The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  Just before she left for California, Helen called on our mother again. “He moved me out there to East Bumbleshoot, and now he’s raising chinchillas. It’s creepy. He’s in the barn all the time in the evenings. I could be in a negligee with a vodka martini in my hand and he’d rather be feeding them pellets. Beware a man with a scheme. He thinks he’s doing it all for you—like I’ve been crying for a chinchilla fur coat—when he’s really just doing it for himself. I decided to leave while I still possessed some semblance of sanity.”

  “Good riddance,” said our father. “No kids, leaving him like that, for no good reason.”

  “Walter,” said our mother. “She had very good reasons. Reasons you don’t know anything about.”

  “What reasons? What?”

  Our mother couldn’t articulate them. Perhaps they were too close to her own, and she didn’t dare voice them. Our mother simply said, “She’s my friend. I miss her.”

  “Well your friend broke Louie’s heart,” said our father, “and I say, good riddance.”

  Our father displayed the same lack of comprehension and anger whenever our mother mentioned she wanted a pet, which she’d been doing for months now. “Eight people in this house and you want to add a ninth? And I’m not even counting Artu!”

  “It’s not like a cat takes up the same room as a person,” countered our mother.

  “There’s no room, no room, no room!” said our father.

  “A cat can be as quiet as a mouse,” said our mother.

  “That’s what you said about Nomi!”

  “Let’s go look at pet supplies,” said our mother the next time we went to Woolworth’s.

  Such a trip was our family’s equivalent of Hannibal crossing the Alps. Pregnant with Ernie, pushing Wally Jr. in a stroller that balked at every curb, our mother waddled down Madison to the York Road bus stop, accompanied by me. I’d been plucked from our fort—a ramshackle building on an empty lot down the street constructed out of two-by-fours, plywood, and paneling we’d liberated from various building sites—by our mother, who already had Wally Jr. trussed and temporarily pacified in the stroller. Sarah and Robert Aaron complained. Hadn’t I just had an “out”? Our mother insisted; I was born the day after Christmas and therefore shortchanged in the celebration department. (“You were born on Boxing Day,” said our father. “In England, we could return you.”)

  I knew what awaited us at Woolworth’s: counter stools and a waitress named Madge, who looked at us as though we were an incarnation of the Holy Family. Soup for our mother and a grilled-cheese sandwich for us, the plate garnished with the strangest condiment in the world: parsley.

  After a leisurely lunch, we would wander up and down the aisles looking at glassware and plate sets, small appliances and kitchen supplies, wire racks of greeting cards, wall clocks and alarm clocks, women’s underthings—I averted my eyes and/or stared guiltily—and then, way in the back, near the storeroom and the employee lounge and the bathroom, the pet area.

  I felt strange being on “an out” with our mother. In the wake of my trip to the Office, I thought I had something special with our father. But I was mistaken in that belief. He took us—me—on other errands around town, but after my special trip I became one of “you kids” again, and the Office reverted to being a mysterious place, a place to which our father disappeared, and from which he returned a different person altogether. I could not enlighten my siblings as to what went on at the Office because I felt sworn to secrecy—“Loose lips sink ships”—and because I was reasonably sure our mother would take a dim view of my having been there at all. I did not understand what had happened that one time, but I had the feeling that our father, when tested, had acted nobly. This was not our mother’s interpretation of his behavior, though it wasn’t clear whether her response was to the incident with Shirley, or to the fact that as often as not he did not act so nobly. At Grandma Hubie’s, for example, I had wanted him to act noble and large and kindhearted, and he hadn’t. He’d acted small and mean and aggressive. And he had been acting this way for a while now. This, too, was taking its toll on our mother.

  I should have known that on an out with our mother I should not bring up our father’s behavior, but I think I wanted these essentially separate worlds, our mother’s and our father’s, to connect. So at the end of lunch I blew it. I was softly spinning myself back and forth on my stool as our mother figured out the bill and handed two dollars to the waitress. She got her change and put a quarter next to her plate. “That’s a tip,” our mother said.

