The Clarinet Polka (21 page)

“As part of my new life, I'm taking a night course at Raysburg College. It's on Wednesday nights. That's where I am right now. He didn't want me to go out tonight, but I said I'd be careful. I said I'd come home at the first snowflake.

“Because I slept with another man once, I seem to be damaged goods. Or tainted. Or something. At any rate, he seems to be having some difficulty touching me. I'm to give him time so he can get over the deep hurt I've done to him and trust me again. So I'm currently living in a state of celibacy—”

“Chastity,” I said. I don't know what made me say it.

“What?”

“Celibacy's when you can't marry. Like a priest or a nun. Chastity's when you're not getting any.” See what a Catholic education can do for you?

“You're right, Jim,” she said, “you're absolutely right. Yes, chastity is certainly the correct word for it.”

Okay, and while we're considering the correct words for things, I guess the word you often hear used for this kind of shit is “inevitable.” We're laying there afterward, and I'm smoking a cigarette, and she's pretending to smoke a cigarette, and she says, “Where's your phone?”

“Phone?” I go. “What phone? Who needs a phone?”

“
We
need a phone. Get one, okay?”

“Yes, boss.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you mean it.”

“You do want to see me again, don't you, Jim?”

Now what the hell do you think I said to that? Well, she couldn't see me again till after Christmas. She only had one more class before the end of the term, and she figured she'd better go to it, but she'd call me in the new year. Was that okay? Oh, you bet, honey.

For the longest damn time, the way I told this story to myself was that I was doing just fine till Connie came along and screwed my life up, but that's just bullshit, right? You look back years later, and most of what you did, honest to God, you can't imagine doing much different because you were just stumbling along from one thing to another and doing the best you could and you didn't know shit from Shinola. But there's bound to be a few times when things were clear, and that night in December 1969 was one of them. As a matter of fact, it couldn't have been any clearer if somebody had slapped up a road sign. You want to know the truth of the matter? Okay, I'll tell you the truth of the matter. I knew that getting involved with Connie again was the wrong thing to do, and I went ahead and did it anyway.

*   *   *

On Christmas Eve we have a special supper with no meat. It's called
Wigilia,
and for the older generation it's more important than anything on Christmas Day. We've always had the same relatives over for as long as I can remember. A few times when we were little kids, Auntie Jean came from Chicago with her family, and that was a big deal, but usually it was my dad's brother Stas and his wife, Eva, and Mom's two older sisters, Aunt Helen and Aunt Stella, and their husbands, and we always had their kids, our cousins, and then when they started having kids, we had a whole bunch of little kids for a while. And Babcia Wojtkiewicz was there, so we had four generations at one table.

But over the years our cousins started moving out of town. It was a matter of going where you could find work, and there wasn't much in the valley unless you wanted to try to get on at Raysburg Steel or Sylvania or one of the chemical plants—and jobs were always tight even when there were jobs. And the last of our cousins had moved away just that past summer, out to California. So you see, the exodus was well under way by then, and when the steel industry went belly-up in the eighties, that really put the old quietus to it. Linda and I've got cousins scattered all over the States, so there's a whole fourth generation of kids who won't have any memory at all of what the old Polish community in South Raysburg was like.

Well, that night—Christmas '69—was the first time anybody could remember when there weren't any kids at
Wigilia
, and everybody thought that was strange and sad. The men had taken over the living room, and my uncles were having themselves a snort of vodka and yanking my father's chain about him not drinking the way they always did, and he was saying what he always said, “You guys have one for me.” The damn dentist Linda worked for had let her off early, but she'd just got home, and she and I didn't have anywhere to fit, so we're kind of in the way—just hovering around the kitchen door smelling all that great food—and our kitchen is not exactly spacious, and there's Babcia and Mom and our aunts in there trying to get things ready, and they just want us out of their hair.

“Go watch for the star,” Babcia says to us. That's a joke, right? Back in Poland you couldn't eat dinner until you'd seen the first star, but we'd never observed that custom for the simple reason that if you're waiting to see a star on Christmas Eve in Raysburg, West Virginia, you might end up standing there till April.

