The Clarinet Polka (50 page)

The beige pills reduced Connie down to your basic pulp. She slept eight or nine hours a night, and then getting out of bed and having breakfast was a real big effort so she needed a nap around eleven. Taking a shower in the afternoon was like running the marathon, so she had to have a little bit of a snooze after that. If she needed anything—like milk—I had to go get it for her. She said, “Just take some money out of my purse.”

I did her laundry for her, which wasn't hard—all she was wearing was pajamas. I'm not much of a cook, but I'd slap together something or other—hot dogs, scrambled eggs—and we'd eat it and watch television for a while, and then I'd get antsy and want to get my ass back into town. She didn't give a damn what she ate or what was on the tube. She didn't give a damn about anything. It was like the speed knob on her had been turned down to low. I don't think she bothered to eat when I wasn't there.

She never made a phone call—which surprised me—but she got a few. The first time her husband called, she's going, “I told you not to call me. I said I'd call you. Yes, I'm fine. Yes, I'm taking my medication,” and she puts her hand over the mouthpiece and says, “Jim, honey, would you mind taking a little walk?” Me mind? Oh, hell no.

She called it “Connie's Beige Period,” and I kept thinking, hmm, I can't quite recall when I signed on for this gig. But it just didn't seem fair to run out on her when she was having such a rough time—and when her husband obviously didn't give two shits. So I figured I was stuck with her until she was on her feet again.

*   *   *

Connie's Beige Period didn't last too long, thank God. There's this one Sunday when I spent the whole day with Janice, and right on into the evening too, and I just couldn't quite get my ass out to St. Stevens. So I was feeling a little bit guilty about my old drugged pal who hadn't attempted suicide, and the first of the week rolls around and I take off from work early—like about two—and go shooting out there to see how she's doing.

Lo and behold, the door to Connie's apartment is standing wide open. The air conditioner's turned off, and the windows are open. She's airing the place out. “It smelled like death in here,” she says.

You know the kind of dress that the plainer it is, the more it costs? Well, she's wearing one of them. Navy blue. And just the right makeup to go with it, and pantyhose, and navy blue shoes—the tasteful kind with the not-too-high heels—and I swear to God a string of pearls. She looks like she's going to go have tea on a nice autumn afternoon in one of those nice little mansions they've got out by the country club and maybe get her picture on the society page. But it's not a nice autumn afternoon. It's August and hotter than hell. “Wow,” I say, “you're looking good. Where you headed?”

“Fuck you, Jim,” she says.

Oh, well, gee, sorry for inquiring. She's not going anywhere, she says—as should be perfectly obvious. She's set up her ironing board in the middle of the living room, and she's ironing her sheets— Oops, that's not what I'm supposed to call them. Her goddamn
linens
.

She's got Bob Dylan going on the stereo. I was never big on him. He always sounded to me like somebody's grandfather. But Connie thought he was a prophet or some damn thing, and she owned every record he ever made, and she's got all of them stacked up on her turntable—like hours and hours of Bob Dylan. She isn't playing him loud. Just this scratchy old man's voice droning away in the background.

I fire up a cigarette, and she says, “Please don't smoke in here.” Oh, okay. She never minded before, but I'm an agreeable guy, right?

I look around and there's not an ashtray in sight. I trot into the can to dump my smoke, and she's got the toilet so immaculate it's a shame to use it, and everywhere I go in that apartment I'm smelling the Dutch Cleanser and the Windex. Now Polish ladies are big on clean, right? My mother's really big on clean, right? So I'm checked out on clean. But this is just nuts—I mean, this is clean out of
Star Trek
.

I stroll back into the living room and it finally sinks in that every damn thing you see is lined up perfectly—like maybe Connie had some land surveyors come in to help her get it right. You can sight down the chairs. The pictures of her kids are arranged in order of size and are perfectly equidistant from each other. Connie's radical newspapers are stacked perfectly in the center of the end table—like she probably found the exact location by the use of a T-square and a triangle.

