C Hribal - The Company Car

I sat up, gently moving Patty’s hand to her side, though if I could have walked down the hall with her hand placed exactly where it was, I would have. Still, I didn’t want us to be found like this. Some things should just remain private.

I went down the hall, hoping to peek in on my siblings acting crazy. Then I would leap into the room, scream Boo! and scare them all half to death. The door was closed but not completely. The noise inside had settled into a rhythm, the clankings hammerlike, and there was the sound of someone in distress breathing hard. Robert Aaron, no doubt, wrestling Ike into submission. He liked to do that, put a hammerlock on you or sit on your head or back and rock you into the mattress, facedown, until you slammed the mattress three times to indicate Uncle.

I swung the door open, just an inch. I couldn’t see anything. Just the side of the bed and a bit of the iron railing headboard. Then I heard Nomi come home downstairs. The noises of the party had subsided. There was a Glenn Miller record playing, but that abruptly ended with a brrrrzipppp! when Nomi or Artu took the needle off by hand. Nomi said she was going upstairs to sleep, Artu said something about having a beer. I could hear Nomi’s foot on the stairs. If they didn’t get out of here this instant, there was going to be hell to pay. There was just enough time if I warned them for them to scamper back down the hall. Nomi would see them shooting by, but unless they’d really made a mess of things, she wouldn’t know what, exactly, my siblings had been doing. I swung the door the rest of the way open.

Some things should remain private. Supporting herself from the crane was Mrs. Plewa, stark naked except for her mittens and the crushed Norton hat Mr. Duckwa had been wearing. Her black leotards were trailing off her calves, and she was furiously raising and lowering herself atop Mr. Duckwa, who was thrashing and bucking as though he were undergoing a seizure. Both appeared to be hurting themselves, only it didn’t seem as if they knew whether they were or weren’t. A groaned “No! No! No!” was followed by an exuberant “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I had seen Mr. Duckwa in shorts and a T-shirt before while he was cutting the grass, so I knew he had a very hairy body, but I didn’t realize the hair covered his belly and chest, even his back, like fur. Mrs. Plewa I had only seen in a housedress before, and the sight of her without any clothes on, the hat bouncing on her head, her spare flesh and bulbous breasts jiggling—she was quite a bit larger than Mr. Duckwa, actually—well, it was like seeing the Venus de Milo come to life riding a lemur. I would have laughed except that at that moment Nomi came up behind me.

“Good God!” she yelled, and this put an end to Mr. Duckwa’s and Mrs. Plewa’s exertions. They threw sheets on themselves and I didn’t see any more because Nomi spun me around to get me out of the room and she spun me smack into Patty Duckwa’s warm soft belly. “Dad?” she cried, and her face crumpled like a shredded balloon. But the carnage was not complete. In the silence we heard a rustling from the hall closet, a closet large enough to step inside, and Nomi, muttering “Good God, Good God” under her breath, opened that door, too. “Good God!” Nomi screamed again, and this time Artu came bounding up the stairs. “What is it? What? Have you hurt yourself?” Nomi only pointed, her cane quivering. I nosed my way in to see, and such was Nomi’s shock that she didn’t stop me. Our father’s balsa-wood boat model was in there, crushed beyond salvaging, but the startling thing was who had done the damage. It was Lorna Duckwa, her dress open neck to belly, and Mr. Boxtein’s pale pimply back covering her, his baggy khaki shorts (he’d come as an African explorer) incompletely covering his pale and skinny behind.

“Good God!” said Nomi.

“Mom?” wailed Patty Duckwa.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Ted Duckwa, draped now in a sheet. Mrs. Plewa had disappeared. Patty Duckwa ran down the stairs and out of the house, weeping profusely. I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t stop anything. My parents were coming up the stairs now, siblings in tow, and Nomi shouted down, “Don’t bring them up! Don’t bring them up!”

“What?” Cinderella and Robert Aaron cried, pushing up the stairs. “Let me see! Let me see!”

“You’re not seeing anything,” said our father, grabbing hold of the two of them.

Nomi said to Artu, “Get him to bed,” meaning me.

I was not allowed to see anything more, but I could still hear them. Mr. Duckwa saying, “Jesus, Lorna, Boxtein? Frank De Bochart I could understand, but fucking Lyle Boxtein? What were you thinking?”

“Like you have such great taste,” hissed Mrs. Duckwa, laboring to extricate herself. “You’d fuck anything that moves.” She started buttoning her polka-dotted dress while she lay on the floor, but she was mismatching the buttons and holes.

“So this is what you do while I’m gone all day,” Mr. Duckwa spat at his wife.

“Don’t be sanctimonious with me!” snarled Mrs. Duckwa. “I’m tired of ‘Ed Norton’ checking out other women’s plumbing and laying pipe for Francine Plewa.”

“Get up!” Mr. Duckwa screamed back, at his wife or at Mr. Boxtein or maybe both. Mr. Boxtein was still facing the floor, his hands underneath him as though he were protecting himself even before he rolled over. “Get up!” yelled Mr. Duckwa. “Get up and take it like a man!”

“Enough!” screamed my father. “I have children in this household. What in God’s name were you thinking? Downstairs, we’re settling this—everything—downstairs.”

And away they went.

___

That was the end of our parents’ social life in Elmhurst. Winter was coming anyway, and it may have been that the last gasp of nice weather and the party’s explosiveness caused a recoil. People nest in the winter, after all. But there also may have been a tacit agreement among our neighbors to give our parents a wide berth. They had hosted a party where everyone had cut loose a little, and several people had cut loose a lot, and a natural response might have been to disassociate yourself from the site of your misdeeds. Shoot the messenger, and all that. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know was that our parents felt isolated, shunned, and our mother spent the winter tight-lipped, as though she were afraid to breathe, as though in the very action of inhaling and exhaling she would either take in or expel poison.

Things may well have gotten better if we’d stayed, but the blowup and aftermath of that evening fueled our father’s desire to move away. Far, far away. He wanted to raise his children in the splendor of nature, where modern life was not imploding on itself. Our mother would have been happier moving back to Chicago, or to a different suburb, but our father wanted wide open spaces. If you’re going to dream of remaking your life, he reasoned, dream big. Always, always dream big.

Of the night in question, nothing was really settled. I don’t know what transpired in our kitchen that evening after the couples were separated; I don’t even know who still remained in the house when it occurred. I can imagine, however, our father in his bus driver’s uniform, all Ralph Kramden/Jackie Gleason eyeballs and outrage, trying to talk sense into the Duckwas, the Plewas, the Boxteins, the De Bocharts, and whoever else remained, and failing miserably, his own ire exacerbating the situation he was trying to help. And our mother—calm, sensible, her Audrey Meadows eyebrows arched—exasperated with our father’s mucking things up again, telling him, telling them all, to go home and forget about it. Work on their marriages.

And still the carnage was not complete. Things festered over the winter. Mr. Boxtein was a mild soul, henpecked to death by Mrs. Boxtein, it was widely believed, and in some quarters (we found this out years later) it was maintained that the events as described couldn’t have occurred; Mr. Boxtein simply didn’t have it in him. Wags would point out, no, Mrs. Duckwa had it in her. Everyone waited for the inevitable—for Mrs. Boxtein to divorce Mr. Boxtein and throw him out on his ear, but it didn’t happen. People in our neighborhood did not divorce. They stayed together and were miserable, or they lashed out at each other with wildly inappropriate behavior, such as semipublicly fucking their neighbors’ spouses, or they medicated their desires into submission, finding relief from each other in an assortment of prescription drugs and Jim Beam, or they turned it all inward, where it went off with a muffled yet devastating explosion.