The Clarinet Polka (46 page)

“I'll tell you what,” he said to Janice. “Let's make a date for ten years from now. You and me and Mark. We'll get together and see if any of us speaks a word of Polish.”

*   *   *

So Janice came back to Raysburg, and she was in fairly horrible shape. “I don't know what I think anymore,” she said. “I don't even know who I am anymore.”

I tried to help her the best I could. I listened to her. I said dumb things like, “Look, you can't just take what your brother says as gospel. You've got to form your own opinions.” I kept wishing I could find exactly the right thing to say—like when she was stoned and Patty said exactly the right thing while I'd just sat there. But nothing I was saying seemed to be much help.

Janice kept coming up with these nasty mind games she'd run on herself. “Suppose I found out I was adopted and my real parents were
Swedish
. Would I still be Polish?”

“I don't know. Would you?”

“Of course I would. It's what I feel—I'm Polish right down to my bone marrow. A lot of times I even
think
in Polish. So that means it's language, not blood. So what does that make you? Are you Polish?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, we're all Americans.”

“Yeah, I know we are, but is that just a nationality? Or is it something more?”

And so on and on she goes, around in circles. Does blood mean anything, and if you think it does, doesn't that make you just like the Nazis? But if you don't think it does, how can somebody who doesn't speak a word of Polish think of themselves as Polish? Like her friends Sandy and Maureen, like most of the younger people in South Raysburg? And how can you ever know who you are anyway?

Well, I've had a problem or two in my life, but wondering who I was has never been one of them. It's always been real obvious—I'm a South Raysburg Polak, and my old man's Walt Koprowski who works at Raysburg Steel, and my mom was one of the Wojtkiewicz girls, and everybody knows them, and everybody knows
me
. “But you see,” Janice said, “I can't say that. I'm not anything. I'm not really Polish.”

“Oh, come on, you just said you were Polish. You're as Polish as Paderewski.”

“Yeah, I feel that way, but do you think my cousin Paulina in Krajne Podlaski would think I'm Polish? But I'm not an ordinary American girl either. Sometimes I feel like we don't belong anywhere—like we've never stopped being refugees.”

Of course all the time this is going on, I've got Linda asking me if Janice has said anything about the band, and I've got to say, “Well, no. Right at the moment that doesn't seem to be a topic that's real high on her list.”

“What are we going to do?” Linda says. “Oh, Jimmy, this is terrible! We're supposed to play at the street fair in August. Should I call Father Obinski and tell him he's got to find another band?”

“No,” I said, “not yet. There's still time. Maybe she'll come back around to the music.” But I wasn't sure she would.

Nope, Janice wasn't saying a word about music. She was still worrying about the Nazis and the problem of evil, and then she decided to throw Vietnam in on top of everything else. It wasn't just enough to say we ought to end the war, what could we do to bring real peace to the world? Why couldn't we just love each other the way Christ taught us? And shouldn't she join an antiwar group?— Yeah, right, I said, just pick one of the four thousand real active antiwar groups they got in Raysburg— And John had told her that the war was being fought by working-class boys. How many South Raysburg boys were in the war?— Aw, hell, I don't know, I said. Not as many as you'd think— And what if her brother was right, and her family really was pathogenic and she was being driven nuts?

I'm only giving you a fraction of what was going on in her head. It was like every time she turned around, she ran right into another big hairy question. She was wearing me out. “Come on, Janice,” I said. “It's not your family that's driving you nuts. You're driving
yourself
nuts.”

*   *   *

Janice had never announced it when she'd decided she was going to start seeing me every day, and she didn't announce it either when she decided she was going to stop. It was like all of a sudden she just wasn't there anymore.

