The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
would have taken her fifteen minutes, but at her pace she circled South Bend for half the day. Old Ken joggled and the plates clacked together in the back seat.
Somehow she made her way to the old Studebaker buildings, where her father had worked so many years, though she hadn't planned on ending up there. In one of the old Studebaker plant parking lots, Lois sat in the car with her hands on the steering wheel, staring at a sign above the first floor of one of the buildings: “Avanti.” She didn't think about it as the name of a car, but as a philosophy. An arrow shot across the skinny letters on the sign. The letters slanted from left to right as though swept along in the arrow's draft. Lois thought Avanti meant something like “Let's go fast and break our necks” in Italian.
A hundred windows, half of them boarded, lined the brick factory with the Avanti sign. Lois still remembered her father complaining about the Fiberglas hulls of the Avantis, how difficult they were to shape. “This Fiberglas is stubborn,” he'd griped to her mom one day. “It doesn't know how to behave. You can't bang it into a sensible shape like metal.” This stood out in Lois's memory because her dad didn't usually gripe and didn't like that kind of behavior in others. He believed that griping made people weaker than they already were. “We must know what we're doing or we wouldn't do it,” he'd added to make up for his complaint. That's how her dad had always spoken of Studebaker. Not the royal “we” but the familial kind, like management cut him in on every decision it made. Studebaker had encouraged that kind of feeling. The company slogan was “Always give the customer more than you promise,” and Lois's dad believed it.
Lois remembered a day when he came home glum and silent for lunch, not griping, but not talkative either. Lois had stayed home from school that day with a slight fever. She didn't say anything when her father mentioned the rumor, and neither did Lois's mother, who set out a bologna sandwich and a bowl of soup in front of him, then snapped on the radio. Lois's father raised his spoon to his mouth, his hand just staying there for three or four full minutes before he pushed his food aside and rested his head on his arms. Lois couldn't remember the words of the radio announcement now, only the somber tone. The plant closed three weeks after Oswald assassinated Kennedy, and, to Lois, the tone of the announcement seemed the same. Just as sudden, just as unbelievable.
“I'm sure we wouldn't have done it if we didn't have to,” was all her father said.
“What's this ‘we’?” Lois's mom said.
“There's got to be a good explanation,” he said.
“A lot of good that'll do.” She took a chair and sat down and looked at him directly. “What about your retirement fund?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I'll find out.” Then he shook his head and said, “They've got to give us an explanation. You don't just drop out without explaining yourself.”fought her way through the front door
Hypocrite, Lois thought now. Well, Avanti to you, Daddy.
A couple of the old buildings at the plant were still in use, but only a store selling old parts had any relation to the old Studebaker. A painting of a Commander adorned the side of the building, and above that the words PARTS FOR STUDEBAKERS. LARK. HAWK, AVANTI. TRUCKS. A chubby man wearing a white shirt and yellow shorts stood beneath the sign, looking in her direction. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and waved to Lois as though she always showed up in the parking lot about this time of day. Lois put the car in reverse and spun gravel.
No matter what, today wasn't going to be a complete waste. She headed for Martin's to buy some necessities for her family.
Lois fought her way through the front door past Willy's dogs. She carried her groceries into the living room and through the den, where Gail sat with her knees up in Willy's leather recliner, her eyes on the tube, her hands picking away at a Fruit Roll-Up. She looked at Lois and said, “Who are you?”
“I'm your mother, I guess,” Lois said.
“You guess?” Gail stared at Lois suspiciously and said, “The kitchen's over there.”
“Where's Meg?” Lois said.
“You mean the pug-nosed wonder?” Gail said.
“I mean, Meg.”
Lois hated the word pug and tried to discourage Gail from using it, which made her use it all the more. Pug reminded Lois of Pekinese. True, Meg had a small nose, and in Lois's heart of hearts, she supposed the nose could fairly be called “pug.”
Gail stuck her arm out straight, her finger pointed toward the kitchen, her eyes still on the set.
Lois walked into the kitchen, where Meg sat at the table, reading a book. Meg dog-eared a page and set the book down. “My nose isn't pug, is it?” she said.
“Of course not,” Lois said, dumping the groceries on the counter.
Gail and Meg didn't look at all alike. Gail, with her short hair and bony figure, looked like some slight teenage boy who one day would shoot into the clouds, to basketball height and beyond. Already she was taller than most girls her age and many boys. In that way, she'd taken after Lois.
Meg, the runt of the family, was shorter than most ten-year-olds. In a family of giants, Willy and Lois had always wondered where Meg might have come from. Her face was round and her hair, which sometimes seemed light red and sometimes blonde, fell long and straight in front of her shoulders. She liked to wear white T-shirts and blue-jean overalls. Gail had a uniform, too, one that Lois thought of as “Dress to Depress.” Her normal outfit consisted of a black T-shirt with the lightning-jagged logo of her current favorite band. Today, she wore “Anthrax” across her chest. While Gail preferred black for her torso, she encased her legs in blue, though just barely. She liked to wear jeans with rips and holes, from which frayed threads dangled. Also, bandanas enthralled her. She wore one around her forehead, and one on each leg. She looked like one of the leads in a heavy metal version of Les Miserables, her clothes tattered, her wounds tended with tourniquets. Not that Lois minded her daughter's appearance. Gail simply went about in costume for a high-school play on a stage without boundaries.
Lois washed her hands at the kitchen sink and told Meg to help her with the groceries.
“What about Gail?” Meg said.
“Gail, come in here and help with dinner,” Lois yelled.
A few moments later, Gail tromped into the kitchen with a weary expression and a stiff-jointed monster walk, her arms in front of her. Lois prepared dinner while Meg and Gail did the dishes from the night before. Lois asked Gail where Willy was, and Gail got a stern look on her face and said, “Dad said he wouldn't be home for dinner.”
Just like him. They had come to an agreement, and now he'd broken it. For their last week living in the same house, they'd decided to at least eat dinner together, all four of them. So Gail and Meg wouldn't think there was any rancor between Lois and Willy.
“Did he say where he'd be?” Lois said.
“God, how would I know. Am I Dad's major confidant? Am I the FBI?”
Meg, who dried the dishes faster than Gail washed them, stood at her sister's side and looked in the air as though waiting for a bus to arrive. “Well, I'm standing here,” she said.
“You're not supposed to just wipe them off,” Gail said. “You're supposed to put them away, too.”
“They're not dry yet.”
“So dry them, you twit,” Gail said.
Meg looked over at Lois and moaned.
“Okay girls, that's enough.”
Gail looked slyly at Lois and said, “By the way, you're in trouble with Dad. Guess who forgot to take him to work this afternoon?”
Lois picked up a carrot and started to peel. “Was he angry?” she said.
“Fuming,” said Gail.
“Jesus,” said Lois, tossing the carrot into the sink. Willy had his