Read Plan B for the Middle Class Online
Authors: Ron Carlson
Plan B for the Middle Class (13 page)
When you fall apart, when you crumble, it doesn't happen all at once, and you don't know about it the way you've known about others who have suddenly cracked up. In fact, for weeks it only feels like too much coffee, too much pizza, not enough sleep, but you wonder if anything is the matter, if there is damage, so you look around for any signs and there are none for you to see, nothing crooked in your landscape. So listen: the way to tell is if you ever say
no problem.
Listen to hear if you say
no problem.
As I said, things are shifting. Tina is busy. She has a leather daytimer and she's at it all the time, the phone pinched to one shoulder, writing things down. Her calendar thickens. After our little interview, I try to gather enough of myself together to keep from going absolutely down the drain. I watch Calvin as best I can and keep him from harm. It's diverting. He is a kid uninterested in TV; no ten hours of cartoons for this guy. If I turn it on and stand and watch half of a soft-drink commercial, Calvin is down the block and half over somebody's pool fence. Calvin likes the
back
of the TV, and I have found him back there several times, licking the terminals: audio in, video in. Sometimes, I'll just put him on my shoulders and tour the house imagining our furniture on the driveway in the final garage sale.
At two-thirty, we walk over, Calvin and I, and meet Janey at school. She taught us early not to wait near her door. We are to stand at the corner of the schoolyard and we are not to wave and call her name. This is
major
, she told us. Her class spills out of the door and I see Jane gather her minions around her, six or seven first-grade girls, and they talk in a circle for a moment and then she dismisses them and eventually saunters over to us. Most days Calvin has escaped me by then and he's halfway to her. “Sick,” she says as he grabs her arm. “This is really sick. Dad, can't you control your own kids?” Calvin loves this behavior and he grins and falls down and gets up and laughs and laughs. Janey laughs too, but between breaths, she says, “Oh, sick, just sick.”
I see a lot of Roger Alguire. He's back to life, commuting with his metal detector to and from the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. He's working through the second green and onto the third hole, and he wears a goofy straw hat festooned with the fishing lures from his first find. Mornings I see him head out as I'm walking Janey to school, and he waves. Some mornings he waits and Calvin and I go with him.
I don't care how dumb you are, dumbest among men, so dumb you voluntarily sign over your high-five-figure bank account to your brother-in-law to buy a golf course that smells night and day like a dead thing, even if you are that dumb, when your wife starts seeing another man, although there is no tangible change to point to, no physical trait or blemish, you will know. If she is your woman and you are dumb in a major way, dumb as a stone, a sandpile, a dirtclod, a tongue-tied golf pro, you will still know. And you will know who it is, even if you have never met the man or heard his name, or seen an ad for the chain of pizza parlors he owns. You'll be watering the kids one day in the front yard, and three will go to four o'clock and you will go in for another cup of real strong coffee, and when you return the whole afternoon will tell you: you're not a viable part of the picture anymore, your wife has a new orbit.
There is a strange thing happening at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. It is a heavy spring day, the clouds piled in ripe gray loads as far as I can see. Roger Alguire drifts slowly across the fourth green, squinting in concentration at his metal detector. Calvin follows him holding on to a piece of rope tied to Roger's belt. There are a few brief powerful gusts before the rain and Roger turns to me where I stand in the sand trap leaning on the shovel and says, “Blow wind!”
“Blow wind!” Calvin says. For a moment they both lift their heads to the sky, listening. The first fat drops sizzle into the sand, and I turn back to where the fourth fairway lies like a minefield of little holes. A newcomer would think we've got real moles. But then he'd see the strange thing. Clear back to the first tee I can see other men wandering the grass, some on their knees prying at the soil, almost a dozen of them searching for things at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. Four have already come over and asked if I was the owner and paid me five dollars. On the sign Mitch and I erected last year, it is listed as the greens fee.
Calvin squeals in the falling rain and runs toward me across the bumpy green, avoiding a bicycle handlebar protruding from the grass. “I've always loved the rain,” Roger says, walking over to me. “But, of course, as a weatherman you can never say that.”
Tina has taken a job. She is the new manager, not assistant manager nor manager-in-training, but
manager
of Sergei's Pizza. I thought she was going to be a legal secretary. When she'd go to lunch, she always dressed like a legal secretary. I thought business school. I thought tutoring. No. She runs Sergei's, twelve hours a day, six days a week. And as she frankly put it to me the second night of her job, the second night she came in at one-thirty: it means we may get to keep the house.
