Belly (8 page)

Twelve booths, sixteen tables, fourteen stools at the counter, twenty-six napkin dispensers that he could see. She wasn’t
even trying to fill the silence. She was doing that hippie thing, that psycho shit: just staring, just sort of smiling.

“Right,” he said. “What else is new?”

“Henry and I are in counseling.”

“Jesus. Doesn’t anyone have a happy marriage anymore?”

“I am perfectly happy being married to Henry,” she said, her voice lifting a bit. “I simply think there are times in a marriage
when perhaps one person can use a little privacy or a bit of extra space, and that it doesn’t have to signal the end of everything.”

“Are you telling this to him or to me?” Belly asked. He cleared his throat as Eliza continued her steady gaze upon him. “So,
why don’t we talk about what’s happened to the retards who used to live on Union Ave.? There’s a fine topic of conversation.
Something a little lighter, please. Man fresh out of jail here.”

“Surely you know something about being married and living apart.”

“I know that I didn’t marry some fat Jew guy who doesn’t eat meat like the Bible tells you to. Some freak who doesn’t like
football and, you know, can’t make babies.”

“I really don’t think his infertility is any concern of yours.”

“Of course it is. The guy cannot make grandchildren. And you married him anyway.”

She had her fake smile on again, but this time sadness seemed to seep out the sides. “Why would I want to bring children into
a family like this?” she asked.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“Why don’t you like Henry? He’s never been anything but kind to you. Think about how much Phil hates you. Is that better?
Someone who punches you at a family picnic?”

“That’s why I don’t like Henry. At least Phil is honest. Kind men are not to be trusted, Eliza.”

“Oy vey,” she said as the waitress presented their sandwiches.

“Anything else?” she asked, placing Belly’s plate before him. He tapped his fingers on the cool purple Formica.

“Nothing,” said Eliza.

Belly leaned over the table and whispered, “Eliza, has he turned you into a Jew? You sound like a Jew.”

A little groan escaped her.

“I’m not a Jew. I didn’t convert. I’m Catholic till I die and maybe even beyond that, so please, Belly, please drop the anti-Semitism.”

“Hey, I’m not against the Jews or anything. They’re fine, just not to marry.”

She shook her head. “Oh my god, you’re just so pathetic.”

“Don’t say that to me.”

She put her hand on his, but he swiped it away. She took a breath, then said quietly, “You’re fucked up, Dad.”

He’d almost never heard her swear. “Don’t you talk to your father like that. Show a little respect. Jesus H. Christ, were
you raised by wolves?”

Eliza lifted up the top piece of bread on her sandwich and laid it down again. “I was raised by you,” she said, keeping her
eyes on the table. “You raised me.”

“Damn straight. And I didn’t raise you to be no Jew-lover, either. And I didn’t raise your sister to be no blaspheming man-hating
dyke bitch.”

Eliza stood and put a bill on the table. “Here’s ten bucks. Get yourself some fries.”

Twenty-nine paintings. Eleven different kinds of cereal in small cardboard boxes on display. Four waitrons. He took a bite
of his sandwich. The eggs were no longer hot and the bread was a little soggy, but he dabbed hot sauce on top, and it was
salty and it was good.

T
he truth is there was nothing wrong with Henry except he was an old-fashioned sissy and Belly would have liked someone a little
more appropriate for his youngest daughter. One of their own kind. Someone he could pal around with. He had one gay kid, and
another one was married to a man who hated him. The least Eliza could have done was shack up with someone Belly could talk
to.

She’d married him so young, so fast, right after high school with no warning, no time to let the announcement sink in. A Jewish
wedding with a girl Jewish priest in a big field in the park in a tie-dyed wedding dress, for Chrissakes. They’d stood under
a giant tablecloth, she’d walked around him seven times, they stepped on some glasses, and that was it. She was gone. The
worst part about it was he knew she was miserable with him, and that seemed to be what sealed them together: two resigned
sorts of people smothered in their own sadness. He would like to see his baby daughter smile every once in a while, for her
to have a man who could make that happen.

