How to Get Into the Twin Palms (11 page)

“Mary, you missed the buses.”

She looked up, looked upset, maybe confused. “I didn’t know they were here.” She started getting up, using her cane. She had already put away her cards, her chips, and her birds. The picture
was still on the table. I ran to see if I could catch the buses but they were all gone. Everyone was. It was just me and Mary. She was sweating when I got back and she looked nervous.

“How am I going to get home?”

The big electronic bingo board had already been turned off and looked worn out and outdated. They were starting to turn off the lights and I knew that I couldn’t leave her.

“I can take you home, Mary.”

Neither of us wanted it but we both moved toward my car anyway.

 

I had to move the seat back for Mary. Her cane, bag, and everything else wouldn’t fit.

“I think you should change back the games to the way they used to be. I don’t like the new ones.”

“I just call the numbers, Mary. I don’t choose the games.”

“You’re all in it together against us.”

I started the car and she looked away from me. Out the window.

“Where do you live?”

“Just drive this way. I’ll show you the rest.”

I told her I was sorry she didn’t win.

“I have to get out of the house. Otherwise, I just walk from room to room missing him.”

She paused for a moment.

“But I keep a clean house, honey.” She pointed her long frosted fingernail at me while she said it.

I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t.

“Why don’t you have someone? You’re not ugly. Anyone can get someone.”

I tried to pull apart what she said. There was no way to answer. So, I just said, I don’t know.

I also said, “I’m trying.”

“Women shouldn’t have to try. Even at the end, when he
couldn’t get more than soft. He felt so terrible. He would cry. But he was mine and I told him it was okay.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying.

“Turn left at that light.”

“I’m sure he loved you very much.”

“I’ll show you my wedding photos. You’re pretty, but I was beautiful.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even compete with an 82-year-old.

“I want it all back again. I want someone again. Not someone old and soft. I want someone young and hard.”

She told me to turn right. I was struggling to keep up.

“You need someone strong like a bull. Someone to fuck you up the back skull. We all do.”

She sighed. I didn’t want to imagine anyone doing that to her. But for a second I imagined Lev doing that to me. With her sitting next to me as I thought about it, I started feeling sick. And then I thought about the man in room 214. It was nice, for a moment, to go there.

“You’ve already had it.” It was the first time I could talk, when I thought she’d actually listen.

“I have.”

“You don’t have to look for it anymore. Some people don’t even get it once.”

“I had it.”

“Things like that don’t exist anymore,” I said, testing her.

“They never did,” she said. She thought about it for a moment. “There are things… you can’t possibly know.”

She said it fast, not like it was profound or anything. Just like that. It wasn’t to her. It wasn’t to me either, I guess.

“Did I tell you what I saw yesterday?” she said.

She asked me to pull up to a house. It was blue stucco and the plants outside were wilting and overgrown. I didn’t know how she was going to get up the stairs, if she was going to ask me to help her and I knew I didn’t want to.

She turned around to face me.

“What?” I said.

“A man, sitting right here – ”

“Oh yeah, you did,” I said.

She smiled at me. Like I knew just what she was talking about. “You’ll always want it, honey. And it’s worse when you’ve had it and it’s gone.”

She pushed her cane out.

“Maybe I can pay you to clean my gutters. And my plants. Look at my plants. I’m just one woman. He did it all for me.”

The lights in her house were already on. I didn’t want to clean her gutters. I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see her again.

“I want to show you how pretty I was. Come on.”

I waited a moment. She wasn’t waiting for me. She was already turning the key to her door. She turned and stood in the doorway and I knew I had to go in. I turned off the car.

THERE WERE PICTURES OF HORSES ALL OVER
Mary’s walls. Mustangs running in packs through the American West, single horses with saddles looking regal and staring off into space, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, and dust. She also had religious statues everywhere and I was surprised she let me in. She didn’t know me. This was her place and not mine. She had a full-sized Virgin Mary with a blue gown like we had when I was young. Her Mary had a chipped face and a broken hand and cobwebs around the base of her.

“Wait here,” she said.

She wandered away from me and I looked around some more. The windows were covered in yellowing lace curtains. Like my grandmother in Poland. Like all the grandmothers in Poland.

