A Guide to Being Born: Stories Read online

  “And your sister looked beautiful in her blue dress,” a husky voice adds. The grandmothers, Alice among them, see the blue dress. Some see a silk navy A-line, some see a cotton sheath belted at the waist, some see an evening dress flicker out the door and into a waiting car. They are quiet in their rememberings.

  “Who is there when I die?” someone asks, and they all nod to say yes, they wonder that too. Alice clears her throat and begins, confident.

  “Your children are there,” she tells them. “All of them. Three of your grandchildren too. They all have their hands on your body. You can feel them letting go of warmth. It doesn’t stop at the skin or at the bone—nothing can stop it. They are singing ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.’ Outside the window you can see a lake and a Ferris wheel on the edge. It is not raining outside but it looks like it might.”

  The grandmothers have wet eyes. They are all picturing themselves lying there with many pairs of hands covering them, more hands than possible, their bodies hidden. It is just the backs of hands, familiar and radiating and with very faint pulses. In their minds, the grandmothers dissolve under those palms. They go gaseous. It is no longer necessary to maintain any particular shapes.

  Alice sits surrounded by the rattle of their collective breathing. These lungs are not noiseless machines anymore. In this close circle they are trading matter; molecules of one go straight into the tubes of another. Alice thinks of the ocean they are floating on, waves rolling out over the miles. And in those waves, fish in schools so large they turn the ocean silver.

  “We are out at sea,” she says. “We should not go to bed. We should go fishing.” The faces in the dim firelight are uncertain. “We are floating on top of a lot of creatures. Let’s see what we catch,” she tries to explain.

  “We don’t have any poles,” a voice counters.

  “We can make some,” Alice responds. “We have no idea what might be down there!” Her voice is high and excited.

  No one wants to be left alone, so they pull their blankets tighter, though it isn’t cold. The women set to work unraveling strings from the salt-heavy ropes coiled like great snakes on deck. They isolate one string at a time and then tie them around the necks of some of the baseball bats. The grandmothers disperse along the railing and drop their very long lines. The lines have no hooks and no bait. Those lines on the port side, where the wind is coming from, are pasted to the hull like clinging lizards. Those lines on starboard blow out so that, all together, the row of them looks like the rib cage of a whale.

  The women themselves are nearly invisible but for some moonlit glowings of hair—fuzzy little white islands in the dark. The sound of the overhead ring of gulls is mostly wing noise and an occasional vocal cry.

  In the underneath, in that syrupy dark, the creatures they are trying to catch do not notice the tips of the hopeful strings. Jellies jet themselves along, not going anywhere, just moving for the sake of moving. Any fishes who can glow, glow. Some have patterns of light on their spines. Fake eyes look like real eyes for the purpose of being left alone. Sharks separate the water like curtains, currents flowing off their bared teeth.

  There is always the chance of a giant squid and the great likelihood of regular squid. The octopus must not need, in the dark hours, to dispense their ink. The ink stays churning inside the cool gut of the creature, all eight arms reaching and twisting and gathering. Miniature fish congregate and suck at the bodies of bigger fish, eating the growing algae. Turtles swim the length of entire oceans in order to lay their eggs on the beach where they were born.

  The ship sloshes and the grandmothers sway. They keep their lines steady, most balancing the tiny baseball bats on their laps. They hum. Their voices are crackly and uneven. Some go for television theme songs. Some fumble over old lullabies. They don’t mind that their melodies do not match up—it is nice to hear the humming and to do the humming, just to make noise. To feel the throat vibrating and air in the nose.

  Alice is humming a lullaby invented by her own grandmother about a small horse when she feels a tug at her line. The song dies in her chest. She is holding on with both her hands, each one bearing a wedding ring—husband number one on her right and husband number two on her left. Her knuckles are pale hills, hunkered down, ready for anything. “Fish!” she calls. “Fish!” The other grandmothers shriek and repeat, “Fish! Fish!” They come to her, some faster than others.

