Plan B for the Middle Class Read online

  The Spring Carnival on our campus is a bacchanalian festival. It is designed with clear vengeance: victory over winter has been achieved and this celebration is to make sure. Years ago, it was held on the quad and consisted of a few quaint booths, but it has grown, exploded really, to the point where now every corner of campus is covered with striped tents and the smell of barbecued this and that clouds the air. I haven’t been in years.

  But. Hartwell’s invitation was tantalizing, and then it was all tripled by something that happened the last week of classes. I was packing my briefcase in my office in Normal when the door opened. There wasn’t a knock or a hello, the door just swung open and Hartwell’s Laurie was hanging on it, half out of breath, her blond hair swinging like something primeval. “Oh, good,” she said. “You’re here. Listen, Downey,” she said, using my nickname without hesitation, “Hart and I are going to the carnival and he mentioned you might like to go. Please do. You know it’s Friday. We’re going to eat and then take it all in.” Hartwell’s Laurie looked at me and smiled, her tan cheeks not twenty-two years old. “It’s going to be fun, you know,” she said and closed the door.

  Well, an interview such as that makes me sit down, and down I did sit. I took the old old bottle of brandy out of my bottom drawer, a bottle so old my father had bought it in Havana on one of his trips, and I had half an ounce right there. Downey. I was jangled. So she and Hartwell called me Downey, when they called me anything. The prospect of being talked about set part of me adrift.

  To the carnival I went.

  But I didn’t go with them. I told Hartwell that I might see him at the carnival, but to go ahead. It was the last week of classes and I had a lot to read. Friday afternoon I was plowing through a stack of rhetoric papers when—outside my window—I heard the Gypsy Parade, the kazoos and tambourines that signal the commencement of festivities. A feeling came to me that I hadn’t had in years. I had heard this ragtag music every spring of every year I’d been in Normal Hall, but this year it was different. It called to me. I felt my heart begin to drum, and I put down my pen like a schoolboy called outside by his mates. It was the last Friday of the school year and I was going to the carnival.

  Part of all this, naturally, was a sympathetic feeling I had for Hartwell. Laurie had invited him to the carnival, after all. I was—and I’ll admit this freely—happy for him. At the corner I stopped and bought a pink carnation and pinned it to my old brown jacket and I thrust my hands into the pockets and plunged into the carnival. The crowds of shouting and laughing merrymakers passed around me in the alleyway of tented amusements. It was just sunset and the shadows of things ran to the edge of the world, giving the campus I knew so well an unfamiliar face, and I had the sense of being in a strange new village as I walked along. Bells rang, whistles blew, and a red ball bounced past. I saw Melissa, Hartwell’s former wife, on the arm of one of our Ph.D. students, eating cotton candy. By the time I’d walked to an intersection of these exotic lanes, I had two balloons in my hand and it was full dark.

  I bought some popcorn and walked on beneath the colored lights. Groups of students passed by in twos and threes. They didn’t see me, but I know that I had taught some of them. I felt a tug at my arm then and it was Laurie, saying, “Downey. Great balloons!” She had Hartwell by the other arm.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling at both of them and tugging at the two huge balloons. “They’re big, aren’t they?”

  Hartwell was in his prime. He looked like a film actor and confidence came off him in waves. He wore a new white flannel jacket and a red silk tie. “They’re absolutely grand!” Hartwell said. “They’re the best balloons in this country!”

  Laurie pulled us over to a booth where for a dollar a person could throw three baseballs at a wall of china plates. The booth was being managed by a boy I recognized from this semester’s rhetoric class, though he wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

  “I want you two to win me a snake,” Laurie said, pointing to the large stuffed animals that hung above our heads.

  “Absolutely,” Hartwell said, reaching in his pocket for the money. Hartwell was going to pitch baseballs at the plates. It was a thrilling notion—and when he broke one with his final throw, that was thrilling too.

  “Well,” I said. “If we’re going to ruin china, I’m going to be involved.” I paid the boy a dollar and threw three baseballs, smashing one plate only.

