C Hribal - The Company Car

Our mother couldn’t articulate them. Perhaps they were too close to her own, and she didn’t dare voice them. Our mother simply said, “She’s my friend. I miss her.”

“Well your friend broke Louie’s heart,” said our father, “and I say, good riddance.”

Our father displayed the same lack of comprehension and anger whenever our mother mentioned she wanted a pet, which she’d been doing for months now. “Eight people in this house and you want to add a ninth? And I’m not even counting Artu!”

“It’s not like a cat takes up the same room as a person,” countered our mother.

“There’s no room, no room, no room!” said our father.

“A cat can be as quiet as a mouse,” said our mother.

“That’s what you said about Nomi!”

“Let’s go look at pet supplies,” said our mother the next time we went to Woolworth’s.

Such a trip was our family’s equivalent of Hannibal crossing the Alps. Pregnant with Ernie, pushing Wally Jr. in a stroller that balked at every curb, our mother waddled down Madison to the York Road bus stop, accompanied by me. I’d been plucked from our fort—a ramshackle building on an empty lot down the street constructed out of two-by-fours, plywood, and paneling we’d liberated from various building sites—by our mother, who already had Wally Jr. trussed and temporarily pacified in the stroller. Sarah and Robert Aaron complained. Hadn’t I just had an “out”? Our mother insisted; I was born the day after Christmas and therefore shortchanged in the celebration department. (“You were born on Boxing Day,” said our father. “In England, we could return you.”)

I knew what awaited us at Woolworth’s: counter stools and a waitress named Madge, who looked at us as though we were an incarnation of the Holy Family. Soup for our mother and a grilled-cheese sandwich for us, the plate garnished with the strangest condiment in the world: parsley.

After a leisurely lunch, we would wander up and down the aisles looking at glassware and plate sets, small appliances and kitchen supplies, wire racks of greeting cards, wall clocks and alarm clocks, women’s underthings—I averted my eyes and/or stared guiltily—and then, way in the back, near the storeroom and the employee lounge and the bathroom, the pet area.

I felt strange being on “an out” with our mother. In the wake of my trip to the Office, I thought I had something special with our father. But I was mistaken in that belief. He took us—me—on other errands around town, but after my special trip I became one of “you kids” again, and the Office reverted to being a mysterious place, a place to which our father disappeared, and from which he returned a different person altogether. I could not enlighten my siblings as to what went on at the Office because I felt sworn to secrecy—“Loose lips sink ships”—and because I was reasonably sure our mother would take a dim view of my having been there at all. I did not understand what had happened that one time, but I had the feeling that our father, when tested, had acted nobly. This was not our mother’s interpretation of his behavior, though it wasn’t clear whether her response was to the incident with Shirley, or to the fact that as often as not he did not act so nobly. At Grandma Hubie’s, for example, I had wanted him to act noble and large and kindhearted, and he hadn’t. He’d acted small and mean and aggressive. And he had been acting this way for a while now. This, too, was taking its toll on our mother.

I should have known that on an out with our mother I should not bring up our father’s behavior, but I think I wanted these essentially separate worlds, our mother’s and our father’s, to connect. So at the end of lunch I blew it. I was softly spinning myself back and forth on my stool as our mother figured out the bill and handed two dollars to the waitress. She got her change and put a quarter next to her plate. “That’s a tip,” our mother said.

“I know,” I said. “And here’s another: Loose lips sink ships.”

“Where did you hear that?” Her lips went thin. “Never mind. I should have known.”

“He always leaves a dollar,” I said, as though I knew what I was talking about.

“I’m sure he does,” said our mother, getting off her stool as quickly as she could manage. “Come on,” she said, “we’re doing some shopping. And on your father’s nickel,” she added.

We went straight to Pets. “I should have done this years ago,” said our mother. We went from cage to cage, staring the animals in the beak, in the snout, in whatever they offered us for a nose. “I want a bird, Emmie,” she said, peering into the cages. “I want something that knows what I feel and can sing.”

What did my mother feel? I had no idea. But I knew she couldn’t sing. She had a terrible singing voice, a fact attested to every Sunday when she sang “Faith of Our Fathers” and “Ave Maria.” It was a voice I was to inherit, and I felt sympathy for her, our father’s tenor soaring over her cracks and croaks (mine, too, though I didn’t know that at the time).

I did wonder, though, if this had anything to do with our father coming home from the Office with another woman’s name written on his back in unguent. It turned out Shirley had pressed her nail down rather hard when she wrote—our father’s grinning at the time must have been him gritting his teeth—and the letters of her name stood out in raised white letters against the burnt offering of his back as though they were embossed there. I know this because the day after our visit to the Office our father requested that I, not our mother, put the unguent on his back. “If Emcee’s going to have a medical career, he’s going to have to learn how to do these things,” said our father, which was the first I’d heard of my aspirations toward medicine. Our mother skeptically raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I applied unguent, smearing it as gently as I could on our father’s back, gingerly going over the raised, ghostly letters. It was not quite right, I was sure, for Shirley to have written her name like that, and it made me feel strange, my fingers tracing their raised surfaces. I tried putting on extra unguent, hoping to cover them under an orange smear, but they were still visible, like a message written in the mud of a glacial lake.

“What do you think of that one?” our mother said, pointing to a brilliantly hued parrot gnawing on its cage. I didn’t like the way it was looking at me. It looked sinister, like it might come into our house, learn our secrets, and fly away with them banded to its leg. I shook my head. “That’s okay,” said our mother, pushing the stroller to the next cage. “It’s too expensive anyway.” The mynah birds were similarly expensive, which was fine with me. The orange spots of bare flesh next to their eyes gave them a tough look, as though they’d put on Halloween masks for the sole purpose of taking your candy. The canaries I didn’t like because they looked like furred lemons, and it was beginning to look as if our mother was simply indulging her wish to own a pet by extending the sphere of her sighs when she stopped in front of one last cage that held not one but two parakeets. They were the color of unripe bananas, pale yellow heads and bodies, sickly green wings, the green in the sixty-four-color Crayola set that you used when you wanted to draw trees leafing out in spring. One was chattering away, the other stood stock-still on its perch, its head canted a little as though it were tired of listening to its partner.

“That one,” said my mother, pointing at the still one. “It needs me.”

Had I been the sullen, smart-ass teenager I would later become I might have said, “Great, Mom, parakeet intervention.” Or had I been the smarty-pants college boy with one psychology course under his belt I’d become after that I might have said, “You’re nesting, Mom. And really, a bird to represent your pathetic desires to get away? Get real.” But I wasn’t seventeen or nineteen. I was six, and what I said was fatal. What I said was “What will Dad say?”