The Company Car Read online

  A pall filled our car on the way home. “I have never been so humiliated—” said our mother, but she didn’t say anything more. It was a phrase we had not yet gotten used to hearing, although eventually we would. Our mother would repeat it whenever we came home from any event our father had drunk too much at, exclusive of his many trips to the Office, which was where he would go this evening once we got home. We knew what he would say as we trooped out of the car and entered our dark and empty house: “And that’s the name of that tune,” he’d say, and roll up his window, and put the car into reverse, and wobble back out the drive. And our mother would want to say something to him but wouldn’t, except maybe to press her lips together and breathe, “You shit,” once he was already into the street, too far away to hear her or to see the fear and determination that lit up her face. “Come on inside, you kids,” she’d say and usher us upstairs and make us ready for bed. Then she’d make herself tea and bring it and a beer-and-sandwich platter up to Nomi, who would listen as our mother poured out her grief.

  That was the rest of our evening—the rest of our childhood, really—already spread out silently before us. For now, our parents sat in the front seat, and we sat in the middle and the wayback, and the air itself seemed permeated with silence, a silence that insinuated itself like a wraith. We kids—we all looked out the windows. Brick houses, ranches mostly, filled our view. We wondered—would life be any different for us if we lived there, or there, or there? We came to the conclusion it wouldn’t.

  6. The Company Car

  CAPEESH?

  “What is it with guys and nostalgia?” Dorie asks me. “You’re so fucking sentimental about things passing—cheese in wax paper, transistor radios, pinochle, euchre, beer in short glasses. For chrissakes, everything’s a little shrine with you. Even your bad memories. You want to know something? Plenty of shit happened to me, too. I just never talk about it. I don’t even think about it.”

  Dorie’s right. She doesn’t look back much. What’s done is done. A practical philosophy, but it also means she doesn’t feel the need to apologize for anything, ever. Whatever lies in her wake is already in history’s dustbin. I, on the other hand, am a sifter of shards, trying to figure out how the pieces fit, and what they might mean. My accidental discovery, for example, that Dorie was packing a diaphragm—a piece of equipment I’d thought no longer necessary given my vasectomy post-Sophie—on her bike trips. And a negligee, one I had never seen before, packed neatly around it. Discoveries I’ve yet to bring to her attention.

  Maybe it’s inevitable. I’m the longest relationship she’s ever had, and she’d been through a lot of them before me. She was with Woolie’s father for maybe half a year, with Henry’s father less than that. And dozens more before that. A restless soul, she does not suffer boredom easily. And lately she has been bored. Distracted, both in and out of the bedroom. “Ace,” she says to me, both fondly and impatiently, “what you need to understand is that sex can be okay even when it’s just . . . okay. You don’t need the rocket’s red glare every time out.” I suppose most marriages, sooner or later, settle into a kind of going-through-the-motions phase, but it still surprises me that these particular motions would be subject to the same laws of entropy. Old joke: Q: What does a wife of over seven years think during sex? A: Pink. I think I’ll paint it pink. Weren’t we the magical exception, though? This was a woman, after all, who was three months pregnant when I first made love to her. She had two dime-size indentations on her lower back, flanking her spine. They drove me crazy with desire. And I was in love with her in high school, too, only she ran with a very different crowd then—the oversexed dirtballs—and she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. A guy named Calvin knocked her up in high school, and six weeks later Dorie disappeared. Not long after that he was happily knocking boots with Holly Gunther and referring to the still-gone Dorie as “my ex-whore.” It still amazes me sometimes that we yoked our wagons together, but once we did it seemed both inevitable and right. Perhaps that’s my mistake. I think in terms of familiarity, intimacy, comfort. I take the inevitability of permanence for granted. I forget about fragility, inconstancy, boredom, and change. The inevitability of things passing. Then it comes and whups me upside the head, and for months I walk around in a daze, a deserving victim of my own optimism.

