C Hribal - The Company Car

“Are you guys arguing?” Sophie doesn’t look up from her Winnie-the-Pooh coloring book, on which she is working intently. I’m not sure when she woke up.

“Mommy and Daddy are having a disagreement about the need for preservation. You know, like in our house, saving all the old stuff because it’s cool.”

“There’s preservation and then there’s being an antediluvian pack rat,” Dorie says over the backseat, though she clearly means this for me.

“You mean like Cza-Cza?” Our father is known for his inability to part with just about anything his hands have ever touched. His house is a monument to how fast paper can accumulate if you let it.

Dorie refuses to talk to our kids as though they’re kids. “Yes, but what we’re talking about is being an emotional pack rat. Saving up memories and feelings not because they’re useful or necessary but just because you had them once.”

“Oh. Can we see the planes?” We’re near Oshkosh. We cannot drive past this town without one of our children, Woolie when he was younger, and now Henry and Sophie, asking if we can’t stop at the Experimental Aircraft Association museum. Woolie, now a sullen teenager, no longer shows interest. He’d rather stare out the window, plugged into Rusted Root or Dave Matthews. It is no longer cool for him to show enthusiasm for anything he has not discovered on his own. But Henry and Sophie get all worked up when they see the F-14 mounted on stilts beside the highway, and the hangars at the far end of the grass airfield. They will get equally worked up when we come to the underground house at the next exit. During the early seventies someone built a house inside a berm. It looks like a coffin with windows. A string of poplars grows atop the berm. Our children measure distance by their memory of landmarks (time itself is an impediment, something that separates the landmarks and prevents them from coming immediately into view as soon as Sophie and Henry recall that they exist), and these two—the EAA and the underground house—mean that we are getting close to Cza-Cza and Mumu’s house. As we come under Cza-Cza and Mumu’s gravitational pull, it seems appropriate that they have two markers—one for rootedness, one for flight.

“How can you say that to her?” I say sotto voce. “Telling her memories and feelings aren’t necessary.”

“The downside of attachment is depression, sweetie. She should know that. And I’m not going to let that happen, not even with you.” Before I can say anything, Dorie cuts me off. “Later, sweetie.”

“No, wait, let me just understand—”

Dorie goes into her singsong “the kids are listening” voice: “I said LA-ter, and I mean LA-ter. ” And that pretty much ends the discussion. Henry is waking up now himself, and the first words out of his mouth are “Are we there yet?” which he repeats until I confirm that we are. But I don’t share his enthusiasm. Nobody in a shaky marriage likes to see family. You feel transparent, your sorrow written in black Magic Marker across your forehead: WE ARE UNHAPPY. And no matter what turbulence there has been in your siblings’ relationships, when your own relationship is wobbling, everyone else’s seems serene. Your own hail-fellow-well-met-ness is a front, your fake serenity—yes, yes, ours too is a match made in heaven—so patently false you’re simply waiting for someone to call you on it. It would almost be a relief if someone did, but in the strange geometry of our family, there’s an unspoken agreement that nobody will say boo. So we will turn and twist, pretending, dissembling, and we will see in people’s eyes that they know we’re lying, that we’re fooling no one. All this will be made worse by the occasion itself—celebrating fifty years of our parents’ marriage having endured. Fifty? I think. Fifty? I don’t know that we’re going to see fifteen. Sophie wants to know what fifty is. “Forty-five more than you,” I tell her. “Fifty is what Aunt Cinderella will be later this year.” Sophie ponders this. You can see her face straining to figure it out. I try to help her. “I was forty when you were born. I’m forty-five now. So in five years I’ll be fifty, too.” No go. Another tack: “Fifty is half of one hundred,” I say. “Fifty plus fifty equals one hundred. So when I’m fifty, what will I be in fifty years?” In the rearview mirror Sophie’s face lights up. She gets it. She is joyous in her knowledge, and no doubt her mother’s words of wisdom have helped her calculations. “In fifty years,” she says serenely, “you’ll be dead.”

If SUVs, minivans, and pickups could stand in for Higgins Boats, then our arrival at our parents’ is not unlike a beach landing. Villagers, Cherokees, and Explorers wash up the drive, disgorge passengers, park in uneven rows. More people arrive by the minute. And this is just immediate family. Lots more people will come tomorrow for the anniversary itself. Robert Aaron and Cinderella have children old enough to drive, and they’re exercising that prerogative. Cinderella has children old enough to have children, and they’re exercising that prerogative as well. Amazing: all these people have issued, in effect, from one horny couple. It is hard keeping them all separate.

But then, it was hard keeping us separate even when it was just us kids. Our mother encouraged us all to be individuals, but our father lumped us all together.

Our father rarely called us by our names. I think sometimes he’d forgotten our names, or that we even had names. To our father we were always “you kids.” We were a collective plague to him, undifferentiated but bothersome. “You kids had better watch yourselves playing ball in the street.” “You kids better eat that soup.” “You kids better help your mother.” “You kids need to make your beds.” You kids. You kids. You kids. For the longest time it was hard to imagine we were complete and separate human beings. To our father we were an early version of Star Trek ’s Borg, threatening him with our massed presence.

Our mother, on the other hand, would get us confused. “Sarah, Robert Aaron, Emmie, Ike, Wally Jr., Ernie, Megan,” she’d say, rapid-fire, like she was fixing our names in her head, making sure we were still who she thought we were. She ran the list in birth order when trying to single out one of us for cautionary words or punishment, stopping when she came to the one she wanted. As though we were too much for her. As though we were a constant blur, which no doubt we were. As though she could remember the names but not the faces: “Sarah, Robert, Emmie, Ike, Wally Jr., Ernie, Ernie! Stop that. You’re hurting your sister.”

But it’s not as though we didn’t—don’t—buy into it, too. When all of us have arrived, and our parents, slow-moving now, with arthritic hips and ankles, shuffle out to greet us, what are the first words out of our mouths? “Mom, Dad,” we say, “the kids have arrived.”

An air of jocular intensity falls over us. We hug, slap backs, buss cheeks. We talk about our cars and our gas mileage and how the drive was. How work is and isn’t. I say nothing about the bookstores. To begin to explain is to own up to failure, and we can’t have that. So I’m relieved that the talk quickly moves to what our kids are up to, and the funny things they’ve recently done or said. We tell each other we look good, though truth be told, except for Ike, Dorie, and Peg Leg Meg, we look middle-aged. Our hair is thinning, our eyes baggy, our skin pasty. I’ve got a spare tire I’d like to lose, though in our family that qualifies me as svelte. Most of us have followed in the fat of our father. Cinderella looks puffy, Robert Aaron rotund, Wally Jr. flabby, Ernie portly. We say none of this. “Looking good,” we tell each other. “You lose a few pounds?” “Workin’ on it,” we reply, and we nod our heads. To eat is human, to dessert, divine. Usually fractious, despite our parents’ admonitions that we are, indeed, family, we are being careful with each other. Our unspoken agreement: we will make nice. For our parents we will put aside old problems, jealousies, enmities.