Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  Residential homes line both sides of RSVP’s block, and across the street is the Emily Andrus House, where, in all the seasons except winter, a large lawn is dotted with old ladies in metal walkers moving like three-toed sloths. It was Leila Post Montgomery—widow of the breakfast cereal magnate C. W. Post (Grape-Nuts, Fruity Pebbles)—and her mother, Emily Andrus, who opened the Andrus Residence about sixty years ago, after visiting some friends at a nursing home. The mother-daughter breakfast cereal heirs returned home devastated and in tears, shocked by the poor caregiving, so Leila and her mom started the project “to provide and maintain a secure, attractive, independent residential environment for self-sufficient senior ladies of our community.” The place opened in 1924. One winter, Mom made Sabina volunteer there, so my sister decided to start up a Jazzercise class at Emily Andrus. Every summer, Mom had me deliver strawberry shortcakes to the elderly ladies once the berries were in season, and I’d catch my sister in her brightly colored leotard, leading the women on a slow walk around the building. Sabina called it the “finale” of their workout.

  I’ve been working here since mom opened RSVP, and this is the first year I am getting compensated in cold, hard cash. This year, I’m no longer considered a volunteer. I get $6.50 an hour, while the boys still get paid in 3 Musketeers candy bars and Beef Jerky from the C-Store down on Emmett Street.

  “Your keys are in the van, Mom,” I say as she grabs her colossal purse off the wooden peninsula covered with a batch of crème brûlées waiting to get their sugary little tops scorched. “Where are you guys going?”

  “Subway,” she says, rushed. “Or McDonald’s or Arby’s or whatever indecent place the boys choose.” It’s lunchtime now, time for Jules and Marek to get paid for half a day’s work of lawn care with the sort of junk food that Mom detests.

  “How come Sabina isn’t taking them?” I ask, but I already know. It’s because when Mom found Sabina’s birth control pills last week, she went bananas and grounded Bean for the rest of her life. No car, no phone, no social outings, and definitely no boyfriend as long as Bean is living under our parents’ roof. After the contraceptive incident, the only liberty Beanie was allowed was when she ran errands for Mom, like taking us to and from violin lessons or the math tutor or work. But then last night Bean got banned from even doing that. She was driving Jules and Marek home after a long day at the restaurant. The boys were slaphappy and making toilet noises in the backseat, and my sister told them that unless they learned to shut their pie holes, they’d be walking the rest of the way home. But that only got them more excited, and they made more noises, even real farts this time, thanks to the Cheetos and Beef Jerky, so she pulled the car over to the side of the road and made Jules and Marek get out, which they did. Later, Bean told Mom and Dad that she had honestly just planned on making just one loop around the block, but somehow she reached Morgan Road and forgot. It wasn’t until two hours later, after Mom drove past Jules and Marek on 6 Mile Road, covered in sweat and mosquito bites and flagging down cars, that she brought the boys home and reminded Sabina that she’d forgotten something.

  “I drive,” Mom says.

  “I can take them for you! Can I drive?” I suggest, and hold my breath.

  “You don’t even have a certification,” she says. “If you got caught by police, poor your soul.”

  “But Dad lets me drive all the time!”

  “In the driveway, Dad does,” she says. “And I am not your daddy.”

  “Fine,” I sigh. “Then do you think you can pretty pretty please pick me up a Charleston Chew on your way back?”

  “Seventy cents,” she says in a grave and precise manner and extends her flattened palm.

  I watch Mom as she leaves the kitchen and gets in her Chrysler minivan. She turns on the engine, shifts gears, then reverses halfway around the shrubbed island in the middle of the asphalt driveway where Jules and Marek are weeding. The two cousins emerge from the bushes like teenage lions, yawning, and I push open the squeaky porch door that leads out back, pull out an empty plastic cassette tape holder from my back pocket, and sit down on the moist concrete porch steps. As my brother and cousin slide open the side door of the van, I roll a single cigarette out of the case and into my hand. As the van door slams shut, I pinch the tube of tobacco between my thumb and forefinger and place it on my lips, and away they go.

  Now it is late September and I am almost seventeen years old. I am peeling off shrimp husks and then gliding the pointed tip of a bamboo skewer down their backs and scooping out their intestines. One shitty blue thread after another and my heart just isn’t in it.

  After I finish the rest of this batch that Mom’s assigned me, the shrimp will be rinsed under a faucet and dried, brushed with extra-virgin olive oil and specks of garlic and dill, pierced with kabobs, and assembled on a large barbecue grill, then eaten before the wedding cake and after Uncle Matteo’s second sacrament of marriage.

  Jules walks into the kitchen and over to my station. “Hey, Bubba Gump,” he says. He reaches into the sink, pulls shrimp shell out from the basin drain, and holds it in front of his eyes. “Holy Crap, did this guy have one huge last meal,” he says. Jules is fourteen years old, and soon I’ll be teaching him how to peel and devein these little bastards.

  “Can I help you with something, Turd Ferguson?” I ask.

  “Mom told me to tell you that after you finish the shrimps, you need to get cleaned up.”

  “What time is everyone getting here?”

  “We have to be ready at four o’clock, so hurry up, scrub,” Jules says, dropping the shell back in the sink. “And by the way,” he says, turning before leaving the room, “Mom’s not in a good mood.”

  This morning, when Dad dropped me off at the restaurant, I found Mom on her hands and knees, washing the floor and muttering.

  “What’s going on, Mom?” I asked.

  “US of Shit!” she said. “That is what is going on.” Mom told me that her bid for a liquor license had been rejected yet again, and that tonight’s server had checked himself into an alcohol rehab clinic and she had no one on her wait staff to cover tonight. “All this before ten in the morning. I guess I’ll be serving dinner myself?”

