Read Plan B for the Middle Class Online
Authors: Ron Carlson
Plan B for the Middle Class (17 page)
Years ago, I called home the night I knew I was leaving veterinarian school. I was in the hospital in Denver and when my mother answered she said, “It's your allergies, isn't it, Lewis? Are you in the hospital right now?”
Ricky comes out and loops an arm around my father's leg. “Granpa, Granpa, Granpa,” he says and points at the chicken sizzling on the grill. “The barbecue is very hot. You must be very careful.”
Ricky's head falls against my father's leg and as my father cups the little boy's head, I know how it feels. The two stand in that kind of hug and watch me as I begin to turn the chicken. This is who I am, some guy with a spatula at twilight. I write about animals. I won't get the big adventures, page-one stuff; I've stood on a lot of patios with my father and I'll stand on quite a few with my son. That is what I'll get.
Later, in our bedroom, Harry is helping Katie pack. She's got both big suitcases open on the floor and Harry sits in one with his binoculars. He's emptied my shaving kit and is sorting through the goodies. I reach down and try to find my razor. “I already put it on the bureau,” Katie says. “Do you want your Hawaiian shirt?”
“What's the protocol? I don't think you take your Hawaiian shirt to Hawaii, do you?” It's a turquoise shirt with little red and white guitars and orchids printed all over it.
“If you don't take it, we may buy another.”
“Take it,” I say. “Let's take it.”
Harry has pulled the lid down now and he's inside the suitcase. In twenty minutes, when my mother has taken Rick in to bed and read him a book and he's flopped over on his stomach aggressively for sleep, I will come back in here and find Harry asleep in my suitcase and carry him to bed.
Of course, when you have children, all your bedtimes come back to you. Not all at once, but from night to night, pieces of your earliest nights appear. It will be the sound of a sheet or the feel of a blanket and the dark in the corner or the way the light from the hall falls on the far wall and there you are being carried to bed by someone who must have been your father or there is your mother with her hand in your hair and your head on the pillow. Some nights I lie in their room with the kids and listen to their nursery-rhyme tapes and I listen to them as they swim in the sheets, Ricky diving down first into sleep, the same way he eats, hungrily, no sense wasting time, and Harry as he turns sideways on his back and then kicks the wall softly with his heels as his blinking grows longer and longer and then his eyes shut for good and I hear the motor of his breath even out in a perfect sine curve.
When Katie comes to bed it is just about midnight. I've been listening to some guy on Larry King's radio show talk about the economy. He keeps referring to the “quietude” of the nineties. He is advising people to keep gold under their mattresses. Katie hits the pillow with a blowout sigh, throwing her right arm up over her eyes. “Are we actually going on a trip?” she says. “Are we going to sleep for four days or what.”
“Depends on what you mean.”
She turns her head my way and smiles. “You monkey. âThe coast is clear.'” That's the line we've used for fifteen years. Petting in her front room, one or two o'clock in the morning, I was always whispering: “The coast is clear.” Once on her dining-room floor as close to putting something on the permanent record as we'd ever been, everybody's pants to the knees, brains full of fire, we heard her father ten feet away in the kitchen drawing a glass of water. And now we'd been living like that again. It makes a person dizzy.
The length of her body is the simple answer to what I am missing. It's an odd sensation to have something in your arms and to still be yearning for it and you lie there and feel the yearning subside slowly as the actual woman rises along your neck, chest, legs. We are drifting against each other now. Sex is the raft, but sleep is the ocean and the waves are coming up. Katie's mouth is on my ear and her breath is plaintive and warm, a faint and rhythmic moan, and I pull her up so that I can press the tops of my feet into her arches. I run my hands along her bare back and down across her ribs and feel the two dimples in her hip and my only thought is the same thought I've had a thousand times: I don't remember thisâI don't remember this at all. Katie sits up and places her warm legs on each side of me, her breasts falling forward in the motion, and as she lifts herself ever so slightly in a way that is the exact synonym for losing my breath, we see something.
There is a faint movement in our room, and Katie ducks back to my chest. There is someone in our doorway. It is a little guy without any clothes on. He has a pair of binoculars.
Who can remember sex? Who can call it to mind with the sensate vividness of actuality? I sit in the window when we lift off from Los Angeles. Katie sits in the middle and next to her a high school kid with a good blitz of pimples across his forehead. Katie speaks to him and I see he has braces. Beneath us I see the margin of the Pacific fall away. I can see all the way up to the Santa Monica Pier and the uneven white strip of sand separates the crawling blue sea from the brown urban grid of the city. We have just left something behind. We have now been released from mainland considerations. Tonight Harry is going to pad west in his bare feet, looking for us with his glasses, but the surf is going to stop him. He'll be mad for a moment at the Pacific Ocean, it's a big one, but then he'll turn and go back to his room.