She came back with an armload of photos and ordered me to sit down. She spread them out before me and she was right. She was beautiful. I looked at her now and I looked at her then, her dress cascading down, looped around the floor and ruffled at the bottom. She was standing on stairs next to him, her husband, and she looked ten feet tall, a redheaded statue with sharp brows and red lips. She was a sexpot. She was all I needed to be.

“Mary, you were a redhead,” I said.

“Always. I was hot. Fiery.”

She touched her husband’s face. “It wasn’t every Tom, Dick,
Harry, and Joe.” She turned her face toward me. “It was only him. He popped my cherry. One man.”

She stuck her index finger in my face and then pointed at the picture. “One man.”

She wasn’t looking at herself. She was looking at him. He was smiling and holding her and in the photo she had a look on her face like she had won. She had tears in her eyes and I knew she wanted to be alone with him and I got up to leave.

“Give me your number, for the gutters,” she said as I stood up.

I did, even though I didn’t want to clean her gutters, and left her alone. I walked to my car and I knew she was crying in there. I felt her loneliness and wanted it. I wanted hers. I didn’t want mine anymore.

IT WAS GOING TO BE RED. NOT BLACK. I
wanted to get her kind of red. That copper, that sheen. That curl. I threw the box of Black Stilettos out the window and started over. The pharmacy was closed when I drove by it so I kept driving. I passed the Downtowner. The desk clerk was standing there. He was staring through the window, out onto the street, and he didn’t recognize me. I was glad. He looked prim, older in his uniform than he really was. I looked at the slip of the pool, no one was in it. Was room 214 still occupied? I slowed down and turned onto a street nearby, sitting in my car for a while. Room 214 was better, it was different, new. Untethered. I got out of my car and walked toward the gate, opened it, and stood next to the pool. The desk clerk looked up, saw me, shook his head, and looked back at the blue glow of his television. The light wasn’t on in 214. I considered asking the desk clerk and thought better of it. He didn’t have any answers. I sat down in a broken-down plastic chair and waited. I wanted it to be like the other night. It wasn’t going to be, though. I knew it.

“He left early.”

I didn’t have to turn around to know the desk clerk had come outside.

“He’s a firefighter,” he said quietly.

Was he missing Room 214 too? I heard the scrape of a chair and closed my eyes. We waited and he never came. He was after the fires too. I knew he did something important, I could tell.

WHEN THE BANGING ON MY DOOR BEGAN LATE
in the night I didn’t open it right away. But I saw lights turning on and knew it was loud and knew he wasn’t going to leave. I went and opened the door. He pushed in, didn’t let me see his face and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. I went back to my room and closed the door. I heard him running water, searching through cabinets. I didn’t care. I closed my eyes.

“Anya, I need you.” There was an urgency in his voice that I hadn’t heard before. My room was dark and the light behind him in the doorway made him look big. I got up and started moving toward him and he went back into the bathroom.

“I need something for my face.”

I didn’t want to ask him. His cheek was swollen and scratched. He looked annoyed, his hair was disheveled and he kept opening cabinets.

“Sit down.” He did what I said and sat on the toilet. He jiggled his foot as he waited. I pulled what I needed together. Cotton balls, alcohol… I eyed his face. Vaseline. I leaned in to him as he sat on the toilet and soaked the cotton ball. I dabbed his face and he closed his eyes. I could tell it stung and I was glad. He hissed at me.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“My wife scratched me.”

My face felt fuzzy. I squeezed the cotton ball against his face
and the alcohol escaped and ran down his cheek. He grabbed it away from me, wiped his face. “What are you doing?”

I backed away from him and was scared of him for the first time. He dabbed his cheek. He wouldn’t look at me.

“We got into fight. She gets upset.”

The words kept coming. I wasn’t listening. I stood in the doorway and watched him. The fuzziness wasn’t going away. He opened the Vaseline and squeezed too much out. He smeared it on his face.

“You’re not doing it right.”

“Do it for me then.”

“No.” I walked away. Closed my bedroom door again. I put my head down on my pillow and waited to stop hearing his sounds.

 

“Anya.” He came in and crawled into bed beside me. “You still have no sheets.”

I rolled over and tried to get away from him.

“I have to stay here a couple of days.”

“No.”

He pulled me close. Wrapped his arm around me and kissed my neck.

“No,” I said.

