by C J Hribal
I decided I’d ask my mom the next day. If anybody could tell me, she could.
Coming to an intellectual decision about such things, of course, doesn’t help you at all when your beloved is sitting right next to you. Or in the next room, playing checkers with Tim Petraglia, who used to be a good friend of yours. Sitting next to Patty and thinking about Marie and Tim (at some point they had discreetly closed the door to my room), I wondered if this was what it felt like, to really love two people simultaneously. Could you do that? Certainly my own feelings were not equal. Patty made Mr. Wiggly stiffen. Marie made me feel warm. That wasn’t the same feeling, was it?
I wondered because of what I saw unfolding before me. Under the urgings of Charlie Podgazem and our father, the Cicero Velvetones had brought their instruments, and they were playing now, and people were dancing with as much abandon as people that old can muster. The whole house seemed to be throbbing. It had gotten so loud, so hot, and so packed that the party had spilled out our living room door, which was open, and into the driveway between our house and the Duckwas’. Nobody complained; most of the neighborhood was there anyway. You couldn’t really hear anything but the music and, over that, this loud huzzing of human voices punctuated by high-pitched laughter. Such a sight: our parents—dancing! But not with each other. That was what I wondered about. Unlike at weddings, where it seemed everybody danced with the people they were married to, here everybody seemed to be dancing with everybody but.
Mr. Duckwa, for instance. I knew he and Mrs. Duckwa did not get along—you’d have had to be deaf not to hear them screaming at each other some evenings—and that would explain why, for this party, they spent hardly any time together, but why did he spend all his time with Mrs. Plewa? They were below us now, standing in the doorway leading to our side yard and the Duckwa driveway. Mrs. Plewa was dressed as a cat, in black leotards and a pipe-cleaner mustache and white mittens on her hands. Mr. Duckwa had his hand resting on the doorjamb above Mrs. Plewa’s shoulder. He looked like a plumber chatting up a slightly chunky Felix the Cat. People had to duck their heads to get outside.
Patty had an answer for why her father was with Mrs. Plewa. “He’s randy,” she said.
“Randy? I thought his name was Ted.”
“His name is mud if my mother catches him.” At that moment Mr. Duckwa lowered his head, obscuring Mrs. Plewa’s face. “C’mon,” said Patty. “I don’t want to be a witness to this.”
It wasn’t any better in my room. Tim and Marie were sitting on the floor, kissing. My throat closed tight. Fearful they had been caught by adults, they stood up immediately. Tim pointed out the window. “We were just watching them.” We looked. The backyard was filled with couples. Some were standing, jabbering away, others sitting on lawn chairs. Superman was chatting with Barbie; the rear end of a horse was having a heart-to-heart with a dalmatian. Each half of our father’s boat had a couple in it, and they were curled up as though at any moment they expected to be hit by lightning.
Uncle Louie and Shirley were lying in the sand circle left by our pool. They looked like they had fallen there. Shirley was on her back, gazing up at the stars, Uncle Louie on his side, stroking her tummy. From time to time he leaned over and pecked her cheek. He also tickled her, causing Shirley’s belly to wriggle and her face to scooch up. It was warm enough in the house that the window was open. We could hear the fainter sounds of the music here, the laughter, and Shirley’s “Oooo, Louie,” as she giggled at the work of his hands. They got up, Louie offering her his hand, and walked to the opposite side of the house with their arms around each other. We went to the opposite window. They were right beneath us when they stopped and kissed. Shirley’s hand, I noticed, was on Uncle Louie’s neck, and it appeared to me that she was writing something underneath his collar with her fingernail. I thought of the labels that came inside my shirts—Van Heusen, Fruit of the Loom. Was Shirley’s insistence on writing her name in cursive on the backs of men’s necks sort of like that?
“Well, they’re all lovey-dovey, aren’t they,” said Tim as they walked down our drive to Uncle Louie’s Chrysler Imperial. I was too jealous to point out that just a moment ago he had been, too. Uncle Louie and Shirley got in the car and closed the door, but they didn’t drive away. The seat folded back, and then they pretty much disappeared from view.
