by C J Hribal
“I know, Mom, I know.”
“You know, Emmie, you can pay lip service to something and then go do the exact opposite. Or want to do the right thing and find yourself doing something else entirely.”
“Is that how you explained Dad’s behavior over the years?”
“Don’t bad-mouth your father, Emmie. He’s a good man, and he tries hard—”
“I know, Mom, I know.”
“It’s just sometimes he—”
“Mom, you don’t have to explain it to me.”
“I wasn’t going to, Emmie. There are things that happen in a marriage that you can’t explain to anyone, even to yourself.”
“You got that right.”
“What’s bothering you, Emmie? You’ve looked distracted ever since you got here.”
“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know that I want to talk about it.”
Up in her bedroom window, speaking from behind her screen, our mother is in her role as priest confessor. This has always been a comfort for us: you can tell her things and she listens without judgment. But because what is happening between Dorie and me is just a feeling I have, not an announcement I want to make, I don’t want her knowing about it. Every once in a while our mother confuses her roles as confessor and publicist.
“That’s okay, Emmie,” she says. If this weren’t a screened window she’d reach out and cup my chin. “It’s late, Emmie. You should get some sleep. Me, too. Tomorrow is a big day. For all of us.”
“Cinderella told us you have things worked out, you and Dad. For after tomorrow, I mean. What have you and Dad figured out?”
“Your father and I—” Our mother starts, then stops. She has this kindly look on her face, like she knows I’m trying to cajole information out of her when I wouldn’t share mine with her. She smiles. “Everyone has their secrets, Emmie. You of all people should know that.”
After the light went out in our mother’s room, I was still at loose ends. I still didn’t want to go inside and lie down next to my wife. I’d have gone back to the tepee, but Ike was there, so I went back on the roof. The rungs of the aerial were ice cold, but it felt good climbing up. In our haste to get down earlier, we’d left the cooler. I counted this as good fortune. I grabbed a beer and sat near the roof’s peak, my back against the chimney. I’m here, I know, for the same reason we so often went to the rooftop in our teens: escape from ourselves. When the clutter and the craziness seemed too much for us to handle, when we needed to get away, when we needed to gather, we climbed the aerial to the roof, where we could talk, be ourselves. We could be anybody else we chose to be as well. And when our mother got tired of being the trouper and she was laying into our father, it was where we went to argue about whether it wouldn’t be best if they just called it a night on their marriage.
“Don’t be crazy,” said Peg Leg Meg. “They love each other.”
“Well,” said Wally Jr., “they got a piss-poor way of showing it.”
The one thing we would do up there that most bonded us, though, was what we called Rooftop Cinema. How many times in our youth, via Saturday Night at the Movies, did we see Jason and the Argonauts or Hercules, Steve Reeves battling monsters and armed skeletons, or Casablanca, or The Maltese Falcon, or Rear Window, or Hatari! with Red Buttons and John Wayne, or McLintock! with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (our father’s favorite), or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (our mother’s favorite—she loved Howard Keel), or Captain Blood or Robin Hood or They Were Expendable or The Longest Day or Harvey or It’s a Wonderful Life or Command Decision or It Happened One Night or The Road to Morocco or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or The African Queen or Birdman of Alcatraz or Gone With the Wind or The Magnificent Seven or any of a thousand other films that filled our heads on Saturday nights and gave us our notions of how the world was and how it should be?
Up on the roof we re-created them. We had help in this. Borowski.
Borowski had a first name, but nobody knew what it was. It didn’t matter. Borowski was Borowski. What he was doing hanging out with us I’ve no idea. Our mother loved him. He said “Please” and “Yes, ma’am,” so she was willing to overlook the fact that he drank too much, got into fights, and had a grade point average in the low one-point-somethings. “He’s just a little misguided,” said our mother, who was willing to tolerate in others what would drive her crazy in us. It was rumored Borowski had parents, but nobody had ever seen them, and when you asked him, he simply said they’d divorced and he never wanted to see them again. He worked for Tony Dederoff and lived there, more or less. We, too, worked for Tony Dederoff from time to time, which was how we knew him.
