Belly

by Lisa Selin Davis

  Belly shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “She told me that your daughter said something to her, a week before she died, something about how she wanted you all to be closer, that she might not always be around to keep you together.”

  Belly clenched his teeth and forced air out his mouth. He said, “Listen, you better stop talking about this. I mean it. Now.”

  “Ann feels like that was some kind of portent. She should have kept a sharper eye on her little sister after she said that. She feels like maybe it was her fault.”

  Belly banged his fist on the top of the truck.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

  “Maybe you could tell her it wasn’t her fault,” said Bonnie, so maddeningly calm.

  Nora and the boys were watching them.

  “What?” he said. “What is everybody looking at? Let’s go before this one misses her bus and we have to keep her another day.”

  He climbed into the truck with the big boys in the wayback and the ladies up front; he sat back and snapped his mouth shut and watched the town roll by and erased that last conversation from his memory bank. They passed Margie walking to work, and Nora beeped at her. Margie waved.

  “How you doing, Hebe?” Belly called out the window.

  “Belly, Jesus,” Nora said.

  “She doesn’t care. Jews are known for their sense of humor.”

  Jimi giggled. Stevie Ray was sullen as usual. The baby fell instantly asleep.

  They turned left on Broadway, past the demolition of the strip mall across from his old bar.

  “That building is going to be beautiful,” Bonnie said.

  Nora nodded. “I can’t wait. There’s going to be a Gap there.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes. Just what we need, another one of those chain stores. If that was here when you had your store you would have gone under, you know that?”

  “It did go under.”

  “Even so,” Belly rolled down his window, lit a cigarette with his special red lighter, and kept his elbow propped on the half-open glass.

  “They have good sales,” said Nora.

  They pulled into the Springway Diner parking lot. Bonnie hopped out and removed her pack from the wayback. Nora and Stevie Ray and Jimi all climbed out; they formed a human Stonehenge around her.

  “Thank you so much,” Bonnie said to Nora. “You were wonderful.”

  “Anytime, come back anytime you want.”

  Bonnie and Stevie Ray hugged and he said, “Bye, Aunt Bonnie.”

  “Bye, honey.”

  Jimi was holding on to her leg. “Let go, sweetie,” said Nora. “Aunt Bonnie has to get on the bus now.”

  Bonnie tapped lightly on Belly’s half-open window. He rolled it down all the way and she put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Later, Belly. Thanks for the chat.”

  He said, “Okay.”

  “You can have my room now,” she said.

  “I’ll be getting my own room soon enough,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’ve got plans,” he said, and he could hear the emptiness of his claim. What landlord would take him now, with a felony on his record, with no income to speak of, with his misdeeds published and trailing along behind him? He’d have to move to some shack in Ballston Spa, some trailer park full of convicts like himself.

  He pulled himself out of the back seat, walked up the handicapped ramp and into the diner. Coffee, he thought, I need coffee, but as he stood at the counter, keeping his profile turned from the dining room in case Maybelline was working, he found no change and no bills in his pockets, and he returned to the car.

  Nora and Bonnie talked a bit, hugged, talked more, and hugged again, weaving him out of some pattern. He sat in the passenger seat with the AC on and the door half open, and finally Nora got back in. Bonnie waved to them all and ducked inside to buy her ticket.

  When Nora turned on the car and rolled up the windows, Belly started in on the kids. “Aunt Bonnie?” he said. “Aunt Bonnie? She’s your aunt now, after staying with you for a week?”

  “She’s married to Aunt Ann,” said Jimi.

  “That’s impossible. It’s illegal, for one thing.”

  “Belly,” said Nora, backing out, “they’ve been together for over ten years. If you and Ann had been talking all that time you would have known her.”

  He covered his ears. “Don’t talk about that stuff in front of the boys,” he said.

  “The boys know all about it.”

  “It’s a sin, for God’s sake. It’s against the laws of the church. It’s against the laws of nature, for that matter.”

