The Company Car Page 7

  On weekends our parents drove out to the home site and Walter guided a very pregnant Susan Marie around the stacks of lumber and brick. Inside they walked from one unfinished room to the next, stepping around coiled wire and cut pieces of flashing and ductwork. Upstairs they checked on the skeletons of the bedroom and sewing room, the bones of the bath. They pulled down the stair that led to the attic, and our father poked his head up inside, announcing to our mother, who was waiting below, that they’d done a very good job indeed with the insulation.

  Just before one of their site visits, our mother discovered a problem. She had been going over the blueprints for the umpteenth time with Nomi and Artu. “See, here’s the back bedroom for the children—it’ll be huge—and the front bedroom, which I can use as a sewing room, and between is the upstairs bath and this large storage area.” She started with the second floor because it contained the sewing room, which simply meant it was a room where she could be alone from time to time—something that seemed more precious now that seven and a half people were living in a two-bedroom apartment. “And here’s the front entrance—we’ll line that with shrubs and flowers out to the walk—and the living room, like so.” Which was when she realized something was wrong. “Wally-Bear, isn’t the front entrance supposed to be in front?” Her finger tapped the blueprint. Wally-Bear came over. “Yes, yes it is,” said Wally-Bear.

  “But when we were at the house last time, weren’t the doors cut for side entrances?”

  Our father closed his eyes. He was trying to picture it. Nomi and Artu exchanged glances. “Yes, I think you’re right, they are,” our father said, his eyes still closed. Then he opened them. “It’s amazing you noticed a little thing like that.”

  Our mother exploded. “A little thing, Wally? A little thing? They’re building the house sideways, those drunken little shits!” Our mother burst into tears. She was never very good at swearing. She always either hesitated before she said a swearword or clipped it short, swallowing whatever effect she’d intended. Sometimes when she was really angry it came out sounding like she was amused instead. How could you take a woman seriously who sounded like she didn’t know how to swear? “Maybe we’re misremembering,” our father said. “Maybe we’re the ones who have it sideways. Tomorrow we’ll check and see.”

  The next day confirmed it. They arranged to meet Ernie and Charlie at the site. Our mother took one look at the doorless brick facing, with two windows that looked like wide-set eyes—this was clearly the side of the house, yet it was facing the street—and shrieked. She tumbled out of the car, stumbled over the packed dirt, our father ineffectively trying to guide and comfort her as she circled the house once, twice, thrice. Ernie pulled up in his Buick Skylark, and Charlie showed up in a Ford Fairlane soon after. Charlie took in the sight of our mother weeping and said, “Holy shit, I had it sideways.” Then he shook out a Lucky Strike and said philosophically, “Well, it’s six of one, half a dozen of another.”

  Ernie, in his best the-customer-is-always-right voice said, “No, Charlie. It’s not.”

  Our father held our mother to his chest and patted her hair and said, “Hey, hey. Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay, really.” But even he seemed to know that now was not the time to echo Charlie Podgazem’s “It’s six of one, half a dozen of another.”

  Our mother was with Ernie Klapatek on this one. “No, it’s not,” she wailed. “It’s not, it’s not. My house, my beautiful house! It’s ruined!”

  “I musta read the blueprints wrong,” said Charlie Podgazem. “That happens sometimes.”

  “It only happens when you’re drunk,” said our mother.

  “Hey, that’s no way to be, Susan. I make mistakes, sure, but it’s not like I’m doin’ it on purpose.”

  “You’re drunk right now,” said our mother.

  Charlie pulled himself very erect and tugged at the belt around his waist. “Only a little.”

  Ernie pulled our father aside. Time to salvage what he could. Wiping his glasses, he said, “Wally, no question we got a problem. The question, though, is what are we gonna do about it?”

  Our mother heard that. “What are we going to do about it? We are going to fix it, that’s what we are going to do about it.”

  “It’s not that simple, Susan.” Ernie tipped his head, meaning our father should follow him. This was man talk. They went around back. Our mother stood looking at what should have been the back and was instead the side entrance. She was inconsolable.

  Around in back, Ernie lit a Chesterfield and dragged his toe in the dirt. “Much as I’d like to help the little lady, there’s not a whole lot I can do. Fact is, it’s more complicated than simply taking down some bricks and cutting a new doorway. Fact is, Charlie turned the whole damn design sideways. Fact is, I can’t just pick the thing up off the foundation and spin it ninety degrees to set it right now, can I? Charlie messed up, but it’s not easy to fix, you understand?”

  “Why don’t you just say that to Susan?”

  “I’m going to, Wally, but I just wanted us to be in agreement first, you see? The men wear the pants in your family, right? What I say to Susan—hey, that’s only mollification. You’re the guy I’ve got to win over here, right, big guy?”

  Ernie was preaching to the converted. Fact is, even without Ernie’s speech our father would have been content to let the whole thing drop. “Six of one, half a dozen of another,” our father believed, as though that kind of stoicism solved everything.

  “So what are you going to say to Susan?”

