Plan B for the Middle Class

by Ron Carlson

  The boys and I go to the airport to pick up my parents. Walking with my sons through the terminal is like magic for me, because I am a man with a secret. My parents are flying in from Michigan to stay with the boys for a week while Katie and I go to Hawaii. I’ll have to spend one day with my old prof Sorenson in his research center at the university taking notes for an article on his first panda and then half of another at the Kapiolani Zoo, looking at their arrangements for the creature, but the rest of the time Katie and I will be having sexual intercourse with short breaks to eat. And I will figure a way to tell her I’ve been fired. This will be our first trip away from the boys, and as I noted, everybody is three. It has been like three years in space, the four of us in a capsule circling and circling in the dark. Every time there is a lull, someone floats by in your face. “Hi, Dad.”

  Katie and I moved our sex life later and later into the night, until it was being conducted with one of us half asleep, and then we tried the mornings, but the boys have always risen first and crawled in with us. Then we bought the VCR and used it to lure them into the living room mornings for twenty minutes of Chip and Dale cartoons while we touched very quietly in our bedroom and listened for little feet. That ploy actually worked pretty well for a while, and then we became guilty about using the TV that way.

  We moved into the shower. That was always good, but it was difficult to hear in there and more than once we saw a small pink figure leaning against the frosted-glass shower doors. It was enough to take the starch out of things. Then a terrible thing happened: we became pragmatic about it. Interrupted once, we would shrug and smile at each other, rinse off, and start the day. Can I even explain how sad it made me to watch Katie pull on her clothing?

  But now, I have a secret; I am one revolution of the earth away from the most astonishing sex carnival ever staged by two married people.

  This is what I tell myself. And I believe it, but there’s more. Though Katie hasn’t said anything, I suspect she knows I’m not Zoo Lewis anymore. Cracroft told me I was history on Tuesday and then he’s called and tried to be helpful twenty times. The syndicate is dropping the column. We both know why, but they cite numbers. I’m down to fifty-two papers from over a hundred and seventy. The papers are dropping the column. The Blade, the Register, the Courier, the Post. They can’t handle the backlash. I’m too political. Maybe I am. It is no longer possible to write cute pieces about the dolphin, the mandrill, the Asian elephant. But this all started with four pieces on simple amphibians and what one of my hate-mail correspondents called “creeping evolutio-environmental liberal bullshit.” Cracroft says no problem, most of the papers will do reruns of old columns for six months, and that should give me enough time to come up with some freelance stuff of a more “general nature” and maybe pitch a book.

  Zoo Lewis bites the dust. Maybe he should. I was getting cranky. I’ve enjoyed it more than I planned to, and only one other time was there trouble: after I wrote an appreciation of the wolf, a very bright, misunderstood creature who mates for life. We got two pounds of mail from Montana and lost the Star and the Ledger.

  Cracroft is a good guy. I don’t blame Cracroft. He called and said I could keep my modem. He said, “I’m sorry, Lewis. Your work is good. It may just be time to shake up the feature page.”

  “What should I do?” I asked him. We’ve known each other for ten years.

  “You’re good,” he said. “Go to plan B.”

  I smiled and thanked him for the modem. Plan B. Zoo Lewis was plan B. I was going to be a veterinarian. I was going to doctor animals, but I couldn’t because of the allergies—they tried to kill me more than once. We can’t even have a dog or a cat or a ferret. We can have fish in a tank, but I don’t want fish. I couldn’t be a vet, so I became a journalist. I’m in plan B. And it’s not working.

  At the gate, I am surprised. When my parents emerge, I have to look twice. It’s not that I don’t recognize them; it is that I recognize them too well. They haven’t changed in a year. Why don’t they look older? My mother wears her sure-of-herself grin, having gone out into the world once again and found herself still every bit the match for it. The interactions of men and women have always amused her. “Society,” she used to tell me, “is not quite finished. Don’t ever fret and stew about your place in it.”

  My father comes forward beside her, carrying his small valise in which there will be four or five pads of blue-lined graph paper already bearing the beginnings of several letters and drawings. He will have seen something from the window of the plane, where he always sits, that has struck him as worthy of improvement and he will have begun the plans. He works on half a dozen projects at a time. When he retired from General Motors four years ago, the grid pads just continued. He has fourteen obscure patents and is always working on two or three more in far-flung fields: a design for a safety fence for horse racing; a design for pressure tanks containing viscous liquids; a tennis racket grip. He writes me every week on the beautiful paper describing his projects and his current concerns. Most recently he’s been considering the rules and statistics of baseball and has in mind several revisions. I watch my father approach with his easy stride and calm smile and I am paralyzed. He doesn’t look older at all. He looks, and this has my mouth open, just like me. It took them almost forty years, but my genes have jelled. No wonder my three-year-old sons leap away, weaving through the travelers, to grab the hands of my mother and my father.

  When I join them, my mother has already pulled two dinosaurs out of her bag and awarded one to each of the boys. I kiss my mother and when I step back she runs her hand up over my ear through the white in my hair and smiles. My father hugs me, letting his hand stay across my shoulder as he always has since my Little League days. Harry has examined his toy, feeling the snout and counting the claws, and finding it authentic, he is very pleased. “Isn’t it great?” I say to him. “A brontosaurus.”

  “Dad,” Harry corrects me. “It’s not.”

  “It’s an allosaurus,” my mother says. I look at her and she gives me the look she’s always had for me, the sweet, chiding challenge: You can catch up if you’d like. None of this is beyond you. But I’m not so sure. It may be beyond me, and if not, I’m not sure I want to catch up. It no longer surprises me that everyone is ahead of me. My parents are keeping up on dinosaurs.

  At home, my father helps me start the barbecue and we stand on the patio in the early dark. He is drinking one of Katie’s margaritas and looking around at the sky as if listening for something.

  “We won’t have a night like this until June,” he says.

  “I know. February is a bonus here. June is a hundred and ten.” I am arranging the chicken pieces on the hot grill. I’d like to tell my father about what is happening, that my job is over, but there is really no need. He knows already. My mother let it slip on the phone that my column wasn’t running in the Journal anymore. My parents have always been mind readers. He can tell that change is at hand by the way I use the tongs on the chicken. This mode of communication is actually a comfort. It spares our talking like people on television.

  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. ‘The 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 this—I 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 electe
d 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.