by C J Hribal
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Our father got more and more restless. He wanted his dreams to be taken seriously. He had grown up watching Al Capone’s cars whiz past him in an alley, and he knew Capone had numerous getaways and lodges up in Wisconsin. These weren’t just places where he could “lie low until the heat wore down.” These were places where Capone went to hunt and fish, to reflect, to unwind—in short, to renew his soul. Our father, I think, wanted a new soul. He wanted to be a farmer. A gentleman farmer, anyway, and Dinkwater-Adams wouldn’t let him.
For some time he’d been railing about this, particularly whenever he came back from the Office. “Jesus, Susan Marie,” he’d say at night, when we weren’t supposed to hear him, “they won’t let me breathe. All I wanna do is just goddamn breathe. Is that so much to ask?”
“No, Wally, no. Now drink your milk and come to bed.” Our mother possessed the unique ability to be distraught with and angry at our father while also pitying him.
Our father had been trying to find meaningful ways to exorcise his restlessness besides spending time down at the Office. To that end he began building a boat in the basement. Not in our basement—he didn’t have the room or the tools—but in his parents’ basement in Morton Grove, which offered him spaciousness and plenty of woodworking tools, Grandpa Cza-Cza having acquired them over the years in the manner that many men do: by going to the hardware store on those Saturday mornings when the prospect of spending the entire day with his wife was simply too much to bear. As our father’s helpers, we were allowed to witness the phenomenon every Saturday. Whenever Grandma Cza-Cza started to harp on Grandpa Cza-Cza, Grandpa Cza-Cza zipped a jacket up tight to his chin, put on an English driving cap, and announced, “I’m going to the hardware store. We need more wood screws.” Or sandpaper, or C-clamps, or pipe clamps, or a screwdriver, or a wood steamer, lightbulbs, coping saw blades, carpenter’s pencils, steel wool, tack cloths, paintbrushes, turpentine, adjustable wrenches, wood chisels, a wood-splitting wedge, and an ax—these last even though there were no trees on their property and no fireplace in which to burn the wood he split. For Grandpa Cza-Cza, the hardware store was the Office.
Had it been up to our father, we would not have been designated his helpers. He would have gone up to his father’s alone, worked all day, maybe spending the night if he didn’t have to usher at church the next morning, and come home Sunday evening at dinnertime. Our mother did not let him indulge in his druthers. If our father was going to visit his parents, shouldn’t he take his children along, at least the older boys, and give them a hobby, a lifetime skill, not to mention some time with their father?
So we were our father’s designated helpers, only we weren’t allowed to help. Our father was an immensely patient man when he was by himself—when he was behind the wheel of a car, say—but he was easily frustrated. His patience with us was wide but shallow, like rivers in Nebraska. He could irrigate us with his love, but we shouldn’t count on a steady stream. “Here, you kids, sand this,” he’d say and give us a block of wood. Sometimes it was a piece meant to go on the boat, sometimes it was a block of wood.
When we got bored there was always the rest of the basement. Grandpa Cza-Cza had a shuffleboard court inlaid in the floor tile in the next room, and we could usually while away a few hours on that. Grandpa also had a cream-colored bas relief of the Venus de Milo. I had seen better breasts on the Duckwa daughter. She wore a bikini while sunbathing, undid the straps when lying on her stomach. Once she forgot herself and stood up without redoing them. That something so secret could be so completely revealed and yet remain a mystery was, I thought, roughly on a par with transubstantiation. Still, the breasts of Venus were pretty good. It was a pity about her arms, though.
When our father found us staring at the sightless woman’s nipples he said, “Learn to appreciate that, it’s art.” But we knew it wasn’t—what was it doing hanging in the basement then? Or maybe he meant not the whole picture but the breasts themselves. That I could understand—the Duckwa daughter was, after all, a work of art. Sometimes when it was time to go home our father stood with a beer in front of Venus, her raised surfaces luscious enough to touch. He’d whistle and say, “Batta-bing, batta-bing, eh? Don’t tell your mother I let you stare.” I think he understood that the Venus de Milo was our escape, that we looked at her raptly not just for her anatomy but because losing ourselves in her mystery was an escape from our own boredom.
Our father never lacked for escapes. Dorie neither. She’s come up with a new one. Two, actually. We’re having a beer, watching the kids being marched down to Ike’s tepee, and Dorie says to me, “This next year I’m going to need to be out of the house more.”
