Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

She tried to hide her accent or maybe I was used to it and couldn’t hear it anymore.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yeah, I was.”

She informed me that it was 11 o’clock on a Monday. Work time. I hated lying to her and was bad at it. I backpedaled and told her I was sick, just today but I’d be back to work for the entire week. She asked me how the unemployment service was, how it felt to be helping people. I lied and told her it was the best work I had done in a long time, the sense of pride I felt helping people. I was living the American dream.

“You are getting people off welfare. That is the worst you can be in this country. Taking handouts.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I had been taking handouts for months. It would only depress her. Her immigrant guilt was too much for me.

“We only took handouts once. And not money. Just clothes. Nothing else.”

“I know, Mother, I know.”

“Did you go to church?”

I was silent. I thought about telling her about the Holy Virgin, converting bingo nights into 3-hour church service, me on the pulpit, calling numbers, helping the wounded widows of the Holy Virgin forget about their deceased husbands.

“What kind of woman do you hope to be if you don’t go to church?” she asked.

“Are you there?”

“I feel dizzy,” I said.

“Church. One hour each Sunday is not a lot to ask, Zosia. And yet you can’t even do that.”

We have been through this before. Every Sunday. It was Monday and she caught me. I hadn’t talked to her in weeks after she had told me I was failing as a woman. Unable to bring religion into the home, that was why I couldn’t find a husband. That is why I was a failure as a woman. I tried not to think about all of these things as I rolled from one side of my mattress to the other, trying to catch a passing hint of Lev. Trying to get the smell of chlorine off of me. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t taken a shower last night. It was unlike me.

“You will never be happy.”

I started listening again. I liked listening to what she had to say about the happiness-is-religion equation. It was always ridiculous to me, but she believed it wholeheartedly.

“Who says I’m unhappy?” I asked.

“You don’t go to church, how can you be happy? You are just a user. You give nothing back.”

“You just said how happy you were about my giving unemployed people a job.”

“It’s not the same, you’re empty without God. No one can do anything themselves. And you choose to go alone. You’ll never make it.”

“I will.”

“It’s too hard,” she said.

“I know.”

“See. You prove it,” she said. But that wasn’t what I meant.

“I’ll go this week.”

“Don’t do it for me.”

“You usually call on Sunday mornings,” I said.

“Your grandfather’s anniversary is today.”

This is why I kept away from her, why I didn’t like talking to her. She would never give him peace.

I thought about my grandfather. He was dead, a few years dead. She still celebrated his death every year at the same time. A day in August I could and could not forget. Celebrate isn’t the right word. Held vigil, something religious and sacred.

She wasn’t even there. I was. She had spent his last few days in Poland “collecting herself.” When my grandfather had to be restrained I had to tie his arms down. He was incoherent and moaning. There was terrycloth fabric on the inside of the restraints, to “add comfort.” He would have pulled out his catheter otherwise; there was evidence of this on the ceiling of his room. Nantucket beadboard covered in blood and urine, caked on thick and in a snake-like shape. I always tried not to look up at it. I was afraid it would drip down on me, even though it’d been dry up there for weeks. Why hadn’t anyone cleaned it? He continued to moan in Polish. He wasn’t even forming words anymore and I wasn’t sure what to do. I undid the restraints and he stopped moaning. He stopped looking at me like I was his tormenter. The silver teeth that had been glinting in the hallway light closed shut in his mouth.

I backed away from the bed and went into the living room, onto the sofa and waited for silence. For the small moans to subside, for the snores to begin, for him to stop mumbling in Polish and begging for my dead grandmother. I fell asleep after there was silence in his room and woke up abruptly when I heard a low growl. I was scared to look but forced myself.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed. Colostomy bag open and shit on the floor and covering his hands. He looked at me and offered it to me like a gift, held out his shit-covered hands and smiled his hollow-mouth smile. He couldn’t understand English so I had to yell at him in Polish.

“ Co ty robisz? ” was all I could say, over and over again. I took it all from him and threw it in the sink. She wasn’t there to help me and I wouldn’t be able to get that smell off my hands for weeks. I kept them in my pockets whenever I could.

THE POLISH CHURCH WAS ON WEST ADAMSand was nothing like the cathedral in Częstochowa. The church had cheap beams criss-crossing the ceiling, a cramped, hot interior. Only their copy of the Black Madonna stood out. Her black face, gold bejeweled crown, ornate robe, the scar on her face, her wound. I liked to look at it. I liked to think about seeing the real thing in Poland and the pebbles eating into my knees as I crawled around the altar in prayer like everyone else who had made the pilgrimage to this holy place, passing the face of the Black Madonna, chanting and praying for forgiveness. This church had a fading, framed poster of Pope John Paul II beside The Black Madonna and old women bent over their rosaries, praying in Polish, moaning the words of Our Father. It reminded me of the women in the graveyards in Poland, the grave cleaners, the tombstone washers. They had lace chustki on their heads, some black, some white. They clutched each bead on their rosary and went through the words.

I odpuść nam nasze winy,

jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom.

I nie wódż nas w pokuszenie,

ale nas zbaw ode złego

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

I remember the words in Polish from church as a child; they were numbing. I liked to hear them and not add in my English version. I liked to stumble along in Polish. Winy sounded like veen-eh, like vino , like wine, but were trespasses. Sins. I prayed for my grandfather’s soul. I prayed that he wasn’t seeing what I was doing but I wondered if he could. I wanted to stop thinking about it so I started praying harder.

WHEN I LEFT THE CHURCH I HAD A MISSED CALLon my phone. It was Mary. The gutters. They needed to be cleaned and she didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know either. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to get back to her house. I only knew it passed the Downtowner motel and so I took a different route. Down Franklin with palm trees buckling over and high-rise apartments built in the ’70s where I heard women who had sex for money lived. They had the nicest views and wall-to-wall Berber carpeting. I liked knowing where the sex workers lived in Los Angeles. I felt like it gave me cache, let me know secrets other people didn’t know. I don’t even know how I knew this fact, but I knew it was a fact. There were prostitutes living on North Fuller and Hillside, there were prostitutes living on North Gramercy and Garfield Place. I saw them walking into their houses late at night as I drove, holding a man’s hand behind them, buzzing people up from their windows. I knew about them but they didn’t know about me.