Oh! Belly, Belly.

Oh, Belly Belly
By Jay S Levenson

For a moment Elaine thought she must've shut all the windows and forgotten. The life outside was like a movie with the sound turned off. An orange dog bounded up and out of a waving garden, leaping as if on rubber springs measured and silent. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe the wind carried the sound of life from her.

She stirred her breakfast, tiny pasta stars that her silver spoon moved through also soundlessly. Baby food; comfort food not for her son who had no appetite but for her. She stopped stirring and stared at the spoon that had begun to sink into the huge bubble that sucked at its side. There were times when you stepped out of yourself. When your son was dying your life became another thing. Her only child who was born a hemophiliac had contracted AIDS. He was going to die. Elaine remembered Joseph her husband and she when they had learned Alan was a hemophiliac deciding to leave Manhattan with its brittle cracked sidewalks, immediately deciding to leave and take Alan someplace safe. They had taken him to a place with sloping manicured lawns that emptied onto curved asphalt drives softened with sunlight - no fences - no enemies - a place with no sharp edges.

It was during this time of deceptive safety - of conscious self-deception that Elaine noticed the similarities in their shoulders her husband's and son's. How they curved down where there should have been angles how they really had no defense or was it a defense their gentle forward roll into the world with no sharp edges. No sharp edges to tear into the shattered pieces that Elaine now saw made up life.

Thirteen years ago they had moved here and she had still not gotten used to the
vacuum between houses, between sorrows. There was an absence of connection which would have not been possible in the apartment the three of them had shared in the city. You smelt your neighbor’s lives. You knew their laughter. You knew how their footsteps sounded coming home and leaving when they had made love the night before. They had a neighbor, a young woman who each day would sing loudly out the window, "God Bless America",
all of it over and over. At first it annoyed Elaine. But it interested Alan and they would listen together, his baby cheeks pushed into the vertical bars that prevented him from falling, her face pressing against his straight back.


Elaine turned to face the kitchen that had like the rest of the house had the uncared for unmade up look of a life that had been worn down. Alan's room was different. Elaine was successful at what she considered her only significant job - to keep his room from smelling of death. To somehow keep his room, which she kept dark since Alan’s eyes, had begun to ache to keep it somehow a place of life. She could not keep Alan from dying but he did not have to smell his own death.

Elaine shivered in Alan's doorway in the half-lit shadow where dangers stalked and still curses hung and followed little boys who should have been blest. "No one grows up here," she thought, "no one grows up here until they die."

Through the shadows she could see the outline of her son's body, now her size.
They were both the same height. His body that had just begun to expand into that hard rangy loveliness young men are as they reach puberty, was shrunken. Now it was soft and without bulk, feminine and fragile half essence half-living flesh.

Alan was awake and looking at her with that look of knowledge of such great
knowledge. She hated that he should be so wise so young without living. He had learned about life in his dying. Alan reached out his hand not for comfort but to comfort her, his mother.

Elaine walked over to her son and drawn in by the possibility of peace she crept into the bed and lay down beside him. They lay together the sides of their foreheads touching. His head always seemed so heavy to her, really contained, and against this solidness Alan's curls mingled with her own short hair the color of which she had forgotten.

They were two thin white bodies - Alan thin from illness and Elaine thin because her body refused to allow her to eat when the flesh of her son was being devoured. They lay, defeated soldiers, lost in the battle that raged within Alan's body which would not surrender. They were soldiers forced to fight a war whose outcome was decided yet not official. Forced to fight and fall bleeding, irrelevant, onto fields that still grew flowers.

Elaine sighed, a sigh that contained all the tears she was yet to weep. Alan stopped twisting her wedding ring around her finger and cooed, "Oh baby, oh baby."


They locked fingers tighter together. His cool, hers close too feverish. Alan smelt cared for and clean. Elaine smelt of loss. She wept without tears into his neck. Alan loosened his fingers from hers, and stroked from off Elaine's forehead their intertwined hair. "Oh baby," Alan sang, "Oh baby," Elaine responded in a hollow sob.
They lay like that for a long time before they turned their bodies flat against one another. Pulling at Alan's ear, watching herself dissolve into his death Elaine repeated once more and again, "Oh baby, baby...Oh baby."
She made love with her son with a determined detachment and a simple hope as he pushed deeper into the place from which he had been born that this blessed unblessed child might start his life over again. Alan was crawling into that space of possibility recharging himself from within the source of his own life.

Elaine felt at once the same expanded sense and absence of time she had felt when Alan was a fetus. Not in control of this mystery growing in her with its own rules taking from her what was necessary to grow yet becoming something separate.

Alan curled into her, his head on her belly, his arms reaching up. Elaine reached down and encircled him with her arms. Alan had first lain like this when he was barely able to walk. He'd come rushing back to her and say, "Oh, belly belly," and he'd curl into her his soft body a small globe the center of which was their circle of safety. Whenever he was frightened or worried that she might be angry - when her smile had formed the boundary of his world he'd come rushing back to Elaine and say, "Oh, belly, belly..." Now all their circles were static breaks; false endings coming up against walls one could never have imagined.

