C Hribal - The Company Car

Her mystery only increased the day I found out her name. Our mother told us, when we were moping about the house wishing for this or that, “Be careful what you pray for. You just might get it.” I did not hear the irony. So I prayed, carefully and hard, and one July day my prayers were answered. The Duckwa Daughter, who’d been lying facedown on the chaise longue, turning her face from side to side to make sure both cheeks tanned evenly, stood up. Her back was to me. Then she turned around and, yawning, stretched her arms high over her head. Then she bent for the bikini top she’d left on the chaise longue. “You’re the one they call Emcee, right?” She was talking to me bent over, getting her breasts back into their cups, then she reached behind herself to fasten the thing. “Just so you know, my name’s Patty, Patty Duckwa.” Then she adjusted herself, smiled, and strolled nonchalantly into her house.

Several minutes passed. Had I really seen this—the curve of the breasts, their full ripe pendulousness, their nipples, the whole nine yards? Then I wanted to cry—with her eyes hidden by huge white-rimmed sunglasses, inadvertently I had focused on her face. The rest was just a lovely, lovely blur. From then on, utter the words “Patty, Patty Duckwa,” and my heart would flutter, it would skip a beat and sigh.

My own little triangle surely was more complicated than Uncle Louie’s: Helen, his ex-wife, was in California, and the women who occupied the other corner were interchangeable. My loves were nearby and not interchangeable. I was in a science club run by Wanda Plewa’s father, who was a chemist for Corning. Wanda Plewa had asked me to join because she liked me. I had joined because I liked Marie Hemmelberger, who’d already joined because of Tim Petraglia, a handsome boy with big eyebrows and soft eyes. So it wasn’t a triangle at all, it was a quadrangle, complicated by the fact that Tim liked Marie just fine. So Uncle Louie and I had something in common. We were simpatico; we knew about the vagaries of love and were trying to make the best of it, carrying our torches, putting on a happy face.

Except for those times when Uncle Louie got morose and lost it. He’d be playing along on “Crying Time” or “Born to Lose” and suddenly break down, put his head on his crossed arms on the piano top, and sob uncontrollably. Our father would say, “Hey, hey, buck up,” and our mother would usher us out of the room. “Uncle Louie’s just going through a difficult period,” our mother would say, her voice full of empathy, seemingly forgetting that she felt he brought these periods on himself. And when he got this low, there were no jokes about his predilections in the car on the way home.

Once we went to see him in the spring, and it rained like nobody’s business for three days. We couldn’t go outside the whole time; the rain beat on the windows so hard it looked as though the glass was melting. Appropriate weather for Uncle Louie’s misery: it rained, he cried. Our mother said he was crying not over the loss of his latest love but over Helen, remarried now. Our mother gestured at all the empty bottles and glasses and full ashtrays. Uncle Louie was in the bathroom right then. “Something needs to be done,” said our mother.

Our father, both palms raised: “What?”

Our mother shook her head. She didn’t know. Something. “He’s drowning,” she said.

Our father looked at the array of bottles, the dead soldiers and those not yet sacrificed to the cause. “I can think of worse ways to go.”

“You’re not helping, Wally.”

Our father changed his tune. “Hell of a way to go,” he said and shook his head.

Uncle Louie came out of the bathroom. With his black frame glasses and pinched face, he looked like an accountant unlucky in love. Or like a dentist, which he was. Our father kept him company, telling him to ease back, have a soda, but Uncle Louie just lit another cigarette and put his palm in his hand as “Crying Time” started for the umpteenth time. Our mother fumed, we played checkers, Stratego, Monopoly, Clue, cribbage. Nothing changed, nothing improved.

When we left, our father had to carry us to the car. Riding his hip, we looked down and screamed. The ground was alive: shiny, wet, tumescent, wriggling. It had rained so hard there was no air in the ground for the worms to breathe; they’d all gone topside. Worse, the roads were the same: Route 20 was solid worm. Our father had a hard time keeping the car on the road; we slid this way and that on a carpet of squished worms. The car squished and lurched, squished and lurched. We felt queasy, the rain beat down. Our mother worried quietly, “Wally, what if we take the ditch? We’d never get out.” We weren’t supposed to hear this, but we did. We made out the ditch—it was fast-flowing, torrents of water up to its brim. If we slid off the road we’d be sent to Davy Jones’s locker in four feet of water. Our father said not to worry, this was a company car, nothing could happen to it. “What about us, Wally? What would happen to us?” Our mother voiced our own fear. We had a vision of the car careening off the road, greased by mud and worm guts. Water would seep into the car’s cabin. We wouldn’t float, as in the Volkswagen commercials. We’d sink, and lodged there, trapped by the water’s force, we wouldn’t be able to open the doors. Trapped like mice, we’d drown, our mouths pressed to the ceiling, eking out breaths from the diminishing air bubble while our father tried to slide out a window to rescue us. We could see him getting stuck, and if we were saved at all it would be because his girth plugged the window so no more water could get in.

We rode in silence, terrified, until we reached a wormless stretch of highway. It was our mother who spoke. Uncle Louie, she said, was in a car just like ours, careening down the highway. And unless he got some help, he’d wind up in a ditch and drown. We weren’t meant to hear this, either, but no one else in the car was talking, and our parents often operated under the pleasant fiction that if we weren’t talking we were asleep. Our mother’s voice was full of concern; she suggested that Uncle Louie should maybe get help both for his drinking and for his self-destructive tendencies in picking out women. We had always been under the impression that our mother didn’t like Uncle Louie, so her tone surprised us. “He needs help,” she said. “He needs to talk to someone, preferably not someone holding a glass of the same stuff he’s drinking.”

Our father said Uncle Louie didn’t need a shrink. Maybe some people felt seeing a shrink would do them some good, but Uncle Louie definitely wasn’t one of them. “Really, Susan Marie, how can you suggest such a thing?”

“It’s just he’s so unhappy,” said our mother. “I would think going to talk to someone about these things would do him some good.”

“Right,” said our father. “And I suppose you’ll be suggesting I see a shrink next.”

“Wally,” started our mother, “there’s really nothing wrong—”

“You’re damn right there’s nothing wrong,” said our father, “and I’ll ask you kindly to remember that the next time one of these damn fool ideas enters your head. Louie is the closest thing I’ve got to a brother, damn it, and what you’re saying about him you’re saying about me. We’re simpatico, capeesh?” His voice dropped a little. “Louie seeing a shrink, Jeez Louise.”

Our mother, as she often did, reacted to our father’s reaction. “Really, Wally, maybe you should see somebody yourself about getting your frustrations under control.”

Our father exploded. “My frustrations? My frustrations? The only thing frustrating me is I got a wife thinks she needs to doctor me up over ‘my frustrations.’ Jesus H. Christ, can’t a man have a few frustrations without his wife calling out the National Guard?” We skidded one more time, then scudded onto wet but inert pavement and traveled the rest of the way home in silence. It was to be our last trip to Uncle Louie’s for some time.