“This is an awfully racy story for a kid,” the General said.
“There is only one version of this story and I’m telling it to you.”
“Is that the end?”
“That’s the first part. Your turn,” Buck said.
“I thought I might like to be a schoolteacher,” the General started. He said he figured he liked children and he had some time but the whole thing fell through when he needed to produce a valid identity.
“I had no birth certificate or Social Security card or address. I went to the old folks’ home instead, where people were much less concerned with safety. I befriended a few old people who needed someone to reach or water or sort for them, and what I got was company. It was good company too, because the old people had been around for a lot of the time I had. I pretended my knowledge of wars and economic highs and lows was from a healthy appetite for books. I kept them up late. We sat around Formica tables.
“Money came up all the time. What things were worth back then and how much you pay now. A hammer, a newspaper, a case of beer. We also talked about dying, which I had done but they hadn’t yet. I couldn’t warn them about it, though. They’d talk about being afraid to go or who had recently made the move. There was always somebody. I tried to be helpful, saying things like ‘There’s much more ahead,’ but really this thought made me very sad. I would have liked to tell them that they were almost finished.”
Buck spat on the ball and threw it high and hard, but the General was fast and caught it.
“The minute they removed the bodies,” the General remembered, “the manager came and took the plants. She kept the good ones for herself. Her office was a jungle of dead people’s greenery. They wound their leaves around her desk legs and up and out the window. The walls were hardly even visible through the foliage. The rest of the plants, the ones she didn’t want, she lined up outside the dining room. Those were usually the first sign the old people got that someone among them was gone. They guessed by the plant who it might be, tried to remember each other’s apartments: who had a ficus in the corner, who a plot of sweet peas in that window box painted with dancing elephants.”
The General paused.
“We only have what’s growing outside,” Buck said. “Nothing alive in the house but us girls.” She dove for a ground ball.
“Turns out you’ve got hands like magnets,” the General said, at which Buck grinned. It’s possible to pitch without a catcher but you can’t do the opposite, so Buck hadn’t known she was playing the wrong position all along. Here she was jumping and sliding, getting the ball every time.
“I’m pretty good,” she admitted.
“You have a definite talent,” he said as he threw a hard one her way. “I expect you’ll be able to get yourself a scholarship if you work at it. I believe it’s your turn.”
“OK. Mother Mom was born an Annie, but I started in calling her Mother the way Annie called Grandma Pete. But Annie said she’d rather be Mom since she felt old the other way, though instead of swapping out, I just tagged on, and from then on the woman had two names that meant the same thing.
“Annie had become a mom because she wasn’t shy about calling Pops ‘Pops’ and she wasn’t shy about what he wanted from her, which kept him coming around a few nights a week. Though they never intended to make a baby out of the situation, pretty soon he took the saddlebags off his bike and unpacked them into the drawer that had been cleared out, all except for a little hand-sewn sachet of pine needles.
“Now, Grandma Pete used to be Grandma Mae until Grandfather Pete died several years back, and she took it as her personal crusade to make him as remembered as a man could be. That was also when she moved into the fixed-up shed behind our house and when she started in loving the game of baseball. She found an old shot of Grandfather when he was in the service playing a game, him at the center of the triangle and a lot of cottonwoods as a backdrop. Handsomest she ever thought he looked. She wanted to make some more copies of that photograph. Come to think of it, she wanted to make some more copies of a lot of photographs. With the help of Mother Mom and me, she covered every inch of wall in her shed-house with pictures of Grandfather Pete. We blew them up and shrank them down for variety. On a long Saturday, the three of us climbed on chairs, stools and ladders to nail up stacks of those photographs so that, in the end, his face looked in from every direction.
“The only places where he wasn’t staring out were the flat surfaces where Grandma kept her collections of trinkets—bears, moose and fairies. ‘A woman has to have a place for herself,’ she always said, dusting them off with her fingertips.
