Belly (27 page)

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.

I
t 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.

I
N 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.

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.”

He shook his head.

“Mom’s is Esther, the saint of stars. I bet you forgot that, Belly.”

“I don’t think I ever knew it in the first place.”

“Eliza had Gamo, patron saint of the arts, even though it’s a man’s name. Ann had Bernadette—I remember just trying to spell
that on the card—and that meant something like “bold as a bear.” Do you remember all this, Belly?”

“Sure,” he lied.

“And Shannon had Irene, saint of peace.” Nora looked up now from her cookbook. “Do you remember mine?”

“Should I?” he asked, and Nora just glared at him.

“I know what it is,” said Stevie Ray. “It’s Josephine.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Stevie Ray leafed through his workbook. “Joseph is the saint of fathers,” he said, closing his book. “Jeez, Grampa, you didn’t
remember that?”

Belly said, “Stevie, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. And on a Sunday, for Chrissake.”

“It’s just about time,” Nora said, closing up Stevie Ray’s notebook and tousling his hair. Whatever war was between them had
ceased for the day. Behind them, Phil appeared, six-foot-six and skinny as a street cat in his Sunday best.

Belly stood up. “I’ve managed to go a whole week without seeing my son-in-law.” He extended a hand and Phil shook it, but
loosely. Belly’s palm was suddenly coated in sweat; he felt as if Phil were the father and he was a naughty little boy.

“Spell’s broken, I guess,” said Phil, and he served himself a cup of coffee but did not say more to Belly.

He watched his daughter’s husband sit down and sip his coffee and read the paper, watched him keep still while his wife moved
around him, watched his sons reach across him, spill orange juice on his paper, trying to get his attention, and the whole
scene made some foreign feeling simmer up inside him, something he vaguely recognized as regret.

They wanted to all go to church together but Phil’s pickup was a two-seater, so they tried to pile all three kids and three
adults into Margie’s borrowed Dodge Dart. Belly waited for them to smoosh in and then he said, “I’ll walk.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Nora. “I don’t trust you to make it there on your own.”

“It’s six blocks away.”

“There are, like, forty bars between here and the church. Get in.”

“Just one minute,” Belly said, and he walked up all those stairs to the attic. He changed into the dress pants and then he
reached under the bed and pulled out the plastic Wal-Mart bag with the flask from Eliza, and downstairs he filled the flask
with Jameson’s and outside he squeezed into the car with the flask resting safely against his heart.

E
ons had passed since Belly had been in this church, more moons than he could count. These last four years remained in sharp
focus, his podmates and their fights over what to watch on television, the rare gift of a cigarette or square of chocolate
when the guards were feeling generous. But the fifteen years before that were now as blank and beige as the universe.

The interior of St. Peter’s was stern and bland, and a young priest had begun taking over for Father Keneally. But everything
about the inside of this church was the same, even the parishioners. Mrs. Radcliffe and her girls, Phil’s brothers and their
wives, everyone coming up to him and asking, “How
are
you?” with faux Christian concern. He recognized a sea of regulars from War Bar and their families.

The question he’d been dreading all week now floated in the air around him: “What are you going to do now? What now? What
lies ahead for you, buddy?” He followed Nora to a pew in the front and knelt, he tried to kneel but it was too hard on his
knees and he sat back on the bench and looked up to the school of people on the stage, each of them wearing index cards with
the names of their patron saints written in bold black ink.