“More than you are now?” I mentally tick off everything that already keeps her out of the house—the fifty-mile training rides, the fourteen-mile training runs, the classes on mountain-biking technique, trail building, the rides themselves, and—oh yeah—all the property she’s managing. Twenty-some apartment houses in Veedon Park and the adjoining neighborhood. Technically she owns half the bookstore, too.
“I want to participate in some of those Ironman triathlons, and my swimming’s for shit right now. And”—slow breath here—“I’ve decided to run for alderwoman.”
“I thought you decided against that.”
“I changed my mind. People are allowed to change their minds, Em.”
“Feeling restless again? You could always work in the bookstore with me.”
“I’d like to make a difference, Em. I can hire a manager for the properties.”
“And between that, the biking, and the triathlon training, who’s going to hold down the fort?”
“The kids are old enough. They won’t be a problem for you.”
“And what, exactly, do I get out of all this?”
“A happy wife?”
“Besides that.”
“You want more? We don’t have a conventional marriage, Em. We never have.”
“Sure we do. It’s just everything’s reversed.” I have a pull of my beer. This must be what our mother always felt, buried under a slurry of prepositions: being at home, waiting for our father, waiting on our father.
Dorie curls her arms around her legs, her chin on her knees. For the second time she asks me, “Don’t you ever feel restless, Em? Don’t you ever feel as though your head’s going to explode?” I’d like to tell her, Sure, lots of times. Now, for instance, but she doesn’t give me the chance. “Never mind, Em, I can see you haven’t. Thank God I run and lift weights—it’s a safe way of burning off all that restless energy.” Again with the safe. I wonder if it’s a line she uses at the gym, a way of flirting with the guys there. Or something she says to the guys she meets on these organized rides. See how they respond to words like safe and restless energy.
“There are dangerous ways, I suppose.” Mustering up my affability.
“Don’t I know it. For a while there, Em, I felt as though I was coming apart. I was a different woman for a while, when I felt that. A woman I didn’t recognize. Me and not me.”
I knew what I was getting in Dorie Keillor a.k.a. Dorothy Braun when I married her. She had gone through a wild streak in high school and a wilder streak after that. Voracious in her appetite. But by the time we hooked up, she told me she was ready to settle down. Only what if she was mistaken? I imagine Dorie in a future life, with some other husband, our kids grown and gone, and the thought torments me so much I can’t bear it. Worse, she’s talking not hypotheticals but something that’s already happened. What made her not recognize herself? And before she discovered the safe ways for burning off her restlessness, what were the reckless ones? I know, of course—there’s that diaphragm and nightgown in her pannier to remind me, but I can’t bring myself yet to ask her. Advice for attorneys: Never ask in court a question to which you don’t already know the answer. Advice for husbands: Never ask your wife a question to which you don’t want to know the answer.
Our father, so far as I knew, favored
the safer ways. Besides the big boat he was building at Grandpa Cza-Cza’s, in our basement he was building a model of the ship he spent so much time on a decade previous. He lugged down an old red linoleum and steel-legged kitchen table of Artu’s, and from a hobby store bought sheets and sheets of balsa wood in various thicknesses, X-Acto knives, and dozens upon dozens of bottles of model paint, most of them gray. Working from photographs, he was going to build a three-foot-long replica of his ship. He wanted it exact, he said, right down to the little men vomiting over the side.
Perhaps our father’s one unsafe pastime was visiting Uncle Louie. Our father felt this dovetailed nicely with his desire for “room to breathe.” Our mother maintained it was just another way to visit the Office. Uncle Louie lived in a sprawling ranch house on a hill outside Rockford. He had five acres of land, a creek, and a long cinder-block building in which he raised chinchillas. Then Helen had left him, despite the chinchillas he was raising “expressly for her.” When we went there it was a curious mix of country holiday and pity party.
Our father, Uncle Louie, our mom, and whatever woman Uncle Louie was dating would look at the chinchillas, make sandwiches and hot cocoa for us, and sit by the fire drinking Rob Roys (our father), sidecars (our mother), bourbon on the rocks (Uncle Louie), and God-knows-what (the woman Uncle Louie was currently seeing).
Things had not gone well for Uncle Louie since Helen had left him. He was doing well financially—enough so that he owned five acres outside Rockford and could lose money on the chinchillas—though he expected to see back his five-thousand-dollar initial investment, he told our father, “just as soon as the little shits start breeding.” In the blockhouse—it smelled of disinfectant and rabbit turds—we helped Uncle Louie feed the furry little rodents. They looked like hamsters or guinea pigs, and you could see in our father’s eyes that there was money to be made from this. “No, Wally,” whispered our mother emphatically, and our father got a hangdog expression on his face.
