Radio Belly

by Buffy Cram

  “I’ve got homework,” Jennifer said.

  “I’ve got dinner,” Kathy said, holding up a grocery bag and then they split off—north, south—and I headed for the computer.

  THAT NIGHT IT was all protein: breast of something covered in sauce with a peculiar sausage as a side. The blinds were snapped tight but we could still hear them out there.

  “You know they’re calling them hybrids now?” I said. Then in my best newscaster voice: “‘The New Hybrid Class.’” I was the only one laughing. “They’re really quite educated,” I added.

  Neither Kathy nor Jennifer had a response—just the sounds of chewing, scraping, swallowing.

  My fork was poised somewhere between plate and mouth when I noticed the sauce was made from the finest paper-thin slices of mushroom. “What type of mushroom is this?” I asked.

  “Chanterelle,” Kathy answered.

  “Such a lovely word,” I said, to kill the silence. Meanwhile, I was wondering how, exactly, was I different from this mushroom? I ate, I slept, I too grew larger, paler by the day.

  Eyes on plates. Sipping, slicing, clinking of ice.

  “Apparently they were once middle class,” I said. “They were students, artists, professor types, too-good-for-the-corporate-ladder types. And when they couldn’t afford their passions anymore, they just... dropped out.”

  “Like your father!” Kathy said to her dinner plate.

  “Passion,” I said to mine. “Another lovely word!”

  I persisted. “Evidently they’ve been holding ‘salons’ in people’s homes. If a family is away, for instance, they’ll just go right in and read all their books and hold seminars. Apparently property values have really...”

  But I was speaking to myself. They were involved in some sort of mother-daughter communication requiring only the slightest eyebrow movements.

  Kathy put her fork down, folded her arms across her chest and looked at me. My daughter, having missed her cue, joined in at the folding-of-the-arms part, fork still in hand.

  I looked from my daughter to my wife: my Jennifer, my Kathy. It was what one might call an awkward silence.

  A slice of chanterelle fainted from my fork, fell to my plate.

  “What did you do to Hez?” Jennifer said finally.

  “And how is it you can afford to be home from work so early?” Kathy asked.

  I was still formulating a response when a bright, farm-smelling whiff passed my nose. “Do you smell that?” I asked, louder than I meant to, so loud Kathy startled. “That funny smell? Like a greasy scalp? I’m telling you, they’ve been in here!”

  I DECIDED TO tell my wife about the tickets that night. Just the tickets. I figured I’d get to the termination thing a little later. She was on the bed rubbing lotion on her legs.

  “How many tickets?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “twenty, forty. It’s nothing really.”

  “Forty!” she screeched. She rubbed more vigorously then, going over the same area again and again—now knees, now ankles, now knees-knees-knees.

  “I’d planned to dispute them when I had a moment. I mean, they can’t give a man fifty tickets for parking in front of his own house! They can’t just declare Cherry Lane a two-hour-max-anytime zone. ‘Social order is hardly worth the price of liberty.’ You know who said that?”

  “Now it’s fifty tickets?”

  “What?”

  “A minute ago it was forty tickets. Now it’s fifty?”

  I pulled back my side of the sheet and looked closely at the accumulation of bodily crumbs there. I couldn’t, just then, be certain they were my own.

  “I think the den needs vacuuming,” I said.

  “I think you’re more and more like your father every day,” she said.

  “I think I’ll be taking a flex day tomorrow,” I said, and then I headed for the couch downstairs.

  IN THE MORNING there was no sign of them, not behind the hydrangea and not in the ravine either. I headed for the basement and, as I’d feared, found two boxes marked CHARITY among those marked KEEPSAKES. Most of the keepsake boxes were Kathy’s: the Montgomery linens tucked in with the Montgomery china and the Montgomery photo albums—boxes of dresses and shoes and ribbons and trophies for every occasion in a Southern girl’s life. In among all that was a single box marked KEEPSAKES: BROWN. My family inheritance. I brought it out to the backyard.

