by Ron Carlson
Back in the dark kitchen, she poured another short splash of scotch and went through the French doors onto the pool deck. It was fresh outdoors after the recent rain and she could smell the wet cement as it dried in the night and she could hear the clacking of the palm fronds above the neighbor’s yard. She walked out around the pool and sat on the side of the diving board. From here her dark yard and house seemed vast, another landscape. Shapes slowly emerged, the lumps of towels, the deck tables, Sean’s suit jacket on the back of a chair.
When she heard the laugh, she felt it as something sharp in her chest and then she heard it again, an alto note that could not be suppressed, and the warmth spread down her arms. “Sean?” she said, her voice strange, ready, and then louder: “Sean?” Now she couldn’t hear anything in the mix of the pool pump, the palm fronds’ dry whispers. “Sean?” She couldn’t see anything in the dark reflections of the water or the windows of the house and she realized she couldn’t move either, she couldn’t get up right now or walk to the house, it was the strangest feeling and it wouldn’t let her speak again either. And for a moment in the liquid night she was that still, not calm, but not panicked either, just kept there by the weight of the two sounds she’d heard and known about all along.
Beneath her she saw the water ripple and heard it lapping at the tile in a new way, then the surface broke in a dark oval which became a face, silver under hair as black and varnished as a movie star’s from the twenties. She didn’t recognize him at first, his face, until he reached for the side of the pool and she saw his wrist and forearm.
“Sean?”
“Yeah. Mom, hi. Party over?” His voice was thick, husky, a whisper.
“Is that David?” Ruth looked out into the dark where she knew Dorie hid in the water.
“No, he just left,” Sean said. He was treading water, staying away from her.
“It’s after midnight, Sean.”
“Really. Okay.”
Ruth now heard Dorie’s body rise from the water, the short rush of water in the far dark, and before her son’s next plaintive “Mom?”—a word so saturated with pleading that she found it almost repulsive—the light in the kitchen went on around the shape of her husband. The light fell in a cartoonish square across the patio and Ruth saw Dorie stand casually as if to meet it, so casually it hurt, and drop the towel the way she would if alone after a shower, her body here only white, her arms, her high breasts white, as she lifted her shift over her head and began to wriggle into it.
“Mom?” her son said again from the water.
But coming out of the house like a figure in a horror film now, in an old pair of pajama bottoms and carrying a liter bottle of Perrier, was her husband, and he said, “Ruth? Ruth? I put it in her car.” He became a dark shadow before her. He didn’t know his son drifted in the water at his feet nor was he aware of the girl dressing behind him—who now knelt and busily worked at her shoes.
Ruth said nothing and then she said, “Carl.”
“It’s raining in the parking lot. Do you see, I know what happened.” He gestured with the bottle of water and his free hand.
“When the girl flopped the front seat forward so I could reach in and put the baby in the car seat—see it? It’s raining. The ground is wet. I put the bag on the floor there behind the front seat.”
There was movement behind Carl and Ruth saw Dorie slip out the side gate. She could see beneath her in the water, like some creature, Sean, his white eyes, in a scene that was now only black-and-white. She stood up.
“Hey,” Carl said. “Is that Sean?”
And Ruth felt then the whole world take hold and her heart, her body flood with wonder. And even though she tried, she couldn’t stop from taking half a step back like an actress in a bad film, her hands raised in defense, in denial, as her eyes actually widened. She saw it; she saw it all. She saw these strangers. It was stark and clear. And she had been brought here from some other place at this point in her life, forty years of age, to live with them.
PLAN B FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS
Everybody’s three. Harry has just turned three and Ricky won’t be four until August, and all I want to do is get Katie in bed. The theme for the spring is sand. It is everywhere. The boys carry it around in their pockets until it pulls their pants down. We don’t even notice the sandy trails through the house anymore, and when the two three-year-olds come in for lunch, they squirm in their seats until each lifts a scoop of sand onto the table beside his grilled cheese sandwich. They will not eat until there is sand on the table.