“What are you kids doing by the window?” It was Mrs. Hemmelberger, Marie’s mom. She had a couple of jackets over her arm.
Patty answered for us. “They’re watching,” she said. “What did you think?”
“Well, no doubt you’ve seen enough.”
“No doubt,” said Patty Duckwa.
You could tell Mrs. Hemmelberger was about to say something, but she stifled it. I’d always wondered about the things adults were about to say but chose not to. I got the feeling those were the things that would let us know that they were human, that they were more than parents and old people. What Mrs. H said, though, was standard Mom talk. “We need to get going. Your brothers and father are waiting.”
“I guess I need to get going,” Marie said to Tim. It was like I wasn’t even in the room.
“Thank your host,” her mother said.
“Thanks, Emcee,” Marie called spacily over her shoulder. I think she was still in a daze from having kissed Tim.
I could hear Mrs. Hemmelberger on the stairs on the way down. “What were you doing in that room with two boys?”
And Marie answering, “It wasn’t two boys, Mom. Patty Duckwa . . .” I didn’t listen to the rest. It didn’t concern me. And I had the feeling that it never would.
The party was starting to wind down. You could hear the good night, good nights shouted from the front doorway. Mingled in with those were the voices of children. “Aw, Mo-o-o-o-m . . .” It was time to go home.
“I’m pretty tired,” I told Patty Duckwa.
Patty rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “I’m pretty tired, too.” She flopped backward on my bed. “Go to sleep,” she said. What was I to do? I crawled in beside her, tucked myself up against her side. Her arm came down over the crown of my head and rested on my shoulder. To shield herself from the eyes of the men at the party, Patty had put on her jean jacket. A peace sign was embroidered over her left breast, a much larger one was embroidered on the back. This was as close to the sixties as I was likely to come. “You have a crush on her, don’t you?” she asked. The lights were still on in our room. I studied the river lines of cracks in the ceiling plaster. “Who?”
Patty Duckwa punched me lightly on the arm. “Who? You know who.”
“Yes,” I admitted. I didn’t want to say I had a crush on Patty as well. I didn’t think she’d laugh, but who knew what a tired woman in your bed was capable of?
She lay back down. “I wanted to thank you for being nice to me,” Patty said to the ceiling. “I’ve had a pretty tough day, you know that?” And it was then that I found out what a tired woman in my bed was capable of. Sleep. Patty Duckwa was sleeping, her luscious warm belly and I Dream of Jeannie/Venus de Milo chest rising and falling as though there were a tiny bellows at work inside her. I rolled up on my elbow and watched Patty Duckwa go on breathing, quietly and evenly, and when I lay down to fall asleep myself, I counted myself a lucky man.
When I woke up, it could have been fifteen minutes or three hours later. I couldn’t tell. But the lights were still on in my room and my siblings hadn’t joined me yet, so it couldn’t have been that long. It had been long enough, however, for me to get a tiny erection, no doubt because in her sleep Patty Duckwa’s hand had found its way to my groin. I shivered with this new, unexpected pleasure. The Bohemian brave takes a wife! Patty was still sleeping, her belly gently undulating, her breasts doing their rise and fall. I could have watched that for some time, but I had woken up to the clankings of metal and the steady poundings of what sounded like a hammer against steel and steel against the wall. It was coming from Nomi’s room. I knew what it was. My siblings were taking advantage
of Nomi’s absence to have a rumpus in her bed. Nomi’s bed was adjustable—a hospital bed with a metal frame and cranks to help her sit up, or to elevate her feet, or to give her back some relief. We weren’t supposed to play on it, but I was sure Robert Aaron and Cinderella and Ike and Wally Jr. were anyway. No question Nomi’s bed was really getting a workout.
I sat up, gently moving Patty’s hand to her side, though if I could have walked down the hall with her hand placed exactly where it was, I would have. Still, I didn’t want us to be found like this. Some things should just remain private.