  “Same thing I said to you, only more so. I’ll explain the positives of this kind of arrangement—and hey, there are a lot of them, as you already understand.” He put his hand on our father’s shoulder. “And you, Wally, are one guy I knew would understand.”

  “You don’t know Susan. She’s going to want something to sweeten the deal.”

  “Sweeten the deal?”

  “You know, to make up for turning our house sideways.”

  Ernie Klapatek got a hard look on his face, as though he were about to say something terrible, but then his eyes softened and he grinned. Our father relaxed a little. Whatever the terrible thing was that Ernie was contemplating, it had passed. But Ernie’s grin still had an edge to it. “Hey, hey, Wally, let’s make nice here. There’s no reason, no reason in the world that we can’t work this out to everybody’s satisfaction. You got a sideways house you don’t like. Fine, don’t buy it. You think you’re the only one wants to buy a house? I got people stacked three deep here waiting on these houses.” He dropped his voice again. “Why you think I hired a Joe Schlepperman like Podgazem in the first place, eh? I got house orders to fill, I need people. It was either him or hire a colored, okay? Besides, I did this as a favor to you. And it’s not the first time. The guy could barely keep his sticks straight when we were in the band together, right? But he was from your neighborhood so I said, fine, he’s Wally’s friend, he’s in the band even if he can’t tell his drumsticks from his wipehole. And now he’s done a number on your house. Okay, I’m sorry. My mistake, I hired him. But it was as a favor to you, okay?”

  Our father was dumbfounded. Ernie Klapatek—friend, bandmate, member of his wedding party—was threatening to sell his house out from under him! And acting like it was his own fault it was happening.

  Ernie was still grinning. “Hey, hey, Wally. I see by the look on your face you’re taking this personal. We can work this out, really. I want to see you in that house, I do. And I understand about Susan. She needs to feel like we’re making restitution. It can’t be changed, but she wants something to make up for that. I understand. It’s a human enough desire. But, hey, Wally, it’s not like you’re gonna go to court on me because one of your friends messed up, right? Even though your friend messed up, I stand behind every one of my houses. And you are a friend. I take that serious. So here’s what we’re gonna do . . .”

  Wally got the feeling that all this talk was just buying Ernie Klapatek time to figure
out what he was going grab out of his ass next, but to our father, that was okay. In the curious world of our father’s logic, a man who reached big was allowed to break the rules. This was true in the military—you got away with whatever you could get away with. And it was true, too, when he got married—Billy Ray King foisting his pregnant daughter off on a national TV audience, and giving her and her lout of a boyfriend the wedding presents destined for him and our mother. And it was true now that he was buying a house somebody else had bungled the building of. Ernie Klapatek was going to get what he wanted because he was willing to reach for it rather than simply desire it. Wanting alone got you nothing. It was the size of the reach that mattered. Our father, never possessing this quality himself, was always in awe of the people who did.

  Wally was listening to what Ernie was telling him, but he wasn’t really listening. He was nodding agreement. He was still nodding when Ernie led him back to Susan and started telling her how it was. How a house turned sideways like that could be a good feature. “Lots of people have carports on the sides of their homes. Haven’t you seen those big places in Lake Forest and Oak Park? They have side entrances and they build a roof, even a whole room, right above where they park.” Would Ernie be willing to do such a thing to make this right? our mother wanted to know. Well, no, he couldn’t do that, he was already doing this house at not much above cost as a favor to our father. If he added anything he’d have to charge them, and in some ways maybe he should do that, but he wasn’t going to. Not to mention it wouldn’t look right. This was a nice house, but a porte cochere—that’s what they called those carports on big houses—would look out of place here among these ranches and bungalows.

  So what was he going to do? our mother wanted to know.

  Well, said Ernie, taking off his glasses and wiping them. He was going to do something equally wonderful.

  And what would that be? asked our mother.

  Leave it the way it was, and let it grow on them, said Ernie Klapatek. Then if they didn’t like it he could come back and do something else for them. Like what? asked our mother. Finish off the basement, said Ernie. In a few years they might want a pool table down there, and it would look better if the basement were finished.

  Or, said Ernie Klapatek, if they really, really didn’t like the house as it was, they could tear up the deed to purchase and wait for the next house, but they’d have to wait at the end of the line. He had people lined up as it was for houses, here and all over. People were crazy for houses outside the city. This was a nice house, sideways or not, and he’d like to see them happy in it, and frankly it’d be their own damn fault if the house ended up being sold to somebody else.

  “It’s a nice house, sideways or not,” Charlie Podgazem echoed.

  “Shut up, Charlie,” said our mother. While Ernie and our father were out back, our mother had considered the other three sides from every angle. Charlie Podgazem was her shadow, his belly as big as our mother’s. Our mother had got over crying, and Charlie had not said a word during her swings back and forth. He was afraid she’d either start crying again or bite his head off. Once she regained her composure, he was right to fear the latter.

  Our mother turned to our father. “What do you think, Wally? And if you say, ‘Six of one, half a dozen of another,’ I’ll scream.”

  That took away our father’s greatest weapon: the cliché that said nothing, that smoothed over everything. Not that it mattered. Even before he said, “I think we should let it ride,” our mother knew he was going to. He simply did not, could not understand. For him the sideways house was fine, just fine. The driveway was on the side. It simply meant they’d have more yard.

