by C J Hribal
For the next five hours we sat on that couch, filled with dread and uncertainty. Five of us, arranged according to height, with identical stricken looks on our long thin faces. Our father hadn’t called, and Mrs. Duckwa forgot to feed us. When she did remember, she confessed she didn’t have much in the way of kid food. She wouldn’t have remembered at all except her daughter came through announcing she was meeting friends for pizza. Mrs. Duckwa looked at us and said, “Oh, my, you little dears.” She heated up some hot dogs and served them on dry buns without mustard or ketchup. Mrs. Duckwa did not eat with us. Evidently Mrs. Duckwa lived on cigarettes and whatever she was drinking from what our father called a “rocks” glass. Mr. Duckwa had not come home yet. Mrs. Duckwa said he sometimes worked late, sometimes he ate out, and sometimes, well, sometimes, she said, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting another, sometimes Mr. Duckwa was a regular SOB. After we ate we put the dishes in the sink, and Cinderella washed them. We went back to the couch. Mrs. Duckwa remained at the table smoking and drinking. Every once in a while she came in to where we were sitting and said, “Your mom’s going to be all right. Everything will turn out fine.” We didn’t believe her—from the torn look of worry on her face we could tell she didn’t believe herself either; I think she was afraid nobody was going to come for us and she’d be stuck with us—but we were too polite to say so. Unspoken in all this, and driving our dread, was our knowledge that there was a baby inside our mother’s tummy, and we knew it was not good for a baby to be falling down the stairs. We tried to cheer each other up: “Kids bounce,” said Cinderella, trying to sound like our father. “Maybe the baby bounced.” “Shut up, Cinders,” said Robert Aaron.
But it was true, sort of. Our father came home about eleven with the news that our mother was okay, considering. She had a concussion and a broken—smashed to pieces, really—nose and a gash above her ear that required twenty-eight stitches to close (it was the gash and the nose that produced all that blood), and they were keeping her overnight for observation, but she was okay other than that. Nomi was staying with her. The baby, as far as they could tell, was going to be all right. It was just as the chain-smoking Mrs. Duckwa had said. As Cinderella had said. As our father always said. Kids bounce.
For years afterward we were reminded of our family’s near brush with tragedy each morning as we got dressed. Our underwear, our socks, our T-shirts—they all bore the once bright, now brown stains of our mother’s blood.
9. You Know What They Do
with Horses, Don’t You?
HOLDING DOWN THE FORT, THE BOAT, THE HEART
“You can’t look at your mother, can you?” said our mother.
It was true. For a little while our mother had been a bloody angel. She’d been almost beautiful, lying at the bottom of the stairs, her stomach great with child, clothes strewn about her, blood streaming out of her. She had been, for those brief moments we stood at the top of the stairs gazing at her, an icon: mythic, eternal, still as plaster.
Seeing her back inside her body again, with a big square of gauze taped to her nose and a long rectangle of it over her ear, her bandages leaking yellow ointment and stained with blood—it was creepy. She had been someplace else and come back damaged. Was she even the same person? People lost their memories all the time after a conk on the head. They were completely different people. I’d seen lots of TV shows where that happened. We had a whole religion based on something like this: He’d died, and when He came back He was a completely different person. He hung around afterward for a while, but He was different, everyone knew it, and eventually He just went up in the clouds and disappeared.
So this stranger in our living room, wincing as she served drinks to Nomi and Artu and the Duckwas and to Aunt Margie and Alvin and Grandma Hubie—it was a little celebration party for her coming home safely—I was wary of her. She seemed different, and it wasn’t just the huge butterfly wings of gauze over her nose. But then she pulled me into her lap and nibbled my ear to make me giggle and I decided, reluctantly, that this woman back from the dead was indeed my mother. Still, it was unsettling.
It was a time of unsettledness and uncertainty. Our pets were dying, the town was changing, and our father was becoming more and more restless.
