The Clarinet Polka (69 page)

HUMP-ah diddle-diddle

HUMP-ah diddle-diddle

HUMP-ah diddle-diddle

Deedle eedle ee—

Well, you can get a hell of a good stomp going on that first beat—that is if you know how to do that old-country stomp, slamming it down with your left foot, and Old Bullet Head sure knows how to do it because he learned it from his old man who learned how to do it back in Poland.

So there's my father, swinging my mother along and stomping the hell out of the dance floor, and guess what? I learned how to do that old-country stomp from him, so all I need is somebody else who knows how to do it. I look behind me, and there's my
ciocia
Eva, so I grab her and away we go.

My dad and I are stomping that beat right together, and we're giving each other the eye—like I'm sending him a message that says, come on, old man, let's see what you got, and he's sending one back that says, more than you got, bright boy. He spins my mom, and I spin my auntie Eva—and they're both laughing—and we spin them back in to us and STOMP down on that beat, and hell, you would have thought we'd rehearsed it, that's how together we've got it. There's people forming like a half circle around us, clapping their hands, and Mary Jo is egging us on, yelling,
“Hop, hop, hop, hopla!”

The drive kicks in again, and the ladies fall right in with us, and now we've got all four of us right together going, STOMP-ah diddle-diddle, STOMP-ah diddle-diddle, people clapping for us on the beat, and when Janice starts to sing again, my dad and I whip up our left hands to give the ladies a pivot, and my mom and my auntie Eva go spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, and then we're back doing the good old STOMP-ah diddle-diddle. “Haw!” my dad yells, and I yell back at him, “Yeah!” And you know what? My dad and I are the two happiest damn crazy Polaks in the whole damn hall.

We get to the end of that polka and I'm soaked, I mean right down to my underwear. The sweat's just pouring down my face like I've been in the shower. And Old Bullet Head's kind of moist himself. He's chugging down a 7UP, and I'm chugging down a tonic water, and he says, “Aw, Jimmy, you're not too bad, you know that?” and I say, “You're not too bad yourself there, old man.”

My auntie Eva's laughing—“Never again,” and my Mom's going, “Walt, I swear you're going to kill me yet,” but I can see she's pleased with herself. I say, “We really got you hopping there,
Mamusiu
,” and my father says, “Oh. God. I'm not goina. Be able. To get out of bed. Tomorrow.”

I hear Janice through the PA system saying, “Wheww! I think after that one, we better slow it down a bit—give everybody a chance to breathe. Okay, so here's a nice pretty waltz. Linda's going to sing it for you.”

I'm strolling along, looking over the tables to see who I can waltz with, and there's Dorothy, and I think, why the hell not? After all those years I spent moping over her, the least she can do is waltz with me. “You want to dance, Dorothy?”

She gives me a sweet smile and says, “Sure, Jimmy.” Her little boy's clinging on to her, so she gives him a push, scooting him over to his dad, and then there I am, just the way I used to dream about, holding Dorothy Pliszka in my arms, drifting along to one of those soppy sentimental waltz tunes.

I'd always wondered if Dorothy and I would have anything to say to each other. I mean, there's all kind of things I imagined her saying, like, “Wow, Jimmy, we sure had a great time in high school!” Or, “I'll never forget you, Jimmy, not in a million years.” Is she saying anything like that? Are you kidding?

I ask her how she's doing, and immediately she starts telling me about their house renovations. Seems like there was a slump in the market so they bought themselves a nice old house out the pike, but it needed a lot of work and the renovations are taking forever, and everything is coming in way over budget, and right at the moment their kitchen is getting done, and it's driving her crazy because they're eating all their damn meals out and it's costing them a fortune.

And I'm going, “Gee, that's too bad,” and, “Yeah, those reno guys are always way over budget,” but it wouldn't make any difference if I was just grunting at her like your basic ape because she's determined to tell me every single little thing there is to know about it. And I dial her out—and then I remember that's exactly what I used to do in high school. I'm not sure she ever noticed.