  This gives me pause when I think about my (our) bookstores. If Dorie decides Van Loon’s is a bad business investment, it’s history. If she decides I’m a bad investment of her time, I’m history. It’s strange to think of our fates linked like that, but they are. Trying to keep a bookstore afloat is not unlike trying to keep a marriage afloat. You have to be possessed of a certain myopia that what you’re doing is right, and you have to keep plugging away, believing in your effort, all evidence to the contrary. And even then, despite your best efforts, if your partner backs out, it really doesn’t matter what you think or what you’ve tried or what you’ve hoped for. You’re toast.

  “Are you guys arguing?” Sophie doesn’t look up from her Winnie-the-Pooh coloring book, on which she is working intently. I’m not sure when she woke up.

  “Mommy and Daddy are having a disagreement about the need for preservation. You know, like in our house, saving all the old stuff because it’s cool.”

  “There’s preservation and then there’s being an antediluvian pack rat,” Dorie says over the backseat, though she clearly means this for me.

  “You mean like Cza-Cza?” Our father is known for his inability to part with just about anything his hands have ever touched. His house is a monument to how fast paper can accumulate if you let it.

  Dorie refuses to talk to our kids as though they’re kids. “Yes, but what we’re talking about is being an emotional pack rat. Saving up memories and feelings not because they’re useful or necessary but just because you had them once.”

  “Oh. Can we see the planes?” We’re near Oshkosh. We cannot drive past this town without one of our children, Woolie when he was younger, and now Henry and Sophie, asking if we can’t stop at the Experimental Aircraft Association museum. Woolie, now a sullen teenager, no longer shows interest. He’d rather stare out the window, plugged into Rusted Root or Dave Matthews. It is no longer cool for him to show enthusiasm for anything he has not discovered on his own. But Henry and Sophie get all worked up when they see the F-14 mounted on stilts beside the highway, and the hangars at the far end of the grass airfield. They will get equally worked up when we come to the underground house at the next exit. During the early seventies someone built a house inside a berm. It looks like a coffin with windows. A string of poplars grows atop the berm. Our children measure distance by their memory of landmarks (time itself is an impediment, something that separates the landmarks and prevents them from coming immediately into view as soon as Sophie and Henry recall that they exist), and these two—the EAA and the underground house—mean that we are getting close to Cza-Cza and Mumu’s house. As we come under Cza-Cza and Mumu’s gravitational pull, it seems appropriate that they have two markers—one for rootedness, one for flight.

  “How can you say that to her?” I say sotto voce. “Telling her memories and feelings aren’t necessary.”

  “The downside of attachment is depression, sweetie. She should know that. And I’m not going to let that happen, not even with you.” Before I can say anything, Dorie cuts me off. “Later, sweetie.”

  “No, wait, let me just understand—”

  Dorie goes into her singsong “the kids are listening” voice: “I said LA-ter, and I mean LA-ter.” And that pretty much ends the discussion. Henry is waking up now himself, and the first words out of his mouth are “Are we there yet?” which he repeats until I confirm that we are. But I don’t share his enthusiasm. Nobody in a shaky marriage likes to see family. You feel transparent, your sorrow written in black Magic Marker across your forehead: WE ARE UNHAPPY. And no matter what turbulence there has been in your siblings’ relationships, when your own relationship is wobbling, everyone else’s see
ms serene. Your own hail-fellow-well-met-ness is a front, your fake serenity—yes, yes, ours too is a match made in heaven—so patently false you’re simply waiting for someone to call you on it. It would almost be a relief if someone did, but in the strange geometry of our family, there’s an unspoken agreement that nobody will say boo. So we will turn and twist, pretending, dissembling, and we will see in people’s eyes that they know we’re lying, that we’re fooling no one. All this will be made worse by the occasion itself—celebrating fifty years of our parents’ marriage having endured. Fifty? I think. Fifty? I don’t know that we’re going to see fifteen. Sophie wants to know what fifty is. “Forty-five more than you,” I tell her. “Fifty is what Aunt Cinderella will be later this year.” Sophie ponders this. You can see her face straining to figure it out. I try to help her. “I was forty when you were born. I’m forty-five now. So in five years I’ll be fifty, too.” No go. Another tack: “Fifty is half of one hundred,” I say. “Fifty plus fifty equals one hundred. So when I’m fifty, what will I be in fifty years?” In the rearview mirror Sophie’s face lights up. She gets it. She is joyous in her knowledge, and no doubt her mother’s words of wisdom have helped her calculations. “In fifty years,” she says serenely, “you’ll be dead.”