"People will die when they will," Elaine thought and fell asleep. She woke when the rumble of Joseph's old car broke the early evening sunset stillness. Jumping up she tore down the extra covering she had put on the windows. Alan should sleep in the light before the sun disappeared entirely - before night fell - before Joseph's presence forced Elaine to subdue her sorrow. She pulled her pain deeper within herself so she and her husband would find it possible to pass one another in the narrow hall.

One tear fell and left a clear puddle on the spotless floor. Outside this room tears fell onto dust into ashes. Here they would evaporate leaving no mark. Alan's room smelled differently this morning. It smelt of autumn. "Well, she'd lost," Elaine thought, "dying had finally come here too."


She was packing clothes that had lain so long neatly folded in the drawers. Unused -never worn - the precisely folded collars silently mocked her as she refolded them over and over. Joseph, the elder, the wise, came in and pulled Elaine up from her knees where she knelt over the open almost emptied bureau drawers. He picked up the suitcase forced it closed and carried it to the car. He put it in the space behind the backseat where Alan lay baking in the late morning sun. He placed the suitcase carefully, ritualistically for Elaine. It helped. He knew she might not have gotten into the car if he hadn't taken it.


Besides - what place did reason have here? Slipping into the seat behind the steering wheel he checked the rear view mirror and looked once quickly at the tangled mound of blankets with Alan's quiet hands resting above.

Joseph felt the sound of the motor starting like a shot to his heart. It shouted, "This is the final trip...this boy will not come back.” His heart beat almost louder than the motor that continued to scream for him, "...this boy will not come back."
"So this what it feels like," he thought as he pressed his foot onto the gas pedal. He could not look at Elaine.

It was early morning. Alan was dying. On TV they watched Sesame Street and game shows about winners. It was all the same for Elaine, yesterday, tomorrow. She was in the season of sameness, in the season of sameness, waiting for death.

She sat and watched Ernie annoy Bert one more time. Bert sighed with her. Alan's eyes were closed. He slowly twisted Elaine's wedding ring around her finger. Elaine's arm was asleep numb from resting forever on the metal bed-frame keeping always within his reach.

Alan's fingers slowed down were still, grew cold. Bert danced "The Pigeon.” Barkley the dog disappeared behind his tree once more fooling the children. The show was over. Elaine sat near the window and wept quietly, alone, mute. The nurses wouldn't disturb them. No one ever came near enough to disturb them.
She finally sank into a deep space, shapeless as remorse and deeper than guilt, in a what if space that could only end with it will never be.

Joseph and Elaine stood together during the benediction over Alan's body. Elaine was dizzy from grief and the new life she alone knew stood with her over the grave of his brother his father.


"Would God punish her - he had already punished her - had he known about her future sins or was it simply like a Greek tragedy meant to unravel itself and herself and all the people she loved for what reason...and why was this man standing next to her his two fingers pressed tightly on her wrist as if he were taking her pulse...why was he too being punished?"

The stranger nodded over her son's coffin. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow..."

"Goodness and mercy," Elaine thought. "Surely, why surely? Why?" she said aloud. Joseph looked down at her, "I don't know why," he said and the fingers that had been pressed to her wrist dropped defeated to his side.
That night they heard on TV an announcement for an "AIDS Special.” "Special," Elaine said, "do you think that means they'll have dancing and singing...A Special on AIDS?” The sound of her laughter surprised her as much as it did her husband by being real. Joseph reached across the wide bed and rested his hand on Elaine's stomach his finger spread. She felt them sink inside her quiet and still like roots. She had almost choked trying to keep them safe. Elaine switched off the high tech computer graphics. "Facts don't heal.

Just the uppermost point of the upturned toes of her new pumps was shining. Elaine had avoided the smooth overly tended walkways that lied about grief. She had learned how one could sink into softness. She'd walked through the fields between the spaces where gravestones sprouted, where weeds were not allowed to grow, a bright poppy the color of courage and blood she'd walked until she reached the grave of her son.

She knelt in her new red suit over Alan's grave. Her pale hands folded almost in prayer pointed towards her heart.

"I can not mourn I mourned so long for the living for the dying...facts do lie yes...people sometimes win, yes, yes, don't they Alan?.... life with only mourning is not life, maybe it is, maybe it is...but life as grief, I cannot carry on, I cannot carry on with only grief..... I cannot wear the color of mourning over my unborn child...over you , Alan...Alan, Alan, not even over you...facts do lie , yes people sometimes win."

For a long time Elaine thought only yes. She no longer felt grief or uncertainty only that her knees had begun to ache. She laid her head upon the mound of earth not yet flattened by time. Her cheek sank into the soft green. From under the Earth she felt small arms reach out and encircle her head.
"Oh belly belly," she wept, "...oh belly belly."