Belly Up Read online

  Gator Tacos

  Try one, he said. It might taste like chicken, but really it’s dinosaur. Not a bird, no, the other kind that somehow survived that giant asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago. The animal that represents the ultimate undead. He called them God’s true zombies. Somehow all their relatives were massacred, and they hid under the couch and survived, thrusting their ancient, prehistoric-looking bodies into modernity. Just swaggering with scales and claws, popping out eggs that won’t grow up to fly, destined to be the mascots of the modern Neanderthal, the Florida football fan. They wallow in the river and in the swamp and breathe moss onto the trees, sucking out the remaining color of the people who are still alive, diluting the air with their reptilian breath, fading vibrancy with humidity, turning the world pastel. Waddle, waddle, they slide in between the river sludge and the fan boats. Austin says to escape them you have to zig-zag. They’ll never catch you if you run like a goon. Just act like an idiot, he says. That saves most people.

  On Exotic Lovers

  Loving a Floridian is like loving Frank Sinatra. Though he might be handsome, he is dead, so really my love is confined to a kind of removed admiration. A sulky, beaten kind of love that floats in between two people but never really sticks to anything solid. It wafts and travels between realms but, ultimately, it can never translate substance for substance—because what does an upbringing with syrupy drawls and overcrowded artificial beaches have to say to the upbringing of reality? The unease of the unfamiliar, however, is undeniably sexy, forcing my mind to jump realms into a place I have only seen in pictures and pornos. Knowing that when our mouths meet, his mouth has been in all sorts of places before mine. Florida places. In alligator swamps and in theme parks and in faded-looking ice cream shops. His mouth has been in Cuban sandwiches and in girls with bleached blonde hair, on river boats and in towns filled with psychics. On his grandparents’ formaldehyde foreheads and in zombies’ flesh. It is because Floridians are free of the bitterness that comes with stark definition that one can only love a Floridian if one accepts their utter separation from the rest of the world, their otherworldly upbringing that has made them so divergent from the standard color wheel, their dilution that stands so stark in the face of living flesh.

  On the Mons Venus

  Before Austin moved out of Florida to the land of the living, he dated a dead girl who was a stripper. She worked at the world-famous Mons Venus. At the Mons, everything yellows like a faded photograph, like a set of weeks-old unbrushed teeth. At the Mons Venus, people smash their skulls against the table to see what’s inside. All the insides fall out and there are gutters on the counters to drain the contents away. At the Mons, there is a VIP room shaped like a UFO that you have to go up a tiny, tiny winding staircase to access. Once inside, there are purple plush seats and a large draining facility for people to suck out their brains. If you pay the Mons enough, they’ll fill your brain with pocket-size strippers. They usually insert them through a hole they make in the very center of your forehead. They dance in your brain, puncturing your spinal column with their clear heels and their yellow teeth. Gnawing with their fingernails against the shag rug of your frontal lobes. Dancing, dancing till the rest of the plastic lining your brain cracks under the weight of their tiny feet, splintering into the bloodstream, and God decides it’s time for you to leave Florida, it’s time for you to go home.

  WHAT I WOULD BE IF I WASN’T WHAT I AM

  I HAD A HUSBAND. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome. I stood right next to him and I screamed at him. And then I got to the phone and called 911. The ambulance came very quickly. The medics broke down the door because I did not have the wherewithal to get up to let them in. They attached machines to my husband and counted backwards from three and the volts from the machine shook my husband and made his fingers stretch out into a perfect individualized ten, like he was reaching for something, like he was reaching for me. The medics, who had taken off my husband’s clothes and electrocuted him with their machines said, I am sorry, ma’am, there is nothing else we can do, and they put my husband on a stretcher and made to take him out the door, out our door, away from me, but I said wait, wait one moment, I want to say good-bye. And so I went over to the corpse of my husband and I looked at him, and I slapped him, and said, how dare you, how dare you leave me like this, all alone.

