by C J Hribal
“She changed, Wally. I don’t know why but she changed. All of a sudden my being a dentist wasn’t enough for her. Raising chinchillas and having the damn little things made into chinchilla fur coats for her—it wasn’t enough either. She had such need, Wally, it was written right on her face. A big heart and a bigger pussy. I failed her, Wally.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said our father.
Louie got up from the bar, plunked some quarters in the jukebox. Ray Charles’s “Born to Lose” started playing, and Louie played along, his fingers finding the notes on the bar top.
“I gotta own up to something else, Wally. Shirley—she didn’t just leave me.”
“No?”
Louie shook his head. “She left me months ago. Some he-man seaman down at Great Lakes, some chief petty officer with a big dick. She moved in with him. This after I sent her all the money from the house. I lost my house, Wally. Sold it for a song. I couldn’t stay there anyway. Too many bad memories.”
“Where are you staying, Louie?”
“I’m a free man, Wally. I got me a trailer. I’m okay. I even get chicks to come back with me if I give them cab fare home.”
“Cab fare,” said our father.
“Plus a little something for their time.”
“For their time,” said our father.
“Hey,” said Louie. “When you pay for the company you keep at least you know what you’re getting, right?” He grabbed our father’s forearm. “Am I right or am I right? Right?”
“Louie—” said our father, but Louie put his finger up to his lips and said, “Shh, shh.” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” came on the jukebox and they sang along with that, sotto voce at first and then louder. Then it was Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” I thought of that Frank Sinatra movie that featured the song “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” and had that great sad moment in the bar where Frank says/sings, “So set ’em up, Joe. I got a little story you oughta know. . . .” I don’t remember how that movie turns out, I just remember that sad romantic moment, the low lighting and the camaraderie of the bartender and Sinatra. It was like that now, only the bartender was taking a backseat to my father, who was singing about Sukie Tawdry and Lotte Lenya along with Louie. The desperate jocularity of the moment struck me, and I recalled a scene from another movie, one that featured Fred Astaire being all depressed and ended with Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling. Amazing. I was hoping for something like that now. Louie was going to announce he was in love again; Shirley was all wrong for him, but he’d finally found somebody right, the sadder but wiser girl, as Robert Preston sang in The Music Man, and he was once again settling down. Those rebound girls—that was all behind him now.
And for a minute it looked like that was exactly the case. Louie said to our father, “I got options, Wally. This ain’t the end of me. Not by a long shot. My woman leaves me, okay, fine. Who needs a wife, anyway? I got options. I got plans.”
“Plans?” said our father.
“I’m applying to be recommissioned.”
“With who?”
“The Navy.”
“The reserves?”
“No, the reserves are for fat guys who want to relive their youth. No offense, Wally”—our father was still in the reserves—“but I’m talking about being where it means something. I’m joining the regular Navy again.”
“Louie, you’re forty-eight years old.”
“They need my experience.”
“They don’t need that much experience.”
“I’m a dentist. They have to take me. They need dentists.”
Our father’s voice got very quiet. Either this was urgent or he didn’t want me listening. I listened anyway. “Why in Sam Hill do you want to be a Navy dentist, Louie?”
“Chicks,” Louie breathed back to our father. “The chicks always dig a guy in uniform. I figure a guy like me could use the cachet to, you know, get him started. With the chicks, I mean. It worked on Shirley. Hell, it works on everybody.”
“And what if they don’t take you, Louie?”
Louie looked into his beer. “Then I’m going to blow my brains out, Wally. You wait and see.”
Louie was as good as his word. I was in college when Louie received a letter stating that the United States Navy, with regrets, would not be recommissioning Lieutenant JG Louis John Hwasko. He had served his country admirably when called upon, but they no longer required his services. I was called home when our parents received the phone call informing them that their best man, our father’s best friend, Louie Hwasko, was found in the trailer he’d lived in since Shirley left him, his brains blown across his kitchenette with his service revolver. He’d been scrambling eggs. The coroner said you’d be hard-pressed to tell what was eggs and what was brain.