  “Stand up!” one yells. “Stand up and let me help you hold that bat.” Alice stands. The woman comes in from behind, threading her arms through Alice’s. The handle of the bat is held now by four hands and it looks like baseball practice, like the coach will, in slow motion, move Alice’s arms in a perfect swing.

  Instead they walk backward, leaning away from the railing. The rope tries to resist. More grandmothers join in, taking the line and hauling the thing up. Arms tire easily. There are those who stand on the sidelines and cheer. It is a long time before the pullers come to the sea-wet part of the rope.

  When the thing finally flops onto the deck, they are surprised to see that built into the fish’s forehead is a small pole with a fleshy light at the end, a greenish bulb. “You must have come from very far down,” Alice says to the fish, “to have your own lantern.” The grandmothers circle up, everything dark except the round light, which illuminates a gnash of long, sharp teeth. The heavy scales reflect the moonlight in vague arches. The fish is not content on deck. It flops its tail, slapping.

  “I know that fish. That’s an angler,” one grandmother says.

  “This fish really exists?” asks another.

  “We should name it,” someone ventures. “I’d like to name it Marty, after my husband.” This is met with silence.

  “I’d like to name it Harriet, after my mother,” someone else tries.

  “And I’d like to name it Marcello.” They add names: Bill, Mort, Jesus, Kayla, Albert, Martha, Susan, Jeanette, Anne, Ned, Hank, as if throwing pennies into a fountain. The fish flops as it takes on the names of loved ones.

  “It’s my fish,” Alice says, “and I am going to name him Fishy. But he can have all those others as middle names.” This does not meet opposition. They stand there over him and do not speak, but in all their heads are prayers. They throw them at the scaled creature, at his round body, at his ugly face. They hope for the good ones to get what they deserve. They hope for the lost ones to get home, for the prices to go down, for more days in the backyard for everyone. Fishy’s light goes a little soft and his eyes are dark liquid balls with shivers of moon inside. Alice bends down and picks the fish up. “Hello, Fishy,” she says. She kisses her fingertips and touches them to its head. “I think we better throw you back now.” She hobbles to the edge of the boat, tired after the long pull, while the knot of old ladies watches. She hums as she goes, returning to the lullaby about the horse. When she reaches the railing, she turns back to the huddle and holds Fishy up for his goodbyes.

  “Goodbye!” “Goodbye, Neil!” “Goodbye, Albert!” “Goodbye, Nixon!” “Goodbye, Bill!” they chant. And out he goes. He does not hit the hull but makes a very straight, very fast journey back to the water, where he will continue to navigate the darkness with his green bulb. On deck some of the grandmothers kneel over the pool of water where Fishy had been. They dip their fingers in it and put it on their foreheads. They taste it, their dry old tongues bitten by the salt.

  • • •

  IT IS A WARM NIGHT and though the rest of the grandmothers go inside to their claimed cabins, Alice lies down on deck. She covers herself with her blanket. “I think tomorrow is Wednesday,” she says to herself. “The garbage goes out on Wednesday.” She can hear the sound of the truck, green and screeching as it devours up the trash and smashes it down. “It’s the day I teach poetry, in my apartment.” The day that she will not attend is laid out before her, the newspaper that she will not read lands at her doorstep. The phone, the refrigerator, the cat. She holds her own hands.

  In a hospital room, four gr
own children surround their mother. Nervous, one eats a bag of chips. Another opens a book of poems, searches for the exact right words. The nurses prepare swabs, towels. Grandchildren collect around the bedside. It is not dark in the room but it is not light either, and even the city outside whispers. There are sailboats slipping along the surface of the lake. They tack around red buoys. The sailors’ voices cannot be heard this high, this far away—the whole world between them—still their boats are part of this big view. When a telephone in the corner rings, the only son chats with two of his mother’s oldest friends before he says, “They’re going to take the tubes out of her lungs. Any minute.” One daughter rubs her mother’s hands with lotion. “It’s in and out, just like this,” she says, breathing to show breathing. “Go as long as you want. It can be two minutes and it can be ten years.”

