by C J Hribal
This news sobered our father. Even though he wasn’t selling anymore, the idea of having his driving privileges taken away—it was too awful to think about.
“I guess you can let things slide for only so long,” said our father.
“No shit, Sherlock,” said the doctor.
“And I’ll be better if I do like you say?”
“Well, you won’t be any worse. But let’s face it, Wally. You’ve done a number on your body, and medical science can do only so much. But let’s at least give it a fair shot, shall we?”
Strangely enough, our father agreed. He had cataract surgery and another angioplasty. He wore a black patch over the exploded veins in his eye. He finally started taking his diabetes medicine, his blood thinners, his beta-blockers. He semi-quit drinking, he semi-watched his diet. Or rather our mother watched his diet for him. Now, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, just like us when we were children, he’s the one who receives the one-third glass of champagne and has to sneak the other two-thirds. And when it’s time for the toast, he holds up his puddle of bubbly and gets this elfin grin on his face like he knows he’s getting away with something.
We smile, too, relieved he’s alive. But we’re a little scared, too. He’s not gotten away with everything he thinks he has. It’s now been a good decade since those strokes, since he wanted to blow up the Smithsonian, but his body and his mind’s slow collapse is exactly why we gathered last night to talk over what we should do about our parents.
His flesh sags in ways it never did when he was a hundred pounds heavier. He’s still a big man, but it’s like watching a fat, juicy sausage being reduced to a hard biscuit before your eyes. You want to say he looks good, but he doesn’t. Partly that’s your fault. You had gotten used to his obesity. Now it’s a shock to see him shrunken and sunken like this.
I think of all the things he missed out on: first steps, first words, first stitches, First Communions, first arguments, first dates, first plays, first graduations, first this, first that. But why limit it to firsts? What about the thousands upon thousands of quotidian events that made up who we were and who we are? Why skip over those? He wouldn’t. We only think he would because he did miss them. And even as adults we believe that if he missed them, then he wanted to miss them. We weren’t listening to the stories he told us, and he wasn’t telling us everything anyway. His fascination with his time in the service, his selfishness, his self-absorption—it was a way of coping with long absence. And in his own mind, everything he did he did for us—the move to Elmhurst, the move to the farm, the long, long hours traveling, the sacrifice of family time for the slightly bigger commission, the kahuna commission waiting out there in the deep of both plumbed and virgin Territory.
The Territory, the Territory. Our father rocking along to the rhythm of the steam train pistons in the opening number of Meredith Willson’s Music Man, crying along with the other peddlers on the train, “But he doesn’t know the Territory!” Yet being enamored of Robert Preston—Professor Harold Hill—who doesn’t know the Territory and doesn’t care to, who plays by his own rules, who digs deep into his bag of tricks, and pulls one out of his ass. Our father believing the world worked that way, some alchemy of the two. He was with the peddlers on the playing-by-the-rules thing, yet he cheered Robert Preston every time he fooled the townspeople who wanted to see his credentials.
Our father played by the rules. He inhaled them. He became them. He hated them. But he continued to believe in them. And he took all of us—wife and kids—along for the ride.
Like most couples starting out after the war, our parents were young and scared and hopeful. They either didn’t know or didn’t want to believe that what was coming down the turnpike was aimed straight at them.
Drugs, Divorce, Depression, Death—the Four Riders of the Suburban-Exurban Apocalypse—you couldn’t stop any of it. Bad things happen. Bad things happen to everybody. Our parents wanted to believe differently. Everybody did. Everybody was the exception. Everybody was the rule.
Our father thought he could beat the rules by playing by them. The odds were stacked against him, but in excess there was possibility. In excess there was hope. They had seven of us trying to beat the odds, trying to get ahead of the curve. Our father threw himself into our mother again and again in the sheer exuberance and exhilaration of beating the odds.
