Belly

by Lisa Selin Davis

  He looked at Nora, reading a romance novel with one hand on her belly and her highlighted hair in a wave across her pretty, swollen face, and he put his hand on her forearm.

  “What?” she said, refusing to look at him.

  “Hand me that People magazine.” And he took his hand away.

  He read through the list of celebrity deaths, weddings, arrests, and divorces and thought about his three weeks of infamy. The raid came off like a sitcom, some fuzzy television flash-forward. He’d received an “anonymous” phone call from the DA’s office a month before telling him to close up shop. But Loretta told him they were bluffing. Loretta told him they had bigger fish to catch and he kept the operation rolling, kept the bets coming and going from all directions, more like an orchestra conductor than a bookmaker. Then they showed up, a whole flock of eager officers, one little rookie just to carry the paperwork. They made a big show of reading him his Mirandas, formally announcing his long list of wrongdoings in front of the customers. The strangest thing about it was the lack of drama, the flat voices, the cloudy smoothness of the operation. In the end it was nothing like television, nothing worth selling the rights to like half of his podmates planned to do. His story was just too small.

  I used to own this city, he thought, and now I don’t even really live here.

  Eventually they were seen by a triage nurse, who asked him if there was any deficiency in his vision or hearing, if he was nauseous or dizzy, confused or losing memory. He wanted to say yes, to all of it, but he simply shook his head. The nurse pronounced him fine, if hung over, slapped a little Neosporin on his scalp and sent them home.

  Nora parked the Dart in the driveway, turned off the car, and faced him. “This is your last screw-up,” she said. “One more stunt like that and you’re out on the street. Am I clear?”

  He nodded.

  “I mean it, Belly. Stevie’s confirmation is tomorrow and we’re having something like sixty people over to the house and you are to be on your best behavior from this moment on. We were locked out of the house yesterday. You stole the keys, you stole the car.” She swallowed hard, and the thought that she might cry launched Belly into a panic.

  “Don’t,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You stole money from me,” she whispered.

  His face erupted with heat.

  “No more. No drinking, nothing. You’re getting a job and saving some money to pay me back and you will behave yourself. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not your child,” he said.

  “Well, stop acting like one then.”

  She waited for him to respond, and when he didn’t she continued. “Mom told me that when she left us, even though she was only half an hour away, and even though she called every night and we saw her every weekend, she said she cried for three weeks after she moved out.”

  Belly didn’t know that she called every night—he was at work, of course. How would he know? And he didn’t know she was with them on the weekend. He was with Loretta.

  “And after three weeks of just crying her eyes out every night and being so angry at how things had worked out… . She was so pissed at herself that she couldn’t quit drinking and she couldn’t make things work with you, and then she just hated crying so much, she was so sick of crying, you know, she was so bored of it.” Nora cleared her throat. “And then she decided she would move on. That’s her motto—that’s what she always tells the kids when she watches them and they have tantrums. Move on.” She looked at him but he did not meet her eyes.

  Nora wedged herself from the car and pushed the door shut gently, walked up the back porch steps, and let the screen door slam behind her. Belly laid his head back on the bench seat. He was so tired. These women, they exhausted him. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, and gathered the energy to move on back to his oldest daughter’s house.

  He decided to fix the dining-room table. It was the least he could do. Nora was slaving away in the kitchen, then scrubbing the house from attic to basement, fielding phone calls and arranging for Stevie Ray’s last-minute meeting with Father Keneally. He retrieved Phil’s toolbox from the pantry and set about working on it.

  It wobbled. The old thing, it had been his father’s, a long slab of mahogany-stained pine, nothing that should last, but here it stood. One of the legs was loose. He could fix that.

  He ducked under the table to examine the ailing leg. He had to lie on his side, his bruised-up hip burning against the carpet. He saw that the table had been repaired before, two metal L-brackets hanging from the wooden leg. Shoddy workmanship, that was the problem.

  “What are you doing?” Nora’s chubby legs appeared before him.

  “I’m fixing it.”

  “You don’t have to. Gene’s coming over early tomorrow to do it.”

  Belly crawled out from under the table. “That’s the problem right there. Gene.”

  “Not one word.”

  He was still on the floor. He had no idea how to raise himself up from that sunken-down plane of the carpet. Nora stood with her arms crossed and resting on her stomach.

  “Why?” he asked. “Just explain it to me.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It is my business, Nora. People on the street are talking about it, and I’m, I don’t know.” He swallowed. “I’m worried about it, is all.”

  Nora took a deep breath and lowered herself to the carpet. She sat cross-legged in front of him, the big mound of her belly resting on her legs. The late-afternoon sun came streaming through the window, lighting Nora up, and Belly sat in shadow.

  “Okay, Belly, we’ll talk about this once more.”

  “Good.”

  “You remember when I went to Mexico right after high school?” He nodded. “Well, Gene and I were supposed to go together. We were going to elope. And then I told him I wanted to go alone, and I didn’t tell him why, I just said I wanted to go by myself and be alone for a while, and I crushed him. I broke his heart.”