The women Uncle Louie was seeing had no interest in the chinchillas except as they might appear in a muff or a collar or a stole. We asked our mother what a stole was. “A stole is what these women are doing to Uncle Louie.”
“Hush,” said our father. “Little pitchers.”
“What?” said our mother. “They shouldn’t hear to steer clear of that kind of woman?”
“What kind of woman?”
“You know,” said our mother. “That kind of woman. The kind he seems bent on seeing. Helen may have had a short attention span, but she wasn’t like this.”
That was why things weren’t going well for Uncle Louie. He couldn’t find somebody “to settle down with.” Every time we went to visit he was dating a different woman, but our mother was right, they all seemed the same: women with big hair and brassy jewelry, women who laughed too loud and who wore too much makeup and not enough clothing. “Barmaids and cocktail waitresses,” said our mother. She and our father discussed Uncle Louie’s latest “find” on the drive home, when we were supposed to be asleep or not paying attention. “If that’s his ‘find,’ ” continued our mother, “I’d throw her back. Honestly, where does he find them? Never mind, I know exactly where he finds them. He just looks through the bottom of a bourbon bottle and there they are.”
Myself, I could see Uncle Louie’s attraction to these brassy, overweight, and invariably full-chested women. They always looked slightly disheveled, as though they hadn’t quite put themselves together from what they’d been doing just before we arrived. Sitting next to Uncle Louie on the limestone hearth surrounding the circular fireplace, tall glasses of Seven & Seven in their hands, they seemed possessed of a sleepy, satisfied-yet-forlorn look, as though they were wondering, having just risen from the bed, Is that all there is? And though their lips—big, generous, and outlined in red—seemed ready to take in the world as they smiled and pursed over their drinks, there was also something desperate about them, incomplete. They reminded me of Mrs. Duckwa, and of that woman we met at the Office, the woman who wrote her name—Shirley—in the unguent smeared over my father’s sunburn. Women who hadn’t quite gotten what they wanted out of life and felt they were due.
No wonder they always seemed to end up hurting Uncle Louie. “You have to tell him, Wally,” said our mother after one such visit. “He’s your closest friend in the whole world—”
“Besides you,” interjected our father.
“Besides me.” Our mother smiled. “You have to tell him he can’t keep on letting these women hurt him. He leaves himself wide open for that. Drinking himself silly and dating cocktail waitresses is not going to help him get over Helen. Helen was one of a kind.”
“Yeah,” said our father, “but what kind?”
Conversations like these happened when Uncle Louie was “between engagements.”
“Engagements.” Our mother snorted. “That’s just what he says to make himself feel better over the fact that he’s sleeping with them.”
“I doubt he has to make himself feel better about that.”
“You know what I mean. You’re just defending him because you want to see him get laid. Those chinchillas aren’t the only things breeding around here. He’s just lucky he hasn’t been any more successful at reproducing than they have.”
When Uncle Louie was “seeing somebody” (which made it sound like he was blind the rest of the time), he drank too much, laughed a lot, treated us all to fish dinners at the Rockford Moose Club. The adults sat at the bar, and we kids were essentially forgotten, which was fine with us. In high spirits, Uncle Louie or our father told stories of being in the service, and all we had to do was show up, tug on their sleeves, and in a matter of moments a fresh kiddie cocktail was handed to us, the maraschino cherries impaled on plastic red buccaneer’s swords, which we used in our games of make-believe or later inserted into each other’s anuses in the privacy of our room. Rockford’s Moose Hall was identical to the ones in Lombard and Villa Park: an open hall done in a style best described as “Tudor gymnasium”—dark polyurethaned picnic tables, a tiny bandstand, and doorways that led to the bar and bathrooms. The bar area was done up with weird green carpeting and dark green or royal blue or red drapes. Or maybe it was red carpeting, and royal blue or seaweed green drapes. After seven or eight Shirley Temples it was hard to remember. We ate our fish fry, then went to see the moose head enshrined on the far wall, wondering what it was thinking behind its glassy eyes. Then we wandered between tables, hiding under the unused ones, remaining perfectly still as our hiding place filled in around us with thick calves and peasant ankles in hose and pumps and cuffed pants with wingtips or crepe-soled shoes. Once or twice we were shocked with a view of someone’s garters and crotch, but we remained quiet, and eventually snuck out the far end of the table, shaking our heads over what we had seen.
