The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  “We’re not going to decide anything tonight, are we?” I say. “I mean, if I just ask point-blank, ‘What’s going to happen with Mom and Dad the next couple of years?’ nobody has an answer, right?”

  Wally Jr. says, “Well, for starters, they could keel over tomorrow. I suppose then all our problems are solved.”

  Meg says, “Or they could live twenty more years, the last eighteen of them in Depends.”

  “Ish, man, I don’t want to think about that.”

  “Who does, Ernie? But it’s possible. And then what? Who’s going to take care of Mom and Dad in their old age? You?”

  “Maybe they’ve got a plan,” Ernie says. “Maybe they’ve got it all worked out.”

  “This is Mom and Dad we’re talking about,” Meg says. “Their idea of a plan is a wish and a promise and a hope for the best.”

  “Dad believes in planning.”

  “Dad believes in miracles. And thinking about this stuff just makes Mom sad.”

  “It makes me sad, too,” says Ernie.

  “But that’s not a reason not to think about it!” shouts Meg. “You want to wait till this problem comes up and bites you on the ass?”

  “Whoa, whoa, what got into you?” Wally Jr. says. “Do we need to take some of Ernie’s beer and shovel it down you?”

  “No,” Meg says very evenly, gritting her teeth, “we need to think about Mom and Dad. Because if we don’t have anything worked out, and they don’t have anything worked out, then we’re going to have this same meeting in a few years, only with a much greater sense of urgency, and I will tell you all something now—I am not going to be the default and fallback position for all of you once you’ve decided Mom and Dad are too much to handle.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Wally Jr. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  “The beginning?” Meg says. “What beginning? We’re talking about an ending here.”

  And indeed we are. Which is why we are having trouble talking about it. Meg lays it out for us, what we are looking at, what anyone with parents in their declining years is looking at: independent living with some in-home care, be it in-home aides or visiting nurses, or something more along the line of assisted-living facilities, such as condominiums for the elderly, or group homes, or further down the road, nursing homes or hospices. Depending on our parents’ health and finances, our finances, and what kind (if any) of estate planning our parents have done or are willing to do, we are looking at a whole host of possibilities and permutations.

  “The real question here,” Meg says, “is what kind of care would be best for them.”

  Everyone is silent. We know what kind of care would be best for them. We grew up with that kind of care. We grew up with Nomi. With Artu, too, though there was always the pretext that he kept up his own apartment. Our mother cared for Nomi until she died. And after Nomi died, Artu moved to his own apartment in a town five miles away and “dropped by” four or five nights a week until he, too, passed away. And when Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza’s minds and bodies failed them, they, too, moved in with our parents. They’d never liked our mother, had worked actively against our father marrying that smoldering sexpot of a woman, but when dementia and heart attacks felled them, they were living with our parents, which is to say they were living with our mother since our father was away 80 percent of the time. Our mother, making sure they took their pills and got dressed in the morning and undressed at night. Making sure they bathed regularly, and when they couldn’t manage that, bathing them herself. Combing their hair and shaving them. Feeding them, wiping their chins, changing their sheets, washing them up after their accidents, rolling them to one side of the bed and scrubbing the shit out of the mattress. “You don’t know what it’s like,” our mother said to us, “lifting up an eighty-nine-year-old man’s scrotum to clean beneath his testicles after he’s soiled himself. And he’s telling you not to touch him, he likes the smell of fresh bread in the morning.”

  “So,” says Meg, looking from one of us to the next, pleased she’s finally raised the Big Topic. “Who wants to volunteer? How shall we handle this? Who takes them first? Do we cast lots? Take turns—yearlong residencies with Mom and Dad—or do we pony up and pay one of us to take on sole responsibility? Or . . . or what, exactly?”

  Ernie says, “I always kind of thought Mom and Dad would stay right here.”

  My thoughts exactly, but Meg is on to that like white on rice. “That’s a lovely thought, Ernie, and I’d like to think so, too. But it still begs the question, who’s going to look after them? Are you going to move here from Eau Claire? Is Emcee going to move here from Milwaukee? Robert Aaron from Racine?”

  Wally Jr. says, “Claire and me live right up the hill.”