Lucky’s quiet demeanor in the store had been misleading. He was not stoic; he was diseased. His eyes clouded with gunk, then swelled shut. His feathers turned translucent, then fell out. Raw, angry skin took up residence beneath the molt. He shat green goop, and his belly distended as though he were a child from some third world country. “Pitiful,” our mother pronounced every morning as she lifted the blanket off Lucky’s cage, and Nomi echoed, “Pitiful.” Then she asked, “When are you going to put that bird out of its misery?” Lucky died before our mother felt she needed to answer. We found Lucky at the bottom of his cage atop page 3 of the Chicago Tribune, his beak posed as though he were searching for goodies up Mayor Daley’s nose.
Our mother promptly got another one. She took each of us in turn, as one Lucky after another died. There were five in all. Each seemed fine for a while, chirping and learning a few words of English, fluttering about the house when our mother let her—or him; we were never strong on bird gender—out of the cage, then becoming ill or despondent, eating little, drinking less, until each one faded quickly and finally died.
The first Lucky had something like a state funeral: a shoe box lined with tinfoil, a worn handkerchief of our father’s, his name lettered on a Popsicle-stick cross. Our father played “Taps” on the accordion, then “Ghost Riders in the Sky” (one of the few times the accordion had come out of the closet since the Kaopectate Wars), then took us out for ice cream. It was a fine Saturday in late September, warm and breezy, and the next day in church we prayed for Lucky’s soul. By Lucky IV or V, though, we were throwing them out with the trash, folded in newspaper so it wouldn’t open until the can was upended over the garbage truck.
Our mother cried, but she also thought Lucky’s death was atonement for Ernie. He’d survived the fall, and if God was going to take it out on her in dead birds, so be it.
Eddie fared no better, though he died of kindness. A turtle, we believed, needed a moist environment. So we lined his tub with wet newspapers and drenched them daily. His feet grew a white cottony fungus, and the skin came off in pale white strips. When he died soon after, I buried him in a shoe box with a Popsicle-stick cross lettered: “Here lies Eddie, a good turtle.”
Our father, despite playing the accordion at Lucky I’s funeral, had little patience for our or our mother’s demonstrations of grief. “Kids bounce, turtles don’t,” he said when our mother brought up the idea of a replacement turtle. And just before Eddie died our father told us, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. His thumb went down like a trigger and he winked. He said the same thing to us when we were sick, and he said it to our mother after Ernie was born. As though death were a comical threat you could hold over someone’s head.
When his own fish went belly-up, he put this theory into practice. No shoe boxes in the backyard, no Popsicle-stick grave markers, no “Taps.” It was strictly burial at sea, our father standing disdainfully over the toilet, hosing them down with his own pee. Capone, our father said, did this over the graves of his enemies. We didn’t think these fish were his enemies, but they had disappointed him by dying, these fish. What did they expect? And then he pulled the trigger and flushed them out of his, and our, memory.
More unsettling, perhaps, than our inability to keep our pets alive was what was happening to our town. Elmhurst had begun its life as a sleepy prairie town at the end of the trolley line. Post-Korea, it had turned into a modest, then teeming suburb. If you looked only at what you wanted to see, you could ignore its lurchings into sprawl, its open spaces filled in, the playing fields sprouting houses. We were home one day when a bulldozer was unloaded in the last empty lot—the lot where we’d constructed a ramshackle clubhouse—our fort
, our jail, our place for privacy. Years later Robert Aaron and I created another such space in the air above our house. And Dorie, I suppose, creates it when she is bicycling by herself across the country. Everyone needs such a place, and most of us will go to great lengths to protect that sacred spot. We ran over to protest. “But that’s our clubhouse,” we said, pointing. Said the bulldozer operator, “It’s okay, kids, we’re just going to move it over to the corner of the lot here.”
You should not lie to kids like that. We would have taken it a whole lot better if he’d simply said, “Hey, we’re going to crush your precious little fort into unrecognizable sticks of kindling.” But he didn’t. We watched as the bulldozer trundled into position, snuffled, huffed, lowered its blade, and without so much as a pause to indicate uncertainty, leveled our clubhouse.
