“That’s what you did, isn’t it?” she asked. “You left Myrna for that Loretta woman?”
Belly shifted himself on the chair. His flesh clung to the plastic slats. He tried to reposition the chair so the sun would not glare at him so directly, but the sun, it followed him wherever he went, it forced the booze from his pores so no matter how much he drank now, here in the pounding heat of the late afternoon, his brain refused to succumb.
“She left me,” he said. “Myrna left me.”
“Is that right?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief.
“She left me a week after the funeral,” he said. “I got home from work and she’d just packed up all her things and put them on the front porch, all these liquor boxes she’d pilfered from the bar.”
“I remember,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “I remember I went over there to borrow some coffee liqueur and Nora said she’d moved out. I just assumed you told her to.”
Belly shook his head. Maybe the wine cooler was working. “I couldn’t believe she just left me with the girls like that. First Nora took off and then, she, then my daughter.” He swallowed. “And then I come home and Myrna’s just gone. No warning. She said she just could not stay sober and stay with me. What did she expect me to do, stop working at a bar? Stop keeping alcohol in the house, just because she couldn’t keep a lid on it? But I mean, her own children. What kind of woman would do that?”
“I remember so clearly that it was coffee liqueur I wanted.”
“It was all her idea. I remember the biggest box she had, it was all booze. She’d written “booze” on it in a big fat black marker. She took all the booze in the house with her and she dumped it in this big Dumpster by the highway. She took my booze.” He was getting worked up, his voice rising so the kids stopped in midwhirlpool and stared, water whooshing all around them.
One dance, they’d tangoed together, a little joke of a twisty drunken dance at the senior prom, after six months of dating, tangoed just the way his Grampa taught him, she got pregnant that night, and they’d never unraveled, not until the day she’d told him she was moving to her own bungalow in that dead little town to the west.
“Is your daughter going to be there?” asked Mrs. Radcliffe.
“Which one?”
“The one who lives in New York, Ann. The news one. She never comes around.” She adjusted her breasts in her bikini bra. “The gay one,” she said, winking at him. “The kind they all know about in eighth grade.”
Myrna’s leaving should have ruined him, should have shamed him into submission. Or he should have begged her to stay, or to return, or to stop drinking and stand up to the task of raising her three remaining children, should have dug up the marriage license and tapped on it with a pencil and recited, “till death do us part,” but he just dropped her off and purged her from his memory. He should have kept the house on Phila Street for the last years that Ann and Eliza went to high school, should have kept their bedrooms preserved with the posters of Shawn Cassidy and LPs of the Cars and the Who and A-ha stacked to the ceiling. He should have given his wife some opening in case she wanted to come home.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
The wine coolers stranded him with a miserable headache. Mrs. Radcliffe’s stretch marks looked like fingers, beckoning him. She smiled her sugary wine-cooler smile at him. “Well, Myrna will be there at least. She’s still a churchgoer.”
He should have left the door open for her. But he couldn’t stand to see his third daughter’s belongings, and even when he shut the door to her tiny room at the top of the stairs, he could see everything inside it, the towering boxes of toe shoes and her textbooks and collection of black dolls and all of her earrings posted on a red ribbon in a ripple above her dresser. And her goddamned pink sweater with the alligator. He couldn’t stand to see his wife, they looked so much alike, and he couldn’t stand to be inside that house, and he hated his three remaining daughters and he hated himself for hating them and none of it was good, nothing worked, nothing pleased him except his mistress Loretta, who erased all his agony with her smoky perfume and that cloud of rusty red hair.
“Well, all that miserable business happened a long time ago,” Mrs. Radcliffe said. “I just wanted to thank you for being so discreet,” she said. “For not giving up any of your clientele. That was very brave of you.”
