A Guide to Being Born: Stories (17 page)

Claribel resists the way people do. “No, no. There are too many,” but already she is unbuttoning her shirt from the bottom up.

•   •   •

WHEN
IT
IS
FINALLY
DARK,
the girls take their clothes off and go in the pool, splash in the hot blue of that gathered liquid. Their skins are a wet slick. Their hair goes pointy and water falls from it in straight beaded lines. “I want to love you guys forever,” they say to the half-lit faces. The new breasts reach out to sniff at the world they will inhabit.

The girls get into the bathtub together, all five, because it is a big one and they are cold. They wash one another’s backs with soap that smells like lilacs. Legs slip against legs. The names of the boys they want to love fall out of their mouths.

Dry but not yet dressed, Genevieve takes out a permanent marker. She draws parallel lines down the center of her chest and then the five loopy fingers of a hand at the end. She writes
Cole P.
inside the wrist. Pheenie turns away and says, “Draw one on my back.” Pretty soon they are covered in the outlines of limbs ending in digits. Some drawings are realistic, the arcs of knuckles and nails. Some are more like paws, round and imprecise. The girls sleep in a pile, the scent of the marker sharp on their skin.

In the morning, the original drawings will be printed again on whatever skin was pressed there; even their cheeks will be ghosted with imaginings of love.

As the shirt comes open, the fingers beneath stretch themselves out, crack their knuckles. Claribel lies down on her back hands.

“Who is this hand for?” Jan asks, filing the first nails.

“That’s Abe Lincoln and next to that is my father. Those were the first two. They grew when I was eighteen and I went to Washington for the summer. I sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and read his biographies. I watched the lump grow to a ball, and then a wrist. The fingers started the same way, lumps and then balls.” Jan massages a jewel of lotion in the palm. “My father called to tell me he was leaving to live in Kentucky with a new woman.
I love you even though I don’t love your mother
, he told me, and right then, all at once, this hand erupted out of my chest.”

They go on. Eleanor Roosevelt, Tom Sawyer. Ms. Earhart. A younger cousin who died in a flood. Men whom she knew for weeks sometimes, hours sometimes, before an appendage began where they touched her and they took their coats and left. “Some of them did not know I loved them. Many of them were dead. I have never known which ones were real, or if all of them were. I have hands that showed up without my ever knowing who they were hoping to touch or hold.”

Jan thinks about this, about her body’s agreement to tell the same story she does: love right away, love still, love always. “I think it’s wonderful that you have loved so much,” she says. “You’ve given your whole body over to it. We award medals for much less useful acts.”

Claribel nods her head and feels the twitter of something beating beneath her skin wanting to exist. “But I have proof all over me that no one is alone in my heart. Everyone wants to be alone in someone else’s heart. In the end, I am alone in mine.”

As Jan works, Claribel’s fingernails become red squares like windows into the coursing, blooded tributaries beneath, as if Jan has painted her way inside.

•   •   •

GENEVIEVE
KNOWS
that her father’s arm is a fake. He likes to take it off when he gets home. He likes to eat his dinner without it in his way, to hug his daughter unimpeded. She does not admit this to her friends, because they believe that what her parents have is the lucky thing everyone hopes for. But it is the lie that Genevieve loves. That he built himself what did not come on its own. He said yes, and though his physical form stayed silent, he created a voice for it. Made it sing the notes of his song.

•   •   •

“MY
HUSBAND’S
ARM
IS
PLASTIC,”
Jan says, and the painted nails wink at her.

“Oh my god. But he talks about it all the time.”

“I know.”

“He must love you though.”

“He must. But he also must not.”

“Climb on,” Claribel tells her. The many fingers reel her in.

“How I used to hold the kids on my feet?” Jan asks. She climbs on, laughing and nervous. Claribel lies on the mattress of her back hands, and Jan rests like a platter on the front. Their bodies are held apart. Air travels through the tunnels. Fingers dig themselves in. Jan puts her three arms out like wings to steady herself.

Outside, boys crash into each other and land in heaps.

“Here I am, held up by everyone you’ve loved,” Jan says. “See that?”

When Jan begins to tip, Claribel tells her, “It’s only because you are looking that you can’t balance. Close your eyes. Close your eyes, because we’ve got you.”

•   •   •

ALONE
THIS
EVENING,
Principal Kevin takes his arm into bed. He lays it down and rubs up against it. He is naked. The hand stays open in a lazy wooden cup. It will only hold what is given. He takes it into his own, places it over himself, moves it around.

“I love you,” he says out loud. “Do you know that? I love you.”

If you say so,
he feels the hand tell him. It is cool on his most delicate skin
.

“We all do,” he tells it. The hand is boss-able. If he wants to grind into it, it is grinded. “We all do,” he repeats. “We all love.”

Thank you to my teachers: Ron Carlson, Michelle Latiolais, Geoffrey Wolff, Christine Schutt, Brad Watson, Amy Gerstler, Doug Anderson, and Jackie Levering-Sullivan. My admiration is truly endless.

Thanks to my cohorts in Irvine who offered insight when these stories were still blind, bald little babies. Everything I’ve written since is better for having shared a table with you all.

Huge thanks to the magazine editors who gave some of these stories their first homes: Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha, Cressida Leyshon and Deborah Treisman, Leslie Daniels, Carter Edwards, and Ben Mirov.

For PJ Mark—books and authors don’t get better friends than you.

Every single person at Riverhead. Special thanks to Geoff Kloske, Sarah Stein, Kate Stark, Glory Plata, and Lydia Hirt. And to Sarah McGrath and Jynne Martin, magicians both.

My family. My friends. How unbelievably good you all are.

For generous support, tremendous thanks to Glenn Schaeffer, the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Tin House Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

And to Teo—I love you from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the Mekong River, Balboa Island to the Gobi desert. From me and you to me and you and Clay. Let’s always run away together.