The Clarinet Polka (55 page)

Well, sure, kid, anything you say, although we're obviously going to be putting one over on your parents, which neither of us wants to mention.

So where the hell was I going to take her? I searched my mind, and all I could come up with was this Japanese restaurant out in Bethel Grove. It'd just opened up in the past year, and it was the first one in the valley and still, you know, kind of exotic. The waitresses dressed up in Japanese outfits, and they had these little booths where the doors slide shut, and I couldn't think of anyplace any more private than that, so I called up and made a reservation.

That Saturday I spent the whole day cleaning my trailer. It was
Better Homes and Gardens
by the time I got done, and you would've thought
I
was in high school—that's how nervous I was—and right on time Sandy Czaplicki's dad's Chevy pulls up with Eddie Dombrowczyk driving it because he's the boy, right? And Janice gets out of the backseat. She waves at them, and Eddie beeps the horn, and off they go. “They'll pick me up here at a quarter of twelve,” Janice says. “So I can be home by midnight. Is that all right?”

“Sure. No problem.” I take one look at her and my heart sinks because she's dressed up like she's going to the school dance, and I know that's what she's told her parents. I usher her into my trailer. She'd said she'd always wanted to see it so she could imagine me in there, and I was just hoping she wasn't imagining me drooling all over myself dead drunk passed out in front of the TV at four in the morning.

She goes, “Oh, it's like a little self-contained world.”

“Yep. Right. A little self-contained world. That's what trailers are like.”

There's only one chair in the whole damn place, and she perches right on the edge of it, and, hell, she's just as nervous as I am. That night she was—well, there's nothing else to say except spectacular. If I'd been a junior at Central, I would've dropped dead at her feet. A blue dress, that real intense color I guess you call electric blue, and her hair down. She had a silver butterfly holding it back. And I wondered how she'd got by her dad wearing that much makeup. She even had perfume on. It smelled kind of silvery, if that makes any sense. Not being a total fool, I'd put on a suit and tie.

“Show me where everything is,” she said, so I had to show her my little TV and the stereo and the mini-fridge and the little cupboard where I kept my soup. “I love it,” she said. “It's like a dollhouse.”

I gave her a Coke, and she was just chattering in that lickety-split kind of harebrained way girls do when they're nervous, which she hardly ever did with me. And for some reason she started talking about her mother. It wasn't anything I hadn't heard before—how when her mother turned fourteen she got to go into Warsaw with her dad, and sometimes her cousin Krystyna got to go too. “Her parents were just the opposite of my parents,” Janice said. “It was her
dad
who let her wear makeup,” and she's telling me how all these years later her mom remembers every little detail of the Hotel Europejski, and every little detail of the clothes she wore, and even the color of the lipstick she wore, and how all the men flirted with her—grown men, friends of her father's. “And it was all perfectly innocent,” she said. “I guess that's what girls did in Poland before the war. I guess it's how they grew up. It must have been a totally different world—but she told me she never really kissed a boy until she kissed my father.”

I guess she must not have been planning to say that—one of those things that just pops out—and she turned bright pink. That's a problem you've got if you're as fair as Janice—every little blush shows—and being, you know, this wise older man, I should've found something to say to make her feel better, right? But my mouth had gone dry as a desert, and I swear I felt like I wasn't a day older than she was.

She jumps up and starts walking around, pretending to look at everything again. “Don't you get lonely?” she says. “I'd get lonely.”

“No, I don't get lonely. I like being able to come in here and, you know, shut the world out.”

“If I lived here, I'd put up pictures,” she says. “You don't have a single picture. I wish you could see my room. Oh, I'd like you to see it—so you could imagine me there. But they'd never let you. Boys don't ever go into a girl's bedroom, and that's just one of those rules you can't even question, but— Oh, I've got pictures everywhere. All over the place. Every inch.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“Well, there's sacred pictures, just exactly what you'd expect, and there's things out of magazines. Anything I like, I tape it up. Clothes I like. Boys I think are cute. I've got a poster of Donovan. And a poster of Alice in Wonderland standing in front of the caterpillar.”

