Radio Belly (5 page)

I was not aware.

“And are you aware of the new ministry-wide zero-tolerance policy when it comes to matters of financial delinquency?”

I was not aware of that either.

“Jesus, Henry,” he said, rising from his chair and looking about as sorry as a grown man can look, “if you'd come to me at any point,
any point
before now, we could have dealt with this reasonably. Like adults.”

And so, in the end, it wasn't the Schmidts. In the end it was the parking tickets. Dan insisted that within the office, my “termination” would be strictly referred to as a “leave of absence.” He insisted I would receive a respectable severance package.

On the way out the door I saw Rhanda gossiping by the copy machine.
Hiss-hiss-hiss,
she was saying, while glancing over her shoulder at me, which is why I was inclined, against my own better judgment, to walk right up to her and rustle my own pants. One minute I was heading for the door and the next I was thrusting up while reaching down. I was scratching and rearranging and jiggling my bits at her. I was calling her “a man-faced skank.”

CHERRY LANE WAS still, except for a small fleet of charity vans idling by the curb. I hadn't been home at that time on a Monday for decades. The “hybrids”—as the media were now calling them—had gotten into the rest of the Large Garbage while everyone was at work. I stood on my doorstep watching the staff recover items from under bushes, off lawns and out of gutters. Where's the money management in this? I wondered. How exactly can these people afford to be volunteers in this day and age? I briefly considered helping but I was overdrawn, expired.

I called to my wife and daughter from the foyer, but it was just me,
man alone.
I instinctively went to the den, kicked off my shoes and clicked on the TV, but it was hours until prime time. I turned it off and that's when I caught a whiff coming from the couch pillows. It was gamey, oniony, slightly animal—a smell some part of me enjoyed, but a smell that had no place in my home. I lifted a pillow to my face and sniffed deeply. I must've drifted away for a time then, for I woke in the afternoon with that pillow sitting on my face, smelling more scalpy than ever.

I sat up with a start and noticed that all of the couch pillows were mussed, that the carpet was showing signs of heavy traffic—and yet, since Lucinda had left, my Kathy had been so diligent, one might even say obsessed, with these kinds of things. She was always making sure the carpet pile went the same way.

I went from room to room then, sniffing, checking the window locks.

In the kitchen I found cheese and cracker crumbs. Cheese
and
crackers: carbs
and
protein. Upstairs, in the master bathroom, I found a bar of soap with deep, dark striations where dirt had settled in. There was a faint scum line around the perimeter of the tub, as though several dirty bodies had been washed there. Glued against the porcelain was a curly red hair. I was searching my wife's drawer for tweezers to collect the hair when I happened to glance out the window and see more hybrids, seven or eight of them, making their way slowly through the ravine at the back of our property. The men were wearing ratty suits and top hats, the women fur and silk.

Never mind tweezers. I was hauling down the stairs with that hair pinched between my fingers when my wife and daughter stepped into the foyer.

“Thank God you're home,” I shouted and then my feet kicked out from under me and I slid down the last few stairs.

They were giggling in their matching yoga wear and the hair escaped my pinch.

“They've been in here,” I said. “Those homeless people. I just found a hair in the tub.”

“
Gross,
Dad!” Jennifer said.

“I think they've been taking baths.”

They looked at me blankly then, all the giggle gone out of them.

“Well, maybe you should have considered this before you let Lucinda go,” Kathy said.

“No, not
our
hair,” I said. “One of theirs. A red one. Wait, I'll show you.” I was patting the floor around me. I was pleading, “C'mon. Help me look.”

“I've got homework,” Jennifer said.

“I've got dinner,” Kathy said, holding up a grocery bag and then they split off—north, south—and I headed for the computer.

THAT NIGHT IT was all protein: breast of something covered in sauce with a peculiar sausage as a side. The blinds were snapped tight but we could still hear them out there.

“You know they're calling them hybrids now?” I said. Then in my best newscaster voice: “‘The
New
Hybrid Class.'” I was the only one laughing. “They're really quite educated,” I added.

Neither Kathy nor Jennifer had a response—just the sounds of chewing, scraping, swallowing.

