Onward Toward What We're Going Toward

by Ryan Bartelmay

  Stan met Chic in the parking lot. He was dressed in a brown leisure suit, polka-dot tie, and horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was carefully messy, and he had a giant, blond mustache. He took a long look at Chic, up and down, seemingly making note of the beret and corduroy blazer.

  “Want some advice, Waldbeeser?”

  What did Stan know that he didn’t? He hadn’t gone to college or anything. He had just graduated from high school and gone to work for his father. And, in fact, in high school, Stan had been good at math and everyone made fun of him because of that, but no one remembered Stan Landry the kid everyone made fun of because he was good at math; they knew him only as the son of the owner of Stafford’s, and apparently this gave him the right to offer advice.

  Stan shook out a Pall Mall cigarette and offered one to Chic. Chic thought hard about taking it. In time, if the road kept this course, then, yeah, cigarettes, but for now, he’d hold off. (And besides, Diane wouldn’t like it.) Stan lit his cigarette with some sort of fancy Zippo trick. He took a long drag, then waved his hand in front of Chic like he was conducting an orchestra. “Look at yourself. You’re wearing a beret.”

  “I like the beret.”

  “Have you ever seen anyone wear a beret in Middleville? This is the Midwest. Illinois. A small town. Look around. We have farm acreage within the city limits. Tractors drive down the street. There are no poets here. The kids don’t even study poetry in high school. We didn’t study poetry in high school.”

  “We did a unit on poetry,” Chic said.

  “Yeah, well, but we were snickering in the back of the room.”

  “How do you know I’m not a poet?”

  “I read those poems. Trust me. You’re not.”

  “So, is that your advice?”

  “Look, Waldbeeser, what are you, forty? You have twenty-some years left at the cannery. Don’t rock the boat. Just fit in. Play the part. Put in your time. Hug your wife when you need to. Then, I don’t know, do what your mom did—go down to Florida and retire. Sit on the benches and watch people ride by on bikes.”

  “My mother didn’t retire to Florida. She ran away with Tom McNeeley.”

  “Wasn’t he a janitor at Blessed Sacrament?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Look. Shave that little bit of hair under your lip. You look ridiculous. And your brother. His health food store. What happened to you guys?”

  “What’s this have to do with my brother?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  At home, Chic found Diane upstairs in the nursery. She was in the rocking chair, cradling a doll. It was a good thing Stan Landry didn’t know about this. Or maybe he did. Chic took off his blazer and hung it on the doorknob. He took off his beret, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it.

  “What are you doing?” Diane asked.

  “Stan Landry offered me some advice, and I think he’s right.”

  “What sort of advice?”

  “He said I wasn’t a poet, and other things. I have a question for you. Why won’t you have sex with me?”

  “I have sex with you.”

  “Ha. We haven’t had sex in, I don’t know, a long time.”

  “Chic, I feel sorry for you.”

  “For me? Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m fine. I’m perfect. I’m living my life. I feel sorry for you.”

  Diane gave him a hard stare, and Chic thought maybe she knew something he didn’t know.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Chic, I know you’re masturbating in the bathroom.”

  “What are you talking about—masturbating in the bathroom? Are you kidding? That’s not true. That simply isn’t true. I am not masturbating in the bathroom.”

  “I hear you. Grunting.”

  “You what . . . grunting?”

  “Like every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

  “Well. I can’t believe you’re listening to me masturbate.”

  “And I know you’re sneaking beers and hiding the crushed cans in the garbage.”

  “That’s . . . how do you . . . did you find the cans?”

  “Chic, we need to move forward, move on, change, grow up. Onward toward what we’re going toward. Like the title of your poems.”

  Chic picked up the beret. “Did Stan Landry say something to you?”

  “No.”

  “He did.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “We used to make fun of Stan Landry because he was good at math. In your dad’s class. You remember that?”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “This has not been helpful. You know, I came to you because I was upset, and you made me more upset.”

  She tried to snatch the beret away.

  “Don’t!”

