The Company Car Read online

  “Walter! He worked all day on that.”

  “What, and I didn’t work all day?”

  “He wanted to surprise you.”

  “So I’m surprised, I’m surprised. Here”—he reaches for the thread—it takes his hand a few tries to locate it, he doesn’t even look at me—and ties the broken ends together. Then his feet go to the fridge, and there’s the pffsst! of a beer being opened. “Okay, pull. I’ll be surprised.”

  “You know, Wally, sometimes you’re a real prick.”

  “What, what did I do?”

  “You knew these kids were sick when you left this morning, you knew I was going to be with them all day, their behinds running like faucets and vomiting, and still you’re late. Just once I’d like to see you make it home on time. Just once I’d like to see you sober.”

  Our father’s feet make steps toward our mother’s. “Oh, come on, honey-bunch, you’ve seen me sober plenty of times.”

  “Don’t touch me! And don’t think you can joke your way out of this one.”

  “Oh, honey—”

  “Don’t, Wally. Don’t even try. Emmie”—our mother was the only person who called me that; to everyone else I was Em or Emcee—“has been waiting for you for hours, and the others have just about given up on you. And frankly, so have I.”

  I look out from under the Formica table, and our mother has her arms crossed over her chest. Our father is looking abashed and guilty and more than a little somber. A couple times he tries lifting his hand to our mother’s shoulder, and our mother either shakes him off or swats it away. “I said don’t touch me, Wally, and I mean it. You think you can waltz in five hours late when I’ve been struggling with sick kids all day and you’re going to love me right up and make it better?” Our mother laughs, a high scornful laugh that scares me. “Ha, fat chance! Like you could do anything in your present state anyway.”

  “Aw, Susan Marie, there’s no—”

  “Don’t Susan Marie me, Wally. You want to make yourself useful, you can go in and sing while I give them their good-night medicine. They might like that even if I don’t. Or maybe you’d like to take a crack at the mound of diarrheaed-on laundry I’ve got waiting in the basement.” Then our mother said, “Come on, Emmie. Time for bed for you, too.”

  We knew things had truly taken a strange turn a few minutes later, when our father stepped inside our room, accordion strapped to his chest, and found our mother dosing us with Kaopectate. “There, that’ll put hair between your—” started our father before he saw what our mother was giving us. “That’s Kaopectate,” said our father.

  “Yes, yes, it is,” said our mother with forced calmness. She was trembling. Something was coming, something was about to happen. We could feel it.

  “Parke-Davis makes that.”

  Our mother turned the bottle in her hands. The spoon was chalky from her having already dosed Ike and Wally Jr., both of whom liked medicine that left grit in your mouth.

  “Yes, so I see.”

  “I work for Dinkwater-Adams.”

  “I know who you work for, Wally.”

  “Dinkwater-Adams makes a very fine antidiarrheal.”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “I sell it.”

  Our mother said nothing to this.

  “We get it for free.”

  Still nothing from our mother, except she placed the Kaopectate lid on the night table and poured out a tablespoonful for Sarah, who was waiting with her prim little nose in the air.

  “What are people going to think, Susan, when we tell them that you bought Kaopectate for diarrhea when you could have gotten Pecarol from me for free?”

  “We aren’t going to tell them, are we?” She was doing Robert Aaron now. I was next.

  “You’re changing the subject!”

  Our mother remained calm. The spoon was filling right before my eyes. If I breathed, it would be like a sudden storm on a little lake. “I’m not. You asked me what would people say—”

  The spoon suddenly flew up before my face, the Kaopectate blotching my face and hair and jammies. I had seen it coming, of course. A man with an accordion strapped to his chest moves slowly even when he’s angry. Even when he’s furious, as our father was now.

  “Damn it to hell, Susan Marie!” Wally Jr. and Ike started crying. “What in the hell do you think it says about me? A man can’t even get his own wife to take what’s freely offered!”

  Said our mother quite evenly, “Sometimes the wife doesn’t want what’s offered. And,” she continued, “I wish you wouldn’t swear in front of the children. You see how it upsets them.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” thundered our father—we knew that was a bad one—“I’ll swear when I goddamn want to. I will feed my children Pecarol when I goddamn want to. I will not come home and find my wife feeding my children Kaopectate when I work for a competing company!”

  Our mother’s eyes narrowed. Her eyes flashed green, green like emeralds, like 7UP bottles with sunlight glinting through them. We were all lined up on the edge of my brother’s bed like gargoyles, some of us crying, some of us shocked into silence. “Is that what this is about? Your need to prove yourself in my eyes? Throw your weight around? Well, let me tell you something, mister. We use Kaopectate in this household because Kaopectate is a superior product. And I will feed it to my children when and if they need it. And if you came home once in a while on time, then maybe some of us would avail ourselves of what’s available in the way of other company products, assuming they were still functioning properly.”

  The accordion sagged ever so slightly, sighing out its harmonicalike breath.

  “I think we need to continue this discussion downstairs,” said our father.

