And then he saw Loretta.
She was wearing the same old kind of outfit: gold lamé hot pants and high heels and a ferocious fuchsia tank top, low cut. It was so low cut. His Nebraskan prairie girl all dolled up for the little northeastern city. Behind her rolled her son in his futuristic wheelchair, blowing in a plastic tube to propel it forward. Belly pressed himself against the shelter of a My Little Pony display and tried not to look at the boy, and the boy, he realized, Darren, must be thirty-two or thirty-three by now, a grown man. He could not believe this was the same stoned kid he sent to pick up his daughter at dance class in his 1972 Mustang, the kid who crashed into the back of the Shoe Barn, the car all covered in moccasins and his daughter with her head snapped back like a Pez dispenser, landing the car and his daughter in the duck pond in Congress Park. If he looked at the boy the ghost of his dead daughter’s face rose like heat monkeys on tarmac.
He remembered the time they ran into a neighbor of Loretta’s on the street, a young woman with a six-week-old, and after they left her Loretta said, “That was one ugly baby,” and he loved her for her heartlessness. He wanted to see her, he wanted her to see him, but not like this, not with tears dried on his unshaven face and sweat stains on his shirt and the whites of his eyes dyed red from beer and pot and unsound sleep.
He wended his way through the endless store, tiptoeing into the aisles like a cat burglar, trying not to let Loretta catch him. He found Eliza perched before the deodorant display, reading labels.
She stood up when she saw him. “Did you see her?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did she see you?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t know what you ever saw in that woman.”
He looked at the contents of Eliza’s yellow plastic basket: she’d managed to find the only products in there with the words “all natural” written across the packages. He thought of her fat Jewish husband at home, slathering organic hair gel on the site of his male-pattern baldness, he thought of their sickly dog, and he said, “You can never tell what goes on between two people.”
Eliza looked up at him. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “That’s so true.”
She asked him, “Do you need anything? Deodorant or anything? Shaving cream?”
“I’m using Phil’s,” Belly said. “He doesn’t know it.”
“Oh, Belly,” she said.
Eliza pivoted around in the toiletry section, filling her basket with Barbasol and Old Spice and Gillette—anything remotely manly, Belly noticed—a whole bathroom cabinet’s worth of macho supplies, and then she led him to the checkout.
They waited in the long line at the register. He read Reader’s Digest while she cashed out and they headed toward the door, but Belly stopped. He told Eliza to wait and he turned around and walked to the customer service desk, his cowboy boots slippery on the shiny white faux-marble linoleum. He walked up to a young black girl in a blue vest and said, “Let me have an application.” She ripped one off a pad and handed it to him. He folded it in half and then he looked up and asked her, “Is it okay if it’s folded?” and the girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “I guess,” and he folded it again and put it in his back pocket. If he dropped off a filled-out application later, he could get some nineteen-year-old manager’s initials on his form, buy himself a little time to find a real job.
Outside he saw Eliza, a postanorexic aging hippie leaned up against a piece-of-shit Subaru. A tiny twinge pricked at his chest: she’d be gone so soon.
She said, “Okay?” and he nodded.
They sat in the car, in the heat, and Eliza handed him a small plastic bag. “I got you a present.”
Inside, an aluminum flask with faux alligator skin wrapped along the sides hugged the bottom of the bag. He looked up and she smiled at him. He couldn’t remember how to smile back, the gift made him so suspicious. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt and fanned the fabric against his chest. “Can you turn up the AC?” he asked.
“I don’t have any,” she said.
“Jesus, why not?”
“Can’t afford to get it fixed.”
“Get your sister to pay, maybe.”
“She’s already giving me money for school, as you know.”
He rolled his window all the way down. “I meant Nora.”
“She doesn’t have any extra,” said Eliza. “They’re paying out all this money to Gene to fix the house.”
“They pay him for that?”
“Of course, you think he just fixes stuff for free?”
Belly looked at his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”
Eliza shook her head. “They’re getting ready to put on an addition, for the new baby. King will need his own room and they only have the three bedrooms, and with you there, that means they need more. They’ve got to fix it up according to the design guidelines, you know, whatever those historic preservation people say.”
“Maybe we know somebody at City Hall who can get them around all that rigamarole. I can make a call.”
“Oh, Daddy, don’t even say things like that. You know you don’t have friends there anymore.”
He stared out the window.
“Anyway,” Eliza said. “I’m not going to need a car in Ala-bama. It’s just a little town. I can walk to everything. It’s kind of like Saratoga used to be.” Belly rolled his window back up. “I was thinking of leaving the car with Ann and Bonnie, so they could get out of the city.”
“Great,” he said. “Then they can come up here all the time. Go ahead and make my life miserable.”
“Well, I don’t know that Ann would come up here, anyway.”
“I thought you said she was coming for the confirmation, instead of you. Wasn’t that the bargain?”
“Well, yes, I thought maybe she would, but I talked to her tonight and I think she’s not going to.” She turned up the vent. “I think it was the e-mail you sent her.”
