A Guide to Being Born: Stories (10 page)

Again, my parents come knocking. “We have to hold a cremation,” they say. “Are you ready? Put on your shorts.” Out the window I see that the hole has been opened. Everything we worked to dig down has been dug up. My mother’s hair is unbrushed. She is still wearing her nightgown and my father has only his underwear on.

“Dogs,” he says.

“We can do a cremation here, at the house?” I ask.

“We build a fire,” my father says.

“Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?”

“There isn’t a whole cat,” my mother says.

“What is there?”

“Parts of a cat,” they say together.

“Bones?” I ask.

“Mostly. And some fur. And some face.”

The sun is now exactly overhead. The trees are sweating from the undersides of their leaves. The air does not move; it is a single object set in place. I am dripping by the time I leave my doorstep. Belbog is back out with his stand and a new pitcher. He is wearing all black. He waves. I do not wave back. Wood is taken from the shed and formed into a pyramid. I haul the three sun chairs together. My mother makes cucumber sandwiches. I walk across the street to Belbog’s stand.

“I would like three glasses, please,” I offer, and he pours.

He looks himself up and down. “We are mourning,” he says. “I am wearing black.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“No charge for the beverage,” he says. “It is on my house. What are you doing now?”

“A cremation,” I tell him. “Don’t come over.”

“If you need any more beverage, I will be here all day. I invite you to come and help me. We will split the profits fifty–fifty. Everything fair and even.”

“Not today. I have plans.”

I pass the cups out and put my drink-cooled hand on my mother’s forehead. “Nice, isn’t it?” I ask. She sighs and smiles under my palm. Even though her head heats me back up right away, I want to leave my hand there and let her burn it. Sear it if she wants.

The fire really gets going. It takes over the wood, sucking on it.

“Can I see the pieces?” I want to know. My father takes out another Ziploc bag full of bones and shreds. Both ears are there. There is a leg with a paw attached. A snout and nose.

“We can’t put that right into the fire—we’ll never be able to find it again,” my mother says.

“Find it again?” my father asks.

“The whole point of a cremation is the ashes. We won’t know which are Houdini’s ashes and which are the wood’s ashes. We have to sprinkle the ashes later, as part of the ceremony. To release Houdini into the place he loved best.” My mother goes inside for a pan. Right away, the fur begins to sizzle away and the smell of it is everywhere. The smoke of the fire is turning my whole sky gray. It is closing in. I begin not to be able to see the street. The world is farther and farther away.

My mother goes inside and changes into a bikini.

“You look hot,” my father tells her when she comes back outside. The fire is going and smoke is everywhere.

“I might as well get some color,” she says, smiling. She lies back in her chair, puts a big hat over her eyes. She moves her toes to a beat that I cannot hear. Her fingers wrap around the ends of the armrests like they have been melted there.

“So,” my father says, “your first burial and your first cremation, all in one day.”

“I have never been alive without Houdini.”

He gives Houdini’s bone-pan a little shake. “We are doing the best thing.” The bones have not turned to ash. They have browned a little and they rattle deeper when they hit the sides of the pan.

“The bones are still just bones,” I say.

“We’ll pound them if we have to,” he answers.

My father closes his eyes and listens to the world around him. I listen too, trying to see what he hears. The fire spits and crackles. The bones spit and crackle. The fur has long since sizzled away, and the fleshy bits smell but make no more sound now that all the moisture has left them. There are birds everywhere, as usual. Cars pass in anticipated bursts. There is no danger that they will hit my cat. He is safe here now in his pan.

My mother starts up snoring and my father stands. “Sleeping beauty,” he says, and goes to pee into the rose bushes at the edge of the house. I follow.

“She’d kill us if she saw us,” he tells me, as our twin streams run in arcs and jump when they hit the green, green leaves. “I have a plan,” my father tells me. “We are going to run in the sprinklers.” His eyes are slippery and ready. “It’s hot as shit out here. Let’s cool off.”

“We are in the middle of a cremation,” I tell him.

“I am your father,” he says. “I’m running the ceremony and I know it’s all right to take a break. Houdini doesn’t need us right now. He will do fine without us. Your mother will keep track of him.”

“My mother is asleep.”

“This is your chance to celebrate summer with your father. No one else.”

He turns the spigot on and water pours out in a fan. We strip down to our underwear and hold hands. We wait until the fan comes up over our heads, dropping pieces of itself onto our waiting hair. My father laughs in triumphant stabs. We are wet and wetter.

My mother sleeps her sleep and I do not go to her with a hand outstretched, do not help her open her eyes. This celebration is only for my father and me. She is missing everything and I let her.

