C Hribal - The Company Car

“Not even the doctors?”

“Not even God,” said Nomi, looking out the window. Nomi said she was tired then, she needed to rest, and I left, looking for someplace where I could ponder what was happening to me and to her in private.

If it was Mother Nature regularly visiting me, and an act of God visiting Nomi, then why did everything seem so accidental? The assigning of a personality, a willful presence, to the nature of accident threw me for a loop. But for the past couple of years everything was throwing me for a loop. And more than anything that summer I wanted to be by myself, largely because I’d made other discoveries.

I shouldn’t have been snooping. We all knew better than to be checking out our parents’ dresser drawers. But snooping is an addiction. Once you find one thing mildly curious you keep looking, and once you find the mother lode you simply cannot stop yourself. All the guilt in the world won’t keep you from looking where you oughtn’t.

The first few times we snooped in Augsbury, it was Cinderella, Robert Aaron, and me. We discovered a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog and snapshots of us as babies. We also found baby teeth in coin envelopes with our names on each one and the dates the teeth were lost.

“That blows the Tooth Fairy theory,” said Robert Aaron.

“Shut up,” said Cinderella. “Like you believed any of that stuff.”

“I used to.”

“Yeah, well you used to a lot of things.” Cinderella had recently gotten cynical, her hair a blond waterfall over her face, her breath smelling of cigarettes and Life Savers. She pawed through the drawers: lipsticks, compacts, a bundle of letters written on onionskin paper from when our parents were first married. “I’ve read those,” said Cinderella knowingly. “Like you’d really be interested in where you should put things.” I made a mental note. Cinderella never let us read those letters. Next time I was alone I would. We looked at more photographs—First Communions, Halloweens, Christmases, Easters—and at our father’s boxers, printed with tiny diamonds or those fat commalike things called paisleys. We discovered our mother’s lingerie, gauzy things we’d never seen her wear. The way it was stuffed into the drawer you couldn’t tell if it had been hurriedly hidden or just forgotten. Cinderella was competitively curious. “I wish I had nice stuff like this,” she said, holding up a sheer black jacketlike thing with a tie at the throat and black fluff at the hem. “It wouldn’t go to waste, if you know what I mean.”

We didn’t know what she meant, but that hardly mattered to Cinderella these days. She had a boyfriend, a guy who was out of high school already. And it wasn’t poor, sweet Mikey Spillsbeth. This worried our mother and pleased Cinderella. “She’s got to stop thinking of me as a Goody Two-shoes,” Cinderella told us, holding up one of our mother’s black lace underwire bras. “I wish I had Mom’s chest. Why didn’t I get Mom’s chest? Mom’s chest is wasted on her,” said Cinderella, the bra comically empty as she held it pinched to her shoulders.

That was one of the great mysteries of life, I thought, though I didn’t tell Cinderella. Life was full of mysteries and secrets, and you could ponder all you wanted, but that didn’t mean you were allowed to figure anything out. Like how come our dad was so big and we were all skinny? And how come our mom had what she described as a voluminous chest and Cinderella’s were petite little mounds? Or why did peanut butter toast always land peanut butter side down? Or why was I drawn to the letters and our mother’s lingerie drawer like a bee to honey? I knew I was bad, and that I would be punished, if not in this life then in the next, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to know, I had to see. And the opened boxes and drawers in our parents’ bedroom, as though everything had just been thrown together or taken apart, made it easy.

One of the many reasons I spent a lot of time by myself that summer was I was getting boners at the drop of a hat. Had been, actually, for the last two years. It didn’t help that the magazines— Time, Life —were running more and more risqué pictures: fashion layouts with models wearing about what we found in our mom’s underwear drawer, and through the sheer tops the models’ inconsequential breasts but dark nipples were clearly visible. But it wasn’t just that. Anything could trigger it. The swoop and dip of a barn swallow, the cold taste of Tang on a hot day, smelling clover in the fields, watching Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, and Ernie Banks turn a double play, pulling myself up on the chin-up bar, seeing Dorie Braun with the right insouciance in her eyes, a bit of rounded flesh peeking out over her swimsuit cup, a bit of belly over her hip-huggers’ waistband—anything at all could set my stem rising, and then it was a question of what to do with it. Peeing with an erection was tricky. You had to push the little fellow down and stand further back, so gravity came into play, allowing the arc to find the porcelain. I wondered if this was why the urinals at school smelled like they did. Was there a whole nation of men and boys out there, all walking around all day with stiffies, and none of them disciplined enough in their aim to hit their intended targets? It certainly gave me a different picture of America. Not an America I wanted to belong to, although I was already a part of it.

I worried, too, about the eagerness with which I crept past Nomi’s room and stole into our parents’, reading and rereading those letters, savoring their incomprehensible deliciousness, fingering the lingerie with the same luscious, lewd thrill of those border guards lo! those many years ago. What it felt like under my fingers! I got goose bumps just touching it.

And then I wanted to wear it. There I was, standing amid the water-spotted Reader’s Digest s and Popular Mechanics es, the accordioned copies of They Were Expendable and A Bridge Too Far, my fingers running up and down the silky length of our mother’s scarlet nightgown. Surely no boy in America was doing what I was doing right then. I showered, our mother’s panty hose just above my head. I toweled off, Little Jr. (I was picking up terminology from our mother’s letters) stiffening under the terry cloth. Then I wrapped the towel about my waist like Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments. Little Jr. strained to peek through, but the towel’s weight was more than it could lift.

No matter. Something besides how much cloth my penis could bench-press was calling me out of the bathroom. Something I’d discovered on one of my first forays to our mother’s lingerie drawer. I was always looking for new stuff, things I’d missed last time. Everything was tangled up, tossed together; you couldn’t be sure what belonged with one outfit and what with another. I rationalized the intrusion on the grounds that putting things away was one of our chores, so my being there had a kind of logic to it: I was trying to find out what belonged where. Armed with opportunity and motive, and needing only courage to run the Nomi gauntlet, I was back there every chance I could get. It was wrong, I was going to hell, I was racked with guilt, tormented by what I saw, but I was also thrilled and curious, and that thrill of being admitted to the hidden mysteries—even if they remained mysteries—was worth the price of admission.

What I found were pictures of our mother without any clothes on. In the pictures, our mother’s torso was white and blocky, like rough-cut marble. Beneath her belly was a stippling of skin that reminded me of bread dough, and one breast was lower than the other, more rounded, and canted to one side. Its nipple was larger, too, more oblong, and her areolae, had I known to call them that, were huge and dark. She was sitting at the kitchen table, as though waiting for coffee to be served, leaning forward, her breasts flattened and spread out, her cheek resting in the palm of her hand. She looked whimsical and amused. When she was sitting back she looked bored, the same look our faces got when our father fiddled with the camera too much. “Hurry up and take the picture,” our mother’s face was saying. “I’m not sitting here naked just so you can get your jollies with the camera. Who cares if it’s too light or too dark? What’s it going to matter? Who’s going to see them besides you, and you can see them any time you like?”