C Hribal - The Company Car

When we got bored there was always the rest of the basement. Grandpa Cza-Cza had a shuffleboard court inlaid in the floor tile in the next room, and we could usually while away a few hours on that. Grandpa also had a cream-colored bas relief of the Venus de Milo. I had seen better breasts on the Duckwa daughter. She wore a bikini while sunbathing, undid the straps when lying on her stomach. Once she forgot herself and stood up without redoing them. That something so secret could be so completely revealed and yet remain a mystery was, I thought, roughly on a par with transubstantiation. Still, the breasts of Venus were pretty good. It was a pity about her arms, though.

When our father found us staring at the sightless woman’s nipples he said, “Learn to appreciate that, it’s art.” But we knew it wasn’t—what was it doing hanging in the basement then? Or maybe he meant not the whole picture but the breasts themselves. That I could understand—the Duckwa daughter was, after all, a work of art. Sometimes when it was time to go home our father stood with a beer in front of Venus, her raised surfaces luscious enough to touch. He’d whistle and say, “Batta-bing, batta-bing, eh? Don’t tell your mother I let you stare.” I think he understood that the Venus de Milo was our escape, that we looked at her raptly not just for her anatomy but because losing ourselves in her mystery was an escape from our own boredom.

Our father never lacked for escapes. Dorie neither. She’s come up with a new one. Two, actually. We’re having a beer, watching the kids being marched down to Ike’s tepee, and Dorie says to me, “This next year I’m going to need to be out of the house more.”

“More than you are now?” I mentally tick off everything that already keeps her out of the house—the fifty-mile training rides, the fourteen-mile training runs, the classes on mountain-biking technique, trail building, the rides themselves, and—oh yeah—all the property she’s managing. Twenty-some apartment houses in Veedon Park and the adjoining neighborhood. Technically she owns half the bookstore, too.

“I want to participate in some of those Ironman triathlons, and my swimming’s for shit right now. And”—slow breath here—“I’ve decided to run for alderwoman.”

“I thought you decided against that.”

“I changed my mind. People are allowed to change their minds, Em.”

“Feeling restless again? You could always work in the bookstore with me.”

“I’d like to make a difference, Em. I can hire a manager for the properties.”

“And between that, the biking, and the triathlon training, who’s going to hold down the fort?”

“The kids are old enough. They won’t be a problem for you.”

“And what, exactly, do I get out of all this?”

“A happy wife?”

“Besides that.”

“You want more? We don’t have a conventional marriage, Em. We never have.”

“Sure we do. It’s just everything’s reversed.” I have a pull of my beer. This must be what our mother always felt, buried under a slurry of prepositions: being at home, waiting for our father, waiting on our father.

Dorie curls her arms around her legs, her chin on her knees. For the second time she asks me, “Don’t you ever feel restless, Em? Don’t you ever feel as though your head’s going to explode?” I’d like to tell her, Sure, lots of times. Now, for instance, but she doesn’t give me the chance. “Never mind, Em, I can see you haven’t. Thank God I run and lift weights—it’s a safe way of burning off all that restless energy.” Again with the safe. I wonder if it’s a line she uses at the gym, a way of flirting with the guys there. Or something she says to the guys she meets on these organized rides. See how they respond to words like safe and restless energy.

“There are dangerous ways, I suppose.” Mustering up my affability.

“Don’t I know it. For a while there, Em, I felt as though I was coming apart. I was a different woman for a while, when I felt that. A woman I didn’t recognize. Me and not me.”

I knew what I was getting in Dorie Keillor a.k.a. Dorothy Braun when I married her. She had gone through a wild streak in high school and a wilder streak after that. Voracious in her appetite. But by the time we hooked up, she told me she was ready to settle down. Only what if she was mistaken? I imagine Dorie in a future life, with some other husband, our kids grown and gone, and the thought torments me so much I can’t bear it. Worse, she’s talking not hypotheticals but something that’s already happened. What made her not recognize herself? And before she discovered the safe ways for burning off her restlessness, what were the reckless ones? I know, of course—there’s that diaphragm and nightgown in her pannier to remind me, but I can’t bring myself yet to ask her. Advice for attorneys: Never ask in court a question to which you don’t already know the answer. Advice for husbands: Never ask your wife a question to which you don’t want to know the answer.

Our father, so far as I knew, favored the safer ways. Besides the big boat he was building at Grandpa Cza-Cza’s, in our basement he was building a model of the ship he spent so much time on a decade previous. He lugged down an old red linoleum and steel-legged kitchen table of Artu’s, and from a hobby store bought sheets and sheets of balsa wood in various thicknesses, X-Acto knives, and dozens upon dozens of bottles of model paint, most of them gray. Working from photographs, he was going to build a three-foot-long replica of his ship. He wanted it exact, he said, right down to the little men vomiting over the side.

Perhaps our father’s one unsafe pastime was visiting Uncle Louie. Our father felt this dovetailed nicely with his desire for “room to breathe.” Our mother maintained it was just another way to visit the Office. Uncle Louie lived in a sprawling ranch house on a hill outside Rockford. He had five acres of land, a creek, and a long cinder-block building in which he raised chinchillas. Then Helen had left him, despite the chinchillas he was raising “expressly for her.” When we went there it was a curious mix of country holiday and pity party.

Our father, Uncle Louie, our mom, and whatever woman Uncle Louie was dating would look at the chinchillas, make sandwiches and hot cocoa for us, and sit by the fire drinking Rob Roys (our father), sidecars (our mother), bourbon on the rocks (Uncle Louie), and God-knows-what (the woman Uncle Louie was currently seeing).

Things had not gone well for Uncle Louie since Helen had left him. He was doing well financially—enough so that he owned five acres outside Rockford and could lose money on the chinchillas—though he expected to see back his five-thousand-dollar initial investment, he told our father, “just as soon as the little shits start breeding.” In the blockhouse—it smelled of disinfectant and rabbit turds—we helped Uncle Louie feed the furry little rodents. They looked like hamsters or guinea pigs, and you could see in our father’s eyes that there was money to be made from this. “No, Wally,” whispered our mother emphatically, and our father got a hangdog expression on his face.

The women Uncle Louie was seeing had no interest in the chinchillas except as they might appear in a muff or a collar or a stole. We asked our mother what a stole was. “A stole is what these women are doing to Uncle Louie.”

“Hush,” said our father. “Little pitchers.”

“What?” said our mother. “They shouldn’t hear to steer clear of that kind of woman?”

“What kind of woman?”

“You know,” said our mother. “ That kind of woman. The kind he seems bent on seeing. Helen may have had a short attention span, but she wasn’t like this. ”