C Hribal - The Company Car

“Modest hopes, modest dreams,” I tell my siblings. Waiting for our parents to ride over our heads in a balloon, I find I am suddenly sentimental, forgiving. I think back to those photos taken of our parents before they were married. That photo of the skinny young man in the alley with his hat flying away behind him, and the one of the young woman in the velvet dress, sitting on a tricycle with a lot of juicy thigh showing. A borrowed car, a trike, and a certain devil-may-care cheeriness and willingness to face the world and all it had to offer—that’s what our parents had to start with. And from that our father hoped to deliver us into a land of milk and honey. And to create for himself an impregnable castle to come home to after he was done with his weekly fight with the world.

Our mother wanted even less. Companionship, someone to drive her around, an enclosed circle of safety within the borders of our house. She didn’t expect such safety out in the larger world, where she knew, things happened. In fact, out there she expected them to happen—disappointments in love and sex, unfulfilling jobs, backstabbing co-workers, incompetent supervisors, bad marriages, cretinous lovers. “But you will always have a home to come home to,” she told us, meaning her home, our first home. And when we would call home from far away, she would entertain us by reciting a litany of catastrophe shocking in its plainness—deaths, dismemberments, divorces, suicides. As though if she recited this litany she could pretend, could convince herself, that we would never find a place within it.

If our parents had bigger dreams, if they wanted more, they didn’t tell us.

In the last years of the twentieth century, our parents gave up any hope of their family surviving intact into happiness. For our father, this was something to rail against, bitterly. For our mother, the most she seemed to hope was for us to survive into contentment. To weather whatever came with a certain grace and dignity, and when that failed, to shrug and keep our opinions to ourselves.

We learned to rail. We learned to shrug.

Our parents weren’t ahead of the curve so much as they were the curve. Or rather, once upon a time they were the curve, when they left Chicago with all those other post-Korea hopefuls. Then they were ahead of the curve, when they decamped the suburbs for the country. Then they were behind it again, holding out as the farms disappeared and the subdivisions mushroomed. Finally, as their taxes skyrocketed, they wondered if they should rejoin the curve, sell it all off, the farm our father had always dreamed of, and take the very tidy nest egg that resulted and move to Montrose, Colorado—the last great dream of our father, as it turns out.

They sprang that on us at the end of brunch. Before the wedding party and all the friends and relatives arrived for the public party, before the balloon launch, we got together, just the family. Wally Jr. in his wheelchair, Cinderella minus Mel, whom she would never marry, Robert Aaron and Audrey and their brood, Ike and his wife, Sam, and their blended families, me and mine, Ernie and the pregnant Cindy, Peg Leg Meg and her beau, Greg. Here we all were, gathered on the day of our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, giddy as kids on Christmas morning.

Things had gotten better. After Wally Jr.’s accident and our father’s breakdown, things did get better. He had been chastised, we had been scared; it seemed like things were heading toward normal. Even some of his financial schemes have turned out okay. A dozen and a half of the black walnuts did make it to maturity, and some high-end cabinetry company will pay our parents fifty thousand a tree. And the land itself? Let’s just say our parents’ wants will be well-funded. We’ve turned out okay, too. I married Dorie Keillor, the world’s unlikeliest girl next door. Things remain rocky between us, but we are still married. Ike, too, had remarried. Granted, it wasn’t a church wedding, but it was a ceremony. He and Sam pledged their troth beneath a scrub oak on some hillock in western Montana. They showed us pictures. Lots of sky, a cabin, the humans insignificant. There are seven people in the photographs: Sam, Ike, Sam’s three kids from a previous marriage, Ike’s two from his. The bride is wearing jeans and a Russian peasant blouse, the groom fringed buckskins and turquoise. His hair is plaited, and the braids rest on his chest like matching pull cords. The children stand like sentinels in a feral American Gothic, holding spears instead of pitchforks. They are their own tribe. Somewhere in Tennessee, Ike’s two other children live with their mother. They will never know him. We will never know them. But the rest of their kids are here, and Robert Aaron and Audrey, not tired of love, adopted Janie and Joe, then had Jake, a late surprise they cherish simply for his existence. Peg Leg Meg got married and divorced—a first marriage as short and disastrous as my own—and she seems happy enough with Greg. Even Cinderella’s children have fared better in some instances, and certainly no worse, than other children of divorce. Perhaps the best indication, though, that the offspring of Cinderella and Oswald Grunner are going to be all right is that, except for Okie II, they all want their mother’s maiden name back. They want to be Czabeks.

So there were our parents, surrounded by fecundity, thirty-eight fecundities in all, the sprawl of progeny, our father’s philosophy of excess made flesh. And what does our father do? He drops the big one on us.

“We’re selling the farm,” he says. “And moving to Colorado.”

“Wally-Bear, don’t exaggerate. We’re thinking of selling the farm. We’re thinking of moving to Colorado.” We look at them, dumbfounded. First, because we don’t believe they would do it. Don’t believe they could do it. We don’t care if their prospective new home is in a happy valley, a place where the temperatures are mild, even in winter. Where the sun shines always and the winds are temperate and a man and a woman can look forward to their remaining years together with other empty-nesters in retirement condos and ranch houses, well-serviced and well-fed, in green fields, beneath a mountain’s majesty and a canyon’s red and yellow walls and God’s unending and azure sky. They would be moving away from their children and grandchildren. They want to move away from all this? Away from us ? What are they thinking?

“Mom,” I ask, “is this what you meant last night when you told Cinderella that you and Wally-Bear have everything taken care of?”

“Not completely,” says our mother enigmatically.

Not completely?

“We have other contingencies,” says our mother, and it’s clear she’s not going to offer up anything more. We are ready to write this off as another of our father’s scatterbrained ideas until he zizzes the rubber band off the rolled-up plans he’s had drawn up by a developer. We decide to humor them.

“Who?” asks Ernie.

“Don’t worry,” says our father. “Someone reputable.”

“A reputable developer,” says Ernie. “That’s a contradiction in terms, ainna?”

We drink, we toast, we cheer. Our parents’ guests will be here soon, and then we need to drive our parents over to Chetaqua and get them in their balloon so they can make their grand arrival midparty. But first our father wants to show us his plans. He rolls them out across the chip dip and the artichoke hearts, across the mayonnaise and the mustard, across the rye bread and the dill pickles, across the salami and the sliced ham.

And there it is. The very thing our father had fled thirty-five years previous—a subdivision on top of our farm. Everything lotted out, sweeping roadways leading back to one cul-de-sac after another, irregular pie slices and puzzle pieces carving up God’s green acres. The woods—gone. The marsh—a pond now with “lake access” or “lake frontage” lettered into the lots that face it. The fields subdivided into curved lots that look like aerial views of 1950s furniture, dotted lines marching across our farm like schematics of how to carve up a side of beef.