The Lullaby of Polish Girls (25 page)

Jola smiles and presses the intercom. “Kinga,
Pani
Marchewska is ready.”

Fifteen minutes later, lying on a metal slab, dressed in a paper gown with a hairnet on her head, Kamila waits. She wants the drugs already. She wants to close her eyes and be done with it.

Norbert walks into the room, in his scrubs, fussing with a pair of beige latex gloves.

“Kamila! On your back and ready for action! Just like your cousin!” Norbert laughs uproariously.
“Gotowa?”

Kamila nods her head weakly. “I’m ready.”

“Okay, Doctor Gniazdo will be here soon to pump the juice. Once you’re out, the whole thing should take about forty-five minutes, depending on how compliant your cartilage is.” Norbert smiles.

“Here’s the spiel, and I gotta give it to you now, because afterward you’ll be too drugged up to comprehend any of it. Jola will give you an after-care packet. You’re gonna clean your nose with Q-tips soaked in hydrogen peroxide about three times a day. Apply Vaseline because everything will be dry and sore. I’ll give you saline spray; use it with abandon. Sleep elevated, on your back, for about a month. And for the first few weeks—and you can give my apologies to Emil in advance—you should sleep alone, in case he elbows you or something.” Norbert futzes with his gloves. “And no sex. No sex of any kind. Once again, apologies to the mister. No bending over, no lifting. No tweezing eyebrows,
no lipstick. No excessive grinning.” Norbert grins and plows on. “No sneezing. No alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine. There will be bruising and swelling and some bloody nasal drip. If there’s a lot of blood, call me. A week from now, I want you to get that splint off, but you can do that in Kielce. Typically you’ll see results in about two weeks, but it takes up to a year to see the full effect. Oh, and you might experience some depression, but God knows why because you’ll look a whole lot better than you do now.” Norbert flashes Kamila another fulsome grin. “You got all that,
Pfeiffer
?”

“No sneezing?” Kamila feels stunned. She’s waited for this her whole life and now, it’s happening too fast.

“No sneezing!? No
sex
, Kamila! That should be your concern. Four weeks is a long time to go without.” Kamila cracks a smile. Four weeks is a drop in the bucket for her. The anesthesiologist walks in, nods politely, and starts turning dials. He injects Kamila, and instantly her eyes roll back. She’s aware of her breathing slowing down, and it feels so nice, this momentary awareness of one’s own spiral into complete and total darkness.

Justyna Kielce, Poland

“It’s your turn,” Justyna grumbles.

“But I did it yesterday,” Paweł groans back.

“Yeah, but I got up twice during the night.”

“Whattya mean?”

“What do I mean? I mean, twice, last night.”

“Twice when?”

“At one-thirty and again at four. He wanted water. So, it’s your fucking turn.”

Paweł mutters,
“Kurwa mać,”
as he heaves his body upright, and sits on the edge of their bed for a moment, postponing the inevitable. He rolls his neck, cracks his back, and shakes his head as if he’s got water in his ears.

“Paweł!” Justyna growls and tries to kick him in the behind. He pulls his sweatpants on and grabs his crying son from the middle of the bed.

“Ah, goddamnit, he peed through the diaper again.”

Justyna silently points toward the door and rolls over. She hears Paweł ripping off the wet diaper while Damian squirms.

“You gotta hold your pee till the morning,
synku
! You’re a big boy now, okay?” His voice turns stern and he prods Justyna with his foot. “No more Pampers at night, Justyna! We’re sending mixed messages.”

“Mama! Maaamaaa!
Wstawaj!
” Damian screeches, trying to wriggle free from Paweł’s arms.

“He wants you.”

“And I want a Lamborghini and a deep-tissue massage. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna fucking get it.”

“Next time he crawls in here in the middle of the night, we take him
back to his room. He’s three, for fuck’s sake. He needs to be sleeping in his own bed. ’Cause I can’t take this. I have work in an hour,
kurwa mać
.”

“I have work in an hour too. It’s called motherhood,
cwaniaku
, and it doesn’t pay shit.”

