Belly Up Read online

  FRIED DOUGH

  A PARTICULAR TYPE OF LOVE STORY takes place in twenty-four-hour donut shops. It involves teenagers in a suburb to a great city. It happens slowly, and then quickly. As in, the teenagers have known each other for most of their lives, and they are just people, and then they are something else: they are in love. In the twenty-four-hour donut shop everything looks yellow. The fluorescent lights make the girl’s cheeks shiny and pale. In this love story, though, this doesn’t much matter. The teenagers are ugly. The girl’s hair is cut too short and the boy’s hair has grown too long and red dots cross both their forehead, cheeks and chin. The donut shop, too, is ugly. It is rundown and johns come in at 3:00 a.m. and get raspberry creams. However, in this love story this ugliness is the right place for the teenagers to be. The donut shop lets them chip paint off chairs because it is a place where only chipped paint chairs reside. Underneath the chairs there is linoleum and underneath the linoleum is a basement that the teenagers have never seen. Paint peels from the ceiling. The smell of burnt sugar sticks to the teenagers’ tongues. Large glops of icing slop fall off old pastries contained in the glass case next to the counter. The wall behind the case was white but has turned a deep cream. An immigrant man works the cash register. One of the teenagers buys a chocolate glaze. This teenager is sixteen, and in twenty-four-hour donut shops all sixteen-year-olds are seen as their own type of criminal. If they haven’t stolen something yet, they will. This sixteen-year-old takes three donut holes while the cashier isn’t looking. This sixteen-year-old shoves them in his pockets and brings them to the other teenager. The other teenager is fiddling. She has seen the crime and is taken by the fact that someone wants to give her something. Neither of these teenagers is stupid, but they’re not smart, either. They are simply half-formed people who are trying to talk to another person and find a way to feel less like there is less in the world and more like there is in fact more. There is more in this donut shop. In this donut shop there are people who sit by themselves late into the night that don’t have the kind of itinerary that these teenagers have. There are also people who are mad. A woman in a paisley dress and matted black hair sits in a corner and mutters words about the kinds of ghosts that live in kitchens. The teenagers talk to the woman in the paisley dress and make her mutterings into sentences and then write the sentences down on a piece of paper that they tape inside the establishment’s bathroom, right above the sink, so that when someone goes to rinse their hands they read, “I am waiting for you in the sugar bowl and other parts of the pantry.” The woman in paisley dress reads the bathroom announcement and walks out the door and past the peeled paint. She waves to the teenagers as she walks down the road, exhaling words as she saunters out of sight. In this donut shop there is also graffiti. It is in the bathroom where the note is, and under the table and on the very plates on which the donuts are occasionally served. The graffiti cusses people and other suburbs that are close to the city and the teenagers feel that they are close to this anger by sitting on top of this graffiti and they like this feeling. They do not scratch anything themselves, however, because right now they are not angry, they are just nervous. Nervous not because they don’t know each other, but nervous because the way they thought the world worked has suddenly shifted. It has been shifting in small ways for a long time and the teenagers have grown accustomed to these shifts and have learned to steady their legs and even sometimes predict when these shifts are coming. The boy has learned that his father lies to him. The girl’s sister has been going places and doing things that she has not done. This difference in experience has caused their link to shift and the girl and her sister are no longer on the same plane, but rather drifting pieces of land across the stretch of the ocean. Two people that were close but are now apart, and that closeness that was once so present is now simply a mark on a timeline that has been passed. Here, in this twenty-four-hour donut shop, things are shifting too. The teenagers are looking for things, but they’re not sure what. They have big fantasies that they think up together and a conception of the world that is wholly wrong, but shared, and that is what makes it real. What these teenagers want more than anything is simply to find another person who wants to experience the world with them, feel the cold of a winter lake or the pain of a cut gained or the thrill of breaking into an abandoned house or, this specific instant: biting into to a piece of fried dough that is not completely good but that is not bad either, it is just the right food to eat because they are in a donut shop. And donuts are food that is good, but not too good, and these teenagers don’t need good food right now because right now they are in love, and when in love what one puts in one’s mouth never really matters. The teenagers come back to the twenty-four-hour donut shop many times. They drive their suburban station wagons across the wide expanse of lanes and into a part of their city where the donut shop resides. They come to the donut shop late, when their parents are sleeping and when the only people in the streets are the ones who are on trial by society at large. The teenagers crawl in and sit in a booth next to the window where the flashing lights of passing cars and the glow of neon signs reflect off their faces. The girl pulls her legs up to her chest and hugs her knees. The boy’s long hair falls in his face when he turns his head to look outside. Seated like this, the teenagers talk to each other, and learn what makes the other feel most strongly that they will never be more than the items they own and the words they say. Then each teenager refutes this feeling, and acknowledges that the other is more than the sum of their actions and possessions, and this gesture is a new gesture and it makes the teenagers feel like more of a whole person than they have previously felt like, as if someone has added sections to their body, filled in gaps and holes and the thin little bits so that they are no longer as see-through as they used to be. Although both teenagers had suspected that this feeling could happen, they are in a giddy space of disbelief at its obvious existence. Another human has come forward and reassured them. This is enough to fall in love, they both agree internally. But the teenagers fall further. Their fall is hurried by their setting. The twenty-four-hour donut shop allows them not only to acknowledge each other as human beings, but to see that there is a place in the world for them and that this place might be together. The teenagers write things and draw pictures. They sketch the patrons’ faces on napkins and give them to the cashier. Thus the teenagers win the hearts not only of each other, but also of the people that surround them. This is something new for both of them. These two teenagers are kind and generally all right at talking, but winning hearts is not their specialty. But for some reason, in this donut shop, people like them. They are so young. The teenagers suspect the old drunks see them as children, which the teenagers admit to the drunks, and themselves, they very well might be. And the drunks and the drug dealers and the johns and the women the johns bring with them find them fascinating. “Ugly children who are in love!” the woman with purple hair whispers to the drunk in the blue jacket. The teenagers suspect that these other people in the donut shop see something of themselves in them. That the john with the funny suit and slouchy eyes and the drunk with missing teeth and gray wiry curls see a small version of themselves when they look at them. And the teenagers like this feeling. They like the feeling of being seen as something other than themselves, and they like the feeling of someone seeing themselves within them. And they also like the feeling of knowing that they could be a drug dealer or a john or a drunk or insane, because that means that their futures are varied, and even if those things are bad at least they are new things, things different from what they know now and things that they cannot possibly foresee. In this twenty-four-hour donut shop, time is a thing that has happened but is, more importantly, something that has not yet come to pass. It is a thing that the teenagers know lay ahead of them, at least much more so than behind. The teenagers look at each other and wrap their legs together around the base of the table. The girl teenager folds her arms in front of her and puts her head on her wrists and falls asleep.
