Free A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel Page A

liver, the urinary tract, the brain. Ben taped pictures of developing fetuses up all over the house. They were on the bulletin board over the dining room table, where receipts and coupons used to go. The black-and-white photographs of soft new heads and still-webbed feet covered the refrigerator. Soon they occupied frames beside the bed, replacing the pictures of friends and parents and vacations. Annie watched her husband remove the evidence of their lived lives in favor of the ghost of their future child. The only remaining photograph of fully formed human beings was of Ben and Annie on their honeymoon, lying in the exact shade of a palm tree, hot white sun inches away from them on every side. Annie would tell herself the story of that day—how they had to move every few minutes to keep up with the shade.
    “We are still a family of two,” Annie said in the dark while they waited for sleep.
    “How else can I prepare for being a father?” Ben asked. “You get to prepare quite literally. You are growing her for us.”
    “I couldn’t have done it without you,” Annie joked, tugging at the elastic of his underwear. “And I can’t still. Let’s be in-love parents. Let’s be parents who kiss all the time.” Ben let her feather his neck with her lips, and he put his hands on her belly.
    “Not in front of the baby,” he said.
    “You still love me?”
    “Unequivocally.”
    Annie woke up early in the morning and wrote her dreams down, a thing she had never done before. She addressed them to the baby, like letters.
Dear Baby
, they went. Over on his side of the bed, Ben pretended to sleep, listening to her shuffling pen and thinking of writing letters to the uninspired mess in his abdomen.
Dear Guts, another day, another day.
    Ben went to work assembling a crib. He was sorry when he was done that the place his daughter would sleep came off a shelf with a hundred others like it. He was sorry that her view would be of bars.
    “I want to build something myself for the baby,” he said to Annie, as she sat with her feet on an upturned bucket in the yard. “What will she need?”
    “She’ll just need us at first. I don’t think she’ll be that into furniture.”
    “Annie. I need a job to do.”
    She smiled. “Why don’t you build her a little table,” she said. “I think little girls like to have little tea parties at little tables.”
    Ben liked the idea of a table where his daughter could put teacups if she wanted, or if she was another kind of kid—dirty socks or eagle feathers or stones. She could lay a cloth down and hide underneath. So he went to the beach and gathered driftwood. He imagined that it had come to him all the way from Asia, or floated up from a ship, sunk into the deep muck someplace. He hugged it to his chest, wet and salty.
    •   •   •
     
    THE TABLE WAS UNEVEN AND TIPPY, but Ben liked it and he called his wife in to see. Her face colored up. “That thing is practically
made
of splinters,” she said. And then, leaning hopeless against the wall, “Do you have any
idea
how delicate her skin will be?”
    Ben brushed his hand over the rough wood. He walked over to Annie, lifted her red sweater up and touched the side of her rib cage, recorded the texture of the skin in his mind. “Two thousand times more delicate than that,” she told him. He pulled her sweater back down and nodded. He turned the table upside down and kicked the legs off one by one.
    Ben threw the wood back into the ocean. He took his shirt off and threw it into the wind. He took his pants off and threw them too. It was cold out, windy spring, but he jumped into the bubbling waves and floated on his back with the dead table parts, hoping the ocean might continue to churn them all smooth until they were splinterless and appropriate for new skin. The gray sky fell toward them.
    When Ben got out of the water and retrieved his clothing—his pants were spread out on the sand like they were trying to run away and