by Ron Carlson
From the lobby, when I open the door, the drums blast me, sucking up all the air. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Two big drums like that in the torchlight. There are, I notice immediately, no little drums. No tambourines. No maracas. Two big drums. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. It makes you duck, this noise. I walk to the cabana in step, boom—boom—boom—boom, leaning against the percussion, in fact, and grab on to the bar. I can feel the drums in my chest against the wood.
Behind me under the torchlight on the lawn, the island dance show is full swing. Six big guys in leafy skirts are stomping up and down and juggling torches. It’s a big show, everything’s big. There are no small guys. Then the women come out and they’re big too. The bartender, another guy in a Hawaiian shirt and a pencil behind his ear, is at my elbow and I order a mai tai. The women are doing something I can only describe as the hula and their hips are winging in astounding figure eights. Their movement is mesmerizing. It is something one should call a feat. I stare at the woman nearest me and all I can do is wonder at the axle of her pelvis, how it could bear such radical and smooth leverage.
The little bar patio is only half full, so I take my drink over to one of the perimeter tables and sip the rum. There is a purple blossom in my drink as well, which I eat. I watch as the women vibrate double-time for a couple of minutes and then promenade off. Everyone applauds, even the people across the lawn inside the luau room. Next to me two young women in sleeveless summer dresses are drinking large red drinks, and on their table is a line of six little drink umbrellas and a little bouquet of wet orchids. Two lawyers from Houston is my guess. “Is that something, or what?” one of the women says to me. I smile and nod. The torchlight flares unevenly and I think I need more torches in my life. More torches and more ocean and more beaches. I can feel the pressures in my head shifting. The cocktail waitress in her green sarong slips by and I order another mai tai.
It was Ryan McBride’s idea to have the graduation party at Black Rock Beach on the Great Salt Lake. It was a weird idea, because in those days the Great Salt Lake was different than it is today. In the old days it was a strange and superlative place. It was the saltiest body of water on earth. It was saltier than the Dead Sea and it was six times saltier than the ocean. It was famous for salt. The mineral content was so high that bathers bobbed like corks on the surface and there were several famous postcards that showed five or six people sitting in the water as if on easy chairs. Through several years the Great Salt Lake, which was hundreds of square miles, was as salty as water can get. In twelfth-grade chemistry, before things got bad, we had studied the way salt would precipitate up an anchor rope, climbing like frost two or three feet above the surface of the water.
The lake itself sat in the broad desolate alkali desert dish twenty miles west of Salt Lake. There were few amenities, just an access road which left tourists on the half-mile-wide beach among the swarming brine flies. At Black Rock Beach there was a magnificent wooden pier which stood like a ruin high and dry, hundreds of yards from the then receding waters of the great salty lake. From time to time, some misguided soul would set up his hot dog stand near the pier and lose money all summer long.
Years before, of course, in the thirties and forties, the water had been high and there had been a famous resort on the water: Saltair, where trainloads of citizens could spend the day riding rides, bobbing in the water, and then dancing until after midnight. It had been abandoned and burned down before I was born. But when we graduated from high school the shores of the Great Salt Lake were the most forbidding place I’d ever seen on this planet. It was a vast, treeless, forlorn place smelling of brine, and even as my classmates began to park their shiny cars on that shore and climb out in their graduation clothes, bright and new and calling to each other in the twilight, it could have doubled for a tragic Martian landscape peopled by teenagers from Earth.
Cheryl Lockwood had written in my yearbook, under her picture in the Ski Club: “… And what are you going to do about it? Love and expectations, Cheryl.” Something major was going to happen, I could tell, and I took her aside at the yearbook-signing party the night before graduation, placing my hand way up under her arm and marching her outside the gym and all the way to the thirty-yard line on the football field where, I’ll say, I kissed her, but in fact I started to talk to her, saying only, “Meet me at the party tomorrow, and come alone.” Whereupon she kissed me and then we twisted closer and kissed again like two doomed lovers under the five-story backside of our high school looming above us, the clock’s ponderous lighted face tragic and remote and, as always, six hours ahead.
