Plan B for the Middle Class (16 page)
Read Plan B for the Middle Class Online
Authors: Ron Carlson
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 wonder 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 stuffâthe “Where does âplaying 'possum' come from?” or “How are porcupines romantic?”âthere 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.
The boys and I go to the airport to pick up my parents. Walking with my sons through the terminal is like magic for me, because I am a man with a secret. My parents are flying in from Michigan to stay with the boys for a week while Katie and I go to Hawaii. I'll have to spend one day with my old prof Sorenson in his research center at the university taking notes for an article on his first panda and then half of another at the Kapiolani Zoo, looking at their arrangements for the creature, but the rest of the time Katie and I will be having sexual intercourse with short breaks to eat. And I will figure a way to tell her I've been fired. This will be our first trip away from the boys, and as I noted, everybody is three. It has been like three years in space, the four of us in a capsule circling and circling in the dark. Every time there is a lull, someone floats by in your face. “Hi, Dad.”
Katie and I moved our sex life later and later into the night, until it was being conducted with one of us half asleep, and then we tried the mornings, but the boys have always risen first and crawled in with us. Then we bought the VCR and used it to lure them into the living room mornings for twenty minutes of Chip and Dale cartoons while we touched very quietly in our bedroom and listened for little feet. That ploy actually worked pretty well for a while, and then we became guilty about using the TV that way.
We moved into the shower. That was always good, but it was difficult to hear in there and more than once we saw a small pink figure leaning against the frosted-glass shower doors. It was enough to take the starch out of things. Then a terrible thing happened: we became pragmatic about it. Interrupted once, we would shrug and smile at each other, rinse off, and start the day. Can I even explain how sad it made me to watch Katie pull on her clothing?
But now, I have a secret; I am one revolution of the earth away from the most astonishing sex carnival ever staged by two married people.
This is what I tell myself. And I believe it, but there's more. Though Katie hasn't said anything, I suspect she knows I'm not Zoo Lewis anymore. Cracroft told me I was history on Tuesday and then he's called and tried to be helpful twenty times. The syndicate is dropping the column. We both know why, but they cite numbers. I'm down to fifty-two papers from over a hundred and seventy. The papers are dropping the column. The
Blade
, the
Register
, the
Courier
, the
Post.
They can't handle the backlash. I'm too political. Maybe I am. It is no longer possible to write cute pieces about the dolphin, the mandrill, the Asian elephant. But this all started with four pieces on simple amphibians and what one of my hate-mail correspondents called “creeping evolutio-environmental liberal bullshit.” Cracroft says
no problem
, most of the papers will do reruns of old columns for six months, and that should give me enough time to come up with some freelance stuff of a more “general nature” and maybe pitch a book.
Zoo Lewis bites the dust. Maybe he should. I was getting cranky. I've enjoyed it more than I planned to, and only one other time was there trouble: after I wrote an appreciation of the wolf, a very bright, misunderstood creature who mates for life. We got two pounds of mail from Montana and lost the
Star
and the
Ledger.
Cracroft is a good guy. I don't blame Cracroft. He called and said I could keep my modem. He said, “I'm sorry, Lewis. Your work is good. It may just be time to shake up the feature page.”
“What should I do?” I asked him. We've known each other for ten years.
“You're good,” he said. “Go to plan B.”
I smiled and thanked him for the modem. Plan B. Zoo Lewis
was
plan B. I was going to be a veterinarian. I was going to doctor animals, but I couldn't because of the allergiesâthey tried to kill me more than once. We can't even have a dog or a cat or a ferret. We can have fish in a tank, but I don't want fish. I couldn't be a vet, so I became a journalist. I'm in plan B. And it's not working.
At the gate, I am surprised. When my parents emerge, I have to look twice. It's not that I don't recognize them; it is that I recognize them too well. They haven't changed in a year. Why don't they look older? My mother wears her sure-of-herself grin, having gone out into the world once again and found herself still every bit the match for it. The interactions of men and women have always amused her. “Society,” she used to tell me, “is not quite finished. Don't
ever
fret and stew about your place in it.”
My father comes forward beside her, carrying his small valise in which there will be four or five pads of blue-lined graph paper already bearing the beginnings of several letters and drawings. He will have seen something from the window of the plane, where he always sits, that has struck him as worthy of improvement and he will have begun the plans. He works on half a dozen projects at a time. When he retired from General Motors four years ago, the grid pads just continued. He has fourteen obscure patents and is always working on two or three more in far-flung fields: a design for a safety fence for horse racing; a design for pressure tanks containing viscous liquids; a tennis racket grip. He writes me every week on the beautiful paper describing his projects and his current concerns. Most recently he's been considering the rules and statistics of baseball and has in mind several revisions. I watch my father approach with his easy stride and calm smile and I am paralyzed. He doesn't look older at all. He looks, and this has my mouth open,
just like me.
It took them almost forty years, but my genes have jelled. No wonder my three-year-old sons leap away, weaving through the travelers, to grab the hands of my mother and my father.
When I join them, my mother has already pulled two dinosaurs out of her bag and awarded one to each of the boys. I kiss my mother and when I step back she runs her hand up over my ear through the white in my hair and smiles. My father hugs me, letting his hand stay across my shoulder as he always has since my Little League days. Harry has examined his toy, feeling the snout and counting the claws, and finding it authentic, he is very pleased. “Isn't it great?” I say to him. “A brontosaurus.”
“Dad,” Harry corrects me. “It's not.”
“It's an allosaurus,” my mother says. I look at her and she gives me the look she's always had for me, the sweet, chiding challenge:
You can catch up if you'd like. None of this is beyond you.
But I'm not so sure. It may be beyond me, and if not, I'm not sure I want to catch up. It no longer surprises me that everyone is ahead of me. My parents are keeping up on dinosaurs.
At home, my father helps me start the barbecue and we stand on the patio in the early dark. He is drinking one of Katie's margaritas and looking around at the sky as if listening for something.
“We won't have a night like this until June,” he says.
“I know. February is a bonus here. June is a hundred and ten.” I am arranging the chicken pieces on the hot grill. I'd like to tell my father about what is happening, that my job is over, but there is really no need. He knows already. My mother let it slip on the phone that my column wasn't running in the
Journal
anymore. My parents have always been mind readers. He can tell that change is at hand by the way I use the tongs on the chicken. This mode of communication is actually a comfort. It spares our talking like people on television.