Belly Read online

  Nora was waiting for him out front, a box of Wendy’s fries on her lap staining her jeans with grease.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  He reached over and grabbed a fry. “Swimmingly.”

  “What did the parole officer say?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. Can you drive, or should we just sit in a parked car in Ballston Spa all day?”

  Nora drove and the baby slept and Belly stared out the window. He felt like he’d been home for months.

  She dropped him off on Broadway, at his request—he pretended he was going work hunting. He walked past St. Peter’s, past the Catholic high school. He walked past the park that huddled at the elbow of the road, marking the end of old downtown and the beginning of the new. Across the street he saw the ruins of the torn-down strip mall where once there was a Woolworth’s, where he sometimes lunched on a grilled bran muffin and black water with Cremora and read the Saratogian in a rare moment of anonymity as his dog, Seaver, waited outside for him to bring her his scraps. His Man-o-War bar, his dog, his park, his Woolworth’s counter, all of it gone now or altered or fixed up beyond recognition, so all he could do was blink at the world with big blank blue eyes, with Eliza’s open eyes, just blink and sigh and wonder.

  Now, in the middle of the day, was when he felt the most tired. For more than thirty years he had slept through the noon hour, and now he had to venture out in the midday heat in search of a job, like a teenager. He could not think of any way to go about it, so he walked to the iron gate of Congress Park and peered inside to the casino and the springs and the remnants of monuments past that had mostly crumbled but whose iron teeth still rose from the grass. He tried to but could not enter. Too much, he thought, too much happened in that park. I don’t need anything else to happen. For the rest of my life, I don’t need a single other event to occur.

  He walked up Broadway to the art supply store, his shirt soaked with sweat, his hips aching, and he peered in the big dirty windows. He could see Eliza in the book aisle, a feather duster fastened to her hips. He thought, What a sad life for such a talented girl. She seemed to sense him there; she looked up, and he stepped to the side of the doorjamb, hoping the metal bar would cloak him, but it was too late. She saw him, and she came forward.

  “Belly, what are you doing here?” Eliza hung out the open door of the store. “You want to get lunch?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Lunch. Good.”

  “Be right out.”

  The sun, he felt, was killing him. The middle of the day in the middle of a heat wave, with nothing and no one to regulate the passing of the hours, just watching the world swim around him. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, he repeated to himself. He would have it all figured out by Sunday. He wished Sunday would come now. He wished for a drink. He wished for a cold front to swoop down and save him. He wished he had his sunglasses. But that was four wishes, he realized, and one would have to go.

  “Jatski’s?” asked Eliza, and he nodded.

  “I don’t have much time, though,” he told her. “I have to meet that girl at two.”

  “What girl?”

  “The one who’s staying in my room.”

  “Oh, Bonnie. Why didn’t you say so? She’s practically your daughter-in-law.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A nervous, avian sort of look flashed across her face. “Nothing. She’s great. I really like her.”

  “You like everyone.”

  They went next door to the diner, and he felt such a sense of relief upon entering that his hips almost gave out. It was exactly the same as it always had been, the plastic booths and the happy, empty paintings by Mama Jatski, and the fake plants. Eliza turned around, and Belly was still standing in the doorway.

  “All right, Belly?”

  “Never felt better,” he said, and followed her to a booth in the back.

  A few tourists—overdressed and scrutinizing the Racing Form—lunched in the diner, but most of the patrons looked like locals, without the makeup and the jewelry and the anxious air of travelers. The same family was running the place, four or five siblings exactly alike, the boys and girls both, slinging coffee and hot plates of instant eggs. He looked, but he didn’t see Loretta or the NYRA boys, anyone who used to frequent this old lunch spot of theirs.

  “Good old Jatski’s,” he said as the waitress filled his coffee cup.

  She said, “Ha,” filled Eliza’s cup with decaf, and dropped their menus on the table.

  Eliza raised her mug. “To Jatski’s,” she said, and they toasted.