Her words, they soothed him. They shut him up. He didn’t tell her that none of the clientele was ever in danger, that only gambling promoters could get in trouble, not gamblers. He didn’t tell her that Loretta and the NYRA boys had threatened his family, that far worse would have happened than prison had he given up names. He just let Mrs. Radcliffe’s words wash over him like some kind of breeze, some little wisp of relief he’d been waiting for. She patted his hand. “Another wine cooler?”
“No,” he said. “Got to keep my eye on the boys. I promised.”
Mrs. Radcliffe chatted on about her daughters, talked about how they’d all be there on Sunday for Stevie Ray’s confirmation party and what she and the girls were going to wear—the three of them had matching outfits for church.
“Boys, let’s go,” he called. “Time to go.”
Faint whines escaped from the boys as they climbed out of the pool and gathered up their things to leave. Belly noticed how Stevie Ray lingered on the edge of the pool, his bare foot catching the edge of one of the twins’ rafts. Two conflicting thoughts rushed at him simultaneously, compounding the headache: he was both proud and jealous of the boy. He followed behind Stevie Ray, watching his walk, shoulders hunched forward in a huddle. He didn’t play sports, this grandson of his, he didn’t hang out with other boys, he caved in on himself when he stood, and Belly realized his oldest grandson was exactly the kind of boy he’d picked on back in junior high.
Belly remembered the morning after his third daughter’s funeral, when all the decibels were too high and too tinny, and even the soft thud of the Saratogian hitting the front steps jolted him awake. He had padded down the carpeted stairs, the swish swish of his Grinch slippers on shag, out to the porch. Mrs. Radcliffe had stood on her front lawn, watering her begonias, pregnant with the twins. She set the hose down so it sprayed a big dark slash on wet macadam. She came to the middle of the road, no double yellow lines, just newly smoothed tar in time for the racetrack. He slumped into the road to meet her. She lifted her arms, soft pads of fat jiggled below her biceps—how he missed women’s bodies before aerobics and Madonna and Jazzercize—he smelled flowery deodorant and sweat and coffee breath—and he meant to rest his head in the perfect round nook between her shoulder and chin, but she took one hand on either side of his Brillo-pad cheeks, she pulled his face to hers and kissed him full on the mouth, slid her tongue in to meet his and licked the filmy enamel of his top teeth. He shook his head now, trying not to remember.
In the kitchen, Stevie Ray popped open a can of Coke, and Belly stared at the black face of the computer. He said, “How do you work this thing?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Stevie, come over here and turn this thing on.”
“It’s right here, Grampa.” He pushed a little round button and a green stripe lighted within it.
“Show me how to e-mail.”
“You don’t know how?”
“This whole Internet thing exploded while I was gone. I know what it is, I just don’t know how to work it.”
“Well, you have to have an account first. You have to have an address.”
“I’ll use yours.”
“No way.”
“I’ll use your mother’s. She has one, doesn’t she?”
“We have a family one,” he said.
Belly tugged on Stevie Ray’s soggy sleeve. “Aw, come on. Give Grampa a break.”
Stevie Ray squished into the chair with Belly, his fingers dancing over the keyboard. He felt the warmth of the boy’s body, smelled the sharp scent of chlorine and sunscreen, and the boy concentrated fiercely on the compu
ter screen. Belly reached up and tousled his hair, but the boy squirmed out from his hand, and then his hand hung there in the air a minute, like Wile E. Coyote before he noticed there was no more ground beneath him.
“You know how to type?” Belly asked. “They teach you typing already? When I was your age only the girls took typing, and the boys took shop.” Stevie Ray ignored him.
The computer made a terrible whining sound and the screen turned blue and then white. Stevie Ray typed something in and another screen opened and he said, “You can do it now.”
“How do you make it go to someone?”
“What’s the e-mail address?”
“How should I know?”
“Who are you writing to?”
“Your aunt.”
“Which one?”
“Ann, dammit. I’m writing to Ann. Make it go to Ann.”
Stevie Ray typed her address at the top.
“Is that the real CBS?”
