“That’s not true. None of that stuff was here.”
“The only thing that wasn’t here before you left was Wal-Mart, and that’s inevitable. There’s not a town left in the U.S. without a Wal-Mart nearby. But everything you complained about—the chain stores and the coffee places and the whole makeover, all that was going on while you were still here.” She paused. “You just didn’t notice.”
“No,” he said.
Margie said, “Yes.”
“Well, I guess there’s good coffee now.”
“That there is. And a bookstore. Good restaurants. It’s not the same place, but it’s not a bad place.”
“I miss my town,” he said. “This isn’t my town.”
“Yes, it is,” she told him. “It’s the same place underneath. You miss the seedy underbelly, but it’s the same everywhere else. Same sewer system. Same streets. Same houses, just painted differently. It’s going through a fancy phase. It won’t last.”
He stood up, he wobbled, he saluted her, and then he went searching for the tree he lost his virginity under, but they were all so tall now. He walked along the stripe of pavement where fifteen years before his Mustang had toppled over, taking Shannon away. He looked up at the canopy of leaves and the sky blackening behind him and the world morphed and swayed. He walked down the steep hill toward the war memorial and the duck pond, a cement gazebo where they’d played duck-duck-goose at Nora’s fifth birthday party. The whole thing was covered in pigeon shit then, but now it sparkled. In fact, he hadn’t seen any pigeon shit the whole week. The church on the corner of Spring and Regent, they used to call that the Pigeon Shit Church. The thing had been boarded up his whole life, but just before he got sent away some bazillionaire had bought it and turned it into condos. Really nice condos, not a speck of pigeon shit anywhere. They must hire people just to clean up pigeon shit now. There was a job for him: pigeon shit cleaner. He’d heard once that in Paris they hire people just to clean up dog shit. They wore orange jumpsuits or something, special uniforms just for the dog shit cleaners. He could do that, get an orange jumpsuit and a mop and a bottle of Windex and just scrub the sidewalks for money.
A raindrop brushed his cheek, just one, then two little tears of water and then it was pouring, raindrops dancing everywhere around him. He hated water, and he stood there in the rain, let it soak through the gabardine, let it seep into his cowboy boots, let it twirl around him like the women in his dreams, choreographing him into drowning.
He saw a gaggle of grown-ups galloping toward him, toward the cover of the war memorial, grown people with crazy strides bouncing along the soggy ground like giant toddlers. He moved closer, the water lapping at the leather edges of his cowboy boots, and saw that the group hiding under the cement awning were all retarded adults, all except one lucky Down Syndrome-less middle-aged lady who must have been their leader or caretaker or den mother or whatever you called them. All this time he’d been wondering where the retards had gone and here they were, at least a few of them, running through the rain in Congress Park on a hot Sunday August afternoon.
Belly shook the water off him like a wet dog. He stepped under the protective concrete of the ceiling and stood next to the retards, all seated in the center like big preschoolers.
“It’s the retards!” he yelled. “Where have you guys been?”
The den mother had big gray poodle hair and big round red glasses that swallowed her face. She shushed her grown-up children and said to Belly, “Can I help you?”
“Where’d they all move to? What happened to all those retarded kids who lived at Furness House?”
“We call them mentally challenged adults, sir, and they dispersed them to smaller houses throughout the county,” she said. “These guys live in Stillwater now.”
He wanted to hug them. He wanted to twist their puerile bodies to face one another and dance around them, duck, duck, duck, and then he wanted to place his hand on the head of the girl who looked so close to normal, goose, with long blond hair and green eyes. Just a little twist of the genes and she could be regular, she could be real, she could be his grown third daughter, thirty-two years old she would be now and absolutely alive, this little inbred vision, this mangled version of Shannon. He placed his hand on her head and then the whole crowd erupted, the melted faces of the retards with their doughy skin and cross-eyes, harnessing all that innocent flesh to accuse him. The den mother said, “Sir, sir, please don’t touch them,” and Belly backed off, away, down the concrete ramp in the rain, up the hill, past the little creek they’d widened into a river, and the rain made circular eruptions in the water.
