Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying.

“Turn left at that light.”

“I’m sure he loved you very much.”

“I’ll show you my wedding photos. You’re pretty, but I was beautiful.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even compete with an 82-year-old.

“I want it all back again. I want someone again. Not someone old and soft. I want someone young and hard.”

She told me to turn right. I was struggling to keep up.

“You need someone strong like a bull. Someone to fuck you up the back skull. We all do.”

She sighed. I didn’t want to imagine anyone doing that to her. But for a second I imagined Lev doing that to me. With her sitting next to me as I thought about it, I started feeling sick. And then I thought about the man in room 214. It was nice, for a moment, to go there.

“You’ve already had it.” It was the first time I could talk, when I thought she’d actually listen.

“I have.”

“You don’t have to look for it anymore. Some people don’t even get it once.”

“I had it.”

“Things like that don’t exist anymore,” I said, testing her.

“They never did,” she said. She thought about it for a moment. “There are things… you can’t possibly know.”

She said it fast, not like it was profound or anything. Just like that. It wasn’t to her. It wasn’t to me either, I guess.

“Did I tell you what I saw yesterday?” she said.

She asked me to pull up to a house. It was blue stucco and the plants outside were wilting and overgrown. I didn’t know how she was going to get up the stairs, if she was going to ask me to help her and I knew I didn’t want to.

She turned around to face me.

“What?” I said.

“A man, sitting right here — ”

“Oh yeah, you did,” I said.

She smiled at me. Like I knew just what she was talking about. “You’ll always want it, honey. And it’s worse when you’ve had it and it’s gone.”

She pushed her cane out.

“Maybe I can pay you to clean my gutters. And my plants. Look at my plants. I’m just one woman. He did it all for me.”

The lights in her house were already on. I didn’t want to clean her gutters. I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see her again.

“I want to show you how pretty I was. Come on.”

I waited a moment. She wasn’t waiting for me. She was already turning the key to her door. She turned and stood in the doorway and I knew I had to go in. I turned off the car.

THERE WERE PICTURES OF HORSES ALL OVERMary’s walls. Mustangs running in packs through the American West, single horses with saddles looking regal and staring off into space, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, and dust. She also had religious statues everywhere and I was surprised she let me in. She didn’t know me. This was her place and not mine. She had a full-sized Virgin Mary with a blue gown like we had when I was young. Her Mary had a chipped face and a broken hand and cobwebs around the base of her.

“Wait here,” she said.

She wandered away from me and I looked around some more. The windows were covered in yellowing lace curtains. Like my grandmother in Poland. Like all the grandmothers in Poland.

She came back with an armload of photos and ordered me to sit down. She spread them out before me and she was right. She was beautiful. I looked at her now and I looked at her then, her dress cascading down, looped around the floor and ruffled at the bottom. She was standing on stairs next to him, her husband, and she looked ten feet tall, a redheaded statue with sharp brows and red lips. She was a sexpot. She was all I needed to be.

“Mary, you were a redhead,” I said.

“Always. I was hot. Fiery.”

She touched her husband’s face. “It wasn’t every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Joe.” She turned her face toward me. “It was only him. He popped my cherry. One man.”

She stuck her index finger in my face and then pointed at the picture. “One man.”

She wasn’t looking at herself. She was looking at him. He was smiling and holding her and in the photo she had a look on her face like she had won. She had tears in her eyes and I knew she wanted to be alone with him and I got up to leave.

“Give me your number, for the gutters,” she said as I stood up.

I did, even though I didn’t want to clean her gutters, and left her alone. I walked to my car and I knew she was crying in there. I felt her loneliness and wanted it. I wanted hers. I didn’t want mine anymore.

IT WAS GOING TO BE RED. NOT BLACK. Iwanted to get her kind of red. That copper, that sheen. That curl. I threw the box of Black Stilettos out the window and started over. The pharmacy was closed when I drove by it so I kept driving. I passed the Downtowner. The desk clerk was standing there. He was staring through the window, out onto the street, and he didn’t recognize me. I was glad. He looked prim, older in his uniform than he really was. I looked at the slip of the pool, no one was in it. Was room 214 still occupied? I slowed down and turned onto a street nearby, sitting in my car for a while. Room 214 was better, it was different, new. Untethered. I got out of my car and walked toward the gate, opened it, and stood next to the pool. The desk clerk looked up, saw me, shook his head, and looked back at the blue glow of his television. The light wasn’t on in 214. I considered asking the desk clerk and thought better of it. He didn’t have any answers. I sat down in a broken-down plastic chair and waited. I wanted it to be like the other night. It wasn’t going to be, though. I knew it.

“He left early.”

I didn’t have to turn around to know the desk clerk had come outside.

“He’s a firefighter,” he said quietly.

Was he missing Room 214 too? I heard the scrape of a chair and closed my eyes. We waited and he never came. He was after the fires too. I knew he did something important, I could tell.

WHEN THE BANGING ON MY DOOR BEGAN LATEin the night I didn’t open it right away. But I saw lights turning on and knew it was loud and knew he wasn’t going to leave. I went and opened the door. He pushed in, didn’t let me see his face and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. I went back to my room and closed the door. I heard him running water, searching through cabinets. I didn’t care. I closed my eyes.

“Anya, I need you.” There was an urgency in his voice that I hadn’t heard before. My room was dark and the light behind him in the doorway made him look big. I got up and started moving toward him and he went back into the bathroom.

“I need something for my face.”

I didn’t want to ask him. His cheek was swollen and scratched. He looked annoyed, his hair was disheveled and he kept opening cabinets.

“Sit down.” He did what I said and sat on the toilet. He jiggled his foot as he waited. I pulled what I needed together. Cotton balls, alcohol… I eyed his face. Vaseline. I leaned in to him as he sat on the toilet and soaked the cotton ball. I dabbed his face and he closed his eyes. I could tell it stung and I was glad. He hissed at me.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“My wife scratched me.”

My face felt fuzzy. I squeezed the cotton ball against his face and the alcohol escaped and ran down his cheek. He grabbed it away from me, wiped his face. “What are you doing?”

I backed away from him and was scared of him for the first time. He dabbed his cheek. He wouldn’t look at me.

“We got into fight. She gets upset.”

The words kept coming. I wasn’t listening. I stood in the doorway and watched him. The fuzziness wasn’t going away. He opened the Vaseline and squeezed too much out. He smeared it on his face.