  “I know,” I said. “And here’s another: Loose lips sink ships.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Her lips went thin. “Never mind. I should have known.”

  “He always leaves a dollar,” I said, as though I knew what I was talking about.

  “I’m sure he does,” said our mother, getting off her stool as quickly as she could manage. “Come on,” she said, “we’re doing some shopping. And on your father’s nickel,” she added.

  We went straight to Pets. “I should have done this years ago,” said our mother. We went from cage to cage, staring the animals in the beak, in the snout, in whatever they offered us for a nose. “I want a bird, Emmie,” she said, peering into the cages. “I want something that knows what I feel and can sing.”

  What did my mother feel? I had no idea. But I knew she couldn’t sing. She had a terrible singing voice, a fact attested to every Sunday when she sang “Faith of Our Fathers” and “Ave Maria.” It was a voice I was to inherit, and I felt sympathy for her, our father’s tenor soaring over her cracks and croaks (mine, too, though I didn’t know that at the time).

  I did wonder, though, if this had anything to do with our father coming home from the Office with another woman’s name written on his back in unguent. It turned out Shirley had pressed her nail down rather hard when she wrote—our father’s grinning at the time must have been him gritting his teeth—and the letters of her name stood out in raised white letters against the burnt offering of his back as though they were embossed there. I know this because the day after our visit to the Office our father requested that I, not our mother, put the unguent on his back. “If Emcee’s going to have a medical career, he’s going to have to learn how to do these things,” said our father, which was the first I’d heard of my aspirations toward medicine. Our mother skeptically raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I applied unguent, smearing it as gently as I could on our father’s back, gingerly going over the raised, ghostly letters. It was not quite right, I was sure, for Shirley to have written her name like that, and it made me feel strange, my fingers tracing their raised surfaces. I tried putting on extra unguent, hoping to cover them under an orange smear, but they were still visible, like a message written in the mud of a glacial lake.

  “What do you think of that one?” our mother said, pointing to a brilliantly hued parrot gnawing on its cage. I didn’t like the way it was looking at me. It looked sinister, like it might come into our house, learn our secrets, and fly away with them banded to its leg. I shook my head. “That’s okay,” said our mother, pushing the stroller to the next cage. “It’s too expensive anyway.” The mynah birds were similarly expensive, which was fine with me. The orange spots of bare flesh next to their eyes gave them a tough look, as though they’d put on Halloween masks for the sole purpose of taking your candy. The canaries I didn’t like because they looked like furred lemons, and it was beginning to look as if our mother was simply indulging her wish to own a pet by extending the sphere of her sighs when she stopped in front of one last cage that held not one but two parakeets. They were the color of unripe bananas, pale yellow heads and bodies, sickly green wings, the green in the sixty-four-color Crayola set that you used when you wanted to draw trees leafing out in spring. One was chattering away, the other stood stock-still on its perch, its head canted a little as though it were tired of listening to its partner.

  “That one,” said my mother, pointing at the still one. “It need
s me.”

  Had I been the sullen, smart-ass teenager I would later become I might have said, “Great, Mom, parakeet intervention.” Or had I been the smarty-pants college boy with one psychology course under his belt I’d become after that I might have said, “You’re nesting, Mom. And really, a bird to represent your pathetic desires to get away? Get real.” But I wasn’t seventeen or nineteen. I was six, and what I said was fatal. What I said was “What will Dad say?”

  My mother’s answer chilled me. “I don’t care what your father says,” my mother said, clutching her belly like it was a basket full of laundry.

  She must have seen the look of horror on my face. “We’ll get him something, too,” she said brightly, and indeed, in choosing a goldfish and a pair of neon tetras for our father, her mood noticeably brightened, as though the purpose of our trip had been to get him a present all along.

