C Hribal - The Company Car

The next day our mother told us it had all been a big misunderstanding. Nobody was getting divorced from anybody. And we did and did not believe her. Especially since that night marked the end of the serenades—no more “Ghost Riders in the Sky” for us. No more family sing-alongs. The accordion went into the hall closet at the foot of the stairs and stayed there, coming out so rarely after that that our latter siblings didn’t believe us when we told them of those once-magical bedtime serenades.

So began the Kaopectate Wars. Like the Cold War, it was about other things. A war of surrogacy. We did not recognize it for what it was: our mother’s tiny, continuing rebellion against our father. There would be others. And like most of the mysteries of and between adults, it would occur mostly in code.

“Okay, you kids, get in the car.” Trips started like that. Our father stacked us like cordwood. Big kids in the wayback if the middle seat was up. Our father had convinced Dinkwater-Adams that his company car should be a station wagon. Easy to haul around samples. So he got one, a Chevy Bel Air, with what felt like real panels of wood on the side. Only it wasn’t wood, it was something better. Plastic. Anything really good was being made out of plastic—plates, silverware, hula hoops, yo-yos, telephones. It was just a matter of time before the cars themselves would be made out of this superior material.

The only provision the company put on the car’s use, which our father said was for insurance purposes, was that the sole driver had to be our father. Our mother had no trouble with that. She was probably the last woman in America who believed it wasn’t necessary for her to learn how to drive. There were times when we weren’t sure our father knew how, either. He had a penchant for coming home and running over our bicycles and tricycles, for crunching our Radio Flyer into the gravel of the drive or pinning it underneath his car or against the concrete stoop outside the kitchen door.

“You kids shouldn’t leave your stuff in the drive,” he’d say. He’d have a bemused look on his face, like he was puzzled being home at all.

“Been to the Office?” our mom would ask.

“I stopped for a few with the boys.”

“More than a few, if your parking’s any indication.”

“The kids shouldn’t leave stuff in the drive. How many times do I have to tell them?”

“How many times have I asked you not to go to the Office?” said our mother.

Our father not going into work—was she crazy? Everybody’s father left in the morning either for work or for the Office. Our father usually left for work, but he came home from the Office. The only exception was Ollie Cicerelli, who didn’t have a father that we knew about, and whose mother was a waitress at the Woolworth’s on York Road.

When we weren’t envying him his freedom—he was frequently left alone until 7:00 or 8:00 P.M. and had the run of the neighborhood—we felt sorry for Ollie Cicerelli. He had only himself to keep himself company, and we had a wealth of relatives, who it seemed, we were always running to see.

We even had a relative living with us—Grandma Nomi, which meant Artu was living with us as well. Artu kept up their apartment in downtown Chicago while Nomi recovered from hip surgery, but most nights he slept at our house. In the morning, our father dropped him off at the train station before making his calls. No question, this made for a crowded house, and that might explain why our father spent so much time at the Office.

That’s what we wanted to believe, anyway—that there was a correlation between Nomi and Artu being in the house and our father’s being at the Office. The other explanation—that he was getting away from us kids—we didn’t want to believe. According to our mother, all he had talked about while he was in Korea was how, if he lived, he wanted to be the father of a big family. So now he was—there were five of us kids and another on the way. How could he not want to be around?

It was easier to explain the friction between him and Nomi. Nomi and Artu were urban Democrats, and our father was a suburban Republican. Artu usually held his tongue on matters of politics, and outside the house our father did, too, but inside it he was lord of his castle, and the idea that this chain-smoking, bedridden woman upstairs was spouting off pieties about Jack Kennedy and what an evil man Richard Nixon was, was simply too much to bear. We didn’t understand the politics of it, but there had been arguments ever since our mother had gotten a letter that made her cry. It was 1962, and after our mother composed herself she explained to us that our father might have to go away because of a bad man in Cuba. He ended up not having to go, but our father seemed to bear a personal grudge against President Kennedy in the same way that Nomi bore one against Richard Nixon.

We noticed in these arguments that our father was the only one shouting. Nomi spoke very calmly and smoked her cigarettes, rolling the tips around the inside edge of her ashtray to get the ash to drop. Then she’d hoist the cigarette up by the side of her face and cross her other arm under her chest. “Your problem, Walter,” she’d say, “is you believe the crap they’re telling you.”

Our father would storm off, complaining that no one allowed him a chance to think. Later we’d find out he went to the Office.

For the longest time, where our father’s Office was and what he did there was a mystery. He did his salesman’s reports at the kitchen table on Sunday and Thursday nights. Did he sometimes do his paperwork at the Office then, too? We knew he worked hard. He must’ve worked even harder at the Office, because whenever he came back from there he seemed addled, as though he’d been thinking too hard.

What we did know was that the Office was the place to which our father disappeared, and from which he returned a different person altogether. The Office never failed to wreak some kind of change on him, a change our mother vociferously protested when she thought we were asleep. Their one big blowup in front of us must have scared them. They didn’t do something like that again. Instead they went back to putting a good face on things when we were present, or sniping at each other in a minor way. The howitzers came out only after we were put to bed. Some nights we’d be awakened by our mother’s screaming and tears. “You’re not the man I married!” she shouted one night, which made us wonder who she thought she’d married, since our father had been like this as long as we could remember. Still, it was obvious to us, upstairs in our beds listening, that the world of adults was a hard place in which to live, strange and dark, and that our father’s long hours at the Office were taking a toll on him, and on our mother, and the best thing we could do was steer a wide path around him, and step quietly. Our task was made easier by the fact that our father was gone so frequently, and did not much like taking us with him anywhere when he was home, unless it was all of us, and we were visiting our relatives, where we were expected. It did not seem, though, that our father much wanted to visit our relatives, either.

Perhaps this was because the relatives we saw most often were our mother’s. Nomi and Artu were already living with us, and the contrast with our father’s parents was striking. When we visited Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza, it felt like we were being put under glass. Despite her bouncy name, Grandma Cza-Cza was a serious woman, and she sat in her house knitting afghans and throws for her couches and chairs, as if she were one of those babushkas ensconced in Eastern European museums who eke out a pittance guarding the galleries while knitting scarves, mittens, and balaclavas for the coming winter.