The Lullaby of Polish Girls (12 page)

“ ’Cause we’re not their mommies. Relax, Marchewska. This will make a good anecdote for you someday. You’ll be a hero back in Kielce, as the lone virgin amongst the savages, keeping vigil in the wild!” Justyna laughs loudly.

Kamila ignores the insult and furiously whispers, “Be quiet! You might wake someone up and they’ll—”

“They’ll what? Come over and rape us all?”

It’s no use with Justyna; nothing gets the girl down. Kamila activates her wristwatch’s neon light. It’s already past midnight. She frowns and sighs. “Anyway, I’m not the ‘lone virgin’ here, not by a long shot—not that it’s anyone’s business. I’m only saying this out loud right now because they”—she points toward the comatose boys lying on the floor—“can’t hear a word. Besides, why is everything with you about sex?”

Anna glances at Kamila and shakes her head. Anna, who always wants to be on everyone’s good side. She seems to think that her greatest tragedy in life is that she’s caught between two worlds. Two worlds! Can’t her dear friend see what a blessing that is?

“Everything with me is about sex because everything
is
about sex.
Perhaps a week stuffed into itty-bitty tents with a few happy drunks will finally make women out of you two.”

Kamila shakes her head. Her friends were not happy drunks. They were drunks that hurled empty beer cans all over the place and grabbed you by your waist too hard.

Somehow, in the morning, the tents get pitched. The guys wander off in search of a snack shack that will sell alcohol at eight
A.M.
It’s a balmy morning. Tent mates are chosen and most of the girls change into their bathing suits and head to the water. Kamila stays behind. She sits on a blanket looking out onto the lake, the same lake that her little brother drowned in. She fumbles in her backpack for her journal, a small black notebook adorned by a collage of torn-out pages from books and quotes from her favorite poets. Kamila’s going to be a junior in the fall at Kielce’s fine arts high school. Her father wants her to be an artist, but even though Kamila has spent all her semesters weaving tapestries and copying paintings of fields and valleys, she has a secret dream. Kamila wants to be a writer, like Anaïs Nin, like Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, whose poem “The Lady Who Waits” is copied by hand a dozen times throughout her diary.
She waits, she looks at the watch of her years, she bites her handkerchief impatiently. Beyond the windows the world pales and grays … and maybe it’s too late for the guests to arrive
. Every time Kamila reads it she feels like Pawlikowska is calling out to her.

One day, she wants her journals to be read by girls like her. She wants her words to strike a nerve, but thus far her own poetry feels mawkish and lacking. Kamila closes her eyes and waits for inspiration to strike her. When she feels droplets on her legs, she looks up and sees Anna, wet from head to toe, grinning at her as she plops down on her stomach.

“It’s heaven.”

“What is?”

“The water, the trees, us in the midst of it.
Jak w raju!
All of it, it’s all heaven. And I never want to come back down to earth again.”

“Why? Is Kowalski flirting with you?”

“Nah. He’s all about Justyna. By the way, she’s this close to taking off her top. She’s trying to convince everyone to skinny-dip! In broad
daylight!” Anna cracks up and flips to her back, squinting up at her friend.

“Uh-oh. You look sad. Are you upset I didn’t show up yesterday? Was it that bad?”

Kamila shrugs her shoulders and closes her book. “It’s not that.”

“Oh, Kamilka, don’t be sad. I bet Emil will realize what a fool he’s been and come riding up here on some white horse and steal you away.”

“Don’t patronize me, Anna.”

“Kamila! You’ve got to stop this! Stop pining and start living. Look around you. This isn’t 1892, okay? It’s 1992. Poland is finally free! And
we
have options too,
dziewczyno
! But you have to be in the moment.”

“I
am
in the moment. And this moment sucks.”

Anna laughs. “The moment is ripe, my friend. I wish I never had to go back to New York.”

“Oh my God, you’re crazy. New York is a gilded city. Everything is modern and ready to burst there. It’s like fireworks. Here? It’s like everyone is taking a perpetual nap in the name of ‘tradition.’ It’s old news. It’s Lolek getting wasted on some poison he brewed in his own bathtub and pissing in front of my grandmother’s doorway.”