  To buy my silence my mother also said I could pick out a turtle. They were all alike, but I spent a great deal of time trying to find one with the right personality, one that could contemplate the world impassively, yet also paddle around just for the fun of it when I wanted a more lively companion. This was nigh impossible since the turtles seemed to do only one thing or the other, but at last I chose one, a slow paddler that came ashore on the wading pool’s hump of sand. He winked at me—I was sure it was a wink, not a random blink—assuring me that he could go a lot faster if I wanted him to. He was still resting when the Woolworth’s clerk followed my finger and plucked my turtle out from the masses. “You got a good one,” said the clerk, a thin, balding older gentleman with glasses slipping down his nose, and I wondered how he knew. Still, it confirmed my choice. The Woolworth’s man had concurred with me, his white lab coat lending an air of esteem and wisdom to my choice.

  Meanwhile our mother was picking out equipment for this mélange of wildlife she had suddenly decided to buy. She had to get a cart from the front to hold it all. I didn’t look when she paid, it was too embarrassing. This pregnant woman (which, as far as I knew, was simply how our mother always looked) trying to push both a stroller with Wally Jr. in it and a cart filled with the accoutrements of her sudden whim: a fishbowl, a windmill for the fishbowl, a squat bag of fish, a birdcage (mildly Victorian with its gazebolike roof), a box of birdseed, some gizmo for the parakeet to sharpen its beak on, a little plastic tub for my turtle, and a shoebox with my turtle in it. For all this she laid out what looked like a week’s worth of grocery money.

  We must have been quite a sight, struggling out of the store and across the railroad tracks to where we could pick up the bus back to York and Madison. A woman with a polka-dotted housedress stretched across her middle and a determined, exasperated look on her face trying to steer a stroller loaded to the gills while clutching the hand of an eggheaded two-year-old, his abashed older brother lagging behind.

  Balanced precariously atop the packages in the stroller was the bag of fish and the cage with the parakeet. I expected both at any moment to topple into the street. I could see it very clearly: the bag bursting open, the fish gasping and flipping in the street, the parakeet chirping piteously as cars struck it glancing blows until a Wonder Bread delivery van put it out of its misery with a direct hit. This seemed like the logical conclusion to our adventure.

  That we made it home without incident was due only to our mother’s quick hands at constantly righting the pile, and her determination to ignore the wails of Wally Jr., who was now missing his nap. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” our mother hissed to Wally Jr., as though a whiny two-year-old could be looked at separately from his milieu. To our mother, making a spectacle of yourself was one of the worst things you could do. She had an endearing sort of blindness in applying this notion to herself.

  “Look what we brought, look what we brought!” our mother cried as we arrived home. She was tired, but she put on a show of exuberance so that we would all be excited with “our” acquisitions before our father came home. He would be less likely to order everything back to the store if we were wildly enthusiastic. “Walter, the children,” our mother could say, and our father could concede or play the ogre, a role he played often but never consciously. To our mother’s credit, she used this stratagem seldom, but she used it on this particular day, putting all the packages on the kitchen table and calling everyone in before she began the grand unveiling. The goldfish and the neon tetras were our father’s, she said, but the parakeet and the turtle were everyone’s. “Look, see what Emmie has in the box for us.”

  For us? I thought. No, for me. It was my turtle. I clutched the shoe box to my chest. We were home now; new rules were being applied. “It’s everybody’s turtle,” our mother said. She had a hard look in her eye. I knew I shouldn’t mess with her, not with what we’d just been through, but I was adamant. “But I’ve already named him Eddie,” I said.

  “Fine,” said our mother lightly, definitively. “Everybody’s turtle is named Eddie.”

  Our father didn’t stand a chance of getting her to go back on this one.