  “Give it to me.”

  “I want it. It’s mine.”

  She let go.

  He put the beret on his head and walked out of the room.

  “Quit using all my lotion when you masturbate,” she called out after him.

  Diane & Chic Waldbeeser

  July 22, 1972

  It was Wednesday night, and like every Wednesday night for the past year, Chic and Diane went bowling at Middleville Lanes. A haze of smoke hung from the ceiling like a low-hanging cloud. Chic noticed the smoke every week, and every week, he wondered why no one else noticed it, or if they did, why they didn’t seem to mind.

  Diane shook her ball out of her pink bowling bag, while Chic picked a community ball, a nine pounder with holes that didn’t squeeze his fingers. He sat down at the scorer’s table and watched Diane laughing with a few of the women on their team. A couple of the guys shook Chic’s hand. One guy bought him a bottle of beer. He saw Diane looking at him. How long had she known he was sneaking beers at home? He should have stored the cans in the trunk of the car and ditched them in the Dumpster at work.

  The guy keeping score, Mitch Watkins, told Diane she was up. Chic and Diane had gone to high school with all the people in the league. They lived in houses not far from the houses they had grown up in. They had kids who would someday most likely end up in a similar Wednesday night bowling league. Stan Landry and his wife were in the far lane. Stan made eye contact with Chic and pointed to his head—Chic had worn his beret. Stan wagged his finger. Stan’s wife threw her ball and got a strike. She leapt into Stan’s arms and gave him a big hug. Chic was up next. He picked up the ball and without really thinking, rolled it down the lane. It picked off one pin in the far right corner before clunking into the gutter.

  “Good try, Chic,” Mitch said.

  “Pick up the spare now. Come on,” someone said.

  Chic waited at the ball return. He watched Diane. She was talking to Leslie Soderstrom, and they were both laughing. What did they have to be laughing about? This wasn’t fun. His ball came back. He picked it up. He aimed. He took three steps and rolled the ball down the lane, knocking down seven pins. An eight in the first frame.

  “Get ’em next time, Chic,” someone said.

  Stan Landry and his wife clinked their beer bottles together, still celebrating her strike. Chic walked up to Diane and held his beer up to her so that he could clink it against the glass of water she was drinking, but Diane looked at him like she didn’t know what he wanted her to do. He sat down. Ever since Diane had told him she knew he was masturbating, he kept picturing her standing outside the locked bathroom door listening to him. Or, maybe, when she was lying in bed listening to Dr. Peale, the sounds of his masturbation wafted through the heating vents. Whatever, Chic told himself that he was just biding time until she was ready to have sex again. Masturbation was like a warm up lap, like knee bends before a big race. It was a way to keep loose and focused. Who was he kidding? It was pathetic. And look at Diane over there, laughing and having a good time, drinking her glass of water, laughing again, slapping her knee. He needed to quit lying to himself. He needed to be honest with himself. You need to be honest wit
h yourself, he told himself. Your life is not the life that you wanted to live. Whoa, that was direct. But it felt pretty good. He tried it again. You’re mad at your father for committing suicide. You blame your mother for it. You hate her for leaving you. Your son died. You blame yourself for that. You masturbate in the bathroom every day. Your son probably knows that you masturbate in the bathroom. Your father, too. Actually, that made him feel small, imagining that dead people knew what he did. Maybe he was being too honest. This wasn’t really working, come to think of it. He didn’t want to be honest. He wanted to put the lid on these thoughts, he wanted to live in a cloud of smoke like all of the people here at the alley and not notice that he was living in a cloud of smoke. Next to him, a cigarette smoldered in an ashtray. He picked it up and took a drag. He coughed. Diane made a nasty face. The guy sitting next to him, Larry Stevenson, whose cigarette he’d picked up, looked at him.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Larry said.

  “I don’t.” Chic handed the cigarette to him and stood up.

  “Hey, where are you going? You’re almost up.”

  “Bathroom.”

