Plan B for the Middle Class: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  Then during dinner, your leader starts in on some topics which any one of us might think inappropriate for the supper table. Instead of the usual reaffirming and pleasant messages, the conversation is full of hostile assertions, statements of doom and gloom. Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.” Try that at home sometime, see if somebody doesn’t spill the wine. Which, our spectrometer shows, every one of the twelve disciples did, the largest spill being here, where Judas sat. In addition, traces of breadcrumbs were found here, as we found everywhere, but these were partially decomposed via the starch-splitting enzymes found in human saliva, so we know almost certainly that Mr. Iscariot, almost two thousand years before the Heimlich Maneuver, choked on his bread when Jesus said that. We don’t know who patted him on the back.

  There is another large spill here (thirty-six square centimeters), and we theorize that Peter was still sitting when Jesus told him he would deny Jesus thrice before dawn. From the shape of the spill, something like a banana, it seems that Peter stood to protest, and dragged his glass with him.

  Other evidence in this sacred cloth suggests that besides bread and wine, the attendees at the Last Supper enjoyed a light salad with rich vinegar and some kind of noodle dish. There was no fish. The wine was a seasoned, full-bodied red wine, which our analysis has revealed to be a California wine. This last bit of evidence has given the skeptics great joy, but I’ve got news for you. That it is a California wine does not mean that this is not the tablecloth of Turin; it simply means that civilization in California is older than some people now think.

  When I look at this magnificent cloth and see its amazing tale of love and faith and betrayal written for all to see in wine, bread, and prints of human hands, I’m suddenly made glad again that I went to Turin last fall with the Art Guild, that I met Antony Cuppolini in his brother’s restaurant, and that for some strange reason known only to God, Antony made me caretaker of this, the beautiful Tablecloth of Turin.

  A KIND OF FLYING

  By our wedding day, Brady had heard the word luck two hundred times. Everybody had advice, especially her sister Linda, who claimed to be “wise to me.” Linda had wisdom. She was two years older and had wisely married a serviceman, Butch Kistleburg, whose status as a GI in the army guaranteed them a life of travel and adventure. They were going to see the world. If Brady married me, Linda told everybody, she would see nothing but the inside of my carpet store.

  Linda didn’t like my plans for the ceremony. She thought that letting my best man, Bobby Thorson, sing “El Paso” was a diabolical mistake. “‘El Paso,’” she said. “Why would you sing that at a wedding in Stevens Point, Wisconsin?” I told her: because I liked the song, I’m a sucker for a story, and because it was a love song, and because there wasn’t a song called “Stevens Point.”

  “Well,” she said that day so long ago, “that is no way to wedded bliss.”

  I wasn’t used to thinking of things in terms of bliss, and I had no response for her. I had been thinking of the great phrase from the song that goes “… maybe tomorrow a bullet may find me …” and I was once again recommitted to the musical part of the program.

  What raised all the stakes was what Brady did with the cake. She was a photographer even then and had had a show that spring in the Stevens Point Art Barn, a hilarious series of eye-tricks that everyone thought were double exposures: toy soldiers patrolling bathroom sinks and cowboys in refrigerators. Her family was pleased by what they saw as a useful hobby, but the exhibition of photographs had generally confused them.

  When Brady picked up the wedding cake the morning we were wed, it stunned her, just the size of it made her grab her camera. She and Linda had taken Clover Lane, by the Gee place, and Brady pictured it all: the cake in the foreground and the church in the background, side by side.

  When Brady pulled over near the cottonwoods a quarter mile from the church, Linda was not amused. She stayed in the car. Brady set the wedding cake in the middle of the road, backed up forty feet, lay down on the hardtop there, and in the rangefinder she saw the image she wanted: the bride and the groom on top of the three-tiered cake looking like they were about to step over onto the roof of the First Congregational Church. We still have the photograph. And when you see it, you always hear the next part of the story.