  When the son hangs up the phone, he asks his mother, “Do you have any idea how many people adore you?” And this woman, this mother and grandmother, smiles wide enough that her teeth, treasures in that cave, shine.

  • • •

  THE BOAT IS ROCKING, the sea stretching around her.

  “Do you think this is it?” Alice asks, but there is no answer. “There are people I was hoping to see again!” she calls out to the dark. Her knees are tucked together, legs folded like wings. Below, so much water moves restlessly. Above, the air does the same.

  The gulls still circle even though it is too dark to hunt. “Do you know,” Alice yells to the birds above, “that I have not been swimming in ages? How do you not swim in such a great big ocean?” Soon she is tying great knots along the enormous rope, every foot and a half. The knots are the size of her head. It gets harder and harder the farther she gets from the end. Her palms are sore. Each knot she ties, she tries to remember a person she loves. She gets the name and the face in her mind. The Jewish boy she wasn’t allowed to see; her cousin, whom she always got in trouble with as a girl; her brother, whom she loved better than others did; her mother, who ended it all when she thought things were starting to get unsightly. Her two husbands, whose necks she could still smell, who had left her, one and then the next, alone on the turning earth. She thinks to herself, Now I can say that I love them all. I am an old woman and no one will try to dissuade me. All the single fibers, twisted together into ten, the ten into a hundred, the hundred into a thousand.

  She takes her dress off and makes the trip in her white slip. She can feel the wind moving through her loose cotton underwear, but it is the slip that really dances. It puffs up and looks, at moments, like a wedding gown, then pastes itself to her body, every shape underneath mimicked by the fabric. The separation of the legs is defined along with the cut of the waist. The rope swings gently, and the clinging lady with it.

  “I don’t know if I can make it!” Alice calls up to the gulls. She is more than halfway down. Again, as her feet move to a new knot, she remembers a person she loves.

  Her feet slide to the next knot and hands follow.

  Alice reaches the water. When she touches down, the water stings. “It’s cold,” she relays to the dry air. But she wants to let go of the rope. She wants to be free of the climb, so she lets herself fall in, her entire weight let loose in the water. It catches her easily and she dunks her head under. She laughs the laugh of a cold, floating person. She waves her arms and lets the yips come out of her mouth. She peers below, trying to see, but the only things are her own feet haloed by green phosphorescence, kicking and kicking and kicking.

  “Will both of my husbands be mine again?” she calls to the birds or the fish or the sky. “Can I love them again now?” She does not get her answer. Her slip rises up around her like a tutu. She looks now like a ballerina on a music box, legs bared under the high-flying skirt. The material is soft and brushes Alice’s arms. She does not try to hold the slip down. Her breasts float up. All around her the green light of stirred water.

  The boat groans and leans away, then begins to slip across the smooth sea. Alice does not feel herself moving and the ship leaves no wake, yet there is much morning-bright water between them. Her rope slaps at the hull, quieter as it goes, until all she hears is the echo of a sound no longer taking place, just her ear’s memory of that song. The ocean is full and the sky is full—how plentiful the elements are! Alice floats on her back at the exact point of their meeting, held like a prayer between two hands pressed together.

  She dives under and spins, making a lopsided flip, and emerges with her hair stuck to her face. Drops fall from her chin in a glowing chain. They fall from her hair and from her ears and from the tip of her nose. They fall from eyelashes and from the lobes of her ears. The drops join back up with the whole ocean and disappear inside that enormous body. Alice throws her arms up in ta-da position, water flying off in a great celebration of sparks.