  On his way to the bathroom, he stopped at the bar and bought two beers. In the bathroom stall, he guzzled them both. He thought of Diane out there laughing—all of them, Stan Landry, his wife, the people he had gone to school with, every single one of them, laughing. At the end of the night, they’d get in their cars and drive home, where they’d laugh some more. In the morning, in the afternoon, and at night when they watched television, they’d laugh some more. Weren’t these people depressed and sad and overwhelmed with their existence? Didn’t they know there was a war going on? People were dying in the jungle in Southeast Asia. People were dying everywhere. Someone came into the bathroom. The person was whistling. He wanted to take that whistling and shove it right down the guy’s throat. The guy burped. He unzipped his fly. He was in the stall next to Chic. The guy did his business and Chic listened to the tinkle of urine in the toilet water. This was what it had come to—sneaking beers in a bowling alley bathroom and listening to people piss. The guy in the next stall finished up and washed his hands and left the bathroom, whistling again on his way out. Chic put the bottle to his lips and finished off the beer, swishing the last drop in his mouth and letting it roll on his tongue and down his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Someone else came into the bathroom. He held still.

  “Chic?” It was Diane. Oh, Jesus. What was she doing in here? “I know you’re in that stall, Chic. I can see your shoes. I know you’re drinking beer. I saw you buy it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” she said, then left the bathroom. He was alone, holding two empty beer bottles. Had his wife just come into the men’s bathroom to tell him to quit feeling sorry for himself? He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He was feeling sorry for her, for them, for the bowlers, the people, all of them. He was feeling sorry for how they didn’t even notice what was obviously right in front of their goddamn noses.

  When he got back to the lanes, he took out his notebook and flipped to an empty page. Everyone was watching him, but he didn’t notice. He tried to write a line, but his mind was a blank. He closed his eyes. He wanted to capture what he was feeling in a poem. He wanted to frame it so it could be hung on a wall, so others could look at his feelings and understand him. He wanted to hand the poem to Diane and say, “Here. This is how I’m feeling. Read this. Right here. This is me. My innermost feelings walking right into your imagination.”

  “You can shatter glass with your concentration, Waldbeeser,” Mitch said.

  Chic looked up. Everyone was staring at him.

  “It’s your turn.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He smiled. He got up and bowled a seven. He sat back down. He looked at a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to him. He thought about Diane coming into the bathroom. He couldn’t tell if that had really happened or if he just thought it had happened. He didn’t really know how much he had had to drink. His head felt stretched out like a balloon with too much air. He felt a little bit different, older somehow, or actually, that wasn’t quite right. He felt like he’d already finished a book that everyone else was just starting, and he knew how everything was going to end.

  On the way home, he wasn’t paying attention and drove past their house.

  “You just passed our house,” Diane said.

  Chic slammed on the brakes. He backed up and pulled into the driveway.

  “You don’t like bowling league, I know. I can tell, but tonight—were you drawing a horse in your notebook?”

  “No.”

  They both got out of the car and stood in the driveway. It was dark. The crickets chirped.

  “Don’t you notice?” he said.

  “Notice what?”

  “The bowling alley. The smoke. There’s this cloud of smoke that hangs over everything.”

  “What do you expect? It’s a bowling alley. People are smoking.”

  “It’s hard to breathe.”

  “What are you talking about Chic?”

  “The bowling alley.”

  “No you’re not. You’re talking about something else.”

  He sighed. “I can’t go on like this. I can’t. I won’t. It’s not natural.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t come to the bowling league anymore.”

  “I’m in this hole. This big deep hole that I can’t get out of.”

  “You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Why? Why do I need to stop feeling sorry for myself? Why is that so bad? Everyone feels sorry for themselves.”

  “Keep your voice down. We have neighbors.”

  “Why do you think I’m masturbating in the bathroom?” he whispered.

  She shrugged. “Desiring other women?”

  “Other women? No.”

  “Not this again. Please. A baby isn’t going to change anything.”

  “Let’s just have sex for the sake of having sex. For fun. People do that, you know.”

