Radio Belly by Buffy Cram

Author:Buffy Cram
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, Fantasy, American, FIC029000, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781553659020
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2012-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Drift

THE LAST TIME Lena’s mother calls, everything seems normal. Normalish. Normal enough.

Lena is standing in the Shark Museum at the time, looking into the mouth of a huge taxidermy shark. Mr. Kapp, the proprietor, lost his arm to this very shark decades ago, but now, it seems, they cohabit peacefully. The shark’s head takes up most of the living room but acts as a kind of coffee table.

“And where do you call from now?” Ama yells in her thick Slavic accent. Already she forgets she’s the one who dialled.

“New Brunswick,” Lena answers. Best to leave the shark out of it. It’s the little things that confuse Ama these days.

“New Bruns-who?” Ama shouts. This isn’t forgetfulness, Lena reminds herself, but Ama’s brand of humour. All across Canada it’s been the same: Mani-who-ba, On-who-io, Who-bec. She waits a beat and sure enough Ama gives her signature “Ha!” to indicate she’s joking. “And how is the museum?” she asks next.

Lately, Ama seems to have forgotten Lena promotes museums in general, rather than working at, say, the gift shop of one in particular. Lena doesn’t correct her. She’s decided not to give too much negative attention to these little slip-ups. Besides, her career has recently tanked and she doesn’t want to get into it.

“It’s fine,” she says, following a group of adults into Mr. Kapp’s dining room. Looking at the hole Mr. Kapp cut into the wall to make way for the shark’s midsection, seeing how the drywall is shredded, not unlike a shark bite, a small sadness blooms in her stomach. This is the kind of thing she would have been able to share with Ama once. Once they would have laughed about it, but now it would just disorient her.

“Your brother, Yakov, likes old things too,” Ama says in a faraway voice.

Lena pauses. She doesn’t have a brother or know anyone named Yakov.

People back home have warned her this might happen. They say Ama has been calling everyone old-world names lately and asking them to fetch water from the well, but Lena is pretty sure most people just don’t get Ama’s humour.

“Funny!” Lena says, laughing loud, “but, seriously, how is the fortune-telling?” Ama has been reading palms out of her home since Lena was young.

“Is fine,” Ama says, snapping back to the moment. “So tell me, how you find husband when always you are running? Why you don’t come home and have me my grandkids?” Lena can feel her heart beating in her ears. Before the abortion, this used to be Ama’s rally cry—“Come home, find man, make baby”—but it’s been years since she’s heard it. She never told Ama what she’d done, of course, but she always suspected Ama knew.

At this point in the conversation Lena would usually change the subject, reminding Ama that she is the “Museum Lady,” that one-point-five museums close their doors every week, and if she isn’t travelling the country documenting their collections, all that history will be scattered in junk shops across the nation. But it’s been a bizarre week.

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