  I found six of my father’s journals. The first one was from the France years, just after his PhD and just before my mom. It was written in scratchy black French. French: the language I could read and write but never quite speak, a taunting, cruel language, a language that had led me right up to the threshold of fluency and then shut the door on me. I almost broke down. I did. My tears landed on the open page, drawing the ink up from the page, the page up from the book. I dabbed with my shirtsleeve but I was only smearing ink and history. I almost gave up, and then the sentences I was reading began to loosen. Verbs and their conjugations, nouns and their complements, tense, vocabulary: it all started rushing back to me as if French, like a good woman, had been waiting for me all those years, as if no time had passed at all.

  I read verse after verse about la lune, about grass blowing in the wind, women’s hair blowing in the wind, hair luminous and flowing and silky and honey-coloured. Rivers of hair. Entire poems about a woman’s eyes. Eyes like syrup, no, coffee, no, caramel, no, amber. The eyes of a seductress. Tantalizing, come-hither eyes. Page after page about a woman’s curves, vast swells of flesh, heaving mountains, soft veldts, damp crevasses.

  I closed the book. It was my mother, of course.

  My dear father. He had the heart of a poet but not the talent, which is why he’d devoted his life to the study of troubadours. One of only a handful of troubadour scholars at the time, he had gone to France to walk in their footsteps, to dig through archives and write a book about his findings. It was while researching a certain French family and their history of troubadour patronage that he met the man who would be my grandfather, and his daughter, who would be my mother. My father was a scruffy American with a big nose and corduroy pants, but my grandfather was so impressed by the young man’s interest in history he let his daughter marry him anyway. So began the Brown family tradition of “marrying up.”

  My father wrote the book, but not before one of his colleagues did, so he was always given second pick of the jobs and the conferences. He worked in a small, cluttered office at the local university until my mother left him—and who could blame her? He had begun to dress in head-to-toe brown as so many scholars do, but, given our name, it made him a target for ridicule. He would wear the same shirt-pant-cardigan combination until it was sour smelling, at which point he would change the shirt or the pants, never both. He smoked and drank with his friends, scholars of equally obscure subjects: Fifteenth-Century Swords of the Middle East, Italian Rococo Hairstyles and Ceilings of Rajasthan. And he wrote terrible French poetry.

  AFTER HOURS OF sitting in the grass reading my father’s writing, I saw Constantine stroll into my yard.

  “Hello,” he said, not bothered in the least by our trespasser–landowner relationship.

  “Hi.” I couldn’t seem to locate anger.

  “What is the meaning of this?” He gestured at the clutter around me. I noticed he was covered in a noble grime.

  “Reorganizing,” I said, closing the box.

  He gave an aristocratic shrug—the first sign of approval I’d had from anyone in days.

  “I’m going to have to ask your girlfriend for that dress back. The white one.”

  “That seems reasonable,” he said.

  I nodded toward the sandwich in his hand. “What’s that?”

  He cracked the bread open. “Prosciutto, brie, tapenade—”

  “Is that grilled portobello?�
�

  “It appears to be,” he said, and ripped off a mouthful. Then he held the sandwich out to me, “Care for some?”

  We shared the sandwich and a bit of conversation. Eventually he excused himself to look for my wife’s dress, and I carried my box inside. It was then, just after he had left, that I managed to locate my anger after all. Where exactly did a hobo like him get a sandwich like that? Just who did he think he was, breaking into the kitchens of the good people of Cherry Lane? I was starting to think laying Lucinda off was one of the greatest mistakes of my life—Lucinda, not just the maid, but the guardian of our home—when I noticed a stiff wind, the front door standing wide open and more of that deep-skin smell. Only this time, it was everywhere.

  I found body-shaped ruts down the centre of each bed, grease spots as dark as cheeseburger stains on the pillowcases. The bottom bookshelf, down where we kept our Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, was in disarray. In the living room, the chess set had been hastily put back on the shelf. The TV was on Masterpiece Theatre. The radio was tuned to NPR.