It is a curiously American belief. But then, our dad is America. Our parents are America. His bald head, his piebald arms. We are safe now from his schemes. Or are we? And why did we rebel and reject and scoff in the first place? Because his was a generation that dared to believe in dreams? Because ours was one that didn’t? Or was it simply that their dreams, being more modest, also seemed attainable, and while we were dreaming big—world peace, the brotherhood of man—we couldn’t bear to see somebody else striving for something more modest, something that seemed to be so easily, impossibly within our reach?
We are up on the roof, all of us. Even Wally Jr., whom we again haul up with ropes, then block the wheels on his chair so he won’t go rolling off the gutters. We packed our parents off earlier, drove them to a field, watched them board a balloon, watched the launch, followed them for a little while, then hightailed it back here and scrambled up on the rooftop so we could watch them come in over our heads. We can hardly believe it. We are waiting for our parents’ arrival, and they are arriving by balloon. We also got everyone from their wedding party who is still alive to witness this. They are going to come over the hill from Otis Kempke’s farm, over Wally Jr. and Claire’s double-wide, over our heads, and they are going to sit that balloon down in the lower part of the field, where we’ve painted a bright red X on the shorn alfalfa. And we are going to climb down, those of us on the roof, and get in cars and trucks and drive or run down our field to greet them, to drink champagne—more champagne! we’ve been drinking it all day—to toast them, to wish them another fifty years together. They have survived—my God!—and we are stunned and taken aback and grateful.
We have spent the day talking about our parents. There is a nursing home on the horizon now, yes, regardless of what other remedies—elder home, assisted care facility—we try before that, but we’re not going to talk about that now. Partly because it shames us that none of us is willing to look out for our parents 24-7, the way they devoted their lives to looking out for us and their own parents, and partly because we are celebrating their expansive past, not their limited future.
“Our parents are America,” I tell my siblings, and they scoff, tell me I’m cockeyed. It’s getting near dusk. I’ve been drinking champagne since breakfast. The sky is pink and pale blue and gray, the color of a mollusk, and the fields still have that look of winter about them. The wind is raw even though it’s barely blowing. We had to pay extra to get the balloon company to take our parents up on a day like this; their season usually starts in late April or early May. “But it’s for our parents,” we explain, “their fiftieth wedding anniversary,” and for a couple hundred extra dollars the operator agrees to do us a favor.
Perhaps I am cockeyed. “I have always thought of our father as an immense man living a small life,” I say, and I try to explain. I tell them that, like most of us, he did not live his life to its fullest margins. Or rather, having glimpsed, when a young man, just how wide those margins were, he decided to take on instead something he thought he could manage.
“He ain’t dead yet, Emcee,” says Wally Jr. “Stop eulogizing him.”
But I can’t stop. Our mother, I continue to tell them, got an even smaller glimpse of what the wide world had in store for her, but she was in love with our father, and she acceded to what he wanted, and it was a long time down the road before she realized she had settled for less than what she wanted—Wally-Bear was plenty, I think she reasoned—and by then it was too late.
“Modest hopes, modest dreams,” I tell my siblings. Waiting for our parents to ride over our heads in a balloon, I find I am suddenly sentimental, forgiving. I think back to
those photos taken of our parents before they were married. That photo of the skinny young man in the alley with his hat flying away behind him, and the one of the young woman in the velvet dress, sitting on a tricycle with a lot of juicy thigh showing. A borrowed car, a trike, and a certain devil-may-care cheeriness and willingness to face the world and all it had to offer—that’s what our parents had to start with. And from that our father hoped to deliver us into a land of milk and honey. And to create for himself an impregnable castle to come home to after he was done with his weekly fight with the world.
Our mother wanted even less. Companionship, someone to drive her around, an enclosed circle of safety within the borders of our house. She didn’t expect such safety out in the larger world, where she knew, things happened. In fact, out there she expected them to happen—disappointments in love and sex, unfulfilling jobs, backstabbing co-workers, incompetent supervisors, bad marriages, cretinous lovers. “But you will always have a home to come home to,” she told us, meaning her home, our first home. And when we would call home from far away, she would entertain us by reciting a litany of catastrophe shocking in its plainness—deaths, dismemberments, divorces, suicides. As though if she recited this litany she could pretend, could convince herself, that we would never find a place within it.
