The Clarinet Polka (68 page)

“I know my timing's lousy,” I said. “I'm sorry. I know you've got to play. And you're probably getting nervous—”

“I don't get nervous,” she said, “but come on, Jimmy, what is it? I don't have a lot of time.”

I was just stammering around like a goddamn fool. “Look— I just wanted to say— When I was drinking, you know— Well, if I ever did any harm to you when I was drinking— Hell, that's bullshit. I know perfectly well I hurt you. I just wanted to say I'm sorry. I mean, I just can't tell you how sorry I am. It's bothered me for years. I mean it's bothered me a whole hell of a lot. I never forgot you, you know, not for a minute, and I'll never forget you— I'll never forget how close we were. And I wanted to ask you to forgive me. If you can. And I just wanted to ask you if there's anything I can do to make amends to you.”

Making that dumb little speech was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life, and I felt like I was hanging out on a limb about ninety miles. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. Then she looked right at me. “You're right,” she said, “you really hurt me.”

“I know I did, Janice. And I'm just sorry as all hell.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that. It means a lot to me.”

Somebody up on the stage—Bev, I think—was yelling, “Janice, come
on
,” and she yelled back really annoyed, “Just a second, okay?” and then she said to me, “Jimmy, I forgave you a long time ago.”

“Thank you,” I said. What else could I say?

“But I'm serious here,” I said. “Is there any way I can make amends to you?”

That was the first time she smiled at me. “I'll think of something,” she said. “Talk to me at the break, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I mean
really
talk to me at the break, okay?”

“Yeah. Right. I will.”

Then she hopped back up on the stage, and I leaned against the wall breathing this huge sigh of relief. My knees felt weak. I felt like this huge weight had rolled off me. It's true what I'd said to her—I'd been carrying that weight around with me for years, and like with a lot of things, I'd never admitted to myself how bad it'd been. I was already starting to feel better—that pain in my stomach was gone—and I thought, just stick with the program, buddy. Because it works.

TWENTY-FOUR

I'm standing by myself off to one side, close to the stage. Mary Jo gets up to the mike. “Hi, folks,” she says, “you all know me. I'm Mary Jo, the polka lady, and these pretty girls behind me here are the Polka Sisters,” and she does her number about their record—how much fun they had making it—and if you want to buy a record, Darlene over there will be happy to sell you one. And Darlene Mondrowski waves her hand in the air so everybody will know where she is.

Then Mary Jo booms out in her great big voice, “But I know what you folks are waiting for. Okay, without further ado, here she is—our own polka princess—Janice.”

Janice steps up to the mike. She gets a good round of applause and she takes a minute to look out at everybody and smile. You never saw anybody so relaxed on a stage. Then she says, “Are we proud to be Polish?”

Well, of course we are, and we let her know it too. And while everybody's clapping and whooping and yelling and whistling and stomping their feet, she yells out, “And if you're
not
Polish, you're sure going to be Polish tonight!” and she grabs up all that energy coming back at her and just flips it right into a polka. Counting in the tune—
“Raz Dwa!”
—and there's Patty and Bev—WHAM—laying down the beat, and Mary Jo squeezing out the intro, and it just yanks everybody up and onto their feet. Like one second there was nobody dancing and the next second the floor's crammed and people are laughing because it feels so good.

Janice is singing that old tune that says we're going to go from town to town, and we're going to dance, and we're going to sing, and we're basically going to party on till the sun comes up—

“Od miasteczka do miasteczka

  
Hej, od miasteczka do miasteczka pojedziemy

  
Będziem tancować i śpiewać

  
I teraz hulać.”

It's a tune you could belt out real easy because it's a real upbeat tune, and I've heard it belted out lots of times, but she's easing it out like honey. Her voice is smoother than I remember—not as raw—but it's still got that wild old-country sound to it like when she was sixteen.

