C Hribal - The Company Car

I decided I’d ask my mom the next day. If anybody could tell me, she could.

Coming to an intellectual decision about such things, of course, doesn’t help you at all when your beloved is sitting right next to you. Or in the next room, playing checkers with Tim Petraglia, who used to be a good friend of yours. Sitting next to Patty and thinking about Marie and Tim (at some point they had discreetly closed the door to my room), I wondered if this was what it felt like, to really love two people simultaneously. Could you do that? Certainly my own feelings were not equal. Patty made Mr. Wiggly stiffen. Marie made me feel warm. That wasn’t the same feeling, was it?

I wondered because of what I saw unfolding before me. Under the urgings of Charlie Podgazem and our father, the Cicero Velvetones had brought their instruments, and they were playing now, and people were dancing with as much abandon as people that old can muster. The whole house seemed to be throbbing. It had gotten so loud, so hot, and so packed that the party had spilled out our living room door, which was open, and into the driveway between our house and the Duckwas’. Nobody complained; most of the neighborhood was there anyway. You couldn’t really hear anything but the music and, over that, this loud huzzing of human voices punctuated by high-pitched laughter. Such a sight: our parents—dancing! But not with each other. That was what I wondered about. Unlike at weddings, where it seemed everybody danced with the people they were married to, here everybody seemed to be dancing with everybody but.

Mr. Duckwa, for instance. I knew he and Mrs. Duckwa did not get along—you’d have had to be deaf not to hear them screaming at each other some evenings—and that would explain why, for this party, they spent hardly any time together, but why did he spend all his time with Mrs. Plewa? They were below us now, standing in the doorway leading to our side yard and the Duckwa driveway. Mrs. Plewa was dressed as a cat, in black leotards and a pipe-cleaner mustache and white mittens on her hands. Mr. Duckwa had his hand resting on the doorjamb above Mrs. Plewa’s shoulder. He looked like a plumber chatting up a slightly chunky Felix the Cat. People had to duck their heads to get outside.

Patty had an answer for why her father was with Mrs. Plewa. “He’s randy,” she said.

“Randy? I thought his name was Ted.”

“His name is mud if my mother catches him.” At that moment Mr. Duckwa lowered his head, obscuring Mrs. Plewa’s face. “C’mon,” said Patty. “I don’t want to be a witness to this.”

It wasn’t any better in my room. Tim and Marie were sitting on the floor, kissing. My throat closed tight. Fearful they had been caught by adults, they stood up immediately. Tim pointed out the window. “We were just watching them.” We looked. The backyard was filled with couples. Some were standing, jabbering away, others sitting on lawn chairs. Superman was chatting with Barbie; the rear end of a horse was having a heart-to-heart with a dalmatian. Each half of our father’s boat had a couple in it, and they were curled up as though at any moment they expected to be hit by lightning.

Uncle Louie and Shirley were lying in the sand circle left by our pool. They looked like they had fallen there. Shirley was on her back, gazing up at the stars, Uncle Louie on his side, stroking her tummy. From time to time he leaned over and pecked her cheek. He also tickled her, causing Shirley’s belly to wriggle and her face to scooch up. It was warm enough in the house that the window was open. We could hear the fainter sounds of the music here, the laughter, and Shirley’s “Oooo, Louie,” as she giggled at the work of his hands. They got up, Louie offering her his hand, and walked to the opposite side of the house with their arms around each other. We went to the opposite window. They were right beneath us when they stopped and kissed. Shirley’s hand, I noticed, was on Uncle Louie’s neck, and it appeared to me that she was writing something underneath his collar with her fingernail. I thought of the labels that came inside my shirts—Van Heusen, Fruit of the Loom. Was Shirley’s insistence on writing her name in cursive on the backs of men’s necks sort of like that?