Belly climbed Nora’s front porch and looked at the two ghost chairs. The railing was made of mud, it slipped in his hands. He set himself down in the chair and watched Spring Street on a Sunday afternoon. He missed the retards when they lived there in the giant extended family that he realized now he always felt part of. He missed Seaver, his old dog Seaver, who used to love to visit the retards, and the retards loved her. Half the time he’d go looking for her he could find her there, drooling demi-adults stroking her shiny black fur. The retards were allowed to walk themselves around the block once a day, and they’d come by in limping herds. He and Phillip Sr. used to offer them little sips of beer and puffs of Newports, and then Seaver would escort them home.
He turned to the empty chair. “Phillip Senior,” he said. “Why did they go and break up the retard family?”
The chair did not answer.
He sang an old folk song Nora used to know. “Where have all the retards gone, long time passing?”
The chair did not answer.
“Should I go in now? Face the music?”
The chair remained defiantly silent.
He kicked it away.
“Why’d you have to go and die, Phillip?” he asked the chair. “We could have got an apartment together. We could pick up a couple of girls and go back to our bachelor pad and party all night. We’re not too old.”
Everything in his body ached.
“You’re too old,” the chair said. “Act your age.”
He nodded at the chair. “You’re right. You’re right, you’re right, you are so right.” The rain died, his pants were dryish again, the air was soft and cool. He smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, sipped from his flask, and made his way down the front porch, along the driveway to the back door and into the kitchen.
The house was filled with women, teams of women with trays of pale carrots, dry cucumbers, mealy tomatoes.
Jimi sat at the kitchen table working on a big bowl of sugar cereal. “Somebody called for you, Grampa.”
“Who?” asked Belly. He tried not to sway.
“I don’t know. They said don’t go back to the track.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, okay, okay.”
He stood in the kitchen doorway and watched the women pivot around the room, listened to the hums of chatter punctuated by an occasional high laugh. He walked through the TV room where some of Stevie Ray’s friends played Nintendo. They called, “Old man, you wanna play? We’ll let you win.” He continued to the dining room. Bread, bread, I need some bread, he thought, something to sop up the whiskey and tequila and wishing.
He tried not to inventory the guests but he could see Gene and Phil on the couch with forties, and Eliza’s poor Henry looking lonely and forlorn without her, his chubby hands leafing through the record collection. Nora stood over Stevie Ray, writing down what gifts and who gave them. Mrs. Radcliffe and her twin daughters stood in matching purple smocks, as promised.
Where was Ann? Which one was Ann? Would he even recognize her?
He planted himself next to the dining-room table and searched for something resembling food. Deviled eggs. Fruit Jell-O. A dish of star mints. There was a giant white cake with strawberries on top.
Nora put her hand on his shoulder, and when he smiled at her, she recoiled at his br
eath.
“How much did you drink?”
“Not enough,” he said. He wanted to ask her if Ann showed up, if Ann would speak to him, which one was Ann? But he said, “Listen, what a man needs at a time like this is a potato. I mean, we’re Irish. Potatoes saved our people, and here we are in America and there’s not one potato on this goddamned table.” Nora escaped back to the couch. She sat next to Gene, smiled at him, and he smiled back, and Phil sat oblivious next to them, and he could see that they all had some kind of arrangement, something he could never understand. He could see some little wavelength of love stretching between Gene and Nora and Phil.
I’m hallucinating, he thought.
An oldish woman came and stood next to him, with another tray of crudités. The woman from church, with the fluorescent red muumuu and candy pink glasses, who was not so homely when he saw her up close. She wore a pink cardigan around her shoulders now. Something sad and familiar circled around her: he felt he could speak to her and she would understand.
“Why has the potato been so shafted in America?” Belly asked her. He was aware of himself as a spectacle, a stretched-out Dudley Moore in Arthur. “Look what’s on here. Celery. I mean, celery.” He put his face right up to this woman’s—she had very dark green eyes that he recognized. “Celery is the worst-tasting vegetable ever made, but you’ve got a whole pile of it right here.” He rifled through the celery sticks with his dirty fingers. “I hate celery.”
