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

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.

GESTATION
     

     

Atria
     
    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