A Guide to Being Born: Stories Read Free Page B

Wednesday.” She can hear the sound of the truck, green and screeching as it devours up the trash and smashes it down. “It’s the day I teach poetry, in my apartment.” The day that she will not attend is laid out before her, the newspaper that she will not read lands at her doorstep. The phone, the refrigerator, the cat. She holds her own hands.
    In a hospital room, four grown children surround their mother. Nervous, one eats a bag of chips. Another opens a book of poems, searches for the exact right words. The nurses prepare swabs, towels. Grandchildren collect around the bedside. It is not dark in the room but it is not light either, and even the city outside whispers. There are sailboats slipping along the surface of the lake. They tack around red buoys. The sailors’ voices cannot be heard this high, this far away—the whole world between them—still their boats are part of this big view. When a telephone in the corner rings, the only son chats with two of his mother’s oldest friends before he says, “They’re going to take the tubes out of her lungs. Any minute.” One daughter rubs her mother’s hands with lotion. “It’s in and out, just like this,” she says, breathing to show breathing. “Go as long as you want. It can be two minutes and it can be ten years.”
    When the son hangs up the phone, he asks his mother, “Do you have any idea how many people adore you?” And this woman, this mother and grandmother, smiles wide enough that her teeth, treasures in that cave, shine.
    •   •   •
     
    THE BOAT IS ROCKING, the sea stretching around her.
    “Do you think this is it?” Alice asks, but there is no answer. “There are people I was hoping to see again!” she calls out to the dark. Her knees are tucked together, legs folded like wings. Below, so much water moves restlessly. Above, the air does the same.
    The gulls still circle even though it is too dark to hunt. “Do you know,” Alice yells to the birds above, “that I have not been swimming in ages? How do you not swim in such a great big ocean?” Soon she is tying great knots along the enormous rope, every foot and a half. The knots are the size of her head. It gets harder and harder the farther she gets from the end. Her palms are sore. Each knot she ties, she tries to remember a person she loves. She gets the name and the face in her mind. The Jewish boy she wasn’t allowed to see; her cousin, whom she always got in trouble with as a girl; her brother, whom she loved better than others did; her mother, who ended it all when she thought things were starting to get unsightly. Her two husbands, whose necks she could still smell, who had left her, one and then the next, alone on the turning earth. She thinks to herself,
Now I can say that I love them all. I
am an old woman and no one will try to
dissuade me.
All the single fibers, twisted together into ten, the ten into a hundred, the hundred into a thousand.
    She takes her dress off and makes the trip in her white slip. She can feel the wind moving through her loose cotton underwear, but it is the slip that really dances. It puffs up and looks, at moments, like a wedding gown, then pastes itself to her body, every shape underneath mimicked by the fabric. The separation of the legs is defined along with the cut of the waist. The rope swings gently, and the clinging lady with it.
    “I don’t know if I can make it!” Alice calls up to the gulls. She is more than halfway down. Again, as her feet move to a new knot, she remembers a person she loves.
    Her feet slide to the next knot and hands follow.
    Alice reaches the water. When she touches down, the water stings. “It’s cold,” she relays to the dry air. But she wants to let go of the rope. She wants to be free of the climb, so she lets herself fall in, her entire weight let loose in the water. It catches her easily and she dunks her head under. She laughs the laugh of a cold, floating person. She waves her arms and lets the