“Yeah. She took us to the studio where Dan Rather does the news and everything.”
“Well.” He could think of no response. “He’s probably a mean boss.”
“She makes a lot of money.”
“Probably not that much.”
“You can type now, Grampa.”
Stevie Ray got up off the chair.
“Where you going?”
“I don’t want to see.”
Stevie Ray headed toward the living room and Belly called, “What do I do when I’m done?”
“Hit send.”
Belly typed. He picked out the words with two fingers as they came into his head. He did not read over what he’d written, he just typed and typed and hit send.
“Stevie,” he called. “Turn this thing off.”
“Belly,” Nora stood in the doorway. “What did you just do?” She pressed some buttons on the computer and the screen went dark.
“I e-mailed.”
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
“Which one?”
“Listen, I just want to let her know that I know that homosexuals are sinners.”
Nora opened the fridge and took out a Piels, opened the can, and handed it to him. “Okay, go ahead and believe that.”
“Thanks, I will.”
“Kids,” Nora called. “Change out of your suits and get ready for dinner. We’re going out.” She turned to Belly. “Thursday is family night. We have pizza at the restaurant with Phil, up at the bar.” She hesitated and he wondered if she wanted him to come.
“Very wholesome,” he said. “Good wholesome family fun.”
He vaguely remembered something like that in his own household, some weekly dinner, one night he would take off and spend with the girls, a ritual he looked forward to every week. A real gourmet feast. He tried to recall where this happened, and when, but then it came to him: it was only a TV show his third daughter used to watch. It never happened to them. What they really ate, what Myrna fixed them, was spaghetti, pizza, grilled cheese, hamburgers. It was basically the kids’ meal at Friendly’s. Really, prison food was better than Myrna’s crummy culinary creations. He thought of telling Nora that, but then maybe she would want to know more, more about prison. Or worse, maybe she would want to know nothing. He wanted to go with them to dinner but he didn’t know how to ask.
She came to him, she reached her hand out for his and he took it. She pressed her palm against his palm and when she removed it he was left with a fifty-dollar bill stuck to his lifeline.
Belly sat on the couch in the empty house and flipped through every channel on the TV three times and drank beer and smoked cigarettes on the porch. He put the fifty in his wallet and let it brew there. Then he climbed the stairs to Nora’s room, he opened the drawers of her dresser one by one: underwear, socks, diaphragm, rubber things he did not want to identify, and he did not know what he was looking for until he found a Ziploc bag with two joints stashed behind her short-sleeved shirts. Underneath the bag hid a pile of crisp twenty-dollar bills and he looked at them for a moment. He put out his index finger and pressed on the pile—trying to remember what it felt like to hold a wad like that, to remember how you could feel the weight of a grand or two or ten. He didn’t want to, he didn’t mean to, but he picked up a twenty, he lifted six twenties from the pile and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans.
He sat on her chenille bedspread and smoked one joint and looked at the pictures affixed to her mirror, pictures of her children and her mother and her husband and Gene, Eliza with Henry and Ann with Bonnie and then an old school photograph with his third daughter smiling in the center.
Ann was still gone and Eliza was going and the third daughter had been gone such a long time. Myrna had left him and Loretta had forsaken him and he wondered which, if any, of these women would come back. Who would stay with him?
Downstairs, back in the TV room, the heat was unbearable. Belly lay in the fringed La-Z-Boy recliner waiting for night to set in, for Nora and the children to return so someone could distract him from himself. He lay in the chair with a Piels in one hand and the remote in the other and he thought, This cannot be my life. It’s Thursday night and this can’t be my life.
Outside the sun was setting; an orange haze seeped into the house and out the window he could see a sliver of moon rising. He raised himself up and stood on the back porch and watched the sun fall behind the trees, felt the heat intensify when it should diffuse, and he could not name the feeling settling in his solar plexus but he knew it was unbearable and he knew no amount of alcohol could cure it.