I love to fly. I always sit in the window and press the corner of my forehead against the plastic glass. I can feel the little bumps in my skull which are full of ideas and I move my head slightly. It kind of hurts in a nice way. Today my skull is full of sex. I'm trying to remember sex. I don't even try to resist by making notes for Sorenson or looking at the magazine,
Inflight.
The fact that I have lost my job and may lose our house, the Buick, the VCR, seems to have sharpened everything, and I feel edgy, alive. The sun is clipping through my window and falls in a square on my wrists and lap. I hear the stewardess come by, her clothing whispering, and I glimpse her tight maroon skirt, seamless and perfect as it passes.
I've always loved to look at women, what is that, terrible? There are moments I harbor in memory: buying my first sport coat on my own downtown in Salt Lake City at Mednicks, the tall young woman helping me, taking the coat back to the counter and then bending down and writing the slips as her white silk blouse fell open like doors of a cathedral and her breasts were revealed to me hanging there in the cool dark, draped in white undergarments as delicate and complicated as certain music. Of course, it happens all the time. When I buy a boatload of groceries at Safeway, the girl asks for identification for my check and then she bends to check the name and numbers. Who would look away from this healthy and dextrous checker, her cleavage sweet as milk. It's as if once she has my driver's license and is certain of who I am, she feels free to show me her breasts. I think of it and it makes buying food magical. And there have been times more raw, when driving down the hot highways I would look down into the Chevelle next to me in the jam, cars from here to heaven, and see her, some weary brunette in a skirt, legs spread, one knee cocked against the door so that the air conditioning ran into the open maw along her bare leg all gooseflesh and pinfeather right into the damp crux of my imagination.
Now, in an airliner with my wife fallen into a book and the jolly boy next to her gnashing peanuts, I suck at a gin and tonic and roll my forehead against the window. Below it is all sea now, and I feel the sleepy discomfort of an erection or half an erection, some vaguely pleasant stretching, and I shift in my seat belt, and I smile. My face feels sleepy and stiff and the smile feels like some kind of little exercise. This is immaturity. This is total regression. I think. I'm half asleep and I'm remembering Ryan McBride.
When we finally got to high school, Rye and I found the information about sex vague and imprecise. We'd been promised in the rumor and legend of junior high something more explicit. We'd heard everything. We'd heard about girls fighting in the parking lot, one girl's bra used to choke her if not to death then into acute brain damage. We'd heard about “heavy petting,” which is exactly the kind of phrase that made Rye spit with rage. “Oh, it's heavy,” he'd say. “Which is the heavy part?”
We were a little ready to rip the veil off anything vaguely masquerading as the unknown. We wanted to know. And it really got to Rye that people used the same phrases for everything.
“Doing it,” they'd say. So-and-so were
doing it.
“Totally bogus,” Rye told me when we heard that about our old pal Paula Swinton and student body vice president Jeff Wild. “How could two words be more wrong?
Doing? Doing?
” he'd rant, his arms presenting the words to me in circles. “Doing?” He'd shake his head and say sadly, “It? Doing
it?
Paula and Jeff are doing
it?
What is it, one thing? Done one way? I mean, is it?” Rye would let his shoulders droop. Rye was a funny guy. He had a way, a campy way with his body. One shrug could get a room to laugh, and he'd been elected as student body secretary, the first boy ever to hold the office, on his reputation as a character. Standing there at his locker looking hurt in his green-and-gray class sweater, he mugged for me and went on, “Hey, Lewis, Lewis, Lewis. This is high school. This,” he waved his book at the teeming corridor, “is secondary education.” We started off for class and he put his arm over my shoulders and leaned on me. He whispered, “I had expected more. Paula and Jeff.
Please.
This place is letting me down.”
And as an antidote for the ambiguity in which we floated, Rye became known, our junior and then senior year, as the guy who defined “heavy petting.” “It's an ugly thing to see and if I were you I wouldn't look” was the first line of his credo as it appeared on blackboards and in graffiti in the stairwells. It closed: “It takes place below the waist.” He said it as a student executive club meeting was breaking up, but it was noted on the blackboard in advanced English. In three weeks the phrase “takes place” could get a laugh in any sophomore class. A high school, we learned, is a three-story brick building with a jillion hormones and one trophy case.
