How to Get Into the Twin Palms (16 page)

“Where were you?” he asked.

“Sleeping.”

“It’s early,” he said.

I didn’t know what time it was but I didn’t think it was early at all.

“Where were you?”

“Nowhere, really.”

He said some things in Russian, looked at me, like he didn’t want me to be his wife, or his keeper, someone who asked him questions. So I stopped and let him through the door. He walked to the bedroom, pulling off his tie, to my sheets and my mattress hiding my stain and I didn’t think he’d ever be in the position to find out about what he was sleeping on. I followed after him, locking the door, and lay down next to him. In between the smell of the glass and the smell of his breath, both heavy with booze and both making my stomach turn. He didn’t lean over to kiss me and I hoped that he would turn over, mouth away from me, before he fell asleep. He didn’t. He pulled me close to him. Face pressed into his chest, I could barely catch my breath while closing my eyes. I regulated my breathing so that I could lie still, lie quietly, and not suffocate. When Lev had asked me to sleep here I thought it would be different. I thought we would do things besides sleep. His grip was hurting my back and I wanted to move but I knew I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and begged myself to fall asleep.

IT HAD BEEN DAYS AND I WAS TIRED OF HIM
already. All I did was open doors for him. Let him out. He hadn’t opened my legs in days.

When he came at first I thought, I win.

But he left graying socks with a hole in the toe everywhere, or faded black ones, and I could see the stitches his wife had probably sewn herself. Green thread against the faded black. I wasn’t going to do that for him; I hope he didn’t expect me to. Maybe that was the part I was missing. I did not know how to sew or knit or darn socks. My mother hadn’t taught me anything. When she tried I broke the needles on the electric sewing machine, sending them shooting all over the room. The little yellowing light of her refurbished machine glared down bright on my fingers as I tried to push the fabric through. The hood covering the little light bulb had cracked and broke before we had gotten it and the bare bulb shone in my eyes, making it impossible to thread the tip of the needle. I licked and sucked at the edge of the thread, tried to make it a point but it never worked. She pulled it away from me, put in a new needle and threaded it all in one motion.

“Zosia, you have to learn these things,” she said as she pushed the fabric under the needle and pressed her foot down on the pedal that was connected to a cord that connected to the machine and sat under the dining table. She pushed down on
the pedal and the sound of whirring and a sound like chomping came out of the sewing machine puncturing over and over.

But it was something I would never learn, and could never do, not even now.

I would not be able to darn Lev’s socks, sew buttons back on to his shirt after they popped off, through my carelessness or his. He would always need his wife for that. The way my father needed my mother.

I found Lev’s hair in the bathtub, sticking to the drain cover, not making it through the holes. The soap had filmed up against it and turned it an ashy color. I thought about picking it up, and did. The dry soap flaked off in bits and sifted down onto the white porcelain of the tub. It was in a clump and I didn’t know where the hair had come from. His head, his crotch, or some other woman, left behind on him somewhere. He wasn’t home then, he was somewhere else and I was cleaning up for us. I felt the hair in between my fingers and it crumpled at first, felt coarse, but when the film of soap flaked off it was soft again, stiff and soft and I rubbed it between my fingers and thought about smelling it, but didn’t. I put it in the garbage instead. I covered it with unused toilet paper and crumpled it to make it look natural. Like garbage.

Lev came home late, about one or two in the morning. The first few nights I stayed in the living room to wait for him. Watching TV shows and drinking Żubrówka at first, Bison Grass Vodka – hoping it really was the aphrodisiac everyone promised it would be, but Lev wasn’t looking for that when he came home. He’d go in the bathroom and wash his face, pull the water through his hair, stare at himself for a while and then close the door when he’d notice me watching him. I could hear his zipper. His urine hitting the toilet water. Sometimes he didn’t close the door and I watched, the arc leaving him and hitting the toilet. Sometimes he flushed and sometimes he didn’t. No one flushed in Poland either. Water conservation.