“When the walls were covered, Grandma walked down to the county clerk’s office and had her name officially changed. The last time she’d been in that room was the day she and her husband-to-be went to get their marriage license. That first time she took his last name, and this time she took his first. She put her old white hand on the counter and asked to be officially renamed in the eyes of God and everyone. The boy filled out the paperwork and got the right signature and sent the old lady out into the afternoon sun with her husband’s name.”
The General encouraged Buck with a steady smile.
“That’s it,” she said. “Since then it’s just been us and the birds.”
“What about your story?”
“My story?”
“Buck’s story.”
Buck scrunched her nose. “It’s the same as my family’s story. As of today I guess I can add that I met you and discovered I can catch even better than I can throw. Your turn.”
“This next part requires acting.”
“Sure,” Buck replied.
The General didn’t know the name of his killer, so Buck stayed nameless. She was told how to spring out from behind a short hill, in this case imagined, and how to weave between bodies. Buck’s important line was “This is your end,” to which the General yelled, “But it isn’t the end of the war!” Before they got there, though, they each fought several other men. The routines were carefully explained to Buck, the General standing behind, his arms wrapped around her, all four of their hands grasping a long branch while they shuffled forward and back, slicing the air. They practiced the scene a dozen times, with Buck ending by hovering over the General every time, her fist around an imaginary knife. “This is your end!” she seethed. She got very good at delivering that final line, her teeth clenched, her face hot.
The light was low by this time, and a fleet of swallows circled overhead catching evening bugs. “I think we’re ready for the real one,” the General said. He handed Buck a short, sharp stick to tuck into her sock. Buck and the General took their places in the clearing and battled imaginary soldiers separately, the sound of their branch-swords making wind as they cut back and forth. They breathed hard and mumbled at their opponents before turning on each other. They followed the steps of their dance perfectly, each putting the other in jeopardy, losing control and trying again. They cursed each other and dove for the ground after dropped weapons. Finally, in the last moments, Buck pulled her stick from her sock and held it over the General’s heart as he lay on the ground staring up, his eyes reflecting the purple of the sunset.
“This is your end,” Buck grumbled, and drove the stick into the General’s chest. She felt more resistance than she had expected. The General yelled back at her, “But it isn’t the end of the war!” and he coughed and spit and made choking sounds that were absolutely realistic.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. You’re fine, right?”
“The story of Buck is just getting going,” he whispered. He held his chest with one hand and with the other he blew her a kiss. “Catch,” he whispered.
Buck could see real pain in his eyes until he relaxed onto his back and his arms fell away and he was still. Suddenly Buck wasn’t sure about anything. She looked at the man with the stick in his chest and then at her own hands and the pinecones and at the darkening forest, and Buck began to run.
She tore
through the woods, kicking up leaves and hitting her shins against low branches. The forest was noisy with evening feeding traffic not limited to the swallows, who continued to swirl overhead. Rustle occurred in the underbrush all around, and bugs occupied the middle region between ground and sky. Buck’s own breathing and stamping and crushing of whatever was on the earth in front of her scared up squirrels, who darted off in every direction.
She got the quilt-squares of lighted windows in her sights. As she approached, she saw her mother lying on her stomach on a flattened plastic sun chair, a cage full of songbirds hanging above her. Buck did not slow her run across the lawn and came to a halt all at once when she could crawl under the chair, her back flat against the sun-warmed stone and her face exactly below her mother’s, whose nose and cheeks were smashed against the plastic. Buck put her hands on the underside of the chair, on her mother’s stomach. The blue weave had absorbed the heat of the body on top. Buck could feel her own heat rising up, the sweat fighting to evaporate against air that was already full of moisture. Her heart had not slowed yet. A drip of spit hung down toward Buck. It was a jewel. Buck took it on her finger and ate it.
Mother Mom woke up suddenly, surprised.
“It’s me,” Buck said, pressing. “I’m home now.”