  Linda screamed. Brady, her eye to the viewfinder, thought a truck was coming, that she was a second away from being run over on her wedding day. But it wasn’t a truck. Linda had screamed at two birds. Two crows, who had been browsing the fenceline, wheeled down and fell upon the cake, amazed to find the sweetest thing in the history of Clover Lane, and before Brady could run forward and prevent it, she saw the groom plucked from his footing, ankle deep in frosting, and rise—in the beak of the shiny black bird—up into the June-blue sky.

  “Man oh man oh man,” Linda said that day to Brady. “That is a bad deal. “That,” she said, squinting at the two crows, who were drifting across Old Man Gee’s alfalfa, one of them with the groom in his beak, “is a definite message.” Then Linda, who had no surplus affection for me, went on to say several other things which Brady has been good enough, all these years, to keep to herself.

  When Bobby Thorson and I reached the church, Linda came out as we were unloading his guitar and said smugly, “Glen, we’re missing the groom.”

  Someone called the bakery, but it was too late for a replacement, almost one o’clock. I dug through Brady’s car and found some of her guys: an Indian from Fort Apache with his hatchet raised in a nonmatrimonial gesture; the Mummy, a translucent yellow; a kneeling green soldier, his eye to his rifle; and a little blue frogman with movable arms and legs. I was getting married in fifteen minutes.

  The ceremony was rich. Linda read some Emily Dickinson; my brother read some Robert Service; and then Bobby Thorson sang “El Paso,” a song about the intensities of love and a song which seemed to bewilder much of the congregation.

  When Brady came up the aisle on her father’s arm, she looked like an angel, her face blanched by seriousness and—I found out later—fear of evil omens. At the altar she whispered to me, “Do you believe in symbols?” Thinking she was referring to the rings, I said, “Of course, more than ever!” Her face nearly broke. I can still see her mouth quiver.

  Linda didn’t let up. During the reception when we were cutting the cake, Brady lifted the frogman from the top and Linda grabbed her hand: “Don’t you ever lick frosting from any man’s feet.”

  I wanted to say, “They’re flippers, Linda,” but I held my tongue.

  That was twenty years ago this week. So much has happened. I’ve spent a thousand hours on my knees carpeting the rooms and halls and stairways of Stevens Point. Brady and I now have three boys who are good boys, but who—I expect—will not go into the carpet business. Brady has worked hard at her art. She is finished with her new book, Obelisks, which took her around the world twice photographing monuments. She’s a wry woman with a sense of humor as long as a country road. Though she’s done the traveling and I’ve stayed at home, whenever she sees any bird winging away, she says to me: There you go.

  And she may be kind of right with that one. There have been times when I’ve ached to drop it all and fly away with Brady. I’ve cursed the sound of airplanes overhead and then when she comes home with her camera case and dirty laundry, I’ve flown to her—and she to me. You find out day after day in a good life that your family is the journey.

  And now Linda’s oldest, Trina, is getting married. We’re having a big family party here in Stevens Point. Butch and Linda have all come north for a couple of weeks. Butch has done well; he’s a lieutenant colonel. He’s stationed at Fort Bliss and they all seem to like El Paso.

  Trina came into the store yesterday pretending to look at carpet. People find out you’re married for twenty years, they ask advice. What would I know? I’m just her uncle and I’ve done what I could. For years I laid carpet so my wife could be a photographer, and now she’ll be a photo
grapher so I can retire and coach baseball. Life lies before us like some new thing.

  It’s quiet in the store today. I can count sparrows on the wire across the road. My advice! She smiled yesterday when I told her. Just get married. Have a friend sing your favorite song at the wedding. Marriage, she said, what is it? Well, I said, it’s not life on a cake. It’s a bird taking your head in his beak and you walk the sky. It’s marriage. Sometimes it pinches like a bird’s mouth, but it’s definitely flying, it’s definitely a kind of flying.

  III

  THE GOLF CENTER AT TEN-ACRES

  I’m sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of our house, spraying the kids as they run across the front lawn. We’ve clothespinned an old bedspread and a tarp over the swing set, and the kids run from this tent to their playhouse as I try to strafe them. I am drinking real strong coffee which I made ten minutes ago as part of my save-the-afternoon mode, but I haven’t typed a single job letter.

