The Company Car Page 12

  But it meant something different to our father.

  What it meant to our father was that he never owned his own car, he never owned any car, and about the time he’d gotten used to one it was time to break in a new car.

  This seemed like a fine idea to us, but it chafed our father. Ownership cut two ways for him. The world was Al Capone’s oyster, after all, because he saw what he wanted and took it. A company car, on the other hand, meant something was given to him, and it wasn’t ever really his. Our father believed in ownership, in the special privileges ownership conveyed—the feeling that this was yours, you’d worked for it, you’d earned it—and with a company car that feeling was impossible. A company car came with certain restrictions, one of which was that the car went back to the company when it hit the 70,000-mile mark, which usually took our father just under two years. Later, when he had a five-state territory (Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and occasionally Ohio), he’d put that many miles on in a single year. Still, he often wanted to buy the car back from the company, and they wouldn’t let him.

  Our father thought this was revenge for his requesting a station wagon in the first place. In this era of minivans and SUVs, and everything leased and traded in every two to three years, our father’s desires for permanence and ownership must seem rather quaint, but at the time it was a badge of shame to our father that he never owned his own vehicle. It seemed so un-American. What were we, closet socialists? Communists? Fellow travelers? Believers in the World Bank?

  It rankled our father. He wanted a station wagon, for chrissakes. What could be more American than that? But Dinkwater-Adams thought it looked more professional for their field reps to drive sedans, not to mention they got a better deal on their fleet cars if they were all the same make and model. So our father had to argue with them, exhaustingly, every winter and spring, about his need for a station wagon. I knew why. Until he started building his own in his father’s basement, a station wagon was, for a long time, the closest thing our father had to a boat.

  Certainly our father needed a station wagon for all the samples he was hauling around, and traveling as a family would have been impossible in anything other than a station wagon, but I think our father would have requested a station wagon regardless. I think he liked the feeling of being in a car that rode—and looked—like a boat. A beach landing craft, to be specific. The famed Higgins Boat. Something you had to moor to the curb, a car that wobbled a little from side to side and whose steering was soft enough it floated. A car with at least the memory of wood on it, something that connected this mode of transportation to his preferred transportation. Our father wept when Detroit replaced the real wood in the woodies with simulated wood-grain plastics, and he railed when Detroit announced it was no longer putting wood trim of any kind, real or simulated, along the hulls—excuse me, the sides—of its station wagons. “What is this country coming to?” our father would ask, his fingers running along the car’s sides the way, many years later, I would tentatively run my fingers along the flanks of the first girl I got naked with. (The question I asked myself at the time was, of course, quite different.)

  I was amazed, year after year, at our father’s slight disappointment with every new car that showed up in our drive. Perhaps this was because of the haggling he had to do to get what he wanted. Perhaps it was because even then he didn’t have much say in the specifics. Or perhaps it was because by the time he got his station wagon—just about when school let out—the other sales reps had had their new sedans for months, and our father was just then taking possession (and temporarily at that) of a vehicle that was already eight months old.

  Still, there they were, every other spring—Oldsmobile Vista Cruisers, Pontiac Bonnevilles and Catalinas, Chevy Bel Air Impalas, Chevy Nomads and Chevelles and Kingswood Estates. Regal in their names, magical in their possibilities. And our father in them.

  Can he really be blamed for hoarding that magic for himself? We wanted to go along with him on his travels, but we understood that some work needed to be done alone. His was a lonely profession—we understood that. We capeeshed. We capeeshed even as we lined up on both sides of the car as he backed out of the drive, heading to the Office for another long evening’s worth of work.

  “Take me with you, take me with you!” we’d cry, and our father, a man on a mission, pretended not to hear.

  7. Loose Lips Sink Ships

  The mystery of the Office was cleared up for us—for me, anyway—one Saturday in July. I was going on seven. Nomi’s hip was better—the cast was off—but she still slept upstairs, and the steel- and chrome-armed pulley-and-brick whatchamacallit was still at the foot of her bed. The evening before our father had done a curious thing. Rather than come home late from the Office, he spent the evening cutting the yard front and back—a job he usually reserved for Saturday mornings. When we asked him why, he said he was keeping his distance from our mother. We knew he was only half-joking.

  While he mowed, we ran around and caught lightning bugs, putting them in a jar with mown grass in it. The grass was for their nutrition. We did this with grasshoppers we caught, too. But they never ate the grass. They just jumped around the insides of the jars trying to find purchase, looking out at our glass-distorted faces with their sad grasshopper ones, and eventually they died of starvation or asphyxiation, despite the holes we punched in the lid. The lightning bugs fared better. We usually released them before they fell on their backs, gasping for breath with their little lightning bug lungs. Tonight we were going to keep them, though, and use them as night-lights. After all, lightning bugs were domesticated insects. They crawled over your hands, lighting up your skin with that weird greenish yellow glow before they got brave enough to fly away, and even then it was easy to catch them, and if not that one then another. So we did that as our father mowed and drank beers. He stopped every few turns for a good long pull at his bottle of Pabst, then put the empty in the case nestled up against the Weber grill and rotisserie. We were already in our pajamas, running around the yard in the new mown grass. Our father did not particularly like an audience that moved. “Hey, you kids,” he shouted, “sit on the stoop. And stay there!” We would listen for maybe fifteen seconds, then we’d be dancing around the lawn again, the grass cool against our ankles.