  IN A VAST WHITE ROOM that was filled with charts and fake plants, a man in a cheap lab coat who looked very convinced of his own authority held out his fist to me. He said, your husband’s heart went like this, and he clenched his fist and then released his fingers from his palm and let them hang in the air and dangle. My husband’s heart wasn’t made out of fingers, I said, which did not please the doctor. It’s a metaphor, he said, a visual aid to help you understand what happened. I don’t need your help, I said, and I walked out of the white room and into the parking lot to look for my son.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1984 my husband and I went on a cruise in the Mediterranean that was supposed to trace the path of Odysseus. That’s how they pitched it to us. We went with friends, three other couples, couples we had known for a very long time. One of the funny things about being married, especially about being married in our insular, picnicking, block-partying, well-exercised group of friends was that people were made to pretend that each couple was one person, like most people were, in fact, only half of one person that only became whole when paired with a mate. We had no single friends. We went on the cruise with the couples. I liked most of the husbands more than the wives and everyone liked my husband more than they liked me. It was alright that way. I am aware that I am not very likable. I am troubled, however, by how much easier it was for me to be with the husbands, how much easier it is for me to talk with men. Were the women on the cruise my husband’s friends? Or were they my friends? Or were they only friends with us as a couple? Friends with only the double human unit we made whole? Maybe the couples were friends with the idea of us, the idea of Ray and Fran. In any case, it was the idea of Ray and Fran that went on the cruise with the couples. The only interesting parts of the cruise were when the idea deviated, when Ray and I went swimming by ourselves off the side of the ship and were left on shore for a night, by accident. What a happy accident! We were ourselves, instead of a couple, when we were alone.

  I FOUND MY SON in the hospital basement, where they kept the bodies. He was looking at the body. When I got to the basement the man who oversaw the bodies said, in a very soft tone, you may want to call those who your husband was close to so they can come and see the body and gain a sense of closure. I didn’t say anything back to the basement-morgue man, because I was tired, and because I have never felt particularly obligated to converse with anyone, regardless of whether or not they have already initiated a conversation with me. I did not call anyone to let them know that they could come see the body. My son was there, which was enough. Besides, my husband’s body was mine, and while it was still around, albeit free of animation, I did not want to have to share it. There are so few things you can be convinced are yours. I stayed there late looking at his face. I became worried that I was letting him decompos
e, that keeping his filing cabinet open that long was going to crash the whole refrigerator. My husband was not old. He was seventy years old. And I was sixty-three.

  I WALKED AROUND MY HOUSE, but could not look at the place where my husband had died and then found I was averting my eyes everywhere and that I could not look at anything. His death expanded from his chair to the carpets on the floor to the wood walls and the ceramic bowls in my cupboard. I looked into my bowl of cereal and I saw my husband. I looked into the grout in between my tile in our shower and I saw his hands. I heard him yelling from upstairs. I heard him yelling from outside. I started sleeping in a different bedroom, but that too became infected with him. I told my son I had to move, so he helped me find a smaller place, a duplex where I shared a wall with a young family so that I could hear people living on the other side of our shared barrier all day long and well into the night.

  I DID NOT THROW my husband a funeral. I threw him a party. We burned his body and put it in a little box that I later sprinkled on the hills of a mountain where we used to hike. At the party people said, Franny, we’ll miss him, we miss him so much already. The couples from the cruise came and bowed their shoulders in unison and shook their sorry heads from left to right. They had handkerchiefs. All I could think about when I saw them were the handkerchiefs. Were they old? Or had they been bought especially for that night? We were getting to an age when people were going to begin to start dying. Perhaps the handkerchiefs were an investment. Perhaps the wives had gone to the department store and bought new ones and thought, quality over quantity, we are getting to that age, it’s a good investment because we will use them again.

  WHEN MY HUSBAND DIED, I was so very young.