  The kids dart into their tent and dry themselves by rolling on an old padded U-Haul blanket, and then they jump up and peek back out at me. Calvin is fearless and skips back and forth in the yard, relishing the flashes of chilly water. Janey is playing it safe. She’s excited, hopping up and down every time Calvin runs back to dry off, but she has only ventured out once or twice.

  I am quite divided. One part directs the hose to douse my youngsters and the other seems to float above the scene and watch. This is what I get. This is the extent of my new life, watering the tender children in my own yard, a golf pro sitting in a green chair, drinking coffee strong enough to chatter his molars, while his wife builds her world around the only Russian in the region to own a chain of pizza parlors. I smile. It’s what you do with rue, don’t you know: you smile. I smile at Janey’s secret face peering through the seams of the tent. I smile at Calvin’s bold grin, his body glistening in the sunlight. At two, he is already a good runner. Janey is as self conscious as I am, poor creature, and she has words for things. “Oh my god! Oh my god!” she cries every time Calvin returns. And then she tries a variation from TV: “Thank god you’re here!” It’s all quite dramatic. She pokes her pretty face out and sees her father again. “Oh my god!” she says, her voice suffused with a nurse’s concern, a sister’s love.

  After a long era of being on hold, a period during which we waited for the next thing to happen in our household, things have begun to shift. Everybody in my family is shaking out. Calvin starts: he has three emergencies a week. He falls off the kitchen counter, having left no evidence of how he achieved the weird height. He is now a tough kid to watch—I mean, he disappears. You’ll have him underfoot and turn to pour a cup of coffee: he’s gone. You’ll find him beneath the bathroom sink checking out the Drano or sitting cross-legged beside the milk in the fridge, the door about to close. Janey has become a smart aleck and says “Sick!” to anything her mother or I say. We were worried about her fitting in and now she’s somehow become the leader of the pack at school and is busy not letting other kids fit in. And Tina. My wife has changed wardrobes. She goes to lunch twice a week with friends and talks it over. She may be sorry she married a golfer. She may be through with motherhood. I watch her when I can.

  My work has run its course, though I don’t talk about it. I went in with Mitch, Tina’s brother, on a sad nine-hole course at the edge of town, and now it’s closed. As Mitch said the day he carted the TV out of the clubhouse: “How much golf can there be? There can only be so much golf.” But that wasn’t exactly it. The Golf Center at Ten-Acres was trouble from the start. We got a deal on the property, at least Mitch told me it was a deal. He knew I had the last of my prize money in the bank, and I think now he knew what we were getting into. But I should have seen it. I should have been alerted simply by the weird yellow color of the fairways and the cloying stench that rose from every bunker. The course was riddled with bumps, and of course later I was able to witness the garbage emerging: the tires, the home appliances. But for a long while I thought it might be all right. We tried. I’m not a good pro and Mitch is no host, but we tried. I knew we were finished when one day on the fourth green, waiting for three dentists to putt out, the small pond beside the fairway caught fire. The next day I just stayed home and mowed the lawn and edged and raked. That was that. Some days now I water the kids.

  Roger Alguire is our eighty-year-old neighbor. He was the first television weatherman in this city. He began weather reporting in 1953 and then was the regular weatherman from 1955 until a few years ago. Roger is a tall, handsome man with resplendent wavy white hair who is no longer recognized in Fry’s or Safeway as the weatherman. He is recognized as the tall man who spends his evenings in the local parks with his metal detector, scanning the ground for lost coins. He used to be seen every night with his wife, Gretchen, who was also tall, and who also had a metal detector she swung over the sandy ground. They made an exotic couple in the park, darkness about to fall, moving rhythmically along the paths and through the playground, their postures somehow noble and aloof like rare animals feeding in the twilight. From time to time, Roger would kneel and fork something from the soil and drop it into the large pockets of his trousers.