Well, the band played through the tune once with only the instruments, and then Linda started to sing. It gave me a shiver—I guess because she's my sister and because her voice was so sweet and clear, but it was also the words she was singing—
“Nie mam nic”
—and that means in English, “I've got nothing left.”

Dorothy's a good dancer—real light and easy to lead—and so we're drifting along to this sweet sad waltz, and she's telling me how hard it is to get real top-quality counter tiles in the Ohio Valley, and Linda's singing—

“Nie mam nic, nie mam nic.

  
Wszystko mi woda zabrała.

  
Tylko mi dziewczyna

  
Na brzegu została.”

I'm all choked up. Linda's always been a sucker for sad tunes, and waltzes are supposed to tug at your heartstrings, but this one's a real gem in the sad-waltz department. It means in English something like this—“I've got nothing left, I've got nothing left. The water took everything away. All I've got left is the girl on the riverbank.”

Dorothy, of course, doesn't know enough Polish to be able to follow the words, so she's just yattering away in my ear, and I've given up on her. I don't give two shits about her house renos, but just because I've stopped saying anything back to her doesn't mean she's going to stop saying anything to me. Nope, no way. It's just like back in high school—on and on she goes to the crack of doom. Tiles and linoleum and kitchen cabinets and countertops. And Linda's singing—

“Dziewczyno, gdzie mieszkasz?

  
Ja cię tam odprowadzę.

  
Pod twoim okienkiem

  
Białe róże posadzę.”

That means, “Young girl, where do you live? I'll walk you home. Under your window I'll plant white roses.”

The waltz is over, and Dorothy says,
“Dziękuję.”

“Don't mention it,” I say. “It's nice to see you, Dorothy. I hope you get your house fixed up right.”

After all those years, that was it, huh? Yeah, that was it. In my mind I'd had her, you know, on some kind of pedestal, and that dumb little pedestal had just fallen over. She'd always been a nice girl, and she was still a nice girl—but not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier—and she was married and had a couple kids. I thought, well, good luck to you, Dorothy.

I was still full of that sad-waltz feeling, and I didn't want to talk to anybody for a minute, so I walked over to the end of the table where Darlene was selling records and I just stood there trying to get myself back together. Dorothy wasn't the one I was thinking about.

*   *   *

No respectable polka band would ever end a set with a waltz. No, you wouldn't want to leave everybody in that sentimental soppy waltz mood, so you've got to end on a good hot polka. The one they did was “Zosia.” That's, you know, about the girl calling her boyfriend into the kitchen, and Mom says, “
Wy, Macieju, co robicie? Że tak Zosię całujecie?
—Hey, Maciej, what are you doing—kissing Zosia so hard?” The kids from out of town all knew it and shouted it back in the right places. The girl I wanted to be dancing with was up on the stage singing, so I danced with Sandy Czaplicki.

When it comes to dancing the polka, Sandy's just as crazy as I am, so we came shooting off the floor at the end of it laughing and gasping for breath and going, “Hey, wow. Far out!” We thanked each other, and I walked over to the side of the stage, and Janice was saying, “Thank you, everybody, see you after the break,” and Mary Jo took over the mike to tell people that this was a great time to buy a record.

Janice was still high from performing, and you could see it—a lot of color in her face, like those real pink cheeks, that wonderful sparkle to her. She saw me waiting for her. “I've got to get outside,” she said. “I'm sweating like a fiend up here.”

I left my ten-gallon hat on the table—I wasn't feeling much like a cowboy—and Janice and I walked out of the parish hall and into the night.

*   *   *

It had cleared right up—not a sniff of rain left—and it was mild for that time of year, or maybe it just seemed that way because she'd been playing and I'd been dancing and we were both of us damn near melted. Janice said, “Let's walk down to Pulaski Park.”