  “So now you have to adopt him? It’s twenty years later. So you broke his heart, so what?”

  Nora rubbed her stomach. “Just try and imagine what it would feel like to plan your future with someone, to expect someone to be with you till the end, and then have her disappear on you.”

  He knew exactly what that felt like. More women than one had walked out on him.

  “And then she comes back and marries your best friend.”

  “Happens every day,” he said, but he could see that she was shaken, that the other secret held her hostage. He knew she was pregnant when she went down there, and there was no baby when she came back. “Tell me,” he said. “Confess.”

  Nora shook her head. “I never should have left. If I hadn’t left, Shannon would still be with us.”

  Belly said nothing.

  “I should never have left my sisters in the care of two mean drunks like you and mom.”

  He was sweating, and he said, “We’re not talking about that. Not.” He began to shake, it must be the DT’s, already he had the DT’s, after not even a week. He wondered if it was a world record, if he could finally make it into the Guinness Book.

  “I’m responsible for two deaths,” Nora said, and he did not try to dissuade her. “Gene never married anybody. He never even went out with anybody again, and we are not together, we are never together, but he’s never giving up on me. He just waits, like he can make that baby come back from the grave.”

  Belly took the ring finger of her left hand and rubbed on the knuckle. She folded her palm against his and they held hands for a moment, in the heat, on the carpet. What could he say to her? This was his one chance to be a father to her, to reassure her, to erase twenty years of exponential Catholic guilt, to assuage the pain of killing her baby. He knew how hard it was to lose a child, even an unborn one. He could talk to her about that.

  But he couldn’t. He didn’t. He only held her hand.

  “Maybe I just married the wrong person. I
just married the person who I didn’t have to worry about hurting all the time, because I knew he didn’t love me as much as Gene did. I didn’t want to have that thing Eliza has, where her husband’s like a child, where he’s so dependent on her she has no room to breathe, and then she has to escape. Henry’s so upset he can’t take care of the dog, he had to bring the dog over here. He can’t stop crying.” Nora’s upper lip trembled the tiniest bit. “Isn’t it possible that we marry the wrong person sometimes, and we just have to figure out how to make it right?”

  Belly nodded, slowly, one hand on the forehead bandage, one hand awkwardly placed atop Nora’s fingers, trying to figure out when and how hard to squeeze.

  She said, “I can’t get up. From the floor, I can’t get up.”

  He pressed on the carpet but his hips were too heavy. “Me either.”

  “Turn around,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  He scooted around so his back was facing her, and she did the same, she laid her back against his and told him, “Press with your back and your legs,” and the two of them raised themselves like that, like an arch.

  He said, “That worked,” and Nora nodded and returned to her household chores.

  Belly watched her working in the kitchen. “Do you remember that vacation? To Florida? To see the Mets?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  She turned from the boiling pots on the stove and looked at him.

  “It was horrible.”

  “What do you mean? It was the greatest.”

  “Are you kidding? All four of us kids got sunburned, terrible sunburns, and you made us go to the games every day in the sun with our blistered-up faces. We hated it.”

  “We cannot be talking about the same vacation.”

  “There were only two, and the other one was worse. Mom was plastered the whole time.”

  “Everybody loved it. You guys loved it. You all said you loved it. I remember.”

  “Belly,” she said, and she walked over to him now, put her hand on his shoulder, the other hand on her swollen tummy, and she looked him straight in the eye. “We liked it because you liked it. You were happy the whole time and that made us happy. Capisce?”

  She just made him so tired. He could barely fill his lungs with air. He followed her to the never-used living room, where she polished a telescope pressed against a window.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked.

  “Mom’s giving it to Stevie for confirmation.”

  “We’re supposed to get presents?”

  “Jesus.” Nora shook her fist at him. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m a senior citizen, for God’s sake.”

  “Your problem is you still want to be somebody big.” She peered through the lens and adjusted the focus. “I heard this thing on the radio recently,” she said. “This announcement that the average color of the universe, you know, the most common color, was turquoise, and then they had to take it back because it turns out the average color of the universe is beige.”

  “Your point is?”

  “Belly,” she said, and she turned away from the window and looked down at him. “If you don’t get my point I can’t help you.”

  He said, “Who asked you to?” and he left her there with her telescope and her stars. He took a six-pack from the refrigerator and trudged up the stairs to the overheated attic. He rifled through his things, looking for something he could give Stevie Ray as a present, but he had nothing, nothing to offer, nothing to give. He found yesterday’s tip sheet. He found the pile of twenty-dollar bills and he skimmed one off the top and put the other five inside the tip sheet. He found the notebook Eliza had made and he stuck the tip sheet and the money inside, and he rewrapped it in the cellophane. He looked out at the dusky sky, the time of day when there is no depth, the tops of houses blending into endless firmament. He drank Piels and he turned on the fan and he lay on the single mattress with the sea of old belongings swimming around him: his daughter’s paintings, his grandmother’s artifacts, every possession Nora had saved over all these years, everything she thought deserved rescue keeping him company while he dreamed.