“I asked her to come. That’s all I said. I said we should try and keep the family together and she should come here.” He loosened his seatbelt. “I told her I missed her,” he said quietly. His heart rate increased, he had trouble breathing, and he told himself if he cried again he would smash his own face in. He pretended he was his father, silencing him with the old equation: one punch for every tear, you little weakling.
“It freaked her out, I guess. First of all, she didn’t even know you knew how to use e-mail. She’s never even gotten a letter from you in her life.”
“That is not true. I sent her a letter once, when she went to college. I even apologized.”
“That was when you went to AA for a month and you apologized to every person you’d ever met. You didn’t mean it.”
“Well, I meant it this time. I just asked her to come visit, but forget it. I don’t care if I never see her again, if that’s what she’s like.”
“She might come or she might not. She’s deciding.”
“Jesus!” Belly banged his fist on the dashboard. “You’re all so ungrateful. Every one of you.” Every time he blinked he saw Darren and his daughter, the wreck, the shoes, the car as it fumbled into Congress Park and landed with the front end in the water, burned strips of metal convulsed into strange silver sculptures on the ground. He propped his eyelids open with his pointer fingers. “Your mother leaves you and you forgive her, and all I do is send this nice e-mail thing and you all turn against me.”
“Nobody’s against you. We’re all for you. We all, you know, we forgive you as much as we can. Mom was drunk, but she —” Eliza stopped. “She was never mean.”
“I wasn’t mean.”
“She never hit us,” Eliza said softly.
And what could he say? She got him. It seemed like that was another man, an episode of Cops, someone else’s life or body or mind. It wasn’t he who hit these girls, his lovely daughters, it was a phantom, an invasion, body snatchers. What could he say?
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“Mom didn’t leave us, you know,” Eliza continued. “We knew she was leaving. She told all of us, and asked if we wanted to come.”
“What? She tried to turn you against me?”
“No, not at all. She just said she needed to get out and that she was going to Stillwater and we could come, but we wanted to finish high school in the same place.” She took a deep breath. “And, frankly, by that time Mom was getting sober and we were more worried about you. We wanted to keep an eye on you. We wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Oh, right, you did it for me.”
“I told you we shouldn’t talk about it.”
“You’re making that up. To make yourself feel better. But I don’t blame you. If my mother walked out on me I’d make up all kinds of lies about it, too. Good job. Very creative. You’re so creative, Eliza.”
She looked for a minute like she was going to cry, and Belly sat back smug, a vague sense of accomplishment rapidly fading to regret.
Then Eliza said, “Did they give you shaving cream in prison? Could you have razors?”
He looked at the window.
“I was just wondering. About things like that.”
“Under supervision,” he said. “You used razors under supervision.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“Did you use those meditation tapes I sent you?”
“My Walkman broke,” he lied.
“You poor thing. How did you listen to music?”
“Oh, there was the heavy percussion of guys banging their tin cups on the bars.”
“No, really.”
“Really.”
“It wasn’t like that, Belly. It was federal prison.”
“How do you know what it was like? Did you ever come down to see me?”
“I sent you things.”
“Right.”
They passed the dump again, and he noticed no putrid smell rising from the grassy knolls of garbage, and he wondered at all the changes and technology and how they could keep a landfill from stinking and how they could get the whole town to come out to a Wal-Mart on a Thursday night and what had happened here?
“You know, I just couldn’t make it all the way to Pennsylvania with Audrey and everything.”
“Who’s Audrey?”
“My dog, Belly. You met her yesterday.”
“Right. The dog.”
“She needs insulin shots twice a day, and Henry has his very strict diet.”
“The only vegan on the Atkins diet. That’s all much more important than visiting your father in prison.”
“Yes,” she said. “But Nora always told me about it. And Ann. She told Ann, too.”
“Who cares about Ann? Apparently she doesn’t like it when her old man’s nice to her.” He rubbed a smudge on the car window.
“Ann was glad to hear about you, though. Bonnie gave her the full report.”
“What does that mean?”
“All that stuff Bonnie was asking you.”
“What about it?”
Eliza glanced at him for a minute before looking back at the road. They drove by the other big Catholic church in town, St. Xavier’s, and the little city park called the East Side Rec—the “poor man’s park” to townies—and it was dark now but still the air was suffocating. All the marijuana had evaporated and no more beer circled in his veins.
“That was all stuff Ann wanted to know. She was getting the scoop for Ann.”
Belly said, “Oh,” and he wanted to know more but then again he didn’t, and he leaned his head against the plate glass and watched the town roll on by.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, Belly.”
“I know.”
She squeezed his hand but he made his fingers limp.
“You can come down and visit me if you want. You and Nora and the boys. We can have a family vacation.”
“Right.”
“It’ll be just like Florida,” she said, and when she smiled he saw for the first time tiny crow’s feet stretching from the corners of her eyes.
Belly said, “Sure it will,” and he patted her shoulder.