  Poppyseed

  LAURA AND I CELEBRATED my new job for the sake of having something to celebrate. I picked up a mushroom pizza and a six-pack of Diet Cokes, and Laura and I sat on a picnic blanket in the middle of our suburban front yard. Poppy sat there too, only she was in her stroller bed as always. The grass was craning out of the dirt and the birds were going for all our scraps. We lay on our backs like Poppy does, flat down, and looked at the graying blue of the sky. It came at us. Storming us with its color, with its light.

  That afternoon, when I accepted the job as the head guide of the ghost tour on the retired ocean liner, the boss told me I could write my own content for the tour. Mr. Peterson said, “We love that you are creative. We think that’s so cool!”

  I shook his hand and then I sat in the car and let go of a few tears. I had to. It was the first time anyone was paying me to write something and it was the worst kind of writing. Shameful, jokey, forgettable.

  “Thank you for taking this job,” Laura said, without turning to look at me. “I know you don’t want it.”

  “I don’t not want it. I want to do whatever I need to do.”

  “Do you want to ever try again?” she asked, looking at her middle.

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “My mother would keep helping with money.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  When the sun dropped behind the trees, their shadows got long and greedy. We went inside and threw away the rest of our dinner, kissed our mute and immobile kin good-night. Our stunted eight-year-old. She didn’t meet our eyes, but she did make some noises; she did hold our fingers in each of her fists, Laura’s in her right and mine in her left.

  We stood there in a chain like that until she let go and released us.

  Dear Poppy,

  I had to tell your father about the pubic hairs. I tried to call him at work, but I didn’t get him—I couldn’t put the news on his voice mail. I waited until he was home and we had eaten our dinner and I asked him, “How was work, honey?”

  He said, “I got there on time and I left on time. I found a guy to install something that will make the ladders shake all at once in the boiler room. It’s very loud.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “They say that’s good. Noise and light—my job.”

  We ate ice cream and held hands over you on the couch.

  I said, “She’s really growing up.” He squinted at me.

  “Are you joking?” he asked. “She’s the same as always. She might look like a second grader, but really, she is exactly, exactly the same as always.”

  “She’s longer,” I said. “But also . . .” I pulled your pants down where, beyond the pink elastic-squeezed line, a few terrible hairs were pressed flat to your skin. He covered you quickly and closed his eyes. He isn’t mad at you, Poppy. You are the size and shape of a regular eight-year-old, with a baby’s brain. How could it be that your body is getting ahead? As we sat there looking over you, covered now, Roger kept saying your age, eight, to himself. Eight, eight.

  “Her body doesn’t have a plan,” Dr. Keller told us on the phone. “Next she’s going to get a period, you know.” He so
unded as if he was scolding us for eating too much sugar. Your father was on the phone in the kitchen and I was on the other line, sitting on our bed. I could hear him breathing through the wires.

  “It sounds to me like her body does have a plan. It’s a bad plan, but it’s a plan,” I said. “I guess you must have a better one?”

  “We could do a hysterectomy. This is actually a no-big-deal procedure. Hundreds are done every day. She has no use for a uterus.”

  I imagined your organs, each slick and pumping shape tucked inside you, with a hole in the middle. I wondered if the rest would ooze over into the new space, if they would grow bigger or else rattle around.

  “And there is the possibility that breasts would cause further discomfort.”

  “You seem to have this all figured out,” Roger said. I heard him in the phone and also in the house. I heard the chair squeaking under him.

  The doctor told us a story of you later, at a time when you have grown too big to lift and we have hired a large caretaker to help out, and this person happens to be a man and he brushes up against you one day and your nipples harden. And he takes this to mean something.

  “Are you suggesting we cut her breasts off, when she gets them?” I asked.

  “No, no. Much simpler. We remove the buds.”

  “There are buds?”

  “They look like little almonds,” he said, “and without them, she remains flat and safe. Nothing grows without a seed.” Dr. Keller rolled on, his voice raised up in a smile. “We can solve another problem too. If we put her on enough hormones, her bones will fuse. We can freeze her at her current size. She’ll always fit in your arms.”