  “We don’t care,” said Stevie Ray. “I know tons of gay people.”

  “What gay people? Where?”

  “All over,” he said. “I’m going into ninth grade, Grampa.”

  Belly rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. The lighter was getting low on juice, and he had to run his thumb along it three and then four times to get it to spark. “At least the dyke bitch is gone.”

  “Don’t say that word in front of the children.”

  They waited at the edge of the parking lot to turn left on South Broadway. A small black Hyundai shaking with Mariah Carey music pulled around them. It was Maybelline, singing loudly and off-key, a long cigarette poking from between her fingers.

  “Belly, there’s your whore,” said Nora.

  “‘Bitch’ is wrong but that word’s okay?”

  “‘Dyke,’ don’t say ‘dyke.’” Nora stopped the car in front of the ex-Dairy Queen. “You want to get out? You want to get out and talk to your whore?”

  “Keep going, and don’t call her that.”

  “Maybelline’s a whore and Bonnie’s a bitch,” said Jimi.

  “Enough,” said Nora.

  “Whatever. I’m just glad she won’t be here to ruin the confirmation.”

  “She might be back,” said Stevie Ray. They turned right on Spring Street and coasted down the hill, past the park, hovering at the traffic light for just a minute. “Aunt Ann is supposed to come on Sunday.” He sat back in the seat. “She might.”

  “Oh, that would be a sight. That would be something for the children to see. Their aunt and wifey making out on the couch.”

  “Enough,” Nora said again.

  They pulled in the driveway and Jimi asked, “Ma, can we go swimming now?”

  “I don’t know, you guys. I’ve got a lot to do and Stevie Ray has confirmation homework for CCD.”

  “I’ll take them,” said Belly.

  “Yeah, Grampa’ll take us.”

  “I don’t know.” They pushed the screen door open and she looked at Belly. “I don’t know.”

  “What? I’ll take them. I can take them.”

  “Okay, but you both have to wear water wings.”

  Stevie Ray put his hands on his hips. “Mom, do I need to remind you that I’m nearly fourteen years old?”

  “Okay, fine, you don’t have to but Jimi does.”

  “I don’t care,” said Jimi. “I’ll wear them.”

  Belly sat at the table while he waited for the boys to change, and Nora puttered around the kitchen. “You have to be careful with them,” she said. “I’m giving you one more chance, just so I can have a moment to myself.”

  “I can watch the kids,” he said. “I can help with that.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got it under control.”

  “But if sometime you want a babysitter or something you can just have me.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Belly fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to pay someone to watch them, it may as well be me.”

  Nora looked at him. “How much money do you have left?”

  He stopped playing with the salt and pepper. “None,” he said.

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. It’s just temporary. Some money’s bound to come through.”

  “From where?”


  “They’re bound to call.”

  “Shit,” Nora threw down a dishtowel. “Don’t you get it? They’re all gone. They’ve cleaned the place up.”

  “They owe me,” he said.

  She stood next to him with her hand on his shoulder, bent down to look directly into his eyes. “You act like you’re some kind of hero for going to prison. But it’s your fault. You never should have gotten mixed up with them in the first place. You’ve shamed the whole family and now you act like everyone’s indebted to you, like people are going to just call you up and offer you money, offer you a job, as if you don’t have to work like the rest of the world.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “Just wait. You’ll find out you’re wrong.” The boys stood in the arch that joined the kitchen to the TV room and they watched Belly. “Let’s go,” he told them. “I thought you little wimps wanted to swim.” They moved through the humidity trapped in the kitchen, escaped to the outside.

  “Watch them,” Nora called after them. “You have to really watch them.”

  Stevie Ray walked five paces ahead of him, and Jimi stayed close to his side, mimicking Belly’s wide steps, avoiding the cracks in the concrete. They turned right on Court Street and then right again on Phila, and Belly could almost hear the sharp clack of his old dog Seaver’s paws as a soundtrack. This was their old route: him and the pup on their midday walk to retrieve the late paper, the stillness of weekday afternoons when the whole world was at work and Belly was just waking, when Saratoga belonged to him.