He wasn’t listening.

THE NEXT DAY, I GOT UP AND LEFT HIM SLEEPING
on my mattress. I stood on the balcony smoking and wondered what I had done. My neighbor came up to me. I didn’t want to talk to him but I hadn’t thanked him for the mackerel yet.

“Did you like?” His mustache was newly trimmed. Too nipped in at the sides. He smiled at me and really wanted me to like it.

“It was delicious.”

“I made for you. My mother said you would like.”

I smiled at him and sucked in my cigarette. “It was delicious.”

“Did you watch out for the bones? I was afraid you choked.”

I thought about it. The bronzed skin of the mackerel. The foggy eyes, the slit stomach, the brown meat. I hadn’t eaten it but I had studied it. The scales looked gilded and I touched them, smoke smell on my fingertips. I had stuck my fingers inside the stomach, touched the flesh and slid my fingers over the ribs, breaking up the meat.

“I didn’t choke.”

He stood there smiling at me. I didn’t know what else to say so I told him it was delicious, again. He walked over to his mother’s balcony and pulled himself over the ledge. He opened the curtains and I saw her portraits. Old faces, black-and-white 8 x 10 photos lining the walls – hardened faces, mothers and fathers, dark suits, staring out into the living room. She had them
all edging the ceiling. On all the walls, looking down into the living room with disdain. She brought the village to Los Angeles. I wanted to steal her photos. I wanted to line my walls with them. I thought about the village. My family in the village. My cousin with permed maroon hair. I helped her perm it once when we visited them. I was thirteen and stained my hands because I didn’t know better yet. The box had a smiling woman with curly hair and the chemicals smelled horrible. I wound her hair tightly around the curlers. They were rubbery and light green and I wondered how old the box was.

My cousin had a garden in her front yard. There were Gerbera daisies and lines of flowers in her small plot. Her sister was named Jagoda and had Down’s Syndrome and she lived there too. Jagoda wore skirts and smiled and sunned herself in the garden. My cousin was married to a man who liked to drink and sometimes he crawled into the wrong bed at night. Jagoda didn’t say anything but my cousin knew and she wasn’t going to leave him. They didn’t do that there. They had our family members in pictures lining the walls and watching them. They had chickens in their backyards and mushrooms drying in their cellar. I liked to walk down there and smell the air. Thick with forest mushrooms and dirt. It was cold down there and I felt alone and I liked it. Jagoda never went downstairs. She didn’t like the dark.

When I left they all stood in the garden and waved at me. Jagoda stepped on some flowers and my cousin scolded her. Her husband just watched me go and waved heartily. Jagoda looked down at her feet, at the flowers pressed into the ground and bit her lip. She looked up and started waving again. Forgetting what she had done. My cousin turned around and walked back into the house. Did anyone else know what I knew?

I passed the graveyard in the middle of the village and saw old women washing the headstones. It was Saturday. The graveyards were filled. Women in
chustki
lined the dirt walkways between the headstones. Kneeling, praying, scrubbing, changing flowers,
holding rosaries, and rocking back and forth. Rubbing on the headstones of their dead husbands. They rubbed their hands raw cleaning the headstones.

Before I left we had gone to the church where my parents had been married. It was quiet, empty. When I closed the door behind me I closed out the sound of the roosters in the front yard across the street, and my cousins chattering in the garden. I walked inside and tried to think about how it was back then. There was an altar and it was covered in food. Glistening bread sculptures. Round, brown, and shining.
Babki
in the form of roosters, cows, and sheep. All on the altar as an offering, the farmers begging for a good crop. There were dried corn stalks leaning against the altar, baskets of apples, potatoes. I stared at it all. They were offering up their food to make more food. I thought about Easter in the Polish church in America. People bringing in baskets with colored eggs, white sausage, salt, pepper, chocolates. Some had lottery tickets peeking out in between sausages and eggs. The priest would come around throwing his holy water at us. We’d cross ourselves. The other Polish people would cross themselves and stare down at their lotto tickets. In this church in Poland there were no lottery tickets stuck around the altar. Just the food and the Black Madonna staring down, cut on her face, holding her son. Gold crown. I stared at the cut in her face. I heard the door open again and knew it was time to go. We walked by the cemetery again. My family was buried there and there were spaces for me and my parents too.