Graduation day was graduation day, of course, elevated and strange, perceived primarily in the stomach, I remember, as I must have been too sober for her tastes, because over lunch, which I ate alone in our empty kitchen in a house that was already seeming someone else’s, my mother sat down with me for just a minute and said, “Oh my, the last sad meal at home for the Porcupine.” (Union’s symbol was the Porcupine.) “And tuna fish at that. Graduation is such sweet sorrow, Lewis,” she went on, “but I want you to know that even after you graduate and you begin to wrestle with life’s big problems …” She was grinning in her omniscient way.
“Mom, I’m eating here, okay? Could we maybe talk later?”
She was having a wonderful time, but I was sweating that maybe she knew somehow that I’d been dreaming about the way Cheryl Lockwood had felt against my chest and planning the way things were going to go tonight late at the Great Salt Lake. After years of living in dank and cloudy ambiguity, I was going to find something out tonight with Cheryl. Promises had been made. We were going to do it. And here I was with my mother. I held my sandwich to my face like a veil.
“Lewis, Lewis,” she said. “You’re on your way and tomorrow you’ll be out in the real world.” She stood and came around the table, casually checking my forehead for fever. “But I’ll still be your mama.” She laughed softly. “Remember that,” she said and went off to other errands.
That afternoon Rye picked me up in his huge Oldsmobile as always, but it was utterly different. We went to Ketchum’s Lumber and filled the trunk with a load of free warped odd bits for the bonfire and then we cruised west on the old highway, which was rippled with ten thousand tar patches. Three carloads of classmates met us at Black Rock Beach in the afternoon sunlight and after we’d dumped all the wood, Rye stepped back and took it all in. “This, my friends, is serious,” he said. At first we all thought he was speaking about the ugly pile of wood, but then he spread his arms to take in the wasteland. “Congratulations on your impending graduation from high school in America. Your first responsibilities as graduates will be to meet me here right after dark for an extended pagan ritual.” He nodded sagely and rolled his eyes. “Bring a date.”
It was probably out there on the sour ragged edge of the saltiest lake on earth that I felt the rules change. I was watching Ryan entertain the troops for a minute before we climbed back in his car and headed for town and graduation. I remember looking back at the city spread on the mountains twenty miles away. There was still a good amount of snow on the peaks, even in June, and the houses on the hills looked like the remnants of someone else’s life. Oh, the feeling was enough to close my callow throat, scary and delicious.
On the way back to town, I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask Ryan, whom I had known for years, if he felt it too. But we didn’t talk that way. There had been lots of times that spring as I climbed in the old Oldsmobile when I’d wanted to say, “These are the electric nights, right? Can you feel it? What is going on?” We were seniors on the baseball team, and State Street had been granted to us, the new kings. We went out almost every night in Ryan’s car that spring, and the nights were just full, the way May can pack a night when you’re seventeen, which is so different from being sixteen. The nights were sweet and long and then suddenly, after cruising State and grabbing a cheeseburger at the Breeze Inn and maybe a Coke for the road, I was being dropped off in the new cool d
ark and even my old house looked beautiful to me too. Oh god, what nights. Something was going to happen, but I didn’t know what it was, and I took the not knowing as my just being seventeen.
The drums stop. The air descends in a hum and I look up and see the dancers rearranging themselves for the torch dance. The patio is now full and two young couples are standing behind my table watching the show. The men have navy haircuts and wear new Hawaiian shirts. The drummers are moving their drums to each side of the raised platform now, and I take it as a cue and stand up, offering the honeymooners my table.
“I’ve been sitting too long,” I say, waving them in. It’s the truth: my rash is at me like fire ants and I’m happy to stand and shake things out. When I turn for the waitress, one of the women at the next table catches my eye and motions me to a chair.
“You can sit with us,” she says. “This is a good part. We saw it last night.” So I sit down with the two women and have another mai tai, which I know is in the margins of my limit, because I’ve just decided it is the best drink possible and I plan to drink them always and always.
