Authors: Ron Carlson

Plan B for the Middle Class (21 page)

BOOK: Plan B for the Middle Class

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For the first hour, I manned the barbecue, blackening the hot dogs just right and then stacking them to one side of the grill. This was the real world, I remembered. Hot dogs were a hard sell. I saw Cheryl Lockwood as soon as she arrived with three other girls. Many of the girls, including Cheryl, wore their white graduation dresses and they stood in the firelight like princesses, their beauty heightened by the raw, malodorous kingdom. When they danced, and I watched Cheryl dance with a series of my friends, it was confounding that such untouchable womanhood could surf, pony, jerk. One by one they retreated to cars and changed into bermudas or Levi's and returned as the girls we knew, and the dancing became even more animated, even in the sand, as “Runaround Sue” beat into the night.

Not long after she returned in a pair of cutoff Levi's and a red football jersey, Cheryl came over to the grill. I saw she had a beer in her hand. She poked at the black papery skin of the hot dogs, finally pinching one and picking it up and examining it. “Do I dare? Who's the cook around here?”

I looked at her: “Dare.”

“Dare
you.
You gonna cook all night?”

“No, Ryan'll be here in a minute.”

“Good,” she said and she leaned over and kissed me lightly. “Good. Then what you gonna do?” She smiled and walked back to the dancers.

I could see my old friends Georgia Morris and Paula Swinton. Paula leaned against the handsome Jeff Wild with whom she was supposedly “doing it,” and Georgia had been going with an older guy for two years. He was twenty-five or something. Those girls didn't even know who I was anymore.

Ryan finally emerged from the tangle of parked cars where he had been goofing off with most of the baseball team. They were into the beer real good, and he brought me a can.

“You're a good guy,” he said, trading it for the spatula. “Good luck.”

I took my beer and walked off a little ways and then I walked way out, down the beach four hundred yards. No one was out there. I wanted to see it all for a moment, the party. I cracked the beer and took a sip. The firelight in everybody's hair and off the corners of the cars made it look like a little village in a big dark void. The dimensions were all vast. I seemed real small. I always seemed real small. I started to walk back. In a world so indifferent and illimitable, it was time to horse around with Cheryl Lockwood.

I found her sitting on the hood of a car, and we danced ten dances in a row, fast and slow. She was looking at me every time I looked at her. During the slow dances I bumped her when I could and tried to let her know that I dared. It was when we went back behind the cars to grab another beer that we started kissing. She guided me around and onto the trunk of someone's Thunderbird and we grappled there for half an hour or so, until we'd exhausted the possibilities of such a place. I had her bra undone, a loose holster in her shirt, and she had both hands in my back pockets.

It was then that she whispered, “Let's go swimming.” When we stood, I was kind of dizzy, but we wended among all the cars and then we sprinted down the beach faster than I'd ever run before. Half a mile from the party, we stopped and kissed again, starting right in all over, but she pulled away and simply took off her clothing. I could barely hear “The Duke of Earl” across the sand, and then I stripped and headed out for the water hand in hand with Cheryl. It was an extraordinarily shallow lake and it took us a long time to get knee deep. When we did, she came against my naked body and I felt the contours of a naked woman for the first time. Behind her I could see the supine form of Antelope Island lying like an alligator five miles away. Then she turned and pulled me deeper in the water, saying something odd, something I've never forgotten. “Lewis,” she said, her voice naked too, “I'm giving you the big green light.”

And that was what I was thinking ofâthat this is really it: we were going all the wayâwhen the water rose up my thighs and in a sudden dip, the warm water washed over my genitals and we were in up to our waists. Cheryl let go of my hand and sat backward in the sea, bobbing back up, arms, breasts, knees, and thighs. It was quite a vision.