“Nah. New York is dirty.”

“Well, at least you have air-conditioning on public transportation.”

“
Dobra, dobra
. I guess the grass is always greener, but New York makes you feel alone. Besides, you wouldn’t like my New York friends. I don’t even know if I like them. They don’t know what it’s like to work for anything.”

“And Lolek does? And Kowalski? They’re on the freaking dole! I wish we could trade lives, even for a few days.”

“Listen, one day I’ll fly you out to New York and you can make up your own mind. For now, let’s just enjoy this. We’re sixteen and it’s summer. The possibilities are, like, fucking endless. Now read me a poem!” Anna grabs Kamila’s notebook and starts flipping through it. Anna is probably the only person in the world, aside from Emil, who is privy to Kamila’s secret aspirations.

“Don’t get it wet,” mumbles Kamila.

“Soon you’re going to be a famous poetess and I’ll make you write my Oscar speech. Pinky swear.” Anna holds out a pinky and Kamila
holds out hers, and they intertwine, just like Anna taught her a long time ago.

“Peenky sweer.”

“Now let’s go swimming. The water’s divine,” Anna proclaims in a Joan Collins-y voice, and hops up, her long legs pumping as she runs back toward the lake. Kamila watches her get smaller and smaller until she looks like a little fish, diving in headfirst, breaking the surface. Kamila crawls inside the tent and curls up into a ball, wrapping her arms around her own torso. She pretends they belong to someone else.

Justyna Kielce, Poland

Justyna ignores the gooey sediment on the bottom of the lake, trying not to notice how her toes sink into what feels like piles of cow shit. The moon is full, casting a silvery shadow onto the still water. In the distance she hears Lolek singing the words to Dr. Alban’s “It’s My Life.” He’s wasted and the foreign words slur and slide into one another, so it sounds like complete gibberish. Justyna inches closer to Kowalski.

A small part of Justyna was surprised that her mother allowed her to go on this unsupervised trip. In June, Justyna got kicked out of school, permanently. The history teacher caught her giving Lucjan Popiel a hand job in the custodian’s office. When the door creaked open and
Pani
Jesienowska walked in, Lucjan was just cumming. “What in God’s name?” she shrieked. Justyna wiped her hand off and looked up at her teacher. “I believe God’s name for it is spunk.”

A two-hour-long meeting followed between the principal of the school, Justyna’s mother, and
Pani
Jesienowska. The school had a laundry list of Justyna’s misdemeanors: hooky, failing grades, graffiti in the girls’ bathroom, the time Justyna punched a girl who was rifling through Justyna’s book bag, about to swipe a very expensive L’Oréal lipstick. “This latest incident just proves to us, again, Mrs. Zator, that your daughter has no respect for the educators here, nor for the institution itself. Although she’s never been caught, we suspect she’s cheated her way through her last two years here. Justyna’s lack of interest, integrity, and effort lead us to believe that she couldn’t care less about us, and so we too have stopped caring about her. Your daughter is no longer welcome here.”

Teresa just nodded and walked out; she couldn’t argue with Justyna’s track record. She briefly thought about filing for an appeal—Lucjan
Popiel got off with a two-week suspension, which Teresa secretly thought was more than unfair. She sat on the steps outside the school, chain-smoking for twenty minutes and thinking about when she got pregnant at seventeen and the bastards at her school had kicked her out. She had bigger plans for her own children, but Teresa had made a fine life for herself despite her lack of diplomas, and Justyna could too. There was no use crying over spilled milk; she had a high-school castoff on her hands and aside from giving Justyna a good thrashing, there was nothing Teresa felt she could do. It was time for her daughter to get a job. She’d go home, smack Justyna upside the head, and place a call to her friend Janka over at the new supermarket in town.

