A Guide to Being Born: Stories (14 page)

He did not know yet that there would be two babies instead of one. That the boy would be named for him, the girl named for a woman who did not exist. He did not know yet the lie he would make up to explain the absence of a mother. He did not know yet about the trip he would make to the crematorium, where he would manage to purchase an urn, empty, and fill it with the ashes from his own fireplace, or how he would place it on the mantel of that same fireplace with a story about a beautiful wedding on the beach and another about a car accident.

•   •   •

KERRALYN
SAT
ON
THE
CURB
waiting for Reggie Lazzarino, Leonard Senior stood at his post and Leonard Junior poured a tall glass of milk and sat down by the telephone upstairs. He watched his sister and his father not talk. He watched his father point at the light display and his sister not look where he pointed. Then he watched a car pull up and Kerralyn get into it and close the door. He watched his father watch her do this. He watched his father send them off in a single flurry of snow, hardly enough to celebrate by.

Junior thought about Bess in her apartment with her roommates watching television. In his picture they were eating baked potatoes, a thing that seemed adult and womanish to him. The potatoes would have a little butter and some broccoli florets and a single slice of white, never orange, cheese melted on top. Junior was nearly certain of this. He picked up and held the body-warmed phone in his hand until it began its noisy reminder that no one was on the other end.

In the street his father got lucky. A large group gathered around him. The snow machine was in the crook of the roof, just outside where Junior sat. When the button was pushed, his entire view was snowed out for a few seconds and he couldn’t see the reactions of the group until the storm had fallen below his line of sight.

Leonard Senior waved up at his son, a strong salute. The room was quiet. The phone did not ring and later it did not ring some more. Junior gave himself a second pedicure and manicure and finished his milk. He plucked the hairs that bridged the distance between his eyebrows with his sister’s tweezers like she had shown him. In a sudden moment of bravery, he picked up the phone again.

Bess said, “What type of shit was that?”

“I want to tell you about your boobies and your stomach.”

“I’m on the other line, Leonard. It’s going to be a long call.”

He started to say, “I’d like to take you to every place I’ve ever been,” but somewhere in the middle, she was gone, replaced by the phone’s over and over cry that its job was over, it had endured his wet breath and stupid words and wanted to be replaced now in its blue cradle.

Junior wrapped his arms around his own chest like they were someone else’s arms. He rubbed his hands on his back like they were someone else’s hands on his back. He imagined that his fingers were tipped with painted nails and that they were slender and long and so soft he would have to comment on it to the owner. “Your hands are so soft,” he would have to say, because it would be true, and Junior believed in telling the truth. In this room though, there was only him, his upper body twisted up into a neat knot.

Junior went downstairs and tried to watch television, explaining each segment of the show during the commercial break to his mother, as though she could hear him but not the TV, as though his voice alone could travel the distance. “She’s a nice girl, Mom,” he said to the urn. “What would you want me to say, if you were a girl? Would you want me to tell you I loved you? That I would love you until everything in the world was completely used up?” His mother did not answer him from above or from inside his head or from anywhere.

•   •   •

IN
THE
CAR,
Reggie Lazzarino had everything laid out perfect. When he picked Kerralyn up at her house, there was a single red rose on the passenger seat.

He said, “Wow, you look like a dream,” and then later, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” When they ate burritos, he looked into her eyes the entire time and asked her about her wishes. Reggie said, “Kerralyn, what do you wish for?”

Kerralyn said, “I don’t know. I wish for money, I guess.” Reggie nodded soulfully, like she had said something profound. “What else is worth wishing for?” she asked him.

“You’re a really smart girl,” he answered.

They shared a cookie and he drove to the edge of the cliff, where the ocean looked like a terrible hole. He said, “Kerralyn, if you want to really know the truth, then you’ll have to know that I want to kiss your lips.”

She said, “You don’t have to sweety-sweet me anymore, Reggie. We have now come to the part of the evening where the bullshit stops.”

He said, “You’re a really smart girl,” and they smashed their mouths together, he smashing more than she, she actually having to pull away slowly because it felt like her face might break open, like he might unhinge her jaw and leave her with her chin hanging free, the dark passage into her throat permanently visible.

Once they had de-shirted and Reggie had his big hands on her breasts, Kerralyn asked him, “What are my boobs like?”

“Tits,” he answered, stupid.

“I mean what would you compare them to?”

“Why compare them to anything else? Tits are the best thing they could be.”

“Then what’s my stomach like?” she asked him, pulling her head away.

“The stomach of a pretty girl,” he said, touching it.

“A metaphor. Say, ‘Your stomach is like soft cream,’ or something.”

“It’s like a platter of buttery dinner rolls,” he said, squeezing.

