by C J Hribal
Her mystery only increased the day I found out her name. Our mother told us, when we were moping about the house wishing for this or that, “Be careful what you pray for. You just might get it.” I did not hear the irony. So I prayed, carefully and hard, and one July day my prayers were answered. The Duckwa Daughter, who’d been lying facedown on the chaise longue, turning her face from side to side to make sure both cheeks tanned evenly, stood up. Her back was to me. Then she turned around and, yawning, stretched her arms high over her head. Then she bent for the bikini top she’d left on the chaise longue. “You’re the one they call Emcee, right?” She was talking to me bent over, getting her breasts back into their cups, then she reached behind herself to fasten the thing. “Just so you know, my name’s Patty, Patty Duckwa.” Then she adjusted herself, smiled, and strolled nonchalantly into her house.
Several minutes passed. Had I really seen this—the curve of the breasts, their full ripe pendulousness, their nipples, the whole nine yards? Then I wanted to cry—with her eyes hidden by huge white-rimmed sunglasses, inadvertently I had focused on her face. The rest was just a lovely, lovely blur. From then on, utter the words “Patty, Patty Duckwa,” and my heart would flutter, it would skip a beat and sigh.
My own little triangle surely was more complicated than Uncle Louie’s: Helen, his ex-wife, was in California, and the women who occupied the other corner were interchangeable. My loves were nearby and not interchangeable. I was in a science club run by Wanda Plewa’s father, who was a chemist for Corning. Wanda Plewa had asked me to join because she liked me. I had joined because I liked Marie Hemmelberger, who’d already joined because of Tim Petraglia, a handsome boy with big eyebrows and soft eyes. So it wasn’t a triangle at all, it was a quadrangle, complicated by the fact that Tim liked Marie just fine. So Uncle Louie and I had something in common. We were simpatico; we knew about the vagaries of love and were trying to make the best of it, carrying our torches, putting on a happy face.
Except for those times when Uncle Louie got morose and lost it. He’d be playing along on “Crying Time” or “Born to Lose” and suddenly break down, put his head on his crossed arms on the piano top, and sob uncontrollably. Our father would say, “Hey, hey, buck up,” and our mother would usher us out of the room. “Uncle Louie’s just going through a difficult period,” our mother would say, her voice full of empathy, seemingly forgetting that she felt he brought these periods on himself. And when he got this low, there were no jokes about his predilections in the car on the way home.
Once we went to see him in the spring, and it rained like nobody’s business for three days. We couldn’t go outside the whole time; the rain beat on the windows so hard it looked as though the glass was melting. Appropriate weather for Uncle Louie’s misery: it rained, he cried. Our mother said he was crying not over the loss of his latest love but over Helen, remarried now. Our mother gestured at all the empty bottles and glasses and full ashtrays. Uncle Louie was in the bathroom right then. “Something needs to be done,” said our mother.
Our father, both palms raised: “What?”
Our mother shook her head. She didn’t know. Something. “He’s drowning,” she said.
Our father looked at the array of bottles, the dead soldiers and those not yet sacrificed to the cause. “I can think of worse ways to go.”
“You’re not helping, Wally.”
Our father changed his tune. “Hell of a way to go,” he said and shook his head.
Uncle Louie came out of the bathroom. With his black frame glasses and pinched face, he looked like an accountant unlucky in love. Or like a dentist, which he was. Our father kept him company, telling him to ease back, have a soda, but Uncle Louie just lit another cigarette and put his palm in his hand as “Crying Time” started for the umpteenth time. Our mother fumed, we played checkers, Stratego, Monopoly, Clue, cribbage. Nothing changed, nothing improved.
When we left, our father had to carry us to the car. Riding his hip, we looked down and screamed. The ground was alive: shiny, wet, tumescent, wriggling. It had rained so hard there was no air in the ground for the worms to breathe; they’d all gone topside. Worse, the roads were the same: Route 20 was solid worm. Our father had a hard time keeping the car on the road; we slid this way and that on a carpet of squished worms. The car squished and lurched, squished and lurched. We felt queasy, the rain beat down. Our mother worried quietly, “Wally, what if we take the ditch? We’d never get out.” We weren’t supposed to hear this, but we did. We made out the ditch—it was fast-flowing, torrents of water up to its brim. If we slid off the road we’d be sent to Davy Jones’s locker in four feet of water. Our father said not to worry, this was a company car, nothing could happen to it. “What about us, Wally? What would happen to us?” Our mother voiced our own fear. We had a vision of the car careening off the road, greased by mud and worm guts. Water would seep into the car’s cabin. We wouldn’t float, as in the Volkswagen commercials. We’d sink, and lodged there, trapped by the water’s force, we wouldn’t be able to open the doors. Trapped like mice, we’d drown, our mouths pressed to the ceiling, eking out breaths from the diminishing air bubble while our father tried to slide out a window to rescue us. We could see him getting stuck, and if we were saved at all it would be because his girth plugged the window so no more water could get in.
