Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Read Free Book Online

charity.”
    â€œBut I don’t want to see it,” Jennifer said.
    My wife let down the blind. I turned up the chandelier and we guided our Jennifer back to the table.
    â€œNever you mind,” I said, putting my hand atop my daughter’s, a wink for my wife. “Now, what can you tell me about the tenth grade?”
    â€œEleventh,” she corrected. Although my error made them both momentarily glum, they soon recovered themselves.
    While my daughter talked about her newest elective, Money Management, and the horrors of a certain partner named Hez, we could hear them outside, hooting and clattering, hauling boxes down driveways.
    â€œYour grandfather on my side made his fortune in money management,” my wife was telling Jennifer. “Foreclosures, refinancing, loss mitigation...” Jennifer was practically gurgling with excitement.
    I tried to follow their conversation, but I’d heard it all before. Kathy was always delineating sides—hers, mine; good, bad; old money, no money. Besides, I was elsewhere. I was stabbing and twisting up bite-sized nests of linguine, trying to recall my own Proust days. My Balzac and Sartre and Camus days in the department of comparative literature, before Kathy persuaded me to switch to the school of business. I was arranging those pasta nests side by side on my plate because the appetite had gone right out of me, or rather it had shifted farther down to become something that had very little to do with food. The truth is, I couldn’t quite recall what was in those boxes. In my race to keep up with the Gregorys, I hadn’t even opened them.
    I sat back in my chair, one hand fogging up my glass of Merlot, gripping the edge of my mahogany table, trying to take comfort in the largest room of my—our—large, large home. Antique cabinets, upholstered chairs, cut crystal: everything so finely crafted. Everything so sturdy, and yet I couldn’t help but see myself as the most tender inside part of that life: me as mincemeat, as mollusc, as morsel.
    IN THE MORNING, charity was strewn across our lawns. Clothing clogged gutters and hung from tree branches. Old magazines and once-loved toys cluttered the sidewalks. I was standing underneath the “two hours max at all times” sign, untucking parking tickets from my windshield wiper—one of the disadvantages of living so close to the city—and taking in the damage when I heard a chattering from under our hydrangea. I crept closer. It was tuxedo man, Constantine, reading—no, reciting —something to Pinky beneath a canopy of flowers. For a moment I envisioned them curled just so under a bridge in a large mainland city, inhaling exhaust fumes, scavenging for fish in diseased rivers, munching on gristly berries by the sides of highways. I felt a sudden kick of pride for having provided a downtrodden man with a flowering bush to sleep beneath—after all, it was my bush he’d chosen—and for a moment I longed for true charity, something beyond Large Garbage once a year. I imagined bringing this man into my home, giving him a shower and a shave, perhaps an old suit and a rudimentary lesson in entrepreneurship. Or if he wasn’t interested in that, at least a proper fishing rod, some bait and tackle.
    But this line of thought came to its snarled end when I noticed the woman was wearing something long, white and glittery, something familiar and poofy, and then it hit me: this skank was wearing my wife’s cotillion gown. I could see it then. How, in my zeal to best the Gregorys, I’d not only grabbed the boxes marked CHARITY, but also those marked KEEPSAKES.
    â€œHey,” I shouted, coming across the flowerbed at them. And I kept on, “Hey-hey. Hey. Hey, ” until I was close enough to reach out and grab Pinky. That’s when I realized I didn’t actually want to touch her.
    The man stood and faced me. Now he was reading to me from the open book: