Radio Belly (6 page)

It was nearly midnight when I heard them. I climbed out of the bushes in time to see a dim, shifty light, a candle or a Bic lighter, moving through the Gregorys' house. I crept across the yard, on hands and knees, and pulled myself up against the tall fence separating our yards. I could smell tuna grilling. I could hear the clink of wineglasses, the hot tub bubbling.

I didn't even walk around the fence; I jumped over and marched up the back steps to confront those hybrids for once and for all.

There were ten, fifteen, twenty of them. They were in the yard, on the porch, in the house. The ones in the patio hot tub were nude, debating intensely. Inside, the air was thick with cigar smoke. It was dark but for the moon and the odd candle. My clothes must've helped me blend in, because nobody noticed me at first. In the living room women and men were lounging about, sipping wine with their feet in each other's laps. They were passing a book—Rilke? Neruda?—taking turns reading verses aloud. The last woman to read finished the poem and asked, “What do you think it means?” closing the book gently. “Do you think he might really fail his lover or is he just afraid of his own mortality?” I was tempted to lie down with them, to speak about love and death while some young woman played with my hair, but I kept on.

Several people were gathered around the dining room table, attempting to interpret a tide chart. They had an almanac out, an atlas, a dictionary, a small flashlight. A petite redhead was at the kitchen counter dishing out food. “Niçoise?” she offered each passerby. It smelled delicious.

A man was drawing different constellations into the dust of the foyer mirror. Cassiopeia, Pegasus and Chamaeleon: he described each one and then a huddle of women with tall hairstyles and names like Scarlett and Arabella recreated the shapes by squeaking their fingers across the marble floor.

On the stairs, two men in tailcoats were debating the Bible from a literary standpoint. “From a purely literary standpoint, Genesis almost directly correlates to Aristotelian structure,” one said as I passed. In the upstairs hallway a couple was slow dancing to a song only they could hear. They were humming softly, voices in perfect harmony. Another couple was making love in the spare bedroom. I stopped before the open door. “You complete me!” the man yelled. “You com
plete
me!” and then they collapsed in groans. A woman smelling of snuffed-out fires came up beside me and passed me an orb filled with bright smoke. I inhaled once, twice, and began to feel impaled. Then, once I was a limbless black core, once I was only the body, only the parts of me that beat, she led me toward the master bedroom. Pinky was there, and Constantine. He was playing a delicate stringed instrument (a lyre?) and she was warbling operatically. They were accompanied by a woman playing some sort of pan pipe.

People were twirling and floating around the room in what can only be described as interpretive dance. The woman, my friend, led me forward and before I knew it my arms were swaying—now I was a tree, now a woman's hair, now grass in the wind. I was twisting carpet pile up between my toes like meringue and reciting something, a French poem I had memorized years ago, a poem I forgot I knew.

I WOKE UP late, alone on Bruce and Linda Gregory's bed, my mouth coated in red wine, salade niçoise ground into my hair. Except for a few minor details—couch pillows, crumbs, the odd carpet blemish—the house had been put back in order.

It was afternoon. Driveways stood empty and for a mo-ment I thought my wife had locked me out accidentally until I found a stack of sandwiches and a glass of milk set outside the back door. There were three, peanut butter and jam, carbs and protein, hastily thrown together. I ate all three, one after another. Then I revised my notes in preparation for the meeting.

At five o'clock on the dot the neighbours filed into the backyard. They arranged themselves along familiar lines—the Andersons clustered next to the Smiths next to the Woodwards, families waving to families across polite distances.

I cleared my throat and mentioned that I'd been keeping an eye on the hybrids. “We all know they're sleeping beneath our shrubbery,” I said, “but did you know they are also living inside our houses while we're at work?”

Alarmed murmurs.

“You may not detect the signs at first,” I said, “but I suggest sniffing your pillows, checking the backs of bookshelves for volumes of poetry, philosophy, literary criticism. I suggest steaming up your mirrors and looking for messages written there.”

They were whispering among themselves and I was beginning to sense skepticism.

“Now you might wonder how it is I know this,” I said. “The truth is, I infiltrated one of their ‘salons' last night, and what I found was rather fascinating. The funny thing is—” I tried to chuckle, but it worked itself into a frog, then a rattle, then a nineteenth-century cough. “The funny thing is,” I tried again, “I think these people may have something to offer. I think, when you find these clues I've mentioned, you might also encounter parts of yourself, long-forgotten parts: books you always meant to read, little notes you scribbled to yourself years ago. You might ask yourself, ‘Who was I before all of this?' and ‘When did
that
end and
this
begin?' You might reassess, I mean
really
reassess, and change your priorities. And you might start to wonder, ‘Who's really free, us or them?'”

