The Lullaby of Polish Girls (2 page)

Standing by the window, Anna can see her breath. Her flimsy T-shirt, the one she’s had on for days now—Ben’s old Lynyrd Skynyrd one, with the neck cut out—fails miserably to keep her warm. Manhattan glimmers past McCarren Park, its peaks and pinnacles shining like man-made constellations, like something from the future. It’s beautiful, but under a blanket of snow, New York would become even more so, turning twinkly and old-timey. This concrete mess with towers sprouting like beanstalks, with subways zigzagging and crowded streets teeming with grime—all of it would be obliterated.

Anna steps back from the window, but leaves it open; she can’t smoke in an enclosed space.
Hipokryta
, her father would have said. She
is
a hypocrite, dissecting everything, especially the things that bring her pleasure. Her father, on the other hand, would lie in bed, chewing saltwater taffy, reading his Polish newspaper till three
A.M.
, and chain-smoking More Reds, as her mother silently suffered beside him. Her father, who, every so often, threatened to hang himself.

“You’re a refugee? You sure don’t look like a refugee,” Ben had said, eyeing her naked body supine next to his.

“
Daughter
of a refugee, if you wanna get technical. The Commies ousted my dad years ago. I was seven.”

“The Commies. Sounds so …”

“Dated?” Anna reached her hand toward his pretty American face.

“Sexy.”

Anna places the ashtray on her lap, hugging it gently between her thighs. Cardboard boxes stare at her from every corner, massacred by cheap utility tape. Months have passed since she and Ben moved into their new apartment, but the boxes remain untouched. She remembers that the super is stopping by today to fix the refrigerator door.

Anna’s head hurts. Her nose is stuffy. The corner of her bottom lip is hot and itchy, a sure sign of a cold sore brewing. There is a weird throbbing pain near her right shoulder blade, which has come and gone intermittently during the last few weeks, and which Anna suspects
might be lung cancer. Ben calls her a “raging hypochondriac,” and he’s right.

When Ben left for the airport five days ago, he begged Anna to join him. It was their tradition: Thanksgiving in Omaha.

“Come with me. Don’t you miss my mom’s stuffing? She misses you, Annie.”

“I can’t fly, Ben. You know that.”

“Then let’s rent a car and make a road trip out of it.”

“I can’t, Ben,” she said and turned away from him.

Ben’s mother, Nancy, always sported Birkenstocks and smelled like patchouli. She had long gray hair and all-knowing eyes that—Anna was sure—could see right through you. Nancy loved Anna from the beginning, and was always begging her and Ben to “have a kid already, wedlock, schmedlock!” So, what would Nancy do if Anna showed up in her current state—slightly overweight and depressed? What would Anna say to her?
Missed you, Nan, but I’ve been real busy, what with the auditions and abortions
. It was too soon to face Nancy; the shame Anna felt was too much.

Ben had called from the airport. Even though things were strained between them, Anna had still wanted him to call her just before takeoff, in case anything happened. Since 9/11, she’d only flown twice—once to LA for a last-minute audition, and once to St. Thomas with Ben. Both times, her heart was in her throat. Anna shuffled down the aisle with her collection of crucifixes in her palm, relics from Catholic schoolgirl days, and her dad’s old chain with the Polish Black Madonna medallion around her neck. She scanned her fellow passengers for dark bearded faces (it was fucked up but true), and didn’t say amen till the wheels touched the tarmac again.

Ben is flying back home today. Back to what, Anna doesn’t know. What can she offer him anymore? In the beginning she offered him exotic tales of growing up in the Flatbush projects, tales of a homely little Polish immigrant. She offered him daily blow jobs and Thai take-out every night. She offered him her world, a world of small but incomparable measure, a world where tanks rolled in the streets, where armed
milicja
jailed idealistic young men who fought for their freedom as their fathers and grandfathers had before them. She offered romance;
it was all so incredibly romantic—the turmoil of a foreign country recounted by a Slavic-looking Marilyn Monroe.