Now I could understand it, right? She'd had enough of that heavy shit and she was taking a break, you know, and making a stab at being normal. Sandy Czaplicki had just got her driver's license, so I'd be driving somewhere and Sandy's car would pull up next to me and go beep beep, and I'd look over and there'd be Janice and some of the other girls from the rat pack, and they'd all wave at me, and I'd wave back, and I'd think, well, good for you, kid—you're probably better off impersonating a teenage idiot than hanging around with me and driving yourself nuts. But understanding something only gets you so far, right? And guess what? I was hurt. I was real surprised at how hurt I was.

I kept telling myself I had no right to feel like that—she was just acting her age for a change—and I felt like a fool. Because I'd got to the point where I was kind of depending on her, you know. And what she was doing was probably good for her, but it wasn't all that good for me. And all of a sudden I've got lots of spare time on my hands—like four million hours of it—and you remember Mrs. Constance Bradshaw, don't you?

I didn't have any reason not to, so I started seeing a lot more of Connie. I even spent the night a few times. I didn't try to sleep in the same bed with her though; I slept on the couch. When I wasn't there, she'd have her husband over. She didn't tell me that, but it was obvious. For one thing, she was still paranoid that I'd just turn up unannounced, and she kept reminding me never to do that. And then there was a couple other things. She was real fanatical about washrags—which I wasn't supposed to call them because that was low rent. She corrected me a million times. “They're wash
cloths
, Jim.” But whatever you call them, if I touched hers, I was dead meat. She had her towel rack and I had mine, and she stood in the bathroom and banged it into my head. “This side's girls, women, female,
mine
. See, they're pink. That side's boys, men, male,
yours
. See, they're green. Got it?”

So one morning I'm shaving and I grab the green washrag, and it smells funny. I use Old Spice, and I always have. It goes back to whatever age I was—thirteen, fourteen—and I come home from school and guess what's waiting for me on the dinner table right in front of my plate? A razor, a mug of soap with a brush in it, and a bottle of Old Spice. And Old Bullet Head says, “Welcome to the club, fuzzface.” So I take a good sniff of the green washrag, and it ain't Old Spice. It's one of those real fruity things—you know, with a name like
Eau de Homme
—and I think, hmmm, well, Dr. Bradshaw doesn't mind paying the big bucks for his aftershave.

And the other tipoff was the leftovers. Whenever I dropped in, there'd be the remains of some wonderful gourmet dinner in the fridge. I'd look forward to it. You know, those pasta dishes with the cream sauce and the red and green peppers, a block of Parmesan so you could grate it fresh right onto your plate. Chicken cooked in wine with potatoes and carrots and little pearl onions. Once there was roast pork with applesauce. And I thought maybe that was Connie's way of trying to get back together with her old man—invite him over, throw a good feed into him, and nature does the rest, right?

And you know what I thought? It's kind of weird what I thought. I'm standing there in her bathroom smelling that green washrag, and it feels kind of right that her husband should be there—a hell of a lot more right than me being there, you know what I mean? And maybe Connie and her husband were getting back together again, and that'd be a good thing. They've got two kids. So what did that make me? The home wrecker, that's what.

So what the hell was I doing there? Well, I was there shaving in Connie's bathroom because I'd spent the night and had my Mature Relationship—and the mature adult way to look at things is that nothing means nothing because you're old enough to know better and everything's a joke, and if it's not a joke, then you do your best to turn it into one, and if you're having trouble doing that, well, you can always get loaded. And I thought about Janice and how she was a million light-years away from all that.

That terrific intensity—you know, when things matter, when it matters what you believe, when you're still asking yourself how to live your life so it counts for something. When you can still say something like “Why can't we just love each other the way Christ taught us?” and you don't feel stupid and uncool and embarrassed for saying something like that— I don't know if you're getting what I'm trying to tell you here. That's how intense Janice was, and that's how intense I felt about her. And it hit me that I'd been using Connie and Janice like a seesaw—one end goes down, the other goes up—and I really hated myself for doing that. And you know the thing that really got me? With neither one of them was I the right guy in the right place.