“Now this time,” he says, “I want us to high-five in the middle of the jump, right when the water hits us.” When I leap, we smack our palms together. The water comes up and pummels the underside of my thighs. My crotch.

The water runs in streams all over the yard. Streams join with other streams and make themselves wide. They reach the fire. They surround it. They run inside and turn to steam. The wood is wet. The wood screams and goes soft. The fire turns to smoke, black and thick. The ashes of the wood are a gray mush. The bones of Houdini float in a gray soup. The smoke is blacker. The water is in my eyes and the smoke is in my lungs. We do not stop jumping. We do not stop lying down right in the sprinkler’s path, where the water crashes down on our faces, shoots us full of holes.

•   •   •

I
WAKE
UP
ON
THE
COUCH.
The sun is heavy and orange through the kitchen window. I can hear my parents talking, laughing. I go to the doorway of the kitchen and watch them. My mother is still in her bikini and she is sitting on the counter. My father is wearing a T-shirt and no pants. He is leaning up against her, feeding her a piece of apple. I can practically feel how cold his skin is against hers. He pretends to put the apple in her nose. She laughs and turns away. He pretends to put it in her ear, and she laughs and wraps her head in her arms. He leans in and puts his mouth onto her mouth, and she uncovers. She does not turn away.

“Is it time to pound the bones?” I ask.

“Shit, kid,” my father says.

“Can you go and collect some rocks?” My mother smiles. “Big ones?”

“Are you going to eat that apple or aren’t you?” I ask her.

“Your job is to go and find a rock,” she tells me, harder this time.

“We got wet in the sprinklers and you slept through it,” I say. She laughs at me. “I know exactly what you are doing,” I tell them and go outside. “You’re trying to get rid of me. This family is getting smaller by the hour.”

“This here,” my mother says, motioning the small distance between the two of them, “is what made you. You don’t even exist without this.” I slam the front door as hard as I can. I collect one big rock. Belbog waves to me, then comes over. I hear the sound of my parents making their way up the stairs, then their voices through their open window.

“Business is slow!” he says. “Do you want to go climb something?”

“I’m in the middle of a ceremony,” I say. He watches while I pull the bones out of the pan and put them on the doorstep, which is stained with something that could either be juice or blood. I hit them, bone by bone, smash by smash, with my big rock. They break into pieces. They get smaller. They get dusty. The dust gets into my eyes but I do not wipe it away. I keep pounding.

I pound until all the bones are gone, until they are a pile of gray.

“Do you want some refreshing drink?” Belbog asks me. “I could bring it here.”

Belbog is sweating, dressed in black long-sleeves for our funeral even though he wasn’t invited.

“All right,” I tell him. “Yes. But I need to run inside for a few minutes first.”

“Thank you,” he says, and smiles.

“Will you please open the door for me?” I ask.

I gather the ash in my cupped palms, carry it carefully inside. Some of it catches on the air and drifts. I move as slowly as I can, keeping my hands perfectly still. I climb the stairs. I push open the door to my parents’ bedroom with my foot and find them there, naked and stacked.

“You can’t be in here,” my mother says, grabbing for the covers. “We are doing something.”

“I am doing something too!” I tell her, and I get up onto the bed, stand over them and make a crack in the cup of my hands. “Congratulations!” Ashes fall down over my father’s back. “Good for you!” They fall over his head and coat the strands of hair. They fall onto his butt and onto the flat surface of the bed. They turn him gray. They stay in the air. The air is full of them, full of Houdini.

“Houdini is dead!” I say. “I love you and I hate you! Welcome to your life!” I throw the last of the smashed bones up in a cloud, a finale. I applaud.

Houdini surrounds us all. He is gritty on my parents’ sweaty bodies. The sun makes his particles look like sparks. My mother and father are statues, gray and frozen, made out of muddy earth, as if they were the ones who had been buried alive. When they breathe in, I can see gulps of Houdini sucked into the holes of their mouths, coating even their pink gullets. All of us breathe the same ashy air—Houdini fills us up, binds us all together. When we breathe out, we send him in gusts, flying over everything that stabs, everything that reaches.

AS
BUCK
AND
HER
SUPPLY BAG
struck out through the side door, Mother Mom was lurking under the overhang waiting for her prey. She was a resourceful woman and always said she didn’t see any reason not to make use of their bountiful wooded surroundings. Mother Mom had bird feeders set up every foot along the eaves of the house, probably two hundred or more of them, mostly homemade, and she hung out in the shadows with a large green net, catching whatever winged creature landed on whichever seed-filled box.

Her hands were webs of scratches and cuts from transferring the terrified creatures into the large metal cages also swinging from the eaves. She tapped her wrist—the sign that Buck should be home in time to help cook dinner—and they blew noiseless kisses at each other.

