by C J Hribal
What made things interesting for us kids were the exceptions, the people not quite like us. The old folks at the end of the block who had no children. The Japanese family, the Kuras, whose kids we rarely saw—their parents kept an even tighter rein on them than our parents did. The only inkling we had that their ethnicity was an issue was when our mother, speaking to Mrs. Duckwa next door, said of the Kuras, who declined invitations to eat rotisseried chicken in various backyards, “They lost the war, you know, that’s why they’re so quiet.” “Well,” said Mrs. Duckwa, “the husband is awfully cute. It’s too bad he’s so short.”
The Duckwas were interesting because Mr. Duckwa had served in the previous war, in the Pacific, so he was older than our father by about a decade, and they had only one child, a teenage daughter, who wouldn’t speak to us. She was so far removed from us in age that she existed on another planet. The Duckwas were the true pioneers, the scouts, in our neighborhood. They’d built first, a muddy brown brick bungalow, and when things started going kablowies in the neighborhood, they were the point family, the family where things happened first.
Finally, there was Ollie Cicerelli, whose mother, Olive, was divorced. This was by far the oddest thing. In our neighborhood families did not get divorced.
It was just an accident that the exceptions lived near us. Surrounding us mostly were families like ours: large, Catholic, recent inhabitants of Chicago. The Kemmels had seven, like us, and the Hemmelbergers six. Only Olive Cicerelli and the Duckwas had single kids.
I don’t know what life was like in these other families; we were rarely inside their houses. Moms sent kids out to play with instructions not to come back in unless you were sick, hurt, or it was time to eat. Ours was one of the few who relented. This leniency made her a marked woman in the neighborhood. “Go play at the Czabeks’,” moms told their kids, knowing they wouldn’t be back until lunch, and maybe not even then if they’d filled up enough on apples and peanut butter at our house. We also went through vast quantities of Tang, which our mother didn’t like to serve because it was expensive, but Tang, having been on the Mercury flights, was like cocaine for ten-year-olds.
The reason all these women let their children run free across the neighborhood was that they believed they could. And the reason our mother became babysitter to the neighborhood was that she didn’t. Or rather, she both believed and didn’t believe that things were as safe as they appeared. Better if we played with our friends in the backyard, or out on the street where she could keep an eye on us. These other women had moved out of Chicago for that very reason—so they wouldn’t have to keep an eye on anyone. Sure, there were other backyards where we were welcome, other moms who occasionally doled out treats, but there was a general sense among us that nobody was watching. Or perhaps it was that we never had the feeling of being watched, except by our mother. I think she was still scared that things could happen to us. That badness could reach out and grab us. So when you got that radar feeling at the back of your neck you’d look up, and there in the back bedroom window (it should have been the kitchen window, but thanks to Charlie Podgazem it wasn’t) was our mother’s head, a look on her face that was so filled with—what? longing? love? bitterness? despair? loneliness? tenderness? fear?—that had we known what it actually was it would have broken our hearts. Instead it made us feel creepy.
“They’re asleep.”
I glance over my shoulder. Dorie’s right. Sophie’s slumped into Henry, whose mouth is open, his head vibrating against the window. He can sleep anywhere. Woolie, headphones still in place, has his head tilted back as though his mouth is waiting for rain. “Finally.”
“Finally? I thought you wanted to tell the kids the story of your parents’ marriage.”
“I thought I did, too. But I don’t think I’m telling it for them. I mean, look at Woolie. Have you ever seen a kid less interested in this stuff? They aren’t his grandparents, and even if they were, so what? And Sophie and Henry, what do they understand about this stuff?” What I don’t tell her: maybe I’m trying to pull all this together in the belief that, explaining what happened with our parents, I can similarly explain what’s happened to Dorie and me.
“So tell it to me, Ace.”
“You’re tired of hearing it from them.”