  “Fine,” said our mother. “There are some things I’d like to say to you that the children really shouldn’t hear.”

  We’d have heard them anyway, even if we hadn’t snuck down the stairs once they got going. Shouts from our mother: “Let me do something in my life once in a while, why don’t you?” and “You don’t understand,” and “You think money grows on trees?” and our father’s heated, “Who works, huh? Who works?” “Oh,” said our mother. “And I don’t?”

  “What’s the point of being married if a man can’t trust his wife while he’s unwinding after a hard day of work?” shouted our father.

  “Then maybe,” shouted our mother back, “maybe we should think about not being married!”

  “What are you saying, Susan? Susan, do you realize what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying,” said our mother, repeating herself now, more coolly, her voice quavering, “maybe we should think about not being married.”

  This freezes us in our seats. Our father has brought up the possibility of the Duckwas getting divorced before. “Ted says he and Lorna are having problems,” our father had told our mother. We were eating casserole—part of our never-ending austerity measures because our parents kept having kids on our father’s salary. Our father opened a can of beer with a church key and poured its contents into one of our milk cups. “He says he’s thought sometimes about how maybe it would be better for everybody if they did—get divorced, I mean.” Our mother had dropped her fork on her plate right then and put her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening to this,” she said. “It’s not right. It’s a sin.” “He says he’s thought about leaving her.”

  Our mother started making this funny sound then, like a low moaning of wind in the trees. That was how our mother was for a long time early on, when our father or somebody else brought up things happening in the world that she didn’t want to hear. It was just ahoooooooo! like wind in the trees when that stuff was mentioned. Ahoooooooo! Our father looked at his beer. “You know, this stuff tastes terrible when you drink it out of Tupperware.” This was a safe remark and allowed our mother to rejoin the conversation. “I put the glass glasses further back in the cupboard. I’ll get you one,” she said. When she came back to the table with a tumbler she said, “The k
ids were breaking too many glasses. You have to be careful.” Now she was looking at us, but we couldn’t tell if she was addressing us or our father. “So many things are fragile. If you’re not careful, they break.”

  Our father emptied his beer into the tumbler. “I’ll tell that to Ted.”

  And yet now it was our mother raising this very same possibility to our father, and she was saying it like she didn’t care who heard it. What were we to make of this? Would our house break? That was what we were told about kids (the only one we actually knew was Ollie Cicerelli) who’d gone through this—that they were the products of broken homes. I had checked out Ollie’s house just to be sure. It was a bungalow, like the Duckwas’, only tinier, and a zigzag crack did indeed work up the side of the porch for four or five bricks like the steps themselves.

  I had already read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in the Classic Comics edition, and I imagined this steplike crack eventually developing into a foundation-shattering fissure. We would come home from school one day and find a smoking pile of rubble where the Cicerelli house had been. Was that what would happen to us? If our parents weren’t married anymore, would our house come down around our ears? Would we be given to other families to be raised while our mother and father carried on with their separate lives? It seemed both utterly possible and too awful to contemplate.

  It was quiet for a while in the kitchen, and then our father said, “Guess I better kiss the kids good night.” We snuck back up the stairs and slunk into our beds, not daring to breathe a word of this to each other. “I feel sick,” Ike told me, but that may have just been the flu. We arranged ourselves in postures of sleep, but that didn’t fool our father. He went from bed to bed, giving us wet kisses from pursed lips. “You know I love you, don’t you?” our father told us. “I love you guys, you know that, right?” We nodded, scared and sympathetic and hoping that he would bring out his accordion and sing, that our mother would appear behind him—even a wan, tight-lipped smile pressed into her face would still be a smile—and we’d know that the union would be preserved. But he just stood there, his hand on the light switch as though it still needed to be turned off, his eyes, glassy in the hall light, taking us in.

  The next day our mother told us it had all been a big misunderstanding. Nobody was getting divorced from anybody. And we did and did not believe her. Especially since that night marked the end of the serenades—no more “Ghost Riders in the Sky” for us. No more family sing-alongs. The accordion went into the hall closet at the foot of the stairs and stayed there, coming out so rarely after that that our latter siblings didn’t believe us when we told them of those once-magical bedtime serenades.

  So began the Kaopectate Wars. Like the Cold War, it was about other things. A war of surrogacy. We did not recognize it for what it was: our mother’s tiny, continuing rebellion against our father. There would be others. And like most of the mysteries of and between adults, it would occur mostly in code.

  5. And That’s the Name of That Tune

  “Okay, you kids, get in the car.” Trips started like that. Our father stacked us like cordwood. Big kids in the wayback if the middle seat was up. Our father had convinced Dinkwater-Adams that his company car should be a station wagon. Easy to haul around samples. So he got one, a Chevy Bel Air, with what felt like real panels of wood on the side. Only it wasn’t wood, it was something better. Plastic. Anything really good was being made out of plastic—plates, silverware, hula hoops, yo-yos, telephones. It was just a matter of time before the cars themselves would be made out of this superior material.