When Justyna’s mother told her the outcome of the meeting, Justyna had tried to keep the relief from registering on her face. Inside, she was thrilled. The charade was over. She would no longer have to pay Tobiasz Tedoroski to write her essays for her, she would no longer have to waste time penning tiny cheat sheets. It was no accident that the subjects she was passing, geography and chemistry, were taught by the two male professors who were defenseless against her miniskirts and pushup bras. She wrote off the rest of her teachers as cunts, jealous and disgruntled, high on power trips. Education came in all forms anyway. The nerds at school, the ones who memorized and studied ad nauseam, the ones who recited facts on cue, they were the ones who stuttered and cowered through life. Once you graduated, who the fuck cared what an isosceles triangle was, or when World War I began? How was such ancient shit relevant? Justyna believed success relied heavily on simple charm, a forceful personality, and the skill of lying in the pursuit of grander dreams. So, in other words—fuck school. Both her parents had been high-school dropouts and look at them now. A year ago, the Zators bought a modern three-story house in the suburbs of Sieje, past the
zalew
, just a few kilometers from downtown Kielce, and somehow worlds away from their cramped apartment life. Come September, Justyna wouldn’t be scouring flea markets for used textbooks; she’d be standing behind the till at the Super-Sam, gossiping with the other cashier girls, and that was fine by her.

At the start of the summer, Teresa made halfhearted attempts at
punishment: no allowance, no partying, and an early curfew. But Justyna, being Justyna, broke all the rules, lied, whined, or just laughed at Teresa’s threats. By the time the camping trip came up, Justyna didn’t even have to beg. “Just don’t drown,” Teresa cautioned.

“Watch out, I hear there are snakes in this water.” Kowalski grins in the dark. “In fact, I think there’s one trapped in my underwear right now.”

“What kind of snake?” Justyna whispers as she glides closer to him.

“A python.”

Justyna dissolves into giggles, vodka swirling in her brain and swimming in her veins. “You sure it’s not a baby eel or something?” Kowalski grabs her hips under the water and roughly pulls her toward him. Their torsos smack against each other, slick and goose-bumpy. “Well, there’s only one sure way to find out,” he growls.

Justyna reaches for him. His dick feels slippery in her hands, thick and massive. He pulls her bikini bottom to the side but it takes him three tries before he’s inside her. The sex is uncomfortable and quick. It hurts, like Kowalski is jamming a rubber glove inside her. Justyna feels chafed and dry. And when Kowalski finally cums, Lolek can be heard roaring the chorus to “It’s My Life” again, his bellows reverberating through the woods, “Eetsma laaaaaaaaaaaf!!”

Kowalski leans his body against hers, his head against her shoulder, and he mumbles, “You let me cum inside you.”

“So?”

“So you’re not worried?” Justyna
is
worried, but only slightly, and only about finding a small bump on her right labia a few weeks before. It was still there yesterday, a rough, white mound, like grains of sand. It didn’t look like a pimple, and if she just gave Kowalski genital warts, she feels no guilt; he probably had them already.

“There’s no reason to worry.”

Kowalski lifts his head. “What? Like, you can’t get knocked up?”

“Like, I’m on my period, moron. You think I’d risk bringing your spawn into the world?” And with that, she swims toward the shore and starts heading into the forest. She glances back at Kowalski, who is sprawled out on the sand, like a beached animal.

She’s cold and wet and feeling slightly remorseful, but Justyna knew
she’d fuck Kowalski on this trip. She had just planned on doing it in a tent. It wasn’t the first time she and Kowalski fooled around; anytime his girlfriend was out of town, Kowalski was on her, extending his cigarette for her to puff on, eyeing her silently. He was less aggressive than the others, and his fingernails were always clean—not that Justyna cared about that shit. He also had a scar that ran from the corner of his right eye down his cheek, like the scars in the portrait of the Black Madonna. There was something mysterious about him. He almost never said a word and he laughed wholeheartedly at jokes, though he never told one himself. But Kowalski was too shy to ever make a first move, unless he was very drunk, like tonight. When he grabbed Justyna’s hand and asked her to go swimming, Justyna saw Anna’s crestfallen face as they ran toward the water, but she wasn’t about to let anyone get in the way of her good time.