  “So you’re volunteering?”

  “No, I’m just saying Claire and me live right up the hill. We could look in on them.”

  “Lovely. And what happens when ‘looking in on them’ isn’t enough? Are you ready to be the full-time caretaker? Do we hire a nurse? Move them to foster care? A nursing home? We’re talking fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year for that. I checked. And the level of care—you know this, don’t you?—varies from decent to despicable. You want round-the-clock care? Round-the-clock care my ass. In some of those places you’re lucky if they turn you over every couple of hours so you don’t get bedsores. ‘Hey, Mom, how’s it going?’ ‘Oh, fine, honey, no bedsores this week.’ How’s that for quality of life? Even a group home or assisted-living facility is going to cost twenty to forty thousand, depending on the situation. Heartland Home for the Elders—that’s right here in town—runs thirty-eight thousand a pop. And who, exactly, is going to pay for that? What, we sell the farm? Chop up their assets, make them look poor? Then they’ll qualify for Medicaid, and get warehoused with the rest of the dead and the dying?”

  “Okay, okay,” says Wally Jr. “We got a problem. Why are you getting so worked up about this? We’ll figure something out.”

  “No,” says Meg. “We won’t ‘figure something out.’ That’s not the way it works in this family and you know it. You boys are going to take a powder—just like Dad. You’re going to complain about your jobs, the distance you’d have to travel, the lack of space in your houses, and it’s all going to fall on me. I’ll end up ‘figuring something out,’ and you’ll all applaud me while your lives go on as before and mine goes right down the toilet!”

  I have never heard Meg talk like this. The reason is simple: I was never around to hear her, and when I was around, I wasn’t listening. None of us boys were. We had grown up in a male-centered family, inherited our perceptions of the world from our father. Men went off and did things. Our task, our responsibility, was to find new territory to strike off into. Even if we floundered, even if we failed, at least, by God, we’d gone off in new directions. And if it seemed too overwhelming to reinvent ourselves for the sake of that journey, if we were shaky in our manhood, well, there was always drink to give us courage. Maybe that’s why we boys went bad all in a rush. We found alcohol, all in a rush.

  The girls, we thought, had it easy. Freed from expectations of success and failure, they needed only to absorb, not flounder. We thought we understood Peg Leg Meg and Cinderella. No mystery there. We could ignore them freely. Slighted, they became slight. Insubstantial. Never mind that, as it was by our mother, the real burden of family was borne by them. Never mind that Meg was right and it was all going to fall on her. Our sisters, we liked to believe, were transparent. And perhaps our greatest act of hubris as boys was pretending we weren’t.

  So okay, the irony mobile has just pulled into our campsite. All those years we’ve agreed to disagree, and now that we need to pull together on something we find ourselves looking around at each other, wondering if it’s possible. Ike feeds sticks to the fire. They crackle and burn, the smoke sucked up the lodgepoles and into the sky. Nobody says anything for a while.

  Wally Jr., though, likes nothing better than beating a dead horse. “What abo
ut Cinderella?” he asks, and Ernie seconds it. “Yeah, what about Cinderella?”

  I expect Meg to explode with exasperation again, but this time she’s calm. “What about Cinderella? I don’t know, what about her? You tell me.”

  The rebuke is so light it’s crushing. The fact is, you cannot count on Cinderella. You can pray for Cinderella, you can feel bad for her, but you cannot count on her. She is our family’s martyr, and martyrdom is a full-time occupation. No question, her travails are many and various, and many of them quite real—a long marriage to an abusive husband, ovarian cysts, a bout with breast cancer that required the removal of part of a breast—and as she was going through them we should have been kinder, more sympathetic. No doubt we would have felt sorrier for her had the word martyr not been tattooed on her forehead. At family get-togethers she spent her time sighing and making game little grins—yes, yes, I’ve been absolutely steamrollered by life, but aren’t I brave for being one of life’s bowling pins? It’s hard empathizing with someone so enthusiastically long-suffering.