  It turned out he didn’t have to. His attention, when he got home hours later, was directed elsewhere. After everyone oohed and aahed over the animals and Nomi’d gotten her cautionary shot in (“I don’t normally take Walter’s side, Susan, but what were you thinking?”), our mother cleared everything away. Lucky’s cage with Lucky inside was put under a blanket in the living room (“He needs to get acclimated to his new home,” explained our mother), my turtle and tub were put in the bathroom (“Until he’s acclimated; then he goes outside,” said our mother. “Fat chance,” said Nomi), and the fish, still inside their bag, were put into their fishbowl, filled now with cool water (“Until they get acclimated,” said Cinderella). Our mother folded the bags and put them under the sink. Then she got a huge wicker basket full of whites and went downstairs with Cinderella to put them in the washer while the rest of us—except for Wally Jr., who went down for his nap—went to study Eddie as he pawed the sides of his tub, looking for a way out.

  The crash and the kathumping and the screams we heard next were absolutely chilling. Shrieks of pure terror, shrieks so high-pitched they sounded like air-raid sirens. Bottomless screams, without beginning or end, ascending as they did into registers only dogs could hear. We heard them plenty well, and they froze us. We caught each other’s eyes, Ike and Robert Aaron and I. Then we pummeled into the hallway, sick with dread. What would we see, what would we see? Nothing, if Nomi had her way. The door to the basement was open, and Nomi was at the top of the stairs. “Good God,” she said and gestured us away. Then she hobbled her way down to where Cinderella was shrieking, quite plainly beyond reason.

  Nomi’s shooing gesture caused us to back up, but as soon as she was down the stairs we crowded forward. Our mother was down there, splayed at the foot of the stairs in a pool of blood. One arm was crooked over her head, and the other cupped her belly. Her head was tipped sideways. That was where all the blood was coming from. Ike burst into wailing, forming a duet with our sister. “Robert! For God’s sake get them back.” Nomi waved, and Robert got us to edge back from the stairway. Then we crept forward again, fascinated and sick at heart. We knew what was down there: the concrete basement floor, the open stairs, the lack of a railing. We could imagine the missed step, the grab for support that wasn’t there. What we couldn’t imagine was the rest of it, how our mother had tumbled, how she had landed. We had seen the results, but we didn’t know how she had gotten there, and we did and didn’t want to know.

  For a moment we dared not look. We could hear Nomi calming Cinderella, hear the ripping of sheets. Nomi was saying that Cinderella had to run next door, to the Duckwas, and ask them to call an ambulance. I think she just wanted to get her out of there. As Cinderella came up, I peered over the threshold again. Our mother was awkwardly twisted at the bottom of the stairs, and the sheets and underwear and socks in the laundry basket were scattered about her head or draped over her like a robe. The whites were crimson. Nomi was kne
eling next to our mother, lifting her head and wiping away the blood so she could see the extent of the damage. Robert Aaron asked, “Is she—? Is she—?” That was as far as he could get. My brain answered in a monotone. Our mother looked like a bloody angel, and there were these words, teletyped and scrolling off the screen of my mind over and over, like on TV when the stations are reporting thunderstorms or tornadoes. My brain kept repeating the words, as though through repetition they wouldn’t mean anything anymore, certainly not what I knew them to mean: My mother is dead, my mother is dead, my mother is dead.

  Mrs. Duckwa arrived and took us to her house. We sat on her couch, and she fluttered about, offering us cookies and Kool-Aid, pacing, smoking cigarettes, shooing us back to the couch whenever one of us got up to look out her windows as she was, holding the curtain open with one hand while anxiously watching the street. When the ambulance came, we rushed to the window and she didn’t try to stop us until the gurney appeared with our mother on it. Then she shushed us back and had us sit on the couch again. Her daughter came home, and Mrs. Duckwa said, “Do something with them.” The daughter whose name we didn’t know—she was simply the Duckwa daughter—looked at us with something like sympathy and said, “You wanna play Monopoly or something?” We shook our heads. The sight of our mother on a gurney was enough to silence us. The Duckwa daughter shrugged and went to her room. She reappeared when her mother asked her to keep an eye on us, and sat with us while Mrs. Duckwa hurried outside. Our father had arrived, and Mrs. Duckwa told him what happened. Then our father drove off, his tires peeling. Mrs. Duckwa came in and said, “He’s going to the hospital. He’ll call once he knows everything is fine.”