Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

“Where are we going?” I said.

“To my friend’s.”

He pulled into a strip mall with a beauty supply, a Little Cesar’s, a convenience store, and a dry cleaner. There were also a couple of buildings that looked empty and that’s where he took me.

He knocked on the door and the shade moved a little. The door opened and we went in. I was glad I was wearing a skirt. The men looked at me like they appreciated it. They were all wearing black leather dusters. Silk shirts. They were sitting around Formica-topped tables and slurping deep red borscht. Women scurried about making sure their plates were full. The florescent overhead made everyone look gray. I stared up at the ceiling not wanting to make eye contact. It was broken up into sheets of stained tile. Lev walked forward and I followed as he sat down at a table in the corner. He said something to the waitress in Russian and she moved away quickly. I sat down and looked around the room. It was all men. Except for me and the women working there. No one looked at us. It made me feel good. It made me feel like I was passing. I mouthed the words of what I saw people eating. Lev studied me while I did. I looked at him and felt self-conscious.

“What?” I said.

“I’m just watching, that’s all.”

“You have an American accent when you speak Polish, you know?” he continued.

“I didn’t.”

“It’s like a young child’s Polish.”

“I learned it as a child,” I said.

“It’s rudimentary.”

I looked away. Felt my throat swelling.

“I ordered for us,” he said, putting a napkin on his lap.

“You don’t know what I wanted.” I rubbed my eyes, they were burning and tired.

“They only make one thing good here.”

Two soups were set in front of us. There were pieces of meat floating in the borscht. A couple of beans. A slice of cabbage. I saw a bone. I didn’t know what this was but I didn’t want it. Lev was already eating when I looked up at him. I started eating because I didn’t want to offend him. And I hated myself for caring after what he said to me. I ate around the meat and bone. It started out good.

“Do you ever go back to Poland?”

Lev was staring into his soup bowl while he asked. Moving the bones around. Eating the meat.

“Sometimes, I did when I was younger.” I was regaining composure. Trying to prove myself to him.

“It’s different now.”

“Probably not. Things don’t change quickly there, thanks to the Communists.” I said it slowly but it didn’t have the weight I wanted it to.

“Communism helped people like me,” he said.

“Why?”

“Not everyone. But me, yes.” Lev ripped a piece of bread and put it in the soup and shrugged his shoulders.

“I wouldn’t be able to survive there,” I said and waited for him to disagree.

“Probably not.”

“Maybe I’ll try.”

“No one should want to leave America. Only the stupid say so.”

He quickly changed the subject when he saw me open my mouth and my face turned red.

“And your parents?”

“What about them?”

“They are still here?”

“Of course.”

“They don’t care that you’re so far away?”

“I don’t know. I never asked them.” I dipped my bread in the soup.

“They stay in their Polish Ghetto in Texas.”

“They were never a part of that,” I spat out.

I wanted to leave and not have to smell the soup anymore. There were a few beans left, the fatty piece of meat, and the bone. There was gristle on the bone and it was turning my stomach. It must have been 5 a.m. already. The waitresses wandered from table to table and looked sallow and gray-faced. Smokers for sure. Their teeth were gray and thin when they smiled. The florescent lights gave their hair an unnatural tinge. I didn’t want to be these women. They spoke hurriedly to the men eating. They were hunched over and old looking but were not old at all. They weren’t much older than me.

They just looked like factory girls. The ones who worked the third shift, coming home in the morning, back to the village from the one train that stopped there to let them off on the broken wooden platform, near the edge of the woods. Where they’d walk home to their children and be tired. Drink tea, smoke cigarettes. Crawl into bed and wonder what time their husbands came home the night before. Our waitress brought our check and I stared at her hands. Her nails were thick, cracking at the tips. She opened her mouth to talk and I could see her silver fillings. Lev paid, got up, and touched her back. He held his hand there and I counted the seconds until he took it off. He could feel her bra strap through her cotton shirt and I could tell that it gave her a small thrill. Her first of the night, I thought. He was the most handsome man in this place and she eyed him coyly. As if I wasn’t standing beside him.

This wasn’t where I wanted to be. This wasn’t the Twin Palms. I didn’t care about passing anymore. I didn’t care about the factory girls. I didn’t want to be one of them.

When we got out to the parking lot the cars all had a thin sheet of ash on them. Lev didn’t notice. We drove back in silence. I didn’t know if he wanted to sleep over and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. I didn’t want his sweat to soil my bare mattress.

“Where do you live?”

“Over the hill,” he said.

“Can I see?”

The night was going away and the sky was turning a bright blue. At the horizon it was the bluest, brightest. I wanted to say azure. It was the first time I’d seen it this blue in a long time. It got darker and darker behind me. There was one star and one moon and the palm trees looked black against the sky. They were long and slender and swayed in step. It looked like a postcard and I wanted to be in it.

He said no. He dropped me off in front of my apartment and said he’d see me later. He kissed me as I fumbled with the door handle. I could taste the soup. I could taste the meat and gristle. The sprinklers were on and I tried not to get my bare legs wet as I got out. He drove away and turned down the street toward the Twin Palms and I knew that’s what he was leaving me for.

I RAN AROUND THE TRACK UNTIL I THREW UP.I think I was there for an hour. Running in circles, making myself dizzy. I stood on the edge of the gravel and stripes and threw everything up. Borscht, hot dogs, carrot cake, bile. I did it until I was heaving and breathing out acrid breaths and there was nothing left inside of me. Teenage girls pointed at me.

They said, “Look at her. She’s throwing up.”

I told them to shut up and wiped my mouth on my sleeve and kicked gravel over the puke. It didn’t cover it at all and I didn’t care.

Small hunched women were wrestling with wire carts and going to the little stores that still sold fruit and vegetables in crates on tables, and not in big behemoth refrigerated wall units. Flies filled the air in these shops but their fruit was sweetest. I shopped there all the time. More people seemed to walk on Fairfax than anywhere else, visiting the apteka , purchasing orthopedic shoes in discreet black bags, stopping in the grocery and buying cans of food labeled in different languages. Sometimes they walked in packs, sometimes alone, always in layers of clothing — always neat and scrubbed clean. Their appearance was carefully fretted over, even if they walked, nearly bent over in an L .

I HAD TO GET READY FOR BINGO. IT STARTEDat 7 p.m. but they were already circling at 4:30, waiting in the foyer of Holy Virgin and fingering their bingo chips, their blotters. I took a shower and did my hair. The roots were coming in again. I’d have to get another box of color. I was thinking darker. Raven-like this time. I wanted to add to my mystery. I wanted my eyes to glow and my skin to look luminescent. Like in the Cover Girl commercials I was seeing. The new thing was Vamp. I think Lev would like it. It would look Russian, maybe Siberian, and it would look good against fur. I had a vision of myself and I liked it.