After this, Kerralyn did not ask any questions. When Reggie put his hands beyond her dinner rolls, she sat there in the passenger seat, unmoved. He unbuttoned and unzipped and breathed onto her so close that her neck had rounds of moisture on it. “This is nice,” Reggie breathed. “You are a very smart girl,” he breathed. “Your legs are like . . .” but Kerralyn stopped him.

“Just be quiet,” she said. “Don’t talk to me anymore.” So Reggie stopped talking but did not stop maneuvering the vehicle of his hand over her, plowing roads through the wilderness.

When he finally crawled over, released the seat all the way back and wriggled his hips into place, Kerralyn was so quiet and still, her only presence in the car outside of the heft of her physical form was her heat mixing with his, making a bubble around them both. The windows were opaque with it. They were white with it. They were heavy and beginning to drip.

“I want you to call me Reginald,” Reggie said, “like my father.” Kerralyn did not call Reggie anything. “I mean right now,” he corrected her, “I want you to call me Reginald like my father right now.” Kerralyn still did not call Reggie anything, so presently he started to do it for her. At first it sounded like he was prompting her, like a baby, as if when she heard it again she would repeat. “Reginald, Reginald, Reginald,” he said. But soon he was not listening for her echo anymore; he had gotten used to her silence and filled the small space with his own voice and his own name. “Reginald, Reginald, Reginald, Reginald,” he chanted, his butt hitting up against the dashboard.
Will this get me to Thursdays?
she wondered.
And what must you have to do to be a Saturday girl?

Kerralyn closed her eyes and watched the bright shapes behind her eyelids and listened to Reggie breathe and repeat his name like this was the last minute of his life and he wanted the universe to remember him, he wanted to prove that he was here, that in a world of Andrews and Marcuses and Tyrones, he was a Reginald in a line of great Reginalds and this moment was no different. This moment was a flag he was staking in the ground so that it might wave in all manner of future winds.

•   •   •

FROM THE UPSTAIRS WINDOW
, Junior watched his sister exit the date car. Her hair was lit by the Christmas display, green and then red, glowing. He could not hear the sound of her footsteps as she walked toward her father, who pressed his button and snowed on her.

Kerralyn slammed the front door and Junior heard her yell, “I’m sorry, Mother!”

Their father paced while the last flakes landed and died on the sidewalk.

Junior watched his father walk out to the middle of the street and put his head back. The sky looked back at him, empty and snowless; the heavens were unpunctuated. Junior slid the window up and began to toss things down, one at a time, precipitation for his thirsty father. Pencils, pennies—which smelled like a fresh cut—the cotton balls Kerralyn used to remove her nail polish. Senior did not notice, lost in the night, in the street. Junior carried the sloshing pedicure pan to the sill and tossed the water out as hard and fast as he could. Still, his father saw nothing of the small storm.

Junior wondered what kind of weather it would take—what kind of hurricane he and his sister would have to make—for his father to finally come inside, gather his children in his arms and secure the windows. Leonard Junior was furious then that they lived in California, where the winds and clouds never conspired to close the roads, take out the phone lines and the electricity—Rudolph relieved of his constant red-and-green leap forward and back, and baby Jesus? For the first time in his holy little life, the bubble around him would tear open in a gust, and he would feel the weight of real water on his cheeks. The family would be confined to the house, where the cupboards would burst with supplies, and the warm, uneven light of candles would remake the room, soften everyone’s faces. They would sit silently holding hot cups and listening to the rain whip at the door but never manage to blow it open.

WHEN
THE
GIRL
AND THE BOY
moved in together, they had sex in the bed and everyone could probably hear it. Houses were pretty close together and there were a lot of open windows. Neighbors must have talked about such a carefree afternoon of loving all week, hushed whispery talk while taking the trash out and untangling the wind chimes. While hanging the
Happy Thanksgiving, Pilgrim!
flag out front. But what could the girl and the boy do? Their young bodies were young and bodies and they weren’t going to stop the rolling around or pushing together on account of proximity to other, older bodies. So they kept it up and they even walked around afterward naked, only closing the most obvious curtain. Whatever the air was doing that day, whatever water was or wasn’t falling, the sun and the crooked light—they wanted it inside.

Hands went all over the girl and boy’s raggedy hills. It didn’t feel like just two bodies in a bed. The girl saw everything in the history of the world in their love—dinosaurs munching the most delicious dinosaur grass, and the smell of cooking chicken and a mountain covered in something mossy and desperately soft and the wind was there, and the sun hit down on everyone’s various cheeks and the two of them, the girl and the boy, stood palm to palm in the middle of all of it.

