The Company Car

by C J Hribal

The history of our marriage writ small: Dorie decides what she and I are going to do, then asks if I want to come along. It’s petty of me, I know, but I don’t much want to be alone with Dorie right now, even for only the few minutes it would take to walk down to the woods. “No thanks,” I say. “If you want company take Audrey. And Jake and Jennifer.” Jake, four, is Audrey and Robert Aaron’s youngest, a surprise baby they had after they thought they’d stopped having kids. Jennifer, twenty-two and engaged, is their oldest. I heard about her conception the same night Robert Aaron did, up on this very roof. Audrey and Robert Aaron were just dating then. Jennifer’s wedding will be in September.

  Dorie goes down the aerial tower a few steps. I love the way her biceps jump, the way her forearms flex. For a second I reconsider. Her head even with my knees, she looks up and grins. “You sure you don’t want to come along?”

  I do but shake my head. She gets this look on her face. I’m being petulant. She knows it, I know it. “Suit yourself,” she says (translation: “fuck you”), and down she goes.

  Wally Jr. shakes his head. “Man, what is wrong with you?”

  “What? We were having a powwow here, weren’t we?”

  “Right. Your wife wants to take a walk in the dark with you, batta-bing, batta-bing, and you turn her down?”

  “Another county heard from. Can we start or not?”

  “Cinderella’s still out with her Prince,” Robert Aaron says. Her Prince—that’s what we call her beau, Mel. Owns a catering firm, seems like a nice enough guy, but like Meg’s beau, makes himself scarce around us. Cinderella and the Prince left at the end of the croquet game.

  “So we just need to get Sleeping Beauty here awake and we’ve got everybody,” says Ike.

  “I can handle that.” Wally Jr. pffsssts open another Dew and pours it on Ernie’s face. Ernie comes to with a start, his chest heaving up from the deck like those of patients in hospital shows when they apply the heart resuscitation paddles.

  “Ow!” he says, sitting up. “I think I broke my butt!”

  Wally Jr. keeps his arm moving in a spiral. Mountain Dew splashes off Ernie’s head. “Another county heard from,” says Wally Jr. He sounds remarkably like our father.

  Piled like cordwood in the wayback and beating on each other as only kids in cramped confines can do without drawing the wrath of their parents, we had not noticed the slow dissolution of our mother from stoic wife and mother to weeping, distraught woman keening over her loss. Such was the hubbub of chatter that it took some miles before any of us heard her. The center of our attention had been Cinderella, who unlike her namesake was bereaved about being yanked away from her ball. “My life is over,” she kept repeating. “My life is over.”

  “Your life is not over,” said our father irritably. “It’s just beginning in a new place. You’ll make new friends. You’ll have a ball.” Stony silence from Cinderella. “Look, you’d have to make new friends regardless of where you went to high school.”

  “I’d at least know somebody!” Cinderella protested, then went back to muttering about hick towns and Hooterville Junction. Green Acres and Petticoat Junction were both popular shows then, and the idea of moving into a sitcom seemed to please only our father. Myself, I was curious about the girls in the water tower, and what you might see there—they left everything to your imagination in the opening credits of Petticoat Junction. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  But then, like our father, I was thinking about only myself. We were leaving our friends, sure, but we were all in the same boat on that score, and we were all close enough in age that we could keep each other company if worst came to worst. Except for Cinderella, who was too busy experimenting with hemlines and makeup and huddling with our mother over deep, dark secrets to have time to play with us. Cinderella’s feelings about the move probably ran parallel to our mother’s, only our mother had put on a happy face while we were packing and Cinderella had balked at every step, even claiming, “You don’t love me,” as though putting everything we owned into a Mayflower truck was an exercise designed to prove exactly that.

  It wasn’t until our father launched into the Green Acres theme song nearing Oshkosh that we actually heard our mother weeping, and we probably wouldn’t have noticed that had our mother not done the unthinkable. She asked our father to stop singing. “Wally,” she wailed, “would you please stop that infernal racket?” Our mother? Asking our father to stop singing? The man who wooed her with song? Telling him to shut up? This was a breach. Our father was trying to inject some levity into the drive. He was trying to calm Cinderella. Granted, he’d gone about it all wrong, teasing her and spewing out facts as we drove—“That’s the Evinrude plant,” he’d said a while ago as we passed a building that looked like the world’s largest pole shed. “Our boat’s motor came from there”—but at least he was trying. He just wasn’t particularly sensitive.

