C Hribal - The Company Car

“Your mother,” our father said, swilling his drink again, “your mother wouldn’t cheat if somebody stuck a dick in her mouth.”

The sudden bitter, certain, and cold-blooded viciousness of our father’s denial made me wonder—if I wasn’t along, would he and Madeleine have shacked up? Would it have been one of those grief-and-guilt-stricken encounters, the imperative of need and ego overriding the imperative of fidelity? Or had he gotten over his scruples and squeamishness and for years had been hooking up with Margies and Jans and Elsies and Karens? We didn’t know. And the myth of the traveling salesman is such that I expected, frankly, at any time to meet a doppelgänger family, all the children of ages roughly corresponding to our own—the dropped offspring of our father as he traveled from town to town while our mother was huge with each of us and our father, ostensibly, was in what he liked to refer to as “dry dock.” Maybe Celia’s mother was right to suspect and fear us. Maybe she knew far better than I what men on the road were capable of. After all, I was supposed to be in “dry dock,” too, yet here I was, on the road all of two days and already imagining myself hooking up with Celia when I had a girlfriend already, a woman I would eventually marry. And hadn’t I nearly hooked up with Rita Sabo, too?

And while our father might have been right about our mother—we didn’t want to believe she was capable of cheating, either—we knew more about her, we thought, than he did. We had seen things he had not. A man deep in the throes of fucking up tends to be solipsistic. He has no idea what the consequences of his actions will be. They simply don’t enter his field of vision.

Often, when our father came home stewed—particularly if he was working close to home, and they’d made an agreement that he would come right home from his rounds and he hadn’t because he was busy buying rounds—our mother would ask one of us to drive her to a motel. “I am not spending another minute in this household!” she’d shriek, and although we knew this was directed at our always-absent father, we also knew it was at least partially directed at us. We were to blame—driving our mother away, driving our father to drink. Our mother would leave us, meet somebody, divorce our father, find happiness, and we would be orphaned or destitute. As she was putting on her gloves, waiting for Robert Aaron to finish heating his car, we would perform a ritual of hangdog glumness—lining up, touching our mother’s hands, the hem of her blouse, the younger children whining and crying—and beg her to stay. Our mother would stand on the landing with her bag packed, hefting it, deciding. Sometimes she’d stay: “I’m doing this for you, and for the sake of our household, not for your father,” she’d say. And sometimes she wouldn’t. Which made us wonder. Did she? When she got to the Holiday Inn, did she park herself in the bar, as our father would have done, and talk to the first man who sat down beside her? Was her fury such that a man at the bar could entice her into a moral holiday, something she could say she had apart from our father? It didn’t seem possible, but I realized then that everybody has secrets, and they stay secrets for a very good reason. And frankly, when our mother was this angry, when her eyes flashed green fire, she was capable of damn near anything.

Did they suspect of each other what we suspected of them? All that separation, all that time apart, all that grief and frustration and loneliness? Maybe they cut each other slack in this regard. Maybe they knew that about each other, or suspected it, but wouldn’t go there, wouldn’t ask or tell. Maybe they put the tab for that on each other’s bill.

Certainly over the years our parents’ marriage took a beating. When our father came home late or drunk, there was hell to pay the whole weekend, and our father couldn’t wait to get out on the road again come Sunday evening. But when he managed to get home sober and on time, our mother was sweetness and light. They went out for Friday fish fries and came home giggling and playing grab-ass with each other. And even if our father was late, if he was at least trying—no unsteadiness to his gait, no broken glass in his eyes, an apology for traffic or a late lunch with a customer—our mother smiled, took his round head between her hands, kissed his balding pate, and said, “It’s okay, Wally-Bear. We’ll put it on your bill.”

But as time went on, and our father seemed to be trying less, or trying more with poorer results, our mother said that less often. Hardly at all, really. And when our father tried to get back in her good graces, smiling his addled smile and saying, “We’ll put this on my bill, right?” our mother only scowled, folded her arms, shook her head.

She refused to believe, though, at least in front of us, that anything extracurricular could be going on with our father.

“Your father is a good man,” said our mother. “He would never be unfaithful, and Lord knows, he’s had plenty of opportunity.” And then she would tell us a story of when she was showing “out to there,” and there was this other woman at the company Christmas party practically throwing herself at our father. “And your father didn’t give that woman the time of day. He didn’t even look at her.” Yes, we wanted to say, but he was working for Dinkwater-Adams then, and was home every night. That was a long time ago. And did our mother know about Shirley writing her name with her fingernail in the unguent on our father’s blistered neck? Of course she did. No matter. The company line was absolute, unbroken, unbreached and unbreachable fidelity. Which made us wonder—did they conspire between the two of them to keep their dark secrets to themselves, and away from us? Or was the secret that there were no secrets, at least not the kind that could destroy a marriage once they were revealed?

Another mystery—and they were many and various—of our parents’ marriage.

Something else we knew about our mother that our father didn’t: Our mother’s closest friends were lesbians. Linnie and Winnie. They’d bought the Bunkas place next door after Alfred Bunkas died, his mother placed in a home. Linnie and Winnie passed themselves off as sisters—Linda and Winifred Jones—who wanted to get away from Minneapolis on account of it being too hectic there. That was the story our father heard, anyway. But they came over often when our father was away, and over coffee with our mother they explained they were actually partners, married in a pledging ceremony, and Winnie had left her husband in Milwaukee, and she didn’t want him to find her or their three kids. Our mother surprised us. “I know just how you feel,” she said, and we were left to ponder which of Winnie’s feelings our mother sympathized with in particular.

In fact, the only time our mother seemed anymore to be able to muster up any energy at all was when she wanted to see Winnie and Linnie. She would hobble across the field to see them and hobble home in the evenings before dinner or, if our father was gone, as he usually was, in time to see us to bed. What was she doing, spending all that time over there? We had no idea. Pouring her heart out, bonding, getting silly-ass drunk on port wine cheese and Beaujolais?

“Some things are best left private,” said our mother, echoing Nomi, and that was as much of an explanation as we were going to get. It was, no doubt, as much as we deserved. Once, however, when I was on the roof mulling things over by myself and our mother was putting dinner together—I could hear her sing-humming off-key below me—distinct cries of “More! More!” wafted toward me from Winnie and Linnie’s house. It was a midsummer day, and their windows were open. Huh, I thought. I wonder where they learned that?