Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Page A

was still formulating a response when a bright, farm-smelling whiff passed my nose. “Do you smell that?” I asked, louder than I meant to, so loud Kathy startled. “That funny smell? Like a greasy scalp? I’m telling you, they’ve been in here!”
    I DECIDED TO tell my wife about the tickets that night. Just the tickets. I figured I’d get to the termination thing a little later. She was on the bed rubbing lotion on her legs.
    â€œHow many tickets?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know,” I said, “twenty, forty. It’s nothing really.”
    â€œForty!” she screeched. She rubbed more vigorously then, going over the same area again and again—now knees, now ankles, now knees-knees-knees.
    â€œI’d planned to dispute them when I had a moment. I mean, they can’t give a man fifty tickets for parking in front of his own house! They can’t just declare Cherry Lane a two-hour-max-anytime zone. ‘Social order is hardly worth the price of liberty.’ You know who said that?”
    â€œNow it’s fifty tickets?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA minute ago it was forty tickets. Now it’s fifty?”
    I pulled back my side of the sheet and looked closely at the accumulation of bodily crumbs there. I couldn’t, just then, be certain they were my own.
    â€œI think the den needs vacuuming,” I said.
    â€œI think you’re more and more like your father every day,” she said.
    â€œI think I’ll be taking a flex day tomorrow,” I said, and then I headed for the couch downstairs.
    IN THE MORNING there was no sign of them, not behind the hydrangea and not in the ravine either. I headed for the basement and, as I’d feared, found two boxes marked CHARITY among those marked KEEPSAKES. Most of the keepsake boxes were Kathy’s: the Montgomery linens tucked in with the Montgomery china and the Montgomery photo albums—boxes of dresses and shoes and ribbons and trophies for every occasion in a Southern girl’s life. In among all that was a single box marked KEEPSAKES: BROWN. My family inheritance. I brought it out to the backyard.
    I found six of my father’s journals. The first one was from the France years, just after his PhD and just before my mom. It was written in scratchy black French. French: the language I could read and write but never quite speak, a taunting, cruel language, a language that had led me right up to the threshold of fluency and then shut the door on me. I almost broke down. I did. My tears landed on the open page, drawing the ink up from the page, the page up from the book. I dabbed with my shirtsleeve but I was only smearing ink and history. I almost gave up, and then the sentences I was reading began to loosen. Verbs and their conjugations, nouns and their complements, tense, vocabulary: it all started rushing back to me as if French, like a good woman, had been waiting for me all those years, as if no time had passed at all.
    I read verse after verse about la lune, about grass blowing in the wind, women’s hair blowing in the wind, hair luminous and flowing and silky and honey-coloured. Rivers of hair. Entire poems about a woman’s eyes. Eyes like syrup, no, coffee, no, caramel, no, amber. The eyes of a seductress. Tantalizing, come-hither eyes. Page after page about a woman’s curves, vast swells of flesh, heaving mountains, soft veldts, damp crevasses.
    I closed the book. It was my mother, of course.
    My dear father. He had the heart of a poet but not the talent, which is why he’d devoted his life to the study of troubadours. One of only a handful of troubadour scholars at the time, he had gone to France to walk in their footsteps, to dig through archives and write a book about his findings. It was while researching a certain French family and their history of troubadour patronage that he met the man who would be my grandfather, and his daughter, who would be my mother. My