C Hribal - The Company Car

Wally got the feeling that all this talk was just buying Ernie Klapatek time to figure out what he was going grab out of his ass next, but to our father, that was okay. In the curious world of our father’s logic, a man who reached big was allowed to break the rules. This was true in the military—you got away with whatever you could get away with. And it was true, too, when he got married—Billy Ray King foisting his pregnant daughter off on a national TV audience, and giving her and her lout of a boyfriend the wedding presents destined for him and our mother. And it was true now that he was buying a house somebody else had bungled the building of. Ernie Klapatek was going to get what he wanted because he was willing to reach for it rather than simply desire it. Wanting alone got you nothing. It was the size of the reach that mattered. Our father, never possessing this quality himself, was always in awe of the people who did.

Wally was listening to what Ernie was telling him, but he wasn’t really listening. He was nodding agreement. He was still nodding when Ernie led him back to Susan and started telling her how it was. How a house turned sideways like that could be a good feature. “Lots of people have carports on the sides of their homes. Haven’t you seen those big places in Lake Forest and Oak Park? They have side entrances and they build a roof, even a whole room, right above where they park.” Would Ernie be willing to do such a thing to make this right? our mother wanted to know. Well, no, he couldn’t do that, he was already doing this house at not much above cost as a favor to our father. If he added anything he’d have to charge them, and in some ways maybe he should do that, but he wasn’t going to. Not to mention it wouldn’t look right. This was a nice house, but a porte cochere—that’s what they called those carports on big houses—would look out of place here among these ranches and bungalows.

So what was he going to do? our mother wanted to know.

Well, said Ernie, taking off his glasses and wiping them. He was going to do something equally wonderful.

And what would that be? asked our mother.

Leave it the way it was, and let it grow on them, said Ernie Klapatek. Then if they didn’t like it he could come back and do something else for them. Like what? asked our mother. Finish off the basement, said Ernie. In a few years they might want a pool table down there, and it would look better if the basement were finished.

Or, said Ernie Klapatek, if they really, really didn’t like the house as it was, they could tear up the deed to purchase and wait for the next house, but they’d have to wait at the end of the line. He had people lined up as it was for houses, here and all over. People were crazy for houses outside the city. This was a nice house, sideways or not, and he’d like to see them happy in it, and frankly it’d be their own damn fault if the house ended up being sold to somebody else.

“It’s a nice house, sideways or not,” Charlie Podgazem echoed.

“Shut up, Charlie,” said our mother. While Ernie and our father were out back, our mother had considered the other three sides from every angle. Charlie Podgazem was her shadow, his belly as big as our mother’s. Our mother had got over crying, and Charlie had not said a word during her swings back and forth. He was afraid she’d either start crying again or bite his head off. Once she regained her composure, he was right to fear the latter.

Our mother turned to our father. “What do you think, Wally? And if you say, ‘Six of one, half a dozen of another,’ I’ll scream.”

That took away our father’s greatest weapon: the cliché that said nothing, that smoothed over everything. Not that it mattered. Even before he said, “I think we should let it ride,” our mother knew he was going to. He simply did not, could not understand. For him the sideways house was fine, just fine. The driveway was on the side. It simply meant they’d have more yard.

Ernie Klapatek shook our parents’ hands and drove away. Charlie Podgazem tipped his hat to our father and half-smiled at our mother—he did not dare shake her hand—and drove away as well. Our father folded his wife in his arms and said it was going to be okay.

But it was not okay to our mother. Oh, sure, they were moving to Elmhurst. But their house was sideways! Her kitchen, instead of looking out into the backyard, would look into the neighbor’s bedroom; her living room, instead of looking onto the street and the elms that lined it, would look into the other neighbor’s driveway. Wally-Bear wouldn’t notice because he wouldn’t be home often enough to care. Wally-Bear didn’t understand because his yearnings were simply for a house he could call his own. He didn’t understand the concept of perfect family happiness that should exist inside the egg of that house. This was supposed to be the house that God built in the spot God had ordained they should live their lives. The house that God built, dammit, not the house that Charlie Podgazem built sideways!

Too late, too late, she realized that tears—her promises to herself that she would not cry notwithstanding—were streaming down her face. And there was Wally, telling her, There, there, there, there, it was okay, it was—all, all of it, in its entirety—going to be okay. And the thing of it was, she believed him. That was the problem: that it was going to be okay. Not perfect, not grand, not magnificent, not dreamlike, not anything but okay.

There is a toll that marriage exacts for those who believe in it—a slow rubbing away of the individual soul—and that is perhaps why, at a certain point in a marriage, people question what the hell they are doing in it. And the union itself? I don’t know. Lately with Dorie, I don’t know much. But I can say with some certainty that Wally and Susan Marie Czabek moved, with three children, into a house dropped sideways at 747 Swain Avenue in January 1957, and that all their troubles at first seemed surmountable. Our mother, after her argument with Ernie Klapatek, did what countless women who have lost one of the big and intangible arguments of their marriages have done for centuries: She cried and moved on. She set about making that bare house, so new you could still smell the paint, the drywall, and the cement in the basement, a home. Her home. She hung curtain rods, sewed sheets with pleated gatherings for curtains, bought a horizontal freezer for the basement, a Norge refrigerator and GE stove for the kitchen.

They were broke, they were saddled with debt, they were happy. That, anyway, was what they wanted us to believe. And even when we had inklings that they weren’t happy, our parents worked hard to keep us from knowing. They worked hard to keep from knowing it themselves, too, until the night when a dollar bill and a bout with the flu yanked things into focus.

It’s easy to understand how things before that weren’t in focus. In a little over eight years they packed that house with four more kids. How in God’s name could they have managed to focus on anything? Here’s how we stacked up:

Sarah (Sarah Lucinda—1953)

Robert Aaron (he was always called by both names—1954)

Emcee (that’s me, Emil Cedric, what were they thinking?—1956)

Ike (James Eisenhower, what were they thinking II?—1958)

Wally Jr. (Walter Sr. finally gets his wish—1960)

Ernie (Ernest John, sounds like a variety of Van Camp’s pork and beans—1963)

Peggy (Megan Sue, born with one leg shorter than the other—1965)