Radio Belly

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Mineral by Mineral

Loveseat

Large Garbage

Mrs. English Teacher

The Moustache Conspiracy

Drift

Refugee Love

Radio Belly

Floatables: A History

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

I
F IT WERE POSSIBLE to pinpoint a beginning, it would have to be
Punctuation Camp!,
a publicity stunt the boss arranged to promote a new educational series.

Instead of cleaning out filing cabinets or pretending to look busy—all the things that usually fill an ordinary week—everyone from the Children's Division of Crawford & Hicks Publishing is forced to dress up like various punctuation marks, in all the colours of the rainbow: a period, a comma, a hyphen, a colon and semicolon. Even quotation marks, as conjoined twins: the “66 Sisters” and “99 Brothers.” Out of the deep sleep of autumn, everyone must conjure good cheer, climb aboard the “Punctuation Bus!” and spend the week driving from one school to another.

This is how, in her thirtieth year, immediately following a breakup and a demotion from the department of real, adult literature—in what the boss is now calling “the shuffle”—Shana ends up dressed as an exclamation point. As if she were Gumby's uptight relative, her body is encased in a block of green foam from her knees to well above her head. Only her face, arms and black-spandex calves poke out of the costume. Her feet, surrounded by foam, are the “point” of her exclamation.

On the first morning of camp, Shana and the other punctuation marks shuffle around a gymnasium while teachers give lessons to groups of “attention- or otherwise-challenged” kids. It's explained that these kids are “very inner-city.” Shana's instructed not to make prolonged eye contact, not to linger, to move quickly and speak only in exclamatory statements: “Punctuation is fun!” and “Clap your hands!” and “Good job, kids!”

Lunch has its own set of challenges. In no mood for portion control, Shana eats fast and hard, getting mayo all over her costume, tomato seeds in her hair. Then one of the 99 Brothers leans in mid-sandwich and teases, “Don't forget to breathe,” loud enough for the whole room to hear, so Shana ends up having to tell her new co-workers the same thing she told her old co-workers: that she has a rare illness, the only cure being a “special, high-calorie diet.” If she didn't eat this way, her body would waste away, she says.

In the afternoon, the “Punctuation Team!” attempts to act out skits while the students burn off whatever they've had for lunch and/or show what they've learned. It quickly becomes evident that they have retained nothing though. The kids rally around, beating the foam shells of the costumes with sticky hands, hugging, kicking and grabbing various parts of anatomy. This is when Shana first interacts with Phoebe, the young Ivy League intern she'll be sharing an office with the following week, and the only person with a costume more cumbersome than her own—whenever Phoebe turns too quickly, and no matter how much frenzied back-pedalling she does, the immense curve of her question mark brings her down. But Phoebe's cheer is relentless. As soon as she's back on her feet she's playing the befuddled question mark again. Pulling Phoebe back up for the second time, Shana starts to get pissed off on her behalf. She begins to feel detached, even monstrous. She wants to level with these kids: “It's time to let your learning limitations guide you! Most of you will become mechanics, carpenters, waitresses, escorts—and punctuation won't even matter!” She wants to instill fear, to hurl their lisping, soft bodies at the walls.

While helping each other out of their costumes at the end of the day, Shana discovers Phoebe is one of those vegetarian, volunteering, virgin-till-married types. Still, she can't help admiring Phoebe's ability to stay in character even after the show's over. If Shana's sentences are dragged down by the lead weight of negativity, then Phoebe's are helium balloons, light as air, despite her costume's structural challenges. They'll never be friends, that's clear, but for some reason Shana still confides in Phoebe about the three-car-pile-up of her life: entering a new decade, being dumped and getting demoted all within a few weeks of each other.

THE NEXT MONDAY, when Shana has finally managed to put
Punctuation Camp!
behind her, she's called into the boss's office and reprimanded for saying “Fuck!” in front of the children too often, for having chased a group of them to the back of the gym yelling, “Avoid the wrath of words!”

“They don't even know what ‘wrath' means,” Shana argues. “It was a game! Like tag.”

But her boss isn't convinced. “Need I remind you about the girl with the pigtails?” she asks.

