A Guide to Being Born: Stories (5 page)

Dear Poppy,

There was another letter addressed to us today, forwarded from the doctor. Since he gave a presentation about his planned procedure on you at a medical conference, he’s been getting a lot of mail, which he seems to want us to see. I don’t know if he is proving a commitment to his convictions or hoping that we’ll reconsider and save us all. It was postmarked from Lincoln, Nebraska. I opened it before Roger came home but got as far as “You have no right to toy with a body that is not your own” before I put it down. We had been warned.

“There is some concern over the rights of the developmentally disabled” was how the good doctor put it to us.

“Yes, I imagine there is,” your father had agreed.

“Of course, we’ll have to convince an ethics committee that this is for Poppy’s comfort less than our own.” I noticed that he was a part of We, part of the fight now, part of the family.

“Are they wrong?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The concerned.”

“No. There is a history of euthanasia and medical experimentation. They are not wrong.”

“But are they right then?”

He clicked his pen and stood. “I think we in this room know what’s good for Poppy,” he said, opening the door of his office and standing at it, his arm extended in a polite request for us to leave.

“I don’t think we know anything,” I said to a fat man stepping on the scale in the hallway.

“We don’t know shit,” he smiled, shaking his head.

I put the letter on Roger’s desk. You and I sat at the kitchen table and I tried to tell you again about what we are saving you from. The horrible cramps. The bleeding. You smiled up at the ceiling. I have stuck a constellation of glow stars above the table because we spend a lot of time here. “And you’d probably inherit my large breasts, which are not even close to what they’re cracked up to be.”

You shrieked and flapped your flightless arms.

On surgery day, Laura made pancakes before I went to work for the morning. I bathed Poppy like I do on weekends. I turned on the water and got in bed with her while it was running. “How’s my girl today?” She cooed and kicked her legs. “You’re going to do great, my darling. You are so good, so good, so good.” I nuzzled my face into her belly and she approximated a laugh. I think she has a sense of humor.

When the tub was full, I undressed her on her bed and carried her pale form into the bathroom. She loves the water. She goes completely limp. It is as if she is back in the womb, back to try another time, develop better, be born better. I held her head in one hand and washed her with the other. I saw the short hairs that had started us worrying. They could easily have been plucked out and we could have gone on pretending. I saw the tiniest rise in her nipples, standing up now slightly. “Do you wish you could outgrow us? Well, we won’t let you.” I washed her face with a soapy cloth, moving in careful strokes to avoid her eyes. She blinked and almost looked at me.

Laura had pancakes on the table when we got downstairs. Poppy cannot eat pancakes, as she cannot eat most things. We ate them in her honor though, assuming that an eight-year-old would like them if she could. I poured extra syrup on mine and thought every bite into her mouth.

I went through the tour route turning on the lights and the fog machines and the strobes. When I got to the pool room, I saw Madeleine sitting next to a lying-down man. I moved closer. A rough beard stuck up.

“What the fuck,” I whispered.

“His eyes were open but I closed them.”

I kneeled down next to them and looked at the man. His skin was blue and his beard was red. His hair poked out in greasy strips.

“Is this a dead person?” I asked, dumb.

“You think?” Madeleine said, mocking. She put his head in her lap. She touched his forehead with her fingertips.

“Don’t do that,” I said, reaching out to stop her. She pushed my hands away.

“I think his name is Steven. He doesn’t like it though and always wished his name was Rupert. His mother was a seamstress and his father died when he was very young.” She kept smoothing her hands over his face.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Of course not. You can be a real jerk. I am telling a story to this guy.” Just then, my boss came into the room, laughing.

“You like him?” He smiled. “I had him made. We can rig it so the body floats up in the pool or something. My first idea was to get real bodies in here and try to haunt the place, but the lawyers are assholes.”

“You made him?”

“I had him made. He’s good, right?” I felt stupid for thinking he was real, stupid for being caught at it.

“This is a ghost tour, not a morgue tour.”

“Can I do my job?” Peterson told me. “Can I do that? Your job is to make up a good story about the things I put in front of you. I’d like to introduce you to George, the new fake dead guy. Go find him a nice suit and a pocket watch and give him a life story. Maybe he ended it himself? Maybe his wife held him under so she could run off with some gentleman with not one, but two yachts?”

I stood there quiet.

“You were really scared! Ha! This is going to be a real moneymaker.” He walked back out again, clicking his pen and humming the theme to an old TV show.

“This doesn’t scare you?” I asked Madeleine.

“He’s not real. He’s a doll.”

I watched her talk. I watched her move her fully functioning hands and adjust her legs and push the hair out of her face.

“What the hell is it like to be a little girl?” I asked her.

“I don’t have a lot to compare it to.”

“I will give you ten dollars to describe being an eight-year-old.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Tell me every single thing,” I said, holding a bill out to her.

Dear Poppy,

At the hospital you lay across our laps. You were longer than the bed we made together. Your feet hung. You looked up at my face, reached to it, scratched the bottom of my chin like I was a cat. I purred for you. Roger was reading a magazine with a picture of an actress I’ve never heard of on the cover. I doubt he had heard of her either. Roger was hunched over to be closer to her, his coat falling off his shoulder and his scarf on the floor. You and I were neighboring planets.

