C Hribal - The Company Car

“I’m getting married,” Harold said.

“Real men—” said our father. “Enough, Wally, I mean it,” said our mother. Our father poured himself another beer. As though he were speaking to the beer he said, “And that’s the name of that tune.” Then he put his fist to his mouth and quacked like a duck, his fist opening as he did so to let the noise increase in volume. He had this tight, befuddled little smile on his face, as though he wasn’t quite sure what line had been crossed, but he was pleased one had.

Nobody said anything. Then Artu, who usually ignored our father when he got like this, said to him, “You fought the Battle of Lake Michigan in World War Two, didn’t you, Walter?”

“I served my country in her hour of need,” said our father.

“In the Coast Guard, wasn’t it? Stateside?”

“I served my country,” our father repeated.

“And in Korea, you hauled troops and ferried refugees around, right? You didn’t see any real action, did you?”

“I could hear the guns,” said our father.

“But you didn’t see any action, did you?”

“I fucking served my country, you son of a bitch!” our father roared. He was standing now, swaying forward on his fingertips. He refilled his glass again. “And that… that is the name of that tune.” He sat down again.

Nobody had knocked their coins to the floor in some time. This was how family gatherings with our father ended these days. Edgy. Our mother stoic but near tears. Her eyes were glistening as she got us our coats. Artu said Irene and Frank would give him a ride home.

“Are you coming, Walter?” Our father hadn’t moved while our mother got our coats. He sipped from his glass, then refilled it. He held up the bottle and toggled it back and forth, meaning one of us should get him another. We didn’t move. Our mother would yell at us if we did. Our father shrugged, put the bottle down. In the dining room we heard Sarah complaining. Why did we have to leave so early? Why couldn’t she stay? Our mother explained icily that nobody was driving out of their way for us. And Sarah Lucinda was old enough to help with getting Wally Jr.’s coat on. Did she need to be reminded that she was part of this family, too? “I hate this family,” said Sarah Lucinda. This was followed by a loud smack.

Our mother reappeared in the sunporch’s doorway. She was furious and resplendent, her green eyes blazing, her pregnant belly lending her a power she didn’t usually have. “Walter,” she said, in clipped syllables that made it sound as though she were cutting them off her tongue with a knife. “Are you coming home with us or not?”

Our father studied his cards. “I believe I’ll let you play this hand out,” he said, tossing his cards into the pot and rising heavily to his feet.

A pall filled our car on the way home. “I have never been so humiliated—” said our mother, but she didn’t say anything more. It was a phrase we had not yet gotten used to hearing, although eventually we would. Our mother would repeat it whenever we came home from any event our father had drunk too much at, exclusive of his many trips to the Office, which was where he would go this evening once we got home. We knew what he would say as we trooped out of the car and entered our dark and empty house: “And that’s the name of that tune,” he’d say, and roll up his window, and put the car into reverse, and wobble back out the drive. And our mother would want to say something to him but wouldn’t, except maybe to press her lips together and breathe, “You shit,” once he was already into the street, too far away to hear her or to see the fear and determination that lit up her face. “Come on inside, you kids,” she’d say and usher us upstairs and make us ready for bed. Then she’d make herself tea and bring it and a beer-and-sandwich platter up to Nomi, who would listen as our mother poured out her grief.

That was the rest of our evening—the rest of our childhood, really—already spread out silently before us. For now, our parents sat in the front seat, and we sat in the middle and the wayback, and the air itself seemed permeated with silence, a silence that insinuated itself like a wraith. We kids—we all looked out the windows. Brick houses, ranches mostly, filled our view. We wondered—would life be any different for us if we lived there, or there, or there? We came to the conclusion it wouldn’t.

“What is it with guys and nostalgia?” Dorie asks me. “You’re so fucking sentimental about things passing—cheese in wax paper, transistor radios, pinochle, euchre, beer in short glasses. For chrissakes, everything’s a little shrine with you. Even your bad memories. You want to know something? Plenty of shit happened to me, too. I just never talk about it. I don’t even think about it.”

Dorie’s right. She doesn’t look back much. What’s done is done. A practical philosophy, but it also means she doesn’t feel the need to apologize for anything, ever. Whatever lies in her wake is already in history’s dustbin. I, on the other hand, am a sifter of shards, trying to figure out how the pieces fit, and what they might mean. My accidental discovery, for example, that Dorie was packing a diaphragm—a piece of equipment I’d thought no longer necessary given my vasectomy post-Sophie—on her bike trips. And a negligee, one I had never seen before, packed neatly around it. Discoveries I’ve yet to bring to her attention.

Maybe it’s inevitable. I’m the longest relationship she’s ever had, and she’d been through a lot of them before me. She was with Woolie’s father for maybe half a year, with Henry’s father less than that. And dozens more before that. A restless soul, she does not suffer boredom easily. And lately she has been bored. Distracted, both in and out of the bedroom. “Ace,” she says to me, both fondly and impatiently, “what you need to understand is that sex can be okay even when it’s just… okay. You don’t need the rocket’s red glare every time out.” I suppose most marriages, sooner or later, settle into a kind of going-through-the-motions phase, but it still surprises me that these particular motions would be subject to the same laws of entropy. Old joke: Q: What does a wife of over seven years think during sex? A: Pink. I think I’ll paint it pink. Weren’t we the magical exception, though? This was a woman, after all, who was three months pregnant when I first made love to her. She had two dime-size indentations on her lower back, flanking her spine. They drove me crazy with desire. And I was in love with her in high school, too, only she ran with a very different crowd then—the oversexed dirtballs—and she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. A guy named Calvin knocked her up in high school, and six weeks later Dorie disappeared. Not long after that he was happily knocking boots with Holly Gunther and referring to the still-gone Dorie as “my ex-whore.” It still amazes me sometimes that we yoked our wagons together, but once we did it seemed both inevitable and right. Perhaps that’s my mistake. I think in terms of familiarity, intimacy, comfort. I take the inevitability of permanence for granted. I forget about fragility, inconstancy, boredom, and change. The inevitability of things passing. Then it comes and whups me upside the head, and for months I walk around in a daze, a deserving victim of my own optimism.

This gives me pause when I think about my (our) bookstores. If Dorie decides Van Loon’s is a bad business investment, it’s history. If she decides I’m a bad investment of her time, I’m history. It’s strange to think of our fates linked like that, but they are. Trying to keep a bookstore afloat is not unlike trying to keep a marriage afloat. You have to be possessed of a certain myopia that what you’re doing is right, and you have to keep plugging away, believing in your effort, all evidence to the contrary. And even then, despite your best efforts, if your partner backs out, it really doesn’t matter what you think or what you’ve tried or what you’ve hoped for. You’re toast.