So Linda and I go outside just like we're kids again. It's one of those pissy nowhere days you get in the valley around Christmas—not cold enough to snow but not warm enough to be pleasant either. When we were little, we'd always get sent out to look for the star, and most of the time we'd never see one, but we'd always pretend we did. It's getting dark, and there's nothing to see in the sky but a big gray glop.

I've got a pint in my coat pocket, so I take a snort, offer her one. She shakes her head. She's been fasting all day just like we were living back in the old country in the olden days. “Linny,” I say, “you're crazier than a bedbug, you know that.”

We keep pacing up and down in front of the house, peering up into the sky just like we might really see a star. I know perfectly well we won't. “How are you doing, Jimmy?” she asks me. “I mean, really. Are you doing okay?”

“Aw, hell, I don't know. I'm not half bad. Yeah, I'm all right.”

“You were so miserable when you first came home.”

I don't know what to say to that. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

I may not have been fasting like my nutty sister, but that doesn't mean I'm not hungry. I'm about ready to eat the paint off the walls. So I have another snort. “You're drinking too much,” my sister says.

My first reaction is to get pissed off, but then I think, what the hell, it's Linda. “You know, kid,” I say, “the same thought has passed through my mind on more than one occasion.”

“I'm not sure there's enough for you here,” she says. She means the valley.

I'm not sure about that one either, but I do know that if we continue exploring these topics much further, we're going to end up plunged into the deep gloom, which is where you don't want to be on Christmas Eve. Then all of a sudden Linda says, “Oh, Jimmy, look!”

A bit of that gray glop's torn apart, and right in the hole is a little star. Of course a star would come out for Linda. So we go running into the house like a couple little kids, yelling, “Hey, we saw a star. Honest to God, for real. Let's eat.”

With all our aunts and uncles there, there's a lot of Polish being spoken. Babcia says that back in the old country, we'd all kneel down and pray now, but nobody takes her up on it; Old Bullet Head saying his little grace is the most she's going to get. She says the same things she says every year. Back in the old country, we'd have straw under the tablecloth to remind us of the manger where the Christ child was laid, and we'd have thirteen different courses, and we'd be doing this, and we'd be doing that, and we'd be doing the other.
“Co kraj, to obyczaj,”
Uncle Stas says, and that's the Polish version of “When in Rome—”

Well, we may be in Rome, but we've set an extra plate for the stranger that might turn up at our door, and we've got an odd number of dishes and an even number of people, because, by God, that's the way it's got to be, and when we sit down, all of us check to make sure we can see our shadows because if you can't see your shadow when you're seated at the table on Christmas Eve, you'll get real sick or even die during the year.

Now the big deal at
Wigilia
is the breaking of the
opłatek
with the members of your family.
Opłatki
are wafers, sort of like Communion wafers but rectangular, about the size of business envelopes, with a Nativity scene on them, and here Babcia is going to have her way. “Władysław,” she says, “you break the
opłatek
with your son. Jimmy, you break it with your father.” You see, in order to break the wafer with anybody, you have to forgive them whatever bad they've done to you in the last year, and Babcia had managed to notice a certain tension between me and the old man—although we have been getting along pretty good lately. So I break the wafer with my father, and I say the thing you're supposed to say,
“Wszystkiego najlepszego.”

He says, “Aw, Jimmy, you're not a bad kid.” From Old Bullet Head, that's as good as it gets.

It was a pretty jolly dinner once we got into it.
Wigilia
is your classic time for
pierogi
. If all you know about
pierogi
is that crap you get frozen in the supermarket, then forget it. Real
pierogi
are rolled out by hand by Polish ladies and stuffed with anything you can think of that's not meat—try the sauerkraut, that's my favorite. Yeah, throw a little butter on, a little sour cream, but lay off the salt, they're salty enough to start with. And naturally you've got your fish—pickled herring and something cooked. Mom always liked halibut. And you've got your
barszcz
and your dumplings and your stewed prunes, and you always finish up with a big poppy-seed cake.

