C Hribal - The Company Car

That day at Grandma Hubie’s was a special event. Our great-uncle Harold had brought his fiancée home to meet the family. Nancy was a skinny redhead with her hair done up in a low beehive and a swoop of bangs over her forehead. She had plucked her eyebrows, then drawn in new ones that looked like the way I drew crows at a distance, had the crows been flying upside down. Her skirt was too short, showing a good two inches of thigh, which endeared her to no one but Grandma Hubie. “Sit down, my dear, sit down,” Grandma Hubie cried, and Nancy was left to her fate while everyone else went about their business. Even Harold eventually removed his hand from hers and went to have a cigarette in the backyard. Hubie and Tillie and Eunice took turns reminiscing to the girl about their own families, then she was released to (or rescued by) the other women, who had their own inquiries to make.

It was spring, but there was still snow on the ground and the air was chilly, especially on the sunporch behind the kitchen, which was where all the men were, playing poker. Artu; our father; Aunt Gwen’s husband, Bruno; Irene’s husband, Frank; Aunt Margie’s husband, Alvin; and Margie’s three sons, Harold, Howard, and Stephen.

Alvin was a nice man, but his face looked like he used it to stop trucks for a living. He had a bullet-shaped head and a gash for a mouth and bad teeth, which was all right because it looked like he possessed only seven or eight of them. He loved to laugh, though, like our father, and after a while you got used to seeing those exposed horrible teeth. It helped that he had a habit of elbowing his stack of winnings—the coins anyway—onto the floor. “Get that, would you?” he’d ask us, and we’d dive to the linoleum, then proffer him our gleanings. “Keep it,” he’d say, and we’d snug in close to his elbows, sentries to his needs, fetching him another braunschweiger and onion sandwich, or another of the pickles he liked to gnaw on for his poor sore gums. The others took to elbowing their winnings on the floor, too, and we fanned out, each of us picking a great-uncle or grandfather whose elbow movements we shadowed.

We had one other favorite uncle, Stephen, but he played only a few hands before he said he had to get back to school. He was a sophomore at Notre Dame. “Midterms,” he said as he put on his jacket. “Major parties,” said Aunt Margie, sighing after he left. She’d come into the sunporch with a warm glass of milk for Alvin, who loved the food he ate but suffered from heartburn. “You’d think he’d stay to chat with Nancy.”

“Why?” Harold asked. “He’s not marrying her. I am.”

Margie cuffed Harold gently on the back of his head.

“It’s okay, Ma. We already agreed, he’s going to be my best man.”

“All the more reason he should be visiting with Nancy.”

“Mom, give him a break. It’s Friday night. I’d be out partying with my friends, too, if I wasn’t here.”

“The point is you are here.”

“If you ask me he should be in the service,” said our father, shuffling the cards in his hand. “Stephen, I mean. It’d do him a world of good.”

“Nobody asked you, Wally,” said our mother. The women had come into the sunporch. It was growing dark, and with Stephen’s departure you could feel the day closing in on itself.

“Last fall they had me on call-up duty, you know that?” said our father. “The Cuban missile thing and they had everybody in the reserves all charged up and ready to go.”

“They could have sent Wally-Bear back to San Diego,” our mother said. “And me, big as a house here with our sixth.”

“It seems crazy,” Margie said.

“Frightful,” said our mother. It sounded like our mother was confessing something, which indeed she was. This was our mother’s way: something horrible would happen, and you would only find out about it later, when she had surmounted it enough to make light of it. You could tell she had been cut, but the wound was healing. That, anyway, was the image our mother wished to present to the world, an attitude no doubt ingrained in her by Nomi, whose motto could have been “Never let ’em see you cryin’, girl, never ever.” Inside her own home, however, was another matter. And even then it was a matter more of our eavesdropping than of her giving vent to her emotions in front of us.

That whole fall had been a tense time in our household. There had been a letter from the government, and our mother had cried when she opened it. Our parents spent a lot of time in front of the TV, which they didn’t usually do, and ushered us out of the room when the news came on. Our father started coming home earlier than usual, and after we were in bed he and our mother would talk in hushed, plaintive voices. Or at least that would be our mother’s voice. Our father’s was calm and accepting, as though the balance of power in the family had shifted back toward him. One evening we heard our mother wail, “But they can’t make you go, Wally, they can’t make you go!” and our father answered, “I’d have to, Susan. I have a commission. I’d have to report.” We peeked over the railing to see our father comforting her. She sat on his lap, folded into his shoulder, her just barely pregnant belly bumping into his. Our father had his arms around her, and he was kissing her hair, saying, “There, there. There, there,” while our mother cried, “I can’t do this again, Wally, I can’t, I can’t.”

The whole scene scared us. Usually our mother was the indomitable one, putting up with our father’s absences, or lambasting him when he did get home—but here she was weeping on our father’s shoulder like a little girl who’d skinned her knee. Without a word passing among us, we agreed not to speak of this. It just settled into our consciousness, that everything could change at a moment’s notice, the world turned upside down. Your parents were your parents, sure, but evidently one of them could leave and call that duty. We didn’t understand this. That evening, behind the closed door of their bedroom, there was a desperate furtiveness to their noises, a plaintive urgency, as though they felt they had to use up everything inside them prior to their world coming apart. That knowledge seeped into us as well.

“It would have been my third war,” said our father. “All under Democratic presidents, if you get my drift.” He winked at everybody around the table. I hadn’t been counting how many beers he’d had, but it had been a lot. Our father drank beer in short glasses quickly and refilled them often. He had acquired the taste.

“Wally, don’t be bringing up politics. You know how I hate that,” said our mother.

“Facts are facts,” said our father. “You want peace and prosperity, you get a Republican. You get a recession under a Democrat, and the first thing after that you got a war on your hands to balance the budget.”

“World War Two was about balancing the budget?” Artu asked.

“It got us out of the Depression,” said our father. “Don’t think Roosevelt didn’t know that. He let Pearl Harbor happen just so he’d have an incident to get us involved.”

“Don’t answer him,” said our mother. “It’ll just keep him going.”

“I thought this one was about keeping the Communists out of Asia,” Harold said.

“It is. But you watch. If the economy takes a tumble, it won’t be just advisers going over there. That’s why Stephen should enlist now. ROTC. Life’s a lot better for you as an officer, and that’s the name of that tune.”

“It’s not okay as a civilian?” Harold asked.

“Real men serve in the military,” said our father. He looked around the table. Bruno had a bad knee that kept him out of the Big One, Artu had come of age between the wars, and Howard had done a very uneventful hitch in the late fifties. That left Harold, who had a soft, serious look on his face I could identify with. Harold was a watcher and a listener. He cleared his throat.