Read Online Radio Belly by Buffy Cram - Free Book Online Page B

window. “Kathy? Kathy?”
    Finally a Kathy-shaped shadow came to the window, her triangle of hair, her small sad shoulders. My wife.
    â€œHoney, I understand you’re mad at me, but could you spare a little change? Just a little?”
    But she quickly moved away.
    THE NEXT MORNING there were only two sandwiches—no peanut butter, just marmalade—and water instead of milk. I tried to remember the previous day’s joy, but I was dirty and hungry and the tiny hairs of my beard were curling back on me.
    I was working on a poem, something to move Kathy to forgiveness, when I heard the bright chirp of teenage-talk coming from the yard next door—not the Gregory side, but the other side.
    I moved to the fence. I heard something about Jennifer first, some new boy she was dating. He was way better than her, they said; she was totally lucky. That’s my Jennifer, I thought, dating up! Then their talk turned to me. Kathy was divorcing me, they said. I had lost my mind and my job and my wife all in one week.
    I considered bribing them for entrance to their house. I could’ve finagled a shower and a shave probably, maybe even one of their dad’s suits. I could’ve headed downtown, talked to Dan and apologized to Rhanda, begged for my job and fit right back into my old life, but I didn’t. Instead I poked my head over the fence.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said. “When you say Jennifer’s boyfriend is better, do you mean from a wealthier family or just more popular?”
    They were frozen on the spot, baring their braces at me.
    â€œListen,” I said, “I won’t tell your parents you’re skipping school if you give me some change. Just enough for a hamburger. And a coffee.”
    WHEN JENNIFER AND Kathy got home later that evening, I was ready. I gave them a moment to get settled, to turn on some lights. Then I stood in the gazebo and yelled to the house. First, an invitation: “My daughter and my wife, my love and my life, please listen to what I have written. Please let me in my home. Please don’t leave me out here alone.” I saw their heads in the window and then I began to recite in my best approximation of French: “La lune, la lune...”
    IT RAINED THAT night, so I was forced to sleep in the shed between the lawnmower and the weedwacker. I could hear the hybrids in the distance. They were chanting something sounding like heave-ho, or hobo, or let’s go. I read until I slept. I cried until my face was plastered to the pages of my father’s diary.
    I ATE THE LAST sandwich in the early morning, looking back at my house from the middle of the yard. This time it was only butter, stale bread, no drink. I knew what the next day would bring. I didn’t want to be there to see it.
    I looked at the building that had contained my life for so many years. Brick and mortar, wood and glass. I thought of my life inside those walls: a kind of mushroom sleep, happiness like a heavy lid. I tried to remember my wife as soft, the contours of her body, but all I could think about were bones, sinew, digestion, respiration—the materials and mechanisms that held her together. I noticed a place where the shingles had lifted off above the sunroom and it was as if I could see the future. There would be a leak in that spot soon. At night my wife and daughter would lay their cheeks in someone else’s hair grease and dream of money and acquisition and accomplishment. Other people would read their books and sleep in their beds and Kathy and Jennifer would be forced to buy zit zappers and special creams to cure their mysteriously oily cheeks. They would buy air fresheners to cover the strange goat smells they sometimes found and they would straighten their bookshelves again and again, never knowing what went on while they were away because only a few ever do. Only a few are brave enough to admit that we’re all living off each other, one way or