The Clarinet Polka (67 page)

Eventually we get back to the stage, and Linda finally lets go of her death grip on me, and Mary Jo gives me a big sweaty hug and I can smell that she's already started in on the suds. And then Bev's giving me a hug, and even crazy Patty hugs me. “Well, stud, so tell me,” she says, “how's things these days on the streets of Laredo?”

They were all dressed alike—in white slacks and white shoes and red vests with the Polish eagle embroidered on them and their name, the Polka Sisters—and the minute I'd walked in, I'd registered this tall willowy blonde, and walking toward the back I'd even got to the point of thinking, well, they must have got themselves a new band member Linda never told me about, and damned if it wasn't the same stupid thing I'd done on her sixteenth birthday—you know, not recognizing her—because that tall willowy blonde was Janice. And somehow I'd known who it was the minute I'd laid eyes on her, but I just hadn't
wanted
to know it, if you know what I mean. “Hi, Jimmy,” she says, and I'm so blown away I can't say a word.

Of course I'd expected to feel bad seeing her again, but I hadn't expected to feel that bad. Like I've got a horrible pain in my chest, and my mouth's gone dry, and my stomach's in a knot, and I'm just, you know, stunned. And then, like your basic moron, I say the first thing that pops into my head—“What happened to your pigtails?”

Her hand goes up to her hair like automatic, and she says, “I kept them as long as I could.” Her voice sounds hurt or something—I don't know what it sounds like—and she just looks at me with those huge blue eyes. It's obvious I'm not going to get a hug out of her.

I guess I must have been staring at her. The reason Janice hadn't had much of a figure when she'd been sixteen was that she was never going to be getting much of a figure. Well, she was a little bit curvier, but she was still this tall lean beanpole just like her dad. And it's not like she was wearing gobs of makeup, but in my head she was still sixteen and it was still 1970, and it really startled me, seeing her with that fire-engine–red lipstick a lot of the girls had started wearing again. And it wasn't like her hair was real short. It was down to her shoulders and curly around her face. I don't know one hairstyle from another, but it must have been whatever was big that month at Zarobski's because Linda had the same thing.

And there was something else too—just the way she was standing and looking at me or something—and I couldn't get it. She hadn't changed all that much, and at the same time she'd changed completely—like she was a totally different person. She still looked young, but nobody would think she was a little kid. No, not in a million years would anybody think she was a little kid.

Then she said—to nobody in particular—“Excuse me a minute,” and she just walked away. Real fast. Like she was in a hurry to get somewhere. She walked all the way across the hall and out the door. She hadn't seemed the least bit glad to see me. Well, what the hell had I expected, the way I'd treated her? I was so ashamed, I just can't tell you.

There was this little pause—this little silence with the girls in the band looking at each other—and then they all started talking at once, like, okay, if there's anything weird going on here, we'll yuk it up and cover it right over. Linda's going, “Hey, Jimmy, don't you want to see what your money paid for?” and she leads me over to a table where there's a couple cartons of records, and she pulls one out and hands it to me.

I'm still thinking about Janice, but I'm pretending everything's all right—you know, for my sister—but when I see the cover, I've got to laugh. It is pretty funny. At the top it says “The Polka Sisters Present” and on the bottom “An Old-Time Polish Picnic.” The picture's out at the park. Mary Jo is standing behind a picnic table with a great big grin on her face like she's just yelled, “Bingo!” and the table is crammed with food—
kiszka
and
kiełbasa
and buns and ketchup and relish and chopped onions and sauerkraut, and there's big plates of
pierogi
and
gołąbki
, and a bowl of sour cream, and of course a gigantic pitcher of cold beer. Janice and Linda are standing on one side of the table and Patty and Bev on the other, and they're smiling out at you and sort of pointing at the table like, come on, buddy, dive right in. Mary Jo just looks like Mary Jo, but the girls are dressed up in peasant outfits with the white blouses and the embroidered vests and the flowered skirts and the ribbons and flowers in their hair—they've even got Bev Wright dressed up like that—and they're wearing these white plastic boots to the knee like you'd buy at the El Cheapo Superior out at the mall. “Wow, terrific,” I say, “it's the Polka Dolls.”

“Oh, shut up, Jimmy,” Linda says. And she drops her voice down so Mary Jo won't hear her. “Mary Jo drove all the way up to Pittsburgh to borrow those costumes,” she says. “They were from some folk dance troupe up there or something, and she was so pleased with herself we just couldn't say no,” and she's telling me how much fun it was to pose for that picture because as soon as the photographer got done, they ate up all the food on the table.

I'm standing there talking to my sister and somebody grabs me from behind and lifts me right up into the air. It's Georgie Mondrowski. He's got just huge—your basic man mountain—and he's trimmed his beard, but he still hasn't had a haircut, and his ponytail's halfway down his back. He's going, “Where'd you drop from, asshole?” and I'm patting his big belly and going, “You better start eating a little more, buddy, or you're going to fade right away.” Boy, was I ever glad to see him. And Linda gives my hand a squeeze and says she's got to go warm up. “I still get so nervous,” she says.

Georgie and I walked around the hall and filled each other in on the last few years. They'd started up a Vietnam vets group in Raysburg, and he was real big on that. “None of this VA bullshit,” he says. “It's ours, just us.” And he and some of the guys were doing their vets' trash removal service where, when you call them up, they'll quick as a wink clean out your attic or your garage or whatever, and it wasn't a lot of money but it was better than a sharp stick in the eye, and he was generally feeling better about things. And I was telling him how great everything was out in Texas.

People were starting to come in early to get themselves a good table, so I was shaking everybody's hand. Vick Dobranski and his wife came in, and I was surprised how friendly he was, like I was a long lost son or something, and he told me he wished I was still living in the valley because he was getting old and just couldn't keep on top of the work anymore and a lot of his customers were slipping away from him.

It was touching how everybody seemed so glad to see me, and I kept thinking, hey, this is nice. It's okay to be here. But at the same time I couldn't shake that sick, ashamed feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I kept thinking about Janice. Where the hell had she been going in such a hurry?

Naturally, the minute she came back, I saw her. I'd been watching for her, and I felt—well, like an electric shock when I saw her, like ZAP from all the way across the hall. She'd been in a hurry leaving, and she was in a hurry coming back. She walked straight over to where the band was set up. She walked right past me and Georgie, but I couldn't tell if she saw us. She took her clarinet out of its case and put it together and blew a scale through it and then put it down on this little gadget—I guess a clarinet stand. And I started drifting over in her general direction.

She looked out into the hall, and she couldn't really avoid seeing me. And I gave her a little wave—one of those things you could pretend you didn't notice if, you know, you wanted to play it that way—and she stepped down off the stage like she was killing time, just wandering around, and she ended up passing by close to where I was, and I said, “Hi, Janice,” and she said, “Hi, Jimmy,” and she didn't really stop walking, but she slowed down, and she said, “It's nice to see you. How have you been?” and Georgie gave me a wink and drifted away.

I walked along with Janice, and I said, “I'm good. I'm great. How about you?”

“Oh, I'm good too. Hey, thanks for paying for our record. That was really nice of you.”

“Oh, I was glad to do it. I haven't heard it yet, but it looks like a real nice record. So, ah, Linda tells me you're going out to Brooke—”

“Yeah. I'm a sophomore.”

“You like it?”

“I love it. It's a terrific school. Small, but really a good school. It's so quiet and pretty out there.”

So we drift away from everybody until we bump into the wall, and then we prop it up. You know, just casual as all hell. I'm sweating like a pig, and it's not particularly hot in there.

“You look terrific, Janice,” I say. “You look all grown-up.”

“Thanks. I guess I should be grown-up by now. I'm going to be twenty next month.”

“Yeah, I remember when your birthday is.”

“Yeah. That's right. You would remember. You were at my sixteenth.”

“Yeah, that's right, I was. So how's your family?”

“They're good. They're all good.”

She told me her brother Mark was graduating from Yale in the spring, and he'd done real well there. And John and Anna had a kid—a little boy—and John was just finishing up his Ph.D. And she said, wow, did I ever look like I was in good shape. She'd heard from Linda I was working out like a fiend, and I said, yeah, I was doing that, and I told her about road running. And I don't know why it seemed important to say it to her, but I told her a little bit about AA. I guess maybe I wanted to remind her of how she'd given me that AA talk all those years ago, but if she remembered, she didn't mention it.

“I'm glad you're doing so well,” she said. “We knew you'd make it. We were all rooting for you,” and I gave her the standard-issue AA stuff about one day at a time and turning over your life to a higher power and like that.

I asked her what she was majoring in, and she said history, and I said that figured, and she said she was specializing in modern European history, and I said that really figured, and we both got a little bit of a laugh out of that one. “So, are you going out with anybody?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I've been dating this guy out at Brooke, but I'm not really
going
with him—”

“Yeah? But I thought— Well, Linda told me you were going out with that Italian kid.”

“Oh. Tony. Oh, yeah, I went with him for a long time. But he was always more serious than I was. I kept telling him I was too young to get pinned down, but— So I just had to break up with him. It was really sad. We're still friends. Maybe— I don't know if you can ever be friends with somebody you used to go out with— How about you? You going with anybody?”

“No, not at the moment. I mean I have been going out with some nice girls and all, but nobody right at the moment.”

There was a little pause and then she asked me if I liked Texas, so I launched into my Texas-is-paradise routine. I must have gone on for ten minutes without taking a breath. I mean, the Austin Chamber of Commerce should have put me on a retainer. And I was telling her what a great airline Braniff was, and how I loved my job, and how I was making real decent money, and how I was just, you know, pretty much happy as a man could be. I listened to myself going on and on, and I just— Well, I felt like an asshole.

She told me she was glad everything was going so well for me, and she asked me how long I was going to be around, and I said about a week. “Maybe we could get together and have coffee or something,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “I'd like that. Call me.”

*   *   *

So that was that, and Janice went back to fooling with her clarinet, and I didn't know what to do. For a while I wandered around talking to people. I was feeling almost exactly the same way you do when you're going into withdrawal—the shakes and the headache and the cold sweat and the sick stomach—and that was just crazy. I didn't know what the hell was happening to me, but all of a sudden I knew I had to get out of there. If I didn't, I was going to drink everything in sight.

I grabbed my jacket and my ten-gallon hat, and I walked straight down to the river. I must have told you how close the church is to the river. The rain had stopped, and it was clearing up a bit, and it wasn't a bad night for February in the Ohio Valley. Just like I'd done a million times before, I stood there and stared at the lights on the Ohio side, and— Well, it sure wasn't Texas. A barge was going by, and it had its big searchlight on, shining on the hills. It was carrying load after load of coal.

You know that line in the Bible—I don't remember where it is, probably in one of the Psalms—about your mouth being full of ashes? That's how I felt, and I thought, well, maybe I'm getting ready for Ash Wednesday early. I was pretty sure if I went back into the parish hall, I was going to drink. So obviously I couldn't go back into the parish hall. Right. So what was I going to do? Go back to the house and watch TV? Boy, that would make for a cheery evening, all right.

But then I thought, no, wait a minute. You're not going to do that. Because I knew what I was coming up against. I was avoiding Step Nine with Janice—just the way I'd been avoiding it for years—and either it means something or it doesn't, and if it means something, then you've got to do it. Even if you don't want to. Even if it's not going to be a barrel of laughs.

So I walked straight back to the church and through the parish hall and up to the stage. I don't suppose they had more than five or ten minutes before they had to start playing.

I said, “Janice, excuse me. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

She just looked at me kind of blank, and then she said, “Sure,” and jumped down off that little stage. We went and stood in a corner.