The Last Studebaker

Robin Hemley

Description

The human comedy of a family in transition

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In 1963, when Lois Kulwicki's father loses his job at Studebaker along with hundreds of other workers, he acts as if he has just been promoted. He buys a new car (the only non-Studebaker he's ever purchased) and takes his family on vacation. On the way home, Mom dumps Dad at a Stuckey's, and that's the last they see of him.

Thirty years later, Lois has a family of her own, as fractured as her childhood family. Divorced but still living with her ex, she decides to move out with her two daughters and start over but then a stranger named Henry enters their lives. Out of this ersatz family, Lois tries to recover something of what she lost, beginning with a search for her abandoned father. The Last Studebaker is a warmly comic tale of lives changed forever, after the last Studebaker rolled off of the assembly line.

Sujets

• General officer
• General
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253000798
• Langue: English

Extrait

“An amazing work—a painstaking and painful, sympathetic and exhaustive meditation upon the investment of American emotional life in things.”
 
D AVID S HIELDS , author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead , a New York Times bestseller
 
 
“The Last Studebaker is never gimmicky, and offers hope beyond economic and personal despair. It's not only the Studebaker, but life itself, that evokes rueful glances and missed opportunities, along with tenderness and unpredictable charm.”
 
R ACHEL S CHTEIR , Washington Post Book World

The Last Studebaker
A Novel
Robin Hemley
This book is a publication of
 
I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
 
iupress.indiana.edu
 
Telephone orders      800-842-6796
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© 2012 by Robin Henley
 
All rights reserved
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
 
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
 
Manufactured in the United States of America
 
                              Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 
Hemley, Robin, [date]
  The last Studebaker : a novel / Robin Hemley.
        p. cm.
  “Break Away Books.”
  ISBN 978-0-253-00012-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0253-00079-8 (electronic book) 1. Families—Fiction. 2. Studebaker automobile—Fiction. 3. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. I. Title.
  PS3558.E47915L37 2012
  813'.54—dc23
2011053288
 
1  2  3  4  5      17  16  15  14  13  12
For my family, past and present
No dignity without chromium No truth but a glossy finish If she purrs she's virtuous If she hits ninety she's pure
 
W ILLIAM C ARLOS W ILLIAMS , Ballad of Faith
Acknowledgments
“Ballad of Faith,” from William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, 1939–1962. Vol. II. Copyright © 1950 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
“The Banana Boat Song,” by Erik Darling, Bob Carey, and Alan Arkin. Copyright © 1956 by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“True Blue Lou,” words and music by Leo Robin, Sam Coslow, and Richard A. Whiting. Copyright © 1929 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1956 and assigned to Famous Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Famous Music Corporation.
“Wives and Lovers,” by Hal David. Copyright © 1963 by Famous Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Famous Music Corporation.
 
I'd like to thank the North Carolina Arts Council, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown for their generous support in helping me complete this work. I'm also grateful to Dr. Patrick Furlong at Indiana University at South Bend for his Studebaker expertise, and my wife, Beverly, Mark West, and Joe Nordgren, all of whom helped me enormously in completing this work.
Part I
Garage Sales
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Always give the customer more than you promise.
–J OHN M. S TUDEBAKER
ONE
Y ou could have paved your driveway with Willy's voice, which was smoother than dirt, but not as even as asphalt. The gravel in it made him sound naturally surly, even when he said hello.
Lois did her best to ignore him. After all, he was her ex-husband. But here they were, rocking like good friends on the porch swing, drinking whiskey out of paper cups, the dogs resting at their feet. Willy drank more than his share while Lois stared into the grayness of the dirt road in front of their yard.
In the field across the road, a ruby light blinked on top of the radio tower, and somewhere overhead she could hear the buzzing of a small plane. Her head felt soggy with liquor. Her thoughts wouldn't focus, but banged away at her forehead like the bugs batting the screen door. She could hardly pay attention to what Willy said.
She and Willy had finally come to an understanding. More like Willy's understanding. He'd told her she had to be out of the house in a week because “my girl wants to move in and there's not room enough for two in the barn.” Willy had set up his own bachelor quarters out there.
“That's not true,” Lois said. “I know of at least two empty stalls. And there's plenty of hay.”
Willy laughed. “Afraid she wouldn't like that,” he said. “She's not a horse. The last horse I dated was back in high school. Velma Parkinson.”
“Velma,” Lois said.
“It shouldn't surprise you,” he said.
“It doesn't,” she said, but it did. “It's your house. You can do what you like.”
“You still have money left, so that shouldn't worry you.”
“It doesn't,” she said.
What worried her was the coldness in his voice, like she was an employee being terminated, like there was nothing personal, but he just wasn't turning a profit.
“You were the one who wanted this in the first place,” he said.
“I know.”
Lois surveyed the heap of Studebakers in front of the barn. Willy had been reconditioning the cars for the last seventeen years. Reconditioning in the sense that a wrecked ship eventually becomes indistinguishable from a coral reef. His aims seemed pretty hazy. He didn't actually want to fix or sell them, though that's what he claimed. Sheer accumulation seemed to be the goal. Willy was the king of rusted Studebakers. At least thirty of them sat out there, and none in one piece. Sometimes she thought he wanted to see how much of an eyesore he could create in one lifetime. But in some ways, Lois supposed, the cars served a purpose. They were man-made habitats for all sorts of creatures. Not tropical fish like in shipwrecks, but possums and woodchucks and field mice. The ground was barren beneath their pocked and chipped chassis; weeds twined around their airless tires and mushrooms grew in the cracked upholstery. Unhinged doors made little lean-tos for stray cats. If Marlin Perkins were still around, Lois would have given him the scoop on this wild habitat. She could hear him now. “Even in the harshest desert, life abounds.”
“I'm not going to miss those at all,” Lois told Willy, pointing to the row of cars that looked like a line of hippos along a riverbank. She'd never made a secret of her feelings toward them. She hated not only these particular cars, but all Studebakers. She hated the name. She hated the family.
A couple of Larks sat side by side like the Doublemint twins, their wide grilles sparkling as the light from the porch bounced off the chrome.
“They're just cars,” Willy said, his voice harsher than before, and slurred with whiskey. “I can't see why you've always been so stubborn about them. Your old man worked for Stude's. These cars are part of your heritage, your family. They're like your children.”
She shivered at that one. How could he compare Gail and Meg to a pack of rusted heaps with deceitful names like Lark and Champion?
“You're a sucker, Willy. Just like everyone else around South Bend.” Here she spoke with a mock Southern accent. “They're part of mah heritage, mah family, mah little babies.”
Willy took a sip of whiskey. “Yeah, well it's been thirty years.” He shook his head and smiled.
“I'm telling you,” she warned.
Willy leaned toward her. She nearly suffocated from the fumes he emitted.
She waved her hand in front of her nose. “You sure you haven't been drinking ethanol?” That was supposed to be a dig, but it went right past him. Willy worked at the new ethanol plant in South Bend, and she liked to blame him for the smell of it. South Bend had been a good place to live before the ethanol plant was built. Now a sweet yeasty odor permeated the air from one end of the city to the other. When the plant opened, the ethanol people said they'd get rid of the smell in six months. That was three years ago. What really happened was that no one noticed it anymore.
“I've been drinking the same fine Kentucky mash that you've been drinking, my dear,” Willy said, and he took a sip t