He wrapped her sandwich in a napkin, left the money on the table, and went next door. Eliza was helping a woman pick out some
paints. She was bent over small glass jars of brightly colored powder, reading the labels and offering them one by one to
the customer.

He slipped into the store, past the art books to the architecture section. He now owned a collection, four whole books on
the architecture of Saratoga Springs that Nora had brought him while he was away. He could point out the difference between
Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Italianate. But he wondered what good that knowledge would do him. What could he do with that
information other than walk down the street and point out the mansions of Union Avenue that were cut up into apartments in
the depressed seventies, the ones that were all bought by rich New Yorkers and restored to their former grandeur while he
was away. What sort of employment could he cull from that?

Eliza was bound to her own thankless job. The couple who owned the store—a fat duo, man and woman both going bald—watched
every move their employees made with a security camera on the second floor, just sat up there all day and spied on their workers,
wobbled down the stairs when they saw someone shelve a pallet wrong. Eliza worked here all through high school and college—they
would only hire locals, she told Belly, never Skidmore students or summer people—and once, just once, Eliza had come home
from a long August Sunday (they were expected to work six-day weeks in August), reached into her pocket, and revealed to Belly
what was apparently a very expensive jar of cobalt pigment. He’d congratulated her on her theft.

“Did you like the books I sent you?” Eliza asked him now. “I never asked.”

Belly hid the sandwich behind his back and leaned against the bookshelves.

“You mean the ones Nora got me?”

“They were from me.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“Yes, they were.”

Grease from the eggs began to seep onto his hands.

“That explains why you never sent a thank-you note,” she said. “Belly, I’m sorry we got into an argument. You just got back
and we don’t have much time, so let’s just, you know, start over.”

He reached back and hid the sandwich in the stacks and put his other hand on her shoulder, elbow straight, and he said, “Apology
accepted.”

She looked at her shoes.

He walked to the door, but before he exited, he turned around and called to her, “Eat some meat, would you?”

Doe-eyed Eliza, the smallest baby of the bunch, the thinnest and shortest with the weakest bones. By the time she was born,
Belly worked so much he would sometimes go days without seeing his children—he left for work just as they got home from school
or day care or CCD, and he went to bed before they woke. It was not on purpose. It was not on purpose. But sometimes he thought
if he stayed away long enough, he’d come home to find he had fathered a boy. When he saw them, his four pale daughters and
his haggard wife, it was always a shock, always like he had woken up in someone else’s life. He used to look at his youngest
daughter with her watered-down smile and her pale spaghetti hair and wonder how she ever came from him.

After her sister died, Eliza was not hungry for a whole year. He’d bring home McDonald’s, Oma’s pizza, kung-pao chicken, but
she’d eat nothing. She was not sick, he refused to believe that she was sick, but then she was eighty pounds and in the hospital,
a feeding tube sucking at her arm, and when he arrived, his wife and two remaining daughters were already there, hovered over
her, Eliza’s pallid hair splayed out on the plastic-covered pillow, her soft blue eyes trained on the ceiling, and Belly couldn’t
go in. He left. She was there for a week. He sent her flowers and balloons and even a singing gorilla, but he never went inside.

There were things, perhaps, a father should not fathom. Sometimes he wondered if he was due for confession. Should he notice
the way Eliza’s hips were still too bony, pressing into her hippie hemp skirts like invitations? That her stomach poked out,
almost like one of those African babies, it peeked out from the waistline of her skirt, that her legs were too long and skinny
and she retained in her stance the air of a stork? Should he notice these things, and how a man might react to them? Should
he wish that one child were thinner and another heavier and that both were prettier? Was that right?

He walked up Lafayette Street now, where the Orthodox Jews lived. It could be such a nice street, but they let it rot, turned
it into a shantytown of dirty Jews on sloping porches, weird ringlet hair and top hats even in boiling heat, a whole clan
of them camped out in the middle of the East Side.