The bathroom in the
blok
my grandparents lived in, my parents lived in, and I was born in, always smelled like urine. The pipes were hot and sweating, linking each bathroom on top and below to one another. My grandmother’s old washer was crammed in next to the tub, open faced and with a metal washboard that vibrated loudly when turned on. I sat in the tub for hours, inhaling the stale urine smell and hearing Polish yelled from above and below, carried through apartments through the vibrations in the pipes. All of the waste from the gray
blok
slid down the pipes and into the basement.

The
bloki
were all the same and still are, now older and more graffitied - swastikas, slurs about soccer teams and words about Łódź that I could not read. Pentagrams too. No one lived in our apartment in the
bloki
anymore. Our moth-eaten sweaters were still in the cabinets. My favorite dresser – each knob an oversized pink-cheeked girl with orange hair and freckles – still there. I used to claw at those faces, pulling them out toward me, talking to them, each round knob too big for my hands, I had to pull them with two hands, and still I couldn’t open the drawers, open the pink-faced girl’s mouth.

I placed the ingredients in a jar, mixed them well, covered the jar with a piece of clean cloth, and let the jar stay in a warm place for 4-5 days, just like the directions told me to. It said, If mold forms on top, remove it before using the zakwas. Mold did form on top and I gagged while skimming the top. I discarded the bread crust and garlic before using.

I fried bacon (chopped), added onion, added garlic and sausage (white). I fried it a little more. I added 3 cups of boiling water, added bay leaf, black pepper. I did not have allspice. I cooked for 20 minutes. Added zakwas. Mixed sour cream with flour, added it to the soup and watched the cream bubble up in lumps. I added dry marjoram I bought at the Polish store, mixed the soup well. I brought it to a boil. The recipe said I could also add chopped, cooked potatoes and chopped hard-boiled egg. I did not add egg.

I THINK I MADE IT TOO SOUR. I LET THE BREAD
and rye flour ferment too long. He spit it back up and that was it.

That’s when he asked to take me somewhere. I knew I could ask for the Twin Palms now, and he couldn’t say no.

“I only want to go to one place,” I said, getting bold now. I had nothing to lose – he had lost his luster to me.

Lev looked at me sideways, up and down. “Do you have a dress,
devochka
?”

“I have several.” I walked away from him and into the bedroom. I heard the shower turning on. I needed to prepare myself, wash myself, and shave things.

I looked in my closet. Nothing seemed good enough. I knew where we were going.

I hoped I knew where we were going.

I chose something black and low-cut and slipped into the bathroom after Lev to finish getting ready.

 

When I came out of the bathroom in the dress, Lev turned me around and kissed my neck, gave me goosebumps. How did he do it, every time.

“Heels, Anka. Nice tall ones,” he said.

“I know.”

I went into my closet and looked for spindle-heeled shoes. The only pair I owned. The only ones that would do and slipped
them on my feet. Wondered how I would make it down the uneven pavement to where we were going. My hair was dry and curled. My lips pert and red. My eyes like a cat’s. I took a shot of vodka in the kitchen while Lev finished in the bathroom. I washed the glass. Wiped the frozen bottle of my melted-through fingerprints and returned it to the freezer.

Lev took something from his car as I stood on the street. He reached for my hand and I let him. We were walking down the street toward the Twin Palms and my hands were clammy. I ambled down the sidewalk in my spindle-heels. I tried to keep up with him and look sexy and distinct and purposeful all at once.

I was finally allowed in.

There were people standing around the sidewalk at the Twin Palms. I trailed behind Lev. Trying to walk in a way that accentuated my features. What I wouldn’t do for one of those long, slim cigarettes in the hands of the women standing there, looking me up and down, checking to see if my teeth were real, if my roots were pronounced, how I walked, if I was pigeon-toed. Why I was with Lev. They turned away quickly. I hoped for a longer look, a longer glare, more curiosity. Lev pulled me up the stairs, toward the mirror and I heard people speaking quickly in Russian and knew that I had made a mistake to come here. I was scared.

