The Clarinet Polka (51 page)

It's a real manic polka. And Walt Solek's got your classic old-country voice, and he just belts it out good, and if you're inclined to like Polish music but you've never heard him before, he's going to blow you right through the wall. And we're all of us standing around that old hi-fi listening to him singing away in Polish. And then the band kicks into the drive with the trumpets blazing, and he's yelping his head off—egging on the dancers—and Janice has got this smile like the sun coming up in the morning.

*   *   *

If you didn't know Janice, you would have thought all that heavy stuff she'd been worrying about had slipped completely out of her mind, because all of a sudden she was instantly back into the music. She hated practicing. She never practiced. But every morning she got up and hopped on her bike and rode it down to South Raysburg and went into the Pajaczkowskis' basement all by herself and played along with those old records for a couple hours. You see, that wasn't practicing—that was just having fun. Patty's mom said she liked having Janice around—hell, everybody liked having Janice around—so she could spend as much time down there as she wanted.

Janice had a girl's four-speed her dad had bought for her twelfth birthday, and it had just been sitting in the garage getting rusty, and at some point it dawned on her that Edgewood to South Raysburg is downhill practically every inch of the way—like she didn't hardly have to pedal and she'd still make it down there damn near quick as a car. Well, I cleaned up that bike and oiled it for her and raised the seat and made sure she had good brakes, and then I tried not to think about her sailing down Highlight Road at thirty or forty miles an hour. I knew perfectly well that's what she did. “You be careful,” I said to her about a million times, and she'd always go, “Oh, sure. I'm always careful.”

It would have taken her maybe four hours to pedal back up, so I'd throw the bike in my trunk and deliver it—and her—back to her house. It gave us a perfect excuse for me to be driving her home every night.

Once she was down the hill, she could ride her bike anywhere she wanted. You don't really need a bike to get around South Raysburg, but if you've got one, you can be anywhere in about thirty seconds flat. So she could go see her girlfriends, or pop into the church to pray—which she did from time to time, being a serious Catholic girl who was still on a spiritual quest. And then in some magical way she'd always run into me. And then after Connie's Beige Period was over and I wasn't going out to St. Stevens anymore, I had lots of time to make sure I was available to be run into.

The one place Janice couldn't stand to be for very long was at home, and she kept getting into fights with her parents about it. “It's the summer,” she kept telling them. “You can't expect me to sit around the house in the summer.”

In that hot weather Janice wore nothing but swimsuits. She had two of them; one was red, white, and blue stripes, and the other was all blue, and if you were wondering what her figure looked like, you didn't have to wonder too long when she was wearing one of those things. She shoved her feet into tennis shoes and didn't bother with socks. She had a schoolbag she strapped onto the back of her bike, and she'd put her clarinet in there, and a few bucks in case she wanted a Coke or something, and a little bag with her makeup—I couldn't believe how much makeup she carried around with her—and a pair of shorts in case she needed to look a little more modest later on in the evening. And then she was all set to ramble around all day and go where she pleased.

It's true, she really didn't have much of a figure. I mean she was definitely a girl but that was about it. Her mom was always onto her to wear a bra and she'd say, “Mom, what would be the point?” That gives you some idea how far we'd gone in the direction of being able to tell each other anything—that she could tell me something like that.

One afternoon Janice went to see my grandmother—you know, Babcia Wojtkiewicz—and they sat around drinking tea and talking in Polish for a couple hours. Babcia told my mom she'd been pleased as punch to have that little girl visit her. “You didn't tell me you were going to do that,” I said to Janice.

“I don't have to tell you everything I'm doing, do I?”

They talked about the old country, and then Janice got to hear about the early years in Raysburg, how they built St. Stans and how hard it was for the steelworkers to get the union organized. “Wow, that strike in 1919 was really ugly,” Janice said.

“Oh, you bet.”

She'd started picking up some of my expressions. It was kind of weird hearing me coming back at me out of her mouth. “The Depression wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs either,” she said.

