A Guide to Being Born: Stories (16 page)

“Spin again,” Professor Baker said. On his second spin, the bottle pointed to a woman whose hair, skin and dress were nearly the same shade of brownish pink.

“I think you are trying to do me a favor,” he said to the circle. The woman looked up at him through her square bangs and smiled, rocking forward onto her hands and knees. He turned his face and offered his cheek to her. She put her lips to his skin and held them there. They were warm and full of questions.

•   •   •

PEOPLE
HAD
COME
to the funeral heavy with flowers. Faustus stood in the circle with the others—people from the department, people from the neighborhood, cousins. His and Petra’s parents were all dead or too senile to travel, and the two of them had no children. Faustus wished in that moment for someone who felt the loss more than he. He wished for a daughter, eyelids swollen from crying, whom he could put his arm around and comfort, whom he could drive home, where they would sit in the dark of the living room and listen carefully to the absence of their wife and mother. Just hear the house without her.

Faustus had read a poem by Ezra Pound over the hole in the ground and each of the gathered people stooped down and took a handful of dirt to throw on the lowered box. The earth accepted Petra in and the living made their way inside, where they stood together reducing the hill of a vegetable platter and talking in voices much quieter than necessary. The guests stayed long enough to prove that they were willing to give up their Sunday afternoon even though it was a beautiful day, even though it was getting close to summer. If any of them had plans for tennis later or for barbecues, they did not let it show. Faustus imagined them that evening in their various backyards refusing plates of grilled chicken, saying, “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much at that
funeral
.”

Like the rest of the guests, Faustus finally went home. He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.

•   •   •

EVENTUALLY,
most of the cookie-savers ate their cookies. They sneaked off into dark corners or pretended to sneeze, quickly stuffing the crunchy morsel into their mouths. They did not want to be spotted and have to share. One woman, an administrator in the Composition Department who wanted her saved cookie to last a long time, held it flat against her palm and licked it over and over like a popsicle.

An African filmologist approached the podium. He wore denim shorts and white socks pulled all the way up to his knees and a sport coat. He had three watches on, all of which told him that it was late and he was tired. He said just a few words, then began that practiced acceptance speech for whichever prize he might someday be awarded. “I want to thank you for this incredible honor. When I was a boy, I sneaked into the cinema one afternoon and, in a way, I have never left that dark room full of magic.” The professors let his speech drift in and around them. To hear him thank his mother the way he did, and the teachers of his youth, felt as though they were all thanking their mothers and the teachers of their youth. He leaned his forehead on the wooden surface of the podium and fell asleep like that, his arms up around his head, the dream of acknowledgment hovering above. The microphone was on, and the in and out of his breathing was amplified through the whole room.

“Tell me if something happens,” the professors said to one another, and everyone closed their eyes. Some lay on the shoulders of others, drooling onto the tweed or houndstooth. Some slept in piles on the floor like puppies. Some found places alone. A Religious Studies lecturer sucked her thumb. Someone turned off the lights, and since there were no windows, the auditorium was completely dark.

Faustus and the rest of the spin-the-bottlers lay down in a circle like toppled dominoes, each head finding rest on a foreign set of legs. Faustus’s right ear was suctioned to the monochromatic woman’s bare calf. The calf did not make noises the way a stomach might. It must have been busy in there, distributing blood to each sinew of muscle, but it did so in silence.

He could not see it, but in the dark around him, some players held hands, sweaty and excited. Faustus looked into the dark and tried to make a list of reasons for existing. Kissing was on there, and so were hollandaise sauce and racquetball.

Suddenly he felt a hand on his face, its digits and palm covering most of his features. It was not a gentle touch, exactly. He felt he was the ocean floor and this was an exploratory machine out to map his exact topography. He tried to breathe consistently in order not to throw off the findings. The curious hand stuck three of its fingers into his mouth, and he sucked them like a baby. Faustus was desperately close to believing that the fingertips belonged to Petra, that if he followed them to the hand, wrist and arm, he would find his wife’s body there. All her inner workings clean and polished. He did not move the hand for a long time. He let it sit, heavy on his chin, while all around him, around all of them, the amplified breathing rattled out from the speakers.

But the fingers were unknown and, he checked, ringless. He carefully moved the hand away, placing it on top of its outstretched twin. He extracted himself from the circle and went to the podium, where he held the African filmologist in his own arms and began to talk quietly into the microphone.

