How to Get Into the Twin Palms (14 page)

“Did you see the shrine to my honey?”

In the corner of the kitchen stood her wedding picture. The front of her dress pulled up to show off her legs, her boxer-faced husband smiling at his red-haired siren. There were other pictures too. Him older, on a leather recliner with a plaid shirt on. I never wanted to see him as an old man. I wanted to keep the young, strapping man in my mind. I wondered why she didn’t want to keep thinking of him as the young man she once had.

I looked around her house. “What’s in there?” I pointed to the closed wood-paneled screen.

“His room. I haven’t cleaned it.”

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“In there.”

I stumbled over this for a moment. Why did she call it his room first? I wanted to see it but I knew she would never let me. It seemed sacred. It seemed like things happened in there that I would never be able to find out for myself.

“He treated me like a princess.”

I became acutely aware that my arm itched more and more. I looked down at it. Red bumps had started to form. I showed them to Mary. She waved them off.

“My love cleaned those gutters all the time, never a scratch.”

“I know, but maybe something’s up there.”

“Not possible.” She went into the kitchen with my glass and came back with a refill. “Two cubes. You look like two cubes.”

All I wanted was water but I couldn’t bring myself to ask so I gulped down the scotch.

“You have to sip, honey.”

“I’m sorry, Mary.”

“I get lonely here. No one gives a fuck about me.”

I wanted to tell her I cared, but my arm itched and the fear of what it was kept me from really, really caring. She did this to me. Her gutters. A man’s job put on me. I only knew her from bingo and I didn’t need this. I hoped she didn’t want me to vacuum too.

“Do you need a boom box?”

I thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

She looked around the room from her perch in the recliner, her husband’s recliner. “Do you know any men who need clothes?”

I only knew a handful of men, Lev, the desk clerk, and Room 214. Greg. I didn’t think they’d want to wear a dead man’s clothes.

 

“He had such nice clothes. I have to give them to someone.”

“Goodwill?”

“Then they could end up anywhere. You know what quality these pieces were? Suits like you’ve never seen. He kept things nice.”

I smiled and tapped my glass. “I bet.”

“Well, I’ll give you the boom box, if you want. But not the clothes. I need to know where they end up.”

I got up and asked to go to the bathroom. She pointed down the hall, past the room. I wanted to push in the screen but I knew better.

The hall had more paintings of horses and ships sailing, bad prints of bad paintings, old paintings, and I knew if I moved them the wallpaper would stand out bright against the rest of the fading paper. The walls faded from the sun and age.

“Oooh, my honey loved horses. He was buried with the best of the horse pictures. I only left myself a few. He loved the horses. I made him a wake that you wouldn’t believe.”

She sighed.

“He bet horses. He sure did. People were after him.” She waved her hand at me, screwed up her face. “You
know.
”

“Oh yeah, Mary?” I said. She never talked badly about him. This was a first. She made a lip-zipping motion and I knew it wasn’t going to happen again.

“I spent my money, honey. I did it right. I didn’t burn him up like those fucks who live across the street. Catholics don’t burn
their dead. We have respect. He said, he begged, ‘Don’t burn me up.’ And I didn’t, honey. I would never.”

She waved her hand at me and I thought about what she was saying. We laid out our bodies too. I walked into the bathroom.

“This is the house Jack built!” she yelled at me as I walked down the hall, away from her.

“What?” I asked, turning.

“This is the house that Jack built! It’ll be here long after me. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, honey. My father didn’t use one piece of cheap material on here.”

“I see that, Mary,” I said and disappeared into the bathroom. I could hear her talking about her father, Jack, as I closed the door.

Inside her bathroom nothing seemed clean, there was a yellow ring around the toilet bowl, dusty rose soaps in seashell shapes, a grime of white haze on the glass shower doors, spots on the mirror and fogging at the sides. It made my face look distorted and I knew why Mary drew her arched eyebrows askew.

It made me feel for Mary and I didn’t want to come out of the bathroom and face her. But I did and when I came out she had cobbled together a gift bag for me – a stuffed leopard, a perfume something by Coty – I couldn’t make out the faded label, and a three-pack of eye shadows. Long strips of blue and pearl pink and silver. The plastic cover was fogged up and a gold French-sounding name was engraved on the cover.