It's funny, but I can close my eyes and still see her sailing along on that blue bike, looking the way she did that summer she was sixteen. She didn't make any effort to get a tan, but just being outside she turned a beautiful golden color that matched her hair.

*   *   *

Well, I put a new belt on Bob Pajaczkowski's old turntable, and I replaced the needles, and jacked in a little amp I salvaged, and wired up a couple good-sized speakers, and lo and behold, we've got enough power to rattle the basement windows. And then I slapped in a tape deck so the girls could record any of the tunes they liked well enough to want to learn to play.

Mary Jo said she had better things to do with her time than sit around in somebody's basement listening to old polka records—the girls didn't want her around anyway—and Bev was home in Barnsville being bored, so we were down to your hard core. That's Patty and Linda and Janice, and when I could fit it in, yours truly. And we'd get together in Bob Pajaczkowski's basement. It was always nice and cool down there, and it was a good place to be in that heat wave we were having. Linda wrote all the information about the records into a big notebook, but Patty and Janice were looking for tunes they could perform.

For years Bob Pajaczkowski had pretty much bought every polka record he ever saw, so there was lots of Chicago stuff, but he'd also bought about a million Eastern-style records. My sister had a prejudice against Eastern-style, so Janice hadn't heard too much of it before and she just loved some of those bands, and so, lickety-split, she's learned to sing about a dozen new polkas. And you know what? Linda and Patty Pajaczkowski got to be pretty good friends. None of us could quite believe it. But I think it changed something for Linda to see that Patty had parents like the rest of us—that she hadn't been, you know, just beamed down from some little violet-colored spaceship in the middle of a bad night. And so my sister's going through the cartons, writing everything down, and there's a polka blaring away, and Janice is singing along with it, and Patty's slapping out a drumbeat on an old tabletop, and one Saturday afternoon Bob Pajaczkowski comes down to see how we're doing, and somehow he can't manage to leave. “Hey, you kids want a beer?”

Well, sure, maybe we could choke down a beer or two. He comes back with a case of Iron City, and we're all listening to polkas. The next thing you know, there's Patty's mom. “You can't fight 'em, join 'em,” she says, and Patty's mom and dad are dancing the polka around the basement, and we're clapping our hands and yelling, “Go, go, go.” Then, eventually, Patty's mom invites us upstairs to dinner, and while we're eating, Patty says, “Hey, Dad, would you mind if we rehearsed down there?”

And he says, “Oh, hell no. I'd love it.” So Bev comes in from Barnsville and crashes with Patty over on the Island, and we pry Mary Jo off her ass, and the band starts rehearsing in Bob Pajaczkowski's basement—because, you know, we're getting real close to St. Stans street-fair time.

I remember one night when Patty's mom and dad came down to listen to the band, and Patty says, “Hey, let's do ‘The Mountaineer Polka' for my parents.” Her grandpa had died just a few years ago, and he'd come from the mountains just like my Dziadzio Wojtkiewicz. She says, “Remember this one, Dad? You used to sing it to me when I was going to bed.”

When Janice starts to sing,
“Hej, góral ja ci góral,”
Bob Pajaczkowski gets all misty-eyed. “I wish your Dziadzio was still around to hear you kids,” he says to Patty. “You kids are really something special.”

*   *   *

Being as stubborn as she was, Janice never let go of the idea of getting her brother and her father talking to each other again—you know, getting her family all reconciled—so she'd been on the horn to Columbus half a dozen times trying to convince John to come home for the street fair. Finally he agreed to do it, but he was going to bring his girlfriend, he said. Anna had always wanted to see that crazy place he came from, and it was probably about time she met his family anyhow because he and Anna had decided to get married.

But he wasn't going to come, he said, unless he and Anna could sleep in the same bed. If they didn't sleep in the same bed, it'd be sheer hypocrisy. “You know perfectly well that Mom and Dad would never let you sleep in the same bed,” Janice said.

