by C J Hribal
“What about Mom? You think Mom cheats?” This was new territory. If we didn’t want to believe it about our father, how could we possibly entertain the idea about our mother? Still—
“Your mother,” our father said, swilling his drink again, “your mother wouldn’t cheat if somebody stuck a dick in her mouth.”
The sudden bitter, certain, and cold-blooded viciousness of our father’s denial made me wonder—if I wasn’t along, would he and Madeleine have shacked up? Would it have been one of those grief-and-guilt-stricken encounters, the imperative of need and ego overriding the imperative of fidelity? Or had he gotten over his scruples and squeamishness and for years had been hooking up with Margies and Jans and Elsies and Karens? We didn’t know. And the myth of the traveling salesman is such that I expected, frankly, at any time to meet a doppelgänger family, all the children of ages roughly corresponding to our own—the dropped offspring of our father as he traveled from town to town while our mother was huge with each of us and our father, ostensibly, was in what he liked to refer to as “dry dock.” Maybe Celia’s mother was right to suspect and fear us. Maybe she knew far better than I what men on the road were capable of. After all, I was supposed to be in “dry dock,” too, yet here I was, on the road all of two days and already imagining myself hooking up with Celia when I had a girlfriend already, a woman I would eventually marry. And hadn’t I nearly hooked up with Rita Sabo, too?
And while our father might have been right about our mother—we didn’t want to believe she was capable of cheating, either—we knew more about her, we thought, than he did. We had seen things he had not. A man deep in the throes of fucking up tends to be solipsistic. He has no idea what the consequences of his actions will be. They simply don’t enter his field of vision.
Often, when our father came home stewed—particularly if he was working close to home, and they’d made an agreement that he would come right home from his rounds and he hadn’t because he was busy buying rounds—our mother would ask one of us to drive her to a motel. “I am not spending another minute in this household!” she’d shriek, and although we knew this was directed at our always-absent father, we also knew it was at least partially directed at us. We were to blame—driving our mother away, driving our father to drink. Our mother would leave us, meet somebody, divorce our father, find happiness, and we would be orphaned or destitute. As she was putting on her gloves, waiting for Robert Aaron to finish heating his car, we would perform a ritual of hangdog glumness—lining up, touching our mother’s hands, the hem of her blouse, the younger children whining and crying—and beg her to stay. Our mother would stand on the landing with her bag packed, hefting it, deciding. Sometimes she’d stay: “I’m doing this for you, and for the sake of our household, not for your father,” she’d say. And sometimes she wouldn’t. Which made us wonder. Did she? When she got to the Holiday Inn, did she park herself in the bar, as our father would have done, and talk to the first man who sat down beside her? Was her fury such that a man at the bar could entice her into a moral holiday, something she could say she had apart from our father? It didn’t seem possible, but I realized then that everybody has secrets, and they stay secrets for a very good reason. And frankly, when our mother was this angry, when her eyes flashed green fire, she was capable of damn near anything.
Did they suspect of each other what we suspected of them? All that separation, all that time apart, all that grief and frustration and loneliness? Maybe they cut each other slack in this regard. Maybe they knew that about each other, or suspected it, but wouldn’t go there, wouldn’t ask or tell. Maybe they put the tab for that on each other’s bill.
Certainly over the years our parents’ marriage took a beating. When our father came home late or drunk, there was hell to pay the whole weekend, and our father couldn’t wait to get out on the road again come Sunday evening. But when he managed to get home sober and on time, our mother was sweetness and light. They went out for Friday fish fries and came home giggling and playing grab-ass with each other. And even if our father was late, if he was at least trying—no unsteadiness to his gait, no broken glass in his eyes, an apology for traffic or a late lunch with a customer—our mother smiled, took his round head between her hands, kissed his balding pate, and said, “It’s okay, Wally-Bear. We’ll put it on your bill.”
But as time went on, and our father seemed to be trying less, or trying more with poorer results, our mother said that less often. Hardly at all, really. And when our father tried to get back in her good graces, smiling his addled smile and saying, “We’ll put this on my bill, right?” our mother only scowled, folded her arms, shook her head.