*   *   *

One night I'm floating around town with Mondrowski, and as per usual he's stoned to the eyeballs, and he's suddenly seized by the desire for ice cream—and not just any old ice cream, he's got to have the triple-mondo sundae at Tommy's. He can, you know, visualize it—the three scoops of different flavors, the three different syrups, the whipped cream, the nuts, the cherry—so I'm laughing at him. “Okay, you sorry asshole,” and I go shooting out the National Road to Tommy's. What I'd forgot is that place is teenybopper city.

We get there, and I say, “You want to eat in the car?” and he says, “Oh, hell, no. Let's go in and check out the honeys,” so we step through the door, and the first thing I see is Janice sitting in a booth with Maureen Wierzcholek and Sandy Czaplicki. I feel this bang in the pit of the stomach that's got real familiar over the years because it's what I always feel when I run into Dorothy Pliszka. I'm going, hey, what is this?

Walking into that place is like walking into a spiderweb. There's kids from Central, kids from Raysburg High and Canden High, young studs from the Academy, and they're all connected up to each other by these strands of the web—like super-aware of each other even though they're too cool to show it—and if you're not in high school, you'll never understand all those connections, not in a million years. I can remember being in that web, and you probably can too, right? It's real exciting and it can be real scary. “Well, hi, girls,” Georgie's saying. “What's the good word?”

“Come on, sit down. There's plenty of room,” Maureen says.

“Oh, no,” Georgie says. “You're doing your thing. You don't want a couple old farts like us falling into your space.”

“Yes, we do,” Maureen says. “Come
oooon
, Georgie Porgie.” She knows him pretty well because he used to go out with one of her sisters. Donna, I think it was.

I keep trying to find some dumb funny thing to say, but nothing is coming out of my mouth. Janice is sitting on one side of the table and Sandy and Maureen on the other, so Janice stands up to go over with them and let Georgie and me have her side. I step back to give her room, and she pauses right in front of me and says, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I say. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, I'm okay. I guess. How about you?”

“Oh, I'm okay. Just fine.”

Those three girls were dressed so alike they must have planned it—I mean, it was practically a uniform—and then they must have spent hours getting themselves together because they've achieved teenybopper perfection. They're wearing their hair down, held back with those band things. And they've done their eyes the same way—you know, like Twiggy—and they've got the same pink lipstick, and these little blouses and miniskirts. It was the look all the girls were going for in those days—like half-sexy, half-grade school.

I'll never forget this. The skirt Janice had on was so short it was higher than the tabletop. I'm not kidding you. It had little buttons up the front, and you could see how flat her stomach was. And white kneesocks the same as always, except this pair went right up over her knees. And little-kid shoes, black and white, but with a real high heel, and where there's usually a strap, they're tied with ribbons. Then she sat down on the other side and slid her long legs under the table. I looked over to catch her eye or something, but she was looking down at the tabletop.

Well, the girls had scored big-time getting a couple older guys like us at their table—yeah, lots of points in the teen scene—and Maureen starts flirting with Mondrowski like you wouldn't believe. He knows it's harmless, she knows it's harmless, everybody knows it's harmless. She's probably always wanted to do that ever since she was nine and he was coming over to take out her big sister. And he's throwing the one-liners back at her, and every time he says something, she and Sandy go off in this explosion of giggles. But what he was saying, I really couldn't tell you. All I'm hearing is this kind of distant yatta, yatta, yatta because I'm in another world. I'm just waiting for Janice to look up at me.

Janice must not have been hearing them either. She's just sitting there looking down. No expression on her face at all. Finally she looks up. And her eyes lock onto mine, and she gives me this deep blue look from her deep blue eyes. She's got big eyes to start with, but with all that black stuff on her eyelashes, they look as big as two headlights. She's got real pale skin, did I tell you that? It's almost white. And I see the color rise up into her face. Right there in front of me she just turns pink. Then she looks away, and my mouth's gone so dry it feels like it's stuffed full of sand.