“Well, they’re all lovey-dovey, aren’t they,” said Tim as they walked down our drive to Uncle Louie’s Chrysler Imperial. I was too jealous to point out that just a moment ago he had been, too. Uncle Louie and Shirley got in the car and closed the door, but they didn’t drive away. The seat folded back, and then they pretty much disappeared from view.

“What are you kids doing by the window?” It was Mrs. Hemmelberger, Marie’s mom. She had a couple of jackets over her arm.

Patty answered for us. “They’re watching,” she said. “What did you think?”

“Well, no doubt you’ve seen enough.”

“No doubt,” said Patty Duckwa.

You could tell Mrs. Hemmelberger was about to say something, but she stifled it. I’d always wondered about the things adults were about to say but chose not to. I got the feeling those were the things that would let us know that they were human, that they were more than parents and old people. What Mrs. H said, though, was standard Mom talk. “We need to get going. Your brothers and father are waiting.”

“I guess I need to get going,” Marie said to Tim. It was like I wasn’t even in the room.

“Thank your host,” her mother said.

“Thanks, Emcee,” Marie called spacily over her shoulder. I think she was still in a daze from having kissed Tim.

I could hear Mrs. Hemmelberger on the stairs on the way down. “What were you doing in that room with two boys?”

And Marie answering, “It wasn’t two boys, Mom. Patty Duckwa…” I didn’t listen to the rest. It didn’t concern me. And I had the feeling that it never would.

The party was starting to wind down. You could hear the good night, good nights shouted from the front doorway. Mingled in with those were the voices of children. “Aw, Mo-o-o-o-m…” It was time to go home.

“I’m pretty tired,” I told Patty Duckwa.

Patty rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “I’m pretty tired, too.” She flopped backward on my bed. “Go to sleep,” she said. What was I to do? I crawled in beside her, tucked myself up against her side. Her arm came down over the crown of my head and rested on my shoulder. To shield herself from the eyes of the men at the party, Patty had put on her jean jacket. A peace sign was embroidered over her left breast, a much larger one was embroidered on the back. This was as close to the sixties as I was likely to come. “You have a crush on her, don’t you?” she asked. The lights were still on in our room. I studied the river lines of cracks in the ceiling plaster. “Who?”

Patty Duckwa punched me lightly on the arm. “Who? You know who.”

“Yes,” I admitted. I didn’t want to say I had a crush on Patty as well. I didn’t think she’d laugh, but who knew what a tired woman in your bed was capable of?

She lay back down. “I wanted to thank you for being nice to me,” Patty said to the ceiling. “I’ve had a pretty tough day, you know that?” And it was then that I found out what a tired woman in my bed was capable of. Sleep. Patty Duckwa was sleeping, her luscious warm belly and I Dream of Jeannie/Venus de Milo chest rising and falling as though there were a tiny bellows at work inside her. I rolled up on my elbow and watched Patty Duckwa go on breathing, quietly and evenly, and when I lay down to fall asleep myself, I counted myself a lucky man.

When I woke up, it could have been fifteen minutes or three hours later. I couldn’t tell. But the lights were still on in my room and my siblings hadn’t joined me yet, so it couldn’t have been that long. It had been long enough, however, for me to get a tiny erection, no doubt because in her sleep Patty Duckwa’s hand had found its way to my groin. I shivered with this new, unexpected pleasure. The Bohemian brave takes a wife! Patty was still sleeping, her belly gently undulating, her breasts doing their rise and fall. I could have watched that for some time, but I had woken up to the clankings of metal and the steady poundings of what sounded like a hammer against steel and steel against the wall. It was coming from Nomi’s room. I knew what it was. My siblings were taking advantage of Nomi’s absence to have a rumpus in her bed. Nomi’s bed was adjustable—a hospital bed with a metal frame and cranks to help her sit up, or to elevate her feet, or to give her back some relief. We weren’t supposed to play on it, but I was sure Robert Aaron and Cinderella and Ike and Wally Jr. were anyway. No question Nomi’s bed was really getting a workout.