“I have been weeding around the Johnny-jump-ups and watering the apricot tree. Yesterday the poppies were looking droopy, so I gave them extra water and they perked right up. It was amazing how quickly they reacted. Remember how the upstairs toilet was starting to leak? I think it’s finally time to replace it. I went to the store last weekend, but I couldn’t decide what to buy. I needed your help. All toilets are ugly and all toilets have the same gross function and I don’t know how to prefer one over another. You would have had a much less emotional reaction to this problem. I also wish you had been there to harvest the basil. And I’ve been reading Chekhov, whom I know you love. Food and books and shit, I guess that’s what you’re missing.”

If anyone was awake, they did not make a sound. Faustus said, “I’m not making a very good argument for your return. I promise that if you were here, I would not make you go to the hardware store. If you were here, I would set you up in the yard with a blanket and a glass of iced tea to watch the hummingbirds hover over the sweet syrup in the feeder. You would never have to move if you didn’t want to.” He looked at his left hand, the ring around and around his finger.

“Petra, people tell me I will ‘move on’ and I can’t believe it. But if it does ever happen, and I forget to feel this pressing absence of you, if I make it through a meaningless party and don’t remember to hate everyone for their peaceful lives until the morning, please know that I am already sorry. I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don’t have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.”

He hung the filmologist back over the podium like a drying suit. Faustus did not return to the monochromatic woman and her exploring hand. And he did not leave or try to leave. He was glad to be able to fall asleep shrouded by the breath of so many others, and he did so curled up under the dessert table.

•   •   •

HOURS
LATER,
with arms draped over other arms and heads nested in the smalls of unfamiliar backs, the professors began to awaken. They made small noises and licked their dry lips. There was no light to see where they were, or who they were lying on. They were hungry. They began to freak out.

“Darkness!” someone yelled.

“Who am I?” one philosopher shouted. The professors climbed over one another like blind worms. They clawed at their own faces in dramatic fashion. For some, this was very satisfying. They felt that they might have a story to tell, a story of insanity and confusion, of terror and, they hoped, of survival. There was a certain disappointment when the buzzing of the fluorescent lights came on and all their wrinkles and mussed hair was revealed in one startling moment.

They looked around and realized with some sadness that they were not refugees or prisoners of war locked in a shabby cell someplace in Africa after having been arrested for their daring, dangerous thoughts. They were not forgotten miners trapped in the coal-black darkness of a tunnel in Kentucky. They were not persecuted intellectuals in a country that valued only hockey and civil war. The professors recognized the school logo on the coffee urns and on the podium. They recognized the nicely reupholstered seats. They recognized one another. Those who had kissed regretted it. Those who had spooned on the floor regretted it less, but still felt some embarrassment, particularly if they had been the Baby Spoon, and the Mama Spoon had been from their own department.

Suddenly, the undergraduate opened the big double door to the outside. The world had been right there, four small inches of squeaky metal away. The professors spilled out into the light. They imagined violin music getting louder as they exited, their arms raised over their heads, praising salvation and daylight. Around them, students were on their way to class. Some even recognized teachers they had had. Teachers whose hair was sticking up all over. Some of whom had their shirts one button off.

Faustus came back awake to the sound of the freed men and women. He was lying on his shirt, his uneaten cookie crushed in his breast pocket. A huge river of light washed into the room, whiting everything out for Faustus, whose eyes had gotten used to dimness.

THE
GIRLS
ARE
WORMED
OUT
across the floor under down comforters even though daytime is hardly over, trying to get a jump-start on the slumber party. “My parents both have perfect love-arms,” Genevieve tells her friends. “Both of them can write. They write love letters to each other. It’s almost sick.” No one thinks this is sick. Everyone wants this. Pheenie, Marybeth, Sara P. and Sara T. all want to have the proof.

Though the girls know many two-armers, even some who seem happy and in love, what they talk about are those with love-grown arms. “My mom doesn’t have anything and my dad just has fingers growing out of his chest. He can’t control them and they grab at anything that is close enough,” says Pheenie.

“My grandmother has seven, but she was always married to my grandfather. She says she fell in love with him over and over,” Sarah T. adds. Seven is an unusual number. Two sometimes, maybe three, but past that something important must have gone wrong. And still, the girls are greeted every morning by the television news anchors, their teeth white, their hair unyielding and their single, perfect love-grown arms, offering no hint of uncertainty.

Sarah P. lowers her head. “My dad’s arm keeps growing. It drags on the floor. It is soft and he can wrap it up and tie it in a knot.”

Genevieve, putting her hand on Sarah P.’s sleeping-bag-burrowed body, says, “I wonder what mine will be like. I want to have two. I think it’s better to fall in love twice, once to try it out and twice to know for sure. I want the first arm to be a stump and the second to be full grown.”

“I only want one. I only want one perfect one.” Pheenie shakes her head.

The girls go quiet and all the arms of all the loves they do not have yet beat silent beneath their skin. They thump and prepare.