  That was when we heard it. Quiet sobbing from our mother. Who knew how long she’d been holding a tissue up to her eyes, staring out her window, sniffling as the scenery passed by?

  “What?” our father asked. “What? I was just—”

  “She doesn’t want to hear that song, Wally, and neither do I.” Our mother blew her nose, and I thought that was going to be the end of it. But then our father did a curious thing. He drove in silence for a bit, then he began to sing, very quietly, “I’ve Got Sixpence.” The song is meant to be a round, and our father’s sotto voce “jolly jolly sixpence” was meant to entice us into singing along. Our father no doubt thought he was teasing our mother, but this was a rebellion, boys against the girls (the ratio in the car was two to one in favor of the males), and if we joined in the singing it would soon become a crashing, crescendoing wave of rebuke. Gleeful and naÏve on our part, more pointed on our father’s, the message would be “Lighten up, we win.” Of course, we didn’t know this at the time. Or we thought it wasn’t the battle it actually was. We were just teasing, too. No cares had we. Poor wife, poor wife.

  We didn’t realize the seriousness of the game until our mother screamed, “What are you teaching them? The same irresponsibility that you enjoy, is that what you want?” She was huddled up against the side door weeping, “It’s over, it’s all over”—just has she had done a dozen years ago when they drove away from San Diego, but none of us knew that. She was weeping so hard our father had to pull off the road to console her. “It’s over,” our mother kept repeating as she wept. “It’s over, it’s all over.”

  Once again our father hadn’t a clue. “What?” he asked. “What in Sam Hill is all over?”

  Between bouts of weeping our mother sobbed, “E-e-e-e-e-ver-ry-y-y-y-thi-i-i-i-ing.”

  Our father was exasperated. “Everything is not all over. Everything is just beginning. You’ll see, honey, you’ll see.”

  “Yeah, Dad, everything is all over,” said Cinderella. “Why don’t you just turn this beast around and head us back home?”

  Our father’s backhand caught her flush on the cheek. “Another county heard from, and yet we didn’t hear a thing.” And with that he put the station wagon back into drive.

  In the wayback, you always see most clearly where you’ve been. We knew why we were moving, and it wasn’t just that Halloween party, the Duckwa marriage exploding in our upstairs hallway. It wasn’t just Mr. Plewa’s suicide, either. It was everything. Our father’s frustrations, his desire for more space, his fear of what the world was becoming. Our parents tried to pretend that none of this mattered, but it did. The summer before their Halloween party, Richard Speck had murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago dormitory. He’d used a knife, and he would have gotten away with it except a ninth nurse had managed to escape. The night was no longer safe. The streets were no longer safe. There were people out there loaded up on drugs and armed with knives and they meant to do you harm. Cities were burning, emptying out. The suburbs were getting more crowded, and who knew who these new people were? And people in those suburbs were leaving for suburbs furt
her out, one ring around another, where the houses were newer, the garages more spacious, where the backyards rolled into fences and the treeless streets curved from one bulbous cul-de-sac into another. Our parents said the hell with all that. The steady progression of sprawl sprawling—it solved nothing. So they leapfrogged all of it, quitting their suburb of Chicago, where there were drugs and divorces and even suicides, where the last lot had been purchased and built on two or three years previous, and quite literally bought the farm.