“The leopard made me think of you. Keep it.”

I thanked her and realized that she wanted me out. “Do you need help with anything else, Mary?”

“I need to do my exercises.” She shuffled past me and opened the wooden screen door to the bedroom. She creaked it closed behind her.

I heard her turn on an exercise video. A woman with pep called out to stretch your legs and shake out your arms. It was muffled behind the door but I could hear it.

I DROVE BY THE TWIN PALMS AND SAW LEV
snuffing out a cigarette on the sidewalk. He ground it down deep with the heel of his shoe and looked up at me, and I slowed down. He looked surprised, I decided, and happy. I rolled down the window and smiled at him.

“Anka, I like it,” he said.

He pulled at my hair and I just smiled. He didn’t say any more about it.

“You going home?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I come by when I’m done.”

“Done with what, exactly?” I smiled at him but he didn’t smile back. He turned and ground the cigarette down under his heel.

I drove away without an answer and watched him in my rear-view mirror as I turned off Fairfax.

The house needed to be cleaned, my underwear changed. I checked down there to see the state of things and was unhappy. I turned on the shower, plucked my eyebrows furiously and tried to keep my hand from shaking too much. He hadn’t specified when he’d come, but I knew he would. I tapped my fingers on my brow, tapping away the redness and closed the shower door behind me, careful not to wet my hair in the scalding water. I did what I could shaving, trying to look effortless but purposeful.

I knew that he had a wife, but what else did he have? A wife I could deal with.

Maybe.

I laid out my clothes, a push-up bra. In the light I noticed the cream color was a dull shade of gray. I had been wearing it so often and not washing that it had taken on a different tone. I considered the time he’d be here, the light filtering into the room. If this shade of gray, dirt, dry skin, sweat, was acceptable. If I wore a dress or a skirt and he could touch my legs and in between my legs he wouldn’t notice the soiled push-up bra. I looked for the best choice of skirt and chose a black mini, black v-neck shirt tucked in.

LEV DIDN’T KISS ME WHEN HE CAME IN. HE
stood in the doorway and asked me where I wanted to go.

I didn’t think we were going to go anywhere. This was a new thing.

“I don’t know,” I said, unprepared.

“I know a Polish place. I bet you miss your own food.”

He was walking to his car before I could say, no, I didn’t want that. I didn’t miss it.

 

There were two –
Warszawa
was upscale, new Polish. Or the other place, in Eagle Rock. He chose the one in Eagle Rock. A strip mall, where no one would see us. Parking was difficult in front of the dry cleaners. On the glass windows of the place, big red letters said “Nutritious Polish Dishes” in cursive. And then, below it, “
Smaczne Obiady!
”

It wasn’t anything like the Twin Palms and it made me ashamed. He pushed me forward and I opened the glass door. A tinkle of the bell alerted the owners that we were there and I wished that I had had an answer for him when he asked me where I wanted to go.

Inside was cramped, booths were crammed next to each other, the inside of the place filled with cheap tables and plastic floral tablecloths. The walls were cubbies filled with dust-covered artifacts from Poland. Blue and white plates with dots
and ducks, Polish flags with eagles, everything red and white and fake-royal looking. People hunched over their full plates of food. It smelled like dill and boiled potatoes and Lev looked around and I didn’t want to look at him, I just stared at the walls. Pope John Paul II in a gilded frame, the Black Madonna nearby, beer steins from Gdańsk, dried flowers pressed into frames and looped into woven, matted straw-sewn vases.

My face grew hot. This was like the mobile homes on the side of the highway in Poland – tucked in the woods. Frequented by truckers and the young girls from Moldavia and Romania who would bend down over their laps in the cabs of the trucks. Fumbling and sucking. Those roadside restaurants had one picnic table outside and a tilting smoke stack shooting through the roof – homemade. This place was no better. Just bigger. And with Mexicans cooking the food. Dusting the potatoes with dill.

 

The owner greeted us with open arms.

