C Hribal - The Company Car

As our father observed, two girls separated by a basketball team. It was unfair to the girls, having that many boys in a row. We ganged up on them, ignored them. Sarah Lucinda, feeling romantic, wanted to be called Lucy, after the heroine in the Chronicles of Narnia, but we called her Cinderella.

She spent a lot of time hiding from us, and she was doing exactly that when Peggy found the door to the basement open and tumbled down the stairs, breaking her hip and making the shortness of the one leg more pronounced. Peg Leg Meg, we called her. It drove her to tears. Calling Sarah Cinderella drove her to tears, too. “Stop that!” our mother told us when they ran to her crying, their own cries to get us to stop having proved futile. But how could we? We loved Peg. We loved Sarah. We had to torment them beyond reason.

It was, to be sure, a male world. The neighborhood was filled with men like our father, all working nine to five, and housewives like our mother. The men were recently quit of the Korean War or WWII, and these were their first houses. They’d gotten educated on the G.I. Bill, married their high school or college sweethearts, and were happy to be affiliated with their employers, to do good work, and to come home and pump out kids as fast as their wives were able. They joined men’s service organizations and clubs—the Kiwanis, the Loyal Order of Moose, the Elks, the Shriners, the American Legion—and went to church on Sunday morning. They drank on Friday night, watched the fights Saturday night, bowled Wednesdays. Their wives got driver’s licenses and went to Kroger’s or even to downtown Chicago. They drank coffee midmorning, watched their kids, did laundry. They spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone talking about the quotidian events of their day as though rehashing them would make them go away. It was the only therapy they could afford. They bought books with accompanying records: How to Belly Dance for Your Husband, How to Make Love to Your Husband. These men and their wives were pioneers on a new plain, and they watched with satisfaction as backhoes and bulldozers chewed up the sod for their homesteads and churches.

What made things interesting for us kids were the exceptions, the people not quite like us. The old folks at the end of the block who had no children. The Japanese family, the Kuras, whose kids we rarely saw—their parents kept an even tighter rein on them than our parents did. The only inkling we had that their ethnicity was an issue was when our mother, speaking to Mrs. Duckwa next door, said of the Kuras, who declined invitations to eat rotisseried chicken in various backyards, “They lost the war, you know, that’s why they’re so quiet.” “Well,” said Mrs. Duckwa, “the husband is awfully cute. It’s too bad he’s so short.”

The Duckwas were interesting because Mr. Duckwa had served in the previous war, in the Pacific, so he was older than our father by about a decade, and they had only one child, a teenage daughter, who wouldn’t speak to us. She was so far removed from us in age that she existed on another planet. The Duckwas were the true pioneers, the scouts, in our neighborhood. They’d built first, a muddy brown brick bungalow, and when things started going kablowies in the neighborhood, they were the point family, the family where things happened first.

Finally, there was Ollie Cicerelli, whose mother, Olive, was divorced. This was by far the oddest thing. In our neighborhood families did not get divorced.

It was just an accident that the exceptions lived near us. Surrounding us mostly were families like ours: large, Catholic, recent inhabitants of Chicago. The Kemmels had seven, like us, and the Hemmelbergers six. Only Olive Cicerelli and the Duckwas had single kids.

I don’t know what life was like in these other families; we were rarely inside their houses. Moms sent kids out to play with instructions not to come back in unless you were sick, hurt, or it was time to eat. Ours was one of the few who relented. This leniency made her a marked woman in the neighborhood. “Go play at the Czabeks’,” moms told their kids, knowing they wouldn’t be back until lunch, and maybe not even then if they’d filled up enough on apples and peanut butter at our house. We also went through vast quantities of Tang, which our mother didn’t like to serve because it was expensive, but Tang, having been on the Mercury flights, was like cocaine for ten-year-olds.

The reason all these women let their children run free across the neighborhood was that they believed they could. And the reason our mother became babysitter to the neighborhood was that she didn’t. Or rather, she both believed and didn’t believe that things were as safe as they appeared. Better if we played with our friends in the backyard, or out on the street where she could keep an eye on us. These other women had moved out of Chicago for that very reason—so they wouldn’t have to keep an eye on anyone. Sure, there were other backyards where we were welcome, other moms who occasionally doled out treats, but there was a general sense among us that nobody was watching. Or perhaps it was that we never had the feeling of being watched, except by our mother. I think she was still scared that things could happen to us. That badness could reach out and grab us. So when you got that radar feeling at the back of your neck you’d look up, and there in the back bedroom window (it should have been the kitchen window, but thanks to Charlie Podgazem it wasn’t) was our mother’s head, a look on her face that was so filled with—what? longing? love? bitterness? despair? loneliness? tenderness? fear?—that had we known what it actually was it would have broken our hearts. Instead it made us feel creepy.

“They’re asleep.”

I glance over my shoulder. Dorie’s right. Sophie’s slumped into Henry, whose mouth is open, his head vibrating against the window. He can sleep anywhere. Woolie, headphones still in place, has his head tilted back as though his mouth is waiting for rain. “Finally.”

“Finally? I thought you wanted to tell the kids the story of your parents’ marriage.”

“I thought I did, too. But I don’t think I’m telling it for them. I mean, look at Woolie. Have you ever seen a kid less interested in this stuff? They aren’t his grandparents, and even if they were, so what? And Sophie and Henry, what do they understand about this stuff?” What I don’t tell her: maybe I’m trying to pull all this together in the belief that, explaining what happened with our parents, I can similarly explain what’s happened to Dorie and me.

“So tell it to me, Ace.”

“You’re tired of hearing it from them.”

“They can’t tell it right anymore. Once upon a time they could, but somewhere along the way they lost it. Everything reminds your father of his time aboard ship, and your mother would rather tell you what she ate last Wednesday at Denny’s than enlighten you as to how she managed to stay married to your father.” Dorie pats my hand. “Maybe you’ll tell it better. Not just the cutesy stuff, but everything in between.”

“Right now I could use the how-to-stay-married-to-your-partner advice.”

More hand patting. Sometimes I want to scream. “Don’t worry, Em, we’ll make it.”

“What makes you say that?”

She pats my hand again. “I found a cure for my restlessness.”

A cure for her restlessness. That’s a good one. That’s priceless. Hilarious. She’s found a cure for her restlessness. Her restlessness. Her fucking restlessness.

More with the hand patting. I take my hand off my lap, go with the ten-and-two grip on the steering wheel. She leaves her hand on my thigh for a few minutes, then moves it. A few more miles like this one, the car filled with the tension of our silence.