Karolina Waclawiak: How to Get into the Twin Palms

“ Devochka moya .” He pulled me close and I could smell his breath. The hot, boozy breath on my cheek. I pulled away. Away from his tattooed fingers and backed into my apartment.

“ Devochka , where are you going?” His breath reached me through the screen. He pleaded with me to come back.

“Not tonight.” I closed the door. And let him moan away. Singing my name and lacing it with Russian. I pulled my towel tighter and turned off the light. I stood in the darkness and watched him watch me. He couldn’t see me anymore but he could sense me there. He sang my name and sang devochka over and over and over again. He stared at me with his shark eyes. Lights turned on and flooded over Lev and he looked upstairs, blinking. He stared up and the lights turned off. Nothing was yelled down from the Ukrainian, for the first time.

I watched him withdraw like an animal and I wasn’t scared.

He was drunk like the men from the villages in Poland. Carousing. Knocking on doors and waking us up in the middle of the night. Looking for their women. Or other women. Anyone warm. I wanted to feel hot, boozy breath on my cheek. I wanted it to wake me up. Back then, I wanted to feel their drunken fingers fumbling at me. I wanted to hear them whisper me awake and tell me to open my legs. I wondered what it would be like in the village, when the men came home from the bar. I wondered if I would make a good village wife, or if I would talk back too much, if I would let them fumble. I would. I would pretend to be asleep when they got home. I’d hear the stumbling and I’d keep my eyes closed, hear the water go on, hear them washing up for me, the footsteps coming closer. I would wait, pretending to sleep. I would make a good Polish wife. I would lie still.

I wondered if Lev would mind if I was still or if he’d want me to act like I liked it. I wanted to know if it was different with a Russian man. If they felt like I did. I wanted to know how close they were to us and if it was just a question of proximity.

I thought about all of this as I lay in my bed, listening to the birds sing outside my window trying to mate with one another under the nighttime heavy orange lights.

THERE WERE CIGARETTE BUTTS ON THE SIDEWALKoutside my doorway in the morning. I picked one up.

Marlboros.

I figured they were Lev’s but they could have been from the hostel on the corner. The students had begun to trickle in. Europeans on holiday. The girls passed my door. Teenagers with backpacks. I started to get jealous thinking of Lev looking at the young girls in shorts and snug tank tops and I would glare at them as they passed, as they tried to find their way up and down and through the grid. I hoped they would get lost. Lose their way back to the hostel. End up in Inglewood or worse yet, Palms. My neighbor in the chustka had already started sweeping the sidewalk for the morning. Her chustka had mirrored circles dangling from the fringe and she was edging toward me. I saw her staring at the pile littered around my feet and each tug of the brush across the pavement brought her closer. She wanted to clean up. Make sure no one saw them. She wouldn’t look at me and I could only think that she wanted me to forget about them too. She stared down, tugged and pulled, back and forth across the pavement and said something to me in her language. She didn’t smile and she wouldn’t make eye contact. She just muttered and droned. I let her sweep away the evidence as Lev walked up. She picked up her broom and disappeared back into her apartment.

“ Pree-vet, kra-sa-vee-tsa. ” That’s how he said it.

“What?” I stared at him blankly.

“You don’t know Russian at all?” He kicked at a butt on the sidewalk.

“What’d you say?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“ Pree-vet. ”

“Just means hello. Don’t worry about it.”

I leaned down and started picking at snubbed out cigarettes that my neighbor had missed.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleaning up your mess.”

He stepped back. He wore thick black sunglasses and I could see the crow’s feet around his eyes. It was early for him. I hadn’t expected him yet. “What mess? I don’t see mess.”

I pointed to the doorway where my aging neighbor had disappeared.

“If you’d let me in there’d be no mess out here.”

“You were drunk.”

“You never seen man drunk before? Fignjá. ”

He was calling bullshit.

I stood up and stared at him. Gathered the half-smoked, crushed cigarettes in my hand and started walking away from him.

“You were walking in front of the window. Nearly naked. What could I do?”

I don’t know why but looking at him — his face swollen and ruddy — I wanted him to work harder.

He should have begged.

I didn’t answer him and just kept walking. Toward the alley and toward the dumpster. He followed me, close. I could hear his steps, his attempt to get in line with mine. He was following me to the dumpster. I crossed pavement and dumped the cigarette butts in the bin, turned on my heel and stared at him.

“All that for a few cigarettes?” he said.

I had embarrassed myself by being overly dramatic.

“You American girls are all the same.” He started walking away.

“Like what?”

“ Zanudi. ”

I searched for a Polish translation. Something similar.

Zanudzać.

Nudzić.

It all meant the same.

Boring.

“Speak English,” I said.

I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what he said. I wanted to hear him say it to me again. He turned around and took off his sunglasses and looked at me cold with his pocket eyes. He wanted to make sure I saw him, his face and his eyes. And then he turned away, walked out of the alley and back to the Twin Palms.

I watched him walk and he didn’t turn around this time. He didn’t check to see if I was watching him. He just knew. I contemplated chasing him. But he had called me an American. Common.

“ Spierdalaj! ”

It was all I knew. He turned around, laughing. “The mouth you have.”

I smiled at him.

“Didn’t your mother teach you better?”

I shook my head no, coyly.

“Come here, Anya.”

I walked real slow. Counted each step. I made him wait.

When I came up to him he took off his sunglasses and he smiled at me and he didn’t look so bad anymore.

“What do you do, Lev?”

“What you mean?”

“What are these?” I held up his fingers gently and we looked at the rings tattooed on.

He squeezed my hand and pulled it away. “If you were Russian I could tell you.”

He winked at me.

“Lev!”

He turned around and the thin man from before was standing there. He started speaking in hurried Russian and Lev started moving, leaving me in the alley. Then he stopped and turned around and came back.

“Anya, I’ll come for you tomorrow.”

I nodded.

He left quickly and I began to panic.

When tomorrow? Where tomorrow? I stood in the alley for a long time. Hoping he would come back and tell me that it wasn’t going to happen. He was rushed. He wasn’t thinking. I wouldn’t have to go through anything. Why did I nod? I was ill prepared for any kind of evening with him. A truck rolled by with a flat bed full of broken down cardboard boxes. They stared at me, slowed and whistled, then said something in Spanish, whistled. I scowled and began to move. I would have to prepare. I would have to start with my undergarments.

I remember the first time I saw my grandmother’s bra hanging in the shower in her apartment. It was large and sturdy. It was peach colored or off-white or maybe just discolored. One side was slapped over the top of the bar and the other hung down, limp and dripping. I touched it, pressed in the fabric. It was thick, synthetic feeling. Like it was made from something that was supposed to pass for satin. The cups were terrifyingly huge. I had hoped that I would never fill in like that. She was “full figured.” She had blossomed early. I would have to enhance my blossoming.