The Clarinet Polka (43 page)

When I drove her home that night, she said in this absolutely couldn't-care-less voice, “You doing anything after Mass tomorrow?”

Now that was an odd question from a number of different angles. First off, I hadn't been to Mass since Easter, and so she wasn't exactly used to seeing me there. As to what I was doing tomorrow— Well, okay, here's my usual Sundays. I crawl out of the sack at whatever point the pain in my skull forces me to, and I scrape myself together. Then I stop by Carlotti's newsstand to pick up
The New York Times
for Mrs. Constance Bradshaw, and I drive out to St. Stevens and we have us a nice little brunch, and it's usually got some dog hair in it—your champagne and orange juice in the chilled glasses—and then we have us our Mature Relationship and end up snoozing in her big bed. Yeah, just lazing around, laying there reading the paper. And that's the way Sundays go, and it puts me back in South Raysburg feeling halfway human just in time for Mom's dinner. It was a nice way to spend Sundays.

I looked into Janice's big sad blue eyes, and I said, “I don't usually make it to Mass these days, but I don't really have anything happening tomorrow.”

“You want to do something?”

“Sure,” I said.

*   *   *

It wasn't like I was planning to see Janice Dłuwiecki damn near every day after that, but that's pretty much how it turned out. She practically moved into our house. With my mom, you never have to guess what she's thinking, and what she said was, “That poor little girl's having a rough time.” Naturally, I told the whole story to Linda, and she felt real bad for Janice and her family, but she also felt real bad for the polka band. “I know it's selfish of me,” she said, “but I just can't help it. We put so much time and effort and love into it, and she's just so
good
. We couldn't ever replace her.” And she went off and had a good cry about it.

I kept saying, “Oh, she'll come back to the music,” but I wasn't sure she would.

Well, Janice had a ten o'clock curfew on weeknights and midnight on weekends—which even back in those ancient days was fairly harsh to lay on a sixteen-year-old in the summer, but I guess her parents were still operating on old-country rules. But she could stay out later if she was with Linda and me. Why that should be, I'm not really sure. I guess they figured we were safe or something. So lots of nights Linda would be yawning by nine-thirty or ten, and then, as far as she knew, I was taking Janice home. And I'd drop Janice off around midnight, and her parents would be in bed, but as far as they knew, it was me and Linda dropping her off. So what did Janice and I do alone together for a couple hours? It's not what you might think. All we did was talk.

We'd sit on the riverbank, or sometimes I'd take her up to various points high above the city where we could get that famous panoramic view, or sometimes we'd just drive around. We never got tired of talking to each other. She'd fill me in on how things were at home and how she was doing with WW II. By the time she'd plowed through that first heavy book, she figured she'd done her duty to the Polish language, so she switched to books in English. She was reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and
The Diary of Anne Frank
and other cheery things like that.

I don't suppose there was anything about myself I didn't tell her—lots of childhood stuff like about Babcia Koprowski and Linda refusing to speak English, and playing football in high school, and how I fell madly in love with Dorothy Pliszka, and going off to Morgantown with Mondrowski, and my war stories about the air force, and just you know, the whole shot. Well, Mrs. Constance Bradshaw I didn't mention, but that was about the only thing. So Janice and I got real close, and I kept reminding myself she was just another little sister.

She went back to see the priest a couple more times. He told her that what she was wrestling with was something that had worried people in the Church forever. There was even a name for it—“the problem of evil”—and it went like this. If God is infinitely good, how come he allows evil in the world? Yeah, Janice said, that pretty well got to the heart of it.

Father Obinski told her it had to do with free will. God's given man free will to be able to choose good or evil, and it's a real choice. Evil comes from man making the wrong choice. And that sounded pretty good to Janice except that— Well, you know how something can fall into place in your head where it all makes sense and you go, oh, yeah, right? Well, just talking about it in general, what Father Obinski was telling her sounded okay, but when she thought about God allowing the Nazis to run those death camps, or allowing the Russians to deport all those people into those horrible places where lots of them died, then Janice just couldn't quite hit that point of going, oh, yeah, right.