It took about three seconds for me to realize what was happening and I felt it first as an odd spasm of chill up my back and then as a flash of heat across my forehead and sweat and then the final thing, the real thing, as the salt bit into my crotch like acid. There was no air. The pain rose way over my head like smoke. My jock rash was almost ninety square inches of raw skin counting both legs and my scrotum. The pain was like no pain. It was a quick unrelenting pressure on my temples, and I went out.

I lost the next five minutes, but whatever happened I give a lot of credit to a naked seventeen-year-old virgin named Cheryl Lockwood, who floated me back to the shallows where I woke looking into her face. I can still summon a brief glimpse of the outline of her breasts in the starlight as I spat salt water and tried to recover. So she saved my life, but I further credit her with saving the last slivers of my ego by not commenting on what had happened. She could so easily have said a dozen things about what this guy did when confronted with the big green light. When I sat up, the pain had become a real thing, a flaring heartbeat in my balls, that had me breathing through my teeth all the way back to the party. Our wet hair and damp clothing were huge hits at the bonfire, but because it was late and there had been worse behavior by others, it was bearable. Later, much later, when everyone was gone and Ryan and I threw the larger bits of debris into his trunk, I told him the truth: I'd failed.

“It means nothing,” he told me and then he went on in a way that reminded me of why he was my best friend. “You went out after dark and passed out in the Great Salt Lake. Come on, who can do that?”

It's much later into the night and I'm in the beautiful men's room off the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel washing my hands and singing Roy Orbison's “Crying” at about six on the ten scale and it sounds pretty good. The walls are black marble in which you can see your shadow and they polish the song so that it reverberates mournfully. This is, without doubt, the best song I've ever heard.

Although Katie has parachuted into sleep, the day won't abandon me, and I have toured the grounds, walked up to the Outrigger for a drink, and returned to the hotel for a nightcap before coming in here. It is just a minute after two
A.M.

That I'd been cry-i-ing

O-ver you â¦”

A big Hawaiian guy comes in and stands at the urinal, but I can't stop myself. I'm drying my hands and I must finish the song: the killer rhyme of
understand
and
touch of your hand
before all the “cry-ings”. The guy stands at the sink and I recognize him as the torch dancer, my hero. He washes his hands with gusto and does the last few “cry-ings” with me. When we stop, I am as sad as I've been in ten years. All animals are sad after sex. This is a magnificent men's room. Our reflections stand ten feet deep in the marble like two sad visitors from the dead. The man points at me fraternally and says with great conviction: “Roy Orbison was a giant.” He leaves.

My Hawaiian shirt is limp with sweat and I look like a guy who is just a little old to be a playboy. I consider doing “Only the Lonely,” but it's clear that I do not have the stamina. I haul my sport coat straight and walk back out into the night. The bar is empty now, the bartender stands talking on the telephone, folding the last bar towel. I walk past the cabana through the little garden and down the cement steps to the beach. The light here is weird, the sand glowing and the sea simply a slick black space. Down along Waikiki, the hotels glimmer like ships awaiting departure. I pass the large catamaran.

“Dancing with the widows,” I say aloud. I'm not really drunk anymore, but I'm still unmoored enough to talk out loud. I'm through singing, I think. Two women whose husbands have been blown to ashes. I picture it, a warm still spring afternoon, the air full and quiet, one brother sweeping the cement floor of the empty tower, the other straightening a bent hinge in the metal door when the dust trembled and fused and it all blew. The air turning white in a dust flash as big as the town had ever seen, thumping the sides of things for two miles, and afterward only the smoking hole, a few chunks of concrete coming down six blocks away, the one brother's pickup cart-wheeling across the rail spur, blown like a wind-twisted section of the sports pages beneath a twenty-story fist-cloud of grain dust. And the men themselves, where would they be? the broom? the hammer?

I take a deep breath, my nose swollen with the mai tais, and gather the late sea smell, mixed with the damp odors of Katie, hotel soap, andâfaintlyâthe panda. I step into the surf. These aren't great sandals. I never met a pair of shoes that couldn't be improved by the Pacific Ocean. The waves here are all tamed, and lip in at about four inches. The surf sucks at my heels in the sand. Some lucky tourist is going to look out his balcony and spot a guy in a blue blazer in the ocean and call the police hoping to thwart a suicide. I'd better back out.