Beyond Mother Mom’s bird terrain was Grandma Pete’s shed, where she sat on an old office chair with her cane in one hand and a picture of her dead husband in his military regalia in the other.

“Good morning, Grandma Pete,” Buck yelled.

“Good day, Lady Buck,” she grumbled back. Buck joined Grandma Pete on the porch for the last inning of a baseball game on the radio. Baseball had come into their lives recently, after Grandma Pete found a picture of her dear husband in his handsome youth at the pitcher’s mound. Listening to the game, Grandma Pete hit her cane against the floorboards at all the calls, good or bad, while Buck swung her pitching arm right along with the man on the mound.

“How’s that look, Grandma Pete?”

“Sure,” Grandma Pete answered, “looks like a pitch.” When the game ended, they turned the radio off and listened to the outside world get its noises back. Grandma Pete started up telling the same four stories she always told about her husband: the day he left for the war, the day their daughter was born, the day he brought home a Christmas goose and four dozen roses even though it wasn’t Christmas, and the day he died.

Buck didn’t stay long. She wasn’t in the mood for anything except tossing her ball around in practice for a major league baseball career in a future she hoped was extremely near in time and far in distance from here.

•   •   •

THERE
WAS
A
THICKET
in the woods with a soft grass floor and some low pine branches that made the whole place feel nestlike. There were blackberry bushes thorning their way over every other plant, and the smell of the dropped fruit rotting on the forest floor rose up warm and sweet. The thicket had a big clearing nearby that made a good place to toss the ball. Buck threw the ball one way and then ran over, found it and threw it back the other way. She had colonies of poison-oak blisters on her wrists from bad aim, so in order to improve, she set up targets where a pinecone was balanced on the stump of dead tree. She tried to hit the pinecone so it made a satisfying
thwap
and its scales detached and scattered like a firework.

When she got tired of going after the ball every time, she threw it up in the air and tried to get right beneath it, opening her hand so it had no place else to land. When she got hungry, she went into her supply bag for a pair of apples.

“You’re eating two apples?” someone’s voice said from out of the bushes. Buck stood up and looked.

“Who said that?” A man in an old gray military uniform came up to sitting. He had a black mustache full of dried mud. “You gonna kill me?” she asked.

“I won’t kill anybody. You’re eating two apples,” he said again.

“One apple makes me hungry and the other makes me full,” she answered.

“You can call me General,” he said, and he put his hand out.

“Buck,” she answered.

He told her, “It’s been lovely to make your acquaintance. If you need anything at all, I’ll be in this sunny spot making a list of what has been lost.”

“You are absolutely certain that you won’t kill me?” She thought about the promise teachers and parents always made her make about strangers. “Or kidnap me?”

“I swear.”

Buck ate the rest of the first apple and the second one too, then wound up and threw the cores. They sailed into the trees and she didn’t hear them land. “And it’s gone!” she said in an announcer voice. The General sat with his eyes squinched up, and Buck chased herself across the tall grass while the bugs rubbed their wings together in one collective grind.

“So is your daddy into cowboys or something? Buck Rogers?” the General asked out of the quiet.

“Yes, sir. Was. But my mom was into First Ladies and they had it out.” Buck’s main plan in life was acting normal no matter what. She tried never to show fear, to always appear as if she was well acquainted with the situation at hand. “My real name is Mamie, after Mrs. Eisenhower, but no one calls me that.”

The General nodded and stretched. “I suppose in this case they both won.”

“I guess,” Buck agreed, watching the General adjust his knee-high boots and his heavy coat, not at all suitable for this hot July day. “Have you figured out what’s lost?” Buck asked.

“Oh, many things. My men. I’m going through their names, trying to remember all of them, first, middle and last.”

“Where did they go?”

“Yanks got them.” The General sighed. “Every time. Yanks.” And this thought seemed to exhaust him in a way he hadn’t expected. His arms flopped out on top of crossed legs. Buck sat as well and studied the two rows of brass buttons and the golden tassels on his costume. The jacket looked sort of like a dress, if a short one, and the pants ended at the knee, where the boots took over. There were a good many holes.

“So anyway . . .” Buck said, hoping this might get them talking. The man only nodded and looked up at the trees. They sat there in the heavy air for a few minutes before Buck got up and walked to the edge of the clearing, where she took her white ball out of her pocket and threw it as far as she could. Then she ran over, retrieved the ball out of the brush and threw it again. She jogged to meet it. The General sat watching while the ball traveled back and forth and Buck after it. After a particularly long throw, the General said, “Excellent throw.”

Buck said, “Thanks. You think it’s good enough for the majors?”

Then the General stood up and moved into position on the opposite side of the grassy space from the girl, who paused, confused for a moment, before realizing that she was being offered a second set of hands. Someone to catch and return.

