C Hribal - The Company Car

“Hon,” she says, “what’s up?”

I concentrate on my driving.

“Ace, you can’t have a mute marriage. You want to talk about something? Talk.”

Talk. She makes it sound so simple. Talk. Now she wants to talk. What I want to tell her is, I’ve been thinking about when you were first “restless.”

Why was everything in our conversations appearing in quote marks, as though all those words were euphemisms? Answer: Because they probably were. Her “restlessness” first appeared the year her father died. She’d been withdrawn, depressed, not interested in much of anything. Like the lights had gone off in her heart and there was nobody home. Lots of staring out the window. Okay, I thought, she needs space. Give the woman space. I just couldn’t believe what she did with it. Distance, distance, and more distance. Then she suddenly got energized. Like her life snapped into focus for her, but she was in a completely new place, one that required her to be gone constantly. Up before dawn for runs, late workouts at the gym, long rides on weekends. She tells me: “Thank God I run and lift weights, Em. It’s a safe way of burning off all that restless energy.”

Safe?

When she gets her mountain bike, she says, “I love my bike. I’m in love with this bike.”

“You said that about the last bike,” I say. “What is this, serial monogamy for bikes? Still, it’s good to know you’re in love with something.”

Says Dorie, “Don’t lay a guilt trip on me for wanting to have a life, Em. Don’t you do it.”

Say I, “You used to have a life with me.”

“You know, Em, I don’t think I’ve ever been alone. Maybe that’s where the restlessness comes from—the desire to be alone.” She steps into the shower then and turns on the water. She’s not bothered by the sudden burst of cold water. I open the curtain, stand there staring at her like some kid at a peep show. Once upon a time she’d invite me to join her, and even if I’d already showered that morning she’d say, “You can never be too clean, Ace,” and in the immortal words of Jackie Gleason, away we’d go. But this time she tells me, “I mean it, Em. I want to be alone,” and pulls the curtain closed.

And I am hurt, but not nearly as hurt as when I begin to suspect that when she goes off to be alone she winds up not being alone. This is not the time or place to open up that can of worms, however—I can picture our kids waking up just as I’m shouting at my wife about the men I suspect she may be fucking—so I say none of this. Instead I say, “I was wondering how our parents made it this far.”

“Inertia,” Dorie answers. “And that’s not something I ever want to be guilty of.”

“No? What do you want to be guilty of?”

“Oh”—she laughs—“all sorts of things, but not inertia.” She fiddles with the heat vent. “Maybe they lasted because people didn’t get divorced then.”

“Yes, they did. Just not as often. Look at your parents.”

“My mother walked out on my father; they did not get divorced.”

“Are we?”

“Are we what?”

“Going to get divorced.”

“Oh, Em.” She raises her arms over her head in a gesture of surrender. She’s taken to wearing bicycling jerseys and soccer goalie tops—brightly colored, form-fitting, sporty, boyish, except her breasts look fantastic in them. In happier times I’d reach beneath that lime green keeper’s jersey with the black diamond-chain pattern and palm and massage what I found there, and Dorie would tilt her head back and close her eyes, maybe even open her legs a little so my hand would have something else to do when it tired of caressing her breast. Erotic options, she liked to call it, the key to a good sex life, which reminds me of how perfunctory ours is of late, as though she were considering wallpaper patterns and which shade of ocher would look best in the front hall while she waits for me to finish. And it is the memory of that disengagement when we should be at our most intimate that has me screaming at her, “Don’t ‘Oh, Em’ me! I asked you a fucking question! Are we going to get divorced?”

I can’t believe I’m shouting this. And it does wake up our kids. Henry anyway. Out of his sleep he asks drowsily, “Who’s divorced?”

“Nobody,” says his mother. “Go back to sleep.” She sighs, and to me she says, “I’d forgotten, Ace, what a complete dork you can be.”

“Ace dork,” Henry mumbles from his sleep, as though he’s concluding a blessing.

I tell this as though I were a set age and everything in our family’s life happened at the same time. In memory, as in childhood, things bleed together. The only difference is how fast it bleeds. For adults looking back, each year is a tiny fraction of their time on the planet, and time washes clean everything in its wake except for flotsam and jetsam. For children, each year is a huge fraction of their time on earth, so time hardly seems to move at all. Things are running along in their normal course, then suddenly veer into left field.

It was like that with our parents’ arguments. They followed a pattern that gave us comfort until the night that comfort shattered. Our parents’ arguments went like this: Our father comes home late on a Friday—past our bedtime—but we’re up because he isn’t home yet. When he does come home, he shrugs off our mother being upset that he’s late. He’s home, isn’t he?

“Where have you been?” asks our mother.

“What? I told you I worked all day. I was at the Office.”

“It’s what you were doing after work that bothers me.”

A moment of silence. Our father is collecting his thoughts. Then he says, “So what did you do all day?” like she hadn’t done anything. And our mother says, “Why can’t you come straight home from work?” which was always news to us that he hadn’t.

“Because I need to unwind.”

“You can unwind here.”

“Not with all these kids running around, screaming like banshees.”

“They are not screaming like banshees.”

“They will in a minute. A man can’t think.”

“So ask me again what I did all day. Who do you think stays home with the banshees?”

Along about then we slide out of the kitchen and the living room and gather on the stairs. The stairs have a closed railing, so nobody knows we’re sitting there.

“Jesus, Sue, it’s just… I mean… a man can’t… I mean, I just wanted…”

“You always ‘just wanted.’ How do you think it makes them feel you coming home so late and calling them banshees? How do you think it makes me feel?”

Truth be told, we had mixed feelings. As scenes like this accumulate, we end up feeling awful, wondering why they argue every time Dad comes home with a quizzical look on his face, but the banshee business—hey, that was all right. Our father had already told us our ancestors came from Prague, Bohemia, so we were Bohemians. Bohemians, like Banshees, were a particularly fierce tribe of Indians, weren’t they? A tribe of green-eyed, yellow-haired Indians with long, thin faces and haunted eyes. Very rare. Maybe our mother didn’t take this news well, but we felt pretty good about it. “I’m Indian,” I told a kid on my way home from school one day. “Bohemian, actually.” The other kid took this in silently. Such was the power of knowing who you were. “And if I feel like it I can scream like a Banshee. Wanna hear?” He didn’t.

Back on the stairs, we don’t dare move. If things get quiet, if there’s murmuring and then we hear our mother say, “Oh, Wally-Bear,” then in just a few minutes they’ll go down the hall, close their bedroom door, and all will be right with the world. Sarah will say, “C’mon,” and we’ll go up to bed. Or if our father says, almost calling it out, “Guess it’s time for the show, if they aren’t asleep, ” we need to scamper up before our father comes in bearing both a grin and his accordion.