In turn, Ben offered her a version of the New World, the uncomplicated pleasure of a boy who came from the average middle class. “I’ve got four brothers,” he told her that first night, as the sun was coming up. “Jonah, Jefferson, Simon, and Samuel.” Anna swooned over the Midwestern musicality of their names. She repeated the names in her melodious voice, tinged with the slightest trace of an Eastern European accent, as if reciting a stanza of an Emerson poem.

“Anna Baran ain’t bad either.”

“Well, it could have been Żdzisława.” Anna laughed when Ben tried to repeat the word, his tongue twisting in on itself, his jaw clenched.

Last Monday, Anna had locked the door behind Ben and prepared for total isolation till his return. There would be no Thanksgiving in New York, but then again, there never had been. Her parents didn’t partake in the turkey. Her father was firm in that regard. “I steal land from the Indian, I rob his everything and put him on casino war camps and now I eat like pig to celebrate? No fuck way!” So there was no one to bother her and she was free to smoke 147 cigarettes, take one shower, and come to the realization that Ben’s absence has not brought fondness or longing, just dread.

At four-twenty
A.M.
, the phone rings. The ashtray balancing on Anna’s lap flies in the air and spills all over the couch. She scrambles to the table on the other side of the room. A phone call at four in the morning can mean only a few things.
Dad
, Anna thinks,
it’s
Tato.

“Hello?”

“
Ania!
Oh, Ania …!” Her mother, Paulina, is wailing on the other end, and Anna’s heart explodes upon direct contact with the sound, a sound that pierces the silence of the room and has no business infiltrating the hush of night in such a sudden, earsplitting manner.

“What is it? Oh God,
Mamo
, what is it?”

“He’s dead!
O mój Boże
, Anna, he’s dead.” This is the phone call that Anna’s been waiting for since she was thirteen, waiting for on subways, in school halls, while playing Chinese jump rope, or taking a bath, or biting her nails like a zombie in front of the TV while her mother paced the dining room waiting for her father, Radosław, to turn up.

“How did he do it?” she hears herself asking before it all has sunk in.

“He didn’t do it. Filip did it!” Anna’s breath slows down and the walls stop closing in.

“Who’s Filip?” Her mother is still crying, loudly, incessantly—and right now, in the midst of obvious confusion, it’s infuriating Anna.

“Filip, Elwira’s boyfriend! Anna, who do you think I’m talking about?” Anna doesn’t answer but her mother thankfully plows on. “Justyna’s husband is dead, he was murdered last night, in his own house. By his sister-in-law’s boyfriend. Can you believe it?”

“
Poczekaj!
Wait. Just wait a fucking second, Mother! Just hold on, okay?” Anna breathes slowly, rearranging her thoughts, smoothing down the tabletop with her hand as she does. “Justyna? From Kielce?”

“Yes! Jesus, how many Justynas do you know? Her husband was stabbed in the middle of the night. Justyna’s a widow. A twenty-six-year-old widow …” And now her mother is whimpering, mewling like an injured cat.

“Wow.”

“Wow?!!
Wow!!??
”

“What,
Mamo
? What do you want me to say? It’s four in the morning. You caught me off guard—”

“Well, I’m sorry if this isn’t a convenient time to tell you that your best friend’s husband was just murdered—”

“She
was
my best friend. She
was
.”

“Oh,
Jezus
, Anka, really?”

“It’s horrible. It’s horrible, but I thought you were …”

“Were what?”

“Nothing. How did you find out?”

“Her dad called me from Poland. I have to go now. Their poor mother is turning over in her grave. Please call Justyna. When you stop crying,
call her
.” There are tears running down Anna’s face, her neck.
How can that be?
she asks herself again, and then the dial tone signals her to hang up the phone and ask stupid questions later.

Kamila Wyandotte, Michigan

They call it Downriver, these clustered neighborhoods of southern Detroit. It is below zero right now, frozen over, iced down. The snow is no longer fluffy or crunchy; it is rock solid, piled high along the road like glaciers. It’s only a few days after Thanksgiving, and already merry fools are dragging Christmas trees along the curb. Kamila can’t help but think that they look like corpses. America is a strange place.