  “Coffee-flavored water, just like I like it.”

  The menu was also the same, save for splotches of whiteout covering the old prices and new figures—just for August—etched in ballpoint pen. “Think I can get a little whiskey in this?” he asked her, smiling.

  She didn’t smile back. “I really wish you wouldn’t start drinking again.”

  “I’m not drinking,” he said. “I had a couple of sips last night, to celebrate. You should try it.”

  “I will never touch that stuff,” she said. “Not a drop.”

  “Maybe that’s your problem right there.”

  She didn’t say anything, just made that little chirping hm sound. Did it signal an end to the topic, or was he supposed to keep saying What, what is it honey, tell me what you mean, let’s talk about it, to try and drag the truth from her? Forget it. He’d rather sit there in the terrible silence. He looked at the girl, his daughter, and she didn’t look familiar to him.

  Eliza sipped her coffee, and Belly looked at every sandwich and every omelet and every beverage. This was the first restaurant he’d been to in four years. He felt green and glowy under the fluorescent lights. Eliza hummed to herself, pretending to be impervious.

  “Well?” he asked Eliza finally. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “What are you, the shrink?” Eliza had folded her menu and wrapped her hands around the white coffee mug. He said, “How’s the art world?”

  “Oh, well, I’m not really in it.” She frowned. “Actually, I’ve kind of stopped painting.”

  “Thank God,” he said. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that, kid. Jesus, those paintings with the blobs. Why don’t you go back to drawing those cartoon animals? That’s something you could make money at.”

  Eliza blinked, then closed her eyes for a moment. “That was in eighth grade,” she said. Her knuckles were white around the mug. Then she began to nod, slowly, and she made big swooping movements with her head, her eyes still closed.

  “Is this a seizure?”

  She opened her eyes. “Belly,” she said. “Can’t you try just a little bit?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think it must take so much work for you to be mean all the time. It must just exhaust you.”

  “I’m not mean. Are you crazy? What did I say that was mean? Tell me what I said that was mean.” Eliza pressed her fingers out in a wave of protest, but he kept going. “That I asked if you were having a seizure? That’s mean? That’s a caring thing to ask. That’s a thing you ask when you care about somebody, which you would know if you thought about anyone but yourself.”

  The waitress came back and tapped her pencil against her cheek, and Belly stared hard at his menu.

  “What can I get you, Eliza?”

  “I’ll have the western egg sandwich on whole wheat. No meat. What about you, Belly? I’m buying.”

  “This is your father?” The waitress pulled her glasses down to get a better look at him. “Guess they let you out.”

  “Looks that way,” Belly grumbled.

  “Your hair got all gray.”

  “Thanks for noticing.”

  “Well, honey, don’t complain. Look at my brothers. Not a gray hair on their heads, ’cause it all fell out.”

  “I come from a long line of not-bald men,” he said, perking up. Now this, he thought, was a conversation. Why co
uldn’t Eliza do this, just have a pleasant chat about nothing and go on about the day? The girl was so serious.

  “What can I get you to eat?” The waitress flipped the sheet on her guest-check pad.

  “Western egg sounds good. With meat, lots of meat.”

  Belly sipped from his lukewarm coffee and counted the paintings on the wall. Then he counted the booths, then the tables, the chairs, the stools at the counter, then he started on the napkin dispensers. Still, Eliza did not speak.

  “So,” he said. “They all know you here.”

  “I’ve been working downtown for eight years.”

  “That long, huh?”

  “I was two blocks away from the bar for four years, and you never came down to see me.”

  “You try running your own business and see how much free time you have.”

  “Especially if you’re running two businesses.”

  They had never discussed it. Not once. In all the time he took bets at the bar, Eliza never made mention of it, and when he was with her, he pretended to maintain his position as upstanding citizen, small businessman. He and Eliza never talked of the booking, of Loretta, of his third daughter, or of Eliza starving herself, and now he wondered what words had ever spilled out to fill the space between them. What could he possibly have to say? He didn’t know what to tell her about it, how to explain.

