C Hribal - The Company Car

When I turned back to Patty, her head was down and her shoulders were shaking. I recognized those heaving shoulders—my mother owned them. Why was Patty Duckwa crying? She could have taken any of those guys in a fair fight. “Are you okay?” I asked. This was the stupidest question on earth right at that moment. But it was what I asked my mom whenever she was crying, and you should lead with your strong suit, even if it’s dumb.

“N-n-n-o-o-o-o,” Patty quaked. She was hiding her eyes behind one hand. Her forearm was crossed over her belly. I grasped that hand and squeezed it. She took a few great gulps of air, settling herself. Her voice was still shaky, though, when she said, “It’s not enough they’ve gotta dump you. They’ve gotta knock you up first. Christ, oh, sweet Christ,” and with a groan she was back to holding her stomach and weeping. She bent way over, nearly doubled, like she was folding in on herself. She was clutching her stomach, and her ponytail hung down one side of her face like a rope. I didn’t know what to say, or do. I had no idea what she was talking about. I put my hand on her back, trying to comfort her, and she put out her hand like she was trying to push me away. But she wasn’t. She was trying to steady herself. Suddenly she sat down on the sidewalk, pulling me with her. She was clutching me like a favorite teddy bear. Her head was resting on my head. My one arm was around her back, my other was around her tummy, and she was clutching my shoulders. I was suddenly in the position Ike had been. Her breasts were nestling my cheek—or was it vice versa?—and I could hear her sighs, hear the clanking of her heart. Her bra was scratching my ear, making me all tingly inside. I liked it, but I felt extremely uncomfortable, too. I was there under false pretenses. She was clutching me because I was handy. It could have been anything—her jacket with the embroidered peace signs, for example—if I hadn’t been there. We rocked like that for a while, she sniffling, muttering “son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” over and over, sometimes punctuating it with “bastard, that bastard,” and I paralyzed in her arms. Finally she wiped her cheeks, and getting up, she said, “Well, come on,” as though we’d sat there because I needed to and she was tired of waiting for me.

We were only a few blocks from our house now, and she was wiping the sidewalk grit and bits of grass off her bottom and running her index fingers under her eyes. “Do I look okay?” she asked. Like my opinion mattered. What could I say? She looked beautiful. She’d used eyeliner past the corners of her eyes to give her face that curvy, almond-eyed Cleopatra-I-Dream-of-Jeannie look. Now it was a blur down her cheeks. But what did that matter? My heart rose and lodged in my throat. “Great,” I managed to croak out. “You look great.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “My mascara is running, isn’t it?”

“You look like you’ve been crying,” I admitted.

“Shit,” she said again, elegantly. “Shit, shit, shit.” She shriveled her arm up her jean jacket and wiped at her cheeks with her cuff. It just smeared more. I offered her my sister’s blouse, which I was wearing. She thanked me and managed, with spit and the sleeve of my sister’s shirt and some crumpled tissues in her pocket, to wipe up most of the damage.

“How do I look now?” she asked. “Better,” I said, and she managed a little smile. Then she took my hand and we headed off into the night.

The party was in full swing when we got home, and it was readily apparent why our mom had hired Patty Duckwa when normally she’d have thrown us upstairs under the semiwatchful eye of Cinderella. In order to get everyone in the neighborhood to come, our mother had promised free babysitting. Our mother hadn’t told us, hadn’t even told Cinderella, whom she also hired on the spot, because she knew we’d be bouncing off the walls all day if we knew fifteen or twenty kids were going to spend the evening at our house. Patty and Cinderella were now in charge. Cinderella took a bunch of kids downstairs; Patty had the upstairs contingent.

Our mom didn’t notice that we were an hour or more late, that Patty had been crying; she didn’t notice anything. She was flushed, her party was a success, she felt pretty, everything was turning out okay. She didn’t even say anything about my running away from Ike. Robert Aaron came up to me just before he disappeared upstairs. “You’re lucky, numbnuts. We got home and Mom was in such a hurry to get us out of the way she didn’t ask a single question.” Our mother’s instructions to both Patty and Cinderella were “Unless there is death or an awful lot of blood, I don’t want to know about it. Settle it among yourselves. I’m granting you full authority to spank, smack, or ground people as you see fit.” The conferral of authority was just for effect. Nobody took it seriously except Cinderella, and we were too much for her. Patty had her own concerns.

That the party was in “full swing” is a bit of an understatement. The house was booming. Windows were shaking. Patty and I could tell that from outside. Inside, pandemonium reigned on three floors. Kids were running around downstairs unsupervised, playing hide-and-seek, hiding beneath the pile of dirty clothes under the laundry chute as though it were a pile of leaves. Kids were also climbing into the barrels storing our out-of-season clothes, which were now scattered in great heaps on the floor, mingled with the dirties. Our father had moved his model-building stuff out of harm’s way, but his train tracks were getting a real workout. The model railroad looked like a miniature tornado had touched down on it.

All the real action, though, was on the main floor. The doings of adults in general were strange and mysterious, and this was doubly true on social occasions, perhaps triply so for a Halloween costume party. Our mother, certainly, was not acting like our mother, and I wanted to see if the other adults would take similar leaves of their senses.

So many people came! It was hard to believe our house could hold so many. It was such a swirl of sound and color and music that I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly want to spend time downstairs covering themselves with our dirty clothes when they could be up here, on the stairs, watching this marvelous scene unfold. For one thing, there was this meeting of our parents’ various worlds that heretofore I had assumed were separate and autonomous. Now everything was a mishmash. The Kluzarskis were talking with Aunt Gwen and Uncle Bruno, Uncle Alvin was laughing with Charlie Podgazem, Agnes Guranski and her husband were dancing with Mr. and Mrs. Hemmelberger, Marie’s parents. Some of the costumes were so elaborate we didn’t even recognize our friends’ parents. Other people you could tell from a mile away just by the shapes of their bodies. Mr. Izzo, for example, with his stubby barrel of a body, was recognizable as a fire hydrant even with his black crew cut and his glasses painted red. His wife came as a springer spaniel. She kept nosing him, circling him, like she was looking for a place to pee.

Our house was filled with human dogs and cats and sea captains and Errol Flynn look-alikes (if you excused the belling of flesh at the waistband and the florid cheeks), mobsters in pin-striped suits, southern belles, a life-size G.I. Joe, a Ken and Barbie. Batman was there, Robin (Mr. and Mrs. De Bochart; Mrs. De Bochart was a very sexy Robin), Superman (Mr. Plewa), a twenties flapper, a king, a queen (“Catherine the Great!” shouted Charlie Podgazem. “Where, pray tell, is your horse?”). Zorro made his appearance, as did a gorilla, an organ grinder and monkey, a doctor (Uncle Bruno drinking vodka and lemonade; he claimed to be a urologist), a nurse, a two-part horse, witches, goblins, ghouls, and all the rest. Our parents had coordinated their costumes with the Duckwas, of all people. They came as the Honeymooners. Dad, as Ralph Kramden/Jackie Gleason, in a bus driver’s uniform. Mr. Duckwa—“call me Ted”—as Norton. Mom and Mrs. Duckwa—“call me Lorna”—were Alice and Trixie, though they wore the same kind of dress with the same checkerboard apron. They had their hair done up like they wore in the fifties, and Mom had exaggerated her eyebrows extensively.