•   •   •

EVERY
EVENING
IN
THE
NEW
TOWN,
the girl and the boy went walking. It was a big-window kind of place due to the ocean view. Lives were on display. Knickknacks and upholstery and kitchenware. Vases of calla lilies and a quiet mess of bills piled on a dark wood desk. The things were owned, as far as the girl and the boy could tell, by a lot of old people with very regular schedules. The white-haired woman in a button-down shirt sat alone at the glass-top dining table with a plate of potatoes and green beans, mashed and steamed. A hunched and tiny man in his big living room, modern art on the walls, watching reruns. The nurse a couple feet away, one eye on his breathing, the other on her foreign newspaper. Mondays and everyone had the football on, burying their socked feet under a pillow to keep warm.

Once they discovered them, the girl and the boy didn’t want to miss the happenings outside. They felt as if their future was being presented to them:
Here you are in sixty years
, the world said.
Here you are in twenty
. The girl and boy put their jackets on and went out to see. They saw the old men and old women enjoying glasses of red wine and, on weekends, pieces of frosting-cake. The men and women power walked. The time was over to stroll, those youthful days of enjoying the view ahead. They wore matching jumpsuits and carried foam-covered comfort weights and listened to FM radios. Their bluey-gray hair was smashed down under headbands.

The men and women brought with them little dogs who snuffed along in their kneelessness, trying to keep up. Who shat on the sidewalk. The girl and boy were surprised to see that men and women often left the little dogs’ shit where it lay. Right in the middle of that good ocean view. It got stepped in. It smeared brown over the sidewalk. The old people had to stop at the next bench and break a stick off one of the potted plants to clean their glistening white sneakers. Some were so disgusted they went straight home and threw the shoes away. Some did not mind so much and continued power walking the shit right off the shoe. They had no time to waste, Their lives were disappearing out from under them by the second. Unstoppable, those ones.

There were people in the town who still worked, whose houses were empty except for a woman who came to vacuum the floor and a man who came to trim the vines. There were dogs in these houses who were not brought out for walks and stood jealous on the furnished porches with nothing to sniff but their own deposit on the Adirondack or the terra-cotta. The girl and boy figured the little dogs craved something new, something Doberman or basset hound, but it wasn’t in the cards most of the time. Such was the life of a dog with an unretired owner. The girl and the boy decided the owners probably had the stock market numbers memorized by the time the coffeepot began to burble. Their ties had a closet to themselves. Audible love was past, but power walking still waited ahead in a future that the unretired hoped would also include polished golf clubs and visits to only the most comfortable of foreign nations.

On a day when the smell of apple pie rose out of all the kitchens and all the people were dressed in fall browns and oranges, the girl and the boy came to a house they had passed dozens of times. Now a wheelchair sat empty on the deck with a sign attached:
Mae Peterson 1922–2006 Funeral on 12/27 at 2:00 p.m., St. John the Worker.

“I’m sorry, Mae, whoever you were,” the boy said.

The girl found a rock nearby and placed it on the chair.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I think it’s traditional. I wonder if she was satisfied with how things turned out.”

“She died right here,” the boy said, looking into the flat, unlived-in living room.

They stood there until it got dark, watching the empty wheelchair. And the stream of little dogs continued, and the stream of improved lifestyles continued, and as evening poured out, lamps were switched on and people cut their chicken into perfect little bites and the warm pie flowed smoothly down their throats.

•   •   •

FOR
CHRISTMAS
the power-walking town was covered in white lights and mechanical singing Santa Clauses, from every rooftop, window box and doorframe. Men and women, especially those with children as visitors, were all set for unwrapping and ham. The girl and the boy, sitting at their little table with a single candle flame jumping between them, said to each other, “Merry Christmas.” They tried to kiss a little. They tried to think about the next year rolling up onto their feet like sea foam, soft and welcoming.

“Will we know what to do when we are thirty? When we are forty-two?” the girl asked. The boy shrugged. “Will there be a day when you decide to get the newspaper delivered and then another when your cholesterol numbers become part of our regular lives?” He shrugged again. “I don’t know anything about wrinkle cream or about being a mother.”

“I don’t want to know until I have to,” he said. He took her smooth hand. “This year we will try some new vegetables. We’ll listen to some new music. That’s all.” The girl closed her eyes, where the darkness was filled with unanswerable questions.

“But you love me, right?” she asked.

“That is exactly what I do,” he said.

They decided to go out and see the special moments taking place all over on this Christmas Day. The families sat at the big table and forked pieces of meat and mashed potatoes. They ate the oven-cooked things and the pan-fried things and the ones that went pan first, oven second. They bit into the pumpkin pie and placed fingerfuls of whipped cream on their tongues, while the girl and boy stood on the sidewalk and looked on. No one invited them in and no one smiled at them. The girl and boy did not ask for those things and they weren’t sorry not to have them. Watching was enough, witnessing all that life. They joked about the dishes they did not have to do, the fights they did not have to have with frustrating uncles.

Candles did their dances across the length of the white lace while the diners updated one another on the outlines of their lives. From the sidewalk, the girl narrated for the women and the boy narrated for the men. “She’s reminding her father to settle the matter of the upstairs carpet,” the girl said.

