The Lullaby of Polish Girls (7 page)

Sebastian exhales.

“Well, guess what, Tefilski? I’m ready now.”

And with that, Justyna gingerly drops to her knees.

Anna Greenpoint, Brooklyn

In the dark, sleeping next to her, Ben looks unfamiliar, like last season’s dress that no longer goes with anything. Anna stares at his receding hairline, lifts the duvet and peeks down at his belly. He’s always had that little pouch, evidence of a hipster diet—low on veggies, high on hops. She used to knead it affectionately. She used to joke about it and right now she wants nothing more than to want him again; it would just be so much less complicated.

Anna reaches under her pillow and finds her glasses. She carefully places a finger on Ben’s mouth and traces its contours. Yes, his mouth is very nice, with soft lips that never chap, even in the dead of winter. But Anna can’t remember the last time they kissed, the last time they
really
kissed, like those high-school kids who slobbered on subways, not caring who was watching. Ben used to walk down the street shielding boners as Anna nuzzled his neck. They just couldn’t stop touching each other, in private or in public. Now they kiss only when someone’s watching, as if it’s to prove something to their friends.

When Ben let himself in the day before, just past eleven
A.M.
, Anna had been curled up in a little ball on the sofa with an ashtray by her feet, its rank contents spilled out on the floor. While making coffee he found her lost glasses in an empty mug in the sink. When he gently eased them onto the bridge of her nose, her eyes popped open.

“Hello there.” He leaned down to kiss her on the lips but she turned her head away from him. He didn’t bother with her cheek. “Frick came by and left a note. He seems pretty pissed you didn’t answer the door. ‘You can fix your own damn fridge,’ he wrote. Nice. What, were you in a coma or something?”

Anna didn’t answer, but instead started bawling. Ben put his arms around her, and when she settled down, she told him about Justyna.
She wanted him to make it all better, but he just sighed and said, “That’s fucked up.” He suggested they go out to eat, said it would help Anna get her mind off things. But at dinner that night, Ben silently chewed his rice while Anna wept into her beef pad Thai.

“I can’t sleep. I had a crazy dream,” Anna whispers in the dark now, tugging on Ben’s earlobe to wake him up. “I was rowing a bathtub through the streets of my
babcia
’s neighborhood and there were horses floating next to me. The whole town was flooded and I was looking for you and then I found you in some apartment, making out with Charlize Theron, but you were like, ‘It’s okay, Anna, she’s very beautiful, you understand, right?’ It was horrible.” Ben’s eyes open.

He turns to face her and under the covers his legs entwine hers. She hasn’t shaved in over a week, and she immediately shifts away.

“Babe, you gotta do something about that tooth.”

“Oh my God! I’m telling you about my traumatic nightmare, and all you do is whine about my breath? Thanks a lot, you prick!” Anna bolts upright and swings her legs over the bed.

“Annie, come on, you want me to apologize for something I did to you in a dream? That’s crazy. And don’t call me a prick again unless you want me to start acting like one.”

“What is that? A threat?”

Ben tries to put his arms around her. “It’s too early for this. You’re distraught. Just tell me what to do, Annie.”

“You can shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

“Do not talk to me like that.” Ben’s voice rises. “I don’t deserve it. I’m sorry for your friend, for what happened to her husband, but when was the last time you saw her? When was the last time you even spoke?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I think you’re reaching into territory that you don’t own. It means that you’re displacing your grief. Besides, the last time you were in Poland, you didn’t even see her, right?”

“That has nothing to do with anything. Does empathy have a fucking expiration date? I invited her to my premiere but she didn’t come.
I was there for only five fucking days, Ben! It was a business trip. Business!”

“I don’t buy it, Annie. Poland was never business for you.”

“What the hell are you saying? I’m not allowed to be upset because we aren’t pen pals anymore?”

“Stop talking to me like that! I’m not the enemy. What happened to your friend is horrible, but get a goddamn grip!”

“ ‘What happened to my friend’? Tell me, Ben—what ‘happened’ to her?”

“I’m going back to sleep. I have a job to go to. Remember what that’s like, Annie, to actually have to rise and shine?” He’s pleading now, he wants to call time-out, but Anna is persistent. She wants to hurt.

“Say it. Name the thing.” Anna’s fist pounds the side of the bed.

“Her husband died.”

Anna makes the sound of a game-show buzzer. “Wrong! Sorry, Bob, the correct answer is: her husband was killed. He did not die. Big difference, right?”

Anna leans across the bed, bringing her face close to his. “Murder and death are two very different things, my love. Or have you already forgotten?”

She pulls back swiftly, so that his fingers barely graze the surface of her cheek, and runs out of the room.

Anna’s version of mourning includes slamming doors and throwing objects across the room. Her grief is the kind that makes noise. She knows that Ben used to love that about her; those mercurial moods, her passionate bellows. He used to tell their friends, in the beginning, that Anna Baran roused him like no one else had ever done. Now, Anna and Ben are just an argument waiting to happen. Two months ago, on Ben’s birthday, they’d come back from a bar and had drunken sex. Ben hadn’t meant to come inside her and a few weeks later, when Anna’s period never turned up and, instead, two pink lines on a stick did, there was no discussion of the next step. In a moment Anna knew; not now, and not with Ben.

