The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  “Dorie—”

  “Have you ever heard of Emil Zatopek?” I knew she hadn’t. Nobody had.

  “Should I have?” I wanted to think she was doing a pretty good job of talking to a kid with a torn-up face without showing the slightest distaste or squeamishness, but really she was just doing a fantastic job of sounding bored beyond belief.

  “Emil Zatopek,” I said through swollen lips, “was a Czech runner who won four gold medals, three of them, an unprecedented triple”—I was quoting my father here—“in the 1952 Olympics.” That was pretty much exactly what my father had told me when I said that kids at school were teasing me about my name. I wasn’t named for Emil Zatopek, and really, nobody cared about a Czech running to glory in his underwear. Still, it was the sort of thing that made possessing such a name easier to bear, and when anybody asked, this was what I told them.

  “I know an Emil,” said Dorie Braun, who was cute in a tough way and was already wiping away my memory of and pangs for the worldly and forlorn Patty Duckwa. “Emil Brauneiger. But Emil—that’s an old name. Like Oscar. Or Irene. Or Matilda.”

  “Don’t go there, Dorie Braun. Or I might tell somebody what your real name is, too.”

  “What is it?” I asked the ceiling, thickly. My mother had me leaning my head against the seat back, which was covered with an old army blanket. My blood was seeping into that.

  “Dorothy,” Dorie answered before her grandmother could say it. “Like in The Wizard of Oz. As in ‘I’ll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too.’ ”

  She did a pretty good job imitating the Wicked Witch of the West’s speaking voice. Her regular voice had a roughness to it as well, which I liked.

  Her grandmother observed, “Nobody’s naming their daughters Dorothy anymore, either.”

  “My dad says that’s because I broke the mold.”

  “Given a chance, you’d break anything.”

  The conversation changed then when Matty Keillor asked our mother what it was our father did. The cautious exploration of each other’s family history and background was something that connected the two women, and left Dorie and me out of their conversation. All this talk had distracted me from the fact that my face was broken, but now as we neared the hospital I realized how I hurt all over. They got me inside, stitched me up while I writhed and screamed, told my mother I’d need to see a dentist about yanking that shattered front tooth, filled me full of painkillers, and sent us on our way.

  Our mother was downright fluttery by the time Matty Keillor pulled into our drive and let us out. She thought she’d made her first real friend. Granted, she had met a number of other women from church, but at least so far they were taking a wait-and-see approach to friendship. It was as though friendship with these women was a kind of exclusive club, with a limit on the number of members, and though they were cordial to our mother, they had all the friends they currently needed, thank you, but do keep in touch, and should one of our members move away (unlikely) or die (only slightly more likely), we’ll certainly keep you in mind.

  It didn’t help that the women gathered in groups—the Women’s Guild, the Craft Union, the Women’s Auxiliary of this or that—in which our mother didn’t feel comfortable. She preferred intimate gatherings—another housewife over for coffee, a shared trip to the fabric store. The one informal place for meeting women was the mothers’ room at church, but being bonded by the fact that you had a crying infant or unruly toddler and therefore had been relegated to the back of the church in a separate room with a sliding glass window that was usually closed was not conducive to real friendship. A few pained looks, shared exasperations, yes, but friendship?

  Not even Matty, who was friendly and open and the most accepting of the women our mother met, could offer her that, though our mother entertained hopes. Matty had seven kids, too, and a husband (and a daughter) who drank too much, but Matty was also a decade older, had been a grandma for a decade. That may have been why our mother liked her so much. She’d already been where our mother was heading. But Matty had her hands full, and being some unhappy city woman’s mentor was not her idea of an occupation. She felt sorry for our mother, that her husband had dumped her in the middle of a cornfield, but it wasn’t her fault things had shaken out as they had, and it wasn’t her job to make everything all better, either.

