Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Page B

father was a scruffy American with a big nose and corduroy pants, but my grandfather was so impressed by the young man’s interest in history he let his daughter marry him anyway. So began the Brown family tradition of “marrying up.”
    My father wrote the book, but not before one of his colleagues did, so he was always given second pick of the jobs and the conferences. He worked in a small, cluttered office at the local university until my mother left him—and who could blame her? He had begun to dress in head-to-toe brown as so many scholars do, but, given our name, it made him a target for ridicule. He would wear the same shirt-pant-cardigan combination until it was sour smelling, at which point he would change the shirt or the pants, never both. He smoked and drank with his friends, scholars of equally obscure subjects: Fifteenth-Century Swords of the Middle East, Italian Rococo Hairstyles and Ceilings of Rajasthan. And he wrote terrible French poetry.
    AFTER HOURS OF sitting in the grass reading my father’s writing, I saw Constantine stroll into my yard.
    â€œHello,” he said, not bothered in the least by our trespasser–landowner relationship.
    â€œHi.” I couldn’t seem to locate anger.
    â€œWhat is the meaning of this?” He gestured at the clutter around me. I noticed he was covered in a noble grime.
    â€œReorganizing,” I said, closing the box.
    He gave an aristocratic shrug—the first sign of approval I’d had from anyone in days.
    â€œI’m going to have to ask your girlfriend for that dress back. The white one.”
    â€œThat seems reasonable,” he said.
    I nodded toward the sandwich in his hand. “What’s that?”
    He cracked the bread open. “Prosciutto, brie, tapenade—”
    â€œIs that grilled portobello?”
    â€œIt appears to be,” he said, and ripped off a mouthful. Then he held the sandwich out to me, “Care for some?”
    We shared the sandwich and a bit of conversation. Eventually he excused himself to look for my wife’s dress, and I carried my box inside. It was then, just after he had left, that I managed to locate my anger after all. Where exactly did a hobo like him get a sandwich like that? Just who did he think he was, breaking into the kitchens of the good people of Cherry Lane? I was starting to think laying Lucinda off was one of the greatest mistakes of my life—Lucinda, not just the maid, but the guardian of our home—when I noticed a stiff wind, the front door standing wide open and more of that deep-skin smell. Only this time, it was everywhere.
    I found body-shaped ruts down the centre of each bed, grease spots as dark as cheeseburger stains on the pillowcases. The bottom bookshelf, down where we kept our Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, was in disarray. In the living room, the chess set had been hastily put back on the shelf. The TV was on Masterpiece Theatre. The radio was tuned to NPR.
    AFTER I TOLD her about the mix-up with her keepsakes, and the trouble at work, and after she dragged my father into it and I dragged her mother into it, Kathy suggested I spend the night at a hotel. I chose to stay in the yard, though, where I could keep an eye on things.
    I spent the early part of that evening reading my father’s journals, falling deeper into French than I ever imagined I could, the language opening to me in new ways. At the bottom of the box, beneath the journals, I found my father’s old scholarly uniform: brown pants, brown cardigan, brown shirt and tie, all my size. Putting those clothes on, I understood why my father wore them a week at a time; it’s a quality you just don’t find in clothes anymore.
    The uniform must’ve filled me with strength and purpose, because I immediately got an idea. After writing out twelve versions of the same note, I walked up and down Cherry Lane tucking one into every mailbox. The notes were a call to action: