The Clarinet Polka (52 page)

“Connie,” I said, “I think maybe you better catch a few Z's. Things are kind of hectic around here right now. I'll call you in a week or so.” Or maybe never, I thought.

*   *   *

The day of the street fair was perfect. Blue sky, big fat clouds, sunny but not too hot. The Wozniak boys over at Interstate had got them to loan us a flatbed truck to put the band on, and I rented the damn best sound system they had in Kaltenbach's—a real big mother with lots of watts. It cost a lot more than the girls thought it did, but I threw some of my own money in and didn't tell them. They were going to be out in the open air, you know, and I wanted them to have a good clean sound and volume that just wouldn't quit.

There's a huge amount of work goes into an event like that, and it's a fundraiser for the church, so almost everything's volunteer. Like the dads are bringing their barbecues and firing up the charcoal briquettes in plenty of time to start cooking the
kiełbasa
and
kiszka
and chicken, and the moms and old ladies have been making their
pierogi
and
gołąbki
all week, and the guys from the PAC are filling up those good old Raysburg Steel garbage cans with ice and beer. And you've got people setting up the over-and-under game and the roulette wheel and, in the parish hall, all the tables for bingo. And then there's things for sale—like sacred pictures, and peasant straw art that somebody imported from Poland, and pastries and embroidery the old ladies have made, and even some slightly used polka records you can pick up for fifty cents apiece.

Naturally everybody you know turns out, and you've also got lots of people coming down for it from outside the parish. You don't have to be Polish to enjoy drinking a beer and eating some
pierogi
and dancing a polka or two. Back in those days when St. Stans Parish was still going strong, we could put on a real good event, and you'd get just a huge number of people passing through before it was all over.

Well, Janice's brother did come home for the street fair, and he brought his girlfriend with him, and they slept in separate beds, and everybody went around not saying what they were thinking, but at least nobody had blown up at anybody yet. Janice stuck pretty close to home in case she was needed, you know, to pour a little oil on the old troubled waters. Then the day of the street fair she turns up at our house, and she's jumpy as fourteen cats.

Mary Jo had been pushing for them to have like a band uniform, and the girls thought that was okay, but then they'd had these endless arguments over it, and they never did agree on anything—which was typical of them. The only thing they ever agreed on was how to play a tune. And finally all they'd been able to come up with was that they should wear something white with something red. So maybe half an hour before they're supposed to start playing, Janice gets dropped off at our house, and she walks in the door and she doesn't say a word—not hi or anything. She looks at my sister. And Linda, being Linda, is wearing this real simple outfit—just a red-and-white blouse and white shorts and tennis shoes—and Janice says, “I knew I was going to look ridiculous.”

She's wearing exactly what she'd had on the night they'd played at Franky Rzeszutko's—the white blouse with the red jumper and the red little-kid shoes. “What's wrong with that?” Linda says. “you look fine.”

“It's too formal for the street fair,” Janice says, “and besides, I look like I'm about twelve. And I'm
already
too hot.”

She's carrying a couple bags with her. She goes zipping into Linda's bedroom and comes out in a red miniskirt. I think I told you she wore her skirts real short, didn't I? Linda's trying to be tactful. “Mary Jo will like that,” she says.

“Yeah, but will anybody else?”

You see, a girl singer in a polka band is supposed to be cute, but she's not supposed to be sexy. She's supposed to look like a girl you might see kneeling next to you in Mass the next morning, so there's a fine line you don't want to cross over—and everybody knows that except for maybe Mary Jo.

I'm going, “Come on girls, we're running out of time.”

“Jimmy,” she says, “please don't bug me,” and off she goes back into the bedroom.

Linda's whispering to me, “What on earth's the matter with her? She's being a real pill.”

So Janice just kept trying on this or that, and she finally got it down to a white blouse and shorts with her red shoes and a red scarf. Then it was the scarf that was giving her the fits. She tried it on her head, you know, tied in the back, but she didn't like that because whenever she looked even slightly like a peasant, she got hell from her mother. “She's says it's an insult to real peasants. Does that make any sense to you? Where are the real peasants who are ever going to see me?”

Then she tried it tied around her neck, but she didn't like that one either. “I look like I'm in the Polish Girl Scouts.”

Naturally I'd set the sound system up that morning, and I'd checked it out the best I could, but to get everything right I needed to do a sound check with the whole band, so I'm tapping my watch and going, “Hey, come on, kid. Get serious here.” Janice just wads the scarf up and throws it across the room and grabs her clarinet case and walks out the door.

Linda and I exchange a look, and then we go running after her, and we get about half a block up the street, and Janice says, “The only red I've got is my shoes, and they look ridiculous with shorts.”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “The old ladies will love your red shoes.”

Linda's doing her best. “Red shoes are big in Poland. There's even a polka called ‘The Red Shoes.'”

“Yeah,” Janice says, “but we don't play it.”

Already the street's filling up with people, and of course we've got to run right into that rat pack of girls Janice hangs around with, and they kind of surround her, all of them talking at once, and I'm going, “Oh, for God's sake.” Even before we left the house, we were late.

“Have you seen my family?” Janice is asking everybody, and nobody has.

Linda and I keep pushing her along until we get to the flatbed. The rest of the band's already set up and ready to go. Mary Jo's plunked down in a folding chair, talking to some other old ladies standing there at the side—Mrs. Lewicki and Mrs. Bognar and I don't know who all—and you'd think somebody as big as Mary Jo would know better than to wear a white blouse with red polka dots, wouldn't you?

Patty and Bev have got themselves flaming red T-shirts, and they're slurping back the coffee and bouncing around like a couple Ping-Pong balls and, you know, getting their adrenaline levels kicked right up into the ozone layer. Bev keeps yelling at everybody about what a beautiful day it is, and Patty yells back, “Yeah, it sure beats playing the tablas in the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

Janice gets up on the flatbed, and she's still asking, “Hey, has anybody seen my family?” Everybody else is getting ready to play, and she's just standing there staring out over the crowd. She hasn't even got her clarinet out yet. “Come
on
, Janice,” Linda hisses at her.

Father Obinski comes floating up to my side. “Is everything okay here, Jimmy?”

“Absolutely, Father, you bet.” And I'm yelling, “Hey, sound check!”

Mary Jo squeezes out a few bars of “The Helena Polka,” and she's coming through real strong and clear, and Patty and Bev go BANGA-BANGA-BANG, BONG BONG, and my sister blows that Marion Lush riff—do, mi, so, tada yata yata ya—and everything's just dandy. Janice opens up her clarinet case and takes out this folded-up piece of paper. I figured it was a set list or the words for some polka she hadn't memorized yet or something like that. I didn't think too much about it, to tell you the truth—but she just stands there staring up the street, slapping that piece of paper against her leg. “Hey, sing something,” I yell at her. She just looks at me. I'm going, “Come on, kid, I gotta check your mike.”

She walks up to the mike and goes, “Test, one, two, three, four,” and Linda just glares at her. Janice puts that piece of paper back in her clarinet case and gets her clarinet out and puts it together, and meanwhile everybody else is waiting, you know, and fidgeting around. They were supposed to open up with “Zosia,” but Janice says, “I don't feel like singing yet. Let's do Eddie Zima's.”

My sister's usually a fairly patient person, but she just loses it. “Oh, for God's sake, Janice,” she's screaming, “don't be such a prima donna!”

“I
said
I didn't want to sing yet.”

Well, that screws up the order of songs they had worked out, and they're all looking at Mary Jo—like she's the oldest and wisest member of the band and she should fix everything. Mary Jo just shrugs. She could care less. “Sure we'll do Zima's,” she says, and she steps up to the mike and makes the same dumb little speech she always makes, and then she counts off the tune. Linda's so mad she fluffs a few notes.

