A Guide to Being Born: Stories (12 page)

MABEL
LADY
FINCH
lived with her dad in a one-bedroom apartment (the living room was hers) in a complex with a pool and weight room that neither of them had ever used. She could have afforded to move out, but she didn’t want to leave her dad alone. He wasn’t really completely alone—he had a girlfriend who, Mabel expected, would hang around for the usual month of romancing, then she’d split just like the others. It was like Charlie, which was what Mabel called him, had been given the first volume of a two-volume set on love. At this particular moment, he was still in the first course of a relationship with a woman named June August.

“They figured, no reason you can’t have two months in your name. No law against that!” she explained, while Mabel did their spaghetti dishes. She tossed her stringy blond hair. Charlie put his hand over her knee in a cup, carefully, like she was a firefly he did not want to damage. Mabel left the kitchen and sat down on her pullout that was not pulled out and read some of her City College psychology textbook, which surprisingly had a picture of a skier on the cover.

Mabel looked at the picture of Lady holding her when she was just born, the picture her father had asked her to keep to herself since it made him too sad to see his lady love holding, tenderly, the cause of her death in her arms. June and Charlie, in his bedroom, made very little sound. So little that Mabel knew exactly what they were doing.

Later, in the late dark with her one little lamp on and the room dressed as a sleeping place, Mabel heard her father knock on the wall dividing them.

“Baby?” he loud-whispered. She knocked back, tap, tippety tap.

“Hi,” she said.

“She’s no good, is she? June August?”

“She’s fine,” Mabel returned.

“Should I tell you about your mother?” The two of them did not read books together; Charlie did not sing. What he did, had always done, was tell Mabel stories about Lady.

“You know the one about when she adopted the puppy without consulting with me?”

“I know that one.”

“What about when we tried to go camping and ended up stranded in the snow with nothing but a butane stove to keep warm?”

“I want to know the one about when she learned she was going to die.”

“What about the one where the old woman mistook her for Audrey Hepburn?”

“That’s not the one I want to hear.”

“She didn’t want to leave us.”

“Do you think about her when you’re with June August?”

“I think about her when I’m with everyone.”

Mabel waited for more. There was just quiet and house noises though, the refrigerator keeping cold, the very low buzz of the lightbulb that you really had to want to hear.

•   •   •

THE
DENTIST
in whose office Booker Cyranowski was a new hygienist was so nice and his teeth were so perfectly white there was no way not to trust him. He even bought Booker a ham-and-cheese croissant on this, his first day, which was delicious.

They talked about the business. The dentist gave Booker some tips on how to keep nervous people from biting. He told a few dentist jokes that would otherwise probably not have been funny, but in this case Booker laughed so hard a little bit of ham went flying out of his mouth and landed right on the dentist’s collar. The dentist just brushed it off with a napkin, patted Booker, whose eyes were huge and terrified, on the hand and said, “Son, I’d rather have that on my shirt than stuck in your teeth.” The way he said it made Booker want to curl up in the crook of the dentist’s armpit and fall asleep. He thought of drifting off to the sound of the dentist flossing carefully in the dark. The squeak of the string on his teeth.

In the elevator, the dentist used a rubber gum pick and Booker stood still with his hands clasped behind his back. He wished he had some instrument to prove how orally hygienic he was.

Out of the corner of his eye, Booker noticed that there was something drawn on the velvety wall of the elevator. He turned to look and saw a picture of a penis and the word
Shit
. He did not want the good dentist to see something obscene—especially since it didn’t even make sense—on his nice elevator, so Booker quickly rubbed his hand over it back and forth to erase it. The dentist looked at him quizzically. “I wanted to check and see if the wall was as soft as it looked,” Booker explained quickly. The dentist squinted his eyes and continued picking his gums for a moment. Then he turned to his right and rubbed his hand over the wall.

“That
is
soft!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never touched it before. All these years and I’ve never touched it before!” He said it like he had just discovered that there was a bright blue lake right behind his house, hidden in the trees, full of trout, with a pier and a nice little red rowboat. He put his hand on Booker’s shoulder and smiled like he was staring out at this most beautiful vista. Like there were cranes in the sky above the turquoise water, and snowy peaks, and naked ladies lying on a cluster of warm boulders.

“Do you have one of these? A Gum Explorer?” the dentist asked.

“No, sir. But I’d like to get one,” Booker said. “I’d like to get one right away.”

•   •   •

MABEL
HAD
ONLY
BEEN
WORKING
Canned Foods since mid-morning. She used to be in Produce, which she preferred. She would rather eat it and she would rather stock it.

It was during her break that things changed. “You look sexy when you eat that carrot,” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers III, Manager, said while they sat in folding chairs in the back of the supermarket amongst boxes of discontinueds and damageds. He leaned down and kissed her forehead with his warm, horrible lips.

Mabel kneed him in the groin and watched him curl up on the floor like a bug.

She got moved to Aisle Nine and told to keep her mouth shut.

Now she had to go through the things that had been long unsold and “refresh” them. The unpopular and dusty hearts of palm and cocktail franks. There were a lot more cans in that aisle than she would have guessed a few days ago, back when her primary concerns were weeding out soft limes and fluffing the Swiss chard.

“Does this suit you?” Mr. Joseph T. Bowers asked, looking at her with greasy eyes.

“Get out of my aisle,” she said.