“How did you meet Loretta, anyway?” Eliza asked him. “I never figured out that part of the mystery.”
Belly sighed. “After your mother left, I just spent more and more time at the bar and Loretta starting coming in there—she was dating the bouncer, you remember him, that kind of fat Malazzi kid? She used to like big guys before me. Goombahs. And I just noticed her after all those years of not really looking at her.”
“That is such… .” She hesitated, then said quietly, “Bullshit.”
“What’s bullshit about it?”
“You were seeing Loretta years before Mom left.”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were.”
“I absolutely was not.”
“Oh my God.” Eliza pulled over.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m having a heart attack.” She put her hand on her chest. “Belly, you are going to drive us all mad.”
“Drive the car.”
“Just give me a minute.”
“Drive, dammit.”
“Are you honestly telling me that you didn’t start seeing Loretta until after Mom left? I mean, honestly you’re telling me that, but what I want to know is if that’s what you actually believe, because if you believe yourself you are in some serious trouble. I mean, go ahead and lie to me, but don’t delude yourself like that. That is just scary.”
“Will you drive the car, please? Will you please drive the car?” He pounded his fist on the dashboard again, and this time a small whitish indentation formed in the aging gray plastic.
“I’m driving, I’m driving.” She pulled back on the road. “Don’t worry. You’ll be out of here in five minutes.”
“I have a minor fear of small, enclosed spaces. You can imagine.”
Eliza turned onto East Avenue, the line between the old and new parts of town, and kept looking at her father out of the corner of her eye. “Well?” she asked him. “What about it?”
It was Loretta he craved, Loretta he loved, Loretta who reaped the profits from his life-on-the-side, Loretta whose rabbit-fur coat and designer clothes he financed with the betting, Loretta who hid out in the apartment above the bar while he still lived with his family on Phila Street, who waited for him every afternoon with open arms and a flat stomach and breasts that called him awake, Loretta who delivered the weekly winnings and skimmed her share off the top. Even after tragedy carved a deep scar in their connection, he wanted her.
“I did not start seeing Loretta until after your mother left.”
“Then why was Darren picking my sister up after dance class that day? Weren’t you with Loretta that afternoon?”
Belly opened the door and a rush of hot air blew in.
“Christ, Dad, shut that, shut the door. What the hell are you doing?”
“Stop the car. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”
“Stop it, Belly,” Eliza screamed. “Close the door. You’re going to kill yourself.”
“Pull the fuck over,” he said. She stopped the car on the corner of Spring and East Avenue and Belly stepped out into the blistering night. He slammed the door and headed down his daughter’s street and he hummed that Dixieland tune hovering in the back of his fading memory, just grabbed the notes from the ether to keep from thinking about anything. He did not want one single thought to circulate through his brain. He wanted a drink and that was the only thing in the whole world that he desired.
He sneaked in the front door of Nora’s house and walked through the living room and TV room to the kitchen. Nora had replenished his Piels supply. Voices wafted in from the side porch and he peered through the screen door to see Nora and Eliza surrounded by a halo: Nora was smoking a cigarette, a lit one. Their voices rose and fell like a mountain range. He shouldn’t listen, he knew he shouldn’t listen, but he s
tood with his shoulders pressed against the doorjamb and he sipped his beer and eavesdropped.
“He didn’t even have deodorant,” he heard Eliza say.
“He can get that stuff himself. He can walk to the Rite Aid,” said Nora.
“It’s not there anymore. They tore it down.”
“Whatever,” Nora said. “Menges and Curtis is still there. He’s a grown man.”
“Nora, I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”
“Listen, you can criticize me when you take him in. Let’s see what happens when he gets old and decrepit and needs his diapers changed. Let’s see who takes care of him then.”
Belly took another beer from the fridge and downed it in one desperate slug and opened another, slowly, so they wouldn’t hear the pop.
“I would, Nora. I would take him in but you insisted.”
“You’re leaving, Eliza. You’re leaving and you always knew you would, so don’t pretend to be the saint.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What a coincidence that you’ve decided to go back to school just after Belly gets back. I wonder how that happened?”
“This has nothing to do with Belly. This is about me, about my marriage going downhill and about my art. If you don’t want me to go, I won’t go. Say the word and I’ll stay here and help you with Belly. With the kids.”
“No. Don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t mean anything. I’m tired. It’s a stressful time and I’m saying things I don’t mean. I’m happy to take care of him. I have the room, I already have the chaos. What’s one more child?”
They both laughed.
“Well, it’s true,” Eliza said. “You have the bigger house. And after you’re done with the renovations you can sell this place for a mint and get a nice big place in Geyser Crest with a real yard and a bigger driveway and you can park all your SUVs there.”
“What are you talking about? I wouldn’t sell this place.”
Belly took out beer number four.
“Oh, I just figured you’d rather live in the ’burbs,” said Eliza. “You always seemed to aspire to that traditional sort of life.”
Belly Page 15