“And he wants to know if she’s gone to the dentist,” the boy added.

“Those two over there don’t usually get along. They fight about each other’s spending habits,” she said.

“Now they are laughing at the story the aunt just told about a minor car accident.” Steam rose from the dishes a lot at first, a little, and then barely at all, except through a crack between lid and body of the soup pot. People picked their forks up less and less often and everyone started to lean down, heavy, toward the floor.

It was dark and cold out. The light from the strands over the windows was crisp.

“Should we go home?” the boy asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “What would we miss?”

A lot of the houses were dark now, the toys flung down and the flannel pajamas worn for the very first, and perhaps last, time.

“Are they satisfied with the birthday party for their Lord?” the boy asked. “Do you think they had a good time?”

“Yes. But they’re tired. It took a lot out of them. Now they’re trying to get ready for the New Year. They have to plan for everything that will happen.”

“The reduction of their thighs, for example,” the boy said.

“Don’t joke,” she said, “they have a lot to worry about.”

The old man in the biggest house, with his couch that stretched the full length of the living room, facing out at the sidewalk, was an unmoving lump there. His small, wrinkled body covered maybe a quarter of the brown leather. Under his blue plaid blanket, he looked like a fish about to be devoured by his enormous house.

“Do you think he’s OK?” the girl asked.

“Sure he is,” said the boy.

“What about Mae Peterson?” the girl asked.

“Just because she died doesn’t mean the whole place is going to drop.”

“One person dying doesn’t stop another,” she said. “Let’s stay here and keep watch.” She almost thought she would feel better if she got to see someone die. Like skipping ahead to the end of the book. After that, all the particular events in the middle don’t matter as much: they go to the same place. The moon was making its regular attempts at light. The boy’s and girl’s hands were white from it.

The girl was sure the old man was dead now, sure that soon his nurse would return and put her ear up to those drooping lips and gasp because there was no air going in or coming out, and she’d call 911 and pretty soon ambulances and fire trucks would be there making their whirling calls, and all the neighbors would come out to watch, standing around the girl and boy, in their bathrobes and glasses. Their hair mussed from sleep, their slippers soaking up the dew on the ground. The paramedics would wheel the old man out on a stretcher, and everyone would whisper what a nice man he was and a few people would look covetously at his house and wonder if they could afford to buy it now or if it would just get passed down anyway.

The moon traveled from the top of the sky to a few inches from the bottom. It began to pinken and the dogs and their walkers started to come out. The blue-haired women in their shiny black suits came out of big doors with small dogs and started to power walk into the day. They adjusted their radios and their waistbands and headed out. They had big Christmas dinners to burn off now, step step step step. Their old-lady hips went back and forth. They waved to each other. “Jean,” said one woman to another, loud, over the sound of her oldies, “you look as skinny as a rail.”

The other woman waved her hand dismissively and said, “Oh, Anne, you’re too kind.” They both smiled and power walked on, not even looking down at the girl and boy cross-legged in their path.

“We could go home now, to our own house,” the boy said, but the girl shook her head.

“Not yet,” she told him.

When the morning light was at full volume, the men and women got into their cars and went to the mall to return all the unwanteds in exchange for amazing bargains.

The boy asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”

“No one else is paying attention,” the girl told him. “We have to be the ones to see what happens.”

And then, while everyone else in town was preparing lunch, the man on the couch simply got up. He sat first, then stood.

“Is he a ghost?” the girl asked.

“He’s a man,” said the boy. The man let the plaid blanket fall next to him. He stretched, reaching far above his head. He was tall and his skin was like a cloak draped over his arms.

“What is he doing?” the girl asked.

“Maybe he needs to go to the bathroom. Maybe he wants a cup of coffee. Maybe someone will come to visit him today.”

The girl began to cry. “How does it end?” she asked.

The boy went to the door and rang the bell. “How are you?” he asked when the man answered.

“I’m excellent,” said the old man. “But I’m having my breakfast. Can I help you with something?”

“Happy New Year,” the boy told him, “was all we wanted to say.” He motioned to the girl out on the sidewalk, and the old man waved to her, smiling. The boy waved too, his young hand and the man’s old hand like flags from neighboring countries. They smiled at either end of life, and the girl could see real, definite happiness in their faces.

The girl and boy wrapped themselves together in bed that afternoon, the curtains drawn against the sun.

“My gift to you is this,” the boy said, kissing her neck. A lineup of porcelain bears, given to the girl by her mother over a series of birthdays, looked on. The bears played dumb. Didn’t even shift to chat with one another. Just watched with their big sloppy eyes while the boy and girl tangled themselves up and breathed into each other’s mouths and forgot everything that hadn’t yet happened, until there wasn’t any light left to see by and they knew each other only by feel.