  This made our parents back-to-the-landers and put them unknowingly at the vanguard of a hippie movement they vehemently disdained. It fact it was partly because of the hippies—“Hippies, yippies, zippies, whatever the hell they call themselves, I don’t like ’em,” pronounced our father—that we were moving. “Their free love stuff is probably what got Patty Duckwa in trouble,” said our mother. Given the trouble Patty had gotten into, I wondered how you could call it free. She had been sent away to have her baby in the middle of May. When she came back she was puffy in the face and sullen. She didn’t hang out in the backyard anymore. She was gone a lot at night. We could hear her and her mother screaming at each other all through June on hot nights. “You can’t make me, you can’t make me” was Patty’s refrain. Mrs. Duckwa’s was “You little tramp, as long as you live in my house—” Then Patty would yell, “Dry up and blow away, you old biddy!” and there’d be a slap, then silence, then the banging of the screen door as Patty went out once again to join her friends, who came to pick her up in a Volkswagen van. We didn’t see her much anymore, just witnessed the fury of her comings and goings.

  We moved in July, midway through the Summer of Love, though you wouldn’t have known it by us. Like lots of families that got started in the fifties, we missed the sixties entirely. Or at least our parents were hell-bent on our avoiding it. We were just old enough to know something was going on, but too naÏve to know we wanted to be a part of it. Sarah was the exception, but at fourteen, what did she know, really? She tried, of course—a few years earlier she and her friends got taxis to take them into the Loop to see A Hard Day’s Night and Help! when they first came out—but Cinderella was a compliant soul, and her heart wasn’t in it. Later, when Yellow Submarine came out, we were already in Wisconsin. Sarah went to visit friends in Elmhurst, and for old times’ sake they took a taxi to the new Oak Brook Shopping Center. They could just as easily have ridden bikes. “I rode my bike to the revolution”—that doesn’t sound so hot in comparison with Watts burning, or marching for civil rights or to protest the war, or to espouse free love and “contemplating your navel,” as our father put it. No Molotov cocktails for Sarah. No storming the barricades, no protests, no tear gas, nothing like that. She ironed her hair flat as a sheet and let it hang down one side of her face like a curtain. “Veronica Lake,” said our father. “Except her hair was wavy.” Sarah cut her skirts as short as the nuns would allow (Sister PMS—Peter Mary Stephen—checked with a ruler when the girls entered school), she wore paisley or giant daisy jumpers, and sometimes she didn’t wear hose to church, but that and lipping off were the extent of her rebellion.

  But why single out Cinderella? Sure, she was the oldest, seven already when the decade started, but by most people’s accounts the decade didn’t really start for a few years after that. So it’s probably wrong to put everything on her, as though she could lightning-rod the decade for us, let us know it was coming, and ground the rest of us. At fourteen she was with the crowd of quiet, “good kids”—what Nixon might have called the silent majority of teens—who kept their rebellions to themselves, who didn’t make public nuisances of themselves.

  We had gone bucolic by the time the decade really exploded. Our parents watched Uncle Walt—Walter Cronkite—on TV as the marches grew in vehemence, as the riots grew worse, as the cities burned and King was assassinated, and then Bobby Kennedy, and the kids went crazy with their music and LSD and marijuana, their clothing bizarre, their hair unbelievably long, and they would say to each other, “Thank God we’re out of that mess.” As though by moving us to Wisconsin they had caused the decade to skip over us. When people say they miss the sixties, they usually mean they long for them. We simply missed them—historical Passover.

  Our parents’ thinking exactly. With “room to move, room to grow,” we’d be safe. It was a noble, misguided idea, postponing the inevitable by a decade at most (in the case of some of us not even that), but credit the audacity of their undertaking. Our parents left everything and everyone they knew and hiked us two hundred miles north to give us a chance to play in unbounded space, the only boundaries being fences you crawled under or through, or creeks too wide to leap across.

  It was a farm we had not seen. Our father had discovered it on one of his weekend drives without our mother. He was now working for Dinkwater Chemical, headquartered—like Dinkwater-Adams—in Dinkwater Park, N.J. (“If you ask me,” Robert Aaron whispered to me after our father had announced his new employment, “Dad’s problem is he just can’t get away from the Dinks.”) Dinkwater Chemical made water additives and defoaming agents for paper mills so they could comply with newly written government standards regarding the purity of industrial discharge. They also made paint, paint removers, thinners, varnishes, and shellacs, the leftovers of which were industrial discharge. Our father was in the Specialty Chemicals division—paper mills, not paints. He started with three states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. For his job he now had to haul around not pharmaceutical samples but five-gallon pails of gloppy chemicals and sample bags and collection bottles and pipettes and petri dishes and a heating oven and a small chemistry set and God knows what else. Dinkwater Chemical had no problem with our father’s request for a station wagon.

