipts and coupons used to go. The black-and-white photographs of soft new heads and still-webbed feet covered the refrigerator. Soon they occupied frames beside the bed, replacing the pictures of friends and parents and vacations. Annie watched her husband remove the evidence of their lived lives in favor of the ghost of their future child. The only remaining photograph of fully formed human beings was of Ben and Annie on their honeymoon, lying in the exact shade of a palm tree, hot white sun inches away from them on every side. Annie would tell herself the story of that day—how they had to move every few minutes to keep up with the shade.
“We are still a family of two,” Annie said in the dark while they waited for sleep.
“How else can I prepare for being a father?” Ben asked. “You get to prepare quite literally. You are growing her for us.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Annie joked, tugging at the elastic of his underwear. “And I can’t still. Let’s be in-love parents. Let’s be parents who kiss all the time.” Ben let her feather his neck with her lips, and he put his hands on her belly.
“Not in front of the baby,” he said.
“You still love me?”
“Unequivocally.”
Annie woke up early in the morning and wrote her dreams down, a thing she had never done before. She addressed them to the baby, like letters. Dear Baby, they went. Over on his side of the bed, Ben pretended to sleep, listening to her shuffling pen and thinking of writing letters to the uninspired mess in his abdomen. Dear Guts, another day, another day.
Ben went to work assembling a crib. He was sorry when he was done that the place his daughter would sleep came off a shelf with a hundred others like it. He was sorry that her view would be of bars.
“I want to build something myself for the baby,” he said to Annie, as she sat with her feet on an upturned bucket in the yard. “What will she need?”
“She’ll just need us at first. I don’t think she’ll be that into furniture.”
“Annie. I need a job to do.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you build her a little table,” she said. “I think little girls like to have little tea parties at little tables.”
Ben liked the idea of a table where his daughter could put teacups if she wanted, or if she was another kind of kid—dirty socks or eagle feathers or stones. She could lay a cloth down and hide underneath. So he went to the beach and gathered driftwood. He imagined that it had come to him all the way from Asia, or floated up from a ship, sunk into the deep muck someplace. He hugged it to his chest, wet and salty.
• • •
THE TABLE WAS UNEVEN AND TIPPY, but Ben liked it and he called his wife in to see. Her face colored up. “That thing is practically made of splinters,” she said. And then, leaning hopeless against the wall, “Do you have an
y idea how delicate her skin will be?”
Ben brushed his hand over the rough wood. He walked over to Annie, lifted her red sweater up and touched the side of her rib cage, recorded the texture of the skin in his mind. “Two thousand times more delicate than that,” she told him. He pulled her sweater back down and nodded. He turned the table upside down and kicked the legs off one by one.
Ben threw the wood back into the ocean. He took his shirt off and threw it into the wind. He took his pants off and threw them too. It was cold out, windy spring, but he jumped into the bubbling waves and floated on his back with the dead table parts, hoping the ocean might continue to churn them all smooth until they were splinterless and appropriate for new skin. The gray sky fell toward them.
When Ben got out of the water and retrieved his clothing—his pants were spread out on the sand like they were trying to run away and his shirt stuck on a pile of seaweed—he noticed that, along with the tiny raised bumps of cold, the skin on his chest looked like a checkerboard or a grid.
He called Annie. He was shivering and his breaths were short. He explained the problem and they met in the hospital parking lot. He wore a winter coat and a pair of pajama pants he found in the trunk. She sat him on the hood of his old Datsun and he pulled his shirt up to reveal six perfect squares separated by half-inch-deep channels.
“Well,” Annie said carefully, “there does not appear to be any redness or irritation.” This was a practiced voice, a parenthood-ready voice. “It doesn’t look broken,” she added, optimistically.
“Nope, it doesn’t look broken,” he agreed. She swished her hand up and back, feeling the ridges.
• • •
THEY WAITED FOR TWO HOURS in the emergency room, where they read all the homemaking magazines.