The girl with rubber boots and a mustard-stained mouth had come stomping after Shana, sour-faced, fists flailing as soon as they'd made eye contact and yet, everyone seems to agree it's
Shana
who has done something wrong. Apparently it isn't okay for punctuation to restrain a child by the pigtails under any circumstances, ever. Apparently Shana was sufficiently warned about the dangers of eye contact.

“And the eating?” Shana's boss asks next.

“Oh, that?” Shana says. “I have this thing. It's like hypoglycemia, except it's hypo-something else.”

As a kid she used to sit at the table stuffing as many grapes/blueberries/cherries into her mouth as she could. She'd bite down, eyes and cheeks bursting, juice running down her chin to her neck. This was the only way to really taste food, she was sure. As she grew older, the hunger grew. These days it's a whole watermelon, a box of doughnuts, an entire Deep 'n Delicious cake in one sitting.

Shana manages to smooth things over with the boss by agreeing to “see someone.” As for Phoebe, after just a few days in the office together it's clear she'll never evolve beyond her punctuation role. Everything she says is delivered the same way—with a perky flip to her words, somewhere between questioning and stupidity. And that wide-eyed, overenthusiastic expression she used to captivate a room full of ADD kids: it turns out that's her actual personality.

IN THE WEEKS after
Punctuation Camp!,
the person Shana has agreed to see—Wendy is her name—encourages Shana to “acknowledge her anger.” It's true, Shana admits, digging her finger into the small planter on the coffee table in Wendy's office—she
is
mad. At everything. Always.

She regularly shows open malice toward those tourists who twirl in the middle of the sidewalk, pointing this way and that like bloated weather vanes, oblivious to the commuter surge around them. At coffee shops she orders non-fat, ristretto lattes, then accuses the barista of not knowing what
ristretto
means, sounding the word out, “Ri-
stret
-to,” her voice in the distinct octave of anger. Everywhere she goes she tests the limits of customer service. Once passive-aggressive, she's now just aggressive.

She's also mad at the businessmen, hunched like little boys at the too-small tables of these coffee shops. Mad at the way they peer over the rims of their paper cups, not just at her but
into
her, as if invited to lounge, belly-up on the (white leather) couch of her innermost soul. These are the men no one else wants—desperate men with eyes like open caves, eyes that give her the feeling she's being pulled into a fishy darkness against her will. She wants to tell them, “This attraction is
all
you,
all
imagined,” but she doesn't have time for eyes. What's worse are the men who don't look. The ones who go as far as shoes-knees-waist, then back to their papers/phones/americanos. Assholes. When she was younger, men's eyes at least made the traverse to arrive at her face. Now it's like her midriff is a mountain range, a jungle on fire—impassable.

She's mad that the only thing she can listen to since David left is punk—songs like “Fuck the World” and “A Good Day to Kill”—because it approximates the noise in her head. Mad that musicians insist on padding CDs these days with verbal interludes, that every open space left in the city is just like one of those interludes: maximized, crammed with a neon sign, a billboard. It seems the world is full of words and noise—all of it embedding itself into her brain like shrapnel.

But that's not all she's mad at.

She's mad that elementary school seems to have been the best time of her life, that the lid on her favourite travel mug has a leak in it (again), that she just bought the entire bedroom set from pages 84–85 of the IKEA catalogue, yet morning still feels like a punch to the gut.

And she's mad at her desk-to-chair-height ratio at work, at the resulting case of what her chiropractor calls “mouse arm.” Mad that what pains her most in this world has been given a name like “mouse arm,” robbing her of all due sympathy.

Wendy gets Shana to admit all of this, and then she puts her pencil to her lips and says, sweet as can be, “Now, what can you tell me about hunger?”

Shana doesn't mean to ignore the question. It's just that she's still focused on the plant on the table before her. It's that wispy kind of fern that requires daily watering. The soil is darker than most, grainy, probably freshly fertilized with that organic stuff full of trace minerals.

Shana's friends recommend medication, meditation, chakra cleansing, ear coning and rereading her favourite novels to figure out how and why her life has come to this. “Fuck off,” she says invariably, before changing the subject. She almost says the same when Wendy first mentions taking pottery classes, but something—call it self-control—gets in the way. Or maybe it's the way Wendy watches Shana, with her pencil and notepad at the ready. It makes Shana think this pottery thing is more than a mere suggestion. Her job may depend upon it.