My fork was poised somewhere between plate and mouth when I noticed the sauce was made from the finest paper-thin slices of mushroom. “What type of mushroom is this?” I asked.

“Chanterelle,” Kathy answered.

“Such a lovely word,” I said, to kill the silence. Meanwhile, I was wondering how, exactly, was I different from this mushroom? I ate, I slept, I too grew larger, paler by the day.

Eyes on plates. Sipping, slicing, clinking of ice.

“Apparently they were once middle class,” I said. “They were students, artists, professor types, too-good-for-the-corporate-ladder types. And when they couldn't afford their passions anymore, they just... dropped out.”

“Like your father!” Kathy said to her dinner plate.

“Passion,” I said to mine. “Another lovely word!”

I persisted. “Evidently they've been holding ‘salons' in people's homes. If a family is away, for instance, they'll just go right in and read all their books and hold seminars. Apparently property values have really...”

But I was speaking to myself. They were involved in some sort of mother-daughter communication requiring only the slightest eyebrow movements.

Kathy put her fork down, folded her arms across her chest and looked at me. My daughter, having missed her cue, joined in at the folding-of-the-arms part, fork still in hand.

I looked from my daughter to my wife:
my Jennifer, my Kathy.
It was what one might call an awkward silence.

A slice of chanterelle fainted from my fork, fell to my plate.

“What did you do to Hez?” Jennifer said finally.

“And how is it you can afford to be home from work so early?” Kathy asked.

I was still formulating a response when a bright, farm-smelling whiff passed my nose. “Do you smell that?” I asked, louder than I meant to, so loud Kathy startled. “That funny smell? Like a greasy scalp? I'm telling you, they've been in here!”

I DECIDED TO tell my wife about the tickets that night. Just the tickets. I figured I'd get to the termination thing a little later. She was on the bed rubbing lotion on her legs.

“How many tickets?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said, “twenty, forty. It's nothing really.”

“Forty!” she screeched. She rubbed more vigorously then, going over the same area again and again—now knees, now ankles, now knees-knees-knees.

“I'd planned to dispute them when I had a moment. I mean, they can't give a man fifty tickets for parking in front of his own house! They can't just declare Cherry Lane a two-hour-max-anytime zone. ‘Social order is hardly worth the price of liberty.' You know who said that?”

“Now it's fifty tickets?”

“What?”

“A minute ago it was forty tickets. Now it's fifty?”

I pulled back my side of the sheet and looked closely at the accumulation of bodily crumbs there. I couldn't, just then, be certain they were my own.

“I think the den needs vacuuming,” I said.

“I think you're more and more like your father every day,” she said.

“I think I'll be taking a flex day tomorrow,” I said, and then I headed for the couch downstairs.

IN THE MORNING there was no sign of them, not behind the hydrangea and not in the ravine either. I headed for the basement and, as I'd feared, found two boxes marked CHARITY among those marked KEEPSAKES. Most of the keepsake boxes were Kathy's: the Montgomery linens tucked in with the Montgomery china and the Montgomery photo albums—boxes of dresses and shoes and ribbons and trophies for every occasion in a Southern girl's life. In among all that was a single box marked KEEPSAKES: BROWN. My family inheritance. I brought it out to the backyard.

I found six of my father's journals. The first one was from the France years, just after his PhD and just before my mom. It was written in scratchy black French. French: the language I could read and write but never quite speak, a taunting, cruel language, a language that had led me right up to the threshold of fluency and then shut the door on me. I almost broke down. I did. My tears landed on the open page, drawing the ink up from the page, the page up from the book. I dabbed with my shirtsleeve but I was only smearing ink and history. I almost gave up, and then the sentences I was reading began to loosen. Verbs and their conjugations, nouns and their complements, tense, vocabulary: it all started rushing back to me as if French, like a good woman, had been waiting for me all those years, as if no time had passed at all.