  If SUVs, minivans, and pickups could stand in for Higgins Boats, then our arrival at our parents’ is not unlike a beach landing. Villagers, Cherokees, and Explorers wash up the drive, disgorge passengers, park in uneven rows. More people arrive by the minute. And this is just immediate family. Lots more people will come tomorrow for the anniversary itself. Robert Aaron and Cinderella have children old enough to drive, and they’re exercising that prerogative. Cinderella has children old enough to have children, and they’re exercising that prerogative as well. Amazing: all these people have issued, in effect, from one horny couple. It is hard keeping them all separate.

  But then, it was hard keeping us separate even when it was just us kids. Our mother encouraged us all to be individuals, but our father lumped us all together.

  Our father rarely called us by our names. I think sometimes he’d forgotten our names, or that we even had names. To our father we were always “you kids.” We were a collective plague to him, undifferentiated but bothersome. “You kids had better watch yourselves playing ball in the street.” “You kids better eat that soup.” “You kids better help your mother.” “You kids need to make your beds.” You kids. You kids. You kids. For the longest time it was hard to imagine we were complete and separate human beings. To our father we were an early version of Star Trek’s Borg, threatening him with our massed presence.

  Our mother, on the other hand, would get us confused. “Sarah, Robert Aaron, Emmie, Ike, Wally Jr., Ernie, Megan,” she’d say, rapid-fire, like she was fixing our names in her head, making sure we were still who she thought we were. She ran the list in birth order when trying to single out one of us for cautionary words or punishment, stopping when she came to the one she wanted. As though we were too much for her. As though we were a constant blur, which no doubt we were. As though she could remember the names but not the faces: “Sarah, Robert, Emmie, Ike, Wally Jr., Ernie, Ernie! Stop that. You’re hurting your sister.”

  But it’s not as though we didn’t—don’t—buy into it, too. When all of us have arrived, and our parents, slow-moving now, with arthritic hips and ankles, shuffle out to greet us, what are the first words out of our mouths? “Mom, Dad,” we say, “the kids have arrived.”

  An air of jocular intensity falls over us. We hug, slap backs, buss cheeks. We talk about our cars and our gas mileage and how the drive was. How work is and isn’t. I say nothing about the bookstores. To begin to explain is to own up to failure, and we can’t have that. So I’m relieved that the talk quickly moves to what our kids are up to, and the funny things they’ve recently done or said. We tell each other we look good, though truth be told, except for Ike, Dorie, and Peg Leg Meg, we look middle-aged. Our hair is thinning, our eyes baggy, our skin pasty. I’ve got a spare tire I’d like to lose, though in our family that qualifies me as svelte. Most of us have followed in the fat of our father. Cinderella looks puffy, Robert Aaron rotund, Wally Jr. flabby, Ernie portly. We say none of this. “Looking good,” we tell each other. “You lose a few pounds?” “Workin’ on it,” we reply, and we nod our heads. To eat is human, to dessert, divine. Usually fractious, despite our parents’ admonitions that we are, indeed, family, we are being careful with each other. Our unspoken agreement: we will make nice. For our parents we will put aside old problems, jealousies, enmities.

  Like hell. None of us wants to be blamed by the others for ruining our parents’ anniversary. If things go kablowies, we all want to be able to shake our heads and sigh with relief. “Well, at least it wasn’t me.”