  WE WERE BUILDING OUR HOUSE, Ray and I. We were going to build a house with our own hands. I was twenty-one and wore worn jeans and a black top that I had cut the collar out of so everyone could get a better view of my neck. You have to know what your strong points are, and then exploit them. I cut out all my collars. I had short dark hair that, if I wasn’t so slight, would have made me look like a man. I lifted stepping stones out of a truck bed and put them in a pile on the ground. Then I called over to Ray. I said, Ray, honey love, where should we put this here path? Ray smiled very widely and walked over to me from where he had been carpentering and got very close so that all I could see of him was his chest, and he took one of his big hands and with it gripped the back of my neck and took his mouth to my ear and whispered, Oh, Franny, I really don’t care. I didn’t exactly smile, but kind of made my eyes bigger than they usually were and lifted the right side of my mouth and then kissed him on his chest and walked away. I laid the granite stepping stones from the driveway to the would-be front door and then there were some extra left over, so I laid some down from the backyard into the wilderness that encircled the plot of land that would become our home.

  WHEN WE FINISHED building the house, it was beautiful. It was a single-level ranch-style structure with a modern single-side slanted roof and a black-bottomed pool out back that was in an organic shape, a kind of wonky oval. It was the early 1960s and I have always liked color, so I decorated the house in bright Scandinavian prints and long grotesque shag rugs. Ray had, of course, hired laborers, people he picked up at the local gardening store, to help him build the structure, but we had mostly done it alone with the help of an architect friend whom we never, surprisingly, saw much after we finished the house. It didn’t seem that radical, at the time, to try and build something ourselves, something we could live in and maybe have a child in and call our home. My son insists that now it would be a clear social marker, a sign that we had certain beliefs that were not compatible with the rest of society and that we were intentionally removing ourselves from society with walls. It wasn’t like that. The building of the house was Ray’s idea. It was just a thing that seemed we might be able to do on our own, and why would Ray keep working his salesman job in the city when he could save money and build his own home and spend more time with me? It just seemed logical. It was like the choice to stay home with my son instead of hiring a sitter. If you like spending time with a child, and you don’t have money to spare anyway, why outsource labor that you enjoy? The summer we started building, we got the frame up quick and then put a tarp over the would-be living room and lived in it like a tent. We had a camper grill that ran on small canisters of gasoline and every morning we would wake up with the sun, and shower nude with the hose and then make coffee and eat something and get to work. Ray had a radio with which we listened to the local jazz station and memorized all the DJs’ names and by the end of the summer we were doing impersonations of Billy Drake and Bobby Dale and Sly Stone when we bought groceries. We’d take our beat-up station wagon to the Safeway down in South City and I’d be in the canned goods aisle with Ray and pick up some garbanzo beans and say, Slam! That’s where it’s at! and slap Ray on the butt a little and slide across the slick linoleum grocery store floor while seamlessly depositing the can into our modest cart of house-camp-summer supplies. We bought lots of things we didn’t need on those grocery trips. We bought cereal boxes that had funny names, like Lots O Nuts and a box of Jello called Slime Pie. We ended up mixing that funny green Jello box mix with water and feeding it to the birds. They loved it. The jays and the cardinals slurped it up like ice cream soup. Look, Ray! I said. The birds love us! Ray looked at the birds and then he looked at me and laughed and said, It’s a good thing I don’t really like birds, because I wouldn’t be surprised if that kills them. No, I said. No, look! They love it! But Ray insisted that the Slime Pie would make them die. I kept buying it and kept feeding it to the birds anyway, and the only dead jay I ever saw at our house was one that had been killed by our cat. They survived, I told Ray when the summer was done and we had our roof and most of our walls. Look at them in the trees! I said. They love me! Maybe, said Ray as he turned back to his task and tried to finish painting one of the front house panels before the last of the light closed in on our little hill and it turned dark.