I'm hanging on every damn word—the way she caresses the word
“pojedziemy.”
It's so gentle and so careful—like she just adores that word. All it means is “we will go,” but she makes it sound so mysterious. Like go where? Go to the most wonderful and mysterious place you've ever been in your life.

Yeah, she's a great singer, but it's more than that. It's not like Polish is my language, you know. English is my language. But Polish is the first language I ever spoke, and it's a language I heard all around me when I was growing up, and I haven't heard a word of it all the time I've been in Texas, and it just gets to me somehow—hearing her sing,
“Hej, od miasteczka do miasteczka pojedziemy.”

They kicked into the drive. I was still staring at Janice because I was, I guess you'd have to say, just blown away. Then I heard one of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard in my life. For a second or two, I thought it was a mistake. I'm not kidding you here, I just couldn't believe it could be coming from the band—like I thought somebody must have turned on a stereo by mistake or something. There's these big, fat, round, perfect notes just flowing along so easy, and I can't imagine what it could be. So I start looking around to try to figure out where that wonderful sound's coming from, and I see it's my sister playing the trumpet.

My eyes start streaming with tears. Just that quick, you know, and I can't do a thing about it. I'm so happy for her, I just can't tell you. And Janice is playing her clarinet—like a little bird flying around Linda's round, fat beautiful notes—and the band's laying down this terrific polka groove, Patty driving them along, Mary Jo pushing it with the bellows shake, and so relaxed, you know what I mean? So easy. And Bev is smacking out those big deep bass notes right on the beat where you want to hear them—feel them—if you're dancing. Yeah, well, I can stand there and cry like an idiot, or I can dance.

The nearest girl is Mondrowski's little sister. I don't figure she's going to be selling too many records during the first polka, so I say, “Come on, kid,” and she jumps up just like she was waiting for somebody to ask her, and away we go. I think I've told you that I like to step right along. So I lead her in a big circle around the hall. The band's really smoking.

The minute I start to move, I feel this tremendous energy go surging through me like four million volts, and I'm just swept right up into the whole shebang. It's all so familiar, you know what I mean? All these familiar faces, all these people I've known my whole life, and there I am right smack in the middle of it all again—hell, it feels like I'm in the middle of the whole damn universe—dancing like a madman and laughing with Darlene Mondrowski.

And here comes her big brother, my old friend crazy Georgie, and he's giving Maureen Wierzcholek a hell of a workout, and here's Larry Dombrowczyk with Arlene Orlicki, and she's doing her cute little majorette-style polka the same as always, and here's my mom and dad still taking it kind of easy because, you know, the night's young and if you're one of the older folks, you've got to pace yourself, and I can already feel that goofy frenzy starting to build up, like we're just going to get crazier and crazier right up to the stroke of midnight when everything stops dead—BANG, just like that—because midnight's Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.

Well, Darlene and I danced the hell out of that polka, and we're coming off the dance floor, and we're both of us panting, and she's turned pink as a pig, and we're giggling like a couple fools, and she's headed back to her table in case somebody wants to buy a record, and I'm standing there catching my breath with the sweat just rolling off me, and lo and behold, Franky Wierzcholek is shoving a big plastic cup of beer at me. “Here you go, Koprowski.” Yeah, a nice gesture, well meant, your basic friendly Polak thing to do, and you better believe it looks good, just like a TV ad, foam spilling down the side.

Right out of nowhere—he must have been watching me—here's Georgie Mondrowski. “He doesn't need that, Frank,” he says, and he pushes the beer away. I've never been so grateful.

Georgie wraps his arm around me and guides me over to the table where they're selling setups. “It's on the house, man. You want 7UP, ginger ale—?”

“You got any of that tonic water?”

“You bet.”

We're just grinning away at each other, and I say, “I love you, Mondrowski, you sorry asshole.”

*   *   *

All that running I'd been doing had got me in pretty good shape to dance the polka, and I don't think I missed one that first set—like I was getting my workout right there in the parish hall. And the whole time, I kept thinking about Janice. I mean, it would've been hard not to, hearing her playing and singing and all that. And she'd turned into a great MC, remembering to thank all the million people you've got to thank, like, “This next one's going out for Ethel Warsinski and all the ladies in the kitchen. They're doing a great job the same as always. Let's give them a big hand.”

