by C J Hribal
“Sons of bitches,” said Patty Duckwa. She patted his head, hugged him some more, got him to his feet. Again I thought maybe Patty Duckwa would walk with me back to our house. Given her newfound sentiment for Ike, I wouldn’t begrudge him his place. He could walk on one side of her, I the other. Holding hands, we’d form a human chain on the sidewalk and sweep away any who dared give us—give Patty—grief.
Again, it wasn’t like that. Patty held Ike’s hand all right, but she hogged the sidewalk. I couldn’t walk beside her without making it obvious I was trying to do just that. I fell in behind instead and consoled myself with the vision of her behind swaying inside her harem pants. Cinderella and Robert Aaron had already put their speed-walking into overdrive and were heading for home. They couldn’t wait to tell Mom what had happened.
I didn’t care anymore. I was the third wheel, the jilted brave, his squaw claimed by a neighboring tribe. But then my luck turned again. Ike asked if he could run after them, and Patty Duckwa said if he promised not to get lost again, sure. He tore off as fast as his fez and his flowing robe would let him.
“So,” said Patty Duckwa, crossing her arms over her chest again. I could imagine her saying “So” in just that tone of voice to somebody her own age immediately before kissing him.
“So?” I didn’t think I had a role here except as parrot or monkey.
“So we’re right back where we started,” she said. “I’m pissed and you’re in trouble.” She was walking briskly. I had to trot to keep up. “Not that you’re the only one in trouble.” I couldn’t figure out how she could walk so fast with her arms crossed over her chest. But she was right. We were all going to get it. Probably Ike was the only one who’d emerge from this unscathed, and he’d spent the last hour curled beneath some shrubbery balling his eyes out.
Right then another car went by and the driver—a cowboy with a ten-gallon hat—and a guy in the backseat dressed like a doctor both hung their heads out the window and yelled, “Hey, Jeannie! Three wishes! Guess what the first two are!”
“Sons of bitches,” said Patty Duckwa under her breath.
But they weren’t done. The car pulled a U-ie and came up alongside us. Now it was a pencil and a can of Budweiser. “Come on, sugar,” said the pencil. “Give me something to write home about.” The can of Budweiser said, “Sit on my face. I’ll guess your weight.” Then they peeled off, all exhaust and laughter and chants of “Piece, piece, give me a piece!” in their wake.
“Bastards!” Patty screamed after them. “Fucking sons of bitches!”
Patty had stopped walking. I had never heard her—or anyone—use that kind of language. I knew those guys were saying mean and dirty things, but it was all code to me, and what wasn’t code was Greek. But shocked as I was, I didn’t blame her. I blamed myself. If I were a bigger, more imposing brave, they wouldn’t have been so mean. The car drove down Madison and turned right. I watched to see if they’d come back. They didn’t. If they had, I’d have suggested we go down a side street. It would have been easy to cut across backyards and lose them.
When I turned back to Patty, her head was down and her shoulders were shaking. I recognized those heaving shoulders—my mother owned them. Why was Patty Duckwa crying? She could have taken any of those guys in a fair fight. “Are you okay?” I asked. This was the stupidest question on earth right at that moment. But it was what I asked my mom whenever she was crying, and you should lead with your strong suit, even if it’s dumb.
“N-n-n-o-o-o-o,” Patty quaked. She was hiding her eyes behind one hand. Her forearm was crossed over her belly. I grasped that hand and squeezed it. She took a few great gulps of air, settling herself. Her voice was still shaky, though, when she said, “It’s not enough they’ve gotta dump you. They’ve gotta knock you up first. Christ, oh, sweet Christ,” and with a groan she was back to holding her stomach and weeping. She bent way over, nearly doubled, like she was folding in on herself. She was clutching her stomach, and her ponytail hung down one side of her face like a rope. I didn’t know what to say, or do. I had no idea what she was talking about. I put my hand on her back, trying to comfort her, and she put out her hand like she was trying to push me away. But she wasn’t. She was trying to steady herself. Suddenly she sat down on the sidewalk, pulling me with her. She was clutching me like a favorite teddy bear. Her head was resting on my head. My one arm was around her back, my other was around her tummy, and she was clutching my shoulders. I was suddenly in the position Ike had been. Her breasts were nestling my cheek—or was it vice versa?—and I could hear her sighs, hear the clanking of her heart. Her bra was scratching my ear, making me all tingly inside. I liked it, but I felt extremely uncomfortable, too. I was there under false pretenses. She was clutching me because I was handy. It could have been anything—her jacket with the embroidered peace signs, for example—if I hadn’t been there. We rocked like that for a while, she sniffling, muttering “son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” over and over, sometimes punctuating it with “bastard, that bastard,” and I paralyzed in her arms. Finally she wiped her cheeks, and getting up, she said, “Well, come on,” as though we’d sat there because I needed to and she was tired of waiting for me.
