C Hribal - The Company Car

Our mother claims that this was a singular occurrence, a stray moment when her feelings overwhelmed her—it was hot, she was pregnant with me—and she was fine after that, she just needed to compose herself. And we would believe her except our parents are great rewriters of their own history, our mother more so since she has few documents to contradict her. Our father, prompted by a ship’s yearbook or photograph, can slip back into exactly how he felt when that photo was taken, and even if the memory has too much rose around the edging, you get the feeling that for him it probably did feel pretty much that way. For him everything was a big adventure.

Our mother, though, when confronted with a picture, edits. You can see it on her face, in the struggle on her lips, the slight misting in the eyes—she feels something intensely but can’t bring herself to say that, whatever it was she was feeling. “Oh, this, ” she’ll say, biting her lip, “this is from when Darlene and I went up to Point Loma and the Sunset Cliffs.” The photo is of two silhouettes and what is probably a brilliant sunset, but rendered in black and white you can’t tell. What you can tell is that one of the silhouettes, our mother’s, is clearly pregnant. “It was before Sarah was born,” our mother says, and you can hear in her voice a trace of longing, a trace of disappointment. “Darlene was pregnant, too, only you can’t see it yet,” and we wonder: in addition to missing their men, what did they talk about? The babies growing inside them, yes, but what else? Did our mother feel a connection to this woman, did they feel they shared something, their blood thickening, their breasts getting fuller, their bellies distending, the bloat in their hands and ankles, the dark circles under their eyes, did they feel marked, set apart, bonded? They were taking part in an age-old ritual—women great with child going up the headlands to stare out at the sea over which their men had disappeared. Yet didn’t they also feel left out? Central, yet extraneous? Mere vessels, their personalities erased by their function, by the ritual itself? Wasn’t our mother suffused with loss even before she knew that loss was what she felt? You can’t tell unless you read into the photographs, those game grins our mother has, straining at the corners of her mouth to keep the smile in place for the camera, not letting it shatter, and the eyes, the eyes full up to bursting with squelched desires, with bitten-back thoughts.

What is it that she’s leaving out? That she had no friends? That the women on the base had a camaraderie they extended to our mother only when they infrequently remembered her? That Mrs. Mapole, rather than being a comfort, was needy, dependent, and a little off, always dropping by for coffee and a monologue on her dead son, lost at sea (not exactly what our mother wanted to hear), and a different monologue on her husband, whose stroke had left him paralyzed and unable to communicate, a thin rope of drool hanging from his mouth while Mrs. Mapole talked to him, as she did to our mother, as though the listener weren’t there. Our mother, therefore, had a double burden, her kids and her landlady. “Hey, can I have a minute?” Mrs. Mapole would say, and that would be the end of the morning. Is it any wonder that Nomi came to visit? That our mother was desperate for company who might inquire as to how she was feeling? That our mother was going stir-crazy, a polite euphemism for going crazy period?

“I cried all day today,” our mother wrote our father at one point. “I don’t know why, I suppose I must have been missing you.” She goes on to other things in the letter, private things, but the tone is of a woman who has ascribed a cause to her feelings that she doesn’t believe but is trying to convince herself is true.

When we ask our mother what were her happiest moments in San Diego, she will say, “Happiest moments?” as though it would be a struggle to recall any. Then she’ll say, “Besides your father coming home?” and she’ll pause again before telling us that the moments she recalls most fondly are the laying-in periods at the base hospital after she gave birth to Sarah and Robert Aaron. “The maternity stays at the base hospital?” Sarah asks. Our mother explains. “They had you lay in for a week back then, and there might be fifteen or twenty of us, all pregnant from the same shore leave, all giving birth within days of each other. We didn’t even see the babies that much. The nurses did the feeding—this was in the bottle days, remember. We were to rest and recuperate, and we talked, and played games, and laughed.” Except for the fact that they were mostly officers’ wives (didn’t enlisted people get married and have families?), our mother almost made it sound like it was a dormitory for unwed mothers. As though it were a bit of a lark, and once you got past giving birth essentially alone (military doctors being notorious for their requirement that births be as convenient as possible for them, the mother’s comfort a distant secondary concern), it was like a party. Our mother goes misty-eyed on us. She did like parties. She’d been pretty, vivacious, gregarious, a young woman feeding on the energy of a bustling city like Chicago in the late forties and early fifties, dating a half dozen men at once and keeping track of them like beads on a string. What was it like for our mother suddenly to give all that up? To settle down with just one man and then not even to have the man? In the months before marrying him, she dropped out of school and got a job as an assistant to the ad manager at radio station WCHI. She wrote copy for supermarket ads, for car dealerships, for hardware and housewares stores, even for the big department stores. She was smart, good with words. If she’d stayed at the station she might have wound up in charge of PR. She had dropped out so she could help our father, a mediocre student at best, get through school. She wrote papers for him, double-checked lab reports. She did this willingly, believing that a little bit of her was in everything she did for him. After work she could go out for a drink with her girlfriends, or meet our father and his bandmates for dinner, then spend the evening in a whirl of music and dancing, singing and romance.

And now how did she spend her nights? Listening to the radio, turning pages in a newspaper, walking the night away with a colicky baby who spat cheese down her shoulder. Your best dresses all smelling of curdled milk. Your evenings spent sterilizing bottles and fake nipples. Meanwhile your own nipples were sore, full to bursting, and you just had to make the best of it. You had to make the best of everything, even if there was nothing special to make. Your hands chapped from wringing out diapers in borax, your hair brittle, the shine gone out of it, your figure a mess, and your insides slipping out of you every time you had to pee.

I don’t think it’s an accident that on the leave before our father’s last trip to the Far East our mother was the only officer’s wife who didn’t get pregnant. This wasn’t like the previous leave, when the captain decided the men could take their wives to Hawaii for two weeks’ R & R and the whole ship got pregnant, even the old man’s wife, and she was forty. This time our father was in port three weeks, and our mother, fertile as always, didn’t pop like she usually did. “Wassamatter, Wally, your equipment ain’t workin’?” fellow officers teased him as they started getting letters, one after the other, about the new bundles of joy on the way, and our father got letters of yearning that remained politely silent on the subject of buns in the oven.

Had our mother denied him access? Had she followed the old wives’ advice about douching in vinegar and sitting in hot baths after sex? Our mother’s not saying. She is amazingly reticent about the last few years in San Diego, as though her thoughts and feelings had gone into hibernation while she waited for our father to come home. Still, the largest gap in our family between siblings (before our mother’s body started slowing down) is between Robert Aaron and myself, and I was a mandatory pregnancy—our father coming home, sick and weak, suffering from a double ulcer, his weight below one thirty, being mustered out, his time up—how could our mother not welcome him home in the one way that would surely please him?