Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

IT HAD BEEN DAYS AND I WAS TIRED OF HIMalready. All I did was open doors for him. Let him out. He hadn’t opened my legs in days.

When he came at first I thought, I win.

But he left graying socks with a hole in the toe everywhere, or faded black ones, and I could see the stitches his wife had probably sewn herself. Green thread against the faded black. I wasn’t going to do that for him; I hope he didn’t expect me to. Maybe that was the part I was missing. I did not know how to sew or knit or darn socks. My mother hadn’t taught me anything. When she tried I broke the needles on the electric sewing machine, sending them shooting all over the room. The little yellowing light of her refurbished machine glared down bright on my fingers as I tried to push the fabric through. The hood covering the little light bulb had cracked and broke before we had gotten it and the bare bulb shone in my eyes, making it impossible to thread the tip of the needle. I licked and sucked at the edge of the thread, tried to make it a point but it never worked. She pulled it away from me, put in a new needle and threaded it all in one motion.

“Zosia, you have to learn these things,” she said as she pushed the fabric under the needle and pressed her foot down on the pedal that was connected to a cord that connected to the machine and sat under the dining table. She pushed down on the pedal and the sound of whirring and a sound like chomping came out of the sewing machine puncturing over and over.

But it was something I would never learn, and could never do, not even now.

I would not be able to darn Lev’s socks, sew buttons back on to his shirt after they popped off, through my carelessness or his. He would always need his wife for that. The way my father needed my mother.

I found Lev’s hair in the bathtub, sticking to the drain cover, not making it through the holes. The soap had filmed up against it and turned it an ashy color. I thought about picking it up, and did. The dry soap flaked off in bits and sifted down onto the white porcelain of the tub. It was in a clump and I didn’t know where the hair had come from. His head, his crotch, or some other woman, left behind on him somewhere. He wasn’t home then, he was somewhere else and I was cleaning up for us. I felt the hair in between my fingers and it crumpled at first, felt coarse, but when the film of soap flaked off it was soft again, stiff and soft and I rubbed it between my fingers and thought about smelling it, but didn’t. I put it in the garbage instead. I covered it with unused toilet paper and crumpled it to make it look natural. Like garbage.

Lev came home late, about one or two in the morning. The first few nights I stayed in the living room to wait for him. Watching TV shows and drinking Żubrówka at first, Bison Grass Vodka — hoping it really was the aphrodisiac everyone promised it would be, but Lev wasn’t looking for that when he came home. He’d go in the bathroom and wash his face, pull the water through his hair, stare at himself for a while and then close the door when he’d notice me watching him. I could hear his zipper. His urine hitting the toilet water. Sometimes he didn’t close the door and I watched, the arc leaving him and hitting the toilet. Sometimes he flushed and sometimes he didn’t. No one flushed in Poland either. Water conservation.

The bathroom in the blok my grandparents lived in, my parents lived in, and I was born in, always smelled like urine. The pipes were hot and sweating, linking each bathroom on top and below to one another. My grandmother’s old washer was crammed in next to the tub, open faced and with a metal washboard that vibrated loudly when turned on. I sat in the tub for hours, inhaling the stale urine smell and hearing Polish yelled from above and below, carried through apartments through the vibrations in the pipes. All of the waste from the gray blok slid down the pipes and into the basement.

The bloki were all the same and still are, now older and more graffitied — swastikas, slurs about soccer teams and words about Łódź that I could not read. Pentagrams too. No one lived in our apartment in the bloki anymore. Our moth-eaten sweaters were still in the cabinets. My favorite dresser — each knob an oversized pink-cheeked girl with orange hair and freckles — still there. I used to claw at those faces, pulling them out toward me, talking to them, each round knob too big for my hands, I had to pull them with two hands, and still I couldn’t open the drawers, open the pink-faced girl’s mouth.

I TRIED MAKING ŽUREK FOR LEV.

Recipe for Zurek “Zhurek”

The base for zurek(“ zakwas”):

3 cups of rye flour,

small piece of crust from rye bread,

2 minced cloves of garlic,

2 cups of warm water.

I placed the ingredients in a jar, mixed them well, covered the jar with a piece of clean cloth, and let the jar stay in a warm place for 4–5 days, just like the directions told me to. It said, If mold forms on top, remove it before using the zakwas. Mold did form on top and I gagged while skimming the top. I discarded the bread crust and garlic before using.

Zurek

2 cups of zakwas

3/4 lb of white sausage — chopped (or just use polska kielbasa)

1/2 lb of bacon

1 onion — minced

2 cloves of garlic — minced

1/2 cup of sour cream

1 Tbsp of flour

1 bay leaf

2 corns of allspice

5 black peppercorns

1 Tbsp of marjoram

I fried bacon (chopped), added onion, added garlic and sausage (white). I fried it a little more. I added 3 cups of boiling water, added bay leaf, black pepper. I did not have allspice. I cooked for 20 minutes. Added zakwas. Mixed sour cream with flour, added it to the soup and watched the cream bubble up in lumps. I added dry marjoram I bought at the Polish store, mixed the soup well. I brought it to a boil. The recipe said I could also add chopped, cooked potatoes and chopped hard-boiled egg. I did not add egg.

I THINK I MADE IT TOO SOUR. I LET THE BREADand rye flour ferment too long. He spit it back up and that was it.

That’s when he asked to take me somewhere. I knew I could ask for the Twin Palms now, and he couldn’t say no.

“I only want to go to one place,” I said, getting bold now. I had nothing to lose — he had lost his luster to me.

Lev looked at me sideways, up and down. “Do you have a dress, devochka ?”

“I have several.” I walked away from him and into the bedroom. I heard the shower turning on. I needed to prepare myself, wash myself, and shave things.

I looked in my closet. Nothing seemed good enough. I knew where we were going.

I hoped I knew where we were going.

I chose something black and low-cut and slipped into the bathroom after Lev to finish getting ready.

When I came out of the bathroom in the dress, Lev turned me around and kissed my neck, gave me goosebumps. How did he do it, every time.

“Heels, Anka. Nice tall ones,” he said.

“I know.”

I went into my closet and looked for spindle-heeled shoes. The only pair I owned. The only ones that would do and slipped them on my feet. Wondered how I would make it down the uneven pavement to where we were going. My hair was dry and curled. My lips pert and red. My eyes like a cat’s. I took a shot of vodka in the kitchen while Lev finished in the bathroom. I washed the glass. Wiped the frozen bottle of my melted-through fingerprints and returned it to the freezer.

Lev took something from his car as I stood on the street. He reached for my hand and I let him. We were walking down the street toward the Twin Palms and my hands were clammy. I ambled down the sidewalk in my spindle-heels. I tried to keep up with him and look sexy and distinct and purposeful all at once.