  We were of one mind, too, when it came to getting their anniversary presents. In years past we have argued and bickered and agreed to disagree, and the result was that sometimes we didn’t get them anything as a group. Each person made an individual offering. But on this occasion, it seemed important that we all pull together. Oddly enough, this means that we have arranged for two separate anniversary presents. One is for our mother—a twilight balloon ride over our farm for her and our father, with all of us gathered beneath them. The other is for our father—a fully restored, two-toned 1955 Chevy Bel Air Nomad station wagon. Our parents know they’re getting the one but not the other. The Nomad’s not here yet. We’ve arranged for Tony Dederoff, our father’s best friend, to drive it over first thing tomorrow morning. It’s actually a model year he never drove—his first company car came the next year, while our mother was expecting me—but we chose it because its detailing seemed oddly and wonderfully symbolic. Almost prophetic. Everything about it—its delta-wing jet hood ornament and the chrome side scroll, even the chrome piping of the roof rack—suggests the open road, empty highway, flight. And yet there on the rear door are seven chrome darts—one for each kid!—representing stability, solidity, staying put. The ballast that kept our father rooted right here. I suppose we’re saying the same thing to our mother with this balloon ride. It’s something she’s been wanting for ages. “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to float across the sky, but gently, not going too fast,” she’s told us. So we get her what she wants, but arrange for the balloon to float over Augsbury, for the flight to end in our alfalfa field. She floats away, but not too far; she ends where she’s always been. And given that our father is joining her on the balloon ride but the car is pretty much his (our mother, certainly, will never drive it), gift-wise, our mother is getting the short end of the stick. But then our mother always got the short end of the stick.

  I speak of the company car as though we understood what it was. But like most things that came to us from the world of adults, we hadn’t a clue as to what it was or what it meant. We thought, very simply, that it meant we got a different station wagon every other year. Maybe even the same station wagon but with clever styling changes—the instrument panel, the trim and body colors, the interior color, the luggage rack, the presence or absence of the vent window.

  “That’s the company car,” our father said. “Nobody touches it, nobody rides in it, nobody breathes on it, unless I say so. Capeesh?”

  We capeeshed all right. The company car. It sounded like everything else in our house that we weren’t allowed to touch, lest we break it. The company car was the car we took out when we had company. Like the company china. The company silverware. The company glasses. “That’s for company!” our mother shrieked when I took out the fine porcelain our father got for her when he was stationed in Japan. “Use the everyday stuff,” she’d admonish us, and I could feel we had dropped somehow in her estimation of our worthiness. I could never figure it out. Why were we saving this stuff for strangers? Weren’t we supposed to reap the benefits of our father’s having gone overseas? Wasn’t that why he went—to make the world a safer place and to get a good deal on postwar china?

  The company car
may as well have been made of porcelain. We rarely rode in it. To go to church, to pick up groceries, to go on vacation, to visit relatives. Perhaps that was why, when you were allowed in it, you felt something special and magical was about to happen.

  On long drives with the wayback down, the five, six, seven of us would be arranged hip to foot, hip to foot, alternating. This prevented our fighting, except for kicking, and even then we didn’t mess around too much. Our father possessed a backhand of infinite reach. The arrangement also gave us the illusion of private space, which was important to us even though we did everything together. In summer we played Alphabet, counted license plates from other states, tried to get truckers to honk for us. In winter we tilted our heads back and looked at the stars, feeling the reel of the infinite above us and the thrum of the road inside our skulls. Sometimes in summer our father pulled off the highway in the middle of the night. “Look, look at the sky!” he’d rouse us, and then he’d cry, “There! There’s one!” and we’d follow a tracer star streaking to its death. In winter he did the same thing, and bundled in coats we’d sit on the engine still ticking heat and watch the entire northern sky change color—pulsing, shifting curtains and rivers of white and yellow and red and green and blue and magenta, and behind that the stars in their velvet. “That’s the aurora borealis,” said our father. “The Northern Lights. People go their whole lives without seeing them. But we have. Now, together, all of us. Never forget that.” This sounded like a prelude to his “You’re Czabeks, never forget that” speech, which was pretty close to our mother’s “Remember, all you’ve got is family” speech, which dovetailed neatly with our father’s “What’s said in this house stays in this house” speech, which scared and thrilled us with the idea that we were the keepers of deep, dark family secrets, part of some conspiracy, something that could bring down the family if it got out, or bring down a government if it didn’t. We were a cabal, the Czabek cabal, and pronouncements like our father’s while we huddled in our winter coats on top of the company car as the aurora borealis shimmered and danced above us reinforced the notion that we belonged to something, and that certain things belonged to us. It seemed as though our father was introducing us to the concept of spiritual ownership, and once you had something, shared in something together, then it was yours, always. So the company car was indeed something special. Inside it, we were transformed.