“Why’d he do it, Dad?” asked Peg Leg Meg. If anyone had been handed a bum deal by life, it was Meg—born with one leg shorter than the other—but she couldn’t understand how anybody could be a pessimist as long as you were still breathing on God’s green earth.
“Because he was a failure,” said our father. He kept saying it, too: “A failure, a failure.” His voice was trembling. His shoulders shook. His gaze started to fall on us, but then he shifted it, out the window and over the fields for which he’d always had such grand plans.
18. We’ll Put It on Your Bill
THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
We’re still bad-mouthing Cinderella when she arrives. Meg’s saying, “She’s not here, is she? Where is she? Why isn’t she here? Tomorrow is the second most important day in our family’s history and she’s not here?” when Cinderella pokes her pale head inside the tepee and says, “Mom said you were down here.”
“Oh, Sarah. We didn’t hear you come down.”
“I guess not.”
“We were just talking about Mom and Dad.”
“I heard.” Cinderella’s face still has that game, haunted look, as though she were apologizing for having intruded on our bad behavior. But there is an edge to her voice. We feel ashamed. It’s also apparent she’s been crying, but then she often looks like that.
“Mom says you shouldn’t worry about things. She and Dad have it all figured out.”
“They do?”
“Pretty much.”
“Care to enlighten us?” I ask.
“She said to say you should hold your horses. They’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“They couldn’t tell us now?”
“You couldn’t have this discussion in front of them? Mom said, ‘Everything in its own way, in its own time.’ Besides, you’re down here now and they’re going to bed.”
“Dad’s awake?”
“He got up for a little while. Then he and Mom talked.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I must’ve gotten home a little after you guys came down here. Mom was still up. She was crying.” Nobody addresses the fact that Cinderella has evidently been crying, too.
Cinderella takes a deep breath to steady herself. “She seemed okay about it. Whatever you said to upset her—she said we shouldn’t worry. That everything was taken care of.”
“Taken care of how?”
“You know, it’s the funniest thing. I asked Mom the same thing, and she got this curious smile on her face. ‘We shall see what we shall see,’ Mom said. Then she laughed and said, ‘And that’s the name of that tune.’ ”
“You’re sure it was Mom who said that?”
“Dad had already gone back to sleep.” Cinderella yawns. “I should, too. It’s late.”
She’s about to leave, but Meg doesn’t want her to go. “So, Cinders,” she says. “Where were you tonight? We had things to talk about.”
“Mel and I had some things to talk about, too.”
“Oh?”
“You wouldn’t want to know.” She means all of us.
“Try us,” I say.
“No, it’ll make me seem like a victim, and I know how you hate tha
t.”
It’s amazing how warm a tent can feel on a cold March night.
But Cinderella can’t not tell us. She looks up at the tepee’s crown, where the smoke escapes to the night sky. She takes another deep breath and sighs. “Mel’s thinking of going back to his wife.”
“Oh, honey,” Robert Aaron says. “That’s terrible.”
“Bummer,” says Ernie.
“Double bummer,” says Wally Jr.
“Yeah, well—” She takes a step into the tepee, catches her foot, and staggers.
“Did he give a reason?” Ike asks.
Meg says, “I still want to know what Mom and Dad’s plans are. How they think everything is taken care of.” Her eyes narrow. “Did she tell you?”
Cinderella rights herself, then gets this sickly, sad, self-satisfied smile on her face. As though God had entrusted her with the secrets of the universe, whispered them into her ear, and she’s dying to tell, but God has also whispered to her exactly what her punishment will be if she reveals them. She puts her finger to her mouth. “Shh!” she says, and you can tell she’s answering both Meg’s question and Ike’s. “Loose lips sink ships.”
