Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

That made him incredulous. “I live here. You get out!”

“Goddamnit.” I tried getting up. My hands were caked with sand. I started rubbing off the sand and moaned. Remembering what I had done. My hands were pink like dead baby skin. Abrasions in between my fingers. On the prints.

“What’d you do to yourself?” He was staring at my hands as I was staring at his chest hair. Layers were falling on top of layers on top of his nipples. I hadn’t even reached his face yet. The fuzz covered his shoulders too. He was like a great big polar bear in yellow swim trunks. He started nudging me with his toe again.

“Do that again and I’ll break your toe.” I couldn’t swat at him this time. My hands were throbbing.

“You think you’re tough? Get up.”

I did what I was told but I didn’t like it. “I need a cigarette.”

“It’s fire season.”

I tried to stand up without using my hands. It was tough.

“What did you do to your hands?”

“None of your business. Do you have a cigarette or not?”

“No, I don’t.”

It was no use. I walked away from him and the beach. I didn’t want to feel nauseated anymore anyway. I turned toward the water one more time and stared real hard. It trembled under the weight of the shine and then it crashed into the sand.

Driving was a bitch. That fur ball man was right. What had I done? I had two skinned baby rabbits for hands and I was having trouble keeping them out of the sun. I put the visor down but that only obscured my vision driving down PCH. I needed salvation. Or Vaseline. Something. I pulled into the parking lot of CVS and walked in, holding my hands down. I found Vaseline. I slathered it on in the car. The sand that was still stuck scraped deeper and deeper and mixed with the yellowish jelly and created a thick coat over my fingers. I clung to the steering wheel and sat in the traffic snaking down and around the glittering ocean.

IF THAT HAD TAUGHT ME ANYTHING AT ALL ITwas that I should never leave the house again. My sheets were gone. Not even in a heap on the concrete floor in the laundry room. One of the Russians had stolen them and put them on their own beds, no doubt. I thought about all the men who had been with me on those sheets. Not many, really.

Each one put his head on the pillowcase. Or pushed my face down into the pillowcase. We had all thrashed around between the same duvet and full-fitted sheet.

All but one.

I lay down on my bare mattress and watched the ceiling fan rotate. I held my Vaseline hands up to cool down, to stop the throbbing. His smell was still here. In the mattress. I felt it in my skin again. Old, turned milk. All men have that smell. It stays on the skin, settles in between the follicles. I kept smelling my arm, both arms. Repulsed and intoxicated. I wanted to erase him and keep him. What did I smell like on him? Was he smelling his hands as he drove? Did he try to erase me too?

THE FIRST TIME I SMELLED THE TURNED MILKsmell was in Poland. The tenements were fading and crumbling. The walls were stained with soot from passing Fiats and Volkswagens. The wallpaper in our apartment in Poland had yellowed. The plastic floral tablecloth had stayed the same, faded in new places. Food smells from the neighbors tumbled through the walls. Chicken fat from soup and dried sausages mixed with urine from the pipes in the bathroom. It accumulated from each bathroom and ran down the pipes in the apartment. The smells seeped into the beds, the sofa, and the carpet. I would hold my face down and inhale through my mouth. Inhale until I felt like bursting, and then hold my face up and gasp for air. My mother would open the windows and curse the neighbors. Curse the chicken fat smell. The smell was heavy in the air coming through the windows and from above. We couldn’t escape it.

I watched out the window as the starlings pulsed back and forth. Over the trees, TV antennas, and big gray bloki . They swirled over the park, once an old Jewish cemetery that the Communists tore through, ransacked the headstones and built walkways and planted trees. My mother used to walk us there, daily. There were no signs of headstones anymore. Everything wiped away. Only the birds kept watch. Swirling above and congregating in the trees. They didn’t fly anywhere else in the city. Just here. Over the bloki , through the sky, over the old cemetery, and over the park.

In Poland, they do three kisses. Once per cheek and then another one. An extra one — the one that tripped me up. One cheek, next cheek, back to the first cheek. There was Polish. They spoke so fast and I tried to understand between the giggles. I stared and smiled and looked coy and they told me how pretty I looked and I smiled even more and then he came and he kissed me and I was confused and I kissed one cheek, another cheek, and then panicked and we both went for the mouth and then I switched to the cheek again and his wife and everyone around us laughed. He smiled and patted my back and I didn’t even know who he was. They set up a long table in their apartment and no one could move around it. The tablecloth was sticky and plastic and covered in burnt orange flowers and brown stems. Strictly Eastern Bloc fare. The galaretka of chicken pieces, carrots, and peas suspended in a yellow gelatin were served in dainty coffee cups with curved handles, and sat among bowls of cucumbers in sour cream and dill, pickle soup, tripe soup, borscht, gołąbki , potatoes with dill, bigos (hunter’s stew), kielbasa steaming and split open.

My plate was layered with food. Crowded in by it. Cherry cordial. Homemade wine from the village. Sharlotka for dessert. I ate everything. Swallowed the pickle soup, watched the sour cream separate and rise to the top, swelling and clouding in the bowl. I caught him staring once or twice. My one-armed auntie caught it too. She made the dinner all by herself. She circled the table and watched us eat. Listened to us slurp.

My mother had stopped making pickle soup long ago and she did not know how to make sharlotka .

They wanted to hear about America.

We used to send them blue jeans when we couldn’t get back into the country, before the Communists left in 1991. Wranglers, Levis, sometimes Guess. They would send letters begging for blue jeans and my mother put together boxes for them. Everything American. Even things we didn’t have. Behind their backs she would call them vultures. When we came they were wearing our blue jeans. He was staring at me and he was wearing blue jeans my mother bought him. A 34-inch inseam. I remember. When he stared at me my face got hot. When he spoke to me I didn’t understand him. He asked about school and friends and I smiled and nodded. Yes. I had both. I averted my eyes and stared at the curtains. Billowing and lacy and yellowing. The adults were talking. Talking about who had died. Who had cancer. Who was next.

He asked me if I wanted to go see the dzialka behind the apartments. My mother pushed me out of my chair. She said yes for me, that I did want to see the garden. She told me to stop looking so bored, in English. They all smiled and couldn’t understand.

We climbed down the stairs of the apartment building. Crumbly, different from our blok . This was a town outside the city and the buildings were squat with red doors and barns nearby. There were cows walking around and Fiats broken down beside the buildings. We walked behind the apartments and there were the gardens each family had. They were fenced in with beets, cucumbers, and tomatoes growing untended. I could hear him breathing beside me. He stuttered a few words in English and said he was taking classes. He was wearing a sweater even though it was warm out. He walked me in between the rusting chicken wire, took me where no one could see, and I wanted to kiss him. I watched his mouth moving and I thought about it.