The Company Car Read online

  Some of the rest stops were more festive than others. At the Arizona-California border, the guards took one look at our father—a geeky-looking guy with lampblack eyes and scoops of hair already missing from his forehead—and another at our mother—a curvaceous brunette with the lips of Betty Grable and the eyes of Lauren Bacall—and they knew what they had were a couple of newlyweds. They recognized the look of a newly married woman when they saw one. A woman dazed with sex, which wasn’t quite the case—she was dazed with pregnancy, but you couldn’t expect these border guards to know that. They ordered our parents out of the car, asked them to please open their suitcases. When our father protested, he was told they were looking for contraband fruit from either Texas or Mexico. They had to search everything. And though they said they were sorry, they certainly didn’t appear to be. Our father’s suitcases received a cursory glance. Our mother’s ended up all over the highway. Her entire trousseau was scattered across the car’s hood and over the roof and trunk, her unmentionables toyed with, then dropped. Our mother went scarlet as the guard in charge held each item up for his compatriots, one after another, then passed it on. Each guard pinched each new item between his fingers like he was holding up a skunk, only his grin showed he knew better. “And what have we here?” and “What’s this?” the head guard kept saying as he examined slips, half-slips, teddies, tap pants, stockings, garters, nightgowns, negligees, bras, panties, silk stockings, camisoles. You name it, they held it up to the stark Arizona sun, then let it trail away from their fingers in the hot Arizona breeze. “What are you doing?” our mother screamed.

  “Checking for fruit,” they replied. “You can’t take fruit across state lines.”

  Four years later, driving back with two squalling kids in the backseat, our mother got even. Besides Sarah, she’d had Robert Aaron, another leave baby, and I was clearly on the way. I was a welcome-back-to-the-States baby, conceived on their fourth wedding anniversary. Besides the two squalling kids, who were turning a high pink no matter how much flesh our mother tried to keep covered—she had put diapers on their arms, pinned to the sleeves of their blouses, and tied bonnets onto their heads—our mother had a load of fruit with her. Three pineapples, a sack of oranges, and bunches and bunches of bananas—big stalks of them—were piled in the front seat and between her legs. Just to see, our mother said. Just to see.

  She got the same border guard, puffier now, but unmistakably him. He took one look at Sarah and Robert, sunburnt and screaming in the backseat, another at our mother, still pretty but obviously far gone into motherhood, and waved us through.

  2. Par for the Course

  Dorie looks up from the Bicycling magazine she’s been paging through. “Good story, Em, but still I wonder, What was it like for your mom? I mean, when they were first married. It wasn’t like now, where you have options. I mean, she was just along for the ride, wasn’t she?”

  I don’t answer. Dorie’s planning her big bike trip for the summer, twelve hundred miles, Milwaukee to Connecticut. She has a tune-up trip before—a lap around Lake Michigan—but that’s with her cycling club, the Acoustic Cyclers of Greater Milwaukee. Her Darien trek, though, is her first solo. Just her, her panniers stuffed with gear, and a Visa card. “It’s all about testing limits,” she tells me when I ask. “Besides,” she says, touching my chest in a rare display of affection, “who’s going to hold down the fort?”

  Fort holding is my job. I knew this even before we married. When we were first dating, it was clear that her appetite for doing, getting, and going was far greater than mine. Perhaps my most exotic desire was wanting Dorie in the first place. A complicated story, but the short version is that, after a very tumultuous period in her life, Dorie wanted to settle down. And strangely enough, she wanted to settle down with me.

  She was a single mom when we met, but comfortably well-off. Had her own business buying and selling farms in the town where we both grew up, then gave it up soon after the boom hit and moved to Milwaukee. Bought a funky old house in a funky old neighborhood—Victorians mostly—and got interested in rehab. A lot of the houses had been carved up into rooming houses, there were prostitutes on the corners and drugs in the alleys—the old urban decay story—and Dorie, God bless her, saw the possibilities of turning Veedon Park into a neighborhood again. Some gay couples and other single moms started buying properties from the slumlords and turning them into places people actually wanted to live in. We met when she came by my apartment on the third floor of a Queen Anne that had seen better days to inform me that she was now my landlord, and if I had any problems, to please come see her, she was living in the Arts and Crafts home down the street—the one with the porch roof propped up with I-beams while the porch itself was being rebricked.