“Please, come in, table for two right here and for you.”

The owner pushed the plastic menus toward us and I stared down at the choices. A small girl ran around the tables. He beamed at her and smiled at us.

“My daughter, Barbara.”

He had a thin comb-over, long and tucked behind his ear, a thin mustache, sweat cradling his brow, a checked shirt tucked into his pants. His wife looked up from the window of the kitchen. She was much younger, close-cropped curled hair. When she smiled I could see the metal wires glinting from her canines, her teeth long pulled out and put in fake, like they did in the village, and I knew how she had come here. She went back to making the salads, covered in sesame seed Asian dressing. I didn’t know why and Lev didn’t ask as he forked around the lettuce leaves, moving around the julienned carrots.

I HAD HEARD ABOUT HIM, THIS MAN, THE
owner of
Solidarność
. He had been a truck driver once, up and down the highways of Poland, past the women standing in the trees from Moldavia, Estonia, waiting to be picked up, to make some money, they stood away from the hunched-over
babcie
selling dried mushrooms along the road. They looked young, 15 or 16, tired and worn-through. I decided that the owner had stopped for them. More than once. He came here and drove trucks again, talking about his exploits, how to please a woman. What to do after hours on the road, how to clean up and smell good. How to open her legs and go down on her. I watched his mouth as he spoke to us, smiled at us, and told us about the specials. I knew this is why he made the restaurant familiar to him. Roadside familiar. Young-girl familiar.

 

His young wife, almost my age, came over and smiled at us, flour covering her hands, and they stood next to each other like father and daughter and I thought about his mouth on her and I didn’t want to eat anymore. Lev pored over the laminated menu and asked for a vodka. The owner said, “I bring it special here from Poland.”

I knew it was from plastic jugs bought at Ralph’s. That he poked a plastic funnel into Polish vodka bottles and poured in the Ralph’s brand, passed it off as authentic and no one
knew better. He talked about the aphrodisiac properties of the Żubrówka, how the bison grass made you virile. Lev gulped down the vodka and asked for another. “You don’t have anything better?”

“This is the best, from Poland,” the owner said, nearly breathless.

“It’s shit,” Lev said.

Lev thought a moment and asked if they had Stolichnaya.

“We don’t carry cheap brands here. Only Chopin. Only Żubrówka.”

I wanted to ask him about the economy-sized garbage cans full of empty plastic jugs of Ralph’s brand vodka in the back alley, but kept my mouth shut. I was concerned about my need to defend Lev over my own kind. Why instead I felt an urge to shame him, and emasculate him.

The owner walked away and I looked at Lev.

“Why the face, Anka? These are your people. Your place.”

I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t want this anymore.

The owner brought us more vodka. He asked us what we wanted to eat. He pitched us the
Królewski
Platter – pierogi,
gołąbki
(cabbage stuffed with meat and rice), and
gulasz
. It didn’t sound like a royal platter to me. Potato and cheese pierogi, sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi, pierogi with meat.

“What are you going to order?” I asked.

Lev grunted and drank his vodka. They brought us soup.
Żurek
. Potatoes, oily bits of bacon, the sour rye taste and smell.

He slurped it up and kept his head down. I looked around at the other non-Polish patrons. They thought this is what we were like. The dusty, dirty shelves of eagles and ceramic red and white sculptures. Salad with sesame seeds. I’m sure they were laughing at this version of us, with all its kitsch and old-world charm. I was embarrassed that the owner pushed it this far. I felt a sense of pride and shame all at once. I felt like I had to tell them how it really was, but then, I didn’t really know at all.

The owner came back over and pushed us for our order. “
Bigos
,” I said. Hunter’s stew. I looked at Lev slurping his vodka.

We sat and ate in silence. I wondered why he wanted to come over if he wasn’t going to speak to me. He ate his royal plate, moved the
gulasz
into his potatoes and left the pieces of meat there, the sauce soaking up the mash.

 

My mouth tasted sour from the
bigos
. Caraway seeds stuck between my teeth, my tongue could feel them but I didn’t want to reach up to the mirror and pick them out in the car, in front of Lev, as he drove back to my apartment.