  The only provision the company put on the car’s use, which our father said was for insurance purposes, was that the sole driver had to be our father. Our mother had no trouble with that. She was probably the last woman in America who believed it wasn’t necessary for her to learn how to drive. There were times when we weren’t sure our father knew how, either. He had a penchant for coming home and running over our bicycles and tricycles, for crunching our Radio Flyer into the gravel of the drive or pinning it underneath his car or against the concrete stoop outside the kitchen door.

  “You kids shouldn’t leave your stuff in the drive,” he’d say. He’d have a bemused look on his face, like he was puzzled being home at all.

  “Been to the Office?” our mom would ask.

  “I stopped for a few with the boys.”

  “More than a few, if your parking’s any indication.”

  “The kids shouldn’t leave stuff in the drive. How many times do I have to tell them?”

  “How many times have I asked you not to go to the Office?” said our mother.

  Our father not going into work—was she crazy? Everybody’s father left in the morning either for work or for the Office. Our father usually left for work, but he came home from the Office. The only exception was Ollie Cicerelli, who didn’t have a father that we knew about, and whose mother was a waitress at the Woolworth’s on York Road.

  When we weren’t envying him his freedom—he was frequently left alone until 7:00 or 8:00 P.M. and had the run of the neighborhood—we felt sorry for Ollie Cicerelli. He had only himself to keep himself company, and we had a wealth of relatives, who it seemed, we were always running to see.

  We even had a relative living with us—Grandma Nomi, which meant Artu was living with us as well. Artu kept up their apartment in downtown Chicago while Nomi recovered from hip surgery, but most nights he slept at our house. In the morning, our father dropped him off at the train station before making his calls. No question, this made for a crowded house, and that might explain why our father spent so much time at the Office.

  That’s what we wanted to believe, anyway—that there was a correlation between Nomi and Artu being in the house and our father’s being at the Office. The other explanation—that he was getting away from us kids—we didn’t want to believe. According to our mother, all he had talked about while he was in Korea was how, if he lived, he wanted to be the father of a big family. So now he was—there were five of us kids and another on the way. How could he not want to be around?

  It was easier to explain the friction between him and Nomi. Nomi and Artu were urban Democrats, and our father was a suburban Republican. Artu usually held his tongue on matters of politics, and outside the house our father did, too, but inside it he was lord of his castle, and the idea that this chain-smoking, bedridden woman upstairs was spouting off pieties about Jack Kennedy and what an evil man Richard Nixon was, was simply too much to bear. We didn’t understand the politics of it, but there had been arguments ever since our mother had gotten a letter that made her cry. It was 1962, and after our mother composed herself she explained to us that our father might have to go away because of a bad man in Cuba. He ended up not having to go, but our father seemed to bear a personal grudge against President Kennedy in the same way that Nomi bore one against Richard Nixon.

  We noticed in these arguments that our father was the only one shouting. Nomi spoke very calmly and smoked her cigarettes, rolling the tips around the inside edge of her ashtray to get the ash to drop. Then she’d hoist the cigarette up by the side of her face and cross her other arm under her chest. “Your problem, Walter,” she’d say, “is you believe the crap they’re telling you.”

  Our father would storm off, complaining that no one allowed him a chance to think. Later we’d find out he went to the Office.

  For the longest time, where our father’s Office was and what he did there was a mystery. He did his salesman’s reports at the kitchen table on Sunday and Thursday nights. Did he sometimes do his paperwork at the Office then, too? We knew he worked hard. He must’ve worked even harder at the Office, because whenever he came back from there he seemed addled, as though he’d been thinking too hard.

  What we did know was that the Office was the place to which our father disappeared, and from which he returned a different person altogether. The Office never failed to wreak some kind of change on him, a change our mother vociferously
protested when she thought we were asleep. Their one big blowup in front of us must have scared them. They didn’t do something like that again. Instead they went back to putting a good face on things when we were present, or sniping at each other in a minor way. The howitzers came out only after we were put to bed. Some nights we’d be awakened by our mother’s screaming and tears. “You’re not the man I married!” she shouted one night, which made us wonder who she thought she’d married, since our father had been like this as long as we could remember. Still, it was obvious to us, upstairs in our beds listening, that the world of adults was a hard place in which to live, strange and dark, and that our father’s long hours at the Office were taking a toll on him, and on our mother, and the best thing we could do was steer a wide path around him, and step quietly. Our task was made easier by the fact that our father was gone so frequently, and did not much like taking us with him anywhere when he was home, unless it was all of us, and we were visiting our relatives, where we were expected. It did not seem, though, that our father much wanted to visit our relatives, either.

  Perhaps this was because the relatives we saw most often were our mother’s. Nomi and Artu were already living with us, and the contrast with our father’s parents was striking. When we visited Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza, it felt like we were being put under glass. Despite her bouncy name, Grandma Cza-Cza was a serious woman, and she sat in her house knitting afghans and throws for her couches and chairs, as if she were one of those babushkas ensconced in Eastern European museums who eke out a pittance guarding the galleries while knitting scarves, mittens, and balaclavas for the coming winter.