“What else you got?”

“All my dolls from when I was little.”

“I never figured you for a girl who played with dolls.”

“Oh, really? Well, I did. I played with dolls a lot.”

I know she wasn't thinking anything at all about it, but she'd sat down on the edge of my bed and the skirt on that electric blue dress was just as short as any of her other skirts—and those long long legs, you know, with those silvery stockings—and all of a sudden I'm checking my watch, going, “Hey, we've got reservations. We've got to get rolling here.”

So we go shooting out the pike, and the minute I'm behind the wheel, I start to feel reasonably okay again. We get out to the Japanese restaurant, and I'm just praying that there's not forty-seven Polaks in there, and we're in luck, we don't know a soul. The waitress—in her little geisha outfit—shows us to our booth. You know these places, right? You've got to sit down on the edge and take your shoes off, and then inside there's a hole in the floor where you put your feet. Janice had never seen anything like it. “Wow, is this ever neat.”

I didn't want to fool around with the menu, so I told our geisha just to bring us the full spread. She slides the doors shut and closes us in there, and Janice goes, “Oh, Jimmy, this is magical. Thanks for bringing me here. This is perfect.”

Yeah, I guess it was perfect—private but not
too
private, you know what I mean? And we got relaxed with each other again, just the way we usually were, talking about one thing or another, and she says, “Let me get this out of the way before I forget it.”

She was carrying a purse—this delicate little thing with a chain—and she opens it up and tells me how she went to see Father Obinski and they had themselves a little talk about alcoholism.

Instantly I'm so mad I'm practically seeing shooting stars, but I'm trying to keep it to myself because I don't want to hurt her feelings. “So what the hell did you say to him? You've got a friend who drinks too much?”

“Sure. That's exactly what I said.” And Father Obinski told her that alcoholism's a disease and your body gets dependent on the chemical so willpower doesn't really have much to do with it, and most people find it real hard to quit on their own. And the only way most people could stop was through AA, and it was an excellent organization and there was nothing in AA that was incompatible with the Catholic faith. In fact some people in AA ended up being even better Catholics. And she hands me this brochure she's been carrying around in her purse. It's a list of every AA meeting in the Ohio Valley.

I took the damn thing, and I just couldn't believe it. Alcoholics Anonymous? That's for the real losers—the guys you see slurping soup down at the Sally Ann or the assholes the cops sweep up off the street with dustpans. Was that where she thought I was headed?

“What's the matter?” she said. “You aren't mad at me, are you? You
asked me
. Did you think I wouldn't take it seriously? I was just trying to help you the way you've always helped me.”

“No, no, I'm not mad at you. It's just kind of— Well, it's one of those things that, you know, throws you for a nine-yard loss.” I took that brochure and I put it in my pocket. I was starting to calm down, and I had to admit it was sweet of her to go to all that trouble—even if it was, you know, like wasted effort. But it was a nice thing to do. Well, she was a nice girl.

We both went jumping away from that topic pretty quick, but I'd ordered
sake
, and I sat there wondering if I should drink it. What the hell, I thought, it's not any stronger than wine. And the Japanese food started coming—you know, in these little bowls and trays they use. It's kind of touching to take somebody to a Japanese restaurant for the first time in her life and see how she finds it all so amazing.

I don't remember what else we talked about, but we'd been there about an hour and she said right out of the blue, “Oh, I wish I could talk to you in Polish.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “If you don't go too fast, I'll follow most of what you say.”

So she started speaking Polish to me. The English language and the Polish language were so different, she said, that the whole world seems different depending on which one you're speaking, and sometimes she felt like there were two of her—the English Janice and the Polish Janice—and the Polish Janice was the person she really was, down deep in her heart. The Polish Janice was that little kid with the dream of Poland just down the river—that little kid going to sleep at night, drifting off when the sound she heard in her mind was Polish. For years when she was alone, she thought in Polish, she daydreamed in Polish. But now it was getting smaller and smaller—that Polish world inside her—and she caught herself most of the time now thinking in English, and she was afraid that Polish world inside her would get totally snuffed out by English. She was afraid that what her brother had told her was true, that in ten years they wouldn't speak a word of Polish anymore. And then she would have lost something very precious. And it felt like her very heart.

