C Hribal - The Company Car

It was better visiting Great-Grandma Hluberstead, Artu’s mother, even though that house was filled with old people. For one thing, we could entertain them by showing we remembered how Hluberstead was spelled by singing it to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song: H-L-U-B-E-R-S-T-E-A-D! For another, they didn’t mind us crawling all over their furniture, which was old and nubbly and draped in antimacassars. For still another, though Great-Grandma Hluberstead herself was old and nubbly—she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy at age ninety-seven—she encouraged us to call her Hubie. Our mother insisted we say Grandma Hubie, at least.

I don’t think our father ever felt comfortable at Grandma Hubie’s house, which was a shame—and a problem—because we drove down there a lot now that Nomi was living with us.

Our mom was pregnant with what would prove to be her penultimate child, Ernie. Artu was still keeping up their apartment at Wilson and Malden, a mile north of Wrigley Field—which pained him, being a White Sox fan—but it was quiet there, with cemeteries at both ends of Malden and the lake not too far away. Artu would stay at the apartment when he was pulling a late shift as an elevator operator, but mostly he worked days, and during the week he stayed with us. Although he owned a car, he usually took the train into the Loop, and our father picked him up either at the Lowell-Wackstein building or at one of the coin shops he liked to frequent. Then he and our father would drive to Elmhurst along with everyone else heading out to the booming western suburbs. Nomi had broken her hip falling down the back stairs of their apartment. She’d just wanted to put out the milk bottles, but it was March and icy. With Artu gone all day, it wasn’t a good idea for Nomi to be laid up all by herself. Dad and Artu had set up a bed in our upstairs front bedroom—the room that was supposed to be our mother’s I-need-my-privacy getaway room. The back bedroom was for us boys. There were four of us at the time—Robert Aaron, me, Ike, and Wally Jr.—and we were very curious about this contraption that Artu and our father had built to help Nomi’s recovery. It looked like a huge steel fishing pole with a pulley and a rope for the line. They baited it with house bricks left over from when they built our house. They were sand-colored with flecks in them like freckles. “Iron-spotted,” said our mother, “the best kind.” She still believed ours was the House That God Built, all evidence to the contrary. We touched the bricks and wondered what on earth they were trying to catch at the foot of Nomi’s bed with this. A closet monster? Something that lived under the floorboards? Traction, Artu told us. The bricks were a counterweight for the cast on Nomi’s hip, which was heavy and uncomfortable.

“Can we see it?” asked Robert Aaron. “The hip, I mean.”

“It hurts her to move,” said Artu. “We have to be very careful.”

What did it look like, a smashed hip? Was the bone showing? Was there a scar? We didn’t know. Nomi was pretty open with us about everything, forthright and plainspoken, so her reticence in this matter puzzled us.

“Why won’t Nomi let us see her hip?” we asked our mother. We were downstairs now, finishing our lunch.

“It’s the first time she’s ever been really hurt,” said our mother. “I think it pains her to be getting old.” Our mother was washing dishes.

“Will they shoot her?” Ike asked. He was a year and a half younger than me, which made him not quite four.

“Shoot her? Why on earth would anybody shoot her?”

Ike said, “Daddy says it’s what they do with horses.”

Robert Aaron said, “Dad says, ‘You know what they do with horses?’ when we get hurt. Then he makes his finger into a gun”—Robert Aaron demonstrated, his forefinger extended, his thumb up in the air—“and pulls the trigger, pkew! ” He did this right at Ike, who started crying.

“Nobody’s shooting anybody!” shouted our mother. She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Your father, really. Sometimes I wonder why I married him.”

Statements like this made us wonder, too. What if she’d married the Italian? Would we look the same, only with black hair? We were all blonds except for Ike, who had auburn hair, like our mother. We didn’t wonder for long, though. Your parents were your parents. Even with that one night when our mother raised the subject of the unthinkable, that seemed irrevocable. What we did wonder about was that traction business—those bricks suspended by a rope. We were in Nomi’s room constantly. Evenings we’d arrange ourselves around her pillows while she read to us, but during the day we’d sneak in while she was dozing so we could study the bricks, the rope, the bright chrome arm, the pulley. If we touched anything, Nomi would say, “Don’t. Don’t mess with that,” and we’d jump. We thought she’d been sleeping. “Eyes in the back of her head,” said our father. “Just like her daughter.” We were alarmed that there seemed to be this symbiotic relationship between this contraption and our grandmother.

We got a glimpse of Nomi’s hip only once, when our mother was giving her a sponge bath just before a trip to Grandma Hubie’s. We were leaving as soon as Artu and our father returned from work. Artu, an elevator operator, had much the better job. Our father’s work, as he explained it, consisted of calling on doctors all over Chicago and trying to get them to buy something from his big brown valise, what he called his sample case. As with Nomi’s cast, we weren’t allowed to examine its contents, either.

Our mother needed our help rolling Nomi up on her side. Nomi kept herself covered in blankets, and when we pushed it was like trying to get a boulder to roll uphill. It was easier to get on the far side and pull her toward us. Our mother washed her back while we stared at a mass of blankets and didn’t see her hip at all except for the crazy railroad spur of the scar end, which looked like it’d been spun by drunken spiders. Its purple thickness scared us. It was like something was living beneath the cast and was sending out tendrils.

Nomi said, “I could use a beer before you leave.”

“You want anything with that?”

“Sausages. Them little bitty breakfast sausages and some eggs and a nice glass of beer.” Nomi was staring up at the ceiling. I thought maybe she was imagining herself back at the diner she and Artu had owned during the Depression. We had heard all those stories. Beer and breakfast sausage and eggs sounded like something you ate for dinner at a diner. A meal like that was something both she and our father loved. Except for the politics, she and our father actually got on well together. They shared the same tastes, greasy breakfast foods with beer for dinner being only one of them. At Hubie’s, Nomi would not be the only woman over fifty drinking beer. She hated not going.

While our mother made the sausages and eggs, I was dispatched upstairs with the beer.

“You want a sip?” asked Nomi, pouring her beer into the short glass she always used. “It bites,” she said when my face scrunched at the taste of it.

“How can you drink that?” I asked.

“It’s an acquired taste,” said Nomi. “Some people acquire it, some don’t.”

“I’m never going to acquire it.”

“Don’t be so sure you won’t. Your father thought he wouldn’t acquire a taste, either, God bless him, and you see how much he likes it now.” Nomi looked out the window. She had a long thin face with high cheekbones and heavily lidded eyes that reminded me a little of a frog’s eyes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but once she had been very pretty.

“How do you acquire a taste, Nomi?”

“Lots of ways,” said Nomi. “Out of hope, out of disappointment, out of other people’s example or expectations. Mostly, though, you just keep on drinking the stuff until you like it. Me, I’m half Irish; I was born with a taste for it. And that makes you an eighth Irish, so you better watch out, or you’ll acquire a taste for it, too.”