“Where's Kathy?” Mrs. Park asked.

“She'll be home any minute,” I said.

“Why are you dressed like that?” one of the teenagers asked. Snicker, snicker went the rest.

“Well, I'm locked out and I haven't had a chance to—”

“You're locked out?” someone asked.

“Of your own house?” said someone else.

“What exactly is going on with you, Henry?”

“Hold on now. Hold on just a minute.” I was that movie actor from
It's a Wonderful Life,
overly earnest, trying to control the angry mob. “I gathered you here to tell you about—”

“How long have you been living in the backyard, Henry?” someone interrupted.

“Wait,”—it was one of the teenagers—“didn't I see you sharing a sandwich with one of them yesterday?”

“You're getting this all wrong. This isn't about me. This is about our community and our way of life—”

Just then the back door opened. It was Kathy, home from work, and she was ushering the neighbours in the door. Like a funeral procession, each family stopped and whispered their apologies before entering my house. I brought up the back of the line. I whispered an apology too even though I wasn't sorry for anything, not really.

“You stay here,” she said, her palm open on my chest. “I need some time.” Her eyes travelled up and down my body, taking in my outfit. “Jesus, Henry,” she said and then shut the door on me. I heard the twist of the lock.

An hour later the neighbours filed out. I could hear them out front—one bright goodbye after another—but I didn't go around. I waited by the back door until the sky grew dark from the east and the mosquitoes rose from the ravine. I waited for Kathy until the bedroom lights came on and moths clunked against the windows.

“Jennifer,” I called up in a loud whisper, but she must've already been asleep.

I moved to the other window. “Kathy? Kathy?”

Finally a Kathy-shaped shadow came to the window, her triangle of hair, her small sad shoulders.
My wife.

“Honey, 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.

“Excuse 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.

“Listen,” 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 another.

Meanwhile, I am moving south with Pinky and Constantine and the rest of the hybrids. We enter people's homes and, while the others deplete the food and drink the wine and lather on expensive shampoos, I find a patch of sun-light to curl up in with a good woman—Pinky, or Scarlett, or Arabella—and she is wearing my father's sweater, and spooning me, wrapping me up in my father's brown sleeves, tugging me down, and my eyelids are filling with fire colours and I am drifting into dreams, dreams large enough to haunt the hollow rooms of another man's home, dreams of poetry and of history, of freedom and of motion. It is the future and I am right where I belong, dreaming troubadour dreams older than me.

A
T FIRST IT'S about money, or its opposite—student debt, that big red wrecking ball swinging above your head at all times.

“So you can assure me the country is no longer at war?” you ask the recruiter before committing to a year.

“No war, promise,” she says.

You sign and fax the contract the same day.

Then, for a brief time, it's about the adventure. “I could've chosen Tokyo or Dubai,” you tell friends, “but I'm tired of safe.” You have visions of twisty alleys, old women retreating into darkened doorways, spicy air, dusty sunsets. It's about leaving behind a peculiar kind of emptiness you've always associated with home—your lightweight life, like a hollowed-out shell.

At your going-away party your smart friend, the one writing a dissertation on everything that's wrong with the world, asks, “Don't you worry ESL teachers are just agents of modern colonialism?” So you spend your last nights at home worrying about exactly that, dreaming of angry white men preaching in tents in the middle of jungles. Then, finally, you stop to consider the source of all this doubt: your smart friend who refuses to shave her legs and bikes her dripping compost to her mother's house across town once a week, your smart friend who always speaks about her “footprint,” who is in fact footprint-obsessed at the expense of romance and career opportunities. You recall the time she scolded you for whitening your teeth and decide, if anything, she is the one raging in the tent. If anything, you are the one out in the jungle holding hands with the children, singing fun and educational songs.

In the end you are grateful to your friend for exorcising your doubts, for helping you home in on what this trip is really about: a desire to do good in the world and a war-ravaged village that needs you. You write her to say thank you for the exorcism and that you will be sure not to leave a single footprint in this foreign land, other than those footprints you've actually been hired to leave. It is the last thing you do before takeoff, mailing that postcard from the airport.

SOON YOU ARE in the back of a van, queasy and sweating, being driven through the landscape you've imagined and reimagined for months. Everything is as expected: the blue-green Tolkien hills in the distance, at the foot of those hills the small, dust-coloured village you will call home. Everything looks exactly like the past. One-room houses with dirt floors and woven walls are scattered across the land like upside-down baskets. There are stray chickens and barefoot boys, goats and mules, men in fields leaning on shovels to grimace at the sky. They know it as well as you: somewhere beyond those hills there is a village flooding, a river slipping its banks, people drowning, mud bubbling. This is a country at the mercy of weather and war. Someone is always dying, but you feel more alive than ever.

