C Hribal - The Company Car

The Audrey Meadows–like eyebrows came in handy when I finally recognized Uncle Louie’s date, the woman welded to Uncle Louie during all the slow dance numbers. It was Shirley, the woman who had written her name in unguent on the back of my father’s neck at the Office! I couldn’t contain myself. I leapt off the stairs, shouting, “Dad! It’s Shirley! Shirley came!” I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe she was Uncle Louie’s date—his latest “find.”

Evidently our mother couldn’t believe it either. She came over, the Audrey Meadows eyebrows going, her lips pursed. “How does he know who Shirley is?”

“At the Office, Dad, remember? I saw her at the Office!”

“She introduced herself,” our father said. “I thought Louie might like to meet her.”

“I’m sure he would.”

“She wrote on your neck, Dad. With her finger, remember?” I was too excited to know what I was saying. Loose lips sink ships.

“So that was Shirley,” said our mother.

“Best thing your father ever did for me,” said Uncle Louie. He and Shirley had heard their names and come over. Uncle Louie was a Confederate general. Shirley was wearing a belly dancer’s outfit. I knew because I had seen an album in the hi-fi’s album well: How to Belly Dance for Your Husband. The lady on the album had nothing on Patty Duckwa as Jeannie, but she was pretty enough. Shirley, though, was pushing it. She had a lot of veils on, and those poofy pants, like Yul Brynner in The King and I. She also had a lot of belly showing, and given that she was a bit hefty, this appeared as a white snowdrift of flesh, soft and voluminous. Like Patty, she was wearing just a bra on top, only this was crocheted, so it looked like her breasts were being held in place by a couple of pot holders. The effect was startling, even for a boy like me. Figuring it was Mom’s record, though, and that therefore she knew all about belly dancers, I was surprised when she asked Shirley, “What are you dressed as?”

“A harlot,” said Shirley, who had lipstick on her teeth. This was greeted with stunned silence and the arching of the Audrey Meadows eyebrows. “No, actually,” said Shirley, arranging her veils, “I’m the queen of Sheba.”

“You were right the first time,” said my mother.

“Best thing your father ever did for me,” repeated Uncle Louie. “I couldn’t have found Shirley without his help.” He gave her a squeeze. Shirley squealed. “Ooo, Louie.” Her breasts rose some out of their halter.

“I think you’d best be getting upstairs, little man,” said our father.

“Yes,” echoed our mother. “I think our little man should be getting upstairs.”

“Little man, little man,” sang Shirley, “oh where, oh where, should my little man go?” I had a feeling this was a rhetorical question on Shirley’s part, not directed specifically at me.

“Wait,” said Uncle Louie. “Since he was present when his dad first met Shirley, he should be present for our announcement.”

“Announcement?”

Uncle Louie curled his thumb and his middle finger into his mouth and issued an ear-piercing blast. “Hey, everybody!” For a moment, everything came to a standstill. Uncle Louie gestured for people to get into a circle, and he waited until there was some semblance of one. Somebody lifted the tone arm on the hi-fi, and the music stopped momentarily. Then Uncle Louie grabbed Shirley’s hand and clasped it to his chest. “I want you to know! This fine lady here and I are getting married!”

A cheer erupted, which I thought was very nice seeing as how two-thirds of the people there had no idea who Uncle Louie or his fine lady were. I found myself buried in a crush of big people and standing next to Bruno Gulch, who had a highball resting on his stomach. His lower lip was stuck out. “When’s it due?” he asked, taking a sip from his glass, but the music had already started up again, and nobody heard him.

“Champagne! Champagne!” Uncle Louie cried. “I’ve got some in the car, Wally. Help me bring it in.”

Our mother caught me standing there taking all this in. Since she couldn’t officially be mad at Shirley anymore (“The nerve of that woman, really,” she said to our father late the next morning, when they both appeared in the living room. “And what possessed her to wear that outfit?”), she had to find another target. “To bed,” she told me curtly. “And I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.” Our mother was pointedly ignoring the assorted screeches and bump-thumping s emanating from the basement, but that was okay. She didn’t really care right then if I was in bed or not. She just wanted me upstairs. That I could understand.

“C’mon, I’ll take you,” said Patty Duckwa. She had been hanging out downstairs, too, but now she was tired of that. There was no mistaking the looks she was getting from some of the men. When we’d first arrived, Patty had excused herself “to go fix her face.” “It doesn’t look broken to me,” said Batman. And timid Mr. Boxtein kept trying to see down her bra. It must have been like being outside again, only the comments weren’t so crude. But the message was the same. I don’t think she wanted to hear that message anymore.

The message, though, was pretty clear. In keeping with the Honeymooner theme, Dad was playing on the hi-fi a steady stream of hits from the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. Dad and Mr. Duckwa and the guys in the band would croon along to “I’m in the Mood for Love,” our father often sounding as good as whoever was singing on the record.

“You know, Wally, we coulda done better than that,” said Charlie Podgazem.

“We can do better than that,” said our father. He was busy pouring champagne for anybody who wanted any.

I was sitting at the top of the stairs now. It was weird, seeing the tops of all these heads milling about. The exodus from upstairs, which began as soon as kids realized there was stuff in the basement to mess around with and no one down there was going to supervise them, continued. They didn’t want to see their parents this way—ten, fifteen years into their marriages letting down their hair, pretending their kids didn’t exist. I wondered hard for the first time what it meant when the door to our parents’ bedroom closed. What happened downstairs when we went to bed, or when our parents got dressed up—infrequently, granted—and left us in Nomi’s care while they went to a party? Was it like this? You really didn’t want to think about it too much.

The number of kids upstairs had really dwindled. Pretty soon it was just me and Marie Hemmelberger and Tim Petraglia and Patty Duckwa. Marie and Tim were playing checkers—one of the few games that Robert Aaron and his minions hadn’t hauled off to the basement. Patty sat down next to me. Our thighs were touching. Here I was, so close to my belusted, but I now knew something I guess I’d always known but hadn’t wanted to believe—that boys like me really were insignificant chunks of matter floating in orbit about her. She had lots of boys like that in orbit. They—we—didn’t count. We couldn’t do her damage like the other ones. She seemed exhausted. We probably were too much for her, even though most of the banshees were in the basement. Also, she was probably still feeling terrible about being “knocked up.” She had said that earlier when she’d started crying. Crying, I knew, took a lot out of you. Our mother almost always looked the most done in after she’d been crying. “Knocked up”: I didn’t know what this meant, but I had the feeling I wasn’t supposed to ask. And if I did ask, the news that Patty Duckwa had been “knocked up” would be all over the neighborhood, and I had the feeling she wouldn’t want that, either. Some things you can just feel.