“Could be, except you’re a girl.” Buck aimed and the General caught. Now it was only the ball that traveled back and forth and, outside of a few steps this way or that and the very rare dive, Buck stayed still.

“So what are you doing here?” Buck yelled.

“Throwing this ball!” the General yelled back.

“No! Here! What are you doing here?” Buck called.

“Being dead!” the General returned, along with the ball that Buck held on to while deciding whether to peel out and run for home or act natural. She was not a fast runner.

“Oh!” she tried out.

“I don’t happen to be alive anymore!” the General explained.

“I see!” Buck yelled back, not really assured. They pitched and caught, pitched and caught, moving together slowly until they were in better talking distance. “Are you going to explain yourself?”

“When I was first killed,” he explained, “I felt very dead. Blank. I could feel that my heart was still and that my spine was shut down. All around me there were other bodies, some in blue and some in gray, but all of them dead too. All of them blank and still. At one point, I stood up before I even realized it didn’t make sense for me to try something like that, and, looking down at my bug-sucked body, I wanted to but could not throw up.”

“Are you a ghost?” Buck asked.

“I’m a man who died. Whatever else that makes me, I don’t know.”

“All right, go on.”

“I kicked and identified my men. Some of them had their arms out as if trying to fly, some faces down, noses smashed into the dirt, some faces up, eyes open, wind scavenging them. Oxygenating. Decomposing.” The General looked at Buck’s face and changed the subject. “I’m sorry. You know much about the game of baseball?” he asked.

“I know my favorite pitcher is Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown because he lost one and a half fingers to a corn shredder.”

“I saw him play a game, as a matter of fact. Chicago, 1908, against the New York Giants. They couldn’t hardly get a hit.”

“You saw him pitch a baseball game in 1908?” Buck asked.

“I have had to keep myself busy. I tried going home to my wife when I was first dead. She couldn’t see me. I sat at our kitchen table and watched her make a pot of soup. I watched her cut up a turnip and three potatoes. I watched her eat the soup alone while I was right next to her.” The General stopped talking and let his head fall back. The trees were a frame for a flat circle of sky whose blue was sharp. “I left. I left before she even knew I was dead.”

“But I can see you.”

“Over time I learned how to toughen up my edges. By then, my Rosie was gone and there wasn’t a home for me to be seen in,” the General explained. “My wife was going to mourn me whether I was in her bed or not, and I couldn’t stand to see it happen. I hoped Rosie and I would get to be dead together someday, and while I was waiting, I went for a walk. For a while it was a fresh sense of freedom every day. I didn’t need to eat or sleep and I didn’t get tired. I went to some ballparks and watched the game of baseball grow up. It was just coming around when I was alive. I found myself some nice spots by the ocean, which I had never seen before, and pretty much just looked out at it.”

“You got bored and lonely,” Buck said.

“I cannot tell you how bored I got. I have been dead for one hundred twenty-two years. My wife never showed up on the other side.” They sat there in silence while Buck tried to imagine that length of time. She was already bored and lonely and she wasn’t even thirteen yet. She stared into the woods, where the trees had their hands up to the sun, their tall noses in as much air as they could reach.

“You know what? No one in my family goes by their real name,” Buck said, a cheerful offering.

“Is that a fact?” The General smiled, grateful.

“That is.”

“If you tell me the story, I’ll keep throwing this ball with you,” he said.

“Better still, we can trade, one of mine for one of yours.” Buck began to tell him the story exactly as it had been told to her. A family history so well memorized she didn’t pause once.

•   •   •

“POPS,
THAT’S
MY
DAD,
who was previously known as Dale, took to the road when he was sixteen on his motorcycle back in the Seventies, not because he was a hippie but because he had gotten wind of the whole free-love aspect and decided he was through hiding his naked magazines in three nested shoe boxes otherwise full of insect, rock and lost-tooth collections. His mother was a cleaner and a duster and he counted himself lucky that she hadn’t stumbled on them yet. The motorcycle had been his own father’s before his own father wasn’t able to ride one anymore due to the loss of his legs in a war that was minor on the books.

“Pops had given himself that name the very minute he got out of his parents’ driveway on his bike. He thought it would make him sound older and like more of an established lover.

“He never made it all the way to San Francisco, but he did talk a lot of long-haired girls out of their clothes, sometimes more than one at a time, and as far as he was concerned, that was all the success a man ever needed. He could conjure up every single one of those girls: name, date and length of leg, perfectly, without missing one. The only thing he added later was a mustache for himself, a nice thick one, when in fact at sixteen he had been little able to get three or four hairs to jut out at the same time from his soft upper lip.”

“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.”