  He pretended she was there, his sweet little mutt, he pretended these grandchildren were his girls, he pretended all four of his daughters and his dog surrounded him like bodyguards as they approached Mrs. Radcliffe’s on the south side of the street. Belly stood with his back to the house where once he’d lived with his whole family unscathed.

  “That’s the house where Mom grew up,” said Jimi, tugging on Belly’s sleeve to turn him around.

  “I know it,” said Belly. “I was there, too.”

  Stevie Ray unlatched the Radcliffes’ rickety wooden gate and led Belly and Jimi inside. In the small yard a big above-ground pool squatted, surrounded by a cheap pine deck. A middle-aged woman in a Day-Glo lounge chair lay with her tired stomach hanging out of her bikini, a towel over her face. This couldn’t be, how could this be Mrs. Sylvia Radcliffe, the same woman who rescued him from the street the morning after Nora’s wedding? Two teenage girls floated on tubes in the pool, holding magazines.

  “Hi, Mrs. Radcliffe,” the boys called.

  She took the towel off her face and he wished she hadn’t.

  “Mr. O’Leary,” she said, beckoning him forward with a manicured hand. “It’s been years.”

  The girls put their magazines down and glared at him.

  “You’ll remember they call me Belly,” he said, making his way slowly up the steps to the deck, running his hands along his hips.

  “I know that,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “Girls, say hello to Mr. O’Leary.”

  They mumbled from the water.

  The boys splashed into the pool, making the girls squeal. Jimi did not wear his water wings, and Belly didn’t make him.

  “Feel free to go in,” she said. “Our pool is your pool.”

  “I don’t swim.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Never?” She leaned over so the stretch marks on her breasts curved like waves.

  “Never.”

  She lay back again. “Me neither. I hate the water.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’d take a dry shower if I could.”

  He laughed. “Me, too.”

  “Isn’t that funny?” she said. She glanced at the kids in the water. “You want a drinky?”

  He remembered this woman, his across-the-street neighbor, as shy and private, as law-abiding and churchgoing and meek. It was as if she’d blossomed in middle age, opened some secret compartment inside her that made her seem shiny and new, like an irresistible toy.

  “What you got?”

  She pulled out a small plastic tub from below her chair. “Wine cooler?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m stuck in the eighties. I can’t help it. I miss them.”

  “Me too.”

  “The drugs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The parties.”

  “I know.”

  “The money.”

  “All of it,” he said. “Me, too. Except the wine coolers. I don’t miss those.” He took another look at Mrs. Radcliffe. Gray roots poked from her dyed brassy hair. She had it pulled back in a neon green cloth, and a little trail of makeup ran down her left cheek like tears. “I never used to see you at the parties,” he said. “When I lived across the street. I don’t think I ever saw you out and about even one time. I didn’t know you partied.”

  “I was busy being Catholic,” she said. “A good Catholic housewife with a kindly husband. I miss it mostly because I never really got to do it.”

  “I’ll take a wine cooler,” he said. “The least disgusting flavor.”

  She popped open a lemon-lime and handed it to him. “Gross,” he said, chugging it down in one gulp. “Give me another.”

  “Don’t tell Nora,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “She thinks I don’t drink. Especially when the kids are swimming.”

  He wrapped his lips around the bottle and said, “My lips are sealed,” his words echoing into the glass.

  “How are things at the farmhouse?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what we call it, Nora’s house. The last white-trash house in the neighborhood.”

  Belly gulped his drink. “Looks all right to me.”

  Mrs. Radcliffe said, “Sure,” and shielded her eyes with her hands, staring out at the pool. “These children were born in the eighties,” she said. “My girls were born in 1986. That’s something, isn’t it? I guess that’s when the eighties were over for me.”