  Twelve booths, sixteen tables, fourteen stools at the counter, twenty-six napkin dispensers that he could see. She wasn’t even trying to fill the silence. She was doing that hippie thing, that psycho shit: just staring, just sort of smiling.

  “Right,” he said. “What else is new?”

  “Henry and I are in counseling.”

  “Jesus. Doesn’t anyone have a happy marriage anymore?”

  “I am perfectly happy being married to Henry,” she said, her voice lifting a bit. “I simply think there are times in a marriage when perhaps one person can use a little privacy or a bit of extra space, and that it doesn’t have to signal the end of everything.”

  “Are you telling this to him or to me?” Belly asked. He cleared his throat as Eliza continued her steady gaze upon him. “So, why don’t we talk about what’s happened to the retards who used to live on Union Ave.? There’s a fine topic of conversation. Something a little lighter, please. Man fresh out of jail here.”

  “Surely you know something about being married and living apart.”

  “I know that I didn’t marry some fat Jew guy who doesn’t eat meat like the Bible tells you to. Some freak who doesn’t like football and, you know, can’t make babies.”

  “I really don’t think his infertility is any concern of yours.”

  “Of course it is. The guy cannot make grandchildren. And you married him anyway.”

  She had her fake smile on again, but this time sadness seemed to seep out the sides. “Why would I want to bring children into a family like this?” she asked.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  “Why don’t you like Henry? He’s never been anything but kind to you. Think about how much Phil hates you. Is that better? Someone who punches you at a family picnic?”

  “That’s why I don’t like Henry. At least Phil is honest. Kind men are not to be trusted, Eliza.”

  “Oy vey,” she said as the waitress presented their sandwiches.

  “Anything else?” she asked, placing Belly’s plate before him. He tapped his fingers on the cool purple Formica.

  “Nothing,” said Eliza.

  Belly leaned over the table and whispered, “Eliza, has he turned you into a Jew? You sound like a Jew.”

  A little groan escaped her.

  “I’m not a Jew. I didn’t convert. I’m Catholic till I die and maybe even beyond that, so please, Belly, please drop the anti-Semitism.”

  “Hey, I’m not against the Jews or anything. They’re fine, just not to marry.”

  She shook her head. “Oh my god, you’re just so pathetic.”

  “Don’t say that to me.”

  She put her hand on his, but he swiped it away. She took a breath, then said quietly, “You’re fucked up, Dad.”

  He’d almost never heard her swear. “Don’t you talk to your father like that. Show a little respect. Jesus H. Christ, were you raised by wolves?”

  Eliza lifted up the top piece of bread on her sandwich and laid it down again. “I was raised by you,” she said, keeping her eyes on the table. “You raised me.”

  “Damn straight. And I didn’t raise you to be no Jew-lover, either. And I didn’t raise your sister to be no blaspheming man-hating dyke bitch.”

  Eliza stood and put a bill on the table. “Here’s ten bucks. Get yourself some fries.”

  Twenty-nine paintings. Eleven different kinds of cereal in small cardboard boxes on display. Four waitrons. He took a bite of his sandwich. The eggs were no longer hot and the bread was a little soggy, but he dabbed hot sauce on top, and it was salty and it was good.

  The truth is there was nothing wrong with Henry except he was an old-fashioned sissy and Belly would have liked someone a little more appropriate for his youngest daughter. One of their own kind. Someone he could pal around with. He had one gay kid, and another one was married to a man who hated him. The least Eliza could have done was shack up with someone Belly could talk to.