We ran home crying, but when our father came home, he shrugged. “Town’s growing,” he said. “What can you do? It used to be Indians here. Now it’s us. That’s progress.”
“Wally,” said our mom, “destroying their clubhouse without apologizing is not progress.”
“Would it have been better if he had apologized? Look, the kids just have to get used to things changing.”
“Like you do at the Office every evening?”
If you wanted to, you could pretend that a sea change was not taking place, but it was. And our father, despite his stiff-upper-lipping with us, could feel it. We heard him at night, railing about how the town wasn’t what it used to be. He wasn’t much crazy about his job, either, spending the better part of each day stuck in Loop traffic trying to get from one doctor’s office to another. He wanted a change. He didn’t mind the selling, he told our mother, he actually liked that—he was good at it, he said, it suited him—it was all the goddamn driving around in traffic. If only Dinkwater-Adams would give him a new territory, and not just outside the Loop. Our father meant territory. “Like up in Wisconsin,” our father said to our mother late one night. Let him operate out of a small town, and he could call on the doctors and hospitals in other small towns. “And the kids, Marie”—when our father got excited he called our mom by her middle name; we’d heard him sigh “Marie, Marie, Marie, Marie” during “you know”—“you think they’d be crying about a smashed clubhouse if we lived out in the country? They could build a million forts, a million tree houses.” Our father was into it now. Once he started saying “a million this, a million that,” there was no stopping him unless our mother physically put her finger on his lips. Our father said, “The way it’s going right now there’s no space for them to play in, Marie, and it’s not likely there’s going to be any trees left for them to climb, either—you read that in the paper, Susan—Dutch elm is wiping out the trees, and pretty soon there won’t be any more goddamn trees, and who—”
“Walter?” Our mother placed a finger on our father’s lips.
“Yes?”
“And what would I do?”
Our father is silent a moment. It’s clear he hasn’t thought of this. But then you can almost hear his face light up. “Why, you’d hold down the fort,” he says and adds, as though our mother hadn’t gotten the joke, “Get it, hold down the fort? And it wouldn’t be just any fort, either, no, they could build tree forts, tree houses. A whole city in the trees,” says our father, warming up to it again. And sitting on the stairs above them, hidden, we are carried away with him, imagining a forest of trees with big, sturdy branches, each of them supporting an elaborate, multistory tree house, with rope ladders and bridges and swings leading from tree to tree.
“You know I’ve always wanted to live in the country, Susan.” Our father’s voice was quieter now, calmer. What was happening down there?
“Well, Wally-Bear, I haven’t. What would I do in the country, Wally? I’ll tell you—nothing. I’ll have nothing to do, and you’ll be traveling all the time, and I’ll go stark staring mad. I’ll be so crazy you’ll have to lock me up.”
“I have to lock you up now.”
“That’s lock me up, Wally, not knock me up.”
We could picture the scene now. Our mother had moved into our father’s lap. She had her arms around his neck and she was kissing him. Then our father said, “Mmmph!” the chair got pushed back, there was a clatter, a crash, and an ow! from our father, and then our mother, of all people, said, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?” And then they were laughing, and there were more mmph! mmph!’s and a sighed “Marie!” and Cinderella said, “C’mon, show’s over,” which meant it wasn’t, but as far as we were concerned, it was.
The last thing we heard before we crept back up the stairs was our father saying to our mother—and we could picture her in our father’s arms when he said this, just before he pushed open the door to their bedroom with his foot and then closed it, just like Jackie Gleason with Audrey Meadows in The Honeymooners—“Susan Marie, you’re the greatest!” And we knew then that whatever was being decided, it would be decided under the influence and afterglow of you know, which meant that it would occur in an absence of reason, that it would be undertaken quite happily by our mother, and that it would be thoroughly flawed.