Right now they are both well into their sandwiches and I watch Katie pour milk and move about the kitchen. I can hear the uneven flicker of sand filtering onto the floor and the sound is magnified by my throat-dry lust. I am trying to restrain myself from going up behind Katie and fondling her breasts. I can sense she’s got an eye on me anyway. This sweet hollow call of desire has been growing for months, it seems, years, perhaps it too is three. It’s rich. It’s as crazy as a song. Just the touch of her sleeve can set me off. Katie brushes the hair off her forehead and looks at me again: “What?” she says.
I turn back into the living room and ask the guy who is fixing the VCR how it’s going. He’s a house-call guy out of the Nickel Ads. He’s young and bald and wearing white overalls. The VCR is out of its shell in four big components on the floor.
“There’s a lot of sand in here, buddy,” he tells me.
“I know,” I say, and he looks up at me for an explanation. “It’s been sandy.”
“Well,” he says, measuring it out like medicine and going back to the pieces of the VCR, “that’s hard on the heads. You’re going to wear your heads out with sand.”
I nod as if to say I understand, I stand corrected, I hear and receive his scolding gratefully, I couldn’t agree more. We’ll do better.
The truth is that if my parents weren’t flying in to be with the kids, I would have poured another cup of sand into the mechanism myself. It has served up a limited repertoire in the two years we’ve had it. The only movies we see are Dumbo, Land of the Lost, More Dinosaurs, and Using Your Cuisinart. After two hundred viewings I became numb to Dumbo, which is an ardent feminist film. Dumbo has no father, the circus workmen drink away their pay, the Ringmaster is a blustering fool, and the only good man is a mouse. Land of the Lost is the hokiest video in the country, drawn from an old television series about a family who take the wrong turn on a raft trip and end up in another world, a world full of dinosaurs, cavemen, the whole show. More Dinosaurs and Using Your Cuisinart are documentaries.
After dinner every night while I run bathwater, Katie cleans up in the kitchen, and Harry and Rick sop up one of these cinema classics. Harry sits there naked—as he is naked at the lunch table right now—and watches the television through his binoculars. Harry is a naked child all of the time. You can tie his shoes one minute and the next find them along with his shirt et cetera on the front step. But he is never without his binoculars. He holds the big end to his eyes, so things must appear way out there. Other people have told us about their children who resented and avoided clothing, so the fact that Harry is always naked doesn’t bother us too much yet. However, his drifting through the house with those glasses held to his face can be disconcerting.
Ricky, on the other hand, isn’t interested in his binoculars. He has become, like so many American preschoolers, an absolute paleontologist. He knows all the dinosaurs and all of their cousins. Katie has kept up with all of this, which is no small task, since they’ve changed all the names and half the theories since we were in school. Except the triceratops; there is still a triceratops.
From time to time, I’ll stop on the way home from work and rent a movie, Body Heat, or An Officer and a Gentleman, figuring we’ll watch something with a little sex in it after the boys are in bed and then I’ll reach for Katie and we’ve had a wonderful life that way—one thing leads sweetly to another. But we never see the films. By the time the kids are down, we’re shot. The vid
eos stay in their cases on top of the console. Once we tried to watch Siesta in the morning while the kids were in the sandbox. Well, that’s no good. That’s not right. You can’t watch movies in the morning.
And now my parents are coming, so they can watch Land of the Lost. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t heard Marshall’s line as the characters look around at their jungle home: “I think we’re in another world.”
Back in the kitchen, Harry smiles at me and puts the large end of his binoculars to his face. He is looking at a full glass of milk that appears to be fifty yards away.
“Boys,” I start, “while we’re gone and Grandma and Grandpa are here, do not put sand in the television.”
Ricky can’t hear me. He is full face into his sandwich, all business, his hands working more and more of it into his mouth. Little naked Harry turns and looks at me with his binoculars. “Dad, Dad,” he says. I wait for him to finish. I must look like I’m up here ten stories.
And, in fact, I feel remote, my little family way below, another life, another world. I’ve lost my job. It crumbled under me and now I’m off balance. Perhaps I’m falling, waiting as in a dream to hit the ground, waiting certainly to tell Katie.