We were only a few blocks from our house now, and she was wiping the sidewalk grit and bits of grass off her bottom and running her index fingers under her eyes. “Do I look okay?” she asked. Like my opinion mattered. What could I say? She looked beautiful. She’d used eyeliner past the corners of her eyes to give her face that curvy, almond-eyed Cleopatra-I-Dream-of-Jeannie look. Now it was a blur down her cheeks. But what did that matter? My heart rose and lodged in my throat. “Great,” I managed to croak out. “You look great.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “My mascara is running, isn’t it?”
“You look like you’ve been crying,” I admitted.
“Shit,” she said again, elegantly. “Shit, shit, shit.” She shriveled her arm up her jean jacket and wiped at her cheeks with her cuff. It just smeared more. I offered her my sister’s blouse, which I was wearing. She thanked me and managed, with spit and the sleeve of my sister’s shirt and some crumpled tissues in her pocket, to wipe up most of the damage.
“How do I look now?” she asked. “Better,” I said, and she managed a little smile. Then she took my hand and we headed off into the night.
The party was in full swing when we got home, and it was readily apparent why our mom had hired Patty Duckwa when normally she’d have thrown us upstairs under the semiwatchful eye of Cinderella. In order to get everyone in the neighborhood to come, our mother had promised free babysitting. Our mother hadn’t told us, hadn’t even told Cinderella, whom she also hired on the spot, because she knew we’d be bouncing off the walls all day if we knew fifteen or twenty kids were going to spend the evening at our house. Patty and Cinderella were now in charge. Cinderella took a bunch of kids downstairs; Patty had the upstairs contingent.
Our mom didn’t notice that we were an hour or more late, that Patty had been crying; she didn’t notice anything. She was flushed, her party was a success, she felt pretty, everything was turning out okay. She didn’t even say anything about my running away from Ike. Robert Aaron came up to me just before he disappeared upstairs. “You’re lucky, numbnuts. We got home and Mom was in such a hurry to get us out of the way she didn’t ask a single question.” Our mother’s instructions to both Patty and Cinderella were “Unless there is death or an awful lot of blood, I don’t want to know about it. Settle it among yourselves. I’m granting you full authority to spank, smack, or ground people as you see fit.” The conferral of authority was just for effect. Nobody took it seriously except Cinderella, and we were too much for her. Patty had her own concerns.
That the party was in “full swing” is a bit of an understatement. The house was booming. Windows were shaking. Patty and I could tell that from outside. Inside, pandemonium reigned on three floors. Kids were running around downstairs unsupervised, playing hide-and-seek, hiding beneath the pile
of dirty clothes under the laundry chute as though it were a pile of leaves. Kids were also climbing into the barrels storing our out-of-season clothes, which were now scattered in great heaps on the floor, mingled with the dirties. Our father had moved his model-building stuff out of harm’s way, but his train tracks were getting a real workout. The model railroad looked like a miniature tornado had touched down on it.
All the real action, though, was on the main floor. The doings of adults in general were strange and mysterious, and this was doubly true on social occasions, perhaps triply so for a Halloween costume party. Our mother, certainly, was not acting like our mother, and I wanted to see if the other adults would take similar leaves of their senses.