Our father’s life was saved by sex and cookies. Once Benny Wilkerson left Drydell and went to work for Dinkwater—which our father, right then, couldn’t contemplate—our father’s days at Drydell were numbered. A few months later he was given a pink slip; the paint division got reorganized, and his territory magically evaporated. Being unemployed again just about killed our father. Excluding the months when dying companies were promising him that pay and bonus checks were “on their way,” our father was out of work nearly a year, and for several years running didn’t pull in anything close to a regular income. What he did earn he spent on drink and fishing equipment. During that time the Arabs and Israelis had a war, Vietnam fell, Nixon resigned, there was an oil crisis, a recession, and a rise in worldwide Communism. African dictators rose and fell, South American ones murdered their own people, the dollar was shaky, prices and wages were frozen, and the Russian Bear was dancing. Closer to home, our father’s best friend blew his brains out, and his oldest daughter was locked into a loveless marriage with an abusive husband.
The really horrible thing, though, was that our mother got a job.
A great many things sent our father to bars, taverns, saloons, and gin joints, but except for the news about Louie Hwasko, the most devastating news our father could receive was that our mother was employed outside the home. Robert Aaron and I had been working for some time already, our college funds had been zeroed out, but the idea that our father couldn’t support our mother—no, no, that just couldn’t be.
“Did it ever occur to you that I wanted to do it, Wally-Bear? Have a job, I mean.”
“No woman wants a job unless she’s one of them women’s libbers burning their bras and waving the damn things in public at you.”
“Lots of women have jobs, Wally, and they didn’t burn their bras to get them.”
“No wife of mine is going to have a job. You already have one. You’re a wife and a mother. These kids are your job. I’m your job.”
“You’re my Job, Wally, not my job. Right now you’re my not so little cross to bear. And ‘these kids,’ Wally? ‘These kids’ are nearly grown. Or hadn’t you noticed? They’re growing up and out, right under your nose, and they’d grow a whole lot faster if we had something in the house besides beer and tortilla chips to put inside their mouths!”
“Sure, that’s right, rub it in. Rub my goddamn nose in it. Twist the knife in his guts, tell a man he can’t provide for his family!” Our father was shouting. He’d been drinking since noon.
“I didn’t say anything about you not providing for your wife and family. I’m simply saying I want to help out. There are a lot of us.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“It’s not anybody’s fault, Wally. We wanted it like this, remember?”
Our father closed his eyes. At that moment it didn’t seem he’d be able to recall anything without a great deal of difficulty. Finally he breathed, “I had you on a pedestal. A pedestal!”
Our mother sighed. “Well, it’s not always fun being up on a pedestal, Wally. You get stiff. Sometimes we like to climb down and move around.” She was rubbing his shoulders. “Maybe this is the best thing for us, you know?” We could see she was trying to make the best of a bad situation. It was why she had taken the checkout job at the same grocery store where I worked. She even appealed to the great mystery of their married life. “You know, Wally, maybe our ‘you know’ would be better if I got out of the house more. I’d feel friskier for having been out in the workaday world, and you’d feel friskier for having a more active wife.”
You could tell from her voice’s waver that she didn’t believe what she was saying to him but that she desperately wanted to. It puzzled us why she’d want to. Our father was drunk and fat, and our mother was an attractive woman, though portly from childbearing and unhappiness. Frankly, we wondered how two round bodies managed to have sex at all.
We understood nothing of the intimacy of grooming, found in other primates, and we thought the excitement of body parts fitting together applied only to nubile bodies. We forgot, or never knew, that given the comic nature of genitalia, “you know” was a pleasure, a release, and a relief, the punch line to a private joke shared by our parents.
Even in times like this. Here they’d been arguing, our father angry and then despondent, everything—his dignity, his respect, his wife—slipping away from him, and now our mother was comforting him. Our father sat at the kitchen table, his head buried in our mother’s belly, pitifully saying over and over in a weak little voice, “I want a job, a job. A job a job a job.”
Our mother kissed our father’s forehead and stroked his ears. “Why don’t we put you to bed and . . . you know.”