  AFTER I TOLD her about the mix-up with her keepsakes, and the trouble at work, and after she dragged my father into it and I dragged her mother into it, Kathy suggested I spend the night at a hotel. I chose to stay in the yard, though, where I could keep an eye on things.

  I spent the early part of that evening reading my father’s journals, falling deeper into French than I ever imagined I could, the language opening to me in new ways. At the bottom of the box, beneath the journals, I found my father’s old scholarly uniform: brown pants, brown cardigan, brown shirt and tie, all my size. Putting those clothes on, I understood why my father wore them a week at a time; it’s a quality you just don’t find in clothes anymore.

  The uniform must’ve filled me with strength and purpose, because I immediately got an idea. After writing out twelve versions of the same note, I walked up and down Cherry Lane tucking one into every mailbox. The notes were a call to action: Tomorrow, 5 pm, my yard, be there, or something to that effect. Then I got the idea to keep an eye on the Gregorys’ house from inside the bushes.

  It was nearly midnight when I heard them. I climbed out of the bushes in time to see a dim, shifty light, a candle or a Bic lighter, moving through the Gregorys’ house. I crept across the yard, on hands and knees, and pulled myself up against the tall fence separating our yards. I could smell tuna grilling. I could hear the clink of wineglasses, the hot tub bubbling.

  I didn’t even walk around the fence; I jumped over and marched up the back steps to confront those hybrids for once and for all.

  There were ten, fifteen, twenty of them. They were in the yard, on the porch, in the house. The ones in the patio hot tub were nude, debating intensely. Inside, the air was thick with cigar smoke. It was dark but for the moon and the odd candle. My clothes must’ve helped me blend in, because nobody noticed me at first. In the living room women and men were lounging about, sipping wine with their feet in each other’s laps. They were passing a book—Rilke? Neruda?—taking turns reading verses aloud. The last woman to read finished the poem and asked, “What do you think it means?” closing the book gently. “Do you think he might really fail his lover or is he just afraid of his own mortality?” I was tempted to lie down with them, to speak about love and death while some young woman played with my hair, but I kept on.

  Several people were gathered around the dining room table, attempting to interpret a tide chart. They had an almanac out, an atlas, a dictionary, a small flashlight. A petite redhead was at the kitchen counter dishing out food. “Niçoise?” she offered each passerby. It smelled delicious.

  A man was drawing different constellations into the dust of the foyer mirror. Cassiopeia, Pegasus and Chamaeleon: he described each one and then a huddle of women with tall hairstyles and names like Scarlett and Arabella recreated the shapes by squeaking their fingers across the marble floor.

  On the stairs, two men in tailcoats were debating the Bible from a literary standpoint. “From a purely literary standpoint, Genesis almost directly correlates to Aristotelian structure,” one said as I passed. In the upstairs hallway a couple was slow dancing to a song only they could hear. They were humming softly, voices in perfect harmony. Another couple was making love in the spare bedroom. I stopped before the open door. “You complete me!” the man yelled. “You complete me!” and then they collapsed in groans. A woman smelling of snuffed-out fires came up beside me and passed me an orb filled with bright smoke. I inhaled once, twice, and began to feel impaled. Then, once I was a limbless black core, once I was only the body, only the parts of me that beat, she led me toward the master bedroom. Pinky was there, and Constantine. He was playing a delicate stringed instrument (a lyre?) and she was warbling operatically. They were accompanied by a woman playing some sort of pan pipe.

  People were twirling and floating around the room in what can only be described as interpretive dance. The woman, my friend, led me forward and before I knew it my arms were swaying—now I was a tree, now a woman’s hair, now grass in the wind. I was twisting carpet pile up between my toes like meringue and reciting something, a French poem I had memorized years ago, a poem I forgot I knew.

  I WOKE UP late, alone on Bruce and Linda Gregory’s bed, my mouth coated in red wine, salade niçoise ground into my hair. Except for a few minor details—couch pillows, crumbs, the odd carpet blemish—the house had been put back in order.