  She’d married him so young, so fast, right after high school with no warning, no time to let the announcement sink in. A Jewish wedding with a girl Jewish priest in a big field in the park in a tie-dyed wedding dress, for Chrissakes. They’d stood under a giant tablecloth, she’d walked around him seven times, they stepped on some glasses, and that was it. She was gone. The worst part about it was he knew she was miserable with him, and that seemed to be what sealed them together: two resigned sorts of people smothered in their own sadness. He would like to see his baby daughter smile every once in a while, for her to have a man who could make that happen.

  He wrapped her sandwich in a napkin, left the money on the table, and went next door. Eliza was helping a woman pick out some paints. She was bent over small glass jars of brightly colored powder, reading the labels and offering them one by one to the customer.

  He slipped into the store, past the art books to the architecture section. He now owned a collection, four whole books on the architecture of Saratoga Springs that Nora had brought him while he was away. He could point out the difference between Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Italianate. But he wondered what good that knowledge would do him. What could he do with that information other than walk down the street and point out the mansions of Union Avenue that were cut up into apartments in the depressed seventies, the ones that were all bought by rich New Yorkers and restored to their former grandeur while he was away. What sort of employment could he cull from that?

  Eliza was bound to her own thankless job. The couple who owned the store—a fat duo, man and woman both going bald—watched every move their employees made with a security camera on the second floor, just sat up there all day and spied on their workers, wobbled down the stairs when they saw someone shelve a pallet wrong. Eliza worked here all through high school and college—they would only hire locals, she told Belly, never Skidmore students or summer people—and once, just once, Eliza had come home from a long August Sunday (they were expected to work six-day weeks in August), reached into her pocket, and revealed to Belly what was apparently a very expensive jar of cobalt pigment. He’d congratulated her on her theft.

  “Did you like the books I sent you?” Eliza asked him now. “I never asked.”

  Belly hid the sandwich behind his back and leaned against the bookshelves.

  “You mean the ones Nora got me?”

  “They were from me.”

  “No, they weren’t.”

  “Yes, they were.”

  Grease from the eggs began to seep onto his hands.

  “That explains why you never sent a thank-you note,” she said. “Belly, I’m sorry we got into an argument. You jus
t got back and we don’t have much time, so let’s just, you know, start over.”

  He reached back and hid the sandwich in the stacks and put his other hand on her shoulder, elbow straight, and he said, “Apology accepted.”

  She looked at her shoes.

  He walked to the door, but before he exited, he turned around and called to her, “Eat some meat, would you?”

  Doe-eyed Eliza, the smallest baby of the bunch, the thinnest and shortest with the weakest bones. By the time she was born, Belly worked so much he would sometimes go days without seeing his children—he left for work just as they got home from school or day care or CCD, and he went to bed before they woke. It was not on purpose. It was not on purpose. But sometimes he thought if he stayed away long enough, he’d come home to find he had fathered a boy. When he saw them, his four pale daughters and his haggard wife, it was always a shock, always like he had woken up in someone else’s life. He used to look at his youngest daughter with her watered-down smile and her pale spaghetti hair and wonder how she ever came from him.

  After her sister died, Eliza was not hungry for a whole year. He’d bring home McDonald’s, Oma’s pizza, kung-pao chicken, but she’d eat nothing. She was not sick, he refused to believe that she was sick, but then she was eighty pounds and in the hospital, a feeding tube sucking at her arm, and when he arrived, his wife and two remaining daughters were already there, hovered over her, Eliza’s pallid hair splayed out on the plastic-covered pillow, her soft blue eyes trained on the ceiling, and Belly couldn’t go in. He left. She was there for a week. He sent her flowers and balloons and even a singing gorilla, but he never went inside.

  There were things, perhaps, a father should not fathom. Sometimes he wondered if he was due for confession. Should he notice the way Eliza’s hips were still too bony, pressing into her hippie hemp skirts like invitations? That her stomach poked out, almost like one of those African babies, it peeked out from the waistline of her skirt, that her legs were too long and skinny and she retained in her stance the air of a stork? Should he notice these things, and how a man might react to them? Should he wish that one child were thinner and another heavier and that both were prettier? Was that right?