C Hribal - The Company Car

Nomi, two years later, would be right. Not even God could help you.

They found me like that, beyond hysteria, my right arm covered in blood, my T-shirt soaked crimson. They carried me back up to the house, where I continued moaning, “I’m a failure, I’m a failure,” until they were able to pump enough bourbon and elixir of Benadryl into me—red juice, we called it (a Parke-Davis product, much to our father’s chagrin)—to calm me down. They got me into a warm tub of bathwater and started cleaning me up. I would need stitches for some of the wounds, but most could be butterflied closed. Our mother washed the tear-streaked dust from my face, washed my arms, held a washcloth to the worst of the wounds, looked with concern at me and with an expression that could melt steel at our father.

Our father tousled my hair and said he was sorry. He didn’t know I had taken things so seriously. He said he wouldn’t do that again. “You have to understand, Emcee,” he said. “The Cubs will always be a day late and a dollar short. It’s no accident they’re so bad. It’s an act of God, and you just have to accept it.”

I was down to whimpering and could breathe again. I looked at both my parents. Our mother with her concern and flared anger, our father stupefied with beer and filled with, yes, fumbling, awkward love. I suppose in a perverse way I had won that round. In breaking down, I had almost broken through our father’s wall of clichés. He had had to say something to me that wasn’t simply a truism. He had used a truism to get at an elemental truth.

And he was right. The Cubs were a day late and a dollar short. And so was I. The only good thing that came out of it was that a couple of years later, when I again tried to woo Dorie with acts of gallant stupidity, it hurt less when I failed.

I have told this story over the years to Dorie—she knows all about my Cubs obsession—but I’ve never told her that it was connected to her as well. She thinks it was purely Cubs-related, and I’ve never had the courage to let her know how much of my breakdown back then was related to her, or how much I desired her even before I understood it to be desire. Nor have I told her that I’ve always been afraid of losing her, both well before she was mine, when the loss wasn’t really consequential, and—more heartbreakingly—after. It is that I am losing her now, or perhaps have already lost her, that is driving me nuts.

Not long after Bucko’s attack on our mother, Nomi took a turn for the worse. Our mother joked with Nomi about anything that touched on the borders of what was going on without ever getting to the heart of the matter. Artu visited often, was always cheerful, yet on more than one occasion on a Sunday afternoon as he was getting his car ready for the long drive back to Chicago I found him in our driveway, a gallon jug of water in his hand (he was topping off the radiator), his eyes glistening as he looked out over our fields. I thought I knew what he was thinking, but I did not. He shook his head, closed the hood of his car, looked back at the house, and drove away.

Inoperable was the word whispered by our mother before she collapsed in our father’s arms, begging to be held. What she meant was “terminal.” Like sex, death had its own euphemisms. For example, the doctors explained that, given the advanced state of the cancer inside Nomi, “aggressive” treatments were called for. Aggressive, we found out later, meant “experimental.” They pumped her veins full of mustard gas, which never reached the cancer but did kill off a number of those veins. You could see the dead rivers and their tributaries beneath her skin: muddy, ghoulish, purply brown. Scars of the doctors’ handiwork.

Nomi, indomitable Nomi, became a wizened sack of bones, whimpering, groaning, dozing in and out of consciousness. It was not pretty, and our mother kept us from her room now that she was “sinking.” She was still in the house, but we no longer saw her except for when our mother ushered us to her doorway when she was napping. It was a little like looking at a mannequin, only the waxy lips were open and the head was tilted to one side. “It’s only a matter of time,” our mother would say. “I pray to God He’s swift with her.”

“Maybe she’ll die in her sleep,” I said.

“Yes,” our mother said. “Maybe she will.” And turned away, her hand over her mouth.

But then Nomi got better. She “rallied,” the doctor said. When she had been groaning and whimpering, he said she “lagged.” It was a language of nuance and things unspoken or glossed over. Nomi herself wasn’t like that, and her rally meant she was her old self, giving our father hell, laughing with our mother, questioning us kids about our homework and our friends and our aspirations. Having graduated high school, Cinderella was now enrolled at the tech, in a field called “fashion merchandising.” Nomi sniffed. “Is that a degree in clerking for Montgomery Ward’s? Sarah Lucinda, you don’t need a degree for that. Just good shoes.”

Cinderella had brought home her tech school boyfriend. He had sandy orange hair, freckles, and bug eyes. He kept licking his mustache. Cinderella said she was going to marry him. He had a name—Oswald Grunner—but everyone called him Okie. “Is that because of the size of his root or because he has an acorn for a brain?” Nomi wondered out loud.

“He spent time in Oklahoma, Nomi. He was in the Air Force and he broke horses.”

“He broke horses. Now there’s an occupation to support a family. Did he get paid when he broke wind, too?”

“I love him, Nomi.”

“You love the idea of being in love. It’s not the same.”

Our mother stayed out of it. She was afraid that if she voiced her displeasure it would alienate Cinderella, might even drive her toward the boy in a fit of romantic it’s-you-and-me-against-the-world passion. And when his unsuitability did dawn on her, our mother didn’t want to have said something that might cause her to feel she couldn’t come home to lick her wounds. Our mother was counting on reason and good sense prevailing. Besides, Nomi was good at doing the dirty work. You couldn’t be mad at Nomi.

She asked to be introduced to Okie and said in his presence to Cinderella, “Anybody can have a fool for a friend. You can even fall in love with one. That doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”

“Mom wasn’t much older than me when she married Daddy.”

“Your father wasn’t a fool. Your father probably doesn’t know this, but I’ve always been rather fond of him.”

“Begging pardon, ma’am, but I ain’t no fool. And we ain’t getting married till it’s time.”

“And how do you reckon it’s time, Okie?”

“I ain’t figured it out yet. I’ll know when I get there.”

“Ah,” said Nomi, “a boy and his dream. Remind me to get you a Timex for a wedding present.”

“I love her, Nomi, and I promise I’ll do right by her.”

“What I’m afraid of,” said Nomi, “is that you’ll have to.”

“Why don’t we go outside and let Nomi rest?” our mother suggested.

It was a fine October day, warm and windy. Cumulus clouds were stretched out and racing across the sky. “It’s a shame we can’t bring Nomi outside,” said our mother. “She’d enjoy this.”

“I thought she only went in for blood sports,” said Okie, not as stupid as he seemed.

“It’s part of the family hazing,” said Cinderella. “If you can get past Nomi, you’re in.”

“So did I get past Nomi?”

Cinderella grabbed his forearm. She was smiling. “The jury’s still out.” I didn’t know squat about love at the time, but right then I had the notion that Nomi was right. Cinderella was in love with the idea of being in love. She liked the commotion she was causing; she liked showing off her beau. She was both oblivious to the outside world, hermetically sealed inside her feelings for Okie, and watching everyone for reactions to her being inside this bubble. They looked like a couple that had already “you knowed,” and had found it pleasing. They made a strange couple—Okie all blunt edges and squares, Cinderella thin and whiplike. And she and Okie were enjoying their moment, their starry-eyed double solipsism, the wind ruffling their hair—take a picture, somebody, please—until Nomi called to our mother, “Susan, I need to pee!”