  One night Roger and Gretchen showed us their treasures. After dinner, Tina left our front door open and we went across the street. This was just before Tina started dressing for her lunches. In an empty bedroom, Roger and Gretchen displayed their findings on a wall of bookshelves. The money was in mason jars: bottles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half ajar of fifty-cent pieces, and stacks of silver dollars. There was a shelf of tools, pliers and screwdrivers, and a shelf of nuts and bolts in peanut butter jars. On one shelf were seven pistols, cleaned and polished, and beside them twenty knives of every sort. On a velvet drape hundreds of gold and silver rings, many with stones. Beside the rings were four feet of pins and brooches. Four directional compasses, a dozen watches, and a shelf of unidentifiable parts of things, little springs and levers. On one side were the one-of-a-kind items: an alarm clock, a tall silver trophy with a motorcycle on top, a silver cup inscribed with the name “Brian,” a folding shovel, a toy locomotive, and a shiny brass whistle. There was more. Everything had been cleaned and laid out beautifully.

  “We’ve found just over a thousand dollars, U.S. money,” Roger said. They had a ledger. “Money isn’t very hard to find.”

  “A thousand dollars,” Tina said.

  “People don’t respect their change anymore,” Gretchen said. “They throw it on the street.”

  “It’s not the money,” Roger said. “It’s the finding.” He waved his long arm at the shelves of bright objects. “These things would be lost. We found them. That’s the excitement.”

  Gretchen smiled. She was a steady friend to him and shared all this. “And it gets us out of the house every night.”

  Okay, it was my money and Mitch made the deal. There is a picture of us putting up the sign: Golf Center at Ten-Acres. I liked the idea of owning a course, but I was never a good pro. I’m a good golfer and enjoy the game. At the University of Houston I was number one my last two years, and after that the three years I toured I paid my way plus banking almost ninety thousand. But I can’t chat. There are too many times when I don’t know what to say. Some guy will chip from sixty yards and bump the flag and I don’t have a phrase. Some guy fanning in the trap, one, two, three, and so? What should I say? I’ve played with those clever guys, quick and funny, but it’s not me. There is a lot of pain in nine holes—three guys looking at you, waiting for a word.

  When Gretchen died, about a year ago, we lost touch with Roger for a while. He wasn’t in the parks and we didn’t see him much. Things were different for us then, we were busy with a toddler and getting Janey settled in school and I was still going out to the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. Our golf carts were always getting flats—nails, screws, metal slivers—and I spent a lot of time repairing them. Tina hadn’t started having her lunches. We were just a family. I went over to Roger’s house a week after the fune
ral and asked if I could give him a hand with anything, and he shucked me off civilly, just as I would have done to him in the same spot. It was all “How you doing?” and blustery goodwill, and in five minutes I was on the porch shaking hands and backing off.

  Then a few weeks later, I started seeing him when I’d take Janey over to the big swings in the park some nights. He wandered alone, head down, listening for the whine of metal and watching the dial on his apparatus: green light for good metal, red for junk. He’d be there when we left. Some nights if I was out in the car I saw him along the canal in the dark, and once taking the sitter home after Tina and I had been to a movie, I saw him working his way across a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. It was midnight.

  When you fail, even when it is something easily foreseen and almost expected, even if it is not exactly failure at all, but some sour mix of stupidity, bad luck, and betrayal involving a golf course, even then, if you are a grown man with two little kids who seem headed for harm, and a mortgage that predicts with fiduciary certainty that you will lose your house in six months, when this kind of failure descends upon you, a freshly unemployed golf pro, you will look up from your pillow at your wife as she comes in late another night from some job interview, some rendezvous, with her new employer, Sergei Primalov, a king of franchisers, a pizza czar, and before she drops her skirt to the floor, you will feel the wires cross in your heart and go hot with feelings you don’t even know about.

  Roger Alguire called me one day, this was six months or so after he’d buried his wife, Gretchen. The kitchen was still his wife’s kitchen; it had the feel of a woman. I’ve been in bachelor’s places and they don’t have the towels, the ceramics, the sense this is a room in which things have been cooked and cleaned for years and years. A bachelor’s kitchen is not about the stove; it is about the fridge.