So we're striding down the street still high from all the music, and I'm going, “Hey, the band sure sounds great. You guys sound like real pros, all right,” and she's saying, yeah, they've improved a lot, and telling me about all the places they've played while I've been gone, and about the new tunes they'd learned, and like that, but then when we get down to the park, all of a sudden we've both run out of things to say. I mean it's just that quick, BANG, and we're standing there in this dead silence. It must have hit us both at the same time—oops, we're alone together, now what?

What I'd wanted to say to her, I'd already said it. But I had to say something, you know what I mean? So I figured the best bet was just to keep on talking about the music. I told her I loved that last waltz they'd played.

She said she'd always loved it too. “My mom used to sing it to me when I was little. I taught it to Linda. I thought it'd be perfect for her. It's on our record. There's two waltzes on our record, one on each side. She sings both of them.”

“Oh, yeah? What's the other one?”

“‘The Linden Tree.'”

“Oh, right, I remember that. You guys did that at Franky Rzeszutko's—you know, that first night you played in there.”

“That's right. We did, didn't we? You've got a good memory.”

“Yeah? Well, about some things I do.”

We'd stopped by the swings. I said, “You too old to swing now?”

“No,” she said, “you're never too old to swing,” but she didn't swing.

She'd brought a jacket with her, but she didn't put it on. We stood there looking at each other, and I could feel how nervous she was. It was like this vibration coming off her. I could see her shivering. “You're going to catch cold,” I said.

“No, I won't. Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

I guess I'd been staring at her. She seemed almost like a stranger and— I don't know how to say this. The girl I was talking to just didn't match up with the Janice I remembered. Well, she did, and she didn't. It was weird. “You seem so different.”

“I'm not that different. I'm older.”

“But you seem different somehow.”

“I'm still me.”

“I don't know. Maybe it's your hair. When'd you get it cut?”

“Oh, the end of my senior year at Central. Mom said there was just no way I was going to graduate from high school in braids, and I thought— I guess I was tired of people asking me how old I was— I cried.”

“You did, huh?”

“I felt like such a baby. Right there in the beauty salon. The tears just rolling down my face.”

“Well, it looks nice.”

“Thanks. I saved the braids. I keep thinking I should get somebody to make a fall out of them.”

We'd had a nice little run for a minute, but then we hit one of those silences again. She took this enormous breath and just exhaled it, like—whew! “Oh, boy, this is hard!”

“Yeah, it is. I'm having a hard time too.”

“Oh, Jimmy,” she said, “I've wanted to talk to you for years. I
have
been talking to you for years—in my mind. And now here you are, and I don't even know how to start.”

“I'm surprised you're talking to me at all, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, I was mad at you. Boy, was I ever mad at you! But I got over it. It took a long time, but I did. Linda told me what you were going through. That helped me understand it. You were struggling with your addiction—”

I had to laugh. “Janice, let me tell you something. For the longest damn time I wasn't struggling a bit. My addiction was one hundred and ten percent in charge of me.”

She laughed too. “I'd almost forgotten how funny you are.”

Then she stopped laughing and we stood there looking at each other again in this kind of miserable way. She was shivering so hard I wished she'd put her jacket on.

“Remember when we came down here and you got stoned?” I said.

“Of course I do. Whew. And you guys were so sweet to me. I hardly knew Georgie Mondrowski. I don't think I'd said ten words to him in my life. Oh, I was such a little kid! And did I ever feel privileged. Hanging out with you guys. I thought I was sooooo mature.”

“Well, you were.”

“No, I wasn't. Remember the night I ran away from home?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Oh, boy, was I a brat. I can't believe some of the things I did.”

“You weren't that bad.”

“Compared to what? I was just— Oh, Jimmy, that summer was— It's like my whole life divided. That's how I think of it. There was everything before and then everything after. I really changed a lot over that summer.”

She was shaking like a leaf. It wasn't just a little thing. “Put the damn jacket on,” I said.

“Okay, okay.” But she didn't put it on. She just wrapped it around her shoulders. “I was afraid you'd forgotten me.”

“There's no way I'd ever forget you, Janice. I told you that. I'll never forget you.”