If our parents had bigger dreams, if they wanted more, they didn’t tell us.
In the last years of the twentieth century, our parents gave up any hope of their family surviving intact into happiness. For our father, this was something to rail against, bitterly. For our mother, the most she seemed to hope was for us to survive into contentment. To weather whatever came with a certain grace and dignity, and when that failed, to shrug and keep our opinions to ourselves.
We learned to rail. We learned to shrug.
Our parents weren’t ahead of the curve so much as they were the curve. Or rather, once upon a time they were the curve, when they left Chicago with all those other post-Korea hopefuls. Then they were ahead of the curve, when they decamped the suburbs for the country. Then they were behind it again, holding out as the farms disappeared and the subdivisions mushroomed. Finally, as their taxes skyrocketed, they wondered if they should rejoin the curve, sell it all off, the farm our father had always dreamed of, and take the very tidy nest egg that resulted and move to Montrose, Colorado—the last great dream of our father, as it turns out.
They sprang that on us at the end of brunch. Before the wedding party and all the friends and relatives arrived for the public party, before the balloon launch, we got together, just the family. Wally Jr. in his wheelchair, Cinderella minus Mel, whom she would never marry, Robert Aaron and Audrey and their brood, Ike and his wife, Sam, and their blended families, me and mine, Ernie and the pregnant Cindy, Peg Leg Meg and her beau, Greg. Here we all were, gathered on the day of our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, giddy as kids on Christmas morning.
Things had gotten better. After Wally Jr.’s accident and our father’s breakdown, things did get better. He had been chastised, we had been scared; it seemed like things were heading toward normal. Even some of his financial schemes have turned out okay. A dozen and a half of the black walnuts did make it to maturity, and some high-end cabinetry company will pay our parents fifty thousand a tree. And the land itself? Let’s just say our parents’ wants will be well-funded. We’ve turned out okay, too. I married Dorie Keillor, the world’s unlikeliest girl next door. Things remain rocky between us, but we are still married. Ike, too, had remarried. Granted, it wasn’t a church wedding, but it was a ceremony. He and Sam pledged their troth beneath a scrub oak on some hillock in western Montana. They showed us pictures. Lots of sky, a cabin, the humans insignificant. There are seven people in the photographs: Sam, Ike, Sam’s three kids from a previous marriage, Ike’s two from his. The bride is wearing jeans and a Russian peasant blouse, the groom fringed buckskins and turquoise. His hair is plaited, and the braids rest on his chest like matching pull cords. The children stand like sentinels in a feral American Gothic, holding spears instead of pitchforks. They are their own tribe. Somewhere in Tennessee, Ike’s two other children live with their mother. They will never know him. We will never know them. But the rest of their kids are here, and Robert Aaron and Audrey, not tired of love, adopted Janie and Joe, then had Jake, a late surprise they cherish simply for his existence. Peg Leg Meg got married and divorced—a first marriage as short and disastrous as my own—and she seems happy enough with Greg. Even Cinderella’s children have fared better in some instances, and certainly no worse, than other children of divorce. Perhaps the best indication, though, that the offspring of Cinderella and Oswald Grunner are going to be all right is that, except for Okie II, they all want their mother’s maiden name back. They want to be Czabeks.
So there were our parents, surrounded by fecundity, thirty-eight fecundities in all, the sprawl of progeny, our father’s philosophy of excess made flesh. And what does our father do? He drops the big one on us.
“We’re selling the farm,” he says. “And moving to Colorado.”