  I knew she was overwhelmed. I had recently been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which Mom suggested was an excuse for people with low self-discipline, and she had already missed two of Julian’s football scrimmages because of having to work overtime. “I don’t have enough hands for tonight,” she cried. But in her own secret language, I knew she was telling me more than the obvious. It wasn’t her staff. It wasn’t the liquor license or the football or my lack of focus and declining math grade. It was her brother.

  A month ago, Uncle Matteo phoned to tell Mom he was getting married. His girlfriend, Vladka, was pregnant, and they’d set the date of the wedding for September. In his phone call, Uncle Matteo had requested that the wedding be at RSVP, and that Mom do him the honor of catering the reception.

  This was a month ago and the wedding is tonight, and I don’t understand why she is doing it for him.

  “He just doesn’t get it,” Mom said. “You have a duty and you do it. I don’t know why I hire him in the first place.”

  “Mom, it’s not a big deal. I can be your server tonight,” I said.

  “No, no. I just do it myself. I do all dis on my own,” she sighed. “I pull myself up by my boots and I make my own living and I still get stuck pulling up slacks of everyone else. People here just abandon ship whenever they feel like it. Americans just do not get it,” she cried.

  “I’m American, Mom. Do I get it?” I asked.

  “This country is a McDonald’s culture,” she continued, talking past me, “and this country is just eating me out!” She dipped her rag back into the bucket of soapy water, and I didn’t correct her.

  I toss the bowl of shrimp shells into the garbage disposal, and flip the s
witch. The blade pulverizes the skeletal remains, making a noise like boots crunching dried leaves, then I turn off the machine and go get cleaned up for the ceremony.

  In this particular memory, my mother is forty-seven years old, with perfectly straight teeth, tomato-red nails, and short-trimmed hair. She looks like a pixie with curves. She has a voluptuous bottom that rounds like a McIntosh apple and squishy, munificent breasts that give all her necklaces the appearance of being impeccably placed. My mother is not tall; she wears sleek dresses with high-heeled shoes and an apron when she’s working. Whenever she laughs, it is a long-lasting, satisfying explosion, but lately she hasn’t seemed so happy. She’s been racing, and her words are prickly and staccato. She is often hurried and tense; ever since she started cooking professionally, she has seemed that way, as if there is a tightness in her that will not break.

  xyx

  The story always begins outside of the story:

  My mother’s childhood home was a small house in Maków, something that looked like it belonged to the set of The Sound of Music. In photographs, the house looks edible—a rustic, graham-cracker brown A-frame built of rough-cut lumber with a red-shingled roof, and sugar-white trim.

  My mother’s father, Karol, was a protective, defensive and an oversexed grump. The man was embittered, but he had his reasons. He had left his family to set off on his own when he was only fourteen; and when Communism engulfed Poland, the man just gave up. He excused himself from the principles of public decency and civic responsibility, and in time, my grandfather got to be as crooked as a do-it-yourself haircut. In time, this bled into his home life. When he wasn’t lying on the sofa or yelling at his transistor radio (a radio that he’d clandestinely tuned to Radio Free Europe each night), Karol was with another woman.

  As a little girl, it’s not something my mother could even talk about. It wasn’t so much forbidden, just simply outside the realm of her comprehension. It wouldn’t be until the road rolled out behind her that she would be able to look back and understand the peculiar habits of her father in his little kingdom, and the family’s curious acquiescence. Not until she was a grown woman and her parents had taken their reasons to their own cold graves could she begin to make sense of it all. Nowadays, and with an air of sad resignation, my mother diagnoses her father as bipolar or manic-depressive. Other times, she pins him as a male chauvinist or an alcoholic. The labels take turns.

  I can see my young mother trying to make things right, helping her mother gather the empty glasses sucked dry of mulled wine and the babka-smeared plates that were left scattered about their home. I can imagine the look of calm on my grandmother’s face change to pity, then pity to anger, then anger to sadness. Mom whispers, “It’s not your fault.” She’s old enough to understand the reasons of her father’s behavior but too young to grasp the consequences.

  She called her daddy’s mistress the “Unofficial Official.” He dragged my young mother to the Unofficial Official’s home during their daylight trysts, whereupon he explained to her that they were conducting political discussions. On the days when my grandmother Henrika was at church, Karol brought the Unofficial Official home with him, where the two of them toasted from the glasses my grandmother herself had washed earlier in the week. They ate the cakes my grandmother had baked for their three children. Behind closed but unlocked doors, the Unofficial Official unlatched the buttons on the shirts that Henrika, despite her rheumatoid arthritis, had starched and ironed earlier in the week.

  The dissolution of their cursed marriage was slow and excruciating. First it was Karol’s frustration, then his anger that led to the couple’s estrangement. Then it was separate beds, separate bedrooms, separate worlds. Finally, when Karol brought the Unofficial Official to little Maria’s First Holy Communion mass, Henrika packed her bags and moved permanently into the family’s cottage up in the Tatra Mountains, where she retreated to her own private world to obscure all her husband’s darkness and deception.

  My young mother also avoided her father and brothers, who sided with Karol. Maria was devoted to her mother. But by the time Maria was grown and left for college in Kraków, Henrika’s fingers and toes were as twisted as ginger roots. In sync with the breakdown of her marriage, my grandmother’s rheumatoid arthritis took control over the rest of her body like a painful invasive species. She could barely walk. She was crippled. Unemployed. And just like the government he despised, Karol withheld and controlled their money. Henrika was helpless. And then suddenly, while my mother was away at school, her mother died.

  I can see my mother arriving at