All the other things, the things I would like to say, to know, I can't ask: does Sergei come by? Has he ever touched you? These questions lack something. They shrivel in the shadow of the question of our house. A house is a big thing which guards your furniture from the weather and provides some quiet from the world.
When I was a kid, seven, eight, nine years old, I used to watch Roger Alguire do the weather on Channel Four. It all came back to me when we first moved in here and I found out who he was. In those days his hair was white only on the sides and he wore classy tweed jackets and a tie and he really moved around the weathermap. He had markers and drew the fronts with arrows, and the pressure areas with circles. He also drew lightning and spirals and little triangles for precipitation. He wasn't like a pal or a coach or some kind of lost host for the climate, the way the guys are today. He had an earnest grace that made him seem complicit in the creation of the weather. You believed him. When he drew the arrow, it made you get ready.
When Tina comes home, she smells faintly of Parmesan cheese, a pale, rank odor, the smell of after-sex. Parmesan cheese is okay by itself, but you don't want to smell it on your wife. She rustles out of her clothing and slips into bed heavily. We haven't touched for weeks. The sour smell of cheese makes me nothing more than weary.
There is a lot of pizza around our house. Russian pizza, two slices in a baggie, half a pie in the white cardboard box, a grinning Lenin on the cover. Tina uses our house for only two things nowâto leave excess pizza and to store her wardrobe. I told Tina good for her, that I was glad we would keep the house, that she was alive again after six years with me, but that I didn't want the kids going to Sergei's. I don't want them to run around in a big pizza place and ride the little rides or beg for tokens for the games, and I don't want them ever in this lifetime to meet Sergei Primalov.
Mornings, after Janey has gone to school, Calvin and I take cold pizza over to Roger Alguire's while Tina sleeps. We have breakfast with him. The Russian makes a whole wheat crust for his pizza and it is wonderful cold with a glass of milk. Roger thrives; he's got the Golf Center at Ten-Acres mapped out and he's halfway through the sixth hole, a dogleg that runs by one of the dry ponds. He eats his pizza with gusto and washes it down with hot tea. He doesn't ask me about Tinaâhasn't for weeks nowâso that tells me he's as sharp as ever. He and Calvin are buddies in these morning pizza feasts, and they sit together in one chair. Calvin's picked up one of Janey's phrases, “Are we having fun, or what?” and when he says this, Roger laughs and laughs. At eight-thirty, we go out to the Golf Center at Ten-Acres.
When your wife doesn't come home one night, and you call her at work the next day and she says she's real busy and, incidentally, she's real happy, but she can't talk right now, and no, she says, she won't be home tonight either, you will have an odd thought, perhaps your first thought: Well, who didn't know that, you'll think. That's no surprise to me.
Like any other person in that spot, eleven in the morning, I put the receiver back on the wall phone in the kitchen and I look at it for what, a couple minutes. It's your right to look at your phone for as long as you want. Finally, I say something aloud. I say, “No problem.”
Calvin and I don't join Roger at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. What I do is go into Roger's house and take the rusty .38 caliber pistol from the shelf. He's oiled it and it will function. Calvin and I drive to Redtent Discount and buy a box of shells. On the way to Mitch's, every block, the weight of what I am doing increases. Until this drive, I have been well measured. I haven't sighed hard or said son of a bitch, but I cannot put any of what is happening back together again and I'm losing my way. I imagine the scene: I will stop at Mitch's condo, walk by the pool, go up the stairs, ring his buzzer, and when he answers I will put the old pistol under his chin and shoot him fully through the head.
We pull into the lot. It's jammed with Saabs and BMWs. I've got the .38 under my seat. The parking lot is full on a weekday. These people don't work. Suddenly something smells as if we were at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. Calvin has got the cigarette lighter and is printing burning circles in the seat.
But the sick truth in the sick pit of my stomach is that I don't really want to see Mitch. Ever. And, regardless of your anger, regardless of your rage, regardless of some other thing like electricity gone wrong in your golfer's brain, you cannot drive over and shoot your relatives. For one thing, there's Calvin. You can't drive your children over to shoot people. You're going to need a sitter.