I read verse after verse about
la lune,
about grass blowing in the wind, women's hair blowing in the wind, hair luminous and flowing and silky and honey-coloured. Rivers of hair. Entire poems about a woman's eyes. Eyes like syrup, no, coffee, no, caramel, no, amber. The eyes of a seductress. Tantalizing, come-hither eyes. Page after page about a woman's curves, vast swells of flesh, heaving mountains, soft veldts, damp crevasses.

I closed the book. It was my mother, of course.

My dear father. He had the heart of a poet but not the talent, which is why he'd devoted his life to the study of troubadours. One of only a handful of troubadour scholars at the time, he had gone to France to walk in their footsteps, to dig through archives and write a book about his findings. It was while researching a certain French family and their history of troubadour patronage that he met the man who would be my grandfather, and his daughter, who would be my mother. My father was a scruffy American with a big nose and corduroy pants, but my grandfather was so impressed by the young man's interest in history he let his daughter marry him anyway. So began the Brown family tradition of “marrying up.”

My father wrote the book, but not before one of his colleagues did, so he was always given second pick of the jobs and the conferences. He worked in a small, cluttered office at the local university until my mother left him—and who could blame her? He had begun to dress in head-to-toe brown as so many scholars do, but, given our name, it made him a target for ridicule. He would wear the same shirt-pant-cardigan combination until it was sour smelling, at which point he would change the shirt or the pants, never both. He smoked and drank with his friends, scholars of equally obscure subjects:
Fifteenth-Century Swords of the Middle East, Italian Rococo Hairstyles
and
Ceilings of Rajasthan.
And he wrote terrible French poetry.

AFTER HOURS OF sitting in the grass reading my father's writing, I saw Constantine stroll into my yard.

“Hello,” he said, not bothered in the least by our trespasser–landowner relationship.

“Hi.” I couldn't seem to locate anger.

“What is the meaning of this?” He gestured at the clutter around me. I noticed he was covered in a noble grime.

“Reorganizing,” I said, closing the box.

He gave an aristocratic shrug—the first sign of approval I'd had from anyone in days.

“I'm going to have to ask your girlfriend for that dress back. The white one.”

“That seems reasonable,” he said.

I nodded toward the sandwich in his hand. “What's that?”

He cracked the bread open. “Prosciutto, brie, tapenade—”

“Is that grilled portobello?”

“It appears to be,” he said, and ripped off a mouthful. Then he held the sandwich out to me, “Care for some?”

We shared the sandwich and a bit of conversation. Eventually he excused himself to look for my wife's dress, and I carried my box inside. It was then, just after he had left, that I managed to locate my anger after all. Where exactly did a hobo like him get a sandwich like that? Just who did he think he was, breaking into the kitchens of the good people of Cherry Lane? I was starting to think laying Lucinda off was one of the greatest mistakes of my life—Lucinda, not just the maid, but the guardian of our home—when I noticed a stiff wind, the front door standing wide open and more of that deep-skin smell. Only this time, it was everywhere.

I found body-shaped ruts down the centre of each bed, grease spots as dark as cheeseburger stains on the pillowcases. The bottom bookshelf, down where we kept our Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, was in disarray. In the living room, the chess set had been hastily put back on the shelf. The TV was on
Masterpiece Theatre.
The radio was tuned to NPR.

AFTER I TOLD her about the mix-up with her keepsakes, and the trouble at work, and after she dragged my father into it and I dragged her mother into it, Kathy suggested I spend the night at a hotel. I chose to stay in the yard, though, where I could keep an eye on things.

I spent the early part of that evening reading my father's journals, falling deeper into French than I ever imagined I could, the language opening to me in new ways. At the bottom of the box, beneath the journals, I found my father's old scholarly uniform: brown pants, brown cardigan, brown shirt and tie, all my size. Putting those clothes on, I understood why my father wore them a week at a time; it's a quality you just don't find in clothes anymore.

The uniform must've filled me with strength and purpose, because I immediately got an idea. After writing out twelve versions of the same note, I walked up and down Cherry Lane tucking one into every mailbox. The notes were a call to action:
Tomorrow, 5 pm, my yard, be there,
or something to that effect. Then I got the idea to keep an eye on the Gregorys' house from inside the bushes.