She refused to believe, though, at least in front of us, that anything extracurricular could be going on with our father.
“Your father is a good man,” said our mother. “He would never be unfaithful, and Lord knows, he’s had plenty of opportunity.” And then she would tell us a story of when she was showing “out to there,” and there was this other woman at the company Christmas party practically throwing herself at our father. “And your father didn’t give that woman the time of day. He didn’t even look at her.” Yes, we wanted to say, but he was working for Dinkwater-Adams then, and was home every night. That was a long time ago. And did our mother know about Shirley writing her name with her fingernail in the unguent on our father’s blistered neck? Of course she did. No matter. The company line was absolute, unbroken, unbreached and unbreachable fidelity. Which made us wonder—did they conspire between the two of them to keep their dark secrets to themselves, and away from us? Or was the secret that there were no secrets, at least not the kind that could destroy a marriage once they were revealed?
Another mystery—and they were many and various—of our parents’ marriage.
Something else we knew about our mother that our father didn’t: Our mother’s closest friends were lesbians. Linnie and Winnie. They’d bought the Bunkas place next door after Alfred Bunkas died, his mother placed in a home. Linnie and Winnie passed themselves off as sisters—Linda and Winifred Jones—who wanted to get away from Minneapolis on account of it being too hectic there. That was the story our father heard, anyway. But they came over often when our father was away, and over coffee with our mother they explained they were actually partners, married in a pledging ceremony, and Winnie had left her husband in Milwaukee, and she didn’t want him to find her or their three kids. Our mother surprised us. “I know just how you feel,” she said, and we were left to ponder which of Winnie’s feelings our mother sympathized with in particular.
In fact, the only time our mother seemed anymore to be able to muster up any energy at all was when she wanted to see Winnie and Linnie. She would hobble across the field to see them and hobble home in the evenings before dinner or, if our father was gone, as he usually was, in time to see us to bed. What was she doing, spending all that time over there? We had no idea. Pouring her heart out, bonding, getting silly-ass drunk on port wine cheese and Beaujolais?
“Some things are best left private,” said our mother, echoing Nomi, and that was as much of an explanation as we were going to get. It was, no doubt, as much as we deserved. Once, however, when I was on the roof mulling things over by myself and our mother was putting dinner together—I could hear her sing-humming off-key below me—distinct cries of “More! More!” wafted toward me from Winnie and Linnie’s house. It was a midsummer day, and their windows were open. Huh, I thought. I wonder where they learned that?
“Penny for your thoughts,” said our father, holding up his glass as though there were something written inside the bubbles, some pattern or message he was meant to see. Neither one of us had said anything since his crack about our mother, and the silence had gotten uncomfortable. I wasn’t about to tell him what I’d actually been thinking—who does that, ever?—but I did have a question from earlier, before Madeleine started making eyes at our father.
“Why aren’t you selling for Nabisco, Dad?” I asked, and he took a minut
e in answering. You could tell he was mulling over whether to tell me the truth or not. We had pauses like this before we were informed about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the fact that Molly was the main ingredient in our hamburgers.
Our father made Dizzy Gillespie cheeks and blew out all the air. He sighed, finished his drink. “They wouldn’t have me,” he said and shook his glass.
“Last one and then I’m shutting you off,” said Madeleine. It wasn’t seven o’clock yet. The place was filling up. She didn’t want a drunk at the bar during the height of the rush.
“Nobody shuts me off,” said our father. “I shut myself off.”
Madeleine crossed her arms under her bosom. “Look, I don’t want a scene. Somebody already whaled on you pretty good. My advice is leave now, then later we can treat each other with some tenderness. What do you say?”
“I say I’ll leave when I’m goddamn ready.”
The second bartender, a behemoth in a green T-shirt who’d just come on, walked over. “Problems, Maddy?”
“Naw, this sweet guy was just leaving.”
“You got problems, holler.”
“No problems, Kenny. Nada. Nothing at all.” Madeleine smiled, and I wondered what it was about my father that caused certain kinds of women to believe they could take care of him. Was it that he resembled a fat puppy, the klutz of the litter? Madeleine whispered, “Get some sleep. Come back later. Leave sonny boy back at the motel.”
