C Hribal - The Company Car

“No shit, Sherlock,” said the doctor.

“And I’ll be better if I do like you say?”

“Well, you won’t be any worse. But let’s face it, Wally. You’ve done a number on your body, and medical science can do only so much. But let’s at least give it a fair shot, shall we?”

Strangely enough, our father agreed. He had cataract surgery and another angioplasty. He wore a black patch over the exploded veins in his eye. He finally started taking his diabetes medicine, his blood thinners, his beta-blockers. He semi-quit drinking, he semi-watched his diet. Or rather our mother watched his diet for him. Now, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, just like us when we were children, he’s the one who receives the one-third glass of champagne and has to sneak the other two-thirds. And when it’s time for the toast, he holds up his puddle of bubbly and gets this elfin grin on his face like he knows he’s getting away with something.

We smile, too, relieved he’s alive. But we’re a little scared, too. He’s not gotten away with everything he thinks he has. It’s now been a good decade since those strokes, since he wanted to blow up the Smithsonian, but his body and his mind’s slow collapse is exactly why we gathered last night to talk over what we should do about our parents.

His flesh sags in ways it never did when he was a hundred pounds heavier. He’s still a big man, but it’s like watching a fat, juicy sausage being reduced to a hard biscuit before your eyes. You want to say he looks good, but he doesn’t. Partly that’s your fault. You had gotten used to his obesity. Now it’s a shock to see him shrunken and sunken like this.

I think of all the things he missed out on: first steps, first words, first stitches, First Communions, first arguments, first dates, first plays, first graduations, first this, first that. But why limit it to firsts? What about the thousands upon thousands of quotidian events that made up who we were and who we are? Why skip over those? He wouldn’t. We only think he would because he did miss them. And even as adults we believe that if he missed them, then he wanted to miss them. We weren’t listening to the stories he told us, and he wasn’t telling us everything anyway. His fascination with his time in the service, his selfishness, his self-absorption—it was a way of coping with long absence. And in his own mind, everything he did he did for us—the move to Elmhurst, the move to the farm, the long, long hours traveling, the sacrifice of family time for the slightly bigger commission, the kahuna commission waiting out there in the deep of both plumbed and virgin Territory.

The Territory, the Territory. Our father rocking along to the rhythm of the steam train pistons in the opening number of Meredith Willson’s Music Man, crying along with the other peddlers on the train, “But he doesn’t know the Territory!” Yet being enamored of Robert Preston—Professor Harold Hill—who doesn’t know the Territory and doesn’t care to, who plays by his own rules, who digs deep into his bag of tricks, and pulls one out of his ass. Our father believing the world worked that way, some alchemy of the two. He was with the peddlers on the playing-by-the-rules thing, yet he cheered Robert Preston every time he fooled the townspeople who wanted to see his credentials.

Our father played by the rules. He inhaled them. He became them. He hated them. But he continued to believe in them. And he took all of us—wife and kids—along for the ride.

Like most couples starting out after the war, our parents were young and scared and hopeful. They either didn’t know or didn’t want to believe that what was coming down the turnpike was aimed straight at them.

Drugs, Divorce, Depression, Death—the Four Riders of the Suburban-Exurban Apocalypse—you couldn’t stop any of it. Bad things happen. Bad things happen to everybody. Our parents wanted to believe differently. Everybody did. Everybody was the exception. Everybody was the rule.

Our father thought he could beat the rules by playing by them. The odds were stacked against him, but in excess there was possibility. In excess there was hope. They had seven of us trying to beat the odds, trying to get ahead of the curve. Our father threw himself into our mother again and again in the sheer exuberance and exhilaration of beating the odds.

It is a curiously American belief. But then, our dad is America. Our parents are America. His bald head, his piebald arms. We are safe now from his schemes. Or are we? And why did we rebel and reject and scoff in the first place? Because his was a generation that dared to believe in dreams? Because ours was one that didn’t? Or was it simply that their dreams, being more modest, also seemed attainable, and while we were dreaming big—world peace, the brotherhood of man—we couldn’t bear to see somebody else striving for something more modest, something that seemed to be so easily, impossibly within our reach?

We are up on the roof, all of us. Even Wally Jr., whom we again haul up with ropes, then block the wheels on his chair so he won’t go rolling off the gutters. We packed our parents off earlier, drove them to a field, watched them board a balloon, watched the launch, followed them for a little while, then hightailed it back here and scrambled up on the rooftop so we could watch them come in over our heads. We can hardly believe it. We are waiting for our parents’ arrival, and they are arriving by balloon. We also got everyone from their wedding party who is still alive to witness this. They are going to come over the hill from Otis Kempke’s farm, over Wally Jr. and Claire’s double-wide, over our heads, and they are going to sit that balloon down in the lower part of the field, where we’ve painted a bright red X on the shorn alfalfa. And we are going to climb down, those of us on the roof, and get in cars and trucks and drive or run down our field to greet them, to drink champagne—more champagne! we’ve been drinking it all day—to toast them, to wish them another fifty years together. They have survived—my God!—and we are stunned and taken aback and grateful.

We have spent the day talking about our parents. There is a nursing home on the horizon now, yes, regardless of what other remedies—elder home, assisted care facility—we try before that, but we’re not going to talk about that now. Partly because it shames us that none of us is willing to look out for our parents 24-7, the way they devoted their lives to looking out for us and their own parents, and partly because we are celebrating their expansive past, not their limited future.

“Our parents are America,” I tell my siblings, and they scoff, tell me I’m cockeyed. It’s getting near dusk. I’ve been drinking champagne since breakfast. The sky is pink and pale blue and gray, the color of a mollusk, and the fields still have that look of winter about them. The wind is raw even though it’s barely blowing. We had to pay extra to get the balloon company to take our parents up on a day like this; their season usually starts in late April or early May. “But it’s for our parents,” we explain, “their fiftieth wedding anniversary,” and for a couple hundred extra dollars the operator agrees to do us a favor.

Perhaps I am cockeyed. “I have always thought of our father as an immense man living a small life,” I say, and I try to explain. I tell them that, like most of us, he did not live his life to its fullest margins. Or rather, having glimpsed, when a young man, just how wide those margins were, he decided to take on instead something he thought he could manage.

“He ain’t dead yet, Emcee,” says Wally Jr. “Stop eulogizing him.”

But I can’t stop. Our mother, I continue to tell them, got an even smaller glimpse of what the wide world had in store for her, but she was in love with our father, and she acceded to what he wanted, and it was a long time down the road before she realized she had settled for less than what she wanted—Wally-Bear was plenty, I think she reasoned—and by then it was too late.