The boy teenager looks at her for a long time and is overcome with the feeling of sheer fortune that he has found someone who is willing to speak with him and draw with him and do things with him including doing nothing at all. He looks out the window into the night and sees the sway of the trees planted in the middle of the street. Large redwoods interspersed with sickly palms shake their dried limbs over the cars that speed past them. The light of the night hovers above the buildings across the road, hanging a haze on to the roof of the single-story structures like snugly fit clothes. The boy teenager continues to look outside and thinks he hears a bird yell from one of the trees in the middle of the street. He cranes his neck and looks for the bird but cannot see it. Looking for the bird makes him sleepy. He puts his head next to the girl teenager’s and also falls into a deep lull. In their lull the teenagers wind their arms together and curve into the gray seat of the booth. They lie intertwined, breathing with their eyes closed, letting their minds wander back and forth to each other and then they are both sound asleep, sleeping next to each other like blind newborn puppies, huddled up to the light of the neon signs, blind from the new birth and happy, oh so happy, that they have someone next to them whose eyes are just as wrecked. The teenagers wake in the twenty-four-hour donut shop when the sun comes through the street-facing window and the light turns their table more blue than yellow. They go home to their own beds and then come back to the twenty-four donut shop when light again escapes from the day. In this love story, the teenagers continue in this way. They go places that are not the twenty-four-hour donut shop, but the twenty-four-hour donut shop remains the place that they always go. Bad things do happen to the teenagers, but these bad things happen outside the donut shop and never, ever while the two teenagers are together. In this way, the teenagers become more melded than most people think two people can be, and far more than the teenagers themselves know consciously. In the dawn of the donut shop, the teenagers imagine the rest of their lives together. They do not speak of their imaginings, but rather have a sense of their existence from their mutual way of knowing and the ways in which each of them expresses ideas about the world and the ways in which they believe this world to work. In their discussions about the workings of the world, there is the understanding that they are in the world together, and therefore any understanding of the world they gain is only possible because the two of them are there sitting together, thinking together. And it is only together that they can figure the world out and perhaps even make it yield a small space for the two of them to reside permanently, away from the suburb, away from their families, and in a place that they know nothing about, but simply imagine is a place that will show them more than the place they are currently in. In this way, there is a slight betrayal of the twenty-four-hour donut shop. The teenagers see it as a place they are in now, but also as a place that they will leave, marching through its cranky, squeaking, poor bell door, past the johns and the drunks and the people with madness written all over their faces and into a place that may have twenty-four-hour donut shops that are not this particular twenty-four-hour donut shop, and that, as both the teenagers acknowledge fully, is a truly different thing. However, the teenagers, despite their thoughts of flight, do have a sense of savoring. They know, somewhere in the space between when they fell in love and when they will be older, that this finding of solace and rest and sleep in a store—a place of commerce, a shop where pieces of dough are fried and dusted with sugar—is a special space that they have made, with their thoughts, into more than an area in which people exchange goods for money. In this love story, this twenty-four-hour donut shop becomes them. Because they spend so much time within it, the donut shop builds a replica of itself in each of their souls where, for the rest of the teenagers’ lives, they will go in their dreams, and whenever a new possibility, such as new love, presents itself and says to them, “I am here. Let me grow within you,” the teenagers will say in their sleep, “Of course. We are here in the twenty-four-hour donut shop, where thoughts can do nothing else but breed.” Breed not just thoughts, but ideas and feelings and an aura of humanness that the teenagers, up until this point in their lives, have found nowhere else. In this love story the teenagers will go on to find other people and other places that reveal that nature is an imperfect thing that has a space for them as well as much more. But, it is this particular twenty-four donut shop that offers them this first experience, this first feeling that they are more instead of less. The teenagers come and go, but mostly they stay and sit and eat cinnamon twists and double chocolate éclairs and glazed crullers and pieces of dough filled with a substance called lemon filling that the teenagers acknowledge alludes to the taste of lemon but is probably not actually derived from that exact fruit. Thus the teenagers settle into themselves, and each other, and the people who surround them, and also the people they encounter in spaces outside. In the twenty-four-hour donut shop, they bring things to read and sometimes they read out loud, and once the girl teenager got on a chair and screamed a passage of a book that she thought was more beautiful than anything she had been previously told was beauty. The immigrant cashier clapped and the john in the funny suit had bowed, which was strange to the teenagers, as it was the teenager who had done the reading, not the john. But, in this love story, the teenagers didn’t care, because after the reading there was a feeling of all-encompassing joy, like someone had shot lightning through all their hearts and that God was allowing everyone, the john included, to stand there, living, electrocuted in the wake of words that meant something about all of them, and therefore maybe the john had the most right to bow, or at least as much right as the reader, who in this case was the teenager, but in retrospect it seemed as if the entire donut shop had read the passage together, emanating a single sound, as if everyone in the donut shop had composed something collectively, and this was a better feeling for the teenager than the feeling of her just reading alone, so she chose to remember this moment differently than it happened. She remembered the entire donut shop reading the passage in unison, everyone having a copy of the same book, reading from the same page, screaming the words in a perfect chorus, and then, at the very end, the john mounting a chair and taking his bow, a bow that was in truth not only his, but every person’s bow who had ever entered a space in their lives where there was no beauty and then beauty was, miraculously, found. In this way, in this particular twenty-four-hour donut shop, in this particular type of love story, there were things that happened that were later misremembered. But most of the things that were misremembered were real, or at least more real than so many other things the teenagers would go on to see crowd the space of time between when they lived and when they ceased to be.

