Belly (7 page)

“What’s your first name, Ms. Monroe?” he asked.

“Ms. Monroe,” she said. “Have a seat.”

Her cubicle’s prefab walls were covered in uplifting prints and slogans. A poster Nora had as a child hung above Ms. Monroe’s
desk: a gray kitten dangling from a tree with “Hang in there” written underneath. Only Ms. Monroe had crossed it out and tacked
on a piece of paper that read
Quit your complaining.

She looked over his file. “How’s it going?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That good, huh?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Adjusting okay?”

“It’s only been a day.”

She took a copy of his release plan from his file and listed one by one everything he had agreed to and he nodded at the whole
list and when she was done he said, “You want me to pee in a cup and then I can go?”

We could walk across the street to Wendy’s, he thought, and sit in a booth and drink Frosties till our mouths are nearly numb
and then we’ll warm each other’s tongues. It’ll be just like high school, but good.

But Ms. Monroe looked up from his file and said, “Actually, I’ll decide whether you require a urinalysis. I’ll decide how
quickly you need to find employment and if that employment is suitable. I’ll be visiting you at your residence and determining
if that residence is satisfactory. So I suggest you take this seriously.”

He wanted to kiss her.

“What’s going on with the job hunt?”

“It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”

“That’s plenty of time.”

“It’s hard because I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“Well, get one,” she said. “That problem’s solved. What about the job here?” She tapped on the file.

“My daughter just arranged that for parole purposes. It’s not a real job offer.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you want to tell a parole officer. That constitutes fraud.”

Belly uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on her desk. “Okay, it was a real live job offer, but it’s
not a job I want. I’m not working at the pallet company with my daughter’s boyfriend, or whatever he is. I’m going to find
something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He took a pencil from her desk and twirled it in his fingers. “I can’t do anything.”

“What did you do before you worked in a bar?”

“I went to high school.”

“What other job did you have?”

“Is this a trick question?” His longing to kiss her shortened and shrank. When did all the women get so hard?

“It’s in your file, that’s why I’m asking. You put it down here when you made your release plan.”

He thought back to that one summer, his last summer of freedom before he met Myrna and knocked her up. He was a roofer, long
hot days in the sun with strips of tar paper and a hammer, a belt with pockets for his number eights and sixteens weighing
down his hips. It was the only job he had where he could see evidence of change. At the bar he saw patrons get drunk and drunker,
he saw them fluff up or deplete bank accounts, but only when he worked construction did he see something grow and shift until
it became a home instead of a shelter.

“I’m too old for that,” he said. “I have fake hips.”

“There are plenty of jobs like that without heavy lifting.”

“You want me to drive a backhoe?”

“Why not?” Ms. Monroe closed his file. “Is there anything else you like to do? Anything you’ve always dreamed of?”

“I love to tango,” he said. His feet automatically shifted a little at the sound of the word. He’d drunk and he’d screwed,
but he hadn’t danced yet.

“I’m serious,” said Ms. Monroe.

“So am I.”

“Listen, I’m giving you a week to find a job. I want you to have a certified offer of employment by next Monday. We’ll meet
again on Friday morning to see where you’re at.” She shut the file and looked at him. “Get it?”

“Why don’t we continue this conversation over a drink?”

“Don’t tell me you’re drinking. Drinking is not allowed. You need a copy of your release plan?”

“No, no, I have a copy. I’ve got the thing memorized.”

She put his file in a metal holder, then she tapped a pencil on the desk and looked at him out the corners of her eyes. “Listen,
here’s what I want to tell you: expect chaos.”

“I do.”

“No, really. Just expect it to be rough, and then you won’t be surprised when it is.”

“Okay,” he said.

She handed him a form and told him to get it signed by anyone he talked to about work.

“Mr. O’Leary,” she said. “I just want to remind you: You can’t drink. You can’t gamble. You cannot work in any establishment
that serves alcohol or promotes gambling. But the rest of the world is open to you. It’s a whole sea of opportunity, so get
on it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and she nodded for him to leave.