The afternoon Anna spent at Planned Parenthood was burned into her memory. She sat in a waiting room, in a green paper gown, with five
other women. She’d felt sheepish about her engagement ring. One of the girls had a belly that was probably swollen into its fifth month and Anna fixated on it. “What?” the girl asked and stared Anna down, before going back to her
People
magazine. Anna flushed, embarrassed by her own hypocrisy; she’d wanted to leap out of the chair and run. But Anna had stayed put until the nurse called her name and managed a small goodbye smile to the women.

Ever since that day Anna’s been withering. Ben would come home from work to find her on the couch, staring at the ceiling. “You look like your dad,” he told her one day.

“Fuck you,” she whispered, without turning her head.

When Ben leaves for work after their fight, Anna is on the couch, eating Cheetos.

“This is all getting out of hand” is the only thing he says, right before he closes the door. Anna spends the entire day in the same spot on the couch, thinking about Justyna, and about breaking free.

The next morning, Anna gets out of bed without waking Ben. In the kitchen, she boils water in a saucepan and scoops a tablespoon of Jacobs Krönung into a mug. She sips the milky instant coffee—the same kind she drank in Poland with her
babcia
—which she buys for four bucks at a deli in Greenpoint. No Starbucks in the world could ever replace it.

Anna climbs out onto the fire escape, mug in hand. It’s cold but sunny. She stares across the rooftops and remembers a day, weeks after their engagement, when she had been waiting for the B43 bus after she returned from an audition in the city. It was drizzling and her hair was damp. Anna stood at the bus stop and fished out a pack of smokes from her purse, and that’s when she noticed him: a young man in a leather jacket, with thick, wavy hair like Michelangelo’s
David
. He looked like he was from Montenegro or Serbia, or some other war-torn Balkan state. He looked the way she sometimes imagined Sebastian Tefilski would look all grown up. He was staring at her, openly, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans. She looked away and smiled; it was textbook flirtation. The rain misted over her face, the bus was nowhere in sight.

“Would you accompany me for the coffee?”

Anna had been right. His accent was thick. She paused and lifted her left hand, wiggling her adorned ring finger. The man hung his head in mock despair, and placed his hands over his heart. “Please, anyway?” She laughed as the bus rolled up.

“Sorry,” she mouthed over her shoulder, and as she boarded the B43, for a moment, she actually was.

Anna thought about that man for days. She fantasized about running off with him, and she kept her distance from Ben, confused by her feelings. The idea that Ben wasn’t enough, that he would never understand, had been planted.

When she crawls back into the kitchen from the fire escape, Anna’s cheeks are raw and she feels like someone realigned her vertebrae or something. The shower is running and she decides to actually make breakfast. The idea comes to her out of the blue, and, aside from piles of take-out menus in the cupboard and a few utensils, Anna is unprepared. She finally unearths a frying pan, after rummaging through a moving box marked KITCHMISC.

Minutes later, three eggs sizzle on a paper plate. It’s not much, but it’s something. Ben emerges from the bathroom, swathed in a towel, trailing steam. “For me?” he asks, pointing to the table. She nods and manages a smile. The whole thing—her effort and his approval—feels lacking, as if they both know a bit of protein can’t apologize for everything. Ben eats right then and there, water dripping down his arm as he digs in. Anna wishes the sight could arouse her, or at best reassure her, but she feels nothing except for a small lump of revulsion when, after the last bite, Ben burps loudly. He leans in to kiss her in thanks, and she lets him.

After Ben leaves for work, Anna goes to her desk, and pulls out an old address book. The numbers look like hieroglyphics and her fingers shake as she dials them.

“Słucham.”

Poles answer the phone in a myriad of ways: a basic
halo
, a polite
dzieńdobry
, or an impartial
słucham
, which translates literally to “I’m listening.” When Justyna says it now, it almost sounds like a dare.

“Justyna. It’s Anna Baran … from New York.”

“Hi, girl. How are you?”

The neutrality in her old friend’s voice takes Anna by complete surprise. “I’m so sorry. My mom told me yesterday.”

“Yeah …”

“I wish I could be there.”

“No, you don’t.” Anna can hear the smile in Justyna’s voice; she knows Justyna is trying to keep the conversation light but somehow it does the opposite.

“How’s Damian? Last time I saw you, he was a baby, right? When was that? 1998?”

“Yeah.”

“And then I got that movie and I—”

“—became a star?” Justyna’s voice doesn’t belie any accusation, but Anna doesn’t know how to respond.

“I’m sorry,” she echoes, at a loss.

“Well, you know, shit happens, right? Damian’s fine. He’s fine.”

“He’s six?”

“Seven.”

“Is he a good—does he like school?”

“Hates it. He’d rather, you know, while away the hours whittling.”

“Whittling?” Somehow the conversation has gotten off course.

“Yeah, it was a thing he did with.” Justyna makes a sentence out of what should be a fragment. “He’s a big baby, though. Still wets the bed, but what are you gonna do? He’s a handful,
wiesz
?” Anna nods her head, but, no, no, she doesn’t know.

“Justyna. Really, I’m so sorry. If you and Elwira need anything, I can wire you some money and—”

“No, no,” Justyna quickly interrupts, “we’re okay. But thanks. So. How are
you
? You married?”

“Justyna, there’s a Western Union near—”

“Listen, Anka, I gotta go. Tell your mom and dad
cześć
. And maybe one day you’ll come to Kielce again, right? I’ll tell Elwira you said hi.
Trzymaj się
.”

Trzymaj się
. “Hold on to yourself,” a casual Polish farewell, like
take care
, but it calls to mind so much more. Anna hangs up when she hears the dial tone.