The classes are held in the basement of a community college in a long, cold room reminiscent of a public change room or a morgue: damp, echoey, with a certain underwater quality to the light. Shana sits across from a woman named Grace who wears a hand-knit sweater and galoshes. Grace has let her grey roots grow out to the halfway point and Shana can't help but admire her for this. Everyone is given a slab of clay and told to knead and pound it against the table. For the first half of class Shana keeps up, copying the teacher's movements, but eventually she ends up sitting and watching as Grace dips her hands in water and runs her wet fingers across the clay, turning it, smoothing it, over and over. It's all that grey water, the smell of it, that causes a thread of drool to yo-yo out Shana's mouth and puddle on the table. Grace looks up at Shana, then down at the drool, but her hands never break pace.

SHANA TAKES HERSELF out for hamburgers and modifies the order to include extra fries, extra bacon, extra burger. On the drive home she stops to buy bags of beef jerky, salmon jerky, turkey jerky. Then, to forgive herself, to forget, she eats whole boxes of mandarin oranges in the dark of her bedroom, fast and all at once.

“YOU HAVEN'T BEEN eating well,” Shana's mom says and then promptly signs her up for mail-order supplements.

“You need to appreciate what you
do
have,” says Phoebe. This from the girl who is visiting Shana's life on an internship, a one-semester layover on the way to something better.

“You're not the same,” Shana's friends say. They've been eyeing her closely since David left for law school on the warmer coast.

It's true. Nothing's the same. Not since that last goodbye in his bright and empty kitchen, the smell of aftershave and espresso on his skin. Not since he asked, “Sure you can't come?” with all the intonation of “Want a drink?” Such a bounding, reckless question. Such casual delivery.

Her friends and her mom and Phoebe are right. She hasn't been herself. Not since David's phone calls thinned and then stopped. Not since her final, desperate call and his confession: “Yes, there's someone. You'd like her. Reminds me of you.” Someone he knew as a kid, someone he'd eaten Play-Doh with more than three decades ago. Perhaps the only someone who could make her and David's last year and a quarter together seem like one of those noisy interludes, an intermission in some other, greater story. This girl (his fiancée, he'd finally admitted) has eclipsed Shana entirely. “Thanks for teaching me to love. You were right, I wasn't open,” David said before Shana hung up on him.

Maybe
that's
where all the anger comes from.

But maybe that's not it at all. David was good in a three-times-per-week kind of way. Sure, they were sexually compatible—predictable for a couple of pent-up office workers. They could share a holiday, a tropical vacation—but a lifetime? Maybe this has nothing to do with David. The world is angry, after all. Fires, floods and quakes. It's trying to shake us off, Shana thinks. Perhaps she's a geyser steaming on account of something greater, something subterranean. Or maybe she just hoped her life would be different by now. By this age she'd expected love. Celebrity. Wealth. Satiety. But instead this: an ordinary road and she an empty bucket rolling down it, the hollow thud waking people in the night. Instead, anger, hunger.

SOME OTHER THINGS Wendy leads Shana to admit:

She's a bit of a snob. She runs her social life like big business or corporate America, with mergers and trades. Only her prettiest friends make the cut. She and these friends dress up, meet over (artisanal, fair trade) coffees or (herbal-infused) martinis and proceed to psychoanalyze the moves and missteps of acquaintances like a bunch of retired players scrutinizing the game at halftime.

Sometimes she lies. On a bad day, the lies come one after another, awkward and tumbling. Simple lies: “Yes, I've kissed a girl. No, I don't watch TV. Yes, I'm fluent in Spanish.” No going back then. She blinks, lets the words clang in her ears, smiles. Her world shrinks ever so slightly. These are the people she must avoid from now on, the ones she's lied to for no good reason.

If she had a warning label, it would read: “Good friend, not great. Talks more than listens. May or may not have a conscience. Manipulative in an emergency. Needs constant attention. May or may not be capable of authentic connections. Should not be exposed to displays of sickness, grief, shame. May contain traces of fraudulence.”