A Guide to Being Born: Stories (6 page)

Inside, the doctors sewed the openings up with thread, your chest safely sealed in immaturity. The two of us held on to each other while, in the darkness of the earth, your unbloomed seeds were at rest.

HAZEL
WHITING
had finished her freshman year at Mountain Hills High, where there were a lot of ponytails and a lot of clanging metal lockers with pictures of hotties taped inside. She had some friends there but not too many and would usually rather be by herself than discussing other people’s haircuts or dreamed-of love lives. The truth of those love lives—a glance in the dingy hallway from a crushable boy, a dark tangled session on an out-of-town parent’s couch—was like a tiny, yellowed lost tooth, hidden under a pillow, which the high-schoolers believed, prayed, would be soon replaced by gorgeous, naked, adoring treasure.

Hazel, of course, wanted love some day too, and she did admit to feeling a whir in her chest when she thought about a bed shared with a boy—or a man, by then. Still, when she looked at Bobbie Cauligan’s gelled-back hair and calculated leather jackets, or the white, always-new sneakers and tennis-club polos strutted by Archer Tate, or the billowing, too-big flannel shirts of the shy boys like Russel Fieldberg-Morris and Duncan Story as they tried to dart from the safety of one classroom to another, Hazel did not see the possibility of love.
Will these people look more like humans when they are grown?
she thought. Now they looked to Hazel like children, like beasts, like helpless, hairless baby rats.
Do I look like that to them too?
she wondered. Whatever it was, high school was a soggy thing, being a teenager was a soggy thing, and Hazel had decided early on in each of these endeavors that she would survive by not becoming invested.

Hazel chose not to follow the troupes of other girls toward endless slumber parties and pictures of models torn from magazines stuck to mirrors in order that they would be reminded every morning, while popping a pimple or switching the part in their hair, of the distance between beauty and their own unfinished faces. Instead, Hazel wanted to walk and observe the day as it revealed itself unspectacularly around her. She wanted the feeling that her life was a small thread in the huge tangle of the world and that nothing she did one way or another mattered all that much.

The last week of May, while her mother held meetings about the potholes and the winter food-drive, Hazel walked all over town, street by street. She upped one block and downed the next while ladies watered their white roses and the few men home during the day—retired or sick or broke—sat in the window reading the paper. When Hazel returned for a sandwich in the middle of the day, she found her mother in their newly renovated blue and yellow kitchen, bent over the construction of a low-this high-that salad, trying feverishly to grate an almond. “Why are you doing that?” Hazel asked.

“The body has an easier time breaking down foods that aren’t whole,” her mother answered, scraping the single nut.

“What’s the point of breaking something if it isn’t whole?” Hazel asked. Her mother looked up at her and narrowed her eyes in a comic-book glare.

“You are such a teenager,” she said. “I felt done with this stage after your sisters went through it, and that was ages ago. Now I’m right back where I started. Couldn’t you just skip ahead?”

“Gladly.”

While she kicked a rock down the oak-lined streets, Hazel considered her mother’s wish. Perhaps, if she opened her arms to whatever came, stopped turning it all away, she might arrive at adulthood earlier. Adulthood was a place Hazel always pictured as a small apartment kitchen far away from anyone to whom she was related, furnished with upturned milk crates and exactly one full place setting.

After a lot of afternoon walking Hazel wanted a break and a snack or a soda with a straw. She went to the 7-11, where she always sat out back on a nice bit of grass that was close enough to the dumpsters so no one else came, but far enough away that she didn’t smell anything except when there was a big gust or a bad bag.

•   •   •

JOHNNY
WAS
TO
BE
HER
FIRST.
He came out of the store on his lunch break, his uniform button-down untucked, planning to piss on the trash bins because they were cleaner than the toilets. He was clearly surprised to see a girl there, but he just said hello and paused for a second before going on with his plan anyway. Johnny stood with his back to her, a plastic bag in his left hand and his right hidden. She could hear two things: him whistling “Strangers in the Night,” and a delicate stream hitting the green metal of the dumpster. After, he sat down next to Hazel and took a large package of teriyaki beef jerky and a six-pack of Miller Lite out of his bag.

He started right in about the horse races in Deerfield and the off-track betting down in Green Springs. He told her about Million Dollar Mama and Sweet Sixteen, both winners. But not Johnny, he’d lost fifty. “Just not my lucky day,” he said. When he said “lucky day,” he looked right into Hazel’s eyes and winked, and it looked as if he’d been practicing for years in his rearview. She sucked her lemon-lime fizzy and noticed his arms, skinny and brown like hungry snakes.

Just a few feet behind where Hazel and Johnny had talked, they lay down on their young backs. There was a muddle of bushes there, hiding them from the road and the midday gassers and snackers. Johnny didn’t have a line, had just asked, “Wanna go lie down behind those bushes?”

“OK,” Hazel said, because she did not have a better answer, and because, having decided the hour before to say yes to growing, she could hardly say no.

He carried her soda for her, left his two empties where they were. When she sat, he said, “Nice hair.”

“Thanks.”

He leaned over and kissed her, putting his tongue right into the center of her mouth and moving it around in whirling circles. It tasted like beef jerky and beer. She decided she was supposed to do the same—two tongues spinning now. But then she wanted a rest, pulled her head back. Johnny took the pause to mean: OK, next step. He rolled on top. He moved his hips the same way he’d moved his mouth. She could feel him pressed into her bladder.

