C Hribal - The Company Car

Billy Ray King was strangely calm, as though he knew this was an argument he was going to win. “How can you know ‘for a fact’ she’s knocked up?”

“What, you can’t see? Take a look at her front porch. How can you not tell? I can tell, the audience can tell. The sponsors and the folks at home can tell. They can simply tell, okay? She’s pregnant, Billy Ray. She’s got a bun in the oven. The little tax deduction has declared itself. Billy, can’t you see? She’s as big as a fucking house!”

“So?” said Billy Ray King, in the perplexed voice of a student who just doesn’t get what his teacher is saying.

“So?” said Alan Pickett. “So we can’t have that. Hey, it happens, I understand that. But we can’t have that on the show. You know that, Billy. It’s your goddamn show.” Alan Pickett’s anger had subsided. He was speaking now in the exasperated voice of that teacher whose pupil refuses to acknowledge the truth of some simple fact like that rivers, in the Northern Hemisphere, flow south. And pregnant women are not married on TV.

They were now arguing loud enough for the studio audience to hear them. Our parents had already been led to their respective toe marks on opposite sides of the stage when Louie got up from his chair and offered to cut the apparent Gordian knot. “I’ll marry Helen,” said the bespectacled and eager Louie, an announcement that was met with a roll of the eyes and a low groan from Helen, who found his chipperness irritating. Truth be told, Louie at that moment would have married Helen, or Agnes Guranski, another of our mother’s friends who came down to watch the wedding in person, or any other woman in the studio audience, up to and including the pregnant woman over whom Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King were arguing.

Billy Ray King waved Louie back to his seat. “We’ll just show them from the waist up,” he said, as though he had solved everything.

“She’s pregnant, Billy Ray. She’s all waist, don’t you get it? Her chest is surfing her belly. We can’t have that, okay? Okay?” Alan Pickett, who towered over Billy Ray King, was hiss-shouting into Billy Ray’s ear.

Billy Ray King tilted his head away. With his face all scrunched up and his hand waving at his ear, it looked like he was trying to shoo away a particularly annoying insect. Then he leaned forward on his tiptoes and hissed into Alan Pickett’s face, “Yeah, okay, she’s pregnant. So what? She’s my daughter and she’s getting married on this television show. On TV, okay? On her daddy’s program. You got a problem with that?”

Alan Pickett stared up at the ceiling, which you could hardly see for all the cable and lighting girders. He sighed, shuffled through several sheets of paper he gripped in his fist. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But you broadcast this and it won’t be a wedding anymore. It’ll be your funeral.” Then Alan Pickett went to his place by our father and waited to be introduced. The stage manager yelled, “Fifteen seconds!” and flashed his open hand three times.

“Idiot,” said Alan Pickett.

“Excuse me?” said our father.

“That man is an idiot. And because of him you’re—” Pickett stopped. “You ready?”

Our father said he was, but he was a little nervous.

“We all are. But that’s okay. Make it work for you. Just be yourself. You sing, right?”

Our father said he did.

On the opposite side of the stage, our mother stood next to Billy Ray King. A believer in other people’s privacy, our mother had tried not to listen to King and Pickett’s argument. She had not heard what the argument was about, only that it had been intense and short-lived. She could not help smelling the man standing next to her, however. She had thought back in the lobby that there might be an odor of alcohol about him, but she wasn’t certain. Now she was. You don’t spend that long in a restaurant with drunken customers without recognizing the scent of gin on someone’s breath. Billy Ray King, in his cups, his mind reeling with everything he had wrought and the thought of its fragility—a daughter, pregnant, a show about to be taken away from him—misinterpreted our mother’s sniffing.

“Aqua Velva,” said Billy Ray King. “It drives women wild.” His hand settled on the small of our mother’s back. It could have been taken as a friendly gesture if you were inclined to take it as such. Our mother chose to ignore it. But she couldn’t ignore the sight of the obviously pregnant woman dressed like a bride who was being seated right at the end of the row sporting our mother’s and father’s attendants.

“That woman is pregnant,” said our mother.

“So what,” said Billy Ray King. His hand slipped lower, coming to rest on our mother’s bottom. Our mother chose to ignore that, too. “You aren’t, are you? You wanna be? Ha-ha.” He gave our mother’s behind a squeeze. Our mother belted him with her flowers, which she’d already been cautioned by the show’s censor needed to be held in front of her voluminous chest.

“Idiot,” said Alan Pickett. “You wait for your cue. Good luck, and have a good show.” Our father couldn’t tell if Alan Pickett was saying all that to Billy Ray King or to him, or if it was meant to be divided equally.

“I will,” said our father, but Pickett couldn’t hear him. He was already strolling into the spotlights as the roll of drums and the brass fanfare swelled. Ready to do what evil needed to be done. Alan Pickett, waving at the home and studio audiences, his smile fixed and mammoth.

And so our parents, scheduled to get married during the second half hour of It’s Your Wedding, With Your Hosts Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King, were instead married during the first. They answered Billy Ray King’s embarrassing questions, they nodded, they smiled, they were a perfect couple. There are no still photographs of them that day, no pictures of them standing stiffly with the TV cameras looming behind them like alien beasts threatening this union. But our parents assure us they wore the same clothes the next day for their church wedding, so we’ll have to go with that: our father in his Navy whites and a crooked grin, our mother in a short pearl-colored jacket over a tea-length pearl dress with a plunging neckline, a triangle of lace covering her cleavage. She is holding her carnations and lilies of the valley as if offering them to the folks at home. The nuptials were witnessed by their attendants and friends in the studio audience; other friends cheered in furniture stores or in frat and sorority houses.

Their parents watched at home. Arthur, Naomi, Bea, and Charlie had chosen not to acknowledge this wedding, which was just as well since the Catholic Church and the state of Illinois did not acknowledge it, either. The priest was not a priest, or a JP, and nothing was going to be legal and official until the next day, though our parents did not know this at the time.

After they chastely kissed, Alan Pickett said to the camera, his manner officious and pleased, “May I present to you our ninety-ninth happily married couple on It’s Your Wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Czabek.” There was polite applause, punctuated by Louie Hwasko’s and Helen Federstam’s wolf whistles, and then Alan Pickett said, “I understand that before our next couple comes out, Walt here is going to play us a song.”

“That’s right, Alan,” said Billy Ray King, “and then we’re going to present our lucky one hundredth bride and groom!”

By then our parents must have known they’d been had, snookered out of the good stuff by a desperate man who wanted his pregnant daughter to be the “lucky” one hundredth bride married on It’s Your Wedding, but to their credit they refused to cry foul or even let on they knew. A certain tightness showed in their faces as they dutifully chose their boxes, their smiles the fixed and nervous smiles of losers abashed at their own defeat, but still game and grinning, and you had to be pretty adept to notice even that. With flourishes inappropriate to the paucity of their haul, Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King presented them with their winnings: a hundred-dollar savings bond, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, fishing tackle, a GE blender, and a gift certificate good for dinner at the Sheridan Hotel, where our parents were going to start their honeymoon.