“He’s my son.”
She straightened up. “Yeah, I know. I get off at eleven.” She went back down the bar to take care of another customer.
“I have never cheated on your mother,” our father repeated.
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“I’m a peddler, Emcee. A drummer. A detail man. A company crier. You can pretty it up and call me a commercial traveler, or a field representative or a field engineer, but what I do is sales. I’m a salesman. Now look at me. I take orders. I fill shelf space. I’m a goddamn traveling stock boy.” He was close to crying. “Nobody knows what it’s like out here. They just don’t know.” Soon tears were streaming down his corpulent face. He wiped them with a bar napkin.
“Are you okay, Dad?” The sight of my father blubbering had a profound effect on me. I was repelled; I was filled with love. I wanted to forgive him nothing; I wanted to forgive him everything. I got him down off his stool and helped him out of the bar. We left plenty to cover the tab and then some. Madeleine, shaking her head, scooped up the bills as we were leaving.
Between the alcohol and the beating he had taken, he was moving pretty slowly. Like he was learning how to walk again after surgery, little mincing steps accompanied by sharp intakes of breath and general unsureness. He winced as I got him into the car.
I drove us back to the motel, the Timberline Inn on the north side of Spooner. He was sawing lumber inside of fifteen minutes. I considered leaving him there, zipping out in the company car, and hitting all the area bars looking for Celia, or at least a younger version of Maddy, someone who might take a shine to me and wasn’t fussy about my address in the morning. But I had the feeling that if I did, when I came back he’d either be gone or have company, and I was too small a person to risk finding out. So I stayed and watched Charlie’s Angels. It was, I knew, the best I was going to do that evening.
I looked over at our father, a whale beached on his mattress, his snores riveting the air. Strangely, I understood now Maddy’s interest in him. He gave off the aura of a good guy, affable and steady, just a little down on his luck, and with patience and nurturing, you knew he’d do right by you. This was somebody a woman down on her own luck, but still plugging away and hoping, could trust. Even if he sometimes did the wrong thing, even if he sometimes screwed up. You could still trust him. He was in this for the long haul. What woman, deep in her own heart, wouldn’t want that?
Dorie, evidently. I want to tell Dorie that we can stay together, we can make it just as our parents made it, on the force of inertia alone, and the thing that scares me is she might feel the same way. Good grief, is that what we’ve come to? Still, it’s something.
Had it always been like this and we just hadn’t been paying attention? I suddenly believed our father. He hadn’t cheated on our mother. And if he had, who could blame him? Who could blame our mother, either? We are weak everywhere. We make mistakes, and other people—our loved ones—make accommodations. We hope the other party is willing to forgive us. We hope he or she is willing to put it on our bill. It scared me—to realize that one of our father’s idiot clichés actually made sense.
The next day we had a lot of territory to cover. It was all red and white pine and blue spruce and green tamarack and blue sky and white birch and quaking aspen, their undersides silver and tremulous in the breeze. And the lakes and rivers glimpsed through the trees were like advertisements for God’s vacation land, the water riffling, shimmering—I expected the Hamm’s beer bear to come dancing out of the trees. On one stretch of highway the trees thinned and all of Lake Superior was open to us, with sailboats and clouds skimming the horizon, and it seemed as though the world was an open and new place. Not so for my father. We had lunch at the Dog ’N Suds in Minong, and I tried to entice him into riding the go-carts next door, but my father had on his thinking-drinking face—pensive, withdrawn, morose.
“C’mon, Dad, lighten up. It’ll be fun.”
Our father shook me off. I poked him in the belly, trying to get a rise out of him. “It’s good exercise,” I said. “Put the pedal to the metal.”