“Śniadanie!”
her mother barks from downstairs, but Kamila can’t eat breakfast so she ignores her mother. Kamila has other things on her mind today, things that can no longer be put off. She’s been here for weeks, and now she’s ready.

The house is quiet. The modest little yellow house that her parents scrounged for is a two-story, gated little piece of the American dream, just off Spruce Street. Kamila’s parents have lived here since 1997, and five years after they left Poland for good, Kamila, their only daughter, has finally come for a visit.

When Lech Wałęsa won and the world changed, Kamila’s parents, Włodek and Zofia Marchewski, took full advantage of their nation’s newfound freedom. They flew from Poland to Ankara for Easter, spent Christmas in Crete, and then, one summer, Włodek visited his second cousin who lived in a sleepy, leafy suburb of Detroit. And Włodek kept visiting, each time for longer periods, until finally his wife, Zofia, allowed him the courtesy and joined him, first for two weeks, then for good. Why exactly he fell in love with Michigan as opposed to Rome or London, nobody knew, least of all Kamila. But fall in love he did, and that love eclipsed all fear of laws and impunities, and so her parents became, like countless other Poles in the States, illegal aliens.

Despite her father’s tales of dollar stores, central air, and the beautiful
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church (
Built in the 1800s by our people, Kamilka!
) Kamila decided to stay behind and finish college in Kielce. “Just send me some postcards now and again, Włodziu,” she told him, half-joking. Włodek did send his only daughter postcards, one every week for the last five years, postcards boasting sepia-toned vignettes of the quaint, historic downtown of his adopted city. Every month he sent her ten twenty-dollar bills neatly folded in half and held in place by a single rubber band. And life was good that way, it was fine and dandy, until the day Kamila needed to escape, far away, and somehow nowhere seemed farther from Kielce, Poland, than Wyandotte, Michigan.

Kamila Marchewska-Ludek has done everything in her power to recoup this past month.
You need to de-stress the situation, you need to cleanse your palate. Fuck him!
her best friend, Natalia, wrote in an email a few weeks ago. “Fuck him.” Was Natalia being funny, or did the irony go sailing past her? Kamila had done nothing but try to fuck him for the entire length of their nine-year relationship, but Emil had always denied her.
Let’s wait. Let’s be old-fashioned
. And she believed his excuses, masturbating once a week to visions of his alabaster body pressed on hers. Later on, he proposed and they married, but nothing changed.

Kamila has escaped, as much as one can escape in a cyber world, where everything is connected, but feels disjointed nonetheless. Though her appointment at the Polish embassy was preplanned, the actual departure was hasty—a last-minute call to the travel agency, a haphazardly packed suitcase—and now, four weeks later, she’s still not sure how she made it out.

Her father met her at the Detroit airport, bouncing on his heels.

“Kamilka! Oh, Kamilka! What did you do to your hair?”

Kamila stepped back from her father, who had aged considerably in five years, whose frame was now as thin as ever, but enhanced by a surprisingly corpulent gut. She touched her black bangs self-consciously.

“I dyed it. You didn’t notice in the pictures?”

“Oh, but it’s not what I expected in real life,
córeczko
. And your nose … it looks nice, Kamilka. But I expected my little girl, with that great big orange mop and those white strappy sandals on your feet.”

“I was ten when you bought me those shoes,
Tato
. I wasn’t ten when
you left. Now, quit crying, please, and take me home.” Włodek obliged, glancing sideways at his prodigal daughter every few seconds. Back in his fold for less than ten minutes, and Kamila was already growing irritated.

Somehow, she settled in quickly. Her parents had cleaned out the sewing room and bought a blow-up mattress for their daughter to sleep on. “For weeks or forever, Kamilka, it’s up to you,” her father said, his gray eyes glistening. She had a desk, a closet, and a phone, and that’s all she needed. They hadn’t asked yet why her husband, who looked so dapper in the wedding album the newlyweds had mailed them five years ago, had not come with her.