A Guide to Being Born: Stories (4 page)

I mentioned to Dr. Keller that I was writing you letters lately, before the surgery, trying to explain your life to you. He told me that he wrote to both of his sons before their circumcisions. How he wanted to explain his reason for cutting them like that, the lineage of Jewish men they would be joining. He paused afterward, realizing, I think, that my letters were not the same thing. You will never read them. There will not be another ceremonial coming-of-age where I find you old enough to take you behind the dark stage of your life and show you the ropes and pulleys, show you the clanking steel and the costume room, and then the two of us reenter holding hands and the theater is full and we take a long mother-daughter bow and you go on being a woman after that. In this case, the letters remain in the box. I show them to no one. And you go on.

On the first tour, two kids got scared and had to be taken back by Britney, whose job it is to follow us along and remove anyone who is freaking out. There was only one couple left after that. It is much harder to lead a small tour, because you don’t get the group fear going. It’s just me, this dopey guide, acting afraid for the hundredth time. The husband was not interested at all in ghosts or in effects.

When the lights went out and the fake steam started to howl from the “broken” pipeline, the guy says to me, “So, like how many men would be working down here at a time, say?”

I tried to ignore him but he persisted, so I told him hundreds of thousands. The lights flickered on and off and the recorded sounds of screaming men echoed in the metal cavern. His wife seemed slightly frightened but never said anything during the entire tour.

“Now, were they
unionized
?”

“Are you kidding me? Do you know what my job is?” I asked him. “My job is to scare you.”

“You don’t know how many men it took to build the ship originally, do you?” he called. “You don’t know shit! You just make stuff up!”

“My daughter is eight years old and she’s growing pubic hair. Does that scare you?”

“You are disgusting. I’m here to see a great ocean liner,” he said. “A
historic
ocean liner.”

I stopped saying anything. I led them through, room by room, signaled the effects and stood quietly while steam and lights and water did their jobs. At the end of the tour, I opened the doors to a fluorescently lit room with a few exhibits of life during the time the ship sailed. Pictures of the now creepy pool filled with happy swim-capped first-classers; a white lace dress such as a lady might have worn to tea in the afternoon. Normally we enter this room and exit right away. For a few minutes then, I can put my feet over the edge and kick them against the curved wood and breathe some actual air and call my wife, who puts the phone to Poppy’s ear so I can tell her I miss her. But this guy wanted to stay. This was the part he had been waiting for. He wanted the facts, not the story I wrote for him.

“Oh, look, Marjorie, what a pretty little teaspoon!” he said, and they stood there looking, their old noses pressed up against the glass. By the time they were finally done, there were nose-grease patterns, two dots side by side, on every case. I did not go hunt for Windex and I did not wipe down the cases. Their twin prints remained there, thin and foggy, while I invoked the dead for eighteen minutes on the hour and the half hour for the rest of the day.

Dear Poppy,

I wanted to buy something to wear to the surgery tomorrow. I want them to believe me, that I’m doing my best. If I arrive looking how I do most of the time, I think they’ll do less of a job for you. They need to think that we are the kind of family who demands good service. We rolled through the awful mall looking at pantsuits. I held them over you so you could see, but you were no help. When I tried them on, I looked like someone I would not like to be friends with. I bought a boring blue turtleneck sweater, but at least it’s clean. As we left the mall, in the central food court there was a little girl about three years old with gold curls bouncing on her shoulders, running ahead of her parents, who seemed entirely unbothered, yelling, “I’m African! I’m African! I’m African! I’m African!” In her mind, was she riding on the back of a zebra over a stretch of land so vast it would be days before she encountered someone who corrected her story, made her put her seat belt on, bribed her to eat six more bites of potatoes before dessert?

We went to the grocery store in the afternoon. I decided that I wanted to make a nice supper for us all. I chose a cart over a basket and made my way around the store with two sets of wheels, yours and the food’s. I chose lamb chops and the makings for salad. I put four red potatoes into a bag. I still think it’s weird to cook for only two. You do not ever, not ever, eat what I make. I think you are ungrateful sometimes. I think you do not even see what I do. You laugh and smile while I stir and chop. You laugh and smile while I measure your medicines and attach a new bag of food for you. You laugh and smile while I clean you.

An old lady in the cereal aisle stared up at me with my two vehicles. She looked into your bed and waited for me to pull you over so that she could pass.

“You are a saint,” she said to me.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked back. “Take her outside and shoot her?”

Usually I am practiced at saying, “Thank you for saying so, but it’s no burden. She is always a blessing.” And this is not untrue. I imagine you gone and it seems horribly empty. I imagine the games of healthy children in the living room and the children seem like loud and insulting beasts. “I don’t mean that,” I told the old woman. “She is always a blessing.” She seemed to accept this, eager, too, to pave over my indiscretion. She wants this to be a place where God sends down the questions of twisted bodies and damaged brains but always sends with them the answers of wide hearts and abundant love.

In the parking lot, a bird flew over us with a fish in his claws. They were about the same size. The fish faced forward and flapped its tail. It flew. It swam through the air. What a surprise that must have been, to be swimming along and then suddenly to be plucked out and held between the sharp talons of a hawk, swooping out over the hills. Suffocating in all that air.

The girl was still in my chair when I got back at the end of the day. She was watching TV.

“So,” I said.

“Hello.”

“You’re still here.”

“My name is Madeleine. I’m eight.” She smiled, sharp. “You?”