“Wally-Bear, don’t exaggerate. We’re thinking of selling the farm. We’re thinking of moving to Colorado.” We look at them, dumbfounded. First, because we don’t believe they would do it. Don’t believe they could do it. We don’t care if their prospective new home is in a happy valley, a place where the temperatures are mild, even in winter. Where the sun shines always and the winds are temperate and a man and a woman can look forward to their remaining years together with other empty-nesters in retirement condos and ranch houses, well-serviced and well-fed, in green fields, beneath a mountain’s majesty and a canyon’s red and yellow walls and God’s unending and azure sky. They would be moving away from their children and grandchildren. They want to move away from all this? Away from us? What are they thinking?
“Mom,” I ask, “is this what you meant last night when you told Cinderella that you and Wally-Bear have everything taken care of?”
“Not completely,” says our mother enigmatically.
Not completely?
“We have other contingencies,” says our mother, and it’s clear she’s not going to offer up anything more. We are ready to write this off as another of our father’s scatterbrained ideas until he zizzes the rubber band off the rolled-up plans he’s had drawn up by a developer. We decide to humor them.
“Who?” asks Ernie.
“Don’t worry,” says our father. “Someone reputable.”
“A reputable developer,” says Ernie. “That’s a contradiction in terms, ainna?”
We drink, we toast, we cheer. Our parents’ guests will be here soon, and then we need to drive our parents over to Chetaqua and get them in their balloon so they can make their grand arrival midparty. But first our father wants to show us his plans. He rolls them out across the chip dip and the artichoke hearts, across the mayonnaise and the mustard, across the rye bread and the dill pickles, across the salami and the sliced ham.
And there it is. The very thing our father had fled thirty-five years previous—a subdivision on top of our farm. Everything lotted out, sweeping roadways leading back to one cul-de-sac after another, irregular pie slices and puzzle pieces carving up God’s green acres. The woods—gone. The marsh—a pond now with “lake access” or “lake frontage” lettered into the lots that face it. The fields subdivided into curved lots that look like aerial views of 1950s furniture, dotted lines marching across our farm like schematics of how to carve up a side of beef.
“What gives, Dad?”
“Yeah, what gives?”
“All my life,” says our father, “all my life I’ve wanted to live out West.”
This is a lie. He’s never said any such thing to any of us, ever. He’s had plenty of dreams, but living in Colorado was never one of them. He had been driven mostly by the curious but common belief that someplace else was better than where he was. Safer, greener, less corruptible, less corrupting. Virgin soil. A place where a man’s dream, like his seed, c
ould take root and flourish. Our father believed in it, in the Holy Grail of open space. Many years ago it had been the open prairie of Elmhurst, the last stop on the trolley line out of Chicago. A decade later it was the seemingly unbounded space of ninety-nine acres three and a half miles from the nearest town. Now it was a valley in a state he had visited only once.
We are stunned. What this means is that for our father, no one place mattered. For all his talk about rootedness and family and home, place is replaceable. It is simply the variable x that finds its way into our father’s equation for happiness. In his heart, our father is the Ancient Mariner. He is Odysseus, he is Arthur, he is Magellan, searching, searching, always searching. Which makes our mother Penelope and Guinevere and whatever poor woman Magellan had taken for a wife. I wasn’t crazy about how any of those stories turned out. I wasn’t crazy about how this one was turning out, either.
“But I thought—I thought you liked it here,” I said. I was perplexed and angry, and I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did, and I didn’t want to admit that. It had to do with Dorie, and with the realization that what you thought was stable could turn into sand beneath your feet. My wife, my father. Was I the only person in this family who did not like surprises, who wanted, after all, even more than my father, for things to remain the same? Have I become my father, or who I thought my father always was, the one person I could never imagine myself becoming?
But then a voice wiser than mine—it was Wally’s, it was Meg’s, it was Ike’s, it was Robert Aaron’s, it was everyone’s—said, “Let it go, Emcee, let it go. It’s what he wants.”
“But how does he know what he wants if it keeps changing?” I cried. I could not believe this was happening.