“They can’t tell it right anymore. Once upon a time they could, but somewhere along the way they lost it. Everything reminds your father of his time aboard ship, and your mother would rather tell you what she ate last Wednesday at Denny’s than enlighten you as to how she managed to stay married to your father.” Dorie pats my hand. “Maybe you’ll tell it better. Not just the cutesy stuff, but everything in between.”
“Right now I could use the how-to-stay-married-to-your-partner advice.”
More hand patting. Sometimes I want to scream. “Don’t worry, Em, we’ll make it.”
“What makes you say that?”
She pats my hand again. “I found a cure for my restlessness.”
A cure for her restlessness. That’s a good one. That’s priceless. Hilarious. She’s found a cure for her restlessness. Her restlessness. Her fucking restlessness.
More with the hand patting. I take my hand off my lap, go with the ten-and-two grip on the steering wheel. She leaves her hand on my thigh for a few minutes, then moves it. A few more miles like this one, the car filled with the tension of our silence.
“Hon,” she says, “what’s up?”
I concentrate on my driving.
“Ace, you can’t have a mute marriage. You want to talk about something? Talk.”
Talk. She makes it sound so simple. Talk. Now she wants to talk. What I want to tell her is, I’ve been thinking about when you were first “restless.”
Why was everything in our conversations appearing in quote marks, as though all those words were euphemisms? Answer: Because they probably were. Her “restlessness” first appeared the year her father died. She’d been withdrawn, depressed, not interested in much of anything. Like the lights had gone off in her heart and there was nobody home. Lots of staring out the window. Okay, I thought, she needs space. Give the woman space. I just couldn’t believe what she did with it. Distance, distance, and more distance. Then she suddenly got energized. Like her life snapped into focus for her, but she was in a completely new place, one that required her to be gone constantly. Up before dawn for runs, late workouts at the gym, long rides on weekends. She tells me: “Thank God I run and lift weights, Em. It’s a safe way of burning off all that restless energy.”
Safe?
When she gets her mountain bike, she says, “I love my bike. I’m in love with this bike.”
“You said that about the last bike,” I say. “What is this, serial monogamy for bikes? Still, it’s good to know you’re in love with something.”
Says Dorie, “Don’t lay a guilt trip on me for wanting to have a life, Em. Don’t you do it.”
Say I, “You used to have a life with me.”
“You know, Em, I don’t think I’ve ever been alone. Maybe that’s where the restlessness comes from—the desire to be alone.” She steps into the shower then and turns on the water. She’s not bothered by the sudden burst of cold water. I open the curtain, stand there staring at her like some kid at a peep show. Once upon a time she’d invite me to join her, and even if I’d already showered that morning she’d say, “You can never be too clean, Ace,” and in the immortal words of Jackie Gleason, away we’d go. But this time she tells me, “I mean it, Em. I want to be alone,” and pulls the curtain closed.
And I am hurt, but not nearly as hurt as when I begin to suspect that when she goes off to be alone she winds up not being alone. This is not the time or place to open up that can of worms, however—I can picture our kids waking up just as I’m shouting at my wife about the men I suspect she may be fucking—so I say none of this. Instead I say, “I was wondering how our parents made it this far.”
“Inertia,” Dorie answers. “And that’s not something I ever
want to be guilty of.”
“No? What do you want to be guilty of?”
“Oh”—she laughs—“all sorts of things, but not inertia.” She fiddles with the heat vent. “Maybe they lasted because people didn’t get divorced then.”
“Yes, they did. Just not as often. Look at your parents.”
“My mother walked out on my father; they did not get divorced.”
“Are we?”
“Are we what?”
“Going to get divorced.”
“Oh, Em.” She raises her arms over her head in a gesture of surrender. She’s taken to wearing bicycling jerseys and soccer goalie tops—brightly colored, form-fitting, sporty, boyish, except her breasts look fantastic in them. In happier times I’d reach beneath that lime green keeper’s jersey with the black diamond-chain pattern and palm and massage what I found there, and Dorie would tilt her head back and close her eyes, maybe even open her legs a little so my hand would have something else to do when it tired of caressing her breast. Erotic options, she liked to call it, the key to a good sex life, which reminds me of how perfunctory ours is of late, as though she were considering wallpaper patterns and which shade of ocher would look best in the front hall while she waits for me to finish. And it is the memory of that disengagement when we should be at our most intimate that has me screaming at her, “Don’t ‘Oh, Em’ me! I asked you a fucking question! Are we going to get divorced?”