  It was afternoon. Driveways stood empty and for a mo-ment I thought my wife had locked me out accidentally until I found a stack of sandwiches and a glass of milk set outside the back door. There were three, peanut butter and jam, carbs and protein, hastily thrown together. I ate all three, one after another. Then I revised my notes in preparation for the meeting.

  At five o’clock on the dot the neighbours filed into the backyard. They arranged themselves along familiar lines—the Andersons clustered next to the Smiths next to the Woodwards, families waving to families across polite distances.

  I cleared my throat and mentioned that I’d been keeping an eye on the hybrids. “We all know they’re sleeping beneath our shrubbery,” I said, “but did you know they are also living inside our houses while we’re at work?”

  Alarmed murmurs.

  “You may not detect the signs at first,” I said, “but I suggest sniffing your pillows, checking the backs of bookshelves for volumes of poetry, philosophy, literary criticism. I suggest steaming up your mirrors and looking for messages written there.”

  They were whispering among themselves and I was beginning to sense skepticism.

  “Now you might wonder how it is I know this,” I said. “The truth is, I infiltrated one of their ‘salons’ last night, and what I found was rather fascinating. The funny thing is—” I tried to chuckle, but it worked itself into a frog, then a rattle, then a nineteenth-century cough. “The funny thing is,” I tried again, “I think these people may have something to offer. I think, when you find these clues I’ve mentioned, you might also encounter parts of yourself, long-forgotten parts: books you always meant to read, little notes you scribbled to yourself years ago. You might ask yourself, ‘Who was I before all of this?’ and ‘When did that end and this begin?’ You might reassess, I mean really reassess, and change your priorities. And you might start to wonder, ‘Who’s really free, us or them?’”

  “Where’s Kathy?” Mrs. Park asked.

  “She’ll be home any minute,” I said.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” one of the teenagers asked. Snicker, snicker went the rest.

  “Well, I’m locked out and I haven’t had a chance to—”

  “You’re locked out?” someone asked.

  “Of your own house?” said someone else.

  “What exactly is going on with you, Henry?”

  “Hold on now. Hold on just a minute.” I was that movie actor from It’s a Wonderful Life, o
verly earnest, trying to control the angry mob. “I gathered you here to tell you about—”

  “How long have you been living in the backyard, Henry?” someone interrupted.

  “Wait,”—it was one of the teenagers—“didn’t I see you sharing a sandwich with one of them yesterday?”

  “You’re getting this all wrong. This isn’t about me. This is about our community and our way of life—”

  Just then the back door opened. It was Kathy, home from work, and she was ushering the neighbours in the door. Like a funeral procession, each family stopped and whispered their apologies before entering my house. I brought up the back of the line. I whispered an apology too even though I wasn’t sorry for anything, not really.

  “You stay here,” she said, her palm open on my chest. “I need some time.” Her eyes travelled up and down my body, taking in my outfit. “Jesus, Henry,” she said and then shut the door on me. I heard the twist of the lock.

  An hour later the neighbours filed out. I could hear them out front—one bright goodbye after another—but I didn’t go around. I waited by the back door until the sky grew dark from the east and the mosquitoes rose from the ravine. I waited for Kathy until the bedroom lights came on and moths clunked against the windows.

  “Jennifer,” I called up in a loud whisper, but she must’ve already been asleep.

  I moved to the other window. “Kathy? Kathy?”

  Finally a Kathy-shaped shadow came to the window, her triangle of hair, her small sad shoulders. My wife.

  “Honey, I understand you’re mad at me, but could you spare a little change? Just a little?”

  But she quickly moved away.

  THE NEXT MORNING there were only two sandwiches—no peanut butter, just marmalade—and water instead of milk. I tried to remember the previous day’s joy, but I was dirty and hungry and the tiny hairs of my beard were curling back on me.

  I was working on a poem, something to move Kathy to forgiveness, when I heard the bright chirp of teenage-talk coming from the yard next door—not the Gregory side, but the other side.