His other connection to us was that he, too, loved the movies. He was even willing to act them out for us. We’d climb to the roof as though it were the balcony, and Borowski, down below, would put on a matinee. Sometimes we’d jump into the landscape of our dreams to help out. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” we’d say. “When the rhino impales Red Buttons in Hatari! it’s like this—” And then we’d demonstrate, bent over, two-by-fours pressed to our foreheads as we ran at each other, trying to gouge, trying to maim.
We rarely did complete movies. Usually it was just scenes. The beach landing scene and the parachute scene from The Longest Day, fistfights from westerns, sword fights from all those Errol Flynn movies, send-ups of the great kissing scenes. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” said Borowski, holding Peg Leg Meg in a clinch, and Meg would fly into hysterics. “That’s not how it goes!” she’d protest, and Borowski would promptly drop her. “You want to get kissed or not?” She’d scramble to her feet and they’d try it again. She had a terrible crush on him, and God bless Borowski, who’d screw anything that moved (back in high school he’d slept with Dorie a few times, if the rumors were true), he did not take advantage of it. Meanwhile we’d hoot and holler and call out for the grapefruit scene from The Public Enemy, or re-create the rooftop scenes from To Catch a Thief and Where Eagles Dare.
Our ebullience sometimes roused our parents, who came outside to see what we were up to. “What in God’s name is going on out here?” our father would ask. They’d stand in what, in a theater, might be the orchestra pit but which was actually our alfalfa field, and by turning their heads this way and that they could take in our antics both on the ground and on the roof. “Oh,” said our mother. “It’s just the normal noises, Wally. Leave them be.” And they’d go back inside, either to wrangle away some more or to make up. Given that we’d been driven outside by their fighting, we counted it a victory if later, sitting above their bedroom window, sipping beers, winding down, moonlight washing over the fields, we heard the sounds of two large bodies administering love to each other, and our mother’s “More! More!” echoing into the night air.
No such noises, normal or otherwise, tonight. Our farm is laid out before me in the moonlight—the fields, the woods, Ike’s tepee nestled in down by the marsh. A fine layer of frost over everything. Below me in the drive is our gift for our father. Tony Dederoff must have driven it over while we were in the tepee. He’d have known our father was already in bed, and he knew what a charge it would be if, in the morning, when everyone awoke, there it’d be, gleaming.
The next thing I know I’m in the driveway dropping its tailgate. Tony left the keys in the ignition. The tailgate gives beneath me, and I think about time and its passing, and what our mother said about secrets. Maybe the two are related. Maybe this is the beer talking, but I don’t think so. Consider how time accelerates as we age. As my siblings and I grew away from each other, away from home, the years passed, quick and then quicker. I tried explaining this once to our kids. How when you are little time seems to go so slowly—the clock hands barely budge—but when you’re older whole months simply fly by. The device they use in old movies to indicate time passing, calendar pages falling like leaves—it’s true. And here’s the reason: when you’re four, say, a year of your life is a full quarter of your life. When you are eight, it
’s an eighth. Still a sizable amount. When you’re twenty, though, it’s a twentieth, when you’re thirty, a thirtieth, and so on. Each year is a smaller fraction of your life. So time itself seems to speed up.
When things don’t seem to be happening in your life, when you seem to be waiting for the next thing to come along, then time slows down again. When I left home for school, for example, the family to me seemed to remain constant. I was the one who was meteoring across time. No doubt if I were listening to Ernie’s and Peg Leg Meg’s stories of that time, though, I would realize that there was a lot going on while I was absent. Things that happened to them while I was gone that I will never know. And vice versa. Maybe that explains some of the distance between me and my siblings. Maybe not.
There’s also this: in the great wash of time, things take place without our seeing them. They don’t show up on our radar screens, and when they finally do register, we are reminded of how quickly time moves, and how different things are. It throws us for a loop.
In families—in marriages—people experience time at different rates. They pay attention to different things. This is what gets families and marriages in trouble.