The woman set the tray down on the dining-room table, her emerald eyes shining. She was littered with wrinkles, deep lines like hieroglyphics. He tried to read the message in those lines.
“I hate celery,” the lady said. “I’m allergic to it, for goshsakes. Don’t you remember?”
He looked closely at her, wobbling as he approached her face. Why, Shannon. She looked like Shannon. Old Shannon.
Belly put his hand over his mouth—to cover a scream or a laugh he didn’t know. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re my wife.” He reached out to touch her face, “You look so beautiful,” he said, and he felt himself tilt back in slow motion, like in outer space. He leaned back against the dining-room table. He felt the world shift beneath him, a hole opened in the earth and everything was falling in. He heard a shout and a few yelps around him, and he thought, the house is falling in. The world is falling in. Where are my grandchildren? Where are my daughters? I’ve got to save them. And he raised himself up, turned to look for them, saw he was covered in something, paint, or gravy, and he heard Nora yell, “Jesus, Belly, you knocked over the whole table,” and he fell. He fell all the way to the floor and lay with his back against the tipped-over table like it was a lawn chair, and he saw the whole ocean moving toward him, the world has fallen in, the Florida ocean, the gulf coast, and his wife in the lawn chair next to him with her umbrella drink, and his three daughters burying the fourth up to her neck in sand. He saw all these faces before him and he reached up to Nora’s shining face, put his hand on her cheek and asked, “Are you all right? Is everybody okay?” But the world went blank before he heard the answer.
When he woke on the couch the last sliver of daylight cut a line across the carpet. It reminded him of the slice of sky slipping into the pod, and he thought of the man a few cells down with all fifty-two glossy Sears portraits of his two daughters plastering the walls. The man once told Belly, “Every day I look at my girls and it’s like I won the lottery.”
One thought wandered across his eyes and plopped down next to him like an old friend. I have three daughters. He lay on the couch and had no idea how much time had passed. There were fewer people, but the house was still buzzing with strangers. He looked out the window. The trees flattened against the sky and the wind expired, and the soft air, the gloaming, swallowed all his fears. Dawn and dusk, those were the only times he felt the least bit hopeful.
Stevie Ray was standing over him. “Are you done ruining my party now?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Belly. And he was.
What should happen now, he thought, what would make this all so cinematic, is if he woke up tomorrow morning and he and Stevie Ray communed somehow, if during the night the weather and the words converged to form a pulmonary wind, to blow them safely to shore. Now he would have a little pal, a baby Belly, an ally. But he thought of the storkiness of the boy, his dogmatic faith, his sensitive skin and what he wanted to be when he grew up, and nothing in the past week would dull their glaring differences. He should summon some wisdom to bestow upon him now, some grandfatherly advice for his newly confirmed status. But the boy was going to be a priest, for Chrissakes. He would be coming to the boy for advice someday.
“Well, it can’t get any worse,” said Stevie Ray. “Get up, Grampa. Time to grow up.” And he extended his hand toward Belly, and Belly let the boy pull him up to standing.
A beautiful song wafted into the TV room, an old Irish tune his grandma used to sing: “The Cliffs of Doneen.” He followed it like a dog catching a scent. And there, next to the knocked-over dining room table, was Nora, Phil accompanying her on the guitar.
He walked right up to her, right up to her face, to make sure she wasn’t faking. She used to love those lip-synching shows.
“Why, Nora, I didn’t know you could sing.”
All the women in the room glared at him. All of them, their faces melting into accusations.
“Belly, Phil and Gene and I had a band in high school.”
“You did?”
She banged her fist on the knocked-down dining-room table. “We played out every weekend. We even played at War Bar. A bunch of times. You got a citation for having underagers in there.”
“You’re making this up.”
“I’m not.”