I can’t believe I’m shouting this. And it does wake up our kids. Henry anyway. Out of his sleep he asks drowsily, “Who’s divorced?”
“Nobody,” says his mother. “Go back to sleep.” She sighs, and to me she says, “I’d forgotten, Ace, what a complete dork you can be.”
“Ace dork,” Henry mumbles from his sleep, as though he’s concluding a blessing.
I tell this as though I were a set age and everything in our family’s life happened at the same time. In memory, as in childhood, things bleed together. The only difference is how fast it bleeds. For adults looking back, each year is a tiny fraction of their time on the planet, and time washes clean everything in its wake except for flotsam and jetsam. For children, each year is a huge fraction of their time on earth, so time hardly seems to move at all. Things are running along in their normal course, then suddenly veer into left field.
It was like that with our parents’ arguments. They followed a pattern that gave us comfort until the night that comfort shattered. Our parents’ arguments went like this: Our father comes home late on a Friday—past our bedtime—but we’re up because he isn’t home yet. When he does come home, he shrugs off our mother being upset that he’s late. He’s home, isn’t he?
“Where have you been?” asks our mother.
“What? I told you I worked all day. I was at the Office.”
“It’s what you were doing after work that bothers me.”
A moment of silence. Our father is collecting his thoughts. Then he says, “So what did you do all day?” like she hadn’t done anything. And our mother says, “Why can’t you come straight home from work?” which was always news to us that he hadn’t.
“Because I need to unwind.”
“You can unwind here.”
“Not with all these kids running around, screaming like banshees.”
“They are not screaming like banshees.”
“They will in a minute. A man can’t think.”
“So ask me again what I did all day. Who do you think stays home with the banshees?”
Along about then we slide out of the kitchen and the living room and gather on the stairs. The stairs have a closed railing, so nobody knows we’re sitting there.
“Jesus, Sue, it’s just . . . I mean . . . a man can’t . . . I mean, I just wanted . . .”
“You always ‘just wanted.’ How do you think it makes them feel you coming home so late and calling them banshees? How do you think it makes me feel?”
Truth be told, we had mixed feelings. As scenes like this accumulate, we end up feeling awful, wondering why they argue every time Dad comes home with a quizzical look on his face, but the banshee business—hey, that was all right. Our father had already told us our ancestors came from Prague, Bohemia, so we were Bohemians. Bohemians, like Banshees, were a particularly fierce tribe of Indians, weren’t they? A tribe of green-eyed, yellow-haired Indians with long, thin faces and haunted eyes. Very rare. Maybe our mother didn’t take this news well, but we felt pretty good about it. “I’m Indian,” I told a kid on my way home from school one day. “Bohemian, actually.” The other kid took this in silently. Such was the power of knowing who you were. “And if I feel like it I can scream like a Banshee. Wanna hear?” He didn’t.
Back on the stairs, we don’t dare move. If things get quiet, if there’s murmuring and then we hear our mother say, “Oh, Wally-Bear,” then in just a few minutes they’ll go down the hall, close their bedroom door, and all will be right with the world. Sarah will say, “C’mon,” and we’ll go up to bed. Or if our father says, almost calling it out, “Guess it’s time for the show, if they aren’t asleep,” we need to scamper up before our father comes in bearing both a grin and his accordion.