He'd fall in step behind some junior in tight white Levi's, her rear bobbing like a searchlight, and he'd lean to me and say, “What is this feeling? The biological urge toward procreation of the species?” Then he'd elbow me and answer the question: “Nah.”
His great and lasting fame derived, however, from planning the graduation party on Black Rock Beach and from his thesis: “Eleven,” which postulated that there were eleven different kinds of erections. I can remember these things with a clarity that quiets me.
Katie has put her book on her lap and her head against my arm. It is sweetly warm here now, sunny with the kind of sleep that closes your eyes from the bottom up. The plane rides the white shell of air over the ocean, splitting silence into broomstraws, and I interlace my fingers carefully so as not to disturb my wife Katie. If you think I don't love her, you're not catching on. I close my eyes in the bright rushing world. I move my lips. So, what is this, more than it should be? I don't know. The truth: I'm praying.
The next: it doesn't last long. I move my lips carefully around the few important things I have to say and then use the bundle of my ten fingers to adjust the knob in my trousers. The walrus has a genuine bone in its penis that ranges in length between ten and twenty inches. The bone is an evolutionary device that is a great help in cold water. Eskimos save these bones, called “ooziks,” for good luck. A sperm whale's penis, when erect, is nearly fifteen feet in length. The grizzly bear, more closely related to man, has erections that average four inches and require greater willing or unwilling cooperation from a mate. My watch tells me I've had this tumescence half an hour and at our speed that's three hundred and fifteen miles, a boner that could go from Denverâif I can hang on ten more minutesâto Santa Fe. It's the kind of erection Ryan used to call number three, the kind you get about ten in the morning in third period, a wonderful extension that makes you slide down in your seat and stretch your legs. It's related to number one, the one you wake up with, stiff as a clothespin. Number two was what? It was also a morning deal, the one that comes up between class, pointed down, trapped in your shorts pointing at five o'clock. Number two was the one you used your chemistry book to straighten out. What were the others? Eleven. We laughed our heads off, but we all knew he was right. There are eleven, minimum.
I remember the larky randiness of those days and my decision finally to push the point with a girl named Cheryl Lockwood at the graduation party. I wasn't really out of the mainstream in high school, most of our class were virgins, but I'd had a couple of relationships that had just dried up and blown away and I couldn't figure it out. I was a little worried, I remember, about being unqualified for the real world of men and women. Who doesn't? My parents, of course, could read my mind, but I could not read theirs. I lived in a kind of dread that my father would take me aside one evening or my mother would try to open the topic. As it was, we lived an uneasy truce. If we were watching television at night together and there was a kissing scene, I would always leave the room, glass of water, homework, something. I was out of there.
Cheryl Lockwood was a cutie. I wasn't going with Cheryl, a smart-looking girl with short brown hair and a nice bosom, but she was my chemistry partner, and whenever we talked, we flirted. Her favorite phrase was “What you going to do, huh? Huh?” It was all smile-smile stuff, but the undercurrent was there. The way we flirted was that I would tell her she had to put on some weight and she would moan about it,
oh, no, no
, like that, and then we'd light the Bunsen burner and melt something down. When I think of her I still smell sulfur.
My decision to make serious moves on her was a result of our being sent to the principal's office together for staining Mr. Welch's hands. Our teacher, Mr. Welch, of course, deserved it, because he understood chemistry and wasn't that willing or able to let the rest of us in on the secret. He was a terrible teacher. We did learn that sodium nitrate stains human skin, however, and we spread a thin layer on our counter just before asking him over to explain something about liquid sulfur. The next day his palms were gray and he sent me and then Cheryl (because she laughed) to the office.
On the way down there I was a little high, you know, from being kicked out of class and the halls were empty and there was Cheryl in step with me and we were kind of bumping together and I said, “There is something so sexy about empty hallways, don't you think?” I put my arm around her shoulder and she put her arm around my waist and squeezed, saying, “Absolutely. What are you going to do about it?” And I said, “I'm going to get you alone at the graduation party and have my way with you.” She squeezed me tighter and said, “Good. I hope you enjoy it as much as I plan to.” We met with Mr. Gonzalez, the principal, and he tried to be mad about what we had done to Mr. Welsh, but he had a little trouble.
And that was that. Cheryl and I didn't flirt for the last two weeks of school. I didn't try anything because I didn't want to break the spell. We had made some kind of deal that day in the hallway and we both knew it.