In the afternoon, while she was doing the garbanzo beans, a woman came into Aisle Nine and started pulling cans off shelves at an unusual rate. She was wearing tight zebra-print pants and a black blazer with most of her breasts sticking out. She noticed Mabel looking at her and smiled a big, glowingly white smile. She put her hand out, offering a shake. “Jessie McFleece,” she said, “Can Opener Gourmet Cookbooks.” Before Mabel could even respond, Jessie McFleece went into what was obviously a well-rehearsed PR speech. “Truth is, I’m lazy,” she began. “I’m always cooking up a new way to save time.” She winked and said, “Pun intended! I’m going to try a lasagna tonight.” Mabel looked into the cart. Nothing but cans: mushroom soup, carrot spears, bright green peas, and stewed tomatoes. Tuna, meatballs, spinach.

“Yum,” Mabel said.

“You betcha. My kids L-O-V-E it. Husband doesn’t mind it so much either. We are just a regular old American dream.” They both looked at her chest.

“You know what? I need a better reason to live,” Mabel said. “If anyone asks, tell them I quit.”

In the parking lot, Mabel came upon a fellow employee. She untied her green apron with the words
Saver! The name says it all!
embroidered across the front. She stepped on it. “You can step on it too, Booker,” Mabel said to the boy. He was humming and shifting back and forth on his feet as if he was warming up for a waltz. “You look like you’re in a good mood.”

He leaned in close and whispered, “Actually, I started a new job today. As a dental assistant! I’m just here to get my last check.”

“Congratulations. We both have something to celebrate, because I just quit. Good luck at the new job.” She paused for a second. “I hope you like teeth.” He smiled and offered her a stick of gum. She put it in her mouth and saved it up in her cheek, feeling the sting of its spiciness against that soft flesh. Booker tore the plastic cover off a rubber toothpick and began to run it along his gum line. Mabel tried to smile. “I can see you’re committed,” she said.

“Look, I live across the street and I have a friendly cockatoo. Come over and eat dinner with us. I’m a harmless dental assistant.”

“Have I just ruined my life?” Mabel asked. “My father is going to be furious.”

“Are you allergic to anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then come on.”

•   •   •

BOOKER
CYRANOWSKI
had worked at the Saver for years, since the day he graduated from high school and took his old Cadillac, which was the nicest color green he’d ever seen on a piece of metal, down the very familiar farm road, out the highway and on up the coast.

“Bye, rabbits,” he yelled out the window to the rabbits. “Bye, tree,” he yelled to the scrubby little pine in the middle of the sage and matted grass. “Bye, birds!” That one he screamed at the top of his skinny little lungs so they would hear it. He turned up the radio and swooped his hand in the wind.

Behind him he knew his seven brothers and sisters and his mother and father still stood out front with their hands on their hips. They’d go back to the strawberry field later, they’d pick since it was the end of picking season. Booker’s Polish father, Bruno, and Mexican mother, Estrella, would take turns reading to the whole team, as they were called, stories of revolutionaries for whom the children had been named. Cesar, Rosa, Martin, Che, Coretta, Zapata, Booker, and the youngest, Andrej, named for Bruno’s grandfather who had, as family legend went, carried all four of his children on his back all during the First World War.

Booker imagined them together in the little living room, over a pot of beans and kale. He was the oldest and the first to leave. His parents were proud to see him head out, to fight the good fight. They were sorry, too, that he wouldn’t be working the earth with them. But in his mind he saw the symmetry: his family grew food to sell that was chewed by the teeth of the people, the very same teeth he would someday be cleaning. As he drove, he thought of all those teeth, healthy in their nests of pink gums.

Booker bought himself a toaster at the big department store, and a cockatoo at the small pet shop. He had always wanted a bird, and without his family he figured he would get lonely. In the pet store, he put his finger through the cage bars and asked her in a quiet and high-pitched voice if she liked to be read to. She was pink and he named her Sue, after no one in particular.

•   •   •

IN
HIS
APARTMENT,
Mabel found that Booker had books. Most of them were about birds, lots about the Civil Rights Movement and the Mexican Revolution, and a few about the state of Arizona, where he confessed he’d never been. Booker pressed Play on his answering machine and a man’s voice came out.

“Dear Booker,” it said. Booker talked over it to tell Mabel that it was his dad.

“He always leaves messages like he’s writing a letter,” he explained. “He comes from another time and place.”

The message went on. “Dear Booker, it’s your dad and your mom and everyone, and we know it was your first day of work at your new job there, and we are very proud of you for going out and doing it, like you always wanted to. The team loves you. Yours, Dad.”

Mabel was holding a book in her hand,
The Sonoran Desert.

“I’m into the outdoors and I think saguaro cactuses are amazing,” Booker said, opening up to a dog-eared page. Mabel read the highlighted sentence, “The outer pulp of the saguaro can expand like an accordion, increasing the diameter of the stem and, in this way, can increase its weight by up to a ton.”

“Wow.” Mabel tried to care about the cactus, because it was clear how much Booker did. But the real excitement was Sue, whom he took from her cage and brought over to Mabel on his index finger.

“It’s OK, you can touch. She’s Sue the Cockatoo.” Sue the Cockatoo checked Mabel out and seemed mostly to approve. Mabel stuck her finger out and Sue beaked it. Mabel made bird noises and Sue made no noises. Then Sue made bird noises and Mabel made bird noises and felt good, like they had connected. Booker put Sue down on the table and she walked awkwardly around.

Mabel watched while Booker stuffed two Cornish game hens with two whole hot dogs each, nested together and sticking out the back of the birds. He hummed and rubbed dried oregano and butter on the pinky-white skin. The birds went in the oven. Then Booker shucked corn, a few of the silky strands falling on the floor. Mabel collected them and braided them together. Booker opened the dishwasher, which was empty, and put the two ears of corn inside, in the place the silverware should go. “My mom’s special recipe,” he told Mabel.

“I see.” Mabel thought for a second. “And they cook in there?” She paused again, though he was nodding.