We rode in silence, terrified, until we reached a wormless stretch of highway. It was our mother who spoke. Uncle Louie, she said, was in a car just like ours, careening down the highway. And unless he got some help, he’d wind up in a ditch and drown. We weren’t meant to hear this, either, but no one else in the car was talking, and our parents often operated under the pleasant fiction that if we weren’t talking we were asleep. Our mother’s voice was full of concern; she suggested that Uncle Louie should maybe get help both for his drinking and for his self-destructive tendencies in picking out women. We had always been under the impression that our mother didn’t like Uncle Louie, so her tone surprised us. “He needs help,” she said. “He needs to talk to someone, preferably not someone holding a glass of the same stuff he’s drinking.”
Our father said Uncle Louie didn’t need a shrink. Maybe some people felt seeing a shrink would do them some good, but Uncle Louie definitely wasn’t one of them. “Really, Susan Marie, how can you suggest such a thing?”
“It’s just he’s so unhappy,” said our mother. “I would think going to talk to someone about these things would do him some good.”
“Right,” said our father. “And I suppose you’ll be suggesting I see a shrink next.”
“Wally,” started our mother, “there’s really nothing wrong—”
“You’re damn right there’s nothing wrong,” said our father, “and I’ll ask you kindly to remember that the next time one of these damn fool ideas enters your head. Louie is the closest thing I’ve got to a brother, damn it, and what you’re saying about him you’re saying about me. We’re simpatico, capeesh?” His voice dropped a little. “Louie seeing a shrink, Jeez Louise.”
Our mother, as she often did, reacted to our father’s reaction. “Really, Wally, maybe you should see somebody yourself about getting your frustrations under control.”
Our father exploded. “My frustrations? My frustrations? The only thing frustrating me is I got a wife thinks she needs to doctor me up over ‘my frustrations.’ Jesus H. Christ, can’t a man have a few frustrations without his wife calling out the National Guard?” We skidded one more time, then scudded onto wet but inert pavement and traveled the rest of the way home in silence. It was to be our last trip to Uncle Louie’s for some time.
By the fall our mother had gotten over our father’s reproach. She was, she said, “only trying to help.” To which our father replied, “He don’t need that kind of help.” Said our mother, “I was talking about you, Wally.” She had a point. The two boats, the trips to Uncle Louie’s—it was not working. Our father remained a frustrated man, not able to breathe—whatever that meant—and his trips to
the Office only seemed to exacerbate matters, not help them, as he claimed they did.
Adding to his frustration was his miscalculation regarding the size of his boat. Or rather, the size of the door the boat had to get through if our father ever wanted it to see water. Artu and Uncles Benny and Louie had come over to help our father lift the boat off the sawhorses and out the door, but the boat was too wide, even when they turned it sideways. This was unfortunate, not only because they could not get it outside but because, except in the case of Artu, who had a sense of propriety and decorum, they had started in on a case of Miller High Life and had drunk two of the three champagne bottles they’d planned to christen our father’s boat with. Men deep in the midst of mirth-making should not, I believe, be confronted by logistical problems, or by anything that requires the figuring out of angles. In this case, the solution was clear. They had to take apart the doorframe, which they did amid much puffing, grunting, cursing, and what seemed to be genial joshing of our father, who’d constructed that classic of American shipbuilding, the boat too wide for its container.
And even then, when they got it sideways, the demolished doorframe a pile of broken lumber just inside the door, and they were nosing the boat out the door, scraping the keel as they went, they were again stymied. Our father—and his father—had forgotten the exterior basement stairs ran parallel to the back of the house, so they were nosing the boat into a narrow stairwell that immediately turned ninety degrees to the left. The boat’s nose bumped the concrete stairwell outside the door, and there they stood for a while, holding their burden, their muscles quaking—a plywood boat is pretty heavy, even if it’s a fourteen-footer—until Artu let his side go and started laughing and laughing. The other guys set their sides down, too, and laughed and wiped tears from their eyes and pointed, and shook their heads, and laughed again.
“Wally,” said Artu, “I do believe you’re going to have to saw this puppy in half if you want to get it up these stairs.”
Our father blinked, and his mouth fell open in an empty look of disbelief. All those calculations and he’d never opened the basement door, had never thought to see what lay outside. He was mortified, stupefied, chagrined. He emitted a low rumbling of curses that sounded like a motor started across a lake and opened to full throttle as it came near.
“Wally, the children,” said Artu, and our father answered him with something that I was reasonably sure was anatomically impossible. Our father was behind the boat, and I believe at that moment, had he the strength, he’d had shoved that boat into the stairwell wall until it was splinters. Instead he gritted his teeth and hissed, “The saw, get me the goddamn saw.”
“I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw,” said Robert Aaron, and for this he was rewarded with one of our father’s backhands across his teeth. Blood was dripping from his upper lip, but he just closed his mouth and said nothing. Nobody else said anything, either, not even Artu.