Then an apparition rose from the sidewalk: a black figure circled in light, a walking silver lining. It could be Loretta, or Phillip Sr., or his third daughter. It could be someone called back from the beyond to retrieve him, and he steadied himself, he readied himself, for the next world.
It was only Eliza. Eliza walked down the driveway, silhouetted against the fiery sky. She walked up to him and took his hand and said, “Belly, I thought maybe you could use some company.”
He shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said.
“You want to do some errands with me? I need a few things before I leave tomorrow.”
“No,” he said.
She said, “Please? Daddy, please?” and he turned and looked at his youngest child, her pale stringy hair and her pale eyes, everything about her light against the darkening sky and he felt something strange, some foreign object clogging his throat. I’m giving birth to an egg out my mouth, he thought, and then he coughed and made a sound and he thought, What is happening to me, what is this? and Eliza put her skinny little arms around him and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, Daddy,” and he still didn’t know, he could not see out his left eye and he let his head hang down on her bony shoulder and he shook and her shoulder was wet. It was all over in a minute. Then the sky was dark.
Eliza said, “Come on, Belly, I’ll take you with me.”
He put his beer can on the back porch steps and let her lead him around the corner to her house, to her old Subaru station wagon, and he strapped himself in the seat. She drove down Union, past the bed and breakfast where the retards used to live and past the mansions and past the racetrack and the arts colony and he said finally, “Where are we going?”
“Wal-Mart,” she said, shifting into fifth gear.
“Oh, Jesus, what the hell?”
“What?” she said. “What’s the problem?”
“You’re the last person who should be going to a place like that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Aren’t you and Margie the antichain gang or something? You hippie types hate that shit.” He wondered if she’d spoken with Margie, if this was the official Wal-Mart intervention program, national get-your-father-a-crappy-job day. But he looked at Eliza and everything about her seemed far away, disinvested. His youngest daughter was already gone.
Eliza turned onto the old road to the mall, past the former dump on one side and the new skating rink on the other
and she said, “I know it’s wrong, but I love it.”
“That’s just what your mother used to say,” Belly told her. “About drinking.”
“Well, that,” Eliza replied. Then, “Let’s not talk about Mom.”
“No, you know what? Let’s do. Let’s talk about your mother. You guys are constantly giving me shit and no one seems to mind that your mother up and left you, you were still in high school and she left you. Now why do I get such a bad rap and your mother is a saint? You don’t remember picking her up off the floor in the morning? You don’t remember how she was passed out on the couch when you came home from school?”
“I do. I remember all of it. I remember going with her to rehab. Checking her in. I remember bringing her things at Four Winds, her perfume and stuff. I remember riding my bike over there after school during visiting hours. I remember how I would never let Henry come in the house. We remember all of it.”
“Then why? You’re not mad?”
“It’s too hard to talk about,” she said.
He put his hand on Eliza’s hand as she downshifted to second and they pulled into the ocean of Wal-Mart’s parking lot, lit up like a football game. A big gray box with green light streaming from it and a giant red, white, and blue “Grand Opening” banner stretched across the top.
“This is what everyone’s talking about?” he asked.
“It’s new,” said Eliza. She wandered off in search of he didn’t know what. It was so big, so bright, he felt paralyzed.
He walked along the endless rows of cheap electronics, past the “Join Our Team” flyers that decorated every aisle, past the new employees, young and old, in blue smocks, and he recalled a promise his nineteen-year-old self had made: to never wear a uniform for work. A banjo player, an older fellow with a gray beard who looked vaguely familiar, strolled through the aisle strumming a Dixieland song—the tune Belly remembered but the words fell away—a big “Ask me: I’m here to help” button on his lapel interfering with the strings.
The light from absurdly high ceilings cast a green glow over everything. Belly got the feeling Wal-Mart was a giant terrarium in God’s garage, each aisle a treadmill, a maze, too many items, too many people, nothing familiar, nothing small, nothing real in the whole box.
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