The last time Janice saw Father Obinski, he asked her if she thought she had a vocation. I guess he hadn't seen too many sixteen-year-old girls trotting into his office wanting to talk about the problem of evil. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Janice said. She told him—in a nice way, you know, but she made it real clear—that her desire to be a nun was a little less than zero.

*   *   *

I don't want to give you the impression that Janice was always heavy into the gloom that summer. When she'd had enough of peering into the pit, then this silly goofball side to her would come out. It was like she was saying, okay, enough of this, now I'm going to be normal. And when she was with her girlfriends, boy, was she ever normal. You see, if Janice and I wanted to do something together on the weekends, we had to find other people to do it with so it wouldn't look like we were going out together. It wasn't something we had to discuss—we both knew it. And Linda wasn't always available. So once, and only once, I took Janice and a couple of her girlfriends swimming out at the park.

There were, I don't know, maybe four or five Polish girls in that rat pack Janice hung out with, and they all dressed alike with that kiddy look that was cool back then. Her two best girlfriends were Maureen Wierzcholek, the youngest of those crazy Wierzcholek girls, and Sandy Czaplicki. Sandy's dad's not the one who owned the grocery store, that's her uncle. Her dad's the one who worked for the phone company— Hell, you don't need to know that. But anyhow, when Janice was with her girlfriends, she acted just like them, so what I've got on my hands are three shrieking, giggling, gum-chewing, standard-issue teenage idiots.

Now I'm not saying they weren't cute. If you're the kind of guy who gets off on teenage idiots, you would've thought they were real cute. They're in my car, and they're yacking away to each other and passing around this little brush to do their eyelashes with, and I'm going, “Come on, girls, one of you's going to put her eyes out,” but they don't pay any attention to me whatsoever. Maureen's got a new lipstick, and they're passing that around too, and they're doing the teenybopper talk—funky, heavy, far out, bummer, and like that. And naturally the main topic of conversation is who's cute in the boy department. Oh, there's so and so, he's sooooo cute, giggle, giggle, giggle—yeah, groovy, wow, out of sight. And I'm feeling slightly older than a trilobite.

We get into the pool, and wouldn't you know it, there's Larry Dombrowczyk and Arlene Orlicki. Larry says, “What're you doing, Koprowski? Starting a harem?”

“Aren't they a little young for you?” Arlene says. “Seems to me they were all in diapers about a year ago.”

Yeah, right, ha ha ha. “I'm your friendly neighborhood chauffeur service,” I say. “I should have my head examined.” I'm hoping that took care of it, but anybody but a total fool should have known perfectly well it didn't.

So I lay down on my towel next to Larry and Arlene, and we're chatting about this and that, and I'm doing my best to give them the impression that, oh, boy, is it ever a relief to see them there because now I've got somebody to talk to. And I'm laying on my face in the sun and wishing I had a drink, and eventually I drift off about half asleep, and which one of the teenage idiots do you suppose thinks it would be real funny to run a Popsicle up the center of my back?

*   *   *

Of course, then there was my Mature Relationship. The first Sunday I canceled out on Connie, I could hear how pissed off she was, but she was working real hard to be cool with it. Things come up, right? That's life, right? When I canceled out the next Sunday, she wasn't the least bit cool. “Do you want to stop seeing me? Is that what this means?”

“No, no. Of course not. Of course I want to see you. It's just, you know, stuff I can't get out of. Family stuff—”

“How about Wednesday night then? Why don't you come right out from work and have dinner? You could spend the night.”

What could I possibly say to that? So I drove out there the next Wednesday night. The minute I walked through the door, she said, “Who's your other girl? She must be really hot.” I just laughed at her.