“OK. Roger. I’m forty-three. Almost forty-four.” I kept talking. I did not find a stopping place. “My birthday is in May. The fifteenth. The ides of May.” I laughed in hollow, uncomfortable rounds. She nodded politely.

“Happy early birthday. I finished my drawing.” She took the paper out. It was Poppy, from the photograph. She looked upsettingly happy in it, the kind of happy where she can tell you exactly how the good things went down—the soccer goal, the A on the math test, the birthday gifts opened and piled.

“You drew my daughter.”

“I know.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t know. How about
Still Life with Child
.” She gave it to me and I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

“
Still Life with My Child
,” I repeated. “We can’t be friends, me and you.”

“OK. Why?”

“I already have a kid.”

“I know—I drew her. And I already have a dad. I just wanted to use your desk.”

When I got home, my girls were asleep on the couch. Poppy was covered in a hand-knit blanket and Laura was uncovered, open to the world. Her pants were twisted around her waist and her shirt was falling open, a square of breast visible through the buttonhole. On the floor, Laura’s sketchbook was open to a drawing of Poppy’s face. Her curled fists were absent. The uneasy shape of her body. In the drawing, her face looked like it could be talked into being normal. A few changed strokes and she would be a regular kid. Oprah was on TV without sound. She sat on her white couch and laughed with a famous person. They looked serious for a moment and then they rejoiced. Serious, rejoice, serious, rejoice. I could hear the breathing of my wife and daughter above all else. They were not in sync. I sat in the nearby chair and did not change anything.

Dear Poppy,

My mother was the last to admit your differences. She came to stay here from Boston when you were born and knit about a hundred blankets and hats and booties. She cooked us dinner every night and changed diapers and sang to you and me and everyone else. She was making a loud entrance as a grandmother. I saw that she had been waiting. When we first learned that you might not develop normally, she went on a tirade about the incompetence of doctors. “They always want to give you a prognosis,” she told me. “It’s a baby! How do they know anything about what’s going to happen!”

“They aren’t predicting that she’ll be a pro ice skater or that she’ll fail the seventh grade. They are taking note of her functioning, her body’s functioning.”

“Of course they are. And who stands to gain from that? How many tests do they want to conduct now? And what’s the price of those tests?”

“Should I refuse them, then?”

“You tell me that there is something wrong with your daughter. Say it, then, if you think it’s true. Say, ‘My daughter is a retard.’”

I didn’t say anything to her. I did let them do tests, though, and they kept coming back with bad news. Even still, your grandmother was your big fan all along. She was the one who set up most of our appointments with learning specialists and everyone else. These people told us happily in their offices that everyone has a different way of developing and all we’d have to do was embrace yours.

She visits you every three months. She still looks at you like a healthy girl. Your uncle has two now, so Grandma gets to do the regular things, which is good for her. She plays softball and reads
Tintin
to them. But when she comes here, she sits right down next to you and rubs your arms while she tells you about the world. “There have been some big trades in baseball already this year,” she says, “and I don’t know if you know, but I think the political tide might finally be turning.” You seem to listen. Your eyes are alert and you squeeze her hand back as if to say, “I hear you.”

We ate outside. It has not been warm enough in months, and we wore our coats and wool socks. Laura put out a nice tablecloth and we forked lamb and potatoes into our mouths with the sound of wind shaking the trees out. There were no buds yet, but the trees seemed ready. They seemed to be putting their fingers up, considering when to unroll this year’s greenery.

“How you doing, Poppy girl?” I said to her, holding her hand. Her eyes were bright but did not meet mine. “You had a good day?” I waved her hand around, I kissed each of her fingers. “Today I scared a lot of people—aren’t you proud?”

“She sang a lot,” Laura told me. “We sat out here all afternoon and she sang back to the birds. A squirrel came and ate the birdseed. I didn’t stop it.”

“A singing lady? That’s you?”

I do not know how to talk to my daughter in any way but as to a baby. She is the size of a large dog now. Her hands are hands, not miniatures, but my voice still jumps an octave when I address her. Laura is better about this. Though she lifts Poppy out of bed to bathe her, though she sits at the side of the tub and washes, she does not baby talk.

I heard her say through the bathroom door this morning, in the same, even voice she uses to speak to me, “You are covered in shit, my love.”

Poppy’s room is next to ours, and a door has been installed to connect them. There is an actual door, but for us what matters is the hole in the wall. Poppy’s bed has rails on it so that she doesn’t scoot herself out in the night. She sleeps the way she lives—on her back. Her entire world consists of whatever is above her. The nubby ceiling is her vista. Her panorama.

In our bed, Laura and I move close. She used to sleep naked and I remember the feeling of our skins wrapped up. Now she likes to be ready to jump out of bed and take care. To wash and comfort.

“There was a girl in my office today,” I whispered. “Someone else’s kid.” I waited for her to be angry.

“Are you trying to admit something to me?”

“I don’t know. She drew Poppy.”

“So did I.”

“I saw—it’s nice. A nice drawing.”

“Of a nice daughter,” she said. “What about this girl?”

“Poppy will never get to sit in my office chair and draw. It doesn’t seem fair that some other kid can.”

Laura laughed and brushed her hand over my neck. “You don’t have to avoid contact with every other child on earth. Poppy doesn’t care who sits in your chair, Roger. Poppy doesn’t even know your name.”

Around us the room was full of its noises. The streetlight outside went off for a second and then flashed back on.