“Dad, I got a big one,” Harry says, gesturing to the milk and knocking the glass completely over in a quick splash. Katie is there in a second with a sponge almost as if she could sense it coming, the way a good infielder moves to the ball when he sees the bat swing, and the mess which I thought would be major, milk and sand, is nothing in a moment. Rick hasn’t stopped eating. When Katie bends down for the last pickup, I can’t stop myself, I run my hand across her arched back, and it is then I feel the first pang of something else, an itch, my rash. My jock rash is coming back. I adjust my shorts and scratch myself.
“That’s lovely,” Katie says, watching me. She sits down with the boys. “No sand,” she says, giving each a look in the eye. “No sand in the television.”
When I was seventeen, I played varsity baseball for Union High School and I developed my first case of this rash, the case for the record books. There could have been many causes. Just being seventeen is what it was. And wet jocks. You take kids seventeen and make them wear wet jockstraps to play baseball, they’ll get something. Jock rash seems the most harmless consequence. The school supplied socks, jocks, and T-shirts, and several times that spring the clothes dryer by the locker room was busted, and we’d take the field against Claremont or Mountain in damp straps. At first I noticed a slight burning and then the visible rash, and then being seventeen and busy, I neglected it the whole term, until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. My friend Ryan McBride had the locker next to mine in the team locker room, and one night after a game I lifted the leg of my boxer shorts—we all wore boxer shorts that year—and asked him, “You got any of this?”
“Holy shit, Lew,” he said. “You’ve got a royal case of jock itch. Come here, Baker, look at Lew’s crotch!”
At the time, I didn’t know that he meant I had it for life. In fact, at the time it didn’t sound too bad. It sounded like a kind of compliment: Hey, Lewis, you’re a man. Something like that.
It was something to see: a raised red rash running out on each leg in an area about the size of a hand, so tender that the hem of my boxer shorts felt like wire. Nights I would douse it with medicated powder and wake up with my heart beating in the raw flesh. There was no help. Finally my mother asked me what—in heaven—was the matter. I was so desperate I showed her. She wrinkled her nose and called Dr. Wilson, making an appointment for after graduation that I would never have to keep.
The video guy is done. He used a little hand-held vacuum cleaner for a while at the end and then snapped the facing back on the VCR and shut his tools. He hands me the ticket: ninety-six dollars. It’s worth it. I’m not going to squawk now. In twenty-four hours Katie and I will be in bed in our room at the Royal Hawaiian while in Arizona my parents watch More Dinosaurs. Ninety-six dollars is cheap.
“See, boys,” I say, “Mr. Waldren”—I read his name from the receipt as I write the check—“has fixed our television. The boys don’t want to put sand in the machine, do they, Mr. Waldren.”
Mr. Waldren takes the check and folds it into his overalls pocket. He looks up at me and simply says, “Why would they want to do that?”
When I was nine years old, I started reading the newspaper, the comics, the puzzles, and “Ask Andy.” My mother would fold the paper to the right page and hand it to me. She encouraged literacy in her household, this farmgirl valedictorian from a Nebraska high school. She always completed the crossword, except for a few easy four- and five-letter words, which I was expected to do, and I remember learning forever the name of the Elbe River in Germany, which appeared with disturbing frequency in the Salt Lake City Tribune. But it was “Ask Andy” which really challenged me. “What Do Pandas Eat?” would be the headline, and then in small print after the two-column answer (bamboo shoots, ten pounds a day) would be some kid’s name and the fact that she had won a set of encyclopedias for asking about pandas. It seemed obvious that I could do better than the panda question, and I began sending questions to Andy.
My first, I remember, was based on the fact that pandas are related to raccoons. “What Do Raccoons Eat?” I followed that with three other questions about raccoons. “Where Do Raccoons Live?” “Why Do Raccoons Have Masks?” “How Did the Raccoon Get Its Name?” I became, in fact, the fourth-grade expert on raccoons, which my teacher Mrs. Talbot thought was just fine, but Andy did not acknowledge my questions. From North American mammals, I went on to magnetism and sent in a series of bewildering questions about the very essence of matter and its fundamental behavior. Andy was unimpressed. It is not a good thing for an elementary school pupil to send off questions in the mail and get nothing in return, and my mother tried to ease the sting by praising my queries (she typed them) and defending Andy in his difficult work. “He gets lots of letters, honey.” Nevertheless, I let Andy go. I stopped reading his column. I just filled in the crossword puzzles with my mother’s help and took up clipping “Gasoline Alley.”