  We stayed there awhile, acting this way, until on my third set, I broke three plates, and the boy, looking as shocked as I did, handed me a huge cloth snake. It was pink. Hartwell was right there, patting my back and squeezing my arm in congratulation, and I imagine we made quite a scene, Laurie kissing my cheek and smiling as I handed her the prize. I’ll say this now: it was a funny feeling there in the green and yellow lights of the carnival—I’d never been patted on the back before in my life. I am not the kind of person who gets patted on the back, which is fine with me, but when Hartwell did it there, calling out “Amazing! Magnificent!” it felt good.

  We floated down the midway, arm in arm after that, until I realized we had walked all the way down to Front Street, which is the way I walk for home. I said good night to them there, Hartwell and I bowing ridiculously and then shaking hands and smiling and Laurie kissing my cheek lightly one more time and calling, “Good night, Downey!” I turned onto Front Street and then turned back and watched them walk away, Laurie tightly on Hartwell’s arm. They stopped once and I saw them kiss. She put her hand on his cheek and kissed his lips.

  As I moved down Front Street, the noises of the carnival receded with every step and soon there was just me and my two balloons in an old town I knew quite well.

  It is not like me to enter houses uninvited. I have never done it. But I was in a state. I can’t describe the way I felt walking home, but it was about happiness for Hartwell and a feeling I had about Hartwell’s Laurie. I had begun to whistle a lurid popular tune that I’d heard at the carnival. This should tell you something, because I do not whistle. And when I came to Old Tilden Lane, where all the sorority houses are lined up, I turned down.

  I’d been to all of the Greek houses at one time or another. Each fall, the shiny new officers invite some of the faculty out to chat or lecture or have tea in the houses, and we do it when we’re younger because it counts as “service” toward tenure or we’re flattered (we’re always flattered), and I had done my canned “English Department” presentation at Tri-Delt years ago.

  I found Tri-Delta, halfway down the winding street tucked between two other faded mansions. It was almost ten o’clock. The lights were on all through the house and the windows and doors thrown open. I walked up the wide steps and into the vestibule. Everyone was at the carnival at this hour and I felt an odd elation standing in the grand and empty house.

  This was among the strangest things I have ever done as a college professor—wander into a sorority house. But I did. I went through the living room and up the wooden stairway to the second floor and I went from door to door, reading the nameplates. The doors were all partially open and I could see the chambers in disarray, books scattered on the beds and underthings on the floor. The hallway smelled musty and sweet, and the doors were festooned with collages of clippings and photographs and memorabilia so that many times I had to read the notes to discover whose room it was. It was kind of delicious there in the darkened hallway, sensing that hours ago a dozen young women had dressed and brushed their hair in these rooms.

  At the end of the corridor, on a dark paneled door, there were several sheets of white typing paper, and I saw instantly that this was Laurie’s room, even before I went close enough to read any of it. It was, of course, Hartwell’s poetry. The poem I had seen was taped there, along with five others he had typed and not shown me. Now, however, each was scrawled with red-ink marginalia in the loopy, saccharine handwriting of sorority girls. Their comments were filthy, puerile, and inane. Obscene ridicule. My heart beat against my forehead suddenly, and my eyes burned. Through
her open door, I saw Laurie’s red plaid kilt on the floor next to a black slip. I felt quite old and quite heavy and very out of place.

  I fled. I rattled down the stairway, taking two steps at a time, and across the foyer and back into the night. A couple, arm in arm, were coming through the door. They were drunk and I nearly knocked them over. I recovered and hurried into the dark of Old Tilden Lane, where I found something on my hand, and I released the two balloons.

  I am a man who lives in six rooms half a mile from the campus where I teach. I like Chopin, Shostakovich, Courvoisier, and Kona coffee. I have a library of just over two thousand books. After these things, my similarities with Hartwell end. He has his life and I have mine, and he is not like me at all. We are lonely men who teach in college. I’ll give you that.