  She stormed off into the house. He followed after her. She was going towards her old bunker, the bathroom, and he headed her off. She did an about-face and went up the stairs and into the nursery and slammed the door. Chic pushed it open.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had sex?”

  “July 1, 1964. It was morning. Independence Day. You had the day off work.”

  “You remember the date?”

  She left the nursery and crossed the hall to their bedroom. Chic followed. “A good man is hard to find,” he said. “I’m a good man, Diane, but you know what? A good woman is even harder to find. Think about that, will you.”

  She turned to him. “Chic, sometimes, you know . . . I’m hurting too. Just like you. Do you think I like bowling? I don’t. But what else are we going to do? We’re stuck, and I’m tired of feeling sorry for myself. I’m tired of it.”

  Chic kicked off his shoes. “Get undressed.” He pulled his shirt over his head.

  “No.”

  “Go with it. Go with the moment.”

  “I’m not going to have sex with you.”

  “Remember Florida. How I seduced you. How I kissed your entire body. Your feet. Your legs, and how I sucked on your toes and licked your earlobes and how you giggled. Remember how I nuzzled into your neck. How we batted our eyelashes together. How I smelled your stomach. How I whispered ‘I love you’ into your ear. Remember. That bed. That room. We had seafood for dinner and we were one. One. We were connected. It was beautiful.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Oh, it’s what happened. We made Lomax that night. I think about it every single day.”

  “Chic, I took advantage of you in Florida.”

  “You did not. We connected in Florida.”

  “I whipped you with your belt. I made you shut off the lights.”

  Chic thought about this. The haze of his memory began to lift. He rec
alled what had really happened that night. It was buried down deep, back in the hollows of his memory where the floor was concrete and cold. He put two fingers to his neck and felt the blood thumping through his veins. He closed his eyes, then opened them. It all flooded in on him. She was mad at him because of Lijy, and locked herself in the bathroom. There wasn’t any cuddling. There weren’t any nuzzle kisses or pecks on the cheek. It was quick and he had no idea what he was doing and afterward she pushed him off of her and picked her panties off the floor and went into the bathroom. He’d sandbagged the real memory, changed it, tried to erase it by building a new memory on top of it, a false one, a lie. He was about to cry. His bottom lip started to quiver.

  Chic Waldbeeser

  July 22–23, 1972

  Chic sat on the couch in the dark living room, his mind replaying and looping. His entire relationship, his entire marriage, his “love” for Diane, was built on lies and false memories. His fingers tracked the throbbing in his neck. He couldn’t sleep. At some point, very late, around two in the morning, Diane came to the top of the stairs and whispered for him to come to bed. He didn’t say anything, then listened as she padded back down the hallway to the bedroom and shut the door. The sun began to blue up the sky a few hours later. It was Thursday. He called work and said he wouldn’t be coming in. Diane came downstairs and made coffee. She asked if he wanted any. He did not. She went back upstairs, and he heard Peale’s voice on the radio. What was the big deal about this guy? He put on his beret and corduroy jacket. He should go see his brother. He was the only person he knew who had pieced together his life after a major setback.

  He parked in front of Middleville Community Bank, directly across the street from the health food store. He dug out binoculars from under the seat. Inside the store, Buddy was wearing a maroon toga robe. He looked ridiculous. A lady took a container of yogurt from the cooler and paid for it. She left. Russ came out from behind the beaded curtain. He had a bowl haircut and was wearing striped athletic socks pulled up to his knees. He sat down on the floor to examine a potted parsley plant. Chic remembered that Buddy still thought that he was Russ’s father. Another lie. Chic lowered the binoculars and remembered the afternoon of his father’s suicide, sitting in his room, on his bed, staring at his brother’s shut door, waiting for it to open, waiting for his brother to come for him, to sit next to him on the bed, to put his hand on his leg, to put his arm around him, to hug him, to make him feel better—to do anything. But when his brother’s bedroom door opened, he only made it worse. He told him their mother was having an affair with Tom McNeeley.