  Our mother knew this, but she couldn’t help getting attached to the woman. Despite what she’d said the night Ernie Ott plowed into our field, our mother wanted to believe she’d found a friend. She found all sorts of reasons to go up the hill to visit. There were eggs and milk to get, and next year’s garden to plan, and what fared well in sandy soil—she wanted to tell Wally—and would Matty like to come over for tea, or would it be okay if our mother just sat for a spell, she got winded easily, this was such a pleasant kitchen to sit in, not like her own at all. The Hovelings had put in their own kitchen, and like most things the Hovelings had done, it was a botched job. A peninsula with cabinets over it cut the kitchen in half, the drawers didn’t fit, the doors didn’t match, the counters were small, you were always turning around for things that should be handier but weren’t, and when Wally-Bear got a nice commission they were going to put in a new kitchen—this was our mother’s fervent, constant hope—and frankly if I were Matty Keillor and this woman was talking my ear off, I’d keep her at some distance myself even if I did like her.

  Like our father, our mother was a person of enthusiasms. Unlike our father’s, hers tended to leave her feeling scalded rather than renewed. When an idea or enthusiasm fizzled for our father, he just embraced a new one. Our mother was enveloped by the ashes of her defeat.

  So it was with that fall’s Halloween party. Held just a few weeks after the bonfire of the rats, it was meant to wipe away the bizarreness of last year’s Halloween party and to introduce our parents to everyone who hadn’t gotten around to introducing themselves. And our mother was hoping to make new friends, maybe find people who wanted to make trips down to Chicago.

  “Hon, are you sure a Halloween party is the way to go for this sort of thing?”

  “Of course,” said our mother. “Everyone will be in costume—what better way to meet people? We’ll talk, discover common interests. And I’m sure there won’t be any excesses.”

  And there weren’t. Excesses or interests. As we found out in later years, it wasn’t because these people didn’t know how to have fun. They just didn’t feel like having it with people they didn’t know well, people recently moved up from Chicago who could decamp just as quickly as they’d arrived. Although our mother’s invitations said “Costumes optional, but encouraged,” few people felt encouraged. Tony Dederoff and his wife, Marcie, had come as hayseed farmers off for their first trip to “the big city,” and Matty Keillor came as a scarecrow, but her husband, Ben, had come as himself, as had most everyone else. Our mother, dressed as a flapper even though her breasts were too big for the sleeveless sequined shift she wore, and our father, a gangster, complete with pin-striped suit, fedora, red carnation, black shirt, and violin case, were adrift in a sea of street clothes: plaid sport shirts and ironed jeans or slacks for the men, flowered dresses for the women. Our mother, with her feather boa, white feather headdress, and kohl-heavy eyes, looked like some exotic dancer from New York or L.A. delivering a candy-gram in the middle of Wisconsin. Not the right thing for what the neighbors thought of as a courtesy call, a perfunctory Saturday night neighborly get-together. The men talked about the weather, the Kafka Feed and Seed, and stock prices (pigs, heifers, steers, and Holsteins, not stocks, bonds, and Wall Street); the women talked about kids and child-rearing, knitting and gardening. Chicago did not come up except as a punch line in jokes. People came, were quiet and polite—our parents were given a wide berth—and excused themselves early. Our mother sat in the ruins of her get-together. It was not yet nine-thirty; there were cases of beer and soft drinks still in the hall, waiting to be squeezed into the refrigerator, and Jell-O salads and little sausages
on toothpicks and cheese cubes and rafters of hard liquor opened and unpoured, and cracked ice melting back into solid blocks in buckets, and unused noisemakers, and all the detritus of a party that never once, not even for a moment, got off the ground. She had thrown everything she had into this party, and it had lasted all of an hour and twenty minutes.

  She started cleaning up, then froze. “Kids,” she called down the stairs, “there’s plenty here to eat. Why don’t you come finish this off?” Then she went into her room and locked the door. She did not unlock it when our father knocked and said in a low voice, “Susan? Susan Marie, honey? Come on and open the door.” You could hear something stifled happening in there, maybe whimpering into pillows, but that was all. Our father turned around to face us.