The two men who met you at the airport hardly said hello. They nodded gruffly, said what sounded like “yuh-yuh” and helped you into the back of the van. Now they are seated up at the front, hardly watching the road, watching instead a small black-and-white TV wedged between the dashboard and window—old reruns of the same medical drama your father likes so much, the one where people are always making speeches over open bodies. The subtitles take up half the screen. This isn't much of a welcoming but you're too tired to be offended. There will be plenty of time to explain about handshakes and hugs, about receiving a home-cooked meal after a long flight.

The men carry your bags into your hut and leave. It is nothing like the picture the recruiter sent you. It has the ambience of a shed—a single room with a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a thin sliding metal door and concrete floors that slope toward a drain in the middle. When you shower, the water fans out across the floor. You have to run around swearing and dripping, dragging luggage to higher ground. That's when the note you scribbled earlier flutters out of your purse—
Embrace the exotic!
it says. You stick it to the wall above your bed, but it's already irrelevant. Already it seems written by another type of person.

The next morning you discover the school is nothing like its photo either. This school is smaller, less reliable looking. Every wall and window is plastered over with rusty old tin signage salvaged from the nearest city. The whole building seems to flap in the wind like a prehistoric bird. You are met by the principal, Mr. Bruce, a short, brisk man dressed for some reason like an Oxford don. He leads you up a long flight of stairs. Inside, the school is like a cave, hardly a sliver of daylight available. Each classroom has bare walls and a window looking onto the hallway. You and Mr. Bruce stop to peer into classes 1A, 1B and 1C. You are just about to suggest more imaginative names, something the students can identify with—dolphins or tigers—when a teacher slaps a ruler across her desk to call the class to attention. The students scurry like sand crabs, tucking limbs under desks. Mr. Bruce folds his hands behind his back and rocks forward onto his toes, looking pleased. As you move down the hall, you notice that the teachers are all women, all from this part of the world. None of them are teaching English
in
English, and for some reason all of the teachers and female students are wearing cloth masks over their noses and mouths.

You catch Mr. Bruce by the leather patch on his elbow. “Why do they wear these masks?”

He pauses, throws his head back, as if searching the ceiling of his mind. Then he nods and says, “Priacy,” stabbing down with his chin.

You squint at his mouth. It's as if his face is too tight or his tongue is too short to speak clearly.

“Oh,
priv
acy!” you say at last. But something must've been lost in translation. Clearly there is either a health concern or this is some form of female oppression. You can't imagine how wearing a tiny little mask offers a person any privacy.

IN HIS SMALL brown office, Mr. Bruce sits on the other side of his desk, beneath a framed poster of Bruce Lee, and explains that you will be given the school's “number one, top-prize class,” the twelve oldest students who are closing in on the “X Test.” He explains how long the students have been preparing, how far they must walk to class, how devastated they were when the last teacher quit just four months before the test, but you know all this because the recruiter prepped you. You also know Mr. Bruce means “exit test,” a standardized exam divided into the areas of Speech and Writing, Vocabulary and Grammar—you have been brought in for Speech. You are the only native-speaking English teacher in the whole country, Mr. Bruce says, so your students have a great advantage. There appears to be a problem though, changes made to the testing format. It's all very troubling to Mr. Bruce, who is now spitting and shouting.

“X Test is eye of needle,” he says, waving his hands over his head. “For this they working whole long life! Now big change!”

It's only once he slides a memo across his desk that you understand. It seems the test makers have decided to add an additional item to the Speech portion of the test. Students will now have to give a three-minute speech on what makes them unique.

“Oh, this is nothing,” you say, sliding the memo back across his desk. “Piece of cake. I don't think we need to worry about this.”

He looks puzzled. “But ‘uniques,'” he says, jabbing his finger at the memo.

“Students love to talk about themselves,” you say.

“But we have no uniques,” he says. “Uniques is opposite of war.”

That strikes you as profoundly true: soldiers and corpses
are
far from unique. “Yes,” you say, “but the war is over and I'm confident each one of your students has a unique living inside them.”

Mr. Bruce looks briefly reassured. He returns to his eye-of-the-needle speech, but you already know the drill: only the top two students in the country will be given the opportunity to attend an American university; of those left behind, only ten percent will gain entrance to the country's one university; for the rest, the exit test will mark the end of their education—the girls will marry and the boys will begin mandatory military service.

“Other side of needle,” Mr. Bruce continues, “is Ha-vad.” He nods fiercely.

“Harvard?” You laugh just a little, more of a snort really. Even your smart friend couldn't get into Harvard.