  It was night when he woke. He peeked into the boys’ bedroom, saw them both on their backs with open mouths, Jimi breathing heavily in the thick night air, no sheets on either of them, sweating. Downstairs Nora and Gene sat on the back porch, Gene with his mixed drink in a martini glass and Nora with her room-temperature can of Wink. He heard them when he took a beer from the fridge, laughter seeping through the windows. Dirty dishes from another dinner he’d missed towered in the sink.

  He thought about bursting through the screen door and separating them, about lifting Nora from her chair and forcing her back inside. He thought about shaking his fist at Gene and telling him to get his own family, find his own wife and child, these were spoken for. But he listened to them chatter, listened to Nora’s voice erupt into laughter, and he thought how lucky she was to have someone make her laugh like that, and he wouldn’t touch it. He’d just leave it be.

  He did not know what to do with himself. He looked around the kitchen, he peeked into the TV room, the silent living room, the sleeping front porch; no place was safe. He drank his Piels and he went to the sink. A picture window hovered above it and he could hear Nora and Gene, he could make out their diaphanous figures sloping gently toward each other on the porch. He filled one side of the sink with sudsy water and the other side with clear water and he washed the dishes and watched his daughter and let the night evaporate that way. He had passed four years waiting, every day some rocky hill to summit and roll down again in sleep, every morning the same unfriendly terrain to traverse, waiting waiting waiting to get out, and now he was out and he was still waiting, only he did not know why and for what. He had been waiting for Loretta, waiting to retrieve his woman and his wad of cash, and now neither would be returned to him. He looked out the window screen to the hazy night and he thought for the first time of the possibility that his life would not improve.

  When he was done he took a bottle of Jameson’s from the cupboard and he walked to the front of the house, unlocked the front door, and sat on the lonely porch. It was late, he did not know how late it was, but the street was quiet and no tourists walked by. He drank and he drank, there alone on the front porch, he drank until that horrible swollen feeling inside him loosened and seeped away, and when the world felt safe again he went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN THE morning Belly climbed the stairs to the second-floor bathroom. He took off his clothes and inspected his head wound in the mirror. The temperature had already risen above ninety, and when he turned on the hot water in the faucet, steam obscured his image in the glass. He wiped a gash clean on the mirror, he shaved, he ran the shower spray over his hand until the temperature came out perfectly cool, and then he stepped inside the cave of water. He stayed under the spray for five, ten, fifteen minutes, until Nora called for him to save some hot water for the rest of them. He did not wash. He stood there under the spout with his eyes closed and the waterfall running over him until his fingertips withered, and then he stepped out.

  Hanging in his closet was his one pair of khaki pants, with cuffed bottoms and pleats, his middle-class pants, his middle-aged pants, and next to those his good dress pants, the bottom half of his one suit. Nora had pressed them with heavy creases running down the legs, and woven a red tie with horses into the hooks of the hanger. He picked at the pleats, finding a tiny ball of pocket lint hiding inside. He left them hanging, slipped on a cleanish pair of jeans with his white shirt, then he climbed into his one navy blazer and ran his fingers through his hair.

  A million electric sounds, razors and hair dryers, toasters, alarms, cell phones, everything was on, everything was going off. Belly had a miserable headache, and he longed to stay home and keep watching the continuing Jeffersons marathon on TV.<
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  Instead he watched Nora milling around the kitchen like a hummingbird, moving so fast she looked still. He looked at her slicked-down brown hair with blond streaks and the pouch poking from her midriff and he felt like he was watching a reenactment of a daughter, that’s how far away she seemed.

  “Grampa’s up,” she said, giving Belly a little slap on his shoulder. He tried to put his arm around her but she was so big, and she was moving so fast. She was a mother on a mission: no stopping her. “What are you wearing?”

  “A suit,” he said.

  “I put your good pants up there. Didn’t you see them?”

  “I saw them.”

  Jimi and Stevie Ray bent their heads over bowls of cereal, bracing for a fight.

  “Don’t give me a hard time today, Belly. Please.”

  “How am I giving you a hard time? By wearing jeans? How does that make your life hard?”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table with the boys. They scooted an inch away from him.

  “Go and put your good pants on. Just go upstairs and put them on.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nora, there’s no reason why I should dress up for church. Jesus wore a toga, you think he cares? Denim is a good, strong, respectable fabric.”

  Stevie Ray was staring at him.

  “What?”

  “I’m wearing a suit,” he said.

  “I can see that. Very good for you. They’ll let you right in up there in heaven someday.”

  Stevie Ray shook his head. “You’re more immature than Jimi.”

  “Maybe I am,” said Belly. “I like it that way.”

  Nora was standing with her arms crossed. He could see her making calculations, deciding whether or not to fight him on this, and he was prepared to stand his ground, to refuse to don those awful old-man pants. Nora shook her head and he saw her let it go.

  “Let me tell you,” she said, forcing a smile. “I can remember everybody’s saint name in the whole family. Did you know that in Europe they celebrate your saint name day? Did you know that? You get presents and everything.”