Take, for still another example, Nancy. Harold’s Nancy. Harold, our cousin who dared suggest to our father that marrying Nancy might be a reason for not going into the military, and his fiancée, who in Evergreen Park that night had been poked and prodded by our relatives—as we did with Meg’s Greg, and Cinderella’s Mel, and anyone else who dared enter our closed circle. How she’d good-naturedly put up with it, though that evening must have crawled by agonizingly slowly for her, as evenings did for us when our father went out of control. Had time speeded up for her once the party was over and she and Harold escaped into the cool evening air? Had they found someplace—the backseat of a car, maybe—and had a good laugh over what they’d been put through? Did they experience a little calm pocket of time right then, a moment when they understood each other completely? And then had time speeded up as they locked on each other’s eyes and started fumbling with each other’s clothes—the opening of Harold’s belt and zipper, the hiking of Nancy’s skirt, her underwear scrunched down her hips, then peeled down her shins and over her ankles, and then, joy, joy, all that frenetic, frenzied, rapturous joy? Which slowed down eventually, their heartbeats slowing, their breathing slowing, time slowing. I can imagine Harold sighing, and Nancy, underneath him, sighing, and time coming almost to a standstill when she breathes to him, “Will you love me forever?” And Harold, exquisitely sated with his new knowledge, breathing back, “Oh, baby, absolutely.”
And then what? The old story: they got married, had kids, Harold was sent to Vietnam. When he came home there was a huge party at his parents’ place. It must have been ninety-seven degrees that day, and Harold was sitting in a lawn chair wearing a T-shirt, a sport shirt, and a wool sweater. I couldn’t believe it. An argyle cardigan sweater. And a blanket draped over his lap. And he kept saying, “I’m cold, Ma. I just feel really, really cold.” What had happened to Harold? Nobody knew. Our father, maybe, but all our father said was “He’ll snap out of it. He just needs to unwind.” Unwind from what? Nobody was saying. But he was going to be all right, wasn’t he? His time there had just been this hunk ripped out of his life, right, but he was still the same Harold, wasn’t he? But why did he feel so cold?
Nancy was there, wearing a sexy dress that was too tight given that she’d had two babies, but she seemed upset, haggard, wrung out, as though having him back was as great a strain as dealing with his absence had been. I hadn’t seen her since Harold’s bon voyage party prior to boot camp, but for some reason I expected her to be unchanged. Harold was supposed to be unchanged as well. But they’d both changed. A lot. Harold looked like someone who was kicked and was waiting for someone to kick him again, and Nancy was flustered and impatient, the way our mother was when we got on her nerves and our father once again was AWOL.
A few years after that welcome home party, Harold comes home early one day from his Borden milk route and finds Nancy in bed with his son’s third-grade teacher. In all recountings of family lore, that is the point at which Nancy ceases to exist. Naked, legs open, caught by her husband in an adulterous embrace with another man, and then she vanishes. I don’t mean there was any foul play; there were court hearings, custody arrangements, things of that nature, but as a part of our family’s history, Nancy was erased, eradicated the way Lenin’s and Stalin’s associates kept disappearing from official photographs. And here is what I found myself wondering as I leaned on the chimney and nursed my beer, our parents’ farm spread out beneath the moon and flickering with hoarfrost, and what I think of now as I sit on the tailgate—what was it like for Nancy in between the time she asked that question of Harold in the backseat of a nearly new Dodge Dart and his homecoming? Or between his homecoming and her affair with her son’s teacher? I imagine the two of them stuck in the shudderings of time. For a while time stops for Nancy, it’s held in suspension. Her man is away, she is waiting for his return, she is a new mother, she is holding down the fort, she is a trouper. But she is also lonely, and the entire country seems to be one big love-in, and she is plodding along, not even a woman anymore, just somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. Then at a PTA meeting someone says hello with what seems like more than casual interest, and you are amazed to find that spark alive in you again, the spark that says someone notices you as a human being, and time once again begins its acceleration until all you can imagine is when you will see him again, see him next. You don’t even know how things had unfolded; they simply had. And now you have secrets, secrets you have to keep from your husband.