  “You keep that up, I’m not doing for you what I’m doing tomorrow.”

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” we asked, but he was already heading the other way, and our question was lost to the bark of the mower. We didn’t follow. If we trailed after him with our questions, he was liable to cut our feet off in the dark. Our mother came out and said, “Off to bed with you, tomorrow is a big day.” We asked her, too, but she remained her enigmatic self. “You’ll see tomorrow,” she said. She seemed both bitter and pleased.

  “We shall see what we shall see,” said our father, who’d come in while we were wiping the grass off our toes. He was finishing his beer. He seemed immensely pleased with himself.

  “What are we gonna see? What? What?”

  “I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.”

  We pretended to puzzle over this one for a few moments. If you answered him, it only encouraged him to say something about the hair between your toes. Or the hair on your chest. Or how you were a day late and a dollar short. Did you really want to volunteer for that barrage?

  Our father held up our jar of lightning bugs. “I’m going to let these go outside,” he said. “They make lousy night-lights.”

  How did he know that was why we’d brought them inside? “You think you’re the only ones who were young once?” That really gave us pause.

  Then he sat on the edge of Robert Aaron’s bed and told us again about how when he was a young boy he used to watch Al Capone’s cars run down his alley, and how he used to catch lightning bugs in a jar and go to sleep watching their irregular flarings on his bedside table. He talked about how he used to build balsa-wood airplanes with tissue-paper skins, w
ith rubber bands attached to the propellers. He went into loving detail about this, how he would spend hours making these things, cutting the struts and gluing the wings, all the bracing and infrastructure, and how careful he had to be or the tissue paper would rip, and how he’d then take his finished airplane to the attic, wind it up, stick a lit match in the nose, and sail it out the window, the whole thing bursting into flame before it hit the trees across the street.

  “Magnificent,” our father breathed at us in the dark, his bottle of Pabst squeezed between his thighs. “The whole thing was magnificent!”

  “You did all that work, and then you burned it up?” Our heads were filled with the image of that balsa-wood-and-tissue-paper airplane afire, burning as it glided into the trees.

  “Some things aren’t meant to last,” said our father. “Lights out now.”

  In the hallway we could hear our mother. “I wish you wouldn’t tell them stories when you’ve been drinking. You always make things seem better than they are.”

  The next morning the family wrestle was cut short because our father said he had “big things cooking for you kids,” and we should let him sleep. We kept bouncing on his belly, and when he rolled over to get away from us, we continued on his back. “What big things? What big things?” we shrieked as we kept bouncing.

  “Go look in the car,” our father said, and groaningly rolled into our mother as we dashed out of their bedroom to look.

  In the back of the Buick was a large rectangular box. BLASTCO’S ABOVEGROUND POOL it read, 48 IN. TALL. There was also a model number that looked like something the Man from U.N.C.L.E. might need Illya Kuryakin to translate.

  “All right!” Robert Aaron and Sarah screamed. This was the big time. An aboveground pool! We weren’t naÏve. We knew that box was too short for it to include a diving board. But there would probably be a deck we could dive off, a shallow and a deep end, and a rope of red and white colored floats. On these hot and humid days, the whole neighborhood could cool off in our aboveground pool! People would come from blocks all around just to see.

  We asked our father when he was going to put the pool up. (Soon. Later that morning. Just let him rest now.) How long would it take to fill? (A long time. He didn’t know. Go ask your mother.) How deep was deep? (He didn’t know. Go ask your mother.) How soon could we go in it? (He didn’t know that either. As soon as it was filled, providing we waited an hour after lunch. Let him rest now.) How deep would it be—over our heads? Would it have its own alligators? Would it be big enough for a boat? Could we go sailing on it? Could we leave it up in the winter and use it as an ice rink? Our mother, coming up from the basement with an armload of laundry she dumped on her husband, said, “Let Daddy sleep. Daddy’s tired. Daddy had too much to drink last night, didn’t Daddy?”

  Too much to drink?

  “Pool water,” said our mother, separating the staticky sheets from each other to find the socks hidden within their folds. “He was testing it.”

  We were starting to sound like that Dr. Seuss classic Green Eggs and Ham. “Could we, would we—”

  “LET ME BE, GODAMMIT!”

  “Pool water makes Daddy cranky,” said our mother, who started folding pieces of underwear and dropping them on the bulge in the blanket that indicated where our father had hid his face. “Still, he shouldn’t use language like that, especially in front of his own children.”

  Actually, he was using that language on his own children, but it didn’t seem like the right time to point that out. So in a rare display of family unity, we helped our mother fold laundry, making neat, wobbly piles down our father’s body, stacking each pile on its own bulge of flesh, our father snoring all the while. Then we made beds, put away the laundry, swept the kitchen, washed our breakfast dishes, and stacked our National Geographics. We didn’t dare leave the vicinity of the driveway. From time to time we looked in the station wagon’s wayback to marvel at the wonderful, unbelievably fantastic aboveground pool (48 in.!), soon to be ours.