He felt the weight of family life and all its messy complications, all the burdens that children brought, and how lost he
would be without them, but he was lost now, and his daughters were strangers who could not console him. He had felt this way
only one other time in his life, like he’d woken up and all the colors were off, everything smudged and soupy. It took a year,
maybe two, to regain his composure after God pulled the rug out from under him, took his daughter away, but once the world
looked crisp and clear to him again, he felt certain it would always be that way. Now he felt trapped in one of Eliza’s paintings,
in blobs of undefined, unnamable shades that swirled together to make a big beige universe.

T
he Basset Hound insisted on meeting him at the “new fancy coffee place on Broadway,” as she called it. In the past hour, downtown
had swelled with tourists, and Belly had to push his way through as he headed south toward Washington Street. He remembered
now that it was Dark Tuesday, the track’s one day off, and there was nothing for trackgoers to do but head downtown and shop.

He pressed the doors open to Café Newton. It was as if War Bar, his second home, had never lived in this space, had never
existed. The walls were two-toned and matched the furniture, everything in the place some muddy autumnal shade that reminded
him of Eliza’s paintings. There were pictures of other coffee shops in the chain on the walls, every one of them exactly the
same. Any evidence of the space’s former life was gone now, and it gave him a sick and floating feeling, that gravity was
no longer holding him down.

“It’s two bucks for a regular coffee,” he said as he sank into a purple velvet chair. “And they got pussy furniture here.”
The Basset Hound had her hair all piled up, thick black glasses on, all businesslike. “Plus, you know, this place used to
be my bar.”

“I know,” she said.

“I lost my bar, and it’s a fucking cappuccino palace. These are sad times for downtown Saratoga.”

Bonnie laughed.

“What?”

“The way you say it, Saratoga. You say it like a local.
Sera-doga.
”

“I am a local. My family’s been here for three generations. You carpetbagger types are the ones ruining it with your twelve-dollar
coffees.”

“But it’s packed in here, Belly. I don’t think people mind.”

“These aren’t people, though. They’re tourists.”

She took a sip and got a little milk foam on her face. He had the urge to lean over and lap it up.

“You know what’s wrong with this place?” Belly asked. “You want an example of how fucked up the world has gotten since they
sent me away? Hillary Clinton is our governor. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Senator,” Bonnie said.

“Whatever. Same thing. Hillary Clinton.”

“I voted for her.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“What do you want to drink?” she asked, getting up. “I told you I’m buying.”

“Whiskey,” he said, but she just stood there. “The cheapest cup of coffee they sell. Light and sweet.”

While she was at the counter, he glanced around, again dreading and yearning to be recognized. None of the faces focused on
him. No one turned to take him in. Bonnie came back with a mug of bitter-smelling coffee, and as she sat down she asked him,
“Why do they call you Belly?”

“Oh, you know. Christmas Bells, hell’s bells, Hell’s Angels, Big Fat Bellies. You know.” It always disappointed people when
he told them how he got his nickname, a departure from “Billy,” just for slipping in and out of the house so often that the
bells his mother hung on the door to monitor him were always ringing. She used to say that Belly’s favorite sport was ringing
people’s bells, riling them up until they lost their tempers or until he did, and then he would bask in the glow of that victory—“The
bell tolls for thee,” his mother would say. Then, “Get back in here, Belly.” Then his father would unhook the bells from the
doorknob and whip them across Belly’s shoulders, and then Belly stayed away altogether so the bells would finally stop ringing.

“You look so different from what I pictured,” Bonnie said. “The way Ann talked about you I thought you’d be bigger. I thought
you’d be as big as your name.”

“In prison they called me Rosie. After Pete Rose? ’Cause he was in for gambling.”

She took out a long, thin notebook and wrote down what he said. She told him, “The way she talked about you I thought you’d
be, I don’t know, less delicate. Less handsome or something. She never said you were handsome.”

Belly thought about last night with Maybelline, about the little rings of fat on her stomach and hips that sipped open and
closed as he entered her. He pulled her from his memory and put Bonnie back in, that smooth line of her long torso, endless
legs that could envelop him.

“Should I call you Rosie, too?” she asked.