Shaking his head, Paweł grabs a change of clothes for Damian, and walks out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him quietly. Justyna gets why he’s angry with her. She shouldn’t let Damian get in their bed like she does; but at three
A.M.
, it’s easier than listening to him throw a tantrum.

Justyna makes sure that Paweł and Damian are out of the room before she opens her eyes. There is no way she’ll fall back asleep now, but she’ll sure as hell lay here till 6:55—five minutes before Paweł has to leave. Sometimes, on days when Justyna feels close to strangling Damian, she will deposit him in his room, toss him a sippy cup and a
smoczek
to suck on, and lock the door behind her. Her son will wail for an hour, but if Justyna is downstairs and turns the TV up high, she can just about drown out his misery, and she does.

Before Damian, Justyna would sleep till noon if she felt like it. Now, Justyna lives for every Friday, when she throws some shit into a backpack and they take the bus to
Babcia
Kazia’s apartment in Szydłówek, where Damian spends the weekend. She milks her freedom for every fucking last drop, till Sunday at three
P.M.
, when she has to get back on the bus and retrieve the snot-nosed, overeager toddler who throws his fat little arms around her neck as if she’s been away for weeks and months instead of seventy-one-and-a-half sublime hours. Thank God today is Friday.

Last weekend, she and Paweł loaded up in a van with some friends and drove to Kraków where they partied their asses off till Sunday morning. Justyna and Paweł couldn’t keep their hands off each other on the ride back, and as they drove into Kielce, Justyna whispered into Paweł’s ear, “Don’t you wish we could go back?”

“We’ll go back next weekend,
myszko
.”

Justyna shook her head.
No, no
, she wanted to say.
Not back to Kraków, but back in time, all the way to sixteen
.

It’s not that she regrets having Damian. Damian happened when he
was supposed to happen, he happened out of love. She felt no regret, but she harbored plenty of resentment. The difference between the two is small, but Justyna understands it the way only a mother can.

The truth is, Damian keeps getting in the way. Like last week, she had to drag him to the pediatrician’s because he had a cough. Ever since that incident with the goddamn pneumonia six months ago, Justyna starts to panic at any sign of a cold. The death of Justyna’s mother had stunned her but she was able to sort out her grief and move on. The mere thought of her son dying, however, almost annihilates her, so she schleps her kid to the doctor’s anytime he has a sniffle.

The
poczekalnia
at the clinic had been packed and Damian ran wild, crying, laughing, spilling water, and throwing his shoes around. At first, Justyna tried yelling, and then she tried pinching his arm and holding him down, but she resorted to the tactic she relied on most days: she gave up and reached for a magazine. One of the mothers, whose daughter sat by her feet in silence, turned to Justyna and cleared her throat. “If you can’t rein him in, perhaps you shouldn’t have had him,” she said.

Justyna blinked her eyes. “Excuse me?”

The woman leaned in conspiratorially.

“I’m sorry, I just see that you’re struggling.”

“You see that I’m struggling,” Justyna repeated slowly. The other women in the waiting room averted their eyes.

“Yes, I do. Look at him. Look at
you
. I see this all the time, you know. And it gets worse. Soon he’ll be a boy and then a teenager and then a man, and you’ll
still
be in over your head. My heart just breaks for him.”

Justyna stood up and clenched her fist. She hadn’t punched someone in a long time.

“You see me struggling,
kurwo
? You don’t see me, period. You see a statistic. If my son weren’t here, you’d be laying on the floor in a manicured, pedi-fucking-cured heap. Damian,
idziemy
!” As soon as Damian heard the words
we’re leaving
, he scrambled out from his hiding place, shouting
Hura! Hura!
Justyna grabbed his sandals and his hand.

“And one more thing,
pizdo
. You know who else had a kid when she was a teenager? Holy fucking Mary, Mother of God! And that shit turned out fine, that shit saved the world, didn’t it now?”

But the woman’s words had haunted Justyna. She never felt in over her head before, but that bitch was right.