I’m wrong about the women, I can tell immediately. They’re not from Houston and they’re not lawyers. By the stack of wrecked umbrellas and orchids I can only tell that they’ve each had four of the large red drinks. They are in their early thirties and both wear wedding rings. Before I can properly introduce myself or find out exactly who they are, the drums explode again, and so we all smile at each other and watch the show.
I haven’t seen the torch dance for a long time, but it only takes a moment for me to decide that it is my favorite dance in the history of dance and I’m going to watch it every chance I get. It’s the one where the big guy comes out and sits on the flaming barrel. He’s wearing a huge leaf skirt, made of real leaves with some kind of oil on them that prevents them from burning, and he sits on the flames with the drums beating and then he rises and the flames shoot right back out again and then he sits down a little longer on the flames and then he finally gets up and the flames still flare and then with the bom-bom-bom of the drums he stands at the edge of the platform, smoke rising from his skirt and sweat shimmering across his forehead.
I can feel myself sweating, and the woman nearer to me says as a kind of whisper, “Don’t do it again.” She’s talking to him, but the dancer moves back behind the flaming barrel and this time kind of attacks it, hopping up and sitting down securely on the flames, looking left and right. The woman next to me says now, “Get up. Oh, get up.” It is real concern. As I hear it I recognize the midwest in her voice. Indiana. We exchange looks and raise our eyebrows and then turn back to the stage, where, after another fifteen seconds, the man jumps off the incinerator and reveals that he has put out the flames. The crowd applauds like crazy, clapping and clapping. There is great relief in this ovation. The show is over. The man takes a deep bow, and a large white smoke cloud rises from his skirt.
“Where on earth would they dream up a dance like that?” the woman across from me says.
“You guys are sisters, aren’t you?” I say.
“Yvonne,” says the one next to me, putting her hand on her chest. She’s younger than her sister and her hair is lighter. “And this is Clare.”
“I’m Lewis,” I say. “And you are both from Indiana.”
“Iowa,” Yvonne says. “Dubuque.”
“And you’re here doing research on native dances.”
“We’re on vacation,” Clare says. “We’re on a two-week vacation from winter.” She’s a severe and pretty woman who looks a little starved. Her attention is given to the two couples at the next table.
“And are you on vacation?” Yvonne asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m doing a little work, but mainly my wife and I are on our first vacation from the kids.”
The hotel’s combo has set up in the gazebo and has begun playing. I signal the waitress again and order us all another drink.
“Is she here?” Yvonne asks.
“No. Not yet. She’s off seeing friends tonight.”
When the drinks arrive, the women take a moment to drain their old ones and then hand the glasses to the waitress. Simultaneously, they withdraw the little umbrellas from the daiquiris and line them up with the others. Our table looks like a miniature Shanghai street scene. I raise my glass. “A toast I’ve never ever made before,” I say. “To Dubuque.”
Yvonne touches my glass, but Clare is lost to the newlyweds. “Clare?” I say, motioning with my glass. She looks at me blankly and then her face ripples and dissolves. She’s crying. She’s folded her face into her hands and is crying over her big red drink.
I look to Yvonne: “Oh, my god. I’m sorry …”
“Let’s dance,” Yvonne says, and she’s lifted me away from the table. The band is playing a series of Elton John’s greatest hits, right now it’s “Daniel,” and Yvonne and I bumble into a loose embrace at the edge of the group of dancers and she tells me the story. The sisters are both widows. Their husbands, two brothers, were killed in a grain-elevator explosion in May. It has been a terrible time, especially for Clare. “You can understand,” Yvonne tells me as the song ends. “She can’t shake it. It’s right here.” Yvonne holds her hand in front of her face. “I’m going to be okay, but Clare, Clare is still hurting.”
As she gives me all this news, I feel my buzz change. The high drunken feeling from the mai tais shifts now, and though I know I’m still mildly drunk because I think Elton John is the greatest musician that ever lived and I make a plan to listen to him all the time when we get home, I feel heavier, more controlled. I check my watch: ten minutes after eleven.