Connie was a good cook, and that night she really did it up right—these little pancake things rolled up with creamy crab stuff inside, and lots of them—and she had candles on the table and a bottle of French wine, and she was wearing one of her leather outfits with nothing under it, so we followed nature down that old inevitable course, and then we settled down to some serious drinking.

Things got ugly fairly fast. Why didn't I get a phone again? So we could keep a little closer contact? She was starting to feel, she said, just a teensy bit neglected, and I'm going sure, sure, right, no problem—although I had no intention whatsoever of getting another phone. I liked it that people had to expend a little effort to find me.

And she was onto me about my “other girl.” She wasn't jealous, she said. Just curious. Of course I had the right to live my own life. So did she, for that matter. But she thought it was important that we be open and honest with each other.

So I told her for the hundred millionth time that there wasn't any other girl, and she told me that she was disappointed because I obviously didn't trust her.

“Honey,” I said, “if I start fucking somebody else, you'll be the first to know.”

That pissed her right off and we yelled at each other for a while. I thought maybe I should leave, but she's going no no no, don't leave, and we had us another drink to contemplate my not leaving, and it's about one in the morning by then, and we decide to hit the sack. Wednesday, right? So I'm obviously working the next day—that's the theory anyway—and I've got to get up early enough to drive from St. Stevens into Center Raysburg and get there by nine.

That's the first and last time we ever tried to sleep in the same bed. I'm fairly loaded, so I'm drifting right off, and she says, “I guess if I get too horny, I can always call the plumber.” I'm going, what, what are you talking about?

“I'll call the plumber,” she says, “and then I'll put on something
really
slutty and wait for him to get here,” and she goes off into one of her tinkly little laughs that means it's a joke.

“Honey, give me a break.”

“You think I'm kidding?” she says. “I fucked the TV repair man, why shouldn't I fuck the plumber?”

“Nice, Connie. Real nice.”

“Oh, I forgot. You don't like to be teased.”

Now I'm wide awake. I'm laying there next to her in the dark. She's got real thick drapes, and it's black as the inside of a coal mine in there, and I'm just fuming. She's passed out and she's even snoring. Well, what I can do is either lay there for hours staring into the dark, or I can get up and have another drink.

In about ten minutes she's padding out of the bedroom in her bathrobe. “What's the matter, honey? Can't you sleep?”

Nothing that another drink won't cure, I tell her. “But what's the matter with you, honey?” I say. “You were out like a light.”

“I can't sleep because you left.”

“Connie, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What do you do on the million and one nights I'm not here?”

So there we go. Right in the middle of another screaming match. About what, I really couldn't tell you.

We're knocking back the booze, and we're stumbling around yelling at each other, and she's banging her fists on the kitchen table to make her point, and I'm kicking the walls to make mine, and we're pouring drinks just as fast as we can get the bottles tipped over, and I'm smoking cigarettes by the pack, and she's grabbing my cigarettes and puffing on them, and we're bouncing off the walls and just having ourselves a ball. Naturally I'd seen her loaded before, but not quite that loaded. I mean your classic staggering, slobbering, slurring, falling-down, totally hopeless, stupid dumb-ass dead drunk. Eventually she passed out, and I picked her up and dumped her into bed. By then, it was damn near five in the morning. I slept on the couch. If you could call it sleep.

Of course I didn't make it into work the next day, and of course she was sorry as all hell about that, and of course I told her not to worry. Vick wasn't paying me that much anyway, and what the hell, it's only money, right? And I drove away from there, and you know what? I was honest-to-God wishing she'd get back together with her husband. He had a lot more practice dealing with her than I did, and he was probably a damn sight better at it.

*   *   *

One night—it must've still been in June sometime—Linda dialed out early so it wasn't even ten yet, and Janice and I walked down through Pulaski Park to the river. You cross the railroad tracks and head south toward Millwood and you hit this little stretch that's pretty well hidden from the road. It's one of those places where we used to go back in high school if we'd managed to score a case of beer.