Her damp linens are in a heap in a big basket, and she yanks them out, slaps them on the board, and irons away at them madly like she's trying to press those suckers to death. When she's done, they're perfectly flat and folded and wrinkle-free. They look like big sheets of typewriter paper. She's got little beads of sweat breaking out on her upper lip, and every time she reaches for another of her linens, I see that her armpits are like they've got faucets in them. The sides of that expensive dress are just soaked.

You want to know what's going down? It's day two without the beige pills. She got up on Sunday morning and realized she'd rather be dead than go on with the beige pills, so she chucked them in the garbage. Then comes Monday morning, she goes to her appointment with her shrink and tells him about it, and he says she absolutely has to take the beige pills or there's nothing he can do for her. She tells him to take his beige pills and shove them. “You know what those damn pills were designed to do?” she says. “They were designed to take a perfectly normal fucked-up adult woman and turn her into a mental patient.”

So she's not taking the beige pills, and she's not taking her good old pills either—you know, the Valium for her anxiety attacks, and the Seconol for not attempting to kill herself with—and she's quit drinking too she tells me. “No more better living through chemistry,” she says. It's the first time I've ever seen Connie on absolutely nothing. Connie on absolutely nothing is pretty damn scary.

You remember how she'd always talk about her husband without ever saying his name—just calling him “he” and “him”? Now she's going on about “they” and “them,” and I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly who
they
were. At first, I thought she meant her husband and the other doctors. She's going, “They just want to shut me up. Connie's an embarrassment. Connie's a pain in the ass. Connie's not playing by the rules. Well, what they should have done was give me a lobotomy when they had their chance. Yeah, that would have taken care of everything.”

Every cell in her body is angry. She's just sizzling with it. “I've had my share of humiliating experiences, believe me,” she says, going BANG, SLAM with the iron. “Growing up was one constant humiliation. But that one took the cake. Every goddamn doctor in the medical center I know socially. And I arrive in a goddamn coma. They pumped my stomach. Said it was probably a little late for it, but they did it anyway. Just to cover their tracks. Bullshit. Just to humiliate me is more like it. It's too bad I don't remember a goddamn thing about it. I'm sure they'd prefer that I remembered something. It'd be far more humiliating if I remembered something. But I was in a goddamn
coma
, for Christ's sake. They probably checked for semen while they were at it. They could have done anything. Oh, I bet they just loved having an unconscious woman on their hands.”

On and on she goes about all the bad things
they
kept saying about her. “Connie's a liar. A filthy-minded little bitch. Nobody's going to believe a filthy-minded lying little bitch. Let's really humiliate her this time. Let's do it in public. Yeah, that'll fix her little red wagon. Well, they better watch out because Connie knows what
they're
up to now. Connie can see through
them
like a windowpane.” And the gist of it is that Connie's taken far too much crap from
them
, and she's been taking crap from
them
her whole life, and by God, she's not going to take it anymore, and
they
better watch out because the worm has turned.

“What are you laughing at?” she yells at me. Maybe I'd been trying for a weak smile, but laughing was something I hadn't achieved yet. She's glaring at me like she's trying to burn holes in me with her eyeballs. “Do you think this is funny?”

Yikes! Seems to me I've got an appointment in downstate West Virginia—way downstate, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it slipped my mind up till a couple seconds ago, but I'm already late for it.

“Go ahead and run out on me, you prick,” she says. “Everybody else always does.”

So how do you figure what you owe somebody? There's what you owe from just one human being to another, and then there's what you owe because you're responsible somehow—and yeah, I did think I was responsible somehow, even if I couldn't have split hairs like a Jesuit and told you exactly how. But by then I was figuring I'd pretty well paid it off.

EIGHTEEN

Meanwhile, life in South Raysburg had been rolling right along. A couple days after Connie had gotten out of the hospital, I went home for dinner one night, and Janice was there, and my sister of course, and guess who shows up? Patty Pajaczkowski. Wearing old ratty cutoffs and one of those muscle shirts—you know, to show off her lizard. Linda goes to the door, and she leads Patty back into the kitchen, and she sends me a look like, oh my God, what is she doing here?

“Oh, hi, Patty,” Mom says like she's used to seeing her dropping in on a regular basis. “Get a chair for her, Jimmy. Sit down, Patty. Can I get you something?”