So many people came! It was hard to believe our house could hold so many. It was such a swirl of sound and color and music that I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly want to spend time downstairs covering themselves with our dirty clothes when they could be up here, on the stairs, watching this marvelous scene unfold. For one thing, there was this meeting of our parents’ various worlds that heretofore I had assumed were separate and autonomous. Now everything was a mishmash. The Kluzarskis were talking with Aunt Gwen and Uncle Bruno, Uncle Alvin was laughing with Charlie Podgazem, Agnes Guranski and her husband were dancing with Mr. and Mrs. Hemmelberger, Marie’s parents. Some of the costumes were so elaborate we didn’t even recognize our friends’ parents. Other people you could tell from a mile away just by the shapes of their bodies. Mr. Izzo, for example, with his stubby barrel of a body, was recognizable as a fire hydrant even with his black crew cut and his glasses painted red. His wife came as a springer spaniel. She kept nosing him, circling him, like she was looking for a place to pee.
Our house was filled with human dogs and cats and sea captains and Errol Flynn look-alikes (if you excused the belling of flesh at the waistband and the florid cheeks), mobsters in pin-striped suits, southern belles, a life-size G.I. Joe, a Ken and Barbie. Batman was there, Robin (Mr. and Mrs. De Bochart; Mrs. De Bochart was a very sexy Robin), Superman (Mr. Plewa), a twenties flapper, a king, a queen (“Catherine the Great!” shouted Charlie Podgazem. “Where, pray tell, is your horse?”). Zorro made his appearance, as did a gorilla, an organ grinder and monkey, a doctor (Uncle Bruno drinking vodka and lemonade; he claimed to be a urologist), a nurse, a two-part horse, witches, goblins, ghouls, and all the rest. Our parents had coordinated their costumes with the Duckwas, of all people. They came as the Honeymooners. Dad, as Ralph Kramden/Jackie Gleason, in a bus driver’s uniform. Mr. Duckwa—“call me Ted”—as Norton. Mom and Mrs. Duckwa—“call me Lorna”—were Alice and Trixie, though they wore the same kind of dress with the same checkerboard apron. They had their hair done up like they wore in the fifties, and Mom had exaggerated her eyebrows extensively.
The Audrey Meadows–like eyebrows came in handy when I finally recognized Uncle Louie’s date, the woman welded to Uncle Louie during all the slow dance numbers. It was Shirley, the woman who had written her name in unguent on the back of my father’s neck at the Office! I couldn’t contain myself. I leapt off the stairs, shouting, “Dad! It’s Shirley! Shirley came!” I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe she was Uncle Louie’s date—his latest “find.”
Evidently our mother couldn’t believe it either. She came over, the Audrey Meadows eyebrows going, her lips pursed. “How does he know who Shirley is?”
“At the Office, Dad, remember? I saw her at the Office!”
“She introduced herself,” our father said. “I thought Louie might like to meet her.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“She wrote on your neck, Dad. With her finger, remember?” I was too excited to know what I was saying. Loose lips sink ships.
“So that was Shirley,” said our mother.
“Best thing your father ever did for me,” said Uncle Louie. He and Shirley had heard their names and come over. Uncle Louie was a Confederate general. Shirley was wearing a belly dancer’s outfit. I knew because I had seen an album in the hi-fi’s album well: How to Belly Dance for Your Husband. The lady on the album had nothing on Patty Duckwa as Jeannie, but she was pretty enough. Shirley, though, was pushing it. She had a lot of veils on, and those poofy pants, like Yul Brynner in The King and I. She also had a lot of belly showing, and given that she was a bit hefty, this appeared as a white snowdrift of flesh, soft and voluminous. Like Patty, she was wearing just a bra on top, only this was crocheted, so it looked like her breasts were being held in place by a couple of pot holders. The effect was startling, even for a boy like me. Figuring it was Mom’s record, though, and that therefore she knew all about belly dancers, I was surprised when she asked Shirley, “What are you dressed as?”
“A harlot,” said Shirley, who had lipstick on her teeth. This was greeted with stunned silence and the arching of the Audrey Meadows eyebrows. “No, actually,” said Shirley, arranging her veils, “I’m the queen of Sheba.”
“You were right the first time,” said my mother.
“Best thing your father ever did for me,” repeated Uncle Louie. “I couldn’t have found Shirley without his help.” He gave her a squeeze. Shirley squealed. “Ooo, Louie.” Her breasts rose some out of their halter.
“I think you’d best be getting upstairs, little man,” said our father.
“Yes,” echoed our mother. “I think our little man should be getting upstairs.”
“Little man, little man,” sang Shirley, “oh where, oh where, should my little man go?” I had a feeling this was a rhetorical question on Shirley’s part, not directed specifically at me.
