C Hribal - The Company Car

“Okay, okay,” says Wally Jr. “We got a problem. Why are you getting so worked up about this? We’ll figure something out.”

“No,” says Meg. “We won’t ‘figure something out.’ That’s not the way it works in this family and you know it. You boys are going to take a powder—just like Dad. You’re going to complain about your jobs, the distance you’d have to travel, the lack of space in your houses, and it’s all going to fall on me. I’ll end up ‘figuring something out,’ and you’ll all applaud me while your lives go on as before and mine goes right down the toilet!”

I have never heard Meg talk like this. The reason is simple: I was never around to hear her, and when I was around, I wasn’t listening. None of us boys were. We had grown up in a male-centered family, inherited our perceptions of the world from our father. Men went off and did things. Our task, our responsibility, was to find new territory to strike off into. Even if we floundered, even if we failed, at least, by God, we’d gone off in new directions. And if it seemed too overwhelming to reinvent ourselves for the sake of that journey, if we were shaky in our manhood, well, there was always drink to give us courage. Maybe that’s why we boys went bad all in a rush. We found alcohol, all in a rush.

The girls, we thought, had it easy. Freed from expectations of success and failure, they needed only to absorb, not flounder. We thought we understood Peg Leg Meg and Cinderella. No mystery there. We could ignore them freely. Slighted, they became slight. Insubstantial. Never mind that, as it was by our mother, the real burden of family was borne by them. Never mind that Meg was right and it was all going to fall on her. Our sisters, we liked to believe, were transparent. And perhaps our greatest act of hubris as boys was pretending we weren’t.

So okay, the irony mobile has just pulled into our campsite. All those years we’ve agreed to disagree, and now that we need to pull together on something we find ourselves looking around at each other, wondering if it’s possible. Ike feeds sticks to the fire. They crackle and burn, the smoke sucked up the lodgepoles and into the sky. Nobody says anything for a while.

Wally Jr., though, likes nothing better than beating a dead horse. “What about Cinderella?” he asks, and Ernie seconds it. “Yeah, what about Cinderella?”

I expect Meg to explode with exasperation again, but this time she’s calm. “What about Cinderella? I don’t know, what about her? You tell me.”

The rebuke is so light it’s crushing. The fact is, you cannot count on Cinderella. You can pray for Cinderella, you can feel bad for her, but you cannot count on her. She is our family’s martyr, and martyrdom is a full-time occupation. No question, her travails are many and various, and many of them quite real—a long marriage to an abusive husband, ovarian cysts, a bout with breast cancer that required the removal of part of a breast—and as she was going through them we should have been kinder, more sympathetic. No doubt we would have felt sorrier for her had the word martyr not been tattooed on her forehead. At family get-togethers she spent her time sighing and making game little grins—yes, yes, I’ve been absolutely steamrollered by life, but aren’t I brave for being one of life’s bowling pins? It’s hard empathizing with someone so enthusiastically long-suffering.

She was the first out of the nest, and desperate to prove she was happy. We wanted to believe she was. So did she. For a long time things took place under a cloak of silence and darkness, and neither she nor we were willing to lift the veil. And once it became obvious how awful it was, we were angry with her for allowing it to happen. She seemed to be cooperating in her own martyrdom, and for this we could not forgive her. At birthdays, at Christmas and Thanksgiving, she would show up in her habitual posture, pasty-faced, with pinched-in shoulders and an uncertain smile. Oh, woe is me. We couldn’t stand it.

Here was something on which we could all agree—Cinderella had given up. We could put it in fairy-tale terms. Two minutes after midnight and she’s sitting in a field on her ass, a smashed pumpkin and a litter of mice at her feet. And unlike the fairy tale, her prince is a shit and her fairy godmother a fraud. It wasn’t only a kiss she gave the prince at midnight. The prince looks at the glass slipper as a memento of a memorable hump and pockets it. Later it falls off the mantel and breaks, and the prince shrugs. What was she doing with that ridiculous footwear in the first place? Those things made her walk funny. The remaining slipper Cinderella keeps wearing in the vain hope that the prince will notice the peasant with the obvious limp and take pity on her. But the prince’s penis is happy elsewhere now, and what need has he of a limping, knocked-up strumpet? Oh, and did we forget to mention, he wasn’t really a prince? He was the village goatherd, but the same idiot story that had her believing pumpkins were carriages and mice were horses and footmen transformed this dung-smelling, mead-swilling lout into a handsome prince. If you only closed your eyes and looked through the slits, and if the backlighting was just right, why…

Okay, so she didn’t give up. She did something worse. She continued to believe. Kept limping around in that slipper until it broke and her foot got gashed and full of slivers. Then she wrapped the foot and kept limping around on the bloody bandage. How it played out is this: We were all at the Round ’Em Up (their name), the Drink Beer for Christ Festival (our name) that St. Genevieve’s put on every summer to help retire the parish’s debt. We were moseying through the craft tent, putting down chances for the raffle (first prize—a whole side of beef), trying our luck at the Ping-Pong ball throw, taking kids on the whirligig ride and the Ferris wheel, when we heard a shriek that sounded like an angel had been stabbed right in the middle of an orgasm.

You could hear it over the merry-go-round calliope, over the bark of the midway’s hucksters, over the warbling of the beer tent’s polka music, over the entire general din of the fairgrounds. It stopped everything. A single shriek that made your hair stand on end and your toes shrink inside your shoes. My God, what had happened? For a moment everyone paused. Then we all came running. We knew. Even as we ran, we knew. As Czabeks gathered from the far corners of the fairgrounds, from the hamburger stand and the pig rassle, from the carnival midway and the dyspeptic goldfish toss, we knew. We got the children off to one side so they wouldn’t see. Cinderella’s kids in particular. “What is it? What’s happened to Mommy?” the youngest asked. The older ones knew. Even without knowing they knew. They wore on their faces their terrible knowledge. Their eyes had that preternatural look about them of animals who smell smoke in the forest even without knowing it’s fire.

We got them away, we kept them from seeing, but they knew. The oldest, Okie II, broke away from the pack, and he saw what the rest of us, gathered in a loose semicircle in the beer tent, also saw. His father sitting on a wooden folding chair with a twenty-two-year-old woman on his lap. The woman bore him no relation though she might eventually bear his child. His eyes were closed and his knees were going up and down as though the music were still playing, as though he were keeping time to a beat only he could hear. Batta-bing, batta-bing went the melody. Batta-bing, batta-bing went Okie’s stubby fingers on the woman’s thighs.

The woman’s name was Kathy Neesmer, and she was pretty if you liked big yellow hair and blue eye shadow and chipmunk cheeks and a slutty pout that years from now would make her look as dyspeptic and unhappy as the goldfish. Cinderella looked stricken. Her face had caved in after her scream, and she looked like her namesake at about midnight plus thirty seconds. So this was her prince? This beery galoot feeling up a coarse-skinned strumpet?