  I was managing a used bookstore then. An English lit Ph.D. in a glutted market, I went with Plan B, which was not so much a plan as it was a series of lucky accidents, the culmination of which was having Dorie Keillor as my landlord. Over beers and brats at a neighborhood potluck, we got to talking. Catching up, actually. I had known her since I was ten, had a crush on her for years, then lost track of her when she was seventeen and she dropped out of school.

  “I remember you were pretty wild in high school,” I said. “At least for Augsbury.”

  “Yeah, and you were a straight arrow and boring. At least for Augsbury.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad we got that out of the way.”

  She had her son with her, a three-year-old kid with a mass of curly black hair (I could see that was where he got his name, Woolie). He was trying to get his mouth around a bratwurst. Ketchup was dribbling onto his lap.

  “Cute kid,” I said. “And so serious. A boy after my own heart.”

  “Yeah, he’s sensitive,” she said. “I’m hoping he grows out of it, but I think you pretty much have to take them as they come.”

  “My mother once told me, ‘Emmie, you’re the most sensitive, highest-strung of all my children. You’re going to feel higher highs and lower lows than any of them. You’re just going to have to get used to it.”

  “Did you?”

  “He will, if that’s what you mean.”

  Dorie had a slug of beer. “It’s not. I was asking you.”

  “Not really.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

  We both turned to look at Woolie. “His father’s in Greece,” she said, as though that explained everything.

  “On business?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen him since the conception.”

  “He run out on you?”

  She laughed. “Nobody runs out on me. I left when my mom died.”

  I didn’t know what to say except “Sorry.” She waved that away. Everybody in town had known what her mom was like. Dorie had been raised mostly by her grandmother. After a minute’s silence Dorie raised her beer. “So, what do you do?”

  “Work at a bookstore for an old guy with a bad hip who wants to move to Florida. I run the place, and he putters around.”

  “What’s keeping him here?”

  “Books.”

  “What, he can’t bear to part with them?”

  “He can’t unload them.”

  “What’s the name of this place?” she asked and I told her: “Rare and Used Books. We Buy, Sell, Trade.”

  “Catchy title. No wonder he’s packing them in.”

  A week later she came to the shop, poked around for a bit, then asked, “You free for lunch?”

  We ate at a Vietnamese restaurant on Water Street. “So, Czabek, why don’t you buy that musty old store from that musty old guy and go into business for yourself?”

  I stood and dog-eared my pockets. Then I sat down again.

  “Money,” she said, “is not a problem. The question is, can you make a go of a bookstore like that?”

  “I don’t think I’d want to own a bookstore like that.”

  “What kind would you want to own?”

  I told her. One that s
old CDs as well as books, because the two places I liked to linger in were bookstores and record stores. And new stuff, because the margin was better. And there should be stationery, and coffee and pastries, and a decent kids’ section. A place where people could just hang out. “More of an intellectual houseboat,” I said, “less like a mausoleum.”

  “And you think you can make a go of this?”

  “With the right people, sure. I’d want people who feel about books as I do—that opening a box of books from a publisher or a distributor is like Christmas morning. You never know what you’re going to get, but you know it’s going to be special. You don’t even look at the invoice until you hold them in your hands, turn them over, sniff them, feel the tangible charge of yes! by God, yes! This is a book! With a staff like that, you’ll get all the customers you want.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Czabek. I’ve got about eight or ten houses I own that are in need of some serious rehabbing, not to mention my own. You help me with the subcontracting—working with all the independent contractors, making sure stuff is actually happening when it’s supposed to, and pitching in with some grunt labor when it’s not—and I help you with financing your little bookstore. What do you say?”