  We were lined up in the hall, arranged from biggest to smallest like an exercise in perspective. The crescent rolls and frankfurters we’d been eating were dry in our mouths. Solemn. That was how we felt. Like we were witnesses to something, some small but critical failure on the part of our parents. We didn’t even know what kind of failure, or what it meant, or why it mattered. We only knew we had witnessed something, and forever after our parents were going to be slightly diminished in our eyes. We knew that, and our father knew it. He took us in, a slow, sad sweep of his head, full of the grandeur of disappointment. Said our father, “You try being married sometime. I’d like to see you try,” and then he was outside and driving.

  Her aspirations having collapsed like a cardboard box left out in the rain, our mother considered the alternatives, one of which was paralysis. I say this as though it were a conscious choice, but it wasn’t. Our mother had always been sickly as a child—rheumatic fever, double pneumonia—and having seven kids in a little over a decade had certainly debilitated her. Still, her health was reasonably good until our move to Wisconsin. Her body rebelled against this move even though she, consciously, did not. She got sick, developed allergies to dust, fur, pollen, mold, and grass. She discovered she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs would seize up on her, she’d try to take a full breath, and all she’d get was a closed-off uuuuhhHHHhhh that peaked in the middle before she realized she was making it worse by sucking in so hard.

  Ironic that we moved to Wisconsin so the kids could breathe country air and it turned out our mother couldn’t. She developed asthma, hay fever, bronchitis, lung infections. Seeing her as an early candidate for emphysema, her physician that winter put her on huge doses of prednisone, among other things, which he neglected to tell her would suck all the calcium out of her bones and make her blow up like a puffer fish. Suddenly she didn’t even look like our mother.

  The house went to pieces. She had never really unpacked the master bedroom. Our father, gone all the time, had left that chore to her, and the prospect of actually taking everything out of the boxes and truly starting a new life here proved too much for her. The bed and the dresser came away from the wall so we could paint behind them, but they never went back against the wall. The sheets we used as drop cloths stayed where they were, dangling half on, half off the furniture. And the Mayflower boxes stayed where they were, only they were unstacked so our mother could get at their contents. Nothing was put away. Washed and folded clothes were precariously stacked and balanced on the corners of the boxes, and whatever fell in fell in. Not that it mattered, since our mother, dazed on her medication, frequently forgot what box something was stacked on, or came to believe it was still in a box (entirely likely), though she couldn’t remember which one, and her mornings were spent rummaging and pillaging boxes, then leaving the mess as it was when she couldn’t breathe anymore.

  It was the same thing with paper. Our mother couldn’t throw anything out. Neither could our father. The result was that our house was soon inundated by years’ and years’ worth of paper. Paper piled in uneven, tottering stacks, which fell and slid together, forming larger, more uneven stacks, which grew and formed the base, the genesis, for even more stacks, the paper breeding underneath the piles, paper increasing incrementally and exponentially until the paper itself linked staples and paper clips and self-sealing return envelopes and became one single, hulking, impenetrable mound, a mountain range of paper cascading from living room to dining room to kitchen to hallway to bedroom to office and back again. There was no beginning and no end to it; it was a Möbius strip of clutter and waste, and any attempt to meet the enemy, to attack it, to put a dent in the mounds, was greeted by either our mother or our father with a crescendoing denial that it needed to be dealt with by anyone but themselves.

  No doubt there was something comforting in all that detritus. When the world is a shaky place, feathering—papering—your nest must seem like a comfort. No doubt that urge explains why I am spending more and more hours now at the bookstores. They’re havens from the sadness occurring at my home. Though there’s sadness there, too. And frustration. If Dorie and I split up, I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen to them—it was, after all, Dorie’s money that made them possible. Even if we stay together it’s possible that one, two, or maybe all three of these stores aren’t long for this world. And she might make that call for me, as she so graciously informed me this evening. Could I buy her out? Only if I leveraged myself to the hilt. And even if it doesn’t come to that, the stores might not make it. In a down economy, books, for a lot of people, are a frill they can live without. Independent bookstores are right up there with restaurants in rates of failure. So I shuttle from one store to the next, my heart filled to bursting with the fragility of what I’ve accomplished.