  Ernie Klapatek shook our parents’ hands and drove away. Charlie Podgazem tipped his hat to our father and half-smiled at our mother—he did not dare shake her hand—and drove away as well. Our father folded his wife in his arms and said it was going to be okay.

  But it was not okay to our mother. Oh, sure, they were moving to Elmhurst. But their house was sideways! Her kitchen, instead of looking out into the backyard, would look into the neighbor’s bedroom; her living room, instead of looking onto the street and the elms that lined it, would look into the other neighbor’s driveway. Wally-Bear wouldn’t notice because he wouldn’t be home often enough to care. Wally-Bear didn’t understand because his yearnings were simply for a house he could call his own. He didn’t understand the concept of perfect family happiness that should exist inside the egg of that house. This was supposed to be the house that God built in the spot God had ordained they should live their lives. The house that God built, dammit, not the house that Charlie Podgazem built sideways!

  Too late, too late, she realized that tears—her promises to herself that she would not cry notwithstanding—were streaming down her face. And there was Wally, telling her, There, there, there, there, it was okay, it was—all, all of it, in its entirety—going to be okay. And the thing of it was, she believed him. That was the problem: that it was going to be okay. Not perfect, not grand, not magnificent, not dreamlike, not anything but okay.

  4. The Kaopectate Wars

  THAT’LL PUT HAIR BETWEEN YOUR TOES

  There is a toll that marriage exacts for those who believe in it—a slow rubbing away of the individual soul—and that is perhaps why, at a certain point in a marriage, people question what the hell they are doing in it. And the union itself? I don’t know. Lately with Dorie, I don’t know much. But I can say with some certainty that Wally and Susan Marie Czabek moved, with three children, into a house dropped sideways at 747 Swain Avenue in January 1957, and that all their troubles at first seemed surmountable. Our mother, after her argument with Ernie Klapatek, did what countless women who have lost one of the big and intangible arguments of their marriages have done for centuries: She cried and moved on. She set about making that bare house, so new you could still smell the paint, the drywall, and the cement in the basement, a home. Her home. She hung curtain rods, sewed sheets with pleated gatherings for curtains, bought a horizontal freezer for the basement, a Norge refrigerator and GE stove for the kitchen.

  They were broke, they were saddled with debt, they were happy. That, anyway, was what they wanted us to believe. And even when we had inklings that they weren’t happy, our parents worked hard to keep us from knowing. They worked hard to keep from knowing it themselves, too, until the night when a dollar bill and a bout with the flu yanked things into focus.

  It’s easy to understand how things before that weren’t in focus. In a little over eight years they packed that house with four more kids. How in God’s name could they have managed to focus on anything? Here’s how we stacked up:

  Sarah (Sarah Lucinda—1953)

  Robert Aaron (he was always called by both names—1954)

  Emcee (that’s me, Emil Cedric, what were they thinking?—1956)

  Ike (James Eisenhower, what were they thinking II?—1958)

  Wally Jr. (Walter Sr. finally gets his wish—1960)

  Ernie (Ernest John, sounds like a variety of Van Camp’s pork and beans—1963)

  Peggy (Megan Sue, born with one leg shorter than the other—1965)

  As our father observed, two girls separated by a basketball team. It was unfair to the girls, having that many boys in a row. We ganged up on them, ignored them. Sarah Lucinda, feeling romantic, wanted to be called Lucy, after the heroine in the Chronicles of Narnia, but we called her Cinderella.

  She spent a lot of time hiding from us, and she was doing exactly that when Peggy found the door to the basement open and tumbled down the stairs, breaking her hip and making the shortness of the one leg more pronounced. Peg Leg Meg, we called her. It drove her to tears. Calling Sarah Cinderella drove her to tears, too. “Stop that!” our mother told us when they ran to her crying, their own cries to get us to stop having proved futile. But how could we? We loved Peg. We loved Sarah. We had to torment them beyond reason.

  It was, to be sure, a male world. The neighborhood was filled with me
n like our father, all working nine to five, and housewives like our mother. The men were recently quit of the Korean War or WWII, and these were their first houses. They’d gotten educated on the G.I. Bill, married their high school or college sweethearts, and were happy to be affiliated with their employers, to do good work, and to come home and pump out kids as fast as their wives were able. They joined men’s service organizations and clubs—the Kiwanis, the Loyal Order of Moose, the Elks, the Shriners, the American Legion—and went to church on Sunday morning. They drank on Friday night, watched the fights Saturday night, bowled Wednesdays. Their wives got driver’s licenses and went to Kroger’s or even to downtown Chicago. They drank coffee midmorning, watched their kids, did laundry. They spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone talking about the quotidian events of their day as though rehashing them would make them go away. It was the only therapy they could afford. They bought books with accompanying records: How to Belly Dance for Your Husband, How to Make Love to Your Husband. These men and their wives were pioneers on a new plain, and they watched with satisfaction as backhoes and bulldozers chewed up the sod for their homesteads and churches.