C Hribal - The Company Car

Like hell. None of us wants to be blamed by the others for ruining our parents’ anniversary. If things go kablowies, we all want to be able to shake our heads and sigh with relief. “Well, at least it wasn’t me.”

We were of one mind, too, when it came to getting their anniversary presents. In years past we have argued and bickered and agreed to disagree, and the result was that sometimes we didn’t get them anything as a group. Each person made an individual offering. But on this occasion, it seemed important that we all pull together. Oddly enough, this means that we have arranged for two separate anniversary presents. One is for our mother—a twilight balloon ride over our farm for her and our father, with all of us gathered beneath them. The other is for our father—a fully restored, two-toned 1955 Chevy Bel Air Nomad station wagon. Our parents know they’re getting the one but not the other. The Nomad’s not here yet. We’ve arranged for Tony Dederoff, our father’s best friend, to drive it over first thing tomorrow morning. It’s actually a model year he never drove—his first company car came the next year, while our mother was expecting me—but we chose it because its detailing seemed oddly and wonderfully symbolic. Almost prophetic. Everything about it—its delta-wing jet hood ornament and the chrome side scroll, even the chrome piping of the roof rack—suggests the open road, empty highway, flight. And yet there on the rear door are seven chrome darts—one for each kid!—representing stability, solidity, staying put. The ballast that kept our father rooted right here. I suppose we’re saying the same thing to our mother with this balloon ride. It’s something she’s been wanting for ages. “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to float across the sky, but gently, not going too fast,” she’s told us. So we get her what she wants, but arrange for the balloon to float over Augsbury, for the flight to end in our alfalfa field. She floats away, but not too far; she ends where she’s always been. And given that our father is joining her on the balloon ride but the car is pretty much his (our mother, certainly, will never drive it), gift-wise, our mother is getting the short end of the stick. But then our mother always got the short end of the stick.

I speak of the company car as though we understood what it was. But like most things that came to us from the world of adults, we hadn’t a clue as to what it was or what it meant. We thought, very simply, that it meant we got a different station wagon every other year. Maybe even the same station wagon but with clever styling changes—the instrument panel, the trim and body colors, the interior color, the luggage rack, the presence or absence of the vent window.

“That’s the company car,” our father said. “Nobody touches it, nobody rides in it, nobody breathes on it, unless I say so. Capeesh?”

We capeeshed all right. The company car. It sounded like everything else in our house that we weren’t allowed to touch, lest we break it. The company car was the car we took out when we had company. Like the company china. The company silverware. The company glasses. “That’s for company!” our mother shrieked when I took out the fine porcelain our father got for her when he was stationed in Japan. “Use the everyday stuff,” she’d admonish us, and I could feel we had dropped somehow in her estimation of our worthiness. I could never figure it out. Why were we saving this stuff for strangers? Weren’t we supposed to reap the benefits of our father’s having gone overseas? Wasn’t that why he went—to make the world a safer place and to get a good deal on postwar china?

The company car may as well have been made of porcelain. We rarely rode in it. To go to church, to pick up groceries, to go on vacation, to visit relatives. Perhaps that was why, when you were allowed in it, you felt something special and magical was about to happen.

On long drives with the wayback down, the five, six, seven of us would be arranged hip to foot, hip to foot, alternating. This prevented our fighting, except for kicking, and even then we didn’t mess around too much. Our father possessed a backhand of infinite reach. The arrangement also gave us the illusion of private space, which was important to us even though we did everything together. In summer we played Alphabet, counted license plates from other states, tried to get truckers to honk for us. In winter we tilted our heads back and looked at the stars, feeling the reel of the infinite above us and the thrum of the road inside our skulls. Sometimes in summer our father pulled off the highway in the middle of the night. “Look, look at the sky!” he’d rouse us, and then he’d cry, “There! There’s one!” and we’d follow a tracer star streaking to its death. In winter he did the same thing, and bundled in coats we’d sit on the engine still ticking heat and watch the entire northern sky change color—pulsing, shifting curtains and rivers of white and yellow and red and green and blue and magenta, and behind that the stars in their velvet. “That’s the aurora borealis,” said our father. “The Northern Lights. People go their whole lives without seeing them. But we have. Now, together, all of us. Never forget that.” This sounded like a prelude to his “You’re Czabeks, never forget that” speech, which was pretty close to our mother’s “Remember, all you’ve got is family” speech, which dovetailed neatly with our father’s “What’s said in this house stays in this house” speech, which scared and thrilled us with the idea that we were the keepers of deep, dark family secrets, part of some conspiracy, something that could bring down the family if it got out, or bring down a government if it didn’t. We were a cabal, the Czabek cabal, and pronouncements like our father’s while we huddled in our winter coats on top of the company car as the aurora borealis shimmered and danced above us reinforced the notion that we belonged to something, and that certain things belonged to us. It seemed as though our father was introducing us to the concept of spiritual ownership, and once you had something, shared in something together, then it was yours, always. So the company car was indeed something special. Inside it, we were transformed.

But it meant something different to our father.

What it meant to our father was that he never owned his own car, he never owned any car, and about the time he’d gotten used to one it was time to break in a new car.

This seemed like a fine idea to us, but it chafed our father. Ownership cut two ways for him. The world was Al Capone’s oyster, after all, because he saw what he wanted and took it. A company car, on the other hand, meant something was given to him, and it wasn’t ever really his. Our father believed in ownership, in the special privileges ownership conveyed—the feeling that this was yours, you’d worked for it, you’d earned it—and with a company car that feeling was impossible. A company car came with certain restrictions, one of which was that the car went back to the company when it hit the 70,000-mile mark, which usually took our father just under two years. Later, when he had a five-state territory (Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and occasionally Ohio), he’d put that many miles on in a single year. Still, he often wanted to buy the car back from the company, and they wouldn’t let him.

Our father thought this was revenge for his requesting a station wagon in the first place. In this era of minivans and SUVs, and everything leased and traded in every two to three years, our father’s desires for permanence and ownership must seem rather quaint, but at the time it was a badge of shame to our father that he never owned his own vehicle. It seemed so un-American. What were we, closet socialists? Communists? Fellow travelers? Believers in the World Bank?