And your husband? He had been frozen in time while he was away, no? Stuck in that terrible place. And when he came back he was a different person, unrecognizable except for his features. Someone or something else was inhabiting the body that you lay down next to at night. It made your skin crawl. You know you should not feel like this, you know your husband needs you to lead him back from wherever it is he’s been, but you are so caught up in your secret life that you cannot see the forest for the trees. There is only the next rendezvous, the next time he leaves for work, and you know it can’t go on like this, the keeping of secrets and the disorienting passage of time. Something’s got to give. You start taking chances, have your lover over later in the afternoon, almost daring yourself to get caught. Perhaps you want to, perhaps that’s the way to end this, get things out in the open, so that the disassociations of time can rectify themselves, so you’re no longer stuck in two kinds of time, the dead time of being with your husband and the electrified, alive time of being with your lover.
And then you are caught. Are things better now? What then? What happens then?
It’s funny, but I haven’t imagined what it must have been like for Harold. I can’t go there—nothing like that ever happened to me—but he must have experienced even wilder, more violent dissociations. The agonizing slowness of battle in contrast to his heart’s clamorings, the drizzling away of days on the base, one by one by one, knowing his kids were zooming through their childhoods without him. The one thing that would keep him from going bonkers was knowing there was a constant in the world, his wife, Nancy. Sure, he had his own secrets, things that had happened to him and things he’d done that he couldn’t tell anybody, not a soul, but that was par for the course, wasn’t it? You walled up those things inside you, came home, and picked up where you’d left off. That was the way it was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? And then to come back and discover that everything had changed! He’d stayed the same—at least that was what he kept telling himself—yet everything back home had changed.
How do you reconcile these changes? How? You close your eyes and hope for the best. And then it turns out that isn’t enough.
Which brings us to Dorie and me. She had been alone for a long time before we got married, she said, and she wanted to be alone now. She started lining up bike trips one after another—a trip across I
owa followed by a trip from Madison to Duluth. For weeks I wouldn’t see her. She checked in by phone every once in a while, but it was as though she were living one life and the kids and I were living the one she’d left. And each time she came back, she seemed a little more distracted, a little more disengaged. When I asked her if she was having an affair, she replied, “Don’t be silly,” which wasn’t, technically, an answer to my question.
Things came to a head on New Year’s Eve. We were at a friend’s party. At midnight it felt as though I was holding an alien being in my arms. Like you’re on one of those dates where she kisses you to get rid of you. On the way home I asked her, “Do you still love me?” It had been a while since I’d heard her say it.
“Don’t be silly. Of course I love you.”
Then I asked, “Are you still in love with me?” There was an uncomfortably long pause.
She sighed. “I still love you, Em. It’s just I’m not ‘in love’ with you anymore.” She paused. “What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that it’s not that I love you any less, I just don’t love you the same way I used to. You understand that, don’t you?” She looked at me. We’d come to a stop sign. I was staring at the roadway in front of us. “Oh, Christ, you don’t. You don’t understand, do you? Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Little micalike flakes of snow were drifting down. An inch had already fallen. Tree limbs were etched white, the snowbanks, gray earlier in the evening, were pristine again, amber under the streetlights, softly blue in the shadows. In another life, it would have looked pretty. A car behind us honked. “Em, honey? You need to drive now.”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the car go. My hands rested on the Villager’s steering wheel, but I couldn’t move them and I couldn’t move my feet. The car behind us swerved to get by, laying on its horn all the way. Still I didn’t move. A couple more cars drove around us before I could make my body work. I drove us home, slowly. We crept along, but in my mind we were flying, the car fishtailing, the new snow acting like sawdust on a freshly waxed floor. We were clipping the sides of cars. Dorie was screaming, “Em, stop!” I hit the accelerator hard. I cut cars off, swerving around them. Horns blared, a cacophony of blaring. Everything except what was right in front of me was a blur. “Em, stop it, you’re scaring me!” I didn’t stop. Ahead of us a traffic light went yellow, then red. I accelerated. I aimed for the heart of the intersection, where an SUV was waiting to make a left turn. “Emmiieeeeee!”