I went down the hall, hoping to peek in on my siblings acting crazy. Then I would leap into the room, scream Boo! and scare them all half to death. The door was closed but not completely. The noise inside had settled into a rhythm, the clankings hammerlike, and there was the sound of someone in distress breathing hard. Robert Aaron, no doubt, wrestling Ike into submission. He liked to do that, put a hammerlock on you or sit on your head or back and rock you into the mattress, facedown, until you slammed the mattress three times to indicate Uncle.
I swung the door open, just an inch. I couldn’t see anything. Just the side of the bed and a bit of the iron railing headboard. Then I heard Nomi come home downstairs. The noises of the party had subsided. There was a Glenn Miller record playing, but that abruptly ended with a brrrrzipppp! when Nomi or Artu took the needle off by hand. Nomi said she was going upstairs to sleep, Artu said something about having a beer. I could hear Nomi’s foot on the stairs. If they didn’t get out of here this instant, there was going to be hell to pay. There was just enough time if I warned them for them to scamper back down the hall. Nomi would see them shooting by, but unless they’d really made a mess of things, she wouldn’t know what, exactly, my siblings had been doing. I swung the door the rest of the way open.
Some things should remain private. Supporting herself from the crane was Mrs. Plewa, stark naked except for her mittens and the crushed Norton hat Mr. Duckwa had been wearing. Her black leotards were trailing off her calves, and she was furiously raising and lowering herself atop Mr. Duckwa, who was thrashing and bucking as though he were undergoing a seizure. Both appeared to be hurting themselves, only it didn’t seem as if they knew whether they were or weren’t. A groaned “No! No! No!” was followed by an exuberant “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I had seen Mr. Duckwa in shorts and a T-shirt before while he was cutting the grass, so I knew he had a very hairy body, but I didn’t realize the hair covered his belly and chest, even his back, like fur. Mrs. Plewa I had only seen in a housedress before, and the sight of her without any clothes on, the hat bouncing on her head, her spare flesh and bulbous breasts jiggling—she was quite a bit larger than Mr. Duckwa, actually—well, it was like seeing the Venus de Milo come to life riding a lemur. I would have laughed except that at that moment Nomi came up behind me.
“Good God!” she yelled, and this put an end to Mr. Duckwa’s and Mrs. Plewa’s exertions. They threw sheets on themselves and I didn’t see any more because Nomi spun me around to get me out of the room and she spun me smack into Patty Duckwa’s warm soft belly. “Dad?” she cried, and her face crumpled like a shredded balloon. But the carnage was not complete. In the silence we heard a rustling from the hall closet, a closet large enough to step inside, and Nomi, muttering “Good God, Good God” under her breath, opened that door, too. “Good God!” Nomi screamed again, and this time Artu came bounding up the stairs. “What is it? What? Have you hurt yourself?” Nomi only pointed, her cane quivering. I nosed my way in to see, and such was Nomi’s shock that she didn’t stop me. Our father’s balsa-wood boat model was in there, crushed beyond salvaging, but the startling thing was who had done the damage. It was Lorna Duckwa, her dress open neck to belly, and Mr. Boxtein’s pale pimply back covering her, his baggy khaki shorts (he’d come as an African explorer) incompletely covering his pale and skinny behind.
“Good God!” said Nomi.
“Mom?” wailed Patty Duckwa.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said Ted Duckwa, draped now in a sheet. Mrs. Plewa had disappeared. Patty Duckwa ran down the stairs and out of the house, weeping profusely. I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t stop anything. My parents were coming up the stairs now, siblings in tow, and Nomi shouted down, “Don’t bring them up! Don’t bring them up!”
“What?” Cinderella and Robert Aaron cried, pushing up the stairs. “Let me see! Let me see!”
“You’re not seeing anything,” said our father, grabbing hold of the two of them.
Nomi said to Artu, “Get him to bed,” meaning me.
I was not allowed to see anything more, but I could still hear them. Mr. Duckwa saying, “Jesus, Lorna, Boxtein? Frank De Bochart I could understand, but fucking Lyle Boxtein? What were you thinking?”
“Like you have such great taste,” hissed Mrs. Duckwa, laboring to extricate herself. “You’d fuck anything that moves.” She started buttoning her polka-dotted dress while she lay on the floor, but she was mismatching the buttons and holes.
