by Ron Carlson
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, and—faintly—the 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 B—or 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
Copyright © 1992 by Ron Carlson
All rights reserved
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’.54—dC20 91-42257
ISBN 978-0-393-24539-4 (e-book)
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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