  She was the first out of the nest, and desperate to prove she was happy. We wanted to believe she was. So did she. For a long time things took place under a cloak of silence and darkness, and neither she nor we were willing to lift the veil. And once it became obvious how awful it was, we were angry with her for allowing it to happen. She seemed to be cooperating in her own martyrdom, and for this we could not forgive her. At birthdays, at Christmas and Thanksgiving, she would show up in her habitual posture, pasty-faced, with pinched-in shoulders and an uncertain smile. Oh, woe is me. We couldn’t stand it.

  Here was something on which we could all agree—Cinderella had given up. We could put it in fairy-tale terms. Two minutes after midnight and she’s sitting in a field on her ass, a smashed pumpkin and a litter of mice at her feet. And unlike the fairy tale, her prince is a shit and her fairy godmother a fraud. It wasn’t only a kiss she gave the prince at midnight. The prince looks at the glass slipper as a memento of a memorable hump and pockets it. Later it falls off the mantel and breaks, and the prince shrugs. What was she doing with that ridiculous footwear in the first place? Those things made her walk funny. The remaining slipper Cinderella keeps wearing in the vain hope that the prince will notice the peasant with the obvious limp and take pity on her. But the prince’s penis is happy elsewhere now, and what need has he of a limping, knocked-up strumpet? Oh, and did we forget to mention, he wasn’t really a prince? He was the village goatherd, but the same idiot story that had her believing pumpkins were carriages and mice were horses and footmen transformed this dung-smelling, mead-swilling lout into a handsome prince. If you only closed your eyes and looked through the slits, and if the backlighting was just right, why . . .

  Okay, so she didn’t give up. She did something worse. She continued to believe. Kept limping around in that slipper until it broke and her foot got gashed and full of slivers. Then she wrapped the foot and kept limping around on the bloody bandage. How it played out is this: We were all at the Round ’Em Up (their name), the Drink Beer for Christ Festival (our name) that St. Genevieve’s put on every summer to help retire the parish’s debt. We were moseying through the craft tent, putting down chances for the raffle (first prize—a whole side of beef), trying our luck at the Ping-Pong ball throw, taking kids on the whirligig ride and the Ferris wheel, when we heard a shriek that sounded like an angel had been stabbed right in the middle of an orgasm.

  You could hear it over the merry-go-round calliope, over the bark of the midway’s hucksters, over the warbling of the beer tent’s polka music, over the entire general din of the fairgrounds. It stopped everything. A single shriek that made your hair stand on end and your toes shrink inside your shoes. My God, what had happened? For a moment everyone paused. Then we all came running. We knew. Even as we ran, we knew. As Czabeks gathered from the far corners of the fairgrounds, from the hamburger stand and the pig rassle, from the carnival midway and the dyspeptic goldfish toss, we knew. We got the children off to one side so they wouldn’t see. Cinderella’s kids in particular. “What is it? What’s happened to Mommy?” the youngest asked. The older ones knew. Even without knowing they knew. They wore on their faces their terrible knowledge. Their eyes had that preternatural look about them of animals who smell smoke in the forest even without knowing it’s fire.

  We got them away, we kept them from seeing, but they knew. The oldest, Okie II, broke away from the pack, and he saw what the rest of us, gathered in a loose semicircle in the beer tent, also saw. His father sitting on a wooden folding chair with a twenty-two-year-old woman on his lap. The woman bore him no relation though she might eventually bear his child. His eyes were closed and his knees were going up and down as though the music were still playing, as though he were keeping time to a beat only he could hear. Batta-bing, batta-bing went the melody. Batta-bing, batta-bing went Okie’s stubby fingers on the woman’s thighs.

  The woman’s name was Kathy Neesmer, and she was pretty if you liked big yellow hair and blue eye shadow and chipmunk cheeks and a slutty pout that years from now would make her look as dyspeptic and unhappy as the goldfish. Cinderella looked stricken. Her face had caved in after her scream, and she looked like her namesake at about midnight plus thirty seconds. So this was her prince? This beery galoot feeling up a coarse-skinned strumpet?

  Okie II ran away crying. Cinderella’s shoulders collapsed. She was shaking and crying into herself. Okie Sr. was nonchalant. “What?” he was saying. “Can’t a man relax on a Saturday afternoon without somebody making a federal case out of it?”