  “I say, Why would you be doing this for me given that I don’t know squat about houses?”

  “I like you, Czabek. You’re the first person who noticed I had a kid who didn’t get that Christ-she-has-a-kid look in his eye.” She poked around her vegetables and rice with her chopsticks. “Plus I’m pregnant, and in about six months I’m not going to be feeling like doing a whole hell of a lot.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t ‘oh’ me, Ace. You interested or not?”

  We became partners, then lovers, then parents. I would rather not go into what I felt making love to a woman with another man’s child already in her belly, and there was an unspoken rule between us that I was not to ask questions re: the fathers of her—our—first two children. She had taken me on as a partner, and my silence was part of the deal. We fixed houses, had Henry, opened the bookstore (Feed Your Head, my choice, was nixed in favor of Van Loon’s, the name of her cat), got married, had Sophie. To keep pace with the competition, we eventually opened two more stores and a website. In hindsight, I can see that was a mistake. The website does great with textbook sales, but two of the three stores are floundering and threatening to take down the third; like my father, I’m a victim of my own exuberance.

  I also made the mistake of hiring people who were too much like me. If my staff had their druthers, they’d stay in the back indefinitely, opening boxes, marveling at their contents, taking their 10 percent on their greatest treasures, and scooting for home. I have to urge them to wait on people, to take their turns at the cash register. “You’re customer service representatives,” I tell them. “Customer service! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” And my best employee, Jillian Kowalska, a single mom with two kids, early thirties, somebody who really needs this job, tells me, “This place would run a whole lot smoother if we didn’t have any customers.” “Well,” I tell her, “you just may get your wish.”

  Dorie was busy, too. Tireless. Her days were spent working with tenants, finding buyers for her homes, meeting with folks from neighborhood associations. She had Veedon Park on its way to being “an urban success story,” the kind featured in city magazines about neighborhoods on the rebound.

  Then, a few years ago, everything changed. Her businesses were fine, but nothing else was. She turned thirty-nine, her father died, and she’d about reached the end of what she hoped to accomplish in the neighborhood. All of this coincided with Sophie turning four and going to half-day kindergarten. We had done the domesticated bliss thing since before Henry, but now Dorie was restless. She mulled a run for city council but decided not to. She spent a lot of time staring out the window. Sighing. She’d look at me, and there was something in her eyes I didn’t want to acknowledge was disappointment.

  Her thirty-ninth birthday was one of those watershed events better spouses than I know to roll with. She bought a road bike and a mountain bike on consecutive weekends. She started hanging out at REI and the various cycle shops around town. Bookmarked all the online gear and touring sites. Pored over catalogs and magazines and cycling books. Found new friends. Did not seem particularly interested in introducing them to me. Our front hall became a staging area. For training runs she’d bike eighty miles to Madison, stay overnight, then bike back the next day. This anniversary trip for my parents is the first time in months that we’ve been in the car together for more than twenty minutes.

  Dorie marks her place in her magazine with her finger, stares out the window. She asks again, “What was it like for your mom, I wonder?” Then she answers her own question. “If it’d been me, I’d have gone crazy.”

  We were prosperity babies, but even prosperity has a price. Our mother recognized that when, just moments removed from her victory over the lascivious border guard, she burst into tears and our father had to pull off the road to console her. “It’s over,” our mother kept repeating as she wept. “It’s over, it’s all over.”

  What did this mean? Our father didn’t have a clue. How could he? The most he’d had to deal with our mother during the last four years was a week or two on his leaves, and most of that time was spent in bed making little Czabeks. Billy Ray King would have been pleased.

  “What?” our father asked our mother. “What’s all over? What?”

  Between bouts of weeping our mother sobbed, “E-e-e-e-e-ver-ry-y-y-y-thing!”

  When confronted with female weeping, men generally are at a loss. The most they can do is offer perplexed comfort, stroking hair and shoulders, kissing foreheads, whispering, “There, there” and “It’s all right,” as though they know what the matter is when frequently it is their not knowing, their absolute ignorance, and/or their inability to intuit or ferret out what’s wrong that is the problem’s root. Our father was a prince in the principality of not knowing.