•   •   •

AFTER
ALL
THE
STUDENTS
save the detentioners have left the building for the weekend, Principal Kevin again tells the story of his love. His wife’s beauty surpasses the Louvre, the Sistine. Both his secretaries chirp. They wide-eye his love-grown arm and tilt their heads and wish for what he has.

“You might not know what it feels like, but I do,” he tells them, “and it’s
terrific
.”

In fact, Principal Kevin stuffs his third sleeve. He stuffs it, but no one at school knows he does. The sleeve is filled with a prosthetic, a real fake arm commissioned from the lab at the hospital. It screws onto a threaded metal disc implanted on his chest. At the write end: a stump. The stump is sewn up to look like the hand has been amputated. Principal Kevin is smart enough to know that a fake hand looks fake, and instead of giving up the whole beautiful vision, he tells a story about a kitchen fire in which he saved his wife and daughter but his third hand, his lovely third hand, was burned to a crisp.

But Principal Kevin knows himself. He is sure that if he
did
have a love arm, and if he
had
lost the hand to it, he would have wanted a replacement. It’s the kind of man he is—everything in its place. So, attached to the very real-looking stump with big, obvious screws, is a wooden hand. It is the fakest he could find, an art class model. Against this, the arm looks especially lifelike.

When he comes to the end of the story, one he has told more than once to everyone he has ever met, he manually straightens the jointed wooden fingers and brushes them against each of his secretary’s right cheeks. “The hand burned,” he muses, “but the arm resisted. The arm did not even singe.”

•   •   •

FEW
OF
PRINCIPAL
KEVIN’S
STUDENTS,
his daughter Genevieve among them, have any love-arm development. The girls check constantly in the bathroom between classes, inviting each other to inspect the soft skin of their side-body for bumps. They say they are falling in love, not with the specifics of one boy, but with the idea that such a thing is possible—that they belong to a species built to snap together in everlasting pairs. They feel themselves falling in love with the entirety of the opposite gender, with their own blooming selves, but their bodies do nothing to corroborate. Their skeletons are stubborn and unchanged.

For the boys, any new protrusions would be bad for their social standing. Unless they are extremely religious and plan on a just-legal wedding, an unmoved form is an asset. Certain other anatomical parts have made some very favorable changes, but love can’t break the seal. After high school this changes. Older brothers are proud of their arms. They sit on thrift store couches, where girlfriends rub lotion onto the new branches and kiss them and want to make love so often because there is proof that what they have is real, that something has changed because of it. They lie close in a twin bed afterward and put their extra arms side by side. They let the unfinished appendages warm each other up just by pressing.

•   •   •

DURING
AFTER-SCHOOL
DETENTION,
Miss C lectures about Amelia Earhart because she wants to and the audience can’t go anywhere. She zooms herself around the room like an airplane making swooping turns between desks. She is a two-armer, but that’s not the whole story. From the waist up, she is covered in hands. Dozens. Under the cover of clothing, their fingers move and stretch and wriggle. Sixteen sixteen-year-olds keep out of her way until she drops suddenly and kneels under a desk. “Blammo,” she says in a loud whisper. “I’m gone, disappeared, just like that.” She does not move for a long moment. Chairs squeak. Students hiss. Miss C remains disappeared at a pair of sneakered feet. The boy reaches down like it is an accident and touches her head. He can feel her skybound heat.

When she stands up, she is rippling, the fingers twitter beneath her blouse. After the bell, in the hall, the boy sticks his chest out and imitates with his two original hands. “Oh, Amelia Earhart, I want to jump your bones,” he squawks.

Miss C sticks her head out the door. “You’ve got a poker face now,” she tells him, “but your body will give you away soon enough.”

•   •   •

THE
HIGH
SCHOOL
BOYS
keep rubber gloves in their wallets and inflate them when they want to try to win a girl over. They tuck them under their shirts and let the bulging, breath-warm air-fingers reach out at their dates, indicating what could be.

Of course, the girls know the hands are stand-ins. But when the boys say
, I could really develop feelings
, and they have the visual aid, and when the music pumping out of the speakers has someone singing a harmony and someone singing a melody, the drapery of their clothing is easily removed, and their desperately hopeful limbs cross and twist and hold.

•   •   •

EVEN
PRINCIPAL
KEVIN’S
HOME
MAIL
comes addressed to Principal Kevin. On this Friday, while he waits for his wife to come home and remove his arm so that he can enjoy the evening unencumbered, he spreads the envelopes out on the table until the whole surface is covered with his name. They ask,
Please, if you could spare some money for the children
. Say,
Do you have any idea what kind of excellent interest rate you deserve?
They report the therms used to keep the house warm, the wife’s desires made known to him by her spending on the platinum credit card. A note from his daughter:
Dad, I love you and I’m at Pheenie’s for the night.—Genevieve
. He is alone with the facts of his existence and it makes him tired. Just looking at the debts and balances.