Nobody was planning on opening with that polka, and you could hear the band having to work to pull themselves together. But Janice was soaring along like she didn't have a care in the world, which was kind of surprising, you know, as weird and uptight as she was. I think with her clarinet playing she could always just put it on automatic pilot.

A few people started dancing, and a whole bunch of Central kids came up and planted themselves right in front of the flatbed—Janice's rat pack, naturally, but a whole lot of other kids too. That Italian kid Tony was one of them. He stands there with his dark eyes shining up at Janice—looking at her like she's the Blessed Virgin—and it's crazy, but all of a sudden I'm so jealous it's like somebody's turned an acetylene torch on me, and I'm thinking, whoa there, Koprowski, get a grip.

Lots of people are coming up to the flatbed—drawn to the music—and here comes Janice's younger brother, Mark, with his out-the-pike girlfriend. The band finishes off the tune, and Janice hunkers down to talk to Mark, and I drift over in case I should need to get my two cents in, and Janice is going, “Where on earth
are
they?”

Mark kind of shrugs. “They're just sitting out in the backyard drinking tea.”

Janice just can't believe it.
“Drinking tea?”

Meanwhile, Linda's hissing at her, “Janice, Janice!” because she wants to get their next tune going.

You can see that Mark's not real pleased to have to break the news. “Yeah, Jan,” he says, “you know how they are. The lunch that goes on forever, and they decide to have some tea, and— Well, they're all just sitting out there, and Dad said it was so pretty in the backyard he didn't feel like moving. He said to tell you they'd come down later. You do play again later, don't you?”

“Matko Boża!”
Janice says. I'd never heard her do that before. She
never
dropped Polish into her English like that, and it really startled me.

She stands up and she goes, “Oh, I am sooooooo mad!”

Linda's about having a bird. “Come
on
, Janice!” And Janice turns around and gives her
the look
. Then she marches over to the mike and she takes it out of the stand just like some rock singer on television. She doesn't give the band a hint what she's going to do. She walks over right to the edge of the flatbed so she's looking down at all her classmates from Central, and she just starts belting out a tune she learned off one of those records in Bob Pajaczkowski's basement—
“A nasza kompania tam w okopach stoi, tam w okopach stoi, tam w okopach stoi. I pisze do Cara że się go nie boi, że się go nie boi, hopaj siup!”

Those words go back to the good old days when we were always making trouble for the Russians—like, “Our company stands there in the trenches and writes to the Czar that we're not afraid of him, hey, hey!” And, yeah, I'd got them a good clean sound system all right—and loud. They probably heard Janice all the way down in Millwood.

I don't think they'd rehearsed that polka more than a couple times, but what's the band going to do but come in with her? They hit the chorus, and BANG, they're all of them right there, and you know what? They've never sounded better. “Yeah!” Patty yells. And then everybody's singing the chorus—I mean everybody in the band and half the people on the street, because it's one of the great old polkas and everybody knows it—
“Hopaj siupaj hopaj siupaj hopaj siupaj, dana—”

You talk about your right tune at the right time, hell—all of a sudden everybody's dancing the polka all up and down the street for two blocks, and Father Obinski gives me a big grin because all you've got to do is hear Janice's voice come belting through the PA system and you just know that everybody's going to have a real good time at the street fair.

*   *   *

The girls played a long set—over an hour—and everybody and their dog was saying to me, “Hey, what a great band.”

They finished up, and immediately Janice was mobbed by those Central kids and they whisked her off somewhere. I mean she was a real celebrity, and naturally she'd go off with her friends—that's what high school kids do, right?—and I'm left standing there by the flatbed with my sister. Linda wants to hear over and over that she played okay and the band played okay and everything was okay. “What's with Janice?” she says, “God, she was a pain. You forget sometimes she's a teenager, and then all of a sudden she's just so awful.”

“Yeah, but she's always great on stage.”

“Oh, yeah. She's always great on stage.” I could see that Linda had a lot more she wanted to say on the topic of Janice but she was restraining herself. “You want to go to Mass?” she said.