Face red, I trailed behind him, and he let go of me at the top of the stairs and slid through the crowd as I tried to keep up with him in my spindle-heels.

He called out to people, they called out to him. Women looked at me for a moment and then back to what they were doing. I didn’t gain a second glance. Lev turned to me. Pale-faced.

“Anka, you should go,” he said.

I blinked because I did not want to hear it and took it all wrong. So, I said no.

“Anka, you don’t understand. It’s not right for you to be here.”

I said no, again.

“I’m going to take you home.”

I walked away and lost Lev in the crowd, focused on the walls, bubbled glass with a light show reflecting off of it, and being in the Twin Palms for the first time.

The walls were mirrored and shimmery silvery-gold curtains were laced open to more mirrors. There was a mural of New York City on the wall behind the dance floor. The skyline was poorly painted and flaking off in places. There were stained glass windows up here, fading out onto the alleyway, the blocks of color in the glass spelled out “Palms” and mismatched green palm trees lined the frame of the glass. I didn’t know what the New York skyline had to do with the rest of the décor but I knew it seemed glamorous to them. The carpet was green, dark like a casino might have and long tables shined with iridescent fabric tablecloths. There was food covering every corner. Picked vegetables, kielbasa, herring with sunflower seed oil, raw onions and potatoes, stuffed peirogi and blini with meat and Russian sour cream. Potato salad – I heard someone call it
olivie
. It was just like the kind we made at home, my mother and I. Chopping up eggs, boiled potatoes, pickles, boiled carrots with the skin still on leathery and slipping from the flesh, raw onions, apples, mayonnaise to stick it all together. There was cured tongue and eggplant
ikra
, surrounded by sliced bread and butter. Red and black fish eggs, some small like poppy seeds and shiny, some round and larger. I had slathered red caviar on bread like jam as a child, spit out the salty brine from my mouth and all the adults around me laughed, patted my head, as if they had all gone through it too, once. I moved away from the smell and the shine. I almost fell into a table of fruit boats with layers of cantaloupe, pineapple, and other fruits exotic to Russia.

It was causing me anxiety, the Russian, the people, the smell of everyone mixed with the food. It looked aged, stuck in time, but I knew it was fresh and made especially for them.

It was too much and I started searching for Lev, but couldn’t
see him anywhere, I was being pushed and shuffled around, not looked at, not noticed. I went to find a bathroom, a reprieve from the smell and the movement and the talking and the fur.

The bathroom smelled of stale cigarettes and I inhaled deeply and wanted to find one. The bathroom attendant stood in front of an overflowing jar of mints and candies with Cyrillic writing and toothpaste and cheap plastic toothbrushes in yellow and red and green. She had Tic Tacs and Sucrets. She did not have cigarettes and she did not speak English. Women were talking over the stalls in Russian and I felt boozy. I wanted to drink more, to steady myself, but instead I put on more red lipstick, I patted it down to matte. I stuck my thumb into my mouth and closed my lips and pulled out slowly, letting the ring of red flatten against my thumb. I rubbed it off with a tissue and gave the attendant a dollar. I patted my forehead and cheeks with another tissue, saw the makeup transfer on the napkin and threw it in the garbage. I heard the toilets flushing and wanted to run out before I had to see them. But I didn’t make it in time, blocked by someone else coming inside. A woman with heaving breasts, loose-fitting leopard gauzy fabric over them. I could see the white of her bra, one of those utilitarian models. Torpedo-shaped and thick strapped, a thick band around the back, letting the fat of her back slide up and down around it.

She spoke Russian to me and for a moment I froze, thinking I had made it. I had passed. The other two women came out of the stall and stared at me too. One had lipstick on thick, carrot-colored that she went to reapply. The other looked at me carefully. Again, the barrel-breasted woman spoke to me in Russian and all I could say was, “
Nie rozumiem.
”