Hazel had had one close call before, in eighth grade with a pimply boy named Derek who was the brother of the girl having the slumber party. Everyone else had fallen asleep and they had made out in the laundry room while the other girls slept to the sound of
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Screaming sounds masked the washing machine’s rattle as Hazel and Derek pressed themselves together on top of a pile of mateless socks.

Johnny got the courage to grab her breasts. He sat up, straddling her, and put one big hand on each B-cup. Squeezed, pumped like udders. He did not softly caress and he did not pinch. Just squeezed and released, squeezed and released. She could tell this was making him happy because his closed eyes were squinting and his mouth was pursed up.
Mmmmmm
, he said.
Mmmmm,
she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long, dark distances.

Johnny took his shirt off and her shirt off. He had a few scratchy little hairs. Then pants and pants. He looked at her and said, “OK?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but she nodded. She found out right away that it meant underwear, and in a second they were both off—his first, then hers. He rolled on top, ungraceful and floppy, bit his lower lip and pushed. Hazel started out making her noise but then realized he didn’t notice either way, so she stopped and instead watched his big head lit up by the sun.
This is it?
she thought.
This is the whole entire thing?

Hazel went home that night and ate salad with her mother on the screened-in porch while the mosquitoes tapped audibly to get in. Hazel lived alone with her mother, though she had three sisters, all much older, all living in their own houses with their own dishwashers, lists of emergency phone numbers, and husbands who had good jobs, good values and well-shaped eyebrows. This family had been symmetrical, a family of plans and lists and decisions made years in advance into which Hazel was a very late, very surprising accident followed almost immediately by her father’s diagnosis. While Mother grew fatter, Father grew smaller, and everyone felt certain that they were watching a direct transfer of life from one body to another.

The two of them were never in the world together—by the time Hazel entered, her father had already closed the door behind him. Her mother was still wearing black in the delivery room, surrounded by a ring of grieving daughters. The final shock came when the baby was a not a boy but a girl, looking nothing like the man she was meant to replace.

“How was your afternoon?” Hazel’s mother asked.

“Fine,” Hazel said, considering if this was a true answer and deciding it was. “Yours?”

“Just the usual disasters. The club has the red, white and blue flowers ordered in time for the Fourth, and what is the city out there planting in every median? Marigolds.”

Hazel did not tell her mother that she had had sex with a convenience-store clerk and that it was disappointing but harmless—she felt no ache to see the boy again, no real change in her own body, no broken heart. She had done this grown-up thing, yet she knew her mother would find her even more childish for it.

•   •   •

HAZEL
WALKED
the northern quadrant of town and, since it was a Saturday, there were a lot of folks out in their yards trimming bushes and pulling dandelions out of the ground with flowered-canvas hands. The day after that, it was the same thing, only the western quadrant, where she watched the first few innings of a family softball game and petted some dogs in the dog park. She walked past a flower shop where the dyed-blue carnations were the best thing going. She walked through the church parking lot. Father O’Donnel’s Honda was the only car there. She peeked into the backseat: an open gym bag, one ratty gray running shoe out, one in.

“Hi,” someone said roughly. Hazel turned around fast. It was a tall man and big, too. He had a fat face and a comb-over; his shirt buttons were barely holding. He was close.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said again. She edged to her right, her back pressed up against the car.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No. Thanks.” Hazel tried to smile.

“Oh. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I have to go.”

“Actually, you have to stay.” He put his hand on her arm, but didn’t grab hard. She didn’t say anything, wanted to play it smart. “Look,” he said, “don’t scream. I won’t hurt you if you don’t scream.” Hazel did not scream. Later she thought she might have been better off if she had. But at that moment everything was underwater and she was underwater and there was a strong current pulling her deeper.

The big-faced man took her hand, almost gently. His round fingers interlaced with her skinny ones. Her heart took over her entire body. She was a drum. Did she ask the obvious questions?
Why am I walking? Why am I not drinking a Shirley Temple and adjusting my bikini top over and over at the country-club pool like all the other girls? Why did I agree to grow up?
Her body asked the questions for her, that terrified, slamming heart spoke them so loud that she could not breathe fast enough to fuel it, but the drumbeat was empty of answers. They walked behind the church, under the dark of the steeple-shaped shadow and into the maples covered in the new green of summer leaves. The man stopped walking and smiled at her.

“I just want to have some sex with you,” he said. “I won’t hurt you if you have some sex with me.” She was barely breathing, the trees were barely breathing, and the turned earth from their footsteps smelled cold. Hazel thought about running or screaming or kicking, but she just looked up at him and said, “Please. Wait. Help.”

He pulled her down to the ground and he kissed her neck. He undid pants and pants. His breath, strong and bitter with alcohol, was boiling water on her face. His mouth was right up next to her mouth but he didn’t kiss her, just breathed into her. She turned her head but he followed. She could not avoid his lungy air. His weight was everywhere. Two words kept pinging in her mind, though she did not know what they meant.
And yet, and yet, and yet.

•   •   •

A
TINY
WHITE
SPINE
began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. Hazel sat on the closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright blue plus sign on one end. She put her hands in her hair, tried to hold her head up.

She thought of the men that could have created this. “How could you be a real living thing?” she asked her growing baby. “How could you be a person?” She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.

•   •   •

“MOTHER,”
Hazel said in the kitchen in early fall where the difficult process of roasting a duck was under way. Hazel’s mother was holding it by the neck over a large pan, searing.