C Hribal - The Company Car

“Mom says you shouldn’t worry about things. She and Dad have it all figured out.”

“They do?”

“Pretty much.”

“Care to enlighten us?” I ask.

“She said to say you should hold your horses. They’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“They couldn’t tell us now?”

“You couldn’t have this discussion in front of them? Mom said, ‘Everything in its own way, in its own time.’ Besides, you’re down here now and they’re going to bed.”

“Dad’s awake?”

“He got up for a little while. Then he and Mom talked.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I must’ve gotten home a little after you guys came down here. Mom was still up. She was crying.” Nobody addresses the fact that Cinderella has evidently been crying, too.

Cinderella takes a deep breath to steady herself. “She seemed okay about it. Whatever you said to upset her—she said we shouldn’t worry. That everything was taken care of.”

“Taken care of how?”

“You know, it’s the funniest thing. I asked Mom the same thing, and she got this curious smile on her face. ‘We shall see what we shall see,’ Mom said. Then she laughed and said, ‘And that’s the name of that tune.’ ”

“You’re sure it was Mom who said that?”

“Dad had already gone back to sleep.” Cinderella yawns. “I should, too. It’s late.”

She’s about to leave, but Meg doesn’t want her to go. “So, Cinders,” she says. “Where were you tonight? We had things to talk about.”

“Mel and I had some things to talk about, too.”

“Oh?”

“You wouldn’t want to know.” She means all of us.

“Try us,” I say.

“No, it’ll make me seem like a victim, and I know how you hate that.”

It’s amazing how warm a tent can feel on a cold March night.

But Cinderella can’t not tell us. She looks up at the tepee’s crown, where the smoke escapes to the night sky. She takes another deep breath and sighs. “Mel’s thinking of going back to his wife.”

“Oh, honey,” Robert Aaron says. “That’s terrible.”

“Bummer,” says Ernie.

“Double bummer,” says Wally Jr.

“Yeah, well—” She takes a step into the tepee, catches her foot, and staggers.

“Did he give a reason?” Ike asks.

Meg says, “I still want to know what Mom and Dad’s plans are. How they think everything is taken care of.” Her eyes narrow. “Did she tell you?”

Cinderella rights herself, then gets this sickly, sad, self-satisfied smile on her face. As though God had entrusted her with the secrets of the universe, whispered them into her ear, and she’s dying to tell, but God has also whispered to her exactly what her punishment will be if she reveals them. She puts her finger to her mouth. “Shh!” she says, and you can tell she’s answering both Meg’s question and Ike’s. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Our father’s life was saved by sex and cookies. Once Benny Wilkerson left Drydell and went to work for Dinkwater—which our father, right then, couldn’t contemplate—our father’s days at Drydell were numbered. A few months later he was given a pink slip; the paint division got reorganized, and his territory magically evaporated. Being unemployed again just about killed our father. Excluding the months when dying companies were promising him that pay and bonus checks were “on their way,” our father was out of work nearly a year, and for several years running didn’t pull in anything close to a regular income. What he did earn he spent on drink and fishing equipment. During that time the Arabs and Israelis had a war, Vietnam fell, Nixon resigned, there was an oil crisis, a recession, and a rise in worldwide Communism. African dictators rose and fell, South American ones murdered their own people, the dollar was shaky, prices and wages were frozen, and the Russian Bear was dancing. Closer to home, our father’s best friend blew his brains out, and his oldest daughter was locked into a loveless marriage with an abusive husband.

The really horrible thing, though, was that our mother got a job.

A great many things sent our father to bars, taverns, saloons, and gin joints, but except for the news about Louie Hwasko, the most devastating news our father could receive was that our mother was employed outside the home. Robert Aaron and I had been working for some time already, our college funds had been zeroed out, but the idea that our father couldn’t support our mother—no, no, that just couldn’t be.

“Did it ever occur to you that I wanted to do it, Wally-Bear? Have a job, I mean.”

“No woman wants a job unless she’s one of them women’s libbers burning their bras and waving the damn things in public at you.”

“Lots of women have jobs, Wally, and they didn’t burn their bras to get them.”

“No wife of mine is going to have a job. You already have one. You’re a wife and a mother. These kids are your job. I’m your job.”

“You’re my Job, Wally, not my job. Right now you’re my not so little cross to bear. And ‘these kids,’ Wally? ‘These kids’ are nearly grown. Or hadn’t you noticed? They’re growing up and out, right under your nose, and they’d grow a whole lot faster if we had something in the house besides beer and tortilla chips to put inside their mouths!”

“Sure, that’s right, rub it in. Rub my goddamn nose in it. Twist the knife in his guts, tell a man he can’t provide for his family!” Our father was shouting. He’d been drinking since noon.

“I didn’t say anything about you not providing for your wife and family. I’m simply saying I want to help out. There are a lot of us.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“It’s not anybody’s fault, Wally. We wanted it like this, remember?”

Our father closed his eyes. At that moment it didn’t seem he’d be able to recall anything without a great deal of difficulty. Finally he breathed, “I had you on a pedestal. A pedestal!”

Our mother sighed. “Well, it’s not always fun being up on a pedestal, Wally. You get stiff. Sometimes we like to climb down and move around.” She was rubbing his shoulders. “Maybe this is the best thing for us, you know?” We could see she was trying to make the best of a bad situation. It was why she had taken the checkout job at the same grocery store where I worked. She even appealed to the great mystery of their married life. “You know, Wally, maybe our ‘you know’ would be better if I got out of the house more. I’d feel friskier for having been out in the workaday world, and you’d feel friskier for having a more active wife.”

You could tell from her voice’s waver that she didn’t believe what she was saying to him but that she desperately wanted to. It puzzled us why she’d want to. Our father was drunk and fat, and our mother was an attractive woman, though portly from childbearing and unhappiness. Frankly, we wondered how two round bodies managed to have sex at all.

We understood nothing of the intimacy of grooming, found in other primates, and we thought the excitement of body parts fitting together applied only to nubile bodies. We forgot, or never knew, that given the comic nature of genitalia, “you know” was a pleasure, a release, and a relief, the punch line to a private joke shared by our parents.

Even in times like this. Here they’d been arguing, our father angry and then despondent, everything—his dignity, his respect, his wife—slipping away from him, and now our mother was comforting him. Our father sat at the kitchen table, his head buried in our mother’s belly, pitifully saying over and over in a weak little voice, “I want a job, a job. A job a job a job.”

Our mother kissed our father’s forehead and stroked his ears. “Why don’t we put you to bed and… you know.”