C Hribal - The Company Car

We think we are fooling our parents, hiding on the stairs, but they know we are there. Sometimes they call us on this and we come back into the kitchen, rubbing our eyes to make it look good. If it’s still midargument, our father says, surly and accusatory, “You were listening.” Or if the fight is settled, an affable “Mother, we have spies. What should we do with these infiltrators?” And then we’re shied off to bed, our mother making sure we’re washed and in our jammies and have said our prayers, and then our father (drum roll, please) enters. He’s wearing—there’s no other word for it, really—his accordion, the one with his name in mother-of-pearl up the side of the keyboard. This is when our father truly comes into his own. When our father seals the deal on his status as family patriarch, as good-guy bon vivant, as someone it is impossible for our mother to stay mad at. Bedtime as event, as production. Our father opens with a quick rendition of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” then lets us sip his beer. We make faces, and he says, “That’ll put hair between your toes.” Hair between our toes? Yuck. Why would we want hair between our toes? And isn’t it supposed to be “That’ll put hair on your chest”?

Says our father, grinning, “If I were your mother, I wouldn’t want hair on my chest.”

Says our mother, a sly smile on her face, “I don’t want hair between my toes, either.”

Repeated action. What comfort we take from the habitual.

The highlight after every fight, the last song, no exceptions, no encores, is “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a song that sends shivers running through us. There we are, lined up on one of our beds, our pajamas zipped up tight to our Adam’s apples, enthralled as our father holds the high notes, his voice quavering with vibrato. He is way, way better than Vaughn Monroe, who made the song famous. And then the accordion squeezes shut and our father comes back from that strange place that he seems to go to while he is singing, that high chaparral where ghostly silhouettes on horseback dance against an orange sky, and we come back from there as well, and he is just our dad again, no longer possessed by some unearthly power, and he smiles and kisses each of us—wet, sloppy kisses tasting of beer and peppermint—and he says, “There, that’ll put hair between your toes.”

We groan at hearing it, but we are delighted just the same. Hair between our toes! How awful! How marvelous! Once our parents leave our room, we spread our toes and check. Any hair there? No, thank goodness. But we’re also disappointed. Oh, to have thick, woolly feet, warm in the winter, like a dog’s paws. We could be miniature yetis, leaving our prints in the snow. And with that we go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that all’s right with the world.

Of late, however, their arguments had become both frequent and unsettling. More and more often they did not end with make-up kisses and sing-alongs. They took to picking up where they left off once we’d been put to bed, and in the dark we could hear their raised voices, a muffled tirade of hurt and complaint. They were taking care not to let us hear anything, but we gathered that our father’s take on things was that he was out there, manning his position, and our mother’s job was to man hers—hearth and home—and that was simply the way things should be. Our mother’s take was that this was not the case, that it should not be the case, and she was extremely upset that it was the case.

Things came to a head the night we came down with a stomach flu and half of us were squirting pitifully out one end while the other half were heaving out the other. Our mother had spent the day running pots, wiping behinds, washing sheets, comforting the afflicted, and getting vomited on with more regularity than a mother had a right to expect.

And our father, once again, is late. The only child remotely ambulatory, I’m under the kitchen table holding a black thread leading to a dollar bill in the middle of the floor, a linoleum floor with little gold boomerangs floating in a sea of gold flecks and tiny black squares. A pin is attached to the bill, the thread tied to the pin. I’d seen this in a joke book. They reach for the dollar bill, you pull the thread, the bill slides from their grasp. People are lured across the floor until their heads bump the countertop. I’d been waiting for the better part of an hour. We’d already eaten crackers and peanut butter, washed it down with flat 7UP, and gotten into our fuzzy pajamas with the zippered fronts and the white plastic footies that made our feet smell.

Finally our father is home. I hear his booming “Well, what have we here?”

Under the table, seeing only his feet, I don’t know if he’s saying this because he sees my dollar bill or if he’s responding to our mother, who’s standing next to the table, the toe of her butter yellow pump going up and down. “Walter,” she says. Our father booms, “Well, what have we here?” again. He is letting me get away with it, and I love him for that. I start pulling the thread—too quick, he hasn’t even reached for it yet—and the dollar bill is doing its slow skittering across the linoleum. Our father steps, and whap! his black shoe comes down on the dollar bill. I pull, and the thread flutters toward me. The bill stays under his foot.

“Walter! He worked all day on that.”

“What, and I didn’t work all day?”

“He wanted to surprise you.”

“So I’m surprised, I’m surprised. Here”—he reaches for the thread—it takes his hand a few tries to locate it, he doesn’t even look at me—and ties the broken ends together. Then his feet go to the fridge, and there’s the pffsst! of a beer being opened. “Okay, pull. I’ll be surprised.”

“You know, Wally, sometimes you’re a real prick.”

“What, what did I do?”

“You knew these kids were sick when you left this morning, you knew I was going to be with them all day, their behinds running like faucets and vomiting, and still you’re late. Just once I’d like to see you make it home on time. Just once I’d like to see you sober.”

Our father’s feet make steps toward our mother’s. “Oh, come on, honey-bunch, you’ve seen me sober plenty of times.”

“Don’t touch me! And don’t think you can joke your way out of this one.”

“Oh, honey—”

“Don’t, Wally. Don’t even try. Emmie”—our mother was the only person who called me that; to everyone else I was Em or Emcee—“has been waiting for you for hours, and the others have just about given up on you. And frankly, so have I.”

I look out from under the Formica table, and our mother has her arms crossed over her chest. Our father is looking abashed and guilty and more than a little somber. A couple times he tries lifting his hand to our mother’s shoulder, and our mother either shakes him off or swats it away. “I said don’t touch me, Wally, and I mean it. You think you can waltz in five hours late when I’ve been struggling with sick kids all day and you’re going to love me right up and make it better?” Our mother laughs, a high scornful laugh that scares me. “Ha, fat chance! Like you could do anything in your present state anyway.”

“Aw, Susan Marie, there’s no—”

“Don’t Susan Marie me, Wally. You want to make yourself useful, you can go in and sing while I give them their good-night medicine. They might like that even if I don’t. Or maybe you’d like to take a crack at the mound of diarrheaed-on laundry I’ve got waiting in the basement.” Then our mother said, “Come on, Emmie. Time for bed for you, too.”

We knew things had truly taken a strange turn a few minutes later, when our father stepped inside our room, accordion strapped to his chest, and found our mother dosing us with Kaopectate. “There, that’ll put hair between your—” started our father before he saw what our mother was giving us. “That’s Kaopectate,” said our father.