You know? Now? It was six o’clock on a Saturday evening. Had our parents no sense of decency? Decorum? They did and they did not. Our parents reminded us at that moment of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows of The Honeymooners. When Ralph, after flying into one rage after another, and generally mucking things up royally, is finally forgiven and brought to rights by Alice, he is invariably flummoxed and perhaps mortified, but he is also thankful. “Alice, you’re the greatest” was that show’s tagline, and it didn’t matter that Alice was a true beauty and Ralph a blustery buffoon. Something happened between them behind those closed doors that was good and healing and was worth staying together for. You didn’t get that feeling with the Petries and their twin beds, or the Nelsons, whose bedroom you never saw. The singular magic of Ralph and Alice Kramden was that, babies or no, they had sex when that door closed at the end of the show. And they had it at Alice’s discretion. For all Ralph’s blustering, she held the reins of power in that relationship. And don’t think Ralph didn’t know it. It was part of what made him an impotent blowhard. He had to flex his muscles meaninglessly at least once an episode just to convince himself he was in charge even though he wasn’t. And even as little kids we could see that about our parents as well. Ralph and Alice, Wally and Susan. “Alice, you’re the greatest,” indeed.
Our mother had a job, our father was despondent and emasculated, and our mother gave him her body to make him feel better. “I don’t deserve you,” said our father as our mother led him back to their bedroom, their fingers twined.
Said our mother, “No, Wally, you don’t.” And then right there in the hall she nibbled his ear. “We’ll put it on your bill, Wally-Bear. We will put it on your bill.”
“We’ll put it on your bill, Wally-Bear”? Since when did our mother start speaking in our father’s clichés? What did it mean, besides that our mother was going to keep her crummy little job as a cashier? It meant a great many things, chief among them that the balance of power was shifting in our family. Our mother, who never learned to drive and therefore was always along for the ride, was starting to feel as though maybe, for the sake of her fami
ly—no, for the sake of her sanity—she ought to be in the driver’s seat more often.
Not long after this our father started selling cookies for Pewaukee Cookie and Biscuit. PCB was a tiny company trying to go head-to-head with Nabisco. Their headquarters were in a quasi-bucolic upscale exurb of Milwaukee. Their advertising made you think fat rural bakers of German extraction pulled their wares from stone ovens on long-handled wooden boards, but the factory itself was in an industrial neighborhood in Milwaukee, where skinny black guys hopped up on speed ran the ovens, and large black and Hispanic women ran the packaging lines and brought home as freebies corner-kinked boxes and cello-wrapped packages with ripped seals.
Our father did, too. We ate trial-size samples, broken remnants, and date-expired rejects, boxes of crackers and packages of cookies accidentally sliced open by a packing knife. By this time I’d had a summer job for several years replacing Nabisco cookie salesmen when they went on vacation, so I knew the routine. When you met one of your counterparts from Keebler or Archway or Milwaukee Biscuit, you exchanged goodies. A packing knife’s slice rendered the package damaged, and that way you didn’t have to bring home the same crap you sold all day. But our father never did that. He refused to take the other guy’s stuff in trade. But why? I asked. “Because I work for PCB,” said our father. Pride, belief—our father’s gods did not die.
Even when he was selling cookies.
It might have saved him, having a job again, maybe even more than our mother leading him back to the marital bed. I can’t vouch for that. But I knew there was something desperate about selling cookies for a living, and it required our father to summon up his courage to go out each morning. What our father didn’t like was that it required no real selling. Everybody loves cookies, our father said, even the knockoff brands. There’s nothing to it. So our father set himself the task of stealing six or eight inches of shelf space from that juggernaut Nabisco. Nabisco, being a juggernaut, commands the cookie aisle’s center, and competing brands are shoved to the ends. Nabisco arranges their products using “bull’s-eye” marketing, meaning their popular stuff—Oreos, Saltines, Ritz crackers—go in the bull’s-eye center—and their own less popular sellers are out toward the fringes, further crowding their competitors’ products to the aisle’s ends. Our father wanted to change all that.