That summer was Little League and YMCA Camp, and it was at camp months later that I struck on the idea that had been waiting for me. I saw it, I felt it just like Moon Mullins with a light bulb over his head. I mean, I felt the physical shock of having a radical thought. Actually, it happened on our cabin’s overnight up the Soapstone Creek. Our counselor, Michael Overholt, a college student and botanical genius, was off collecting and pressing ferns for his collection, and the other campers and myself were having a contest. We were gathered around one huge Douglas Fir (flat needles,) seeing who could pee furthest up the trunk. It was there, leaning backward marking the tree, that I saw the concept that sent me back to “Ask Andy” for the last time.
The rest of camp went by in a blur as I waited to get home and write my letter. I remember falling off a horse on our trail ride, making a black-and-yellow key chain with boondoggle in crafts, and spending most of capture-the-flag in jail. It was all irrelevant to me. I had seen the future.
As was her custom, my mother typed my letter for me. I had to print it first, as always, and though I could tell she didn’t think it was a brilliant question, she didn’t say anything, just moved to the typewriter (a bad sign) and had me look up the word “urinate,” which wasn’t much of a task once she let me know it began with a u. “Dear Ask Andy, When I urinate, why does it stay in a stream instead of spraying all over the place?” It was my longest letter to Andy, more than twice as long as anything about raccoons, and my mother did say, as she typed the envelope, that its length might hurt it.
I didn’t care. It was a great question. And during the next year, fifth grade, I read “Ask Andy” every day. It was a big year for the planets, space in general, with secondary themes of reptiles and mineralogy. There was almost no anatomy or hydrology. It didn’t really hurt my feelings. I remember thinking as the spring came that year and baseball started up again: It’s okay. No wo
nder he didn’t print my question. He doesn’t know.
My mother bought a set of The Book of Knowledge that year and would buy a set of Britannicas the next. There wasn’t anything in either about my question, and after a while I got into the mysteries of art, studying all the jungles of Rousseau, the stark dramas of Goya, and then settling on the romantic Delacroix. I would stare at “Liberty Guiding the People” for hours at a time in The Book of Knowledge. Her blouse is torn down, as you know, but it isn’t a moment for niceties. If she stopped to cover herself, the battle could be lost. I was in the sixth grade by then and I found the painting compelling. I couldn’t get her courage and nudity into my head at the same time, and burned with curiosity about such things. But it came to me from time to time as I’d write ELBE in the crossword puzzles, which my mother was leaving more and more blank for me to do: I’d stumped Andy. I had this picture of some guy who looked like Mr. Drubay, my arithmetic teacher, standing in his little office which was stacked high with envelopes of questions as he looked out the window at a big city and scratched his head. He wasn’t happy. There were probably a lot of things he didn’t know, things he would never know. I feel that way more and more myself. He probably worried about being fair giving out the encyclopedias. So I ended that year thinking about that confused guy in his office and staring at Liberty’s beautiful breasts amid all the damage and the danger. I’d stumped Andy. All I could think was: If there were an answer for every question, what kind of world would it be?
I am told that one of my strengths as “Zoo Lewis,” in my column “Animals Unlimited,” is the patience I display toward obvious questions. In my eleven years I’ve received four Press Service Awards for the column, “for making the obvious interesting and the complex understandable.” I enjoy my work, sure, and most of the questions I receive are extraordinarily good, germane, challenging, and lead naturally to interesting columns. People are always surprised that the armadillo crosses a river by walking across the bottom, that the gnu can run so fast, that the marten is so small. Beyond the fun stuff—the “Where does ‘playing ’possum’ come from?” or “How are porcupines romantic?”—there are a lot of unanswerably weird letters about feathers and fur and the death of pets. I answer all my mail. I say “I don’t know” sometimes in the letters. I have even answered all of the hate mail I’ve had in the last six months about the evolution problem, even though I use a photocopied form for those. It’s not a surprise that I answer letters; Andy never wrote back to me.