We think we are fooling our parents, hiding on the stairs, but they know we are there. Sometimes they call us on this and we come back into the kitchen, rubbing our eyes to make it look good. If it’s still midargument, our father says, surly and accusatory, “You were listening.” Or if the fight is settled, an affable “Mother, we have spies. What should we do with these infiltrators?” And then we’re shied off to bed, our mother making sure we’re washed and in our jammies and have said our prayers, and then our father (drum roll, please) enters. He’s wearing—there’s no other word for it, really—his accordion, the one with his name in mother-of-pearl up the side of the keyboard. This is when our father truly comes into his own. When our father seals the deal on his status as family patriarch, as good-guy bon vivant, as someone it is impossible for our mother to stay mad at. Bedtime as event, as production. Our father opens with a quick rendition of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” then lets us sip his beer. We make faces, and he says, “That’ll put hair between your toes.” Hair between our toes? Yuck. Why would we want hair between our toes? And isn’t it supposed to be “That’ll put hair on your chest”?
Says our father, grinning, “If I were your mother, I wouldn’t want hair on my chest.”
Says our mother, a sly smile on her face, “I don’t want hair between my toes, either.”
Repeated action. What comfort we take from the habitual.
The highlight after every fight, the last song, no exceptions, no encores, is “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a song that sends shivers running through us. There we are, lined up on one of our beds, our pajamas zipped up tight to our Adam’s apples, enthralled as our father holds the high notes, his voice quavering with vibrato. He is way, way better than Vaughn Monroe, who made the song famous. And then the accordion squeezes shut and our father comes back from that strange place that he seems to go to while he is singing, that high chaparral where ghostly silhouettes on horseback dance against an orange sky, and we come back from there as well, and he is just our dad again, no longer possessed by some unearthly power, and he smiles and kisses each of us—wet, sloppy kisses tasting of beer and peppermint—and he says, “There, that’ll put hair between your toes.”
We groan at hearing it, but we are delighted just the same. Hair between our toes! How awful! How marvelous! Once our parents leave our room, we spread our toes and check. Any hair there? No, thank goodness. But we’re also disappointed. Oh, to have thick, woolly feet, warm in the winter, like a dog’s paws. We could be miniature yetis, leaving our prints in the snow. And with that we go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that all’s right with the world.
Of late, however, their arguments had become both frequent and unsettling. More and more often they did not end with make-up kisses and sing-alongs. They took to picking up where they left off once we’d been
put to bed, and in the dark we could hear their raised voices, a muffled tirade of hurt and complaint. They were taking care not to let us hear anything, but we gathered that our father’s take on things was that he was out there, manning his position, and our mother’s job was to man hers—hearth and home—and that was simply the way things should be. Our mother’s take was that this was not the case, that it should not be the case, and she was extremely upset that it was the case.
Things came to a head the night we came down with a stomach flu and half of us were squirting pitifully out one end while the other half were heaving out the other. Our mother had spent the day running pots, wiping behinds, washing sheets, comforting the afflicted, and getting vomited on with more regularity than a mother had a right to expect.
And our father, once again, is late. The only child remotely ambulatory, I’m under the kitchen table holding a black thread leading to a dollar bill in the middle of the floor, a linoleum floor with little gold boomerangs floating in a sea of gold flecks and tiny black squares. A pin is attached to the bill, the thread tied to the pin. I’d seen this in a joke book. They reach for the dollar bill, you pull the thread, the bill slides from their grasp. People are lured across the floor until their heads bump the countertop. I’d been waiting for the better part of an hour. We’d already eaten crackers and peanut butter, washed it down with flat 7UP, and gotten into our fuzzy pajamas with the zippered fronts and the white plastic footies that made our feet smell.
Finally our father is home. I hear his booming “Well, what have we here?”
Under the table, seeing only his feet, I don’t know if he’s saying this because he sees my dollar bill or if he’s responding to our mother, who’s standing next to the table, the toe of her butter yellow pump going up and down. “Walter,” she says. Our father booms, “Well, what have we here?” again. He is letting me get away with it, and I love him for that. I start pulling the thread—too quick, he hasn’t even reached for it yet—and the dollar bill is doing its slow skittering across the linoleum. Our father steps, and whap! his black shoe comes down on the dollar bill. I pull, and the thread flutters toward me. The bill stays under his foot.