“Hello, Buck,” Mother Mom said. She did not seem surprised to be acting as her daughter’s protective canopy. “You all right?” Buck nodded and pressed. Mother Mom scooted up so that her face came over the top of the chair.
“Catch anything?” Buck asked just for the sake of niceness, because she could see and hear that her mother had.
“I caught you,” Mother Mom said, and she smiled and reached her arms around and took hold of the small hands below.
• • •
THE STORY OF Buck’s own name was the only one she had wrong, but it wasn’t Buck who was lying. Indeed she had Mamie on her birth certificate, after the president’s wife. But Pops, who had been very angry about the existence of any baby because it meant the end of his roving, ranging, free-love life, and who also had no interest in cowboys whatsoever, had come storming into the hospital room where Annie and the new bald girl were lying. She nursed her and petted her soft head. When he saw the baby, he pulled his wallet out of his front pocket where he always kept it, for safety. “Here!” he yelled, throwing a one-dollar bill at the bed. “This is my contribution! Call that baby Buck, ’cause that’s all he’s worth!”
“It’s a girl, Pops,” Annie said, her eyes sharp.
“Even worse,” he growled as he marched out to his bike, revving it outside the tiny hospital so that it made the baby’s head vibrate ever so slightly on her mother’s chest.
The dollar bill hadn’t floated more than three inches from the place Pops had stood, and it stayed there for exactly one hour while Pops sat on the side of the road throwing stones at the carcass of a smashed cat. He hadn’t expected the baby to look so vulnerable and for Annie to look so beautiful holding it. Truth be told, he hadn’t even gotten around to thinking it might be a real actual living thing, since he’d been busy all nine months stewing about the damper it would put on his excursions. Not that there were really so many excursions anymore. The fact was that Pops had been staying with Annie for months anyway and had tried only once to pull another girl’s skirt up, and up it went, but he, sadly, could not get himself to do the same, so he dropped the girl off at home, having apologized and bought her an ice-cream cone.
But he didn’t go back. He rode on, left his things in the drawer, left the baby with milk passing into her open mouth while her mother dozed. The doctor came and after checking some boxes on a chart, he noticed and took the dollar bill on the floor, stuffed it into his breast pocket, where it traveled all day until it was taken out in the cafeteria in exchange for a bag of unsalted peanuts.
Annie called Buck “Buck” as if it were an apology and a tribute to Pops, as if it were the least she could do. But she never told her daughter the truth of her name. In the family legend, Pops had been a fan of cowboys and had gone off to find a ranch for his own lovely daughter to raise horses on, her hair shining in the dry, red sunset.
• • •
GRANDMA PETE was in the kitchen playing solitaire with the picture of Grandpa Pete propped on the chair next to her. “Hi, Petes,” Buck managed. Her body was buzzing like it was full of a new substance: not blood anymore but something rattling and dry.
“All right, line up,” Mother Mom commanded, and handed out tools. She gave Buck her mallet and Grandma Pete her cleaver, got herself a wastebasket and put a large cutting board in front of each of them. In the center of the table, she put down a platter and a bowl of marinade. Theirs was a well-practiced assembly line.
Buck reached her hand into the cage, where it was scratched and pecked until she caught a bird, and then held it on her cutting board and knocked it on the head with the mallet. There was a delicate crack like a blown eggshell. She passed it on to Grandma Pete, who took its head off and gutted it, her hands slick with red and the bowl in front of her a squirm of guts. Mother Mom plucked it naked, while her own blood-sticky fingers became covered in feathers.
“Do you ever see Grandfather Pete?” Buck asked her grandmother.
“What’s not to see, dear?”
Mother Mom started humming against the noise of wings constantly crashing against the cage bars, striking them so they sang like guitar strings.
As they passed their work around, the women’s hands met for split seconds, the skin at varying levels of elasticity, varying levels of heat. Their fingers were slippery and eager to touch one another. Slowly the room quieted down until there were no more screeching birds in the cage and the plate in the center of the table was a hill of slumped pink bodies soaking in butter and homemade wine.