His wife comes in from her exercise class and she finds him here, wilted. He looks at her and picks the prosthetic up with his good left hand like a bone.
Look what I found, take this from me, I have been waiting.

“You could have done it yourself,” she says.

“It’s yours. I want you to do it.”

“We have the PTA meeting tonight,” she reminds him, kissing the arm as if it were real. As if it does not whisper to her that her eyes to him are tiny emptiness and her hair a strangle of ropes and her heart a flicked, rolling marble.

“Will you go in my place? Tell them it’s a headache. I just want a nap and a break.” She kneels on the floor in front of him and takes his shirt off, then twists the arm to the left. The elbow bends as she unscrews, so the arm faces in all the wrong directions.

She puts the arm down on a chair, brushing the hair so it faces in one direction like windblown wheat. She kisses his cheek and returns him to his kingdom of bills. She comes back a moment later with a cloth to wipe clean the metal threads of the attachment, both innie and outtie. They get sweat-damp throughout the day. A shimmer of salt crusts the edges. She dries. She oils and dries again.

She does not take care of his fake love-arm with her real one. She lets that sit against her side, the fingers spread out against her, quiet and still. It is her born-on hands she tends to him with, just as he tends to her with his.

•   •   •

PRINCIPAL
KEVIN’S
ARM
needs caring for like leather does. Cleaning and mink oil. While he sits with his mail, his wife takes it with her into the bathtub and lets it float there while she washes herself, her triangles and spheres and nubs, and her own third arm, this one very real. She cleans both authentic and created with extra-gentle baby shampoo. The wooden hand is heavily waxed, and water beads, then scrambles off, as if afraid. She closes her eyes and leans back against her twisted-up hair, the prosthetic floating limp on the surface of the water, a ship stuck in a tiny, unleavable sea.

“Good bath?” he asks, naked, from the bed when she comes out. The sun shoots off the metal hole in his chest and blinds her. She tightens her robe and turns away, places his arm on a stand by his dresser, where it stretches straight, pointing out the window at the bug-buzzing evening.

“You know you are my peach,” he says to her. “Come and sit.” He strokes what she has grown for him. It is elbow length but unjointed and has a hand, always carefully manicured. He pushes the cuticles back. “My love is bigger than any limb,” he tells her.

“What is mine then?”

•   •   •

THE
BOYS
LIKE
TO
WATCH
Miss C walk down the hall, all those hands and fingers moving together under her clothes, beckoning. This evening, when she makes a trip back and forth to her car, the football team turns from the field where the lowering winter sun skates the grass pink. They watch her search in her bag for keys, which come out glinting. Her hair picks up the light the usual way, but it is her body that receives it in waves, like she is the surface of the ocean and all the water inside is angling for a peek at the great open space of the sky.

Miss C is really named Claribel. She goes into her office alone with the blinds down, door locked, grading papers shirtless before the PTA gets started. Her hands hold things for her: red, blue, green pens. Paper clips and sticky notes. Her breasts are surrounded by a ring of four hands each and look like lakes in a forest, calm, quiet, protected. While she scratches at the paper, the hands clean each other’s nails. They hook fingers.

•   •   •

PRINCIPAL
KEVIN’S
WIFE
also has her own name, which is Jan. She is a committed mother and she has excellent legs. Both are goals she has been able to meet. While the prom committee presents its plan for an Antarctic theme, Claribel leans over and whispers to Jan, “You’ve got great legs.” She is a fan of this appendage, a limb that does not sprout up but comes exclusively with the original configuration, and always in one matched pair. “Your daughter is a real contributor lately,” she adds.

Jan humbles her head but knows it is true. “I am proud of her. I think it’s hard to be the principal’s daughter.”

“He’s such an admirable man.”

“Sure.”

When the meeting is over, they go up to Claribel’s office for a coffee, look out the small window at the football field. The team practices in the dark for a game they need to win. The women talk about teaching and administration. They talk about the graduating class and where they will go to college. Jan’s extra hand emerges out a lavender cuff with a pearl button.

“Your nails look nice,” Claribel remarks. “I have too many hands to take that on. It would cost me thousands of dollars.”

“That would be quite a project,” Jan admits. A flock of blackbirds rushes by and they call out to one another. Jan can see her car in the parking lot waiting to take her home, where she will find her husband on the couch, devouring popcorn and laughing loudly at the commercials, and this thought makes her stomach sink. “You know what? I’ll do them for you,” Jan says. “Your nails. Let’s do them.”