“So this is what you do while I’m gone all day,” Mr. Duckwa spat at his wife.
“Don’t be sanctimonious with me!” snarled Mrs. Duckwa. “I’m tired of ‘Ed Norton’ checking out other women’s plumbing and laying pipe for Francine Plewa.”
“Get up!” Mr. Duckwa screamed back, at his wife or at Mr. Boxtein or maybe both. Mr. Boxtein was still facing the floor, his hands underneath him as though he were protecting himself even before he rolled over. “Get up!” yelled Mr. Duckwa. “Get up and take it like a man!”
“Enough!” screamed my father. “I have children in this household. What in God’s name were you thinking? Downstairs, we’re settling this—everything—downstairs.”
And away they went.
___
That was the end of our parents’ social life in Elmhurst. Winter was coming anyway, and it may have been that the last gasp of nice weather and the party’s explosiveness caused a recoil. People nest in the winter, after all. But there also may have been a tacit agreement among our neighbors to give our parents a wide berth. They had hosted a party where everyone had cut loose a little, and several people had cut loose a lot, and a natural response might have been to disassociate yourself from the site of your misdeeds. Shoot the messenger, and all that. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know was that our parents felt isolated, shunned, and our mother spent the winter tight-lipped, as though she were afraid to breathe, as though in the very action of inhaling and exhaling she would either take in or expel poison.
Things may well have gotten better if we’d stayed, but the blowup and aftermath of that evening fueled our father’s desire to move away. Far, far away. He wanted to raise his children in the splendor of nature, where modern life was not imploding on itself. Our mother would have been happier moving back to Chicago, or to a different suburb, but our father wanted wide open spaces. If you’re going to dream of remaking your life, he reasoned, dream big. Always, always dream big.
Of the night in question, nothing was really settled. I don’t know what transpired in our kitchen that evening after the couples were separated; I don’t even know who still remained in the house when it occurred. I can imagine, however, our father in his bus driver’s uniform, all Ralph Kramden/Jackie Gleason eyeballs and outrage, trying to talk sense into the Duckwas, the Plewas, the Boxteins, the De Bocharts, and whoever else remained, and failing miserably, his own ire exacerbating the situation he was trying to help. And our mother—calm, sensible, her Audrey Meadows eyebrows arched—exasperated with our father’s mucking things up again, telling him, telling them all, to go home and forget about it. Work on their marriages.
And still the carnage was not complete. Things festered over the winter. Mr. Boxtein was a mild soul, henpecked to death by Mrs. Boxtein, it was widely believed, and in some quarters (we found this out years later) it was maintained that the events as described couldn’t have occurred; Mr. Boxtein simply didn’t have it in him. Wags would point out, no, Mrs. Duckwa
had it in her. Everyone waited for the inevitable—for Mrs. Boxtein to divorce Mr. Boxtein and throw him out on his ear, but it didn’t happen. People in our neighborhood did not divorce. They stayed together and were miserable, or they lashed out at each other with wildly inappropriate behavior, such as semipublicly fucking their neighbors’ spouses, or they medicated their desires into submission, finding relief from each other in an assortment of prescription drugs and Jim Beam, or they turned it all inward, where it went off with a muffled yet devastating explosion.
Kind, quiet, gentle Mr. Plewa responded to his wife’s infidelity and some setbacks at work—being passed over for promotion was one rumor, receiving a lateral move that effectively ended his career was another—by going into his basement laboratory one fine March day, and while Wanda was out bicycling and Mrs. Plewa was out shopping, drinking a sulfuric-acid-and-arsenic highball.
“A chemist doing that? That combination? Jesus, he must have really wanted to suffer,” said our father when our mother told him, sotto voce, over dinner.
“Wally, please.”
“I mean, I can see punishing her for wanting a divorce after she was the one that went and cheated on him, but punishing her for wanting a divorce by drinking sulfuric acid? Jesus.”
“Wally, please.”
“What happens when you drink sulfuric acid?” we wanted to know.