  It doesn’t help that when I get there I’m confronted by a customer who says she was told by a staff member that her choice of a book—the latest legal thriller—was poor and she should read instead this “serious” story collection by a promising but unknown writer. “Who told you that?” I ask, and it is, of course, my best employee in terms of energy and exuberance, Jillian Kowalska, on whom, I am sure, I am developing a crush. After I deal with the customer—no, no, we really want her to have the thriller—I speak with Jillian. “It was my Pick of the Month,” Jillian defends herself. “It’s right there.” She points to the wall of “Our Staff Recommends” books. “I tell them what to buy, and they always ignore me.” “Well, that’s their prerogative.” “Yes, but their prerogatives are stupid,” Jillian says, leaving me to wonder how I’m going to keep this afloat when my employees are haranguing the customers. I briefly wonder, too, under what circumstances a harmless crush might turn into something else, but I abandon the thought on account of its general stupidity and impossibility. What I really would like right now is simply to build a wall of books around me and not have to deal with another living soul for a very long time.

  Still, what was at our parents’ house was junk. And there was no end to it, no matter how much we tried to help get rid of it. We’d fill a few shopping bags, maybe a Hefty garbage bag or two, stack newspapers and tie them with twine, and then the litany of protest would begin. “Not that. I was just looking at that. Let me handle that.”

  We felt ashamed, living with all that junk. It was a failure of character. And of course we blamed our mother. She seemed to be competing with our father for “most debilitated while serving a parental role,” but we granted our father indulgences we never granted our mother. Our father was the mystery in the center of our lives. The absent center, but still the center. And our mother? Our mother was . . . ordinary. Commonplace. How dare she collapse like this! How dare she not be able to breathe! She would pick at the papers for a little while and then give up, the dust was affecting her, the mold spores, everything. I don’t think we ever quite forgave her for falling apart on us like that.

  It would be safe to say that our mother gave up, except that she didn’t. She was rebelling.

  We did not know this at the time, but like any crafty, small, benighted country threatened by powerful neighbors—and our father, a larger-than-life blustery and blustering man, tormented by his own smallness, was in his infrequ
ent visits to the kingdom of his family more like an invading neighbor than a principal ruler—our mother was resisting through surrender.

  She never breathed a word of protest, at least not in front of us, except sometimes to say, “Your father seems to think money grows on trees” or “Your father sometimes gets possessed by strange and costly ideas.” She might cry, she might weep for her lost and always-promised-but-still-far-off kitchen (the once and future kitchen, we liked to say), she might rail at him in private, and we might overhear the heat and passion of her anger, but in front of us she kept up a brave front. When he realized, from time to time, just what a shit he was, he’d say to us, “You know, your mother is a trouper,” and then he’d feel better, having sainted her. He would not change his own behavior, of course. Saints, after all, have fewer material needs than sinners.

  Was it any wonder our mother collapsed, took to her bed, came down with a thousand and one ailments? She was being buried alive, she was drowning in a sea of paper, and after a while her resistance was to give up breathing itself. Asthma, bronchitis, bronchial asthma, pneumonia—if TB were still possible to catch, she’d have come down with that.

  That Christmas we all piled into the company car, our bloated mother up front looking froglike, the rest of us stacked in the familiar feet-to-hips arrangement. The seats were down. It was a Friday night, and we were going to spend Christmas visiting the relatives in Beverly, and bouncing from one household to another. During the long drive to Chicago I pretended, for the sake of the little kids, that the red lights on the high-tension electrical wire towers were the winking lights of Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer. Our mother usually took on this role, and we were simply required to play along, but on this drive she was strangely silent. Cinderella was moody, too, and Robert Aaron had gotten a smart mouth and for now couldn’t be trusted with the family myths. So it was up to me to explain to the littler kids how if they saw lots of lights in procession—a field of high-wattage lines—then what we were looking at was the whole crew: Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Blitzen, et cetera. They had received the red noses as badges of their courage. For it took a lot of courage to navigate these night skies with all those planes about. “What else could it be?” I asked Wally Jr. and Ernie and Peg Leg Meg.