“Wait,” said Uncle Louie. “Since he was present when his dad first met Shirley, he should be present for our announcement.”
“Announcement?”
Uncle Louie curled his thumb and his middle finger into his mouth and issued an ear-piercing blast. “Hey, everybody!” For a moment, everything came to a standstill. Uncle Louie gestured for people to get into a circle, and he waited until there was some semblance of one. Somebody lifted the tone arm on the hi-fi, and the music stopped momentarily. Then Uncle Louie grabbed Shirley’s hand and clasped it to his chest. “I want you to know! This fine lady here and I are getting married!”
A cheer erupted, which I thought was very nice seeing as how two-thirds of the people there had no idea who Uncle Louie or his fine lady were. I found myself buried in a crush of big people and standing next to Bruno Gulch, who had a highball resting on his stomach. His lower lip was stuck out. “When’s it due?” he asked, taking a sip from his glass, but the music had already started up again, and nobody heard him.
“Champagne! Champagne!” Uncle Louie cried. “I’ve got some in the car, Wally. Help me bring it in.”
Our mother caught me standing there taking all this in. Since she couldn’t officially be mad at Shirley anymore (“The nerve of that woman, really,” she said to our father late the next morning, when they both appeared in the living room. “And what possessed her to wear that outfit?”), she had to find another target. “To bed,” she told me curtly. “And I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.” Our mother was pointedly ignoring the assorted screeches and bump-thumpings emanating from the basement, but that was okay. She didn’t really care right then if I was in bed or not. She just wanted me upstairs. That I could understand.
“C’mon, I’ll take you,” said Patty Duckwa. She had been hanging out downstairs, too, but now she was tired of that. There was no mistaking the looks she was getting from some of the men. When we’d first arrived, Patty had excused herself “to go fix her face.” “It doesn’t look broken to me,” said Batman. And timid Mr. Boxtein kept trying to see down her bra. It must have been like being outside again, only the comments weren’t so crude. But the message was the same. I don’t think she wanted to hear that message anymore.
The message, though, was pretty clear. In keeping with the Honeymooner theme, Dad was playing on the hi-fi a steady stream of hits from the Jackie Gleason O
rchestra. Dad and Mr. Duckwa and the guys in the band would croon along to “I’m in the Mood for Love,” our father often sounding as good as whoever was singing on the record.
“You know, Wally, we coulda done better than that,” said Charlie Podgazem.
“We can do better than that,” said our father. He was busy pouring champagne for anybody who wanted any.
I was sitting at the top of the stairs now. It was weird, seeing the tops of all these heads milling about. The exodus from upstairs, which began as soon as kids realized there was stuff in the basement to mess around with and no one down there was going to supervise them, continued. They didn’t want to see their parents this way—ten, fifteen years into their marriages letting down their hair, pretending their kids didn’t exist. I wondered hard for the first time what it meant when the door to our parents’ bedroom closed. What happened downstairs when we went to bed, or when our parents got dressed up—infrequently, granted—and left us in Nomi’s care while they went to a party? Was it like this? You really didn’t want to think about it too much.
The number of kids upstairs had really dwindled. Pretty soon it was just me and Marie Hemmelberger and Tim Petraglia and Patty Duckwa. Marie and Tim were playing checkers—one of the few games that Robert Aaron and his minions hadn’t hauled off to the basement. Patty sat down next to me. Our thighs were touching. Here I was, so close to my belusted, but I now knew something I guess I’d always known but hadn’t wanted to believe—that boys like me really were insignificant chunks of matter floating in orbit about her. She had lots of boys like that in orbit. They—we—didn’t count. We couldn’t do her damage like the other ones. She seemed exhausted. We probably were too much for her, even though most of the banshees were in the basement. Also, she was probably still feeling terrible about being “knocked up.” She had said that earlier when she’d started crying. Crying, I knew, took a lot out of you. Our mother almost always looked the most done in after she’d been crying. “Knocked up”: I didn’t know what this meant, but I had the feeling I wasn’t supposed to ask. And if I did ask, the news that Patty Duckwa had been “knocked up” would be all over the neighborhood, and I had the feeling she wouldn’t want that, either. Some things you can just feel.
