Karolina Waclawiak: How to Get into the Twin Palms

When my Russian comes back there is a ticket on his car and he says a string of words in his brusque language and stares at me like I’m supposed to know. I blush, get nervous. He calls to me in his accented English and asks me if I saw them do it.

I say no.

“You should have listened to me. I think.” I say it with a smirk. He looks up, taken by surprise.

“What’s your name?”

I tell him it’s Anya. A good, strong Eastern Bloc name. I watch him move toward me.

He stares up at my apartment building. Satellites hanging off every balcony. He asks me if I live here. I tell him yes. And then he asks me what I wanted him to ask me.

I pause and wonder what I should say. If I should tell him the truth or if I should tell him what he wants to hear.

“Do you think I’m Russian?” I counter.

He says something to me in Russian. Something I can’t comprehend completely, maybe a word or two, but said so quickly it just sounds like a scramble. He has his answer, I am not. He stares at me, looks me up and down. “So, what are you then?” he asks.

I hesitate, I can be anything, but I revert to some kind of small pride. “Polish,” I say.

He cocks his head, like he knew all along and was putting me through the motions. He says something to me in Polish. Now I can understand: “Polish girls are very beautiful. Almost like Russians.”

I blush in the way you blush at an insult. I have named myself to him now. “Have you been to the Twin Palms?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says and laughs.

“What’s it like?”

“Not for girls like you.”

“What kind of girl is that?”

He stares at me and starts backing away. And as he does I know exactly what kind of girl that is. He turns and walks back to his car and I already want to see him again.

I ask him what his name is.

“Lev.”

He doesn’t even smile.

WHAT I AM IS ALWAYS THE FIRST QUESTION.Since the camps. Since always. One camp was in Austria when I was very small, after we left our village and before my father began to fear everything. While we waited for a country to take us, Reagan became our hero. While he worked hard to stamp out Communism, he let us sneak in on a Pan Am flight.

I was sent to the other camp when I was eleven.

Bandera, Texas.

Camp Rainbow was a camp for immigrant children, a place where we could learn to be American. We took classes like arts and crafts and classes about appropriate assimilation and learned about MTV. American pop culture. I already knew about it. I danced hungry like the wolf.

I never wanted to be a good Polish girl.

When I was young in Texas, the woman across the street had a snake hose that flailed around, sending water sailing through the air. Her yard was still brown and I had a hard time trying not to get wet as I walked up the steps to knock on her door.

She knew my mother. She felt bad for us. Our threadbare clothing, church donated in black bags, broken-armed dolls. She fed me American things.

My favorite things:

Wonder Bread — I liked to touch it, watch the white bounce back from my fingertips.

Margarine — I didn’t know what it was but it was a bright yellow that looked like egg yolks and slid across the Wonder Bread without ripping it.

Sugar — I had it sprinkled on top of Wonder Bread and margarine. The sandwich had to have the edges neatly pinched together so not a granule was lost. My neighbor did this for me but it was also important for me to reinforce the creases myself.

I always ate these sandwiches hungrily. It was my favorite thing. A bread, butter, and sugar sandwich. I snuck away to her house, dust-covered fake foliage in every corner. She fed me sandwich after sandwich and I was careful not to lose a granule. The layer of sugar crunched in my mouth. If I lost a bit on her stoop, while sitting there eating it, I’d take my finger, stick it in my mouth, wet it and run it along the concrete, picking up the sugar and sticking it back in my mouth.

My mother didn’t know about my bread, butter, and sugar sandwiches.

We ate galaretka at our house. Things little girls did not like. I picked the pieces of dill off of my potatoes and checked the refrigerator daily, hoping one day there would be a tub of margarine. There never was.

But, I wasn’t off the boat anymore, like these people. The second wave of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Laos, Cambodia. We couldn’t speak to one another. They were too fresh. We slept on bunk beds and were told to watch out for scorpions, water moccasins in the river, tarantulas in the trees.

I ate sliced pickles from a jar every meal for two weeks and lost 15 pounds. My father said I looked like an escapee from a concentration camp. I thought I looked slim and tan and newly American. I kissed a Polish boy there. His name was Poitr and his face was covered in red pustules. I felt them on his back too, when I rubbed at his shirt. I felt one pop. He always wore black shirts. Even in the Texas sun. Piotr gave me presents of N.W.A tapes and the N.W.A hat he was so proud of, the red stitching of the letters bursting from black fabric.

He stuck his tongue in my throat and jabbed it around. Hit my teeth. I giggled and he kept asking me what was so funny. I wanted him to hurry up and finish. I told him I was fourteen and he was already sixteen and I wanted him to put his hand under my shirt but he was scared. He was not a man.

I left him on the picnic tables, alone, and went looking for someone older. Someone less scared. Later, I would put the hat over my face and inhale, play the tape in my boom box, and try to remember him.

I tried to look beautiful for the American camp counselors but they didn’t understand us. They just shoved us together, in the pool, at dances. Told us how we were supposed to act now, swaggering. Accent-less, unlike our parents. We still had a chance in this country, we could still pass.

I had been in America longer than the rest of these children. Mimicry is what I was good at. I observed and made practiced movements, keeping quiet so that I could listen. It pleased me to know I could do these things. American things like shout cocksucker as a punctuation mark, gyrate my pelvis wildly to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf” while mouthing the words “ I’m on the hunt I’m after you ,” and saunter around the bone-dry landscape as if drunk, as if I were some kind of John Wayne. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what these things were, just that I was free to do them with no one to stop me.

LOS ANGELES HAS ONE POLISH CHURCH.Catholic, of course. On West Adams. I went there when Pope John Paul died and everyone was sobbing. The mass was in Polish and I could pick out lines and prayers that I had learned when I was a child. Still learning Polish. Still learning English. On one side of the altar hung a large photograph of the deceased Pope. It had no doubt been affixed to the wall when John Paul became Pope. On the other side, a copy of the Black Madonna.

The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland, has a cut on her cheek and a golden crown and holds her son. Her cheek was sliced by the Hussites in the 1400s and it bled. We worship the painting and we worship the scar. I have crawled on my knees in front of her image in Poland.

She is surrounded by reminders of sickness. Hanging crutches, small crosses worn around the neck of the sick and dying, miraculously cured. All the cured leave the remnants of their maladies all around her in the Jasna Góra Monastery where she is worshiped. She is the mother of God and an image of her hangs in every good Polish person’s house.

There is also only one Polish store and two Polish restaurants in Los Angeles. Sausages hang on the walls of the store. The older women do not speak English. The younger ones look bored and tired and don’t want anything to do with me. I am nothing to them. A strange in between. They grunt at me when I try and place my order in their language. Behind them hang kielbasas; thin and long, short and fat, in between sizes too. Blood sausages, hunter’s sausage, white and special for Easter. Most have names that I cannot read so I point and sound out the words in my head, too shy to say them out loud. One day, maybe I will. Not today. I line the counter with sauerkraut I will never eat, and chocolates filled with plums that will get pushed to the back of the cupboard. Reminders of who I am, but who I am not quite.