How You Are Born

HOW YOU ARE BORN / David Borofka MIRANDA LAMBERT'S BEDROOM WAS on the third floor of the family's manor house, overlooking the sweep of the back lawn, the reflecting pool, the twin gazebos and the rose garden. During the winter the view was not remarkable; mist obscured the details of the scene like a painting that has been overworked, and clouds provided such a low ceUing as to make a submariner claustrophobic. In winter the drapes were rarely opened, but in summer, during those moments when the overcast was suspended, the picture from her leaded glass windows was something out of a fairy tale, including the beauties of the back half of the estate as well as the Olympian triangle of Mount Hood. Today the drapes were open, but she was not admiring the landscape. She was, instead, trying to teach me the intricacies of a card game called Hell Bridge. With little success, I might add. It was some variation of Rummy or Michigan Kitty that the Lambert family played, but Mira was not a normal girl, and her explanation of the rules sounded like something out of Lewis Carroll. I could make no sense of it. "You're not trying, Fish," she said, "this isn't geometry or logarithms." "I know it's not." I stifled a yawn. "Freddy had me up all night." The night before, at midnight, her brother had shaken me out of a fitful sleep to invite me to a party down by the river. He opened the window of my room and showed me the way across the slate roof and down the trellis on the south side of the house to the ground. Freddy was two years older, had recently obtained his driver's license, and I was flattered that he would include me. Only later did I realize that he had invited me because my bedroom window was his only escape route. Our way was lighted by a fickle moon that played tag with the clouds. At one moment the path along the roof was outlined as clearly as day, the next we were feeling our way toward the edge where nothing separated the roof from the ground but air. Then down the trellis, clutching the ivy, and across the back lawn, sprinting like burglars from one shadowed border to the other. 28 ' The Missouri Review "No, no, no," Mira was saying, "a run of four has to be in the same suit." "You said they had to be in sequence." "And in the same suit," she huffed. "Honestly, Fish." "Don't be snotty." "Don't be stupid." I swallowed one more enormous yawn, then stretched out on the braided rug. As large and as elevated as her bedroom was, the only habitable room on the third floor, it was not a fourteenyear -old girl's pink-and-cream fantasy. The wallpaper was peeling off plaster walls that were themselves crumbling, wind whistled through the casements and down the chimney of her fireplace, and a person could easily pick up splinters from the hardwood floor. In the center of an ornate rose medallion, an unshaded bulb dangled from an archaic wire. By comparison, on the floor below, the room that I had been assigned had been completely redone: paint, floors, fixtures, the works. Mira's mother had told me that her room was the last of the Lambert house to be renovated. Mira had so far frustrated her mother's efforts, saying that she liked her room as it was, but Mrs. Lambert was closing in. I was reminded of my father's aunt who near the end of her days became convinced that the nuclear threat was imminent and, claiming that her twenty-three-room house was too big a target, chose to live in the detached garage. Mira's stubbornness seemed no less eccentric than my great-aunt's fright. "This place is a dump," I said. "You ought to let your mother fix it." "My mother isn't going to get within ten feet of this room." Mira held the deck of cards in her right hand, flexing them in the direction of my head. "Can you...