  Our father came outside at nine-thirty, rubbing his eyes and forehead, a cup of coffee in hand. By that time Artu had arrived with a trunkful of sand. Our father got plastic sheeting and his toolbox from the basement and unloaded the pool box from the station wagon. Then he went for more sand. We stared at the box, trying to imagine it unpacked, set up, the water glistening. When our father came back, he and Artu started unloading the sand from the trunk of Artu’s car into a wheelbarrow, then dumping it onto the plastic sheeting. It was hard, hot work. During a break Artu opened up the pool box and took out the instruction sheet. “I see we’re supposed to cut a circle for the base,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be easier, Walter, if we cut that first, then dumped the sand right where we wanted it to go?”

  “I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw,” said our father.

  Our father said this every step of the way. He said it less frequently as the day wore on. By day’s end he was using a lot worse language than when we’d tried waking him that morning.

  It was getting hot. We—Robert Aaron and I—were standing on the sand pile while Artu and our father were cutting out the sod. Sarah was off somewhere, pouting over not owning a Barbie like her friends. Wally Jr. stood at the bottom of the pile with a bottle hanging out of his mouth. Ike tried getting onto the pile with us, but it was too small and we kept pushing him off.

  “Hey, you kids, stop that. We won’t have any sand left for the pool bottom.”

  Chopping out the sod and hauling it to our compost heap made unloading the sand look easy. Artu had stripped down to his athletic T and an old pair of his elevator operator’s pants, which were slate gray and had dusty blue stripes up the sides. He looked like a Civil War soldier. Our dad went inside and came out wearing his Christmas present from our mom, a fishnet T-shirt he’d seen advertised in a magazine as the latest thing from Sweden to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

  They finished removing sod from the circle and started hauling wheelbarrows of sand, dumping each in place. Our mother called us in, no doubt so we’d stop bugging our father and Artu as they toiled under the hot, hot sun. Lunch came and went. Our mother served them lunch on the shady side of the house while we ate inside. Artu put on a long-sleeved shirt. “You should put a shirt on, too, Walter. Sun’s bad today. It’ll fry you.”

  “I’ve seen tougher suns than this aboard ship,” said our father, for whom his time in the Navy had become the benchmark and reference point for all experience. He was taking things out of the box and lining them up on the grass. The big curl of the frame was sky blue. As though someone had taken a shears to the heavens and cut out a goofy rectangle. The lining was the same color, and there were yards and yards of curlicued white rim to keep the lining in place. Now came the hard part, stretching the lining, getting it to stay on the frame, keeping it smooth on the bottom and sides, getting the trim in place without the lining slipping. They worked on it for hours. We got bored watching them, even with our father’s bad language. Our mother kept coming to the kitchen window and yelling, “Walter, the children!” as though we were meat on the rotisserie he had forgotten, and he’d yell back, “I know, I know,” and then quieter, under his breath, “Jesus H. Christ, you’d think they never heard the words before.”

  “At least not from you,” said Artu. For our part, we were pleased to be reminded that our savior had a middle name. No doubt Henry, Hank for short.

  We rode our bikes around the neighborhood for a while. Nobody was out. Maybe everyone had gone to the pool up on York Road, or to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs take on the expansion Mets, who were so bad even the Cubs could beat them. Or maybe other mothers worried more about their kids being out on a day when the sky had gone white with haze and if you stopped pedaling and straddled your bike pools of sweat formed on the sidewalk.

  “Hot,” said Robert Aaron, and all we could do was agree.

  We went home, and there it was, our oasis, with an aluminum and white plastic ladder on
the side and a green garden hose looped over the railing. Water gurgling into the bottom. There was already an inch or two, enough to cover the hose’s tip. We watched the turbulence of the new water coming in against the bright blue bottom. We went inside and drank a gallon of Tang and begged our parents to let us sit in the pool while it filled up.

  “Your bellies will burst,” said our mother.

  “That water’s ice cold,” Artu said. “I can put you in there if you want, but I’ll be taking you right out again once you cool off.”

  Artu was not given to hyperbole like our mother. If he said something, you could believe him. Still, we didn’t want to believe him.

  “Where’s Dad?” Robert Aaron asked.

  “Your father,” said our mother both loftily and with pity, “is in a world of hurt.”

  Indeed he was. We found him in his bedroom lying belly-down on the bed, a thick smear of orange jelly across his back. He was moaning. It sounded worse than this morning. We were used to his morning moan. Threaded through that complaint was a certain good-naturedness; we knew it would eventually stop and he’d get up, almost playful, and start bacon and eggs snapping in the fry pan. The underpinning of this moan, however, was a pitiful whine, the sound dogs make after you’ve kicked them. And underneath that smear of orange jelly you could make out the source of his whine: a diamond plate pattern of boiled skin, so red it was ugly. It stood out even more because each diamond was separated from its neighbors by a white border formed by the shirt he’d been wearing. His back looked like a white window well cover had been stenciled over a slab of hot meat. As though a grill had left its marks on his back in negative.