N
ora was waiting for him out front, a box of Wendy’s fries on her lap staining her jeans with grease.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

He reached over and grabbed a fry. “Swimmingly.”

“What did the parole officer say?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Can you drive, or should we just sit in a parked car in Ballston Spa all day?”

Nora drove and the baby slept and Belly stared out the window. He felt like he’d been home for months.

She dropped him off on Broadway, at his request—he pretended he was going work hunting. He walked past St. Peter’s, past the
Catholic high school. He walked past the park that huddled at the elbow of the road, marking the end of old downtown and the
beginning of the new. Across the street he saw the ruins of the torn-down strip mall where once there was a Woolworth’s, where
he sometimes lunched on a grilled bran muffin and black water with Cremora and read the
Saratogian
in a rare moment of anonymity as his dog, Seaver, waited outside for him to bring her his scraps. His Man-o-War bar, his
dog, his park, his Woolworth’s counter, all of it gone now or altered or fixed up beyond recognition, so all he could do was
blink at the world with big blank blue eyes, with Eliza’s open eyes, just blink and sigh and wonder.

Now, in the middle of the day, was when he felt the most tired. For more than thirty years he had slept through the noon hour,
and now he had to venture out in the midday heat in search of a job, like a teenager. He could not think of any way to go
about it, so he walked to the iron gate of Congress Park and peered inside to the casino and the springs and the remnants
of monuments past that had mostly crumbled but whose iron teeth still rose from the grass. He tried to but could not enter.
Too much, he thought, too much happened in that park. I don’t need anything else to happen. For the rest of my life, I don’t
need a single other event to occur.

He walked up Broadway to the art supply store, his shirt soaked with sweat, his hips aching, and he peered in the big dirty
windows. He could see Eliza in the book aisle, a feather duster fastened to her hips. He thought, What a sad life for such
a talented girl. She seemed to sense him there; she looked up, and he stepped to the side of the doorjamb, hoping the metal
bar would cloak him, but it was too late. She saw him, and she came forward.

“Belly, what are you doing here?” Eliza hung out the open door of the store. “You want to get lunch?”

“Yes,” he said. “Lunch. Good.”

“Be right out.”

The sun, he felt, was killing him. The middle of the day in the middle of a heat wave, with nothing and no one to regulate
the passing of the hours, just watching the world swim around him. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, he repeated to himself. He would
have it all figured out by Sunday. He wished Sunday would come now. He wished for a drink. He wished for a cold front to swoop
down and save him. He wished he had his sunglasses. But that was four wishes, he realized, and one would have to go.

“Jatski’s?” asked Eliza, and he nodded.

“I don’t have much time, though,” he told her. “I have to meet that girl at two.”

“What girl?”

“The one who’s staying in my room.”

“Oh, Bonnie. Why didn’t you say so? She’s practically your daughter-in-law.”

“What do you mean?”

A nervous, avian sort of look flashed across her face. “Nothing. She’s great. I really like her.”

“You like everyone.”

They went next door to the diner, and he felt such a sense of relief upon entering that his hips almost gave out. It was exactly
the same as it always had been, the plastic booths and the happy, empty paintings by Mama Jatski, and the fake plants. Eliza
turned around, and Belly was still standing in the doorway.

“All right, Belly?”

“Never felt better,” he said, and followed her to a booth in the back.

A few tourists—overdressed and scrutinizing the
Racing Form
—lunched in the diner, but most of the patrons looked like locals, without the makeup and the jewelry and the anxious air
of travelers. The same family was running the place, four or five siblings exactly alike, the boys and girls both, slinging
coffee and hot plates of instant eggs. He looked, but he didn’t see Loretta or the NYRA boys, anyone who used to frequent
this old lunch spot of theirs.

“Good old Jatski’s,” he said as the waitress filled his coffee cup.

She said, “Ha,” filled Eliza’s cup with decaf, and dropped their menus on the table.

Eliza raised her mug. “To Jatski’s,” she said, and they toasted.

