Plan B for the Middle Class (15 page)

“What?” Carl looked at her.

“There's something to know about necklaces,” she said.

“What is it? What is there?” Carl pointed down the empty roadway, “You can turn now, Ruth. There's nobody coming.”

Ruth measured the turn with exaggerated care. “She's not his girlfriend,” she said.

At home the house was empty though the television was on. Ruth stood and watched it for a moment—a highrise building was burning. Carl slumped through the room, his eyes half shut, waving both palms at her and going straight to bed. Ruth sat down and slipped off her shoes. On television now, two blond men smeared with camouflage grease in sleeveless T-shirts, carrying automatic weapons, detonators, and a strange sphere, entered an elevator. This is where Sean would say to her, “Those are the bad guys, Mom.” It was one of their jokes—the way she had always talked to him as a child when he watched television. Ruth watched the screen. She had distinctly heard him say it, “She's such a cunt.” Several of the upper stories of the building exploded, spraying fans of white sparks into the night.

Leaving the television on, Ruth went into the kitchen and made herself a scotch and water. She wandered back through the house, every room, straightening things in the dark, her desk—so clean already—Sean's bed—neat too—in a room so clearly still a boy's, the walls all athletes and animals, his first debate trophy on the shelf (Carl's phrase, “
Your first
”). In the glowing dark she touched the dish of change on his bureau and then suddenly became self-conscious, her face warm, as if she'd been going through his pockets, and she moved into the hallway and then to the front of the house, making sure again that the porch light was on.

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.

E
verybody'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 videos 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.”