Another thing surprised me—I didn't know she could be that damn funny. A couple times she really turned the goofball side of herself loose—like on that Walt Solek tune, the “Little Blondie Polka,” she's really hamming it up, prancing around and flipping her hair like
she's
the blond-haired girl in the song, and jumping right to the edge of the stage and giving us these ridiculous looks, like making fun of ditzy blondes, and when she hits the Polish part, she's rolling her
R
's like crazy, and the band's really got that Solek sound down—big bicycle horn mounted on one of Patty's drums, and Janice runs over and goes HONK while Patty hammers away on a cowbell—and me and Mondrowski and some of the other guys are whistling and yelling at them, “Go, go, go!”

Like I've told you, the downside of living in a place like South Raysburg is that everybody knows everybody. But do you know what the upside is? That everybody knows everybody. So who all did I see? Well, Franky Rzeszutko had closed the restaurant for the night because he wouldn't have missed the ball for anything, and there were the Czaplickis from the grocery store, and of course my Babcia Wojtkiewicz grabbing me and crying and talking to me in Polish, saying thank God for bringing me home safe, and I said, “Come on, Grandma, you've got to dance with me.”

Janice's parents were there, sitting at a table right up by the band, and they got in a polka or two before the night was over. Old Czesław seemed real happy to see me and told me I had to drop out to the house while I was home, and I said, yeah, I'd sure do that, and then Arlene Orlicki's little sister yanked me out onto the dance floor.

And I got a chance to swap a few one-liners with all the guys like Burdalski and Dombrowczyk—you know, the boys—and after that first close call, I was ready, so the next time somebody shoved a beer at me, I said, “Thanks, but no thanks, buddy, I'm an alcoholic.” For most people that usually does the trick.

Father Obinski stopped to chat with me for a minute—he was going around trying to have a word or two with everybody—and he was real pleased with the crowd. It was, you know, a fund-raiser for the church. He's not adverse to dancing the polka, so we were both of us kind of panting away, and I was thinking, hey, he's a nice fellow. I don't know why he used to put me off so much—maybe it's just because he wasn't old Father Joe Stawecki.

I loved seeing the tiny girls dancing with each other, or dancing with their daddies, and I was glad there was still a few young families in the parish. Like Dorothy Pliszka—I mean, Dorothy Green—and her little girl, cute as a button, and her daddy was teaching her how to dance. They'd had another kid too, a little boy, and there were a few other kids running around, nowhere near as many as in the old days, but still a few young moms left. And like always, lots of old folks. Old Gene Duda was dancing with the old ladies—my grandma and Patty's grandma—and you should have seen old Mrs. Zembrzuski, Shirley's grandma. She put some of the thirty-year-olds to shame.

So I'm munching a
pączek
and talking to people I've known my whole life, and I'm dancing every dance, and I've stopped thinking about having a drink—I mean, it's just gone completely out of my head. And all of a sudden it hits me. All the time I was in Texas I'd been lonely for Polaks.

Well, the word must have gone out that the Pączki Ball was where it was happening because the hall was packed—as crowded as I've ever seen it—and they opened all the doors because the place was getting kind of steamed. They ran out of tables and chairs, and still the people kept coming, not just people from the parish, but a whole bunch of other folks—a lot of them kids—from one place or another, and whenever they came in, Janice knew who they were and gave them a good welcome. “Oh, here's our friends from Mercersville. This next one's for them—and for everybody else who drove all the way here tonight from the great state of Ohio.”

So we were coming to the end of the first set, and the band kicked into
“Oj Dy Di Daj.”
It's one of those “Come on, girl, give me a kiss” polkas, you know,
“Daj mi, dziewczę, buzi daj,”
and the rhythm in the drive goes like this—