C Hribal - The Company Car

I imagined this conversation between them, our mother bored and a little impatient, but willing to play along if it pleased our father, and our father frustrated that the equipment wasn’t working right, the flash failing to fire, or firing too early, or the photo tearing when he pulled it from the back of the camera, and then the fixer, that pink tongue of chemicals you had to wipe over the picture to keep it from fading, something could always go wrong with that, and meanwhile our mother is sitting there naked, nipples stiffening in the cool of the house, and it was this moment of easy yet awkward intimacy between them, stolen from the rest of their day—we were outside, playing, likely to return soon, sweaty and demanding Tang—that made me realize what a fragile, wonderful thing marriage is, and to what lengths one will go to preserve it.

There was one other photograph, and it revealed mysteries I couldn’t even guess at. The photo shows our mother reclining on the bed in the House That God Built. Her legs are spread, and the photo is taken from the foot of the bed, by her feet. Our mother looks vulnerable and inviting. Looking at the dark bush of hair where her thighs met, I can’t believe our father didn’t put down his camera immediately after this photo was taken. Who could resist? Certainly not me, and I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. I just knew I wanted to climb up there. I had the feeling it was home; it was where I needed to be. I touched myself. Little Jr. was a hard branch grafted into my groin. It felt as though it might burst into flame if I kept touching it. I kept touching it. I was driven by some force that seemed both inside and completely outside myself. Satan, I was given to understand, did his best work through ecstasy.

We had stopped going to parochial school once we moved to Wisconsin. It was simply too expensive. To make up the difference, every Wednesday we went to Sunday school (Sunday school on Wednesdays—another contradiction of the Catholic Church), which was run at St. Gen’s by a nun with all the charm of a drill sergeant. She delighted in instructing us in the wages of sin by telling us stories that illustrated her point, stories that scared the bejesus out of us.

Sister Henrietta’s favorite story was of the boy who went to a cabin with a group of friends (he was eighteen, an age remote enough from us to give it the proper moral weight and glamor)—including some girls (Sister Henrietta called them “girls”; she called anyone under fifty “girls”)—and come Sunday morning the boy in question went waterskiing rather than to church to take our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his soul to nurture him morally and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One. That was her name for Satan: the Evil One. “But he did not go to Mass to take our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his soul to nurture him morally and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One,” said Sister. “He went waterskiing with his friends. With those girls. ” Sister Henrietta raised a bony finger. I stared at the three dark hairs growing from a mole on the underside of her chin. Did she know they were there, and if so, why did she choose to ignore them? Didn’t nuns own tweezers?

“Had he prayed,” continued Sister Henrietta, “had he been in church where he belonged, taking our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his body to nurture his soul and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One, he might be alive today.” Sister Henrietta let that one sink in a little while. Her voice dropped to an excited whisper. “Do you know what happened, boys and girls? Do you know what always happens to boys and girls who do not find the strength in Jesus to resist the ways of the Evil One?” Another pause. “He drowned. The boat swung him around too fast and he lost his footing. And he was a silly boy, a proud, silly boy, and he wasn’t wearing a life preserver, and when the boat came around again, his own friends, with their boat, clunked him on the head and he slowly sank to the bottom of the lake.” Sister Henrietta paused yet again. “And we can only hope, and pray, that that dear, sweet boy, who missed Mass only that once to go waterskiing, regained consciousness enough as his lungs filled with water and as the blood vessels in his chest burst, we can only hope and pray that as he was drowning he regained consciousness long enough to pray a complete Act of Contrition before he died. Otherwise he is in Purgatory, was sent there as soon as he died, and he is still there, to this very day.” Again Sister Henrietta paused. Her voice sweet now, sugary with moral righteousness. Another group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds stricken with a deep-seated fear of God. “Can we all say an Act of Contrition, dears? Both for our own souls, that we are spared making such choices as presented to us by the Evil One, and can we also offer up our prayers today for that sweet, good boy who chose wrongly just one time, and to this very day suffers eternal torment and longing in Purgatory for that one sin he was never able to confess or wipe away with an Act of Contrition, thereby damning himself for all eternity?”

And while we prayed I kept picturing, as I’m sure everybody else did, this poor boy slowly floating to the lake bottom, his arms and legs loose in death, blood-tinged bubbles escaping from his mouth. But I thought of something else as well: that girl in the boat, what was she wearing? A bikini? A peach- or lemon-colored bikini? And did he sleep with her the night before? Did he die happy, knowing, at least, that he’d had sex with her the night before he died? And was that what God was punishing him for? Was he really being punished for that? And that girl—did she like it? Was she pining for the loss of this boy who’d maybe made her happy? Was she cognizant that every boy she’d ever be with after that would have to compete with this memory, and they would always fail, for who—ever—can compete with a ghost and win? And what about that girl, who I pictured looking like Dorie Braun—what did she look like under her bikini? Were her breasts tan and creamy? Was the place where her thighs junctured a lovely white? Would I be the boy who years later would finally wipe away the memory of that boy lost forever at the bottom of the lake? Could I be that sweet and kind and gentle, could I please her? Would she let me reach inside the cup of her peach-colored bra and palm what I found there?

It was all a tangle, all of it. There I was, contemplating sex and death, sin and salvation, touching myself while looking at a picture of my mother naked, and imagining a girl in a peach-colored bikini, a girl I would never meet, though she had Dorie Braun’s face and Dorie Braun’s body. I went back into the bathroom, where our mother had left her panty hose draped over the shower curtain rod. I took down the panty hose. I put them on. I was all scrunched up inside the panty hose and there was a tingling throughout my loins that surely had to be what that boy and girl felt when they’d pleased each other the night before he drowned.

But something was missing, too. I wanted to feel manly. So I went into the back of our father’s closet and put on one of his helmet liners and on top of that the slate green steel helmet, which was so heavy it made my neck wobble like that of one of those NFL dolls you see mounted in the back windows of Chryslers. I took his twenty-two rifle, too, the one with the scope, and I stood in front of the wardrobe mirror that had never been mounted on the wardrobe. It sat on the floor, amid the detritus of our parents’ lives, their clothes and papers and magazines, their Sansabelt slacks and terry-cloth robes, their bank statements and survivalist-spiritualist books, their Reader’s Digest s and Outdoor Life s, their catalogs and cosmetics and purses and briefcases, their shotguns and their rosaries—all the clutter that our mother would not pick up because doing so might indicate she was settling down here, and she still wanted to believe this move was temporary—and I stood there, too, in panty hose and helmet, brandishing a twenty-two, sure I could do damage to somebody.