• • •
BEFORE THE LONG RITUAL of sucking tiny morsels of meat off needle-thin bones began, and while the smells of cooking rose out of the oven, the most delicate underfeathers, having escaped the broom, were airborne again and again with even the smallest human movements.
The women went outside, where Mother Mom and Grandma Pete cheered for Buck, who threw the beaked heads, pitch by pitch by pitch, into the usual place.
“That must have been ninety miles an hour, that one,” Mother Mom hollered, and Grandma Pete said better than that. The woods offered up the many-legged creatures from deep within the bramblebush to catch everything Buck threw. Life crawled over other life, devoured it, opened itself up to whatever it had been given. The whole world squirmed with hunger and desire, in the thick and thin places, in the trees and in the clearings.
Saver
MABEL LADY FINCH lived with her dad in a one-bedroom apartment (the living room was hers) in a complex with a pool and weight room that neither of them had ever used. She could have afforded to move out, but she didn’t want to leave her dad alone. He wasn’t really completely alone—he had a girlfriend who, Mabel expected, would hang around for the usual month of romancing, then she’d split just like the others. It was like Charlie, which was what Mabel called him, had been given the first volume of a two-volume set on love. At this particular moment, he was still in the first course of a relationship with a woman named June August.
“They figured, no reason you can’t have two months in your name. No law against that!” she explained, while Mabel did their spaghetti dishes. She tossed her stringy blond hair. Charlie put his hand over her knee in a cup, carefully, like she was a firefly he did not want to damage. Mabel left the kitchen and sat down on her pullout that was not pulled out and read some of her City College psychology textbook, which surprisingly had a picture of a skier on the cover.
Mabel looked at the picture of Lady holding her when she was just born, the picture her father had asked her to keep to herself since it made him too sad to see his lady love holding, tenderly, the cause of her death in her arms. June and Charlie, in his bedroom, made very little sound. So little that Mabel knew exactly what they
were doing.
Later, in the late dark with her one little lamp on and the room dressed as a sleeping place, Mabel heard her father knock on the wall dividing them.
“Baby?” he loud-whispered. She knocked back, tap, tippety tap.
“Hi,” she said.
“She’s no good, is she? June August?”
“She’s fine,” Mabel returned.
“Should I tell you about your mother?” The two of them did not read books together; Charlie did not sing. What he did, had always done, was tell Mabel stories about Lady.
“You know the one about when she adopted the puppy without consulting with me?”
“I know that one.”
“What about when we tried to go camping and ended up stranded in the snow with nothing but a butane stove to keep warm?”
“I want to know the one about when she learned she was going to die.”
“What about the one where the old woman mistook her for Audrey Hepburn?”
“That’s not the one I want to hear.”
“She didn’t want to leave us.”
“Do you think about her when you’re with June August?”
“I think about her when I’m with everyone.”
Mabel waited for more. There was just quiet and house noises though, the refrigerator keeping cold, the very low buzz of the lightbulb that you really had to want to hear.
• • •
THE DENTIST in whose office Booker Cyranowski was a new hygienist was so nice and his teeth were so perfectly white there was no way not to trust him. He even bought Booker a ham-and-cheese croissant on this, his first day, which was delicious.
They talked about the business. The dentist gave Booker some tips on how to keep nervous people from biting. He told a few dentist jokes that would otherwise probably not have been funny, but in this case Booker laughed so hard a little bit of ham went flying out of his mouth and landed right on the dentist’s collar. The dentist just brushed it off with a napkin, patted Booker, whose eyes were huge and terrified, on the hand and said, “Son, I’d rather have that on my shirt than stuck in your teeth.” The way he said it made Booker want to curl up in the crook of the dentist’s armpit and fall asleep. He thought of drifting off to the sound of the dentist flossing carefully in the dark. The squeak of the string on his teeth.
A Guide to Being Born: Stories Page 10