C Hribal - The Company Car

“Yes, yes, it is,” said our mother with forced calmness. She was trembling. Something was coming, something was about to happen. We could feel it.

“Parke-Davis makes that.”

Our mother turned the bottle in her hands. The spoon was chalky from her having already dosed Ike and Wally Jr., both of whom liked medicine that left grit in your mouth.

“Yes, so I see.”

“I work for Dinkwater-Adams.”

“I know who you work for, Wally.”

“Dinkwater-Adams makes a very fine antidiarrheal.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“I sell it.”

Our mother said nothing to this.

“We get it for free.”

Still nothing from our mother, except she placed the Kaopectate lid on the night table and poured out a tablespoonful for Sarah, who was waiting with her prim little nose in the air.

“What are people going to think, Susan, when we tell them that you bought Kaopectate for diarrhea when you could have gotten Pecarol from me for free?”

“We aren’t going to tell them, are we?” She was doing Robert Aaron now. I was next.

“You’re changing the subject!”

Our mother remained calm. The spoon was filling right before my eyes. If I breathed, it would be like a sudden storm on a little lake. “I’m not. You asked me what would people say—”

The spoon suddenly flew up before my face, the Kaopectate blotching my face and hair and jammies. I had seen it coming, of course. A man with an accordion strapped to his chest moves slowly even when he’s angry. Even when he’s furious, as our father was now.

“Damn it to hell, Susan Marie!” Wally Jr. and Ike started crying. “What in the hell do you think it says about me? A man can’t even get his own wife to take what’s freely offered!”

Said our mother quite evenly, “Sometimes the wife doesn’t want what’s offered. And,” she continued, “I wish you wouldn’t swear in front of the children. You see how it upsets them.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” thundered our father—we knew that was a bad one—“I’ll swear when I goddamn want to. I will feed my children Pecarol when I goddamn want to. I will not come home and find my wife feeding my children Kaopectate when I work for a competing company!”

Our mother’s eyes narrowed. Her eyes flashed green, green like emeralds, like 7UP bottles with sunlight glinting through them. We were all lined up on the edge of my brother’s bed like gargoyles, some of us crying, some of us shocked into silence. “Is that what this is about? Your need to prove yourself in my eyes? Throw your weight around? Well, let me tell you something, mister. We use Kaopectate in this household because Kaopectate is a superior product. And I will feed it to my children when and if they need it. And if you came home once in a while on time, then maybe some of us would avail ourselves of what’s available in the way of other company products, assuming they were still functioning properly.”

The accordion sagged ever so slightly, sighing out its harmonicalike breath.

“I think we need to continue this discussion downstairs,” said our father.

“Fine,” said our mother. “There are some things I’d like to say to you that the children really shouldn’t hear.”

We’d have heard them anyway, even if we hadn’t snuck down the stairs once they got going. Shouts from our mother: “Let me do something in my life once in a while, why don’t you?” and “You don’t understand,” and “You think money grows on trees?” and our father’s heated, “Who works, huh? Who works?” “Oh,” said our mother. “And I don’t?”

“What’s the point of being married if a man can’t trust his wife while he’s unwinding after a hard day of work?” shouted our father.

“Then maybe,” shouted our mother back, “maybe we should think about not being married!”

“What are you saying, Susan? Susan, do you realize what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying,” said our mother, repeating herself now, more coolly, her voice quavering, “maybe we should think about not being married.”

This freezes us in our seats. Our father has brought up the possibility of the Duckwas getting divorced before. “Ted says he and Lorna are having problems,” our father had told our mother. We were eating casserole—part of our never-ending austerity measures because our parents kept having kids on our father’s salary. Our father opened a can of beer with a church key and poured its contents into one of our milk cups. “He says he’s thought sometimes about how maybe it would be better for everybody if they did—get divorced, I mean.” Our mother had dropped her fork on her plate right then and put her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening to this,” she said. “It’s not right. It’s a sin.” “He says he’s thought about leaving her.”

Our mother started making this funny sound then, like a low moaning of wind in the trees. That was how our mother was for a long time early on, when our father or somebody else brought up things happening in the world that she didn’t want to hear. It was just ahoooooooo! like wind in the trees when that stuff was mentioned. Ahoooooooo! Our father looked at his beer. “You know, this stuff tastes terrible when you drink it out of Tupperware.” This was a safe remark and allowed our mother to rejoin the conversation. “I put the glass glasses further back in the cupboard. I’ll get you one,” she said. When she came back to the table with a tumbler she said, “The kids were breaking too many glasses. You have to be careful.” Now she was looking at us, but we couldn’t tell if she was addressing us or our father. “So many things are fragile. If you’re not careful, they break.”

Our father emptied his beer into the tumbler. “I’ll tell that to Ted.”

And yet now it was our mother raising this very same possibility to our father, and she was saying it like she didn’t care who heard it. What were we to make of this? Would our house break? That was what we were told about kids (the only one we actually knew was Ollie Cicerelli) who’d gone through this—that they were the products of broken homes. I had checked out Ollie’s house just to be sure. It was a bungalow, like the Duckwas’, only tinier, and a zigzag crack did indeed work up the side of the porch for four or five bricks like the steps themselves.

I had already read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in the Classic Comics edition, and I imagined this steplike crack eventually developing into a foundation-shattering fissure. We would come home from school one day and find a smoking pile of rubble where the Cicerelli house had been. Was that what would happen to us? If our parents weren’t married anymore, would our house come down around our ears? Would we be given to other families to be raised while our mother and father carried on with their separate lives? It seemed both utterly possible and too awful to contemplate.

It was quiet for a while in the kitchen, and then our father said, “Guess I better kiss the kids good night.” We snuck back up the stairs and slunk into our beds, not daring to breathe a word of this to each other. “I feel sick,” Ike told me, but that may have just been the flu. We arranged ourselves in postures of sleep, but that didn’t fool our father. He went from bed to bed, giving us wet kisses from pursed lips. “You know I love you, don’t you?” our father told us. “I love you guys, you know that, right?” We nodded, scared and sympathetic and hoping that he would bring out his accordion and sing, that our mother would appear behind him—even a wan, tight-lipped smile pressed into her face would still be a smile—and we’d know that the union would be preserved. But he just stood there, his hand on the light switch as though it still needed to be turned off, his eyes, glassy in the hall light, taking us in.