  Another truism: Men like facts; women prefer feelings. Men like facts so much they are comforted by them even when the facts are against them. “Just give me the facts,” men say. “Give it to me straight, I can handle it.” Men like facts so much that what most people would consider opinion men turn into facts: “These are the cold hard facts,” a man will say, when what he’s just voiced is his own dubious view of a situation open to any number of interpretations. Women do the same thing, but there’s no alchemy involved: “That’s just how I feel,” a woman says, and the wall she puts up with her feelings is as solid and unscalable as anything a man puts together with his Erector set of facts. What women do that men don’t is allow their feelings to change. Facts, being hard, impenetrable objects, do not change. A man will not allow that to happen. A wall of feeling, on the other hand, can be disassembled. Our father, therefore, wanted to know what the facts were, at least as they pertained to him. He stayed away from what he couldn’t know, couldn’t intuit, and for him the facts were these:

  For most of the past four years he had been serving his country. For the second time, the second war. The first one he had lied his way into. Well, not exactly lied. He’d joined the Coast Guard at seventeen; his mother had signed for him. She thought he’d guard the Chicago River or something. Early in the war she’d seen Coast Guard boats slip upriver. She’d thought he’d do that. Pilot a patrol boat upriver and be home each evening for dinner. She wasn’t far off. But when the war ended his ship was designated a troop transport—all over the globe troops were waiting to come home. So off he went through the Suez Canal to Egypt, to the Philippines, to India, to Japan, and back home by way of Hawaii. He made several of these trips before he was mustered out and met our mother. He stayed in the reserves, though, and when Korea heated up he received his commission. But spent only part of his hitch in Korea. He was called up while the French were losing their taste for colonialism, and as they were pulling out of French Indochina (now emerging as the po
litically schizophrenic Vietnam), his ship was assigned the task of evacuating citizens from North to South, and vice versa. Years later, as our own country became mired in that debacle, and sentiment for and against the war was waged in the streets and in newspapers and on television sets, our father always nailed shut his end of the argument by saying, “Look, bucko, I was there. In ’fifty-four and ’fifty-five, when the French were pulling out.”

  He also suffered a double ulcer and got shipped stateside for treatment. Like many of the boats in the “mothball fleet”—ships used in World War II that were put back in service first for Korea and later for Vietnam—his was understaffed, and the junior grade officers picked up the slack. Our father was in charge of a landing boat, a gunnery crew, served as the ship’s decoder, the morale officer, and a medic, his time usually spent giving penicillin shots to men returning from leave—the men having found their own means of raising their morale. One of his men had had his morale raised so high he went AWOL and got courtmartialed. Fallen in love, the man said. Love, said our father. Right. To make sure the man remembered his indiscretion, our father dropped the syringe needle point first on the table—plonk! plonk! plonk!—before giving him his shot. Then our father got him off on a technicality. That kept the man from being dishonorably discharged, but afterward our father was continually passed over for promotion. The Navy, like an elephant, never forgets. The accumulated stress, coupled with the ingestion of quarts and quarts of black coffee, ate not one but two holes in his stomach, and since his being shipped stateside coincided with the end of his four-year hitch, he decided it was time to become a civilian again, start being a daddy to his two kids, and start being a husband to his wife.

  His wife, who had done what exactly during these past four years while he was serving his country? He didn’t know. He had ensconced her before he shipped out in a one-bedroom ranch linked by a shaded walkway to the larger Mission-style ranch in front of it. The owner, an elderly woman named Mrs. Mapole, had lost a son early in the Second World War. She and her husband, a machinist from Chicago, had moved out here after the war and had hoped her son’s wife would move into the guesthouse, but the daughter-in-law had stayed among her own people. Mr. Mapole had suffered a stroke and was rarely seen. Our parents’ rent helped cover expenses. Our father thought Mrs. Mapole could help with the babies and provide company for our mother, and vice versa.