  “Me, too,” he said, but he did not remind her why.

  One good thing, there was one good thing that happened in 1986. The Mets and the Red Sox in that seven-game set, that famous Bill Buckner play in game six, eight glorious days when nothing existed but baseball, the first time since July, since his third daughter died, when he’d woken up hopeful, when he’d found a reason to rise.

  Mrs. Radcliffe was staring at him. She looked right at him with a wine-cooler glow in her cheeks and she said, “What do you think of life on the outside?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  Stevie Ray was hanging on one of the girl’s floats, and the girl lay on her stomach with her head on her arms and they were talking close like that, and Belly felt the foot of space between his lounge chair and Mrs. Radcliffe’s like a precipice. He was too sober to fall in.

  “Did you hear there are gay people in the eighth grade?” he asked her, taking another wine cooler from her.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Stevie Ray.”

  Mrs. Radcliffe sipped a big swig of wine cooler, she smoothed the wavy lines of flesh over her stomach. “Must be one of the Kennedy boys,” she said. “They always wear pink—I think it’s part of their religion or something, but everybody calls them gay.”

  “Remember when it was bad to be gay? When people had to hide it? Whatever happened to that? When I was little I didn’t even know a single gay person, not anyone who would admit it. People just flaunt it these days. Where is the shame?”

  Mrs. Radcliffe swiveled onto her hips. Flesh pooled on the lawn chair, red stripes from the plastic slats decorated her thighs. “You must have met some gay people in jail, I would imagine.” She didn’t smile.

  “Never.” He rested the wine cooler on his jeans. It made a dark circle and he ran his fingers around the circle.

  “I’ve seen Oz.”

  “Are you trying to tell me Dorothy was gay?”

  “I mean the HBO show. Haven’t
you seen it?”

  “No premium channels in prison,” said Belly. “I’m out of the loop.”

  “How about Midnight Express then?”

  “That was Turkish prison,” he said. “And I don’t remember any buggering.”

  “In the movie or in the jail?” she asked.

  He took a big sip of sugary carbonation, this stuff would never make him drunk enough, and he said, “I’ve seen some things,” and he would not say more. She was leaning over, her painted lips were parted and she wanted the details, and he downed the rest of the spiked soda and he would not say more.

  The two girls floated in the center of the pool, and the boys made a whirlpool around them, running alongside the plastic walls until a current bubbled and the girls began to twirl.

  Mrs. Radcliffe said, “My husband used to use your services.”

  “I remember,” he said. “Whatever happened to him, anyway? He just disappeared one day. He came in, I used to see him once a week, and then he was just gone.” He vaguely recalled the heavyset man, balding, always a little dab of saliva caught in the corners of his mouth.

  “What happens to any of them?” she asked, and served herself another bottle. “He found himself somebody younger.” She raised one eyebrow at him and he thought maybe she was coming on to him, maybe he could take off her bikini top and let those stretch marks hang down over him, maybe she would whisper to him while he worked at her, maybe she would take him inside that big warm house and hide him.

  He thought about Mr. Radcliffe then, about Bruce. Bruce was a talker. He’d stop in on his way home from work for a pint of Guinness and relate the family woes. He’d had some kind of tumor erupt on the side of his face, nothing serious, but it looked bad, some giant ball of pus at his temple. And Mrs. Radcliffe’s appendix burst, they thought it was period cramps or something, and they’d all held a vigil over her hospital bed; Bruce had been left to care for these girls, they were twins, that’s right. Bruce had always been thankful that their problems were solvable—“The best kind of problems to have,” that was his motto. No one had died, no cancer, no long-suffering illnesses, no losses.

  Belly wondered what it felt like to stick it out with someone like that, to seal yourself to another human being by surmounting adversity together. He’d never had the chance. Myrna left him before they could survive their tragedies. But then, the Radcliffes hadn’t made it either.