The highlight of these evenings was when the band set up—a piano player or someone with a Hammond organ, a small drum kit, an upright bass. Men in gold lamé suits with crushed velvet collars and black trim on the pockets took the platform—you hesitated to call it a stage—and started tickling the ivories, plucking the bass, and—our favorite of all—brushing the snare drum: Ch-che-che, ch-che-che, ch-che-che. We stood in front of the band, or sat as near them as we could, and watched them do low-voltage dance tunes, songs the beef-faced and thick-ankled adults glided over the floor to, dreaming of when these songs were new and they were young. We watched the couples, too, dancing cheek to cheek, their eyes misting over with memories. You could see it in our parents’ eyes when they danced: they were thinking of a time before we came along and changed everything. Not that they regretted it, we knew, but still.
That was when Uncle Louie was in a good mood, when he was “in love” and happy. When he wasn’t, when Uncle Louie was “between engagements,” he stayed home, built huge fires that he let burn down to nothing while drinking bourbon and playing his Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album over and over again on the hi-fi, tickling
the ivories right along with Ray, and shaking his head, eyes closed, plaintively singing along to “Born to Lose.” He was miserable (our father’s pronouncement), godforsaken (Uncle Louie’s), and wallowing (our mother’s). “The music consoles him,” said our father. “It’s his only solace, to listen to Ray sing those sweet sad tunes.” Said our mother, “His only solace is when he gets his thingie between the sad sweet legs of some barmaid.”
“Little pitchers,” said our father.
“Really, the way he douses himself with alcohol, it’s amazing he gets his bottle rocket to go off in the first place. Or maybe those women have a low tolerance for fireworks.”
“The rocket’s red glare,” said our father.
“The bombs bursting in air,” said our mother, and they laughed, and squeezed hands, and I felt sorry for Uncle Louie, all alone in his house except for when a new and no doubt temporary Alice or Maggie or Trish or Debby came over and he could serenade her with songs of how miserably the previous woman had treated him.
To be fair, he often did the same thing when he was in a good mood, when things were blossoming between him and his latest find, only then when he sang along he was just pretending to be sad and lonely, a loser. You could hear it in his voice; he was enjoying the heartbreak because his heart wasn’t breaking. It was the voice of a man who’d been through all that, and who was hoping this time it would be different—it would be different this time around, baby, wouldn’t it?—and the Joyces and the Monicas and the Louises would clearly be touched by his vulnerability and playfulness, and touch his forehead with their fingers, or even kiss him and say, There there, there there, it’ll be different this time, sugar, I promise.
I admit I liked it either way. Uncle Louie’s female problems were my own. Like Uncle Louie, who pined for his lost Helen while simultaneously pining for whatever woman had left most recently, I was in love with two women at the same time. One was nineteen, the other nine. The nine-year-old was Marie Hemmelberger. The older woman was the already mentioned Duckwa daughter. Home from college that summer, the Duckwa daughter spent every day sunbathing in her parents’ backyard. She had a proud, haughty, sullen face and hair so brightly blond—like incandescent lemons—that it had to have come from a bottle. She set up shop on a lawn chair, dozing or flipping through pages of her magazines, which she kept stacked on a white rattan ottoman next to her. She wore bikinis—sometimes green, sometimes yellow polka-dotted. She wasn’t even all that pretty, really, just sexy because she was so casual about baring so much flesh. Vast amounts of oiled, limber, toned, tanned, silky, exquisite flesh. She was oblivious to us, too, unfastening her bra strap when she was on her stomach, and she wasn’t too particular about fastening it again when she turned over, flipping herself like an omelet, her hand holding the bra cups in place. She didn’t seem to care who saw her. Maybe she was taunting us, pleased to be giving all the little boys a show, giving us tiny little erections like the first shoots off a sapling, erections we didn’t even know what to do with. She was an icon, as remote from us as if she were on display in a museum, an invisible velvet rope separating her from us peons. The mere possibility that I might see something I wasn’t supposed to kept me at the edge of the Duckwa driveway. When she was on her stomach dozing, her back to me, the soles of her feet filled my soul with their delicateness. She knew, I think, that I was there, my eyes the size of dinner plates, my heart folding in on itself inside my chest. For the longest time I had no name for her. She was the Duckwa Daughter, as mysterious to me as the Man in the Iron Mask was to all of France.