  DeRAY

  One thing led to another. Liz and I started fixing up our place before the baby came. First the nursery and then wallpaper in the hall and new carpet and then new linoleum and new cabinets in the kitchen and then a new small bay window for the kitchen; and it was through this new window that we would look out upon the lot and silently measure the progress of the weeds.

  I was ready to use August to lean back and do a little reading, but you get a woman and an infant standing in a tidy little bay window looking out at a thorny desert and seeing a grassy playground, and you get out the grid paper and sharpen the pencils and start making plans.

  A dump truck unloaded nine yards of mountain topsoil. I took delivery of eighteen railroad ties and four hundred and fifty used bricks. I tiered the garden with three levels of ties and laid a brick walkway along the perimeter. I dug the postholes and stained the redwood before I assembled the fence, and then, when I nailed the boards in place—just so along the string line on top—that’s when my plan became apparent from the window. It would be a little world, safe, enclosed, where my daughter, when she got around to walking, would tumble in the thick green grass.

  It was a dry summer and I’d wait until late in the day when the house could throw its shadow on the project and then I’d plunge out into the heat. Our pup, Burris, wouldn’t even go out with me. I was only good for two hours, and then I’d stumble into the house, dehydrated, a crust of dirt on my forehead, my shirt soaked through. Burris would lift his head from the linoleum and then go back to sleep.

  Evenings while my strength held, I marched around the yard, pulling my old stepladder loaded with four cinder blocks, leveling the topsoil. I would drag it in slow figure eights through the thick dirt with the rope cutting at my chest like a crude halter. And it was during this time, during my dray-horse days, that my neighbor DeRay would cruise in on his cycle and come to the fence and say, “Hey, good for you, Ace. I’d give you a hand, but I’ve already got a job. But you know where you can find a beer later.”

  So I started going over there when I’d feel the first dizziness from the heat. I’d drop the rope and pick my wet shirt away from my chest and walk next door and visit with DeRay.

  If I told you that DeRay was a guy who was on parole and loved his motorcycle, it would be misleading, though he did have a big blue tattoo of a skull and a rose. He wore size-thirteen engineer boots and a biker’s black cap, greasy as a living thing. In the evenings he arrived home, proud as a man on a horse, yanking the big Harley back onto its stand, and throwing his right leg back over the bike purposefully to come to the ground and stand as a body utterly capable of trouble.

  But the picture needs qualification. For instance: it wasn’t actually parole. It was like parole. Once a month DeRay saw a guy at social services to state that he had not been in any bars. He could not go into a bar for another four months, because he used to be in barroom fights. He would go to biker bars and when a fight would start, he would fight. It was his personality, they told him. He knew none of the people in the fights and the fights weren’t about him in any way, but his personality—when it was exposed to a fight, especially indoors—dictated that he fight too. So, it wasn’t parole. And he did have that tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, but unless he stopped to show it to you it was hard to tell there was a rose. It looked like a birthmark.

  He showed it to me one night on his front porch. Evenings were cool there and that is where he and Krystal sat on an old nappy couch and watched the traffic and drank beer. They drank exactly five six-packs every night, he told me, and—at first—thirty cans seemed a lot, and I worried that there might be a fight, but I came to see that DeRay generally slowed down over the evening, climbing off the porch in those big boots to move his Lawn Jet, or to pack another six beers into the Igloo. Some nights he stood and talked to the traffic. If he started talking like that while I was around, I stood and quietly left. It was his business.

  The thing about DeRay that cannot be minimized was his love for his motorcycle. It was a large Harley-Davidson with a beautiful maroon gas tank and chrome fenders. The world was ten miles deep in the reflections. The way he listened to it when he first kicked the starter; the way he kept it running—silent—when he drove away in the morning as if man and machine were being sucked into a vacuum, disappearing down the street; the way he dismounted with clear pleasure—these things showed his affection.

  Once Liz was out in front of our garage putting Allie in the stroller when DeRay came up and plucked the baby from her, saying, “Come on over here, baby, check these wheels.” He put Allie on the seat of the huge motorcycle and she broke into a real grin. She could see her face in a dozen shiny places. “See,” DeRay said to Liz, “she loves it. It won’t be long.” He called to the porch: “Hey, Krystal, check this out!”