He was right about the trees. Elmhurst was aptly named until Dutch elm disease denuded the city. The full devastation took place after we’d left, but the days of biking beneath those huge intertwining crowns, those days when even on hot, bright July afternoons you bicycled in a cave of dark coolness, the boughs above you a shimmering translucent green, were numbered. Already holes were showing in the crown, gaps in the firmament.
It was a sign, had anyone taken notice: in the natural world, things were not right. Any dramatist worth his salt knows what that means. But who wanted to believe the gloom and doom predictions of a couple of plant pathologists at Elmhurst College? Two plant pathologists, skinny and poorly married, the sort of geeky, eggheaded academics that it was already fashionable not to listen to. They didn’t come off well in town meetings, their noses buried in the reports from which they were reading, and what they recommended would have cost lots of money—clear-cutting trees with early infestations or in proximity to said trees and squirting the bejesus out of the rest with chemicals. They said with such precautions you could save probably 60, perhaps 70 percent of the trees. But who believes that scientific claptrap? It wasn’t until after the town had been denuded that they remembered the two pathologists and said to them, “Why didn’t you warn us about this stuff?”
Our parents, no doubt, felt the same way. Threats were everywhere. There were drugs in the high schools now—marijuana, LSD. Even in the private high schools, which had once seemed so safe. Sure, terrible things happened at York High—kids beaten up, beer parties—but at Montini, the private school where Sarah wanted to go? The older sister of one of Sarah’s friends had gotten pregnant there after a prom. Pregnant! How could that be? And, of course, the Duckwas’ marriage was on the rocks. We pictured them hung up in a boat, so busy blaming each other over how they got there that they hadn’t realized yet they were taking on water.
There was a sense now that accidents, when they occurred, were permanent. After falling down the stairs with Ernie still inside her, our mother had gotten pregnant one more time, even though the doctor had warned her that another pregnancy would be dangerous. “It was an accident,” she told Dr. Wilton. “It wasn’t like we were planning on it.” Dr. Wilton said accidents like this could be prevented, and she and our father hadn’t planned any of the rest of us, either. She did realize, didn’t she, that it was possible to have sex without getting pregnant? Our mother said she understood that, and though it wasn’t any of his business, just for the record she and Wally “you knowed” quite often. As Catholics, however, they practiced rhythm. Ah, said Dr. Wilton. Practiced. And did she know what you called someone who “practiced” the rhythm method? Our mother said she didn’t. You called her Mommy, said Dr. Wilton. “It will be the last one,” our mother insisted. “It had better be,” said Dr. Wilton. “You don’t have enough hormones i
n you to make more than one.”
When Meg was born, so tiny, with one leg slightly shorter than the other and with bones that broke easily (she was two when she repeated our mother’s swan dive down the basement stairs), Dr. Wilton’s warning seemed oddly prophetic. Permanent accidents, Dr. Wilton called us, and our mother all but agreed with him. Our mother recounted her visit to Dr. Wilton to our father that evening. Cinderella, Robert Aaron, and I were on the stairs, listening intently—the Hear Evil, See Evil, Speak Evil little homunculi. It was like we had radar that picked up whenever they were talking about us.
“They were accidents, Marie, every last one of them,” said our father.
“But they’re our accidents, Wally, and I seem to remember we had a pretty good time making them.” We could hear them kissing. She was probably on his lap again.
“No argument there,” said our father. He was making smoochie sounds.
“We knew what we were doing, Wally. If they were accidents, they were planned.”
“You mean intended?” More kissing. Our father groaned; our mother sighed. Good God, were they going to . . . you know . . . right there in the kitchen? Our mother was already pregnant. Was this how you got twins?
“Intended, planned, and permanent,” said our mother. “Every last one of them.”
“What if there are problems?” said our father. “These last few haven’t been easy for you. Dr. Wilton’s right about that.”
“There are always problems,” said our mother. “We’ll deal with those as they arrive.”
Which was what our mother did when Meg arrived with one leg shorter than the other. Was this because Meg was an accident? No, said our mother, she was a gift from God.
Still, if this was God’s idea of a gift, He had a pretty perverse sense of humor.