Well, they'd stay in a motel then. “You're not going to stay in any motel,” she said. “They'd take that as a real insult. Don't be so childish. Why are you doing this? You guys have been living together for a year. It's not going to kill you to sleep in separate beds for a few nights.”

Then her parents were saying they weren't sure they were up to having both John and this strange girl they'd never met before. “Yes, you are,” Janice said. “You should be pleased he wants to bring her home. Make an effort.” Janice said that sometimes she felt like she was the only grown-up in her family.

Things were a little better at home but not a whole hell of a lot. Her parents had gone back to sweeping it all under the rug—just soldiering on—and it was like nobody had ever said a word about World War II. But it was still hanging in the air all the damn time, and Janice felt this terrific strain whenever she walked into the house. Was she going to do the right thing, say the right thing? Was it all her fault in the first place? She said sometimes she felt like running away for real—instead of, you know, just that one night when all she'd been doing was being a brat. She said sometimes she wished she really
was
an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family so she could be a brat without the world caving in on her.

*   *   *

I hadn't seen or talked to Mrs. Constance Bradshaw since the day of the Great Clean, but the week before the street fair she calls me at work just before quitting time. “Do you have a minute?” she says.

“I'm on my way out the door, honey.”

“Can you call me back?”

“Well, not right away.” I know she thought I was giving her the brush-off, but I wasn't. We'd had a good rain and it'd broke the heat wave and I was trying to get back into working out. Mondrowski was already standing there waiting for me. “I'm on my way to the Y,” I said.

“Okay, so call me when you get finished.”

Janice and I hadn't planned anything—we never planned anything—but I had a pretty good idea I was going to run into her later on. “I'm going home for dinner,” I said, “and I really can't call you from there— How you feeling?”

I heard her sigh. “A lot better. I'm sorry about the last time you saw me. I was pretty much at my worst. When
can
you call me?”

“It might be kind of late.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake. Okay, call me when you can.”

“It might be after midnight—”

“Jim, I don't give a flying fuck what time it is. Just call me
tonight
, all right?”

What I should have done was tell Georgie to wait and let Vick go home and then had that conversation she wanted to have right when she wanted to have it. Because I spent the whole evening worrying about it.

Well, I didn't get around to calling her until I ended up at the PAC at about a quarter of one in the morning. She answered on the first ring, and I could tell instantly she was back to better living through chemistry. It wasn't the beige pills. With those suckers, she wouldn't have even been conscious at that hour. It sounded more like her old pal Gilby's gin, and a whole lot of it. She was slurring pretty bad, and her voice had this sad whiny sound to it, and she was going around in circles, saying the same things over and over.

Right off the top she's onto me about how sad it makes her that I don't trust her. Just like I'm supposed to, I ask her why she thinks I don't trust her. Because I won't tell her about my girlfriend—and I've obviously got one. “Connie,” I say, “let's not get into that one, okay? That topic's not going to take us anywhere at all.”

She wanted to tell me how much she appreciated all I'd done for her—she kept coming back to that one—and she especially wanted to tell me that because we were obviously at the end of the road. We were like two people who'd met at a crossroad one sad dark night, and we'd shared some precious time together, and now we were going off on our separate directions. She wished me well, and she wanted me to know that she appreciated all the help and support I'd given her, and she wanted to apologize for the last time I'd seen her. She'd been having one of her terrible anxiety attacks, but it passed. They always do. Just like everything else. Oh, yes, and she wanted to say that without me she might not even be around anymore, and she's well aware of that one too, but I wasn't to think that I was responsible for her. No, nobody's responsible for anybody. We're born alone and we die alone—that's the sad sorry truth about human life—and in that tragically brief time between those two infinite icy black states of nothingness we snatch at whatever little scraps of happiness we can get, and she wished me well, snatching at whatever little scraps I might have coming my way.