I had my hand on your belly where your womb will not be. You wriggled like a snake. I had this thought: You and I leave, your whole body in my arms. Your father does not notice us go and your stroller stays there too, its various straps hanging toward the floor. We get into the car and drive away. We get pregnant together. Not by men but by sperm. We grow matching stomachs, globes, entire earths of our own. We measure them against each other. We eat the whole aisle of candy and watch movies in bed. Everyone leaves us alone.

When the babies are born, they join us in our bed. We nurse them together. We hold hands under the covers. The babies learn words. They put the fleshy bundles of their feet on the ground and move over it. They go between us: you on the bed to me on the chair; you on the bed to me standing in the lit doorway; you on the bed to me at the top of the stairs. I feed all three of you with blended foods carried to your mouths on rubber-coated spoons. It is the talking I look forward to most. If you had a child and she could speak to me, then I would be almost speaking to you. If she came from your body, I could ask her, at least, what it was like in there. The slip and bubble, the churning.

We took you into the surgery room and kissed you and kissed you and kissed you before going back to our waiting chairs. In the doorway I turned back and said, “Could we see the breast buds? When you take them out?”

“They look like almonds,” the surgeon answered.

“But they aren’t almonds. You don’t have to show me the uterus. I would please like to see them. Please.” He looked at me and shook his head in disbelief.

“Margie will bring them out.”

Laura and I crossed half the street to the grass-fuzzy median in front of the hospital. We lay next to each other, the lanes on either side of us quiet, trickling riverbeds.

“Being a kid is OK,” I said. “She avoids a lot.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be her mother.”

“Is this a new sweater? It looks nice on you.”

“I sort of wish the hormones could shrink her, not just stop her here. I wish she could get so she could fit in my hand. Or smaller.”

“Like a doll.”

“No chairs, no tubes. Just the two of us.”

“The three of us?”

“OK.”

She sat up and her spine was a mountain range in her shirt.

“That’s what happens when someone dies,” I said. “That’s when you get to have them everywhere.” She nodded, tipped her head to rest on one shoulder.

“There’s a lot to look forward to,” she said, and began to lie down.

“Wait,” I told her, “your hair is full of leaves.”

I sat up and started to pull the dry brown pieces out one at a time. They fell apart in my fingers.

Dear Poppy,

We held hands and turned the pages of magazines. We said little. She’s going to do great and She’s so brave and I love you. I drank more coffee than I should have. It felt like something was about to change, but it wasn’t. That was the whole point. We were sending you in there so that nothing would ever change. Your brain has elected to stop where it is, and now your body will be eight years old until one day when you die. Will you get old? Will your hair turn lighter? Will your skin fall wrinkled over your little-girl body?

There was an old man in the waiting room with a cane and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that he’d probably had since 1950. He was reading the newspaper and I could see, even from across the room, the sprigs of hair growing out of his ears. I liked him for this. He seemed to be turning into earth, growing grass. I wondered who he was there for. No one joined him all morning and he did not fidget. At around 11:30 a nurse came out and told him, “Your wife did perfectly.” He carefully folded the paper up, smoothing it out, and said, “Of course she did.”

Another nurse came out holding a small dish with two bloody little beans on it. “These are the breast buds,” she told us, sounding bored. “As promised.” Before she could stop me, I picked one up and put it in my mouth. “Holy shit,” the nurse said, “what the fuck are you doing?” Roger was completely silent. He looked at me, huge eyed and flat faced. “Lady!” the nurse said. “You have to spit that out! That’s biohazard! That’s not something you can eat!”

I felt the thing in my mouth. It was perfectly smooth. It slipped over the skin of my cheek and my tongue. I could feel the threads of veins.

“Ma’am. Lady. You have to spit that out immediately.” She turned and looked around for someone who could help her. The desk was nurseless. No blue-scrubbed person in sight.

Roger put his hand on my back. “Maybe you should spit it out, Laura.”

“Too late. I swallowed it.”

“Holy shit!” the nurse says, “Jesus. Lady.”

But, Poppy, as the nurse was turning, spinning on her heels, looking for a kind of help she had never needed before, your father plucked the other bud out of the dish and held it in his hand. He looked at me and his lips spread out in a smile. The nurse looked into the glass dish smeared with a little pink blood. She shook her head and then suddenly she went quiet. She stopped her search and whispered to us, “You all are fucking nuts. Please don’t tell anyone this happened.” And off she went with her empty dish.

We ran outside holding hands. I spit the breast bud out into my palm.

“I thought you swallowed it,” he said.

I shook my head. “I had to lie so she’d let me go. Come on.” In the median I knelt down and began to dig a hole. Your father understood right away and helped, his left hand a protective fist, his right a shovel. In a few minutes, we had come to darker soil and we both put the seeds of you inside, covered them in earth. “To growing,” I said. “Whatever that might mean.” We sat down and held hands. We did not look at each other, but we squeezed our fingers tight together. Both of our cheeks were streaked from crying.