Our aunts kept teasing me and Linda about how we should be supplying the next round of kids. When they're talking to us, they switch into English. “What's the matter with the two of you?” Aunt Stella says. “You're not even married yet.”

“I don't know about Jimmy,” Linda says, “but I've joined the Holy Virgins of Mary.”

“Holy Virgins, my ass,” Aunt Stella says.

“I heard she was dating that Mondrowski kid,” Aunt Helen says.

“Who?” Aunt Stella says. “Frank Mondrowski's kid? The one that was in the service? What's with him anyways? He forget where the barber shop is?”

“There's nothing going on with me and Georgie Mondrowski,” Linda says.

“Yeah, that's right,” my mother says. “They're not dating. That's what they tell me anyway. They're just hanging out.”

“Hanging out?” Aunt Stella says.

“What's the matter with you, Stell?” my mother says. “Aren't you with it? Kids don't date anymore. They hang out. You know, like two T-shirts on a clothesline.”

“Oh, Mom!” Linda says.

While all this has been going on, Old Bullet Head and my uncles have been having their own conversation, muttering along about how shitty the economy is in the valley these days or some damn thing, but now my father says, “What the hell are you girls talking about?”

“These two,” Aunt Stella says, “the next generation.”

So our aunts start coming up with suggestions on who Linda and me can go out with. Most of their ideas are totally ridiculous, and for some reason it's annoying the hell out of me and I just wish they'd shut up.

Uncle Stas decides to put his two cents in. “Aw, let them alone,” he says. “She's just a baby, and he's just got out of the service. He wants to batch it a while yet.”

“Yeah, goina be a while before that one's husband material,” Old Bullet Head says, jerking his thumb at me.

“To hell with that,” Aunt Helen says. “A guy's got to settle down sometime.”

“It ain't just guys,” Aunt Eva says, giving Linda the look.

They just wouldn't let the topic alone, and I was getting fairly pissed off—like I had no sense of humor about it at all. I hated to admit it, but it was true—no girl with half a brain would take me for husband material. Which was kind of a bummer because sometimes the only thing I thought I really wanted was to be married—you know, to some nice girl like Dorothy Pliszka—and just be living an ordinary life with the rest of the fools.

At some point, one of our aunts translates the gist of the conversation for Babcia, and she gets a good laugh out of it. “I'd like to see some more great-grandchildren,” she says in Polish.

“There you go, kids,” Aunt Helen yells at us. “You heard what your grandma said. Go forth and multiply!”

Ordinarily after dinner we'd light the Christmas tree and open our presents, but seeing as there's no little kids this year, we haven't got a tree, and we've decided to do the presents tomorrow when we turn back into Americans and have our turkey dinner. But you always go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve—that's what we call
pasterka
—and if you're at all close to the church, you walk there. Even old folks like Babcia. The old people always walked everywhere as long as they could, which is probably one of the reasons they lived as long as they did.

Linda's gone on ahead of us because she's in the choir, and the rest of us go outside and make this procession down the street, and everywhere you look there's everybody else on their way to the church. It's like the whole world's turned out, and the closer you get to the church, there's more people, wishing each other a Merry Christmas, waving, stopping to chat. I always loved this part of Christmas Eve when I was a kid—seeing everybody, all the neighbors walking to St. Stans—and I think, hey, this is nice, this is really nice.

We intersect the Mondrowskis walking down from Jacob Street, and Georgie gives me a big bear hug, lifts me right off the ground, and I see Old Bullet Head checking out all Georgie's hair, and I can read his mind. He's thinking, well, I guess he's allowed to be nuts; he was in Vietnam. And then from the other direction here comes Dorothy Pliszka with her husband and her kid and her parents and her in-laws. Of course I'd have to see her, and I get hit with the same little pang in the pit of my stomach I always get. She's wearing one of those Jackie Kennedy outfits, and she looks like a million bucks. She gives me this dumb wave like you'd give your uncle Bob from Buffalo, and I'm thinking the same thing I always think—am I going to go through the rest of my life feeling like shit every time I run into Dorothy? We're right in front of St. Stans by then, and the church bell rings twice, and that means we've got fifteen minutes till Mass.