A Guide to Being Born: Stories (8 page)

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.

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 any
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.

“What did you eat?” Annie wanted to know.

“You think this is food related? You think this is from some bad chicken?” Ben snapped.

“It’s from something.” She opened her magazine and paged loudly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She nodded. “You look like someone’s ready to build a city on you. Property lines all set to go.”

The nurse who finally called them in gave the battery of tests very slowly, glancing up at Ben’s new feature every second or so, nervously. She fetched the doctor without bothering to make cheerful small talk. They could hear her on the other side of the curtain: “He has moats . . . He has squares.”

The doctor had the nurse take a picture of him posing with the couple. In it, he made a serious face. A magazine-cover face. But he had no advice, only a tall pile of referrals. In the coming weeks, Ben and Annie scheduled appointments with the heart doctor, the dermatologist, the orthopedist, the cancer specialist, even the ear, nose and throat guy.

Annie woke up the following morning with her arm over her husband’s side and she felt, extending out from his body, a warm, hollow box that seemed to be attached to Ben’s chest. She screamed. She probably woke the baby, swimming in her pool of warm body fluid. She definitely woke her husband, who looked down at his chest and saw a section of it sticking out, a drawer. He sat up. He was barely awake, right out of a dream about an escape from a pack of dogs. He closed the skinless bone drawer with some difficulty, as it was quite stiff. In order to open it again, Ben needed his nails since it had no knob. None of these actions hurt. Ben looked up at his wife in her blue flannel nightgown. She was staring at him with wet eyes. “Look” was all he said.

•   •   •

BEN
AND
ANNIE
packed up for a medical appointment in the afternoon, but it was one they already had: the ob-gyn, for Annie. While her feet were up in the stirrups, she asked the doctor if she had ever happened to see someone with a drawer coming out of his chest. The doctor did not answer, because she thought it was the beginning of a joke.

“Have you?” Annie asked again.

“No, why?” the doctor said, waiting for the punch line. But Annie just started to cry.

The waiting room was empty except for Ben, who had unbuttoned his shirt and sat there opening and closing his drawer. He had a small butter knife, taken from the dish rack this morning, to help him get it started until his fingers could fit inside and pull. He was smiling, running his fingers around the rim of his polished new cavern.

Ben reached over to the magazine table and picked up a pamphlet about STDs. He read through it and tore out a picture of a happy couple who were STD-free since they had been careful and followed the pamphlet’s directions. In the picture, the man was wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater and was giving the girl a piggyback ride. Her brown hair streamed behind her and they were both laughing in a clean, sexually responsible way. Ben folded the picture up into a little square and put it in his drawer. He closed it most of the way, leaving enough space to get his fingertips in. He grinned and looked around the room. He opened the drawer a little and peeked in at the paper square. All that was visible in the dark of his own body were the man’s white teeth.

Ben got up and gathered items. A yellow plastic magnet of the letter N from the kids’ corner and a miniature lounge chair from the dollhouse. He tried a pen that said
Women’s Center West
and had a picture of a uterus, but it was much too long so he put it back. He went into the bathroom and found, inside a closet, extra supplies. He took three Q-tips, one tongue depressor and a square of gauze. The tongue depressor had to be broken into thirds. He put them all in his drawer, happily. He sat down on the closed toilet seat and arranged his inventory alphabetically, starting with the picture because he decided to name the man Aaron. So it went: Aaron, chair, gauze, N, Q-tips, tongue depressor parts one, two and three.

Annie walked out into the waiting room with the doctor and looked around. No husband. She called. No answer. Figured he was probably in the bathroom. “Ben,” she cooed. “Are you in there?” Ben buttoned his shirt, composed himself, opened the door.

“The doctor thought she might like to take a look at your chest,” she said.

“I think it’s fine. I think I just have a drawer now,” he replied.

In a voice sculpted for use on a three-year-old, Annie pleaded gently, “I’m sure you’re right. Would you let her just take a peek? Please?”

“I think it’s fine,” Ben repeated. “I think I just have a drawer now.”

Her face became a square of irritation. “Pull up your shirt, Ben.” She glared at him. And then sweeter: “We’ll go have a coffee after this. At that place you like.”

“I will pull up my shirt, Annie, but I think everything is fine. After this, I’m not showing my drawer to anybody else.”

She breathed slowly and put her hand on her belly. “I’m not going to yell at you. Not in front of the baby.”

The doctor rubbed her hands together, excited, when he began to unbutton.

“Oh, goodie,” Ben mimicked.

•   •   •

OVER
THE
NEXT
THREE
DAYS,
the one drawer was joined by five more. They were small, about two inches square, and pulled out halfway, seeming to have mechanisms that stopped them there. They were stiff and did not slip open when Ben bent over to pick up a fallen napkin or clean the shower drain, but were not watertight, so it was important that he dry each cavity out to keep it from getting dank and moldy inside. He used a washcloth followed by a Q-tip for this job, and the process extended his morning routine by six minutes.

Annie bought some apricot exfoliant, which she used on both her face and his chest, to polish it. The bone was bright white. Ben asked her to rub some of her cocoa butter ointment onto him because he found it soothing, though he had no actual feeling there anymore.

“This stuff is for mommies who don’t want stretch marks,” she told him.

“As soon as they start making a product for me, I’ll switch.”

He just liked the act of it, watching her long fingers rub the yellow goo in circles. She tried to pretend that she was not worried. At night she laid her ear up to his back, hearing the same heartbeat that she used to listen to in his chest. “I need you. We all three need you,” she whispered. “Please don’t stop beating.”

In the evenings Annie still practiced Lamaze and did prenatal yoga with the women in her Mothers to Be group. She and Ben read through the shelves of books on child rearing, learned what to expect at each month of development post-birth. The cooing, the lifting of the head, the ability to wiggle on purpose—these were all things they could look forward to. Ben continued to attend birthing classes with her, but she caught him touching his own chest as often as the other dads touched their wives’ round bellies. She’d elbow him. “Ben. Pay attention to
my
deformity now.”

•   •   •

THOSE
FIRST
ITEMS
from the doctor’s office stayed. Ben came to think of Aaron, smiling from his pamphlet, as a friend and unfolded the paper occasionally to whisper hello. He didn’t like the girlfriend as much and she never got a name. More things were stored in the drawers, too. He put a travel toothbrush and mini-paste in one and carried it around all day long, taking it out to use in the morning and before bed. His collection expanded to include loose change (useful, except that he didn’t want to open himself up in public, so he ended up running out to the car anyway); a miniature jar of good mustard they’d bought on a trip to Germany; his father’s pocket watch, which hadn’t run in years; the ring he had bought his wife when they were first together: a round piece of amber set in silver. This he had stolen out of her jewelry box, but so far she didn’t seem to miss it. He folded some paper towels up and lined the drawers with them so that the items inside did not roll around noisily.