At ten to seven, Justyna rolls out of bed and and glances at herself in front of the full-length mirror that hangs on the door. Her breasts bounce perkily midair. At least by forgoing breastfeeding, she’s saved them from doom.

She lives for these Fridays. She lives for going out. Downtown Kielce, while no downtown Warszawa or Gdansk, is nonetheless
her
downtown. The orange-domed bus depot, the wild parks and dark alleys, the homegrown boys; Justyna loves it all. But she lives for the nightclubs. Pod Krechą, Vspak, and Disco Park, these are her sanctums. There was sorcery in the opening of drawers to search for the right
stringi
underwear, in selecting a tight white outfit because white turned fluorescent under the club lights; it was in the way she sashayed down the porch steps, legs gleaming with baby oil, the smell of summer mixing with the scent of her Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume. Suddenly Justyna
was
sixteen again. Sixteen, and howling “Wannabe” into the heavens, holding her heels in her hand, back when she
was
a Spice Girl, when she was free and tipsy and nothing could stop her.

People fawned over toddlers, but the truth was that they were primordial beasts, living exclusively according to their needs and desires, and sometimes, nothing but a smack to their heads got through to them. Yes, Damian gave her satisfaction in small ways that she knew she’d miss one day, like his slobbery kisses and his dimpled smile. But Damian also deprived her, and his new, boorish disposition was too much to handle. Prior to the pneumonia, Justyna coasted by, biding her time till he was old enough to fix his own lunch and wipe his own ass. But after his illness, she finally understood the depth of her wretched love for him. More and more often she’d pinch his arm a little too hard, smack him on the head, or shove him off her with a little too much force. Those impulses scared her but she couldn’t stop them.

“Justynaaaa!” She hears Paweł summon her from the kitchen. Once again, she won’t have time to shower before Paweł takes off. She throws on a Reebok tank and her black denim shorts—the same thing she wore yesterday—and thunders downstairs.

The kitchen is a mess, a cataclysmic mess. Damian is squatting in the middle of the floor, attempting architectural genius with a pile of pots and pans.

“I’m late. I’m fucking late.”

Justyna blows Paweł a desultory kiss and he rushes out the door. Justyna stands there, wishing she was going with him.

“Damian, wanna watch a show?”

But Damian is too busy stacking the unstackable, biting his lip in solemn concentration, because everything is a matter of life and death to him, including getting the frying pan to balance on top of the eggbeater.

So Justyna leaves him to his work, pours herself a cup of Jacobs instant, and lights her first cigarette of the day. Its effect is instant and she feels herself relax. They’ll make it through until three o’clock somehow.

As she puffs contentedly, glancing at Damian from the corner of her eye, Filip walks into the kitchen, wearing underwear and nothing else. The old tighty whities are no longer white and are hanging loosely at his crotch. He sits down across from her and helps himself to one of her smokes.

Filip Bednarczyk is Elwira’s latest find, and where she found him God only knows; he’s in his late twenties, with no ties to anyone or anything. The sisters’ taste in men has always differed, and this guy was worse than all the rest.

“Jesus. Put some pants on, will you?”

Filip laughs and taps his ashes into the ashtray.

“You don’t like what you see? Then look away, Strawicz.”

“
Kochanie
, if you handed me a telescope right now, I still wouldn’t see much.”

Filip lets loose a jarring laugh.

“
Oj, dziecko
, where’s my breakfast?”

“Probably getting cold over at your
mamuśka
’s. Why don’t you go back there.” Justyna stands up and motions to Damian. “
Chodz synu
, let’s go outside, okay?”

Damian doesn’t even look her way but he scrambles to his feet, and runs to the hallway.

“By the way, do us all a favor, and kick my sister to the curb before you get her pregnant, all right? If my father were here, you’d be gone yesterday.”

Six months after their mother’s death, their father had packed up a suitcase and hightailed it to Naples, where he said work was rampant for the Poles. Justyna knew it wasn’t money he was after, but escape. He could no longer function after Teresa died. At first he called them regularly, then just mailed some lira every few months, and in the end even that stopped. Justyna had no idea if he was alive or had drunk himself to death. In her mind, he was dead anyway.