He thought back, reached way back in his gray mind to the days before Shannon was taken, and saw Nora and Phil and Gene on the stage, some long-haired greasy fool behind them on the drums, his other three daughters perched atop the bar stools drinking Shirley Temples, and Myrna lacing up their shoes, his longtime regulars congratulating him on the talent of his oldest child, on how well she’d turned out.
“The Lawn Jockeys,” he said.
“That’s right.”
His brain seemed to wake up then, he was using more than the three percent of it Shannon said all humans had access to. “Keep going,” he said. “Keep singing.”
Gene stood next to him, awkward in his heavy Sunday suit over that lumbering frame. Belly nodded at him.
“She has the greatest voice,” said Gene.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good, I guess.” He paused. “Gene, do me a favor, would you? I mean, let’s fix the front porch. I really want to fix the front porch. Get some pallets up in there and make that thing nice again.”
“We can do that.”
Gene sipped his beer and stared at Nora. “Belly,” he said. “You know you can’t work for me now.”
He said, “I’ve got something lined up. It’s okay.” All his life he thought he would come out above the bar, better than his father’s life or his grandfather’s. He wanted what every parent wanted: for his children to be happy, for their lives to be easier and more fluid than the bumpy ride he’d endured. He looked at his oldest daughter surrounded by friends and family, he thought of his youngest daughter sewing bindings in Alabama, of Ann and Bonnie and their cosmopolitan lives, and he thought of Shannon and her beautiful, sweet face, her eyes closed in the coffin.
He would never get his money back, never get Loretta, and he could never tell his daughters how he’d tried, for once in his life, to do something for them. He would live with his daughter for a little while and work for some crummy corporation, he would not be rich, and he would watch his grandsons grow into men. A small life, then, a small life of an old man near the end.
Stevie Ray stood next to them, and Belly tried something, just for an experiment. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and squeezed, just a little, the tiniest pressure, and Stevie Ray let him stay there a minute be
fore he ducked out of Belly’s grasp and back to his friends.
Up to the attic one last time. They could make a museum out of this place, he thought. A life: in furniture. And he didn’t want it, not any of it, not his recliner, his Piels sign, his tropical island wall-sized poster, not his great-grandma’s spinning wheel, not his daughter’s field hockey equipment, not the girls’ beanbag chairs and that shaggy rug they used to call their pet doggie since he would not allow another animal in the house after Seaver passed. There was only one thing he would retrieve: a small, framed portrait, a goddamned Sears portrait with a creamy-blue background and the family posed awkwardly, a mannequin family with Belly at the head, Myrna next to him, wearing hangover eye shadow and orangey lipstick. All the colors faded till they were just reds and greens—a colorless Christmas family, and their four beautiful daughters: Nora, a tad overweight with a terrible feathery haircut, and Eliza sickly thin with a sallow smile, and Ann looking mean and glum and punk—he’d forgotten about her punk phase, that stupid spiked hair and gobs of black makeup around her eyes and all those black rubber bracelets. And Shannon, relaxed, smiling widely, in her homely thrift-store outfit. He looked at Nora’s thick arms and broad shoulders in the picture, and around him now at her stacked-up tennis and field hockey trophies, and now he saw how she had tried her best to fulfill his wish for a son.
They had been, he realized now, a normal, unhappy family. Most men lost interest in their wives. Most wives had a vice like alcohol or cigarettes, television or the crossword puzzle; most gained weight, cooked poorly. Myrna had been kind to him, and she had done everything she could to quit drinking, until all she could do was leave him.
The attic was cool now, relieved by the rain, and he retrieved Eliza’s homemade book and brought it back down to his grandson. Stevie Ray was surrounded by presents, and by flowery Hallmark cards filled with checks. A painting rested on the back of the couch. Belly felt it call to him, felt the colors beckoning. The whole world was a smear, but the painting remained sharp and clear: a portrait of Nora and Phil and the three kids. They all wore sneaky little smiles, didn’t look happy or unhappy, just content, or resigned, or something else. Just real. They looked absolutely real. There was a signature on the bottom. Eliza O’Leary Kessel.
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