“You think this is just fun and games up here, don’t you?” our father said, suddenly angry. “You think it’s just about going inside these stores and seeing what’s on the shelf and ordering more of it, don’t you?” I wasn’t going to answer him, but yeah, that was pretty much the way I saw it. When I was working for Nabisco, there was the sweet-talking of the store managers to do, but cookies are not a product you need to hard-sell, especially in a resort area. They pretty much leap off the shelf. You’re always wangling for display space, but that you’re going to get some eventually is pretty much a given. You just want to tie it in to the big weekends—Memorial Day, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. But I wasn’t seeing it the way he was, as a Nabisco competitor. As somebody who had to cajole, wheedle, beg, and finesse owners and store managers who, when he introduced himself, would say, “Pee-what-akee? Never heard of ’em.” This was what our father was fighting against, and the ignominy of it infuriated him.
He was still going. “You think it’s about taking orders and getting yourself some poontang, don’t you? Like you’re on leave, and you can schmooze up some nice girl at a bar and she’s going to put out for you. Well, it doesn’t work like that. You’re dreaming if you think it is. It’s nothing like that. It’s—” Our father stopped. He was at a loss for what to say next. He wasn’t selling. He wasn’t doing anything he thought necessary to count himself part of the sacred, holy order of the peddler. He hadn’t tried to sell anything to a soul all morning.
He shook his head, looked away. “Lunch is over,” he said. “We’ve got more orders to take.” I had never heard his voice so settled, so resigned. It continued in the afternoon. Our father went into the grocery stores and didn’t seek out the managers or the owners. There was none of his usual patter, no exuberant greetings, no jokes. He didn’t breathe a word to the people behind the counter in the smaller places unless they asked him what he thought he was doing. He got in, wrote his order, got out. We finished that day’s route in record time.
That evening I managed to get him out fishing after supper, but he took no pleasure in it. He didn’t say a word all evening, just quietly drank himself silly. I can’t say I understood or empathized with him. I couldn’t, twenty-one years old and hopped up with possibility, imagine the world being that foreclosed a place.
The best indication of how young and naÏve I was is that I thought I was the wise one.
The next day we drove Highway 53, the car s
ilent except for the hum of the tires, the occasional bursts of chatter on the CB, bursts of chatter our father left alone. We worked our way down to Highway 29 for the long drive home. Twenty-nine is dotted with towns all built on one side of now largely defunct railroad tracks, each town a tattered carbon of its neighbor and former self. Each has its pitiful grocery and gas station—some still sporting the green Sinclair dinosaur rather than the clean and corporate red-white-and-blue ARCO signs—and each has its feed mill and boarded up hotel and three taverns, which looked like additions to people’s houses, as though drinking were a private pastime taken public, as though they were still in their living rooms, charging for beer and brandy shots. As we flew past we could see each bar had its two or three half-ton pickups parked out front. If I weren’t along, this would have been the start of our father’s long, slow pub-crawl home.
We were east of Chippewa Falls, and we’d not said three words since we’d started driving. We? Our father drove; he always drove. “It’s a company car, Emcee, I can’t have you driving it. The insurance risk is too great.” I chose not to point out that after he’d tied one on after his skull was broken open by Celia’s mother he was happy enough to have me drive, but maybe that was a stupor dispensation. The local road mix was red clay and granite, so the crumbling double-lane highway we were driv-ing looked like a bit of ossified Georgia. Pine trees and open fields, the raised railbed on our right. We were zipping past fluffy white clouds shredded like cotton wadding. It was a beautiful day. Why couldn’t we talk?
“You about ready for a potty stop?” asked my father, and I nearly burst out laughing. How is it that we never lose the language of childhood for certain fundamental pleasures and necessities? Potty stops and “you know.” But it was frustrating, too. I’d been with him all week, and except for his drunken tirade we’d yet to have a conversation. I had been playing the role of our mother—the silent copilot, watching the scenery roll away and disappear behind us while our father silently drove on and on, lost in his own thoughts. It was a private place he went to when he drove, his talk saved for the truckers who’d “keep the front door open” or “watch his back door.” Our father was selling to them, too, getting them to believe that in his company car he was one of them. I couldn’t stand it, the ease of his camaraderie with them. The brotherhood of the road. At one point my father got all the guys on that stretch of highway on the same CB channel, the whole lot of them sawing away through Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”