I walk back ten feet and then just sit suddenly in the wet sand. The waves can still wash up over my waist and as they do I feel the sure mild tonic of salt on my crotch and it makes me smile. “No, he's just drunk, dear,” the tourist is saying to his wife. “Look, he's on an elbow in the surf.”

Actually it's a wet journalist, some guy who wanted to his teeth to be a veterinarian, but whose allergies nearly killed him in a routine dissection a month into his first semester, and now he's lost his column and received a bushel of hate mail from the fundamentalists, people not highly evolved enough to know when
i
comes before
e
, letters that hurt regardless of the spelling.

Oh the water feels good sloshing through my trousers. I can tell I'm getting better: the rash will be gone by Wednesday. “Go to plan B,” Cracroft had said. It makes me smile. I was already on plan Bâor was it C? What a deal. How could I not smile? What would stop me there, half in the ocean, from smiling? Plan B. A person could go through the alphabet. With a little gumption and some love, a person could go through every single letter of the alphabet.

Life in a body is the life for me. That night, coming home from my high school graduation party at Black Rock Beach, Rye and I sang songs. Do you see, we sang. I'm not kidding. We sang this and that and a marathon version of “Graduation Day,” by the Lettermen, that went on and on as we made up verses until my street and Rye pulled up to the curb. We crooned the ending until our voices cracked. We sang. I plan on doing it again. Rye pointed at me when I opened the door to get out and said, “Here we go. Good luck, Chief. First night in the real world.”

Inside, the house was dark and quiet, everyone in bed. I spent some time sitting in a wedge of light in front of the open fridge making and eating eight or nine rolled ham deals, putting different fillings in the ham each time: pickles, cheese, macaroni. I had failed with Cheryl. I had failed. I felt sad. What I felt was a kind of forlorn that when my mother saw it on my face she would say, “My aren't we a sick chick?” I was a sick chick.

But when I finally went upstairs is when something happened. I'd left my salty shoes on the patio. At the top step, I heard a noise. It was a laugh, my mother's laugh, but I didn't know it was a laugh at that moment. I mean, I thought it might have been a cough or some other noise, but then I went by their room and the door was open and I saw my mother's bare leg in the pale light from the window, the curve of her flank as she rolled, and I went right into my room without stopping and then my heart kicked in and I heard the sound again and I realized it was a kind of laughter. Well, I know all about it now, don't I? This is an easy place from which to know things, a hundred years later a million miles at sea, but then I didn't know and something slammed my chest in such a way that I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep. I'd graduated from high school, do you see, some sick chick with no sure sense of self, but as I stood at my window for the next four hours until finally some birds began to chitter and the gray light began, a new feeling rose in me. My parents were lovers. Oh sure, oh sure. I know all about it. I knew all about it then, I thought. But the idea killed me. It clobbered me. It filled me with capacity. I didn't have the words for it, nor did I know exactly what it was, but I was certain to my soul that I had the capacity for it. I had grown up in a house with two adults who were lovers. Like wolves or swans, they had mated for life. Years later, I would too. I stood there at the window until my elbows filled with sand and I was heavy with sleep. I could see two neighbor kids walking down the alley. One had a stick and was swinging it against the fences. They were up early, the first sun orange in their hair, and they owned the day. I would give them this one. Through the stunning blue air, I could see the houses of our neighborhood floating away from me. Do you see? That was the first time my heart brimmed. The world was real.

ALSO BY RON CARLSON

Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald Truants

The News of the World

First Edition

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Carlson, Ron.
Plan B for the middle class: stories / Ron Carlson.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3553.A733P57 1992

813'.54âdC20 91-42257

ISBN 978-0-393-24539-4 (e-book)

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.