“I’ll dance with her,” I tell Yvonne.
“You could try.”
Back at our table, Clare has finished crying and is sipping her drink through the straw while she watches the foursome next door come back from dancing. They bump into chairs and laugh. I sit and extend my forearms onto the table as if I had big news. “Listen,” I say, “Do you guys know the difference between a diplodocus and an allosaurus?”
Yvonne’s being a good sport and shakes her head no, but Clare gives me that flat, open-eyed look that means she’s going to cry again.
“Clare,” I say too loudly. “Shall we dance?”
Yvonne stands and helps Clare scoot around. Now the band is presenting a middle-of-the-road version of “Your Song,” and when I take Clare into my arms, I feel her stiffen. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the corner of her eye, and the way we are arranged it feels like close combat, like dancing with your enemy.
There are times in my life, perhaps too many times, when I feel utterly unqualified for the present moment. I had that feeling when I looked up from the examination table in veterinary school and saw the faces of my classmates looking at my ballooning face as I wheezed once and passed out. I feel this way now with Clare when the song ends and we haven’t said word one and I am very ready to get back to my mai tai, the greatest drink on the island, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t take her arm from my shoulder or her other from my hand. She stands stock still. I do too. There are other couples milling, embracing, so we’re not really a spectacle, but the heat rises in my face anyway and I think: Of course, this is perfect. An unemployed journalist from Arizona who has been up for twenty hours is dancing on the patio of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel with a young widow from Dubuque. What will you do now?
The band kicks into a slow jazz number and Clare starts to lead. She’s a good dancer, really, steady and right on the music. I pull back for a moment and say, “You know what I do? I work with pandas.” She gives me a scary appraising look and I add, “Panda bears. I was a writer.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “You’ll be okay.”
But when we fall together after that interchange, the whole dynamic scatters. Clare adjusts herself, hitching her arm around my neck further, and drawing her body against mine.
“Vonnie told you about Frank and Allen, didn’t she.”
&nbs
p; “Yes,” I say. Clare grips me at the neck. We won’t be talking anymore. I can feel her against me like a drumbeat and I simply dance. Slowly. It is one of the closest embraces I have ever engaged in in public. She is pulled up so that our ears are almost touching and I can feel—with every step—the lean hardness of her body. The keyboard player is leading the combo through “Feelings” now, milking the vacant maudlin song to the limit. I look over and see Yvonne at our table and she gives me a brave nod: Good for you, keep it up. Clare and I have tightened things right up and now I can feel her pubic bone bruising against me with every move, intentionally, but I don’t give way. She’s using it to search my pelvis the way an impatient woman roots her purse for keys, and then she’s found it, and hungrily she stays right on the beam. The other dancers seem oblivious to our humping; this is the age of dirty dancing or whatever, so I close my eyes and follow as she tilts frankly into me, pressuring me up to nine o’clock and then quickly to eleven. This would be the right time for Katie to show up, of course, and I could explain how I was comforting the sisters. The other couples have fallen into two-armed embraces, but Clare and I keep our clasped hands out in a classic ballroom pose, perhaps a trifle low, while our hips work like two guys tunneling out of prison.
My father told me a few things about sex. A person remembers these scenes. It was one of those nights when I was going out and I was reading Time magazine in the living room waiting for Ryan to honk. My father always wore plaid shirts after work with the sleeves rolled and his pencils in the pocket. He was a practical man who everywhere he went had a pencil, and though I may be more reticent than he is mostly, I am just like him with that pencil. He was an engineer and he took that approach.
“Let’s talk about sex for a minute,” he said. I remember he didn’t say “What do you know about sex?” or “What do you want to know about sex?” No, we were in this together. We were going to talk about sex for a moment. “I’m sure that you understand the technical principles involved,” he said. “The guiding physical laws of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman are very simple. You know how the man is designed, and a woman is constructed in a complementary fashion in terms of the location of the vagina and its angle. These things are obvious. What isn’t as obvious to students of anatomy and sex is another essential principle of engineering.” Here he asked a question: “Do you know what that principle is?”