Now a lot of people if they turn up right smack in the middle of dinner and you offer them something will say, “Oh, no, no. I already ate, thank you,” but not Patty. “Sure,” she says, and she starts digging in like she hasn't seen food in a week. You'd be amazed at how much that skinny girl could pack in. I practically had to arm wrestle her for the last couple
gołąbki
.

Old Bullet Head is asking how her dad is, and she's going, “Oh, fine, fine, fine, no problem,” and she's got this funny little smile on her face like the cat that ate the canary—and that's a fairly un-Patty-like expression. She looks at me and Linda and Janice, and she says, “It's a sign, finding all three of you here at the same time.”

She has something to show us, she says. She wouldn't say what. But there's something about Patty that you've just got to take on faith, so we finish dinner and stand up and follow her out the door and over to her parents' house.

We didn't get the whole story till later, but the way it'd started out was like this. Patty and her dad had got themselves reconciled. You see, they hadn't had a good word to say to each other for years. Patty's big sister had done everything right—finished high school, married a nice guy, settled down, had a couple kids—but Patty didn't exactly follow in her footsteps. Nope, Patty took up the drums at any early age, dropped out of school, ran away from home, ingested every known drug and a few unknown ones, screwed around with guys of assorted races and an occasional other girl if you want to know the truth, lived with the Indians, got tattooed, and committed a number of other good wholesome acts along those lines, so, for an old-time working stiff like Bob Pajaczkowski, his little Patricia was pretty much the daughter from hell. Then he sees her playing in a polka band at Franky Rzeszutko's, and it's the first time she's done anything right since maybe her tenth birthday, and when he gave her that big hug after their set was over, it was a fairly heavy-duty moment for him—and for her too, I guess.

So they're standing around afterward trying to talk to each other in an embarrassed kind of way, and Patty says, “Hey, Dad. You know those polka records you were always playing when I was a kid? You still got any of them?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I've got every single one of them.”

Well, Patty doesn't think about it much but it keeps ticking around in the back of her head, and then finally she goes home for the first time in years and sits around shooting the shit with her parents, just, you know, pretending she's a normal human being, and she remembers the records. So her dad takes her down in the basement and shows her all these cartons, and there's 78s going back to when he was still in high school—and that's the thirties, for Christ's sake—and then there's 45s and LPs, just carton after carton of those damn records. “Are they all polkas?” Patty says.

“Yeah, well, there's some Christmas tunes and like that, but they're pretty much all polkas.”

She starts pulling out these old 78s and blowing the dust off them, and of course there's L'il Wally and Johnny Bomba and Eddie Zima, but there's also Ed Krolikowski's Radio Orchestra and Gene Wisniewski's Harmony Bells Orchestra and Frank Wojnarowski's Orchestra and all these other ancient orchestras, and this is all the stuff she grew up listening to, and things kind of fall into place for her—you know, like why she'd come back to Raysburg in the first place and why she was playing in a polka band.

So we walk over to the Pajaczkowskis' and in the front door, and there's her parents sitting in front of the tube and they're kind of startled to see us. “I just want to show them your records,” Patty says to her dad, and we follow her down into the basement.

Linda starts looking through the cartons, and she goes, “Oh, my God, this is priceless! We've got to archive it.”

Patty says, “Archive away to your heart's content, sweetheart. I just want to hear it all again.” And she looks at Janice with that little pussycat smile and says, “What do you think, Rapunzel?”

Well, Janice doesn't know what to think. It's been awhile since she's said a word about the band, and the last I heard, she'd been saying she wasn't sure she could ever play a polka again. There's a rat's-ass hi-fi from the fifties down there, and Patty has it plugged into a light socket. She takes one of those old records and puts it on the turntable and drops the needle on it, and behind all this hiss and rumble, what we hear is Walt Solek. Now he speaks English just as good as you or me, but he's got this dumb-shit immigrant voice he uses sometimes when he's performing—you know, to be funny—and we hear him saying in this thick Polish accent, “All right? Are you ready? Once more polka.
Raz Dwa!
” And BANG, there's “The Marching Trumpets Polka.”