  IN THE SOUTH, THE SAND WINDS ARE OUR GREATEST ENEMY

  GLEB AND OLEG WERE banished brothers. They lived together in a prison infirmary surrounded by snow. Gleb was a surgeon and Oleg a sculptor. When the brothers were banished, Gleb convinced an officer that in order to be of use, they had to stay together.

  “I have bad eyesight,” Gleb had said. “And a poor sense of proportion. I need my brother’s eyes to make sure I sew things on in perfection.”

  “It’s true,” Oleg had said. “Anatomy has never been Gleb’s forte.”

  The officer had squinted his eyes at Gleb and Oleg in consideration. Oleg was infinitely more handsome than Gleb, but far thinner. How can one work with such a pretty face? Oleg-faced people were never much use anyway.

  “Alright,” the officer had said. “If you need your brother’s eyes, so be it. People often lose limbs around here, so I expect, with the two of you on the job, there to be no excuse for failed attempts at reattachment.”

  “Thank you,” Gleb said. “We’ll do just fine.”

  Gleb and Oleg sat at a desk during the day and slept in the sick beds during the evening. The sick beds were comfy, straw filled-mattresses. The sheets were good, blue wool with stripes. Ten days after their arrival, Oleg took to wearing a nurse’s hat that he found under one of the blankets.r />
  “You’ve always liked looking womanly,” Gleb grumbled.

  “You’re just jealous mom used to let me wear her Sunday dress,” Oleg batted his eyes.

  As Oleg giggled to himself a man came in the front door with a missing digit. “My God!” Oleg said. “Where is your thumb?”

  “No idea,” said the man. “One of my prison-mates accidentally lopped it off with a shovel. It took me a good moment to realize it had gotten away. My hand was nearly frozen solid from bricklaying out by the west wing. I had my whole squad looking for it in the snow but we found nothing. White snow, white thumb. A needle in a haystack.”

  “More like a butter cookie in a pile of powdered sugar!” Oleg exclaimed. “In the south, the sand winds are our enemy,” Oleg continued. “But here in the north, our enemy is the snow.” Oleg tried to exhibit appropriate bedside manners and show his sympathy for the loss of this man’s digit. He was still wearing a nurse’s hat and sat down on the side of one of the beds and sighed.

  The man looked confused and slightly put out by Oleg’s melancholy.

  Gleb said, “Well, let’s look among the recent corpses and see if we might be able to find something suitable.”