C Hribal - The Company Car

But a strange thing happens on the downstroke. Our mother’s swing slows up, and rather than send his ball flying, she pokes it maybe fifteen feet. Our mother smiles. “Had you scared, didn’t I?” she says. Then she mouths, “You owe me.” Our father, flustered and bemused, shakes his head and smiles. “I know,” he says. “I know, I know, I know.”

It may be the first time he has ever acknowledged such a debt in public.

Our parents’ turn at croquet is just for show. They tire easily these days, play one round, then shuffle back inside, our mother tilting from side to side on her rebuilt hips and bad ankles, our father listing to port as he overcompensates for his bad eye. They are starting to be a collection of replacement parts and broken down things that cannot be replaced. It’s what we expect, what we dread. That they’ll poop out early is also something that we count on, our father falling asleep in his chair in front of the TV, a tape of Command Decision or They Were Expendable still hissing in the background, our mother rousing him, finally—“Wally-Bear, come to bed”—and getting him to what used to be their bedroom, and then crossing the hall to the room last occupied by Nomi, where she will read the large-print edition of a John Le Carré novel until she falls asleep herself, waking two or three times in the middle of the night because her bladder isn’t what it used to be and hasn’t been since about the fourth or fifth of us stretched her uterus beyond recognition.

You could mistake this gathering for any midsummer picnic, only it’s already getting dark. The tall stacks of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds are turning pink and pewter in the twilight. Soon, I think, we’ll talk. The kids will get tired from running around like banshees, the youngest will be put to bed, the oldest will take off, and the kids in the middle will follow Ike down to his tepee in the woods. Ike’s tepee sleeps eight, with a rock-banked fire in the center (and a gas heater for really cold nights), and the kids will be crammed in there, sitting on bearskin rugs, feeding sticks to the fire, gussying up sparks. They’ll toast marshmallows, crunch pretzels and chips, swill soda, their eyes wide, their faces orange-yellow in the firelight. They’ll finger bear claws, pass around arrowheads and spear points, examine knitting needles and fishhooks Ike has fashioned out of bone. And they’ll listen as Ike, Pied Piper of Czabek youth, spins a web of stories about the fate of Native Americans in this country, how they lived and hunted, raised crops and families, generation to generation, until the Anglo ax fell on them.

Why Ike has gone native is anybody’s guess. When your brother decides to become a Native American, you do not question it. We know things happened to him while he was in the service. When he wanted to talk, we didn’t want to listen. Our solace now is that this preoccupation is infinitely better than his previous one, which was alcohol.

Why have any of us turned out the way we have? Wally Jr. angry, Cinderella glum, Ernie drunk, me anxious, Ike stoic, Robert Aaron cheerful, Meg uncertain. As though each of us were given a faulty compass and put in a leaky boat, and even though we’ve steered the best we can, between the bad compass and the listing boat and the fog in which we navigate we were bound to veer off course. And bump into each other, over and over again. Our father believed that was par for the course—“Kids bounce,” he’d say. Our jostling for position would make us stronger. That was why he and our mother had so many of us.

Amid such fecundity now, it’s easy to ignore the fact that we still have serious business to discuss. Kids might bounce; parents don’t.

Not long after my visit to the Office with our father, our mother announced that she was getting herself a pet. For companionship, she said. We tried not to understand—Why did our mother need companionship? Didn’t she have us?—but we did. Our mother had a problem with companionship: she didn’t have any. She had us and she had Nomi, but we were duties, not companions. And our father was not home enough to be the companion she’d thought he’d be. His absences were taking their toll. She held dinner for as long as possible before conceding that he wasn’t going to be joining us. “Sarah Lucinda, call your brothers,” she’d say, and fighting back tears she’d grimly serve us dried-out roasts, scorched vegetables, and pasty casseroles—dishes that could withstand frequent reheatings even after they had been cooked beyond recognition.

Other mothers had cars, and spent their days shopping, getting their hair done, having lunch with friends, taking in matinees, driving into Chicago, or just—just not being around. Our mother took a dim view of all this gallivanting about. No doubt she was jealous of their freedom. No doubt, too, she resented being the one mom at home to whom all these abandoned kids gravitated. Worse, our mother had never learned to drive, and even if she had, she had no car. She couldn’t reciprocate had she wanted to go on these trips, and soon enough the offers petered out. Which was fine, our mother said, she’d rather go to the Arie Crown Theater anyway, or to the Brookfield Zoo, or to the Field Museum—places she could go with our father and us.

But the company car seemed capable of going only to certain places. “I want to go to the Botanic Garden,” said our mother, to which our father replied, “You don’t want to go there,” as though he’d already checked it out and found it wanting. “Yes I do,” said our mother. “Fine,” said our father, turning the pages of his newspaper. “Get yourself a car and go.”

“I don’t need your car,” said our mother, in a tone that made it plenty clear he was optional, too, as far as she was concerned.

Our parents did go places, but usually they were company functions, or trips to see Benny Wilkerson or Louie Hwasko—our father’s friends, our mother’s only by extension. She didn’t see her friends anymore. Helen Federstam had moved to California, and Agnes Guranski had moved with her husband to Michigan. Benny, on the other hand, lived in the next suburb over, and Louie had bought some land and built a house outside Rockford, where he had set himself up in dental practice and was licking his wounds after his marriage had gone south. That was our father’s term for it: Louie’s marriage had gone south. It had actually gone west: Helen Federstam had married him two years before I was born and left him two years later. “Everyone was getting married. I thought I should, too. I liked it that Louie could whistle,” Helen reported to our mother in the weeks leading up to her departure. They were having coffee in the kitchen, one of the last times our mother enjoyed that with a friend. “That’s not enough to base a marriage on, though you could have fooled me at the time. What was I thinking? So how’s it going with Mr. Accordion? Better?” Our mother didn’t answer that one.

Just before she left for California, Helen called on our mother again. “He moved me out there to East Bumbleshoot, and now he’s raising chinchillas. It’s creepy. He’s in the barn all the time in the evenings. I could be in a negligee with a vodka martini in my hand and he’d rather be feeding them pellets. Beware a man with a scheme. He thinks he’s doing it all for you—like I’ve been crying for a chinchilla fur coat—when he’s really just doing it for himself. I decided to leave while I still possessed some semblance of sanity.”

“Good riddance,” said our father. “No kids, leaving him like that, for no good reason.”

“Walter,” said our mother. “She had very good reasons. Reasons you don’t know anything about.”

“What reasons? What?”