  Krystal appeared and leaned over. “Oh, right, DeRay. She’s a real mama. She’s your new mama, all right.”

  I watched it all from our new kitchen window, and seeing DeRay there holding the baby on the Harley, I thought: There’s the center—the two most loved things on the block.

  Both DeRay and Krystal were somewhere in their forties. She was a lean woman who looked good in tight jeans. In the face she resembled Joan Baez, perhaps a little more worn—and her nose was larger, pretty and hawklike at the same time. Her long reddish hair was wired with some gray and she usually wore it all in a bandanna. She told me she was one of four women who were on line crews in the entire state. She made it sound like a lot of fun. I’d sit on their porch, my head full of bubbles anyway with yard fever, dirt, and cold beer. One of my calves would start to tremble, and I imagined if I worked with Krystal she’d always be telling me what to do, like a mother, and I would do it. Her lean face seemed hard and affectionate. It had seen a lot of traffic, that was clear. From the corner of the porch, I could see my new kitchen window—Liz in there moving around the high chair.

  One night when I was at DeRay’s, Krystal went inside where we could hear her on the phone. “Her in-laws,” DeRay told me. “Old Krystal’s had herself a couple of cowboys.”

  Later, we were just talking when out of the blue he said, “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  I knew that he was going to make some confession, a theft or beating a woman, some threat he’d made stick. He looked hard that night, his face vaguely blue in the early-evening gloom.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Burn down the ROTC Building.” It was an old joke. I was on the roof of the building the night it burned, but I was only peripherally involved in the crime.

  “Oh, arsony,” DeRay mocked. “That’s terrible.”

  I drank from my beer and went ahead: “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  “What you’re doing now.”

  “What?” I sat up. “What am I doing?”

  “Dragging dirt around. Putting in a yard.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I hear that. It’s torture.”

  “No you don’t. You don’t even know,” he said. “I’ve had three houses. How old do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know. Forty-five?”

  “Forty-nine.” He rocked forward and threw his beer can out with the oth
ers. “I’ve had three families, for chrissakes. And that doesn’t even count this deal here.” He gestured over his shoulder where Krystal was on the phone. He snapped another beer open and grimaced over the first sip: “I mean, I put in some lawns.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” I said.

  “Nah.” He waved it off. “You can’t even hear me. But listen, when you dig for the sprinklers, rent a trencher. You won’t be sorry.”

  And DeRay was right. There is nothing better after an unbroken plain or manual labor than to introduce a little technology into the program. The trencher was beautiful. The large treaded tires measured the line exactly and the entire mechanism crawled across my yard like a tortoise. The trench was carved as if with a knife, straight sides and a square bottom exactly eight inches from the surface. All the other feats of the past year, the room in the basement, the kitchen window, my straight fence, vanished before this, the first stage of my sprinkling system. That night I worked way beyond my usual quitting time. When I finally looked up, I saw the yellow light in the kitchen; the world was dark.

  This is when DeRay opened the gate and came up and took the handlebars of the trencher out of my hands and conducted it to the end of the line. It was the last ditch. He surveyed the yard and switched the machine off. “Yeah, it’s a good, simple machine,” he said. “Load it up and come over for a beer.”

  I stayed at their place until almost eleven. I didn’t count as I left, but I knew there were more than thirty empties on the lawn. DeRay receded from the conversation and Krystal told me about her first husband, who was in a mental health facility in Denver, a chronic schizophrenic. She filed to divorce him while he was in the hospital. “He was as crazy as you get to be,” she said. “I still keep in touch with his mom and dad in Oklahoma City. He was a dear boy,” Krystal said, “but he couldn’t keep two things together and his jealousy cost me three jobs.”

  When I went home all the lights were off. I took my clothes off in the garage as always and padded in. Liz was in bed watching television. I could hear people laughing. I turned on the bathroom light, and Liz said, “How’re the Hell’s Angels?”