C Hribal - The Company Car

And then what? The old story: they got married, had kids, Harold was sent to Vietnam. When he came home there was a huge party at his parents’ place. It must have been ninety-seven degrees that day, and Harold was sitting in a lawn chair wearing a T-shirt, a sport shirt, and a wool sweater. I couldn’t believe it. An argyle cardigan sweater. And a blanket draped over his lap. And he kept saying, “I’m cold, Ma. I just feel really, really cold.” What had happened to Harold? Nobody knew. Our father, maybe, but all our father said was “He’ll snap out of it. He just needs to unwind.” Unwind from what? Nobody was saying. But he was going to be all right, wasn’t he? His time there had just been this hunk ripped out of his life, right, but he was still the same Harold, wasn’t he? But why did he feel so cold?

Nancy was there, wearing a sexy dress that was too tight given that she’d had two babies, but she seemed upset, haggard, wrung out, as though having him back was as great a strain as dealing with his absence had been. I hadn’t seen her since Harold’s bon voyage party prior to boot camp, but for some reason I expected her to be unchanged. Harold was supposed to be unchanged as well. But they’d both changed. A lot. Harold looked like someone who was kicked and was waiting for someone to kick him again, and Nancy was flustered and impatient, the way our mother was when we got on her nerves and our father once again was AWOL.

A few years after that welcome home party, Harold comes home early one day from his Borden milk route and finds Nancy in bed with his son’s third-grade teacher. In all recountings of family lore, that is the point at which Nancy ceases to exist. Naked, legs open, caught by her husband in an adulterous embrace with another man, and then she vanishes. I don’t mean there was any foul play; there were court hearings, custody arrangements, things of that nature, but as a part of our family’s history, Nancy was erased, eradicated the way Lenin’s and Stalin’s associates kept disappearing from official photographs. And here is what I found myself wondering as I leaned on the chimney and nursed my beer, our parents’ farm spread out beneath the moon and flickering with hoarfrost, and what I think of now as I sit on the tailgate—what was it like for Nancy in between the time she asked that question of Harold in the backseat of a nearly new Dodge Dart and his homecoming? Or between his homecoming and her affair with her son’s teacher? I imagine the two of them stuck in the shudderings of time. For a while time stops for Nancy, it’s held in suspension. Her man is away, she is waiting for his return, she is a new mother, she is holding down the fort, she is a trouper. But she is also lonely, and the entire country seems to be one big love-in, and she is plodding along, not even a woman anymore, just somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. Then at a PTA meeting someone says hello with what seems like more than casual interest, and you are amazed to find that spark alive in you again, the spark that says someone notices you as a human being, and time once again begins its acceleration until all you can imagine is when you will see him again, see him next. You don’t even know how things had unfolded; they simply had. And now you have secrets, secrets you have to keep from your husband.

And your husband? He had been frozen in time while he was away, no? Stuck in that terrible place. And when he came back he was a different person, unrecognizable except for his features. Someone or something else was inhabiting the body that you lay down next to at night. It made your skin crawl. You know you should not feel like this, you know your husband needs you to lead him back from wherever it is he’s been, but you are so caught up in your secret life that you cannot see the forest for the trees. There is only the next rendezvous, the next time he leaves for work, and you know it can’t go on like this, the keeping of secrets and the disorienting passage of time. Something’s got to give. You start taking chances, have your lover over later in the afternoon, almost daring yourself to get caught. Perhaps you want to, perhaps that’s the way to end this, get things out in the open, so that the disassociations of time can rectify themselves, so you’re no longer stuck in two kinds of time, the dead time of being with your husband and the electrified, alive time of being with your lover.

And then you are caught. Are things better now? What then? What happens then?

It’s funny, but I haven’t imagined what it must have been like for Harold. I can’t go there—nothing like that ever happened to me—but he must have experienced even wilder, more violent dissociations. The agonizing slowness of battle in contrast to his heart’s clamorings, the drizzling away of days on the base, one by one by one, knowing his kids were zooming through their childhoods without him. The one thing that would keep him from going bonkers was knowing there was a constant in the world, his wife, Nancy. Sure, he had his own secrets, things that had happened to him and things he’d done that he couldn’t tell anybody, not a soul, but that was par for the course, wasn’t it? You walled up those things inside you, came home, and picked up where you’d left off. That was the way it was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? And then to come back and discover that everything had changed! He’d stayed the same—at least that was what he kept telling himself—yet everything back home had changed.

How do you reconcile these changes? How? You close your eyes and hope for the best. And then it turns out that isn’t enough.

Which brings us to Dorie and me. She had been alone for a long time before we got married, she said, and she wanted to be alone now. She started lining up bike trips one after another—a trip across Iowa followed by a trip from Madison to Duluth. For weeks I wouldn’t see her. She checked in by phone every once in a while, but it was as though she were living one life and the kids and I were living the one she’d left. And each time she came back, she seemed a little more distracted, a little more disengaged. When I asked her if she was having an affair, she replied, “Don’t be silly,” which wasn’t, technically, an answer to my question.

Things came to a head on New Year’s Eve. We were at a friend’s party. At midnight it felt as though I was holding an alien being in my arms. Like you’re on one of those dates where she kisses you to get rid of you. On the way home I asked her, “Do you still love me?” It had been a while since I’d heard her say it.

“Don’t be silly. Of course I love you.”

Then I asked, “Are you still in love with me?” There was an uncomfortably long pause.

She sighed. “I still love you, Em. It’s just I’m not ‘in love’ with you anymore.” She paused. “What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that it’s not that I love you any less, I just don’t love you the same way I used to. You understand that, don’t you?” She looked at me. We’d come to a stop sign. I was staring at the roadway in front of us. “Oh, Christ, you don’t. You don’t understand, do you? Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Little micalike flakes of snow were drifting down. An inch had already fallen. Tree limbs were etched white, the snowbanks, gray earlier in the evening, were pristine again, amber under the streetlights, softly blue in the shadows. In another life, it would have looked pretty. A car behind us honked. “Em, honey? You need to drive now.”

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the car go. My hands rested on the Villager’s steering wheel, but I couldn’t move them and I couldn’t move my feet. The car behind us swerved to get by, laying on its horn all the way. Still I didn’t move. A couple more cars drove around us before I could make my body work. I drove us home, slowly. We crept along, but in my mind we were flying, the car fishtailing, the new snow acting like sawdust on a freshly waxed floor. We were clipping the sides of cars. Dorie was screaming, “Em, stop!” I hit the accelerator hard. I cut cars off, swerving around them. Horns blared, a cacophony of blaring. Everything except what was right in front of me was a blur. “Em, stop it, you’re scaring me!” I didn’t stop. Ahead of us a traffic light went yellow, then red. I accelerated. I aimed for the heart of the intersection, where an SUV was waiting to make a left turn. “Emmiieeeeee!”