  AFTER RAY DIED, I lived in the duplex. I liked being able to hear the neighbor children’s young feet run back and forth. I imagined the children running very fast like small dogs, and then suddenly stopping, closing their eyes and falling smack on their faces fast asleep. I will admit that there were times when I put my ear to the wall, when I slid my pressed body from the first floor to the stairs, and up them, just to follow the family’s evening, to hear the father giving a bedtime story and putting his little boy and girl to sleep. I realized, after some time, that my mind was playing tricks on me. That I would hear conversations on the other side of the wall that did not exist. One day I had my head pressed to the side of the kitchen, and I heard the young husband and wife arguing about Slime Pie, why it was still on the grocery list, what a waste of money it was, and how it would surely kill the birds. My God, I thought, it’s Ray and I in that apartment, and I began to cry. I became very worried that I had invented the whole family, that I was, in fact, in a regular house, not a duplex, all alone. I rushed out into the front yard to make sure the house was doubled, to make sure that there were two front doors and a wall that was shared. I looked at the duplex. It was a building folded over, and duplicated. There was certainly another structure that was connected to mine. I rang the doorbell of the other front door. A handsome young man immediately came and answered it. Fran, he said, Fran, how are you doing? Is there anything I can get you? Do you want to come inside? No, no thank you, I said. I said, I am so sorry to bother you, I thought I heard someone inside cry.

  IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME to distinguish which parts of myself are the original me, which parts of myself predated Ray, and which parts were developed while I was with him. And, for those parts of me that were developed while I was with him, how am I to tell which parts I would have developed on my own, without him, and which parts of myself never would have come to pass if I had never met him? For instance, I am a painter. I paint portraits of people, portraits of people I like, or people who
I meet that interest me. I have sold some paintings for some money, and a gallery in the city, one time, even put on a full show of my work. However, I rarely show the people I paint their portraits, because I think that they would not like them, that they would be angry and insulted that I had painted them in such a way. They are not realist paintings, but they are most definitely portraits of specific people, and after I paint a portrait, it can be difficult for me to not think of the portrait as a summary of that person, which is why I have always liked painting people multiple times, because of course people change, and my understanding of people changes, so of course, over time, my portraits of specific people will be very, very different. In this way, I think of my paintings as a kind of thesis of my understanding of someone, and I can look back at all of my paintings that I have made of a specific person and see how my understanding of that person has changed. I started painting when I was a young mother, when I was twenty-four and was home all day all alone with Adrien, our infant son. While Ray was at work, I walked down the hill to a small convenience store and bought a cheap, child’s set of watercolors, and then I marched back up the hill with Adrien in my arms and the package of paint tucked under my arm. I put Adrien on the floor, on one of the faded shag rugs, and ripped out some pages from a notebook and painted him. I painted a can of peaches and a spoon, and wrote under the image ADRIEN, MAY 5TH 1966. I painted him each day for a week, and then I began to paint people I saw in the grocery store. I would put Adrien in the stroller and roll him down to the store, with the paints hidden in the bottom compartment of the stroller, and stand in the frozen foods section and watch people open the icy doors, and watch the small, cold clouds slick out of them, and watch the people hover over ice cream choices and frozen vegetable dilemmas. I eventually became very friendly with the grocery store staff, in particular, one man who was about nineteen who I suspect was in love with me. His name was George and on the third day he saw me in the frozen food aisle he brought me a stool to sit on. When he gave it to me, I looked at him very gratefully. I said, thank you so much, thank you, you have no idea what this means to me. And, the next day, when I came back, I gave him some cookies which I had baked at home the night before. In this way we became friends. In between stocking the shelves and mopping up messes, he would come speak to me. And I asked about his life, where his parents lived, if he had a girl and if he was happy with his work, doing what he was doing, doing what he wanted to do. He was very happy, and happier now that I was there, he said. I got in the habit of calling the store if I knew I was going to be absent and had to be elsewhere or had to stay home. I didn’t want George to worry. I wanted him to know I wanted to be there, I wanted to be in the frozen food aisle with him making my pictures, sharing an apple, talking about nothing, most of all not about Ray and my life in the house we had built with our own hands that now had a somewhat neglected front lawn and a roof that was not as structurally sound as we had planned.