  “What is it, Okie honey? What’s wrong?” Kathy Neesmer asked.

  “My wife,” replied Okie. “I guess we got her all bent out of shape.”

  Sarah let loose with another wave of caterwauling. Okie’s fingers resumed their little drumbeat on Kathy Neesmer’s thigh. “Well,” he proclaimed to nobody in particular, “if she knows, she knows—that’s the price of admission, right, babe?”

  Wally Jr. stepped forward. He was responding to something Okie’d already said. “Bent?” Wally Jr. seethed, his fists rising. “I’ll give you bent, you fucker.”

  “Wally, don’t!” Cinderella wailed.

  “What, are you going to punch me or something?”

  “Or something,” said Wally Jr., and his fist landed in the middle of Okie’s face before Kathy Neesmer could get off his lap. You could hear the nose breaking even before the blood burst from it.

  “Okie, Okie honey! Are you okay?” asked Kathy Neesmer, who’d spilled over backward with Okie and was now bent over him. Okie, her hero. Okie didn’t try to get up. Wally Jr. was still standing over him, fists at the ready, daring him to. Tony Dederoff and his Dairyland Dreamers launched themselves into a fast polka, the musical equivalent of “Okay, everybody, show’s over,” and people went back to whirling away. It was a strange tableau. As a scene it lasted maybe two minutes, but as I stood there, it seemed to take on the arrested timelessness of a Brueghel painting: the dancers’ nervous, sweaty smiles, the blotches of color, the laid-out Okie, the attendant Kathy, Cinderella standing close by, her arms crossed over her sunken chest, hollow-eyed and crying, waiting for her chance to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Had we not led her away, I believe she might have gone to him, too, and tried to elbow aside the woman who’d already replaced her. Oh, her fallen knight! He needed her!

  That night we had a family powwow and decided to pursue that benighted Vietnam strategy of destroying the village in order to save it. If Cinderella would agree to leave Okie, we’d each take one of her children while she put her life back together. If Cinderella couldn’t do it, we would call Social Services and charge her and Okie with being unfit parents. We’d been in their house—no food, no hot water, a gas heater in the middle of the living room for heat. Okie had money for beer and women but nothing for his own family. Robert Aaron, a few years out of college, was the assistant director of social services for a county in central Wisconsin. He knew the ropes.


  “You’d do that to me?” asked Cinderella.

  “We’d do that to you to save the kids, yes,” replied Robert Aaron. We couldn’t tell if Cinderella was listening or not. Her face wore the shocked, vacant expression of someone whose interior regions are empty.

  “Does it have to be this way?” asked our mother.

  “Yes, it has to be this way,” said Robert Aaron. “Otherwise, the county steps in and the kids will be placed in foster homes and we won’t have any say in the matter at all.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Cinderella.

  “Try me,” said Robert Aaron.

  Our father just kept shaking his head. Our mother bit back tears. They were mortified. Had our parents really believed that in moving the family to the country they would be able to deliver us from evil? Yes.

  They were wrong. But we understood. We had wanted to believe it ourselves.

  Is it any wonder that later, when she was making her own late bid for happiness with Mel, we couldn’t bend our minds around the thought that earlier our sister had relished her martyrdom? How dare she not be a victim now? Even though Mel is a relatively nice guy, seems genuinely to care for her, we call him the Prince, as though he had inherited the title worn by the dung-covered village goatherd. Cinderella is a failure in our family—a failure at being happy, a failure at being a victim. She became our sacrificial offering. We turned our backs on her, leaving her to her fate, then we intervened, landing on her like a pile of bricks. Did we do that because we believed that maybe then fate would, if not smile, at least be lenient with us?

  Or did we beat up on her because she was like our father, and because we could?

  ___

  Habitual action (whether it’s martyrdom or sales)—is it method or madness? I wondered about our father, going to bed every night in a new place, waking up bewildered. Did things seem real if every room he slept in looked different from every other, yet vaguely familiar? Timbered north woods motel rooms or functional HoJos. Hotels with potted palms in the lobby, or drive-up rooms with railed balconies overlooking pine trees and dumpsters.