He fixes his eyes on your collarbone and flings his hand toward a portrait hanging on the wall behind you, saying, “See fo' self.” The portrait is of a young man dressed in graduation regalia. It must've been taken in the seventies, the way his hair is feathered, the way he looks immersed in a soft purple fog. The table beneath the picture is done up like a shrine with fake flowers and bouquets of red and gold Harvard pencils, never sharpened.

“My student. Ha-vad grad,” Mr. Bruce says. Then, as if offering you a mantra for the coming months, he says, “Ha-vad, Ha-vad, Ha-vad.” He is snapping down on the words, angry or rapturous or both.

WHEN YOU ENTER the classroom for the first time, your students are already seated, looking bored but determined, as if they've come to do your taxes. The boys and girls are on opposite sides of the room and the girls are all wearing those privacy masks.

When you smile, their faces scrunch up like babies encountering something bright or sour for the first time.

You attempt introductions but they all say the same thing—what sounds like “I am Pin Pon”—and you lose track. You can't tell if the girls are smiling or frowning behind their masks and the boys might as well be wearing them, their faces are so placid.

You write your name on the board, but it doesn't matter. You are “Mrs. Teacher” to them.

You notice that the boys have textbooks but no paper, that the girls have paper but no textbooks, so you ask them to pair up while you search for supplies. But by the time you find pencils nobody has moved and Principal Bruce is peering in through the hallway window.

All of this might be intimidating except that you believe Speech to be the most dynamic of subjects. With Speech there is no need for textbooks
or
pencils
or
paper. You will write a topic on the board and in no time at all the room will fill with the dull roar of opinion.

You break the class up into girl-girl, boy-boy teams and open your X Test book to find a topic. The first ones are all about extracurricular activities—TV and team sports and afternoons at the mall. The next ones are all about money—allowances, college funds and after-school jobs. You flip through the pages but the rest of the topics are no better. They're centred on the perils of modern North American life: obesity, skin cancer, drinking and driving.

You snap the book shut. “What would
you
like to make speeches about?” you ask brightly. You will be the fun teacher, like Robin Williams in that movie. In this room learning will be relevant, crucial, exciting.

The boys stare through you. The girls look at their hands.

“Things to do when not farming?”

No response.

“The perils of riding a bike with a flat tire?”

Still nothing.

“What to do during a mudslide?”

And that's when you sense it, a total lack of compre-hension.

YOU DISCOVER YOUR students speak barely comprehensible English, that even though their vocabulary is excellent, English sounds like mashed potatoes in their mouths. Because their own language requires swallowing entire syllables, getting them to open their mouths and enunciate may be the single greatest challenge of your teaching career.

You draw larger-than-life pictures of the inside of a mouth, the tongue curling or backing up to make certain sounds. Then, to show Mr. Bruce the true meaning of privacy, you tape these pictures over the hallway window. Now when he stops to peer in, his head is a shadow perched on the tip of a huge tongue.

The first week is all about pronunciation. You lead them through a series of facial contortions while repeating “A-E-I-O-U” and the various diphthongs, but there's only so much progress you can make while the girls' mouths are behind masks. You have reason to suspect these masks are holding the boys back too, not to mention the country.

After work on Friday you corner Mrs. Diana, the only other teacher with even a smattering of English, and confirm via charades that indeed the masks have nothing to do with contagion, nothing to do with privacy. That's when you decide it: next week will be different.

“It's just, I've come all this way,” you explain to Mrs. Diana, “and there are only four months until the test.”

ON MONDAY MORNING the whole procedure takes only a few minutes. You get the boys to face the back wall and the girls to face you. There is some whimpering and the girls hang their heads for a time, but you try not to take that on. You do have to resort to the ruler twice, but it's all for the greater good. You are stripping them of their masks, true, but in exchange you are giving them the world.

You try to illustrate this point for them: “Do you think American women hide their mouths? Do you think you'll fit in at Harvard showing half a face?”

On the first day, the boys and girls continue to face away from each other while you run them through call-and-response speaking drills. On the second day, you hand out small mirrors and invite them to watch themselves talk. On the third day, when the girls raise their wet brown eyes to meet your own, it is like seeing them for the first time. Such trembling beauty! So many lovely differentiated mouths! These young women are blooming before your eyes, speaking with clarity and a new confidence.

You know it's finally time for the boys and girls to face one another when you catch them stealing glances at each other in their mirrors. It is awkward and heart-thumping at first. Their faces change colour and the heat rises in the room as they turn slowly, hands squeaking across desks. You cheer them on from the back of the room: “Freedom isn't for the faint of heart!” and “One day you'll thank me!”