Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

I was finally allowed in.

There were people standing around the sidewalk at the Twin Palms. I trailed behind Lev. Trying to walk in a way that accentuated my features. What I wouldn’t do for one of those long, slim cigarettes in the hands of the women standing there, looking me up and down, checking to see if my teeth were real, if my roots were pronounced, how I walked, if I was pigeon-toed. Why I was with Lev. They turned away quickly. I hoped for a longer look, a longer glare, more curiosity. Lev pulled me up the stairs, toward the mirror and I heard people speaking quickly in Russian and knew that I had made a mistake to come here. I was scared.

Face red, I trailed behind him, and he let go of me at the top of the stairs and slid through the crowd as I tried to keep up with him in my spindle-heels.

He called out to people, they called out to him. Women looked at me for a moment and then back to what they were doing. I didn’t gain a second glance. Lev turned to me. Pale-faced.

“Anka, you should go,” he said.

I blinked because I did not want to hear it and took it all wrong. So, I said no.

“Anka, you don’t understand. It’s not right for you to be here.”

I said no, again.

“I’m going to take you home.”

I walked away and lost Lev in the crowd, focused on the walls, bubbled glass with a light show reflecting off of it, and being in the Twin Palms for the first time.

The walls were mirrored and shimmery silvery-gold curtains were laced open to more mirrors. There was a mural of New York City on the wall behind the dance floor. The skyline was poorly painted and flaking off in places. There were stained glass windows up here, fading out onto the alleyway, the blocks of color in the glass spelled out “Palms” and mismatched green palm trees lined the frame of the glass. I didn’t know what the New York skyline had to do with the rest of the décor but I knew it seemed glamorous to them. The carpet was green, dark like a casino might have and long tables shined with iridescent fabric tablecloths. There was food covering every corner. Picked vegetables, kielbasa, herring with sunflower seed oil, raw onions and potatoes, stuffed peirogi and blini with meat and Russian sour cream. Potato salad — I heard someone call it olivie . It was just like the kind we made at home, my mother and I. Chopping up eggs, boiled potatoes, pickles, boiled carrots with the skin still on leathery and slipping from the flesh, raw onions, apples, mayonnaise to stick it all together. There was cured tongue and eggplant ikra , surrounded by sliced bread and butter. Red and black fish eggs, some small like poppy seeds and shiny, some round and larger. I had slathered red caviar on bread like jam as a child, spit out the salty brine from my mouth and all the adults around me laughed, patted my head, as if they had all gone through it too, once. I moved away from the smell and the shine. I almost fell into a table of fruit boats with layers of cantaloupe, pineapple, and other fruits exotic to Russia.

It was causing me anxiety, the Russian, the people, the smell of everyone mixed with the food. It looked aged, stuck in time, but I knew it was fresh and made especially for them.

It was too much and I started searching for Lev, but couldn’t see him anywhere, I was being pushed and shuffled around, not looked at, not noticed. I went to find a bathroom, a reprieve from the smell and the movement and the talking and the fur.

The bathroom smelled of stale cigarettes and I inhaled deeply and wanted to find one. The bathroom attendant stood in front of an overflowing jar of mints and candies with Cyrillic writing and toothpaste and cheap plastic toothbrushes in yellow and red and green. She had Tic Tacs and Sucrets. She did not have cigarettes and she did not speak English. Women were talking over the stalls in Russian and I felt boozy. I wanted to drink more, to steady myself, but instead I put on more red lipstick, I patted it down to matte. I stuck my thumb into my mouth and closed my lips and pulled out slowly, letting the ring of red flatten against my thumb. I rubbed it off with a tissue and gave the attendant a dollar. I patted my forehead and cheeks with another tissue, saw the makeup transfer on the napkin and threw it in the garbage. I heard the toilets flushing and wanted to run out before I had to see them. But I didn’t make it in time, blocked by someone else coming inside. A woman with heaving breasts, loose-fitting leopard gauzy fabric over them. I could see the white of her bra, one of those utilitarian models. Torpedo-shaped and thick strapped, a thick band around the back, letting the fat of her back slide up and down around it.

She spoke Russian to me and for a moment I froze, thinking I had made it. I had passed. The other two women came out of the stall and stared at me too. One had lipstick on thick, carrot-colored that she went to reapply. The other looked at me carefully. Again, the barrel-breasted woman spoke to me in Russian and all I could say was, “ Nie rozumiem. ”

“What you say?” she asked me. She slurred it really. I could smell booze on her breath and I knew.

She said something in Russian to the other women, the women from the stall, and the woman with the Sucrets and Tic Tacs, and I still couldn’t understand.

All I heard was the word Lev.

She blocked the door and I looked behind me. There were no windows. No stained glass. Just metal-doored bathroom stalls and the Russian woman applying her carrot-colored lipstick. The other two chattering above me. The bathroom attendant stayed mute.

“Who you come with?” the leopard lady asked me.

The thin woman stood near the mirror with her friend, standing quiet and still. She was wearing a petal-pink suit-skirt and patterned silk shirt. Her shoes were open-toed and revealed swollen toes. She had bunions, I could tell. A hammer toe maybe. The shoes were misshapen and the material jutted out in strange directions. The polish on her toes was old, faded, and shimmery pink, chipping at the tips and her nails were splitting vertically. An old woman’s feet.

I wanted to look away but I didn’t want to face the barrel-busted woman and her question.

“ Nie rozumiem ,” I said again.

“You don’t understand English either?” she asked, low and slow.

I shook my head no and gave myself away.

The thin one spoke, finally. “I saw you come with Lev?” She said it like a question and I didn’t know how to respond. So I slowly nodded yes.

“You know him,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The leopard lady neighed at me, held her drink to her lips and slurped some up.

“That’s her husband.” She pointed at the thin woman, and her friend stopped applying her lipstick. Her mouth sufficiently orange.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. They were circling me now and wouldn’t let me pass. They were older than me and they could all be my mother, young mothers or grandmothers.

“He has three kids at home. One baby.” She trilled the th of three . She held on to it long, like my mother would. “And two in Moscow.”

I wasn’t surprised but I wished I could be. I wanted to be.

The thin woman, Lev’s wife, glared at me. “What you think, you his first shluha ?”

I could hear the big one snorting and I knew what was going to happen.

She let loose on me. I felt the warm wet against my scalp. She had spit on me. All of them were doing it. The bathroom attendant continued folding towels and acted like she wasn’t seeing it. The others took their turns too. On my face, my neck, the orange-lipped woman got her orange-tinged spit in my ear.

I started hitting them, whoever I could get. I smeared orange across the woman’s face. Got it on the palm of my hand. I launched after the leopard tank afterwards. I knocked her in the mouth. Her dentures flew out and left a pink-gummed crevice. She squealed and I saw her Soviet-era teeth break into bits, tooth by tooth on the bathroom floor, sliding beneath the toilet. She covered her mouth and yelped. A gaping-mouthed old woman. She didn’t look sinister anymore. She looked old and poor.