  Since March he’d been living in small-town motels during the week and driving around on the weekends trying to find us a home. Sometimes, if his workweek ended in Racine or Kenosha, he’d come home, get Mom, and they’d go looking together. Once or twice we joined them, but the strain of looking at houses with seven kids put that low on the totem pole of possible options. Finally, one Sunday night our father came home and said he had found the perfect place. Subject to our mother’s approval, of course.

  “I’d like to have been consulted before you get everybody’s hopes up, Wally.”

  “It’s ninety-nine acres, honey! Think of it! Ninety-nine acres!”

  “What’s it like? What’s it like?” we shouted.

  “We shall see what we shall see,” said our father.

  “But we wanna know now!”

  “Oh, all right,” said our father. He got out a map. He pointed to a tiny black dot. “It’s three and a half miles from here,” he said. The town’s name was Augsbury.

  “We’re three and a half miles from town?” said our mother.

  “We’re going to own ninety-nine acres,” said our father. “Think of it—for the same price as this house, we’re going to have ninety-nine acres.”

  “How big is Augsbury?”

  “It’s got a high school and an elementary school and churches of three denominations,” said our father. “It’s got a grocery and a chiropractor’s and a bowling alley and a funeral parlor. It’s got a Dog ‘N Suds and two garages and a car dealership. It’s plenty big.”

  “How big?”

  “Appleton, which is nearby, has almost fifty thousand people,” said our father.

  “Wally.”

  “Green Bay, home of the Green Bay Packers, is forty-three miles away. Eighty-seven thousand people.”

  “Wally, I’ll scream.”

  “Augsbury, Wisconsin, has a population of one thousand, three hundred, and sixty-three people,” said our father, sounding like the voice-over to one of those documentary filmstrips we often saw in school.

  “So all by ourselves we’re going to raise the population by”—she quickly did some math in her head—“six-tenths of a percentage point.” Our mother got that look on her face she often had when our father came home from the Off
ice with a definite weave in his walk.

  “Honey, please, just come and see. If you don’t like it we’ll keep looking.”

  Our mother hesitated. It hadn’t been her idea to leave in the first place. “I’m sure it’s fine, Wally, it’s just—”

  We waited, not saying a word. It some ways it was like we weren’t even in the room.

  “What, Susie Q? What is it, lamby-kins?”

  “It’s just—” Our mother hesitated again. Something was warring inside her. We could see it on her face. She was torn between expressing her own feelings and saying what she thought was right for the family. Our father looked at her expectantly. She said quietly, “It just seems so far away, Wally.”

  “It’s not so far,” said our father. “Early on, until you get settled, we could make weekend trips back down here.”

  Whatever our mother was going to say next is lost to us. She opened her mouth, started, then stopped. Her throat constricted. She put a smile on her face that looked as though she was keeping her own feces warm inside her cheeks. “I’m sure it’s very nice, Wally.”

  Nothing more was said on the subject until moving day. As it got nearer, Cinderella got more and more petulant, but our mother ascribed that to “growing pains,” and aside from lecturing her about being more thankful for our parents’ sacrifice, she let Cinderella sulk to her heart’s content. Our own friends wished us well, expressed envy, gave us a few parting jabs—“Criminy, a farm. What are ya gonna do up there, Czabek, sleep with chickens? Hope you like the smell of cow shit”—and that was about it. What had attracted people to the neighborhood wasn’t in the neighborhood anymore.

  Our mother did visit the farm with our father once, but she said nothing about it. She was taking the company line. Her mouth had settled into a thin gray line, and she packed and got us ready with a brusque efficiency that let us know that if this were the Charge of the Light Brigade she’d go ahead with it, but she had severe misgivings and thought the person in charge was misguided if not out-and-out delusional. The most she let slip to us was one evening as she was sorting clothes and putting them in big Mayflower boxes. She sighed, folded a pair of pants, and sighed again. “Your father has his dreams, doesn’t he?”