“Coffee-flavored water, just like I like it.”

The menu was also the same, save for splotches of whiteout covering the old prices and new figures—just for August—etched
in ballpoint pen. “Think I can get a little whiskey in this?” he asked her, smiling.

She didn’t smile back. “I really wish you wouldn’t start drinking again.”

“I’m not
drinking,
” he said. “I had a couple of sips last night, to celebrate. You should try it.”

“I will never touch that stuff,” she said. “Not a drop.”

“Maybe that’s your problem right there.”

She didn’t say anything, just made that little chirping
hm
sound. Did it signal an end to the topic, or was he supposed to keep saying
What, what is it honey, tell me what you mean, let’s
talk
about it,
to try and drag the truth from her? Forget it. He’d rather sit there in the terrible silence. He looked at the girl, his
daughter, and she didn’t look familiar to him.

Eliza sipped her coffee, and Belly looked at every sandwich and every omelet and every beverage. This was the first restaurant
he’d been to in four years. He felt green and glowy under the fluorescent lights. Eliza hummed to herself, pretending to be
impervious.

“Well?” he asked Eliza finally. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“What are you, the shrink?” Eliza had folded her menu and wrapped her hands around the white coffee mug. He said, “How’s the
art world?”

“Oh, well, I’m not really in it.” She frowned. “Actually, I’ve kind of stopped painting.”

“Thank God,” he said. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that, kid. Jesus, those paintings with the blobs. Why don’t you
go back to drawing those cartoon animals? That’s something you could make money at.”

Eliza blinked, then closed her eyes for a moment. “That was in eighth grade,” she said. Her knuckles were white around the
mug. Then she began to nod, slowly, and she made big swooping movements with her head, her eyes still closed.

“Is this a seizure?”

She opened her eyes. “Belly,” she said. “Can’t you try just a little bit?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think it must take so much work for you to be mean all the time. It must just exhaust you.”

“I’m not mean. Are you crazy? What did I say that was mean? Tell me what I said that was mean.” Eliza pressed her fingers
out in a wave of protest, but he kept going. “That I asked if you were having a seizure? That’s mean? That’s a caring thing
to ask. That’s a thing you ask when you care about somebody, which you would know if you thought about anyone but yourself.”

The waitress came back and tapped her pencil against her cheek, and Belly stared hard at his menu.

“What can I get you, Eliza?”

“I’ll have the western egg sandwich on whole wheat. No meat. What about you, Belly? I’m buying.”

“This is your father?” The waitress pulled her glasses down to get a better look at him. “Guess they let you out.”

“Looks that way,” Belly grumbled.

“Your hair got all gray.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

“Well, honey, don’t complain. Look at my brothers. Not a gray hair on their heads, ’cause it all fell out.”

“I come from a long line of not-bald men,” he said, perking up. Now this, he thought, was a conversation. Why couldn’t Eliza
do this, just have a pleasant chat about nothing and go on about the day? The girl was so serious.

“What can I get you to eat?” The waitress flipped the sheet on her guest-check pad.

“Western egg sounds good. With meat, lots of meat.”

Belly sipped from his lukewarm coffee and counted the paintings on the wall. Then he counted the booths, then the tables,
the chairs, the stools at the counter, then he started on the napkin dispensers. Still, Eliza did not speak.

“So,” he said. “They all know you here.”

“I’ve been working downtown for eight years.”

“That long, huh?”

“I was two blocks away from the bar for four years, and you never came down to see me.”

“You try running your own business and see how much free time you have.”

“Especially if you’re running two businesses.”

They had never discussed it. Not once. In all the time he took bets at the bar, Eliza never made mention of it, and when he
was with her, he pretended to maintain his position as upstanding citizen, small businessman. He and Eliza never talked of
the booking, of Loretta, of his third daughter, or of Eliza starving herself, and now he wondered what words had ever spilled
out to fill the space between them. What could he possibly have to say? He didn’t know what to tell her about it, how to explain.