“I said,” hissed our father, “get me the goddamn saw.”
“Which one?” Louie asked.
Our father reflected a moment. He walked up and down the length of his boat, his fingers stroking the gunwales as the owner of a fine horse with a broken leg might stroke its withers prior to ordering that it be put down. Our father shook his head, and we could see he was near tears, bitter, bitter tears. “Well,” he bit out, “if I’m going to make a proper butchery of it, then I suppose I shall need the circular saw.”
Louie fetched it, plugged it in, ceremoniously held it out to our father. Had he been able to play “Taps,” I believe he would have. Then our father lowered his safety goggles, ordered his friends to hold the boat steady, and when the whine of the saw started to bite into the wood, we all had to turn away. It wasn’t only the sawdust being scattered in its wake that made us flinch. That whine, that whine, I will always remember that whine. The shriek of metal eating wood. It is the sound of dreams being sawn in two.
10. The Big Halloween: We Shall See What We Shall See
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR
Roof summit. While Ike entertains our kids, we climb up the aerial tower abutting our parents’ house, setting up shop with a cooler of beer and soda. That triangular tower held together by Z-shaped rebar has been the sibling escape route, and the roof has been the sibling meeting place, of choice for over thirty years. How wonderful the farm seemed from up there. You were alone on the planet, on a different plane, and for a little while you could, in the words of our father, hear yourself think. Robert Aaron and I first used it as a place where we could get away from our siblings and talk about everything in the world that scared us—our changing bodies, girls, late periods and near-pregnancies, the future, our place in the world, what we wanted or feared to want. Eventually we were discovered, and soon everyone was climbing up on the roof. It was a place our parents weren’t supposed to know about, though, so even if the sib you hated most in the world right at that moment found you, you couldn’t order him or her off the roof. That was our one rule: “Nobody throws anybody else off the roof.” And we meant that literally. We’re talking a ranch house here, one and a half stories, a low pitch, so the worst you’re looking at is a sprained ankle or a broken leg, but still, it probably says something about us that we needed to have the rule in the first place. Expecting us to agree on anything is like expecting an amicable solution to the troubles in the Middle East. And for the same reason—too much history, too many pent-up animosities to untangle.
Robert Aaron, popping open a beer, is in charge. “Okay, the first order of business is nobody throws anybody else off the roof. And watch your step. I don’t want anybody taking an accidental header, either. Going splat on Mom and Dad’s anniversary—definite bummer.”
“Ha-ha,” says Wally Jr., who’s still down below. He has a hard time getting up on the roof anymore on account of his wheelchair. We offer to haul him up with ropes and block the wheels so he doesn’t pitch off, but he’d rather pull himself up, hand over hand. He’s fat now, though, so it’s slow going. “Now when I was a lean, mean fightin’ machine,” he says, “this would have been simple.” He says it cheerfully, without bile or bitterness, puffing a cigar as he pulls himself onto the roof. His wife, Claire, has gone back to their house. Can’t stand cigar smoke, she says. We’ve always suspected it was us she couldn’t stand, but that’s another story.
“So here we are,” says Ernie, popping his sixth or seventh beer of the evening.
“Ike’s not,” says Meg. “Cinderella neither.”
“But Ike’ll be up as soon as the kids in the tepee run out of gas—”
“Or he does.”
“—and what we decide isn’t going to affect Cinderella anyway. It’s not like Mom and Dad are expecting to move in with her.” Robert Aaron is reminding us that Cinderella, having helped mother us, gave up raising her own kids about halfway through and, given the additional burden of her own poor health, is not in the host-parents-in-their-old-age sweepstakes.
“Are you sure Mom and Dad can’t hear us?” asks Meg.
“Our father,” says Robert Aaron, “is piloting a La-Z-Boy into oblivion, and Mom is in her room with all the windows closed. What’s to hear? Besides, we’re just doing the Five P’s now.”
“The Five P’s?” Except for Brian, Meg’s beau, a quiet guy who suffers our loudness well, Dorie’s the only nonsibling up here. Our conversation was interrupted when Robert Aaron asked us to join him on the roof. Dorie’s stretched out at the base of the chimney, eyes closed, hands folded over her belly. She’s only vaguely interested in this. Her thoughts are on the hills of Pennsylvania, the sandy roads around Lake Michigan.
“Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”
“You get that from Dad or Dale Carnegie?”
“From me,” says Ernie. “And I got it from Tony Robbins. Or Pete Lowe, one of those motivational guys. My whole office had to go to one of those seminars. You know, where they have you hugging total strangers and shouting ‘
I can do it! I can be happy! Today I can be better than yesterday and tomorrow I can be my best!’ ” Ernie does exaggerated cheerleading moves, his hands shaking imaginary pom-poms as he skitters across the roof.
“Careful,” says Robert Aaron. “I don’t want you throwing yourself off the roof.”