Golf is a game full of tactical decisions, most of them so small and automatic that you hardly realize you're making them. At every distance and at every incline and turning, you decide whether to cut it close or go around, which club to use, how hard to swing. But the truth is there is no real tough stuff. You never have to decide, for example, somewhere on the seventh fairway to turn around and play back through six. It is a game with a clear etiquette and the rules are followed. Things are kept quiet and the person furthest from the hole plays first. The greens are smooth as felt and the traps are raked to look as if you were the first one to make a mistake. It is not a game to prepare young people for the simmering rigors of marriage and mortgage. It has not prepared me.
After one full night of thought, a night wandering our house, room by room, checking on the kids, sitting on the bed and then every chair in turn, and then the lawn furniture as the dawn came up, an old .38 pistol in my lap, trying to think of the one thing I could do to make things even a tiny bit better, I make a tough decision.
I put all of Tina's clothing in the street. It is a quiet activity which I do with thoroughness. By sunrise I have done a careful job, folding the clothing neatly into stacks at the edge of the street. Tina has a lot of clothes. Roger Alguire comes out to get his paper and he calls to me. “Looks like no more pizza.”
“We've had our share,” I say. I want to go inside before the huge pile of clothing can make me sad.
“When the kids get up, come over for some eggs,” he says. “And bring back my pistol,” he adds. “Before you hurt yourself.”
The parking lot at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres is full when we arrive at nine. I've never seen it full in my life. Men and women are scattered all over the nine holes, scanning the course and digging here and there. A group of five sit on the lip of the trap along the second green and watch a man trying to wrestle something from the ground. Behind them two hundred yards I can see a man and a woman circling in the rough beside the ninth fairway, their metal detectors poised. They have found something. The pocked greens and fairways today emit a different odor, less sour, something. It actually smells like Tina when she gets a permanent, toasty and serious. Several people wave at Roger and three guys come up to me opening their wallets.
By noon the clubhouse is full. I'm frying burgers and Roger is serving drinks, pop and beer. I still have a beer license. I've spent the morning filling a cigar box with greens fees and keeping an eye on Calvin. Janey walks up and back in front of the clubhouse like a hostess. On or near all the little tables are the
things
my patrons are finding in the ground. Carburetors, desk lamps, silverware. It is Saturday. Through the windows I can see hundreds of people wandering the Golf Center at Ten-Acres.
Sometime in the midafternoon there is a scream. I've let my guard down and begun smiling, and when I hear the scream I know in a second it's Janey and that everything is up in the air again. “Dad! Dad! Dad!” Janey screams, running into the room and collapsing on my knees. “Oh thank god!” Several people look over. “Dad. I've got to tell you something,” Janey goes on, her face now practical, the nurse.
“Good,” I say. “Here I am.”
“Dad,” she says, putting her hand on my wrist like a counselor, “Calvin ate some pennies.” She points out where Calvin stands on the practice green, his chin down.
Outside I lift him up and ask, “Did you put some pennies in your mouth?”
He clips his chin tighter against his chest.
It's a bad moment. I hear the tinkling of fishing lures on a hat, and Roger Alguire is at my side. He takes Calvin from me. “Did my boy eat some money?” he says and Calvin hugs him around the neck. As he does, his fists unclench and a few pennies spill to the green.
Calvin will do anything Roger says, so that when he's instructed to lie on the grass, he gets right on his back, his arms straight along his sides. Roger sits on the bench and holds the metal detector across his lap. He is adjusting the controls. “I didn't mean this to happen to your golf course,” he says, nodding out at all the people. “I just need more time. I'm eighty and I need more time to adjust to everything. We were married forever. This is all new to me.” He stands up. “Are you ready, Calvin, my boy?”
Calvin's eyes go large and he nods.
I love my son, but I start to float again, to rise above the scene as Roger steps on one of the fallen pennies and places the head of the device over his foot. The metal detector whines. “Okay,” he says. “Are we having fun, or what?” Several people have come up to the edge of the practice green to watch the demonstration. I look down on all of this, my children, my new life. What I wanted is not possible. Now, here above my riddled desert property I see that I wanted fifty-two years, someone to finish sentences for me.
“It's all right, Calvin,” Janey says. “It's an experiment.” Calvin lies still and beautiful on the lumpy practice green. My neighbor Roger Alguire runs the head of his metal detector slowly over the little boy from head to toe and back again. Things have stopped for a moment as people look up from their digging here at the Golf Center at Ten-Acres.