She said she was trying to fight back. She read the Polish newspaper from Chicago now, and she was trying to read books in Polish, and she'd started keeping a diary in Polish. She wrote down in Polish everything her parents told her about the war. And she wished that I spoke Polish, because if she spoke to me in Polish, I would be seeing the real true heart of her. And if she'd tried to say any of that in English, she couldn't have got out more than a sentence or two before she died of embarrassment.

It was damn near one of the most touching things I'd ever heard in my life, and God knows how, but I managed to croak out some Polish back at her. I told her that I'd understood pretty much everything she'd said, and I thanked her for telling me all that.

Well, we sat there in our little booth with the doors shut as long as we could. I had everything timed down practically to the last second because I didn't want to be alone with her back at my place any longer than I had to be. So I drove back in town, and Sandy and Eddie pulled in just a couple minutes behind us, and we got out of my car, and I walked her over to their car, and we just looked at each other, and she said, “Oh, thank you so much. Everything was so wonderful. I'll see you on Tuesday,” and she got into their car and they drove away. I stood there outside my trailer for the longest damn time.

In some crazy way I'd never been happier in my life, but still I felt like— You know the feeling you get sometimes that something terrible is going to happen? I knew what we'd done was wrong. I mean, I'd just taken her out on a date. The only thing missing was the good-night kiss. And we'd been putting one over on her parents—on her dad who thought of me as a friend of the family. The thing that really got to me was that Czesław trusted me—he'd always trusted me, the damn fool—and I felt like a real piece of shit.

*   *   *

A few days later I'm coming home for dinner, right? And you know how sometimes you can feel there's something wrong the minute you walk in the door? Old Bullet Head's reading the paper, and he doesn't even look up to see if I'm sober enough to let in the house. But I am sober—well, reasonably sober anyways—and I keep on going out into the kitchen, and Mom and Linda are deep in conversation. They whip around and stare at me. Mom's in one of her pressure-cooker moods—steam coming out her ears—and she hisses at me, “Jimmy Koprowski, I need to talk to you.” I look at Linda, and she casts her eyes up to the heavens like, sorry, Jimmy, I can't help you on this one.

“I don't want your father to hear this,” my mom says, and she shoves me out the back door and pulls it shut behind her, and there we are standing on our back porch looking out across the alley at the back of the Lewickis' house. “What the hell do you think you're doing with that little Dłuwiecki girl?” she says.

My heart kind of misses a beat, and I go, “Aw, come on, Mom. What do you mean? I'm not doing a damn thing with her.”

“Don't give me that crap, Jimmy. I wasn't born yesterday.”

“Who you been talking to?”

“It doesn't matter who I been talking to.”

“Sure it does. We always got the right to know who's accusing us. I think that's in the Constitution somewhere.” I'm trying to get a laugh out of her, but fat chance of that.

The doctor hadn't scared my mother into quitting smoking yet, so she's pawing around for her cigarettes, which is ridiculous because when she's cooking, they always end up on a shelf by the stove. I take out my pack and offer her one, and then we both just stand there blowing smoke at each other. “Betty Czaplicki,” my mother says.

Well, that figures, right? Sandy's mom. And there's not a Polish girl from here to Crakow can keep her mouth shut longer than about four and a half seconds. “What'd she say?”

Instead of answering me, my mother just launches in. “You think you got troubles now, buster, try a wife and a kid. Hell, Jimmy, you can barely wipe your own ass. How far you think what Vick Dobranski's paying you is going to go to supporting three people? And you think you're going to get any help from her family? You think they're going to thank you for her dropping out of high school? I know they've got plans for that girl—college and all—so how you think they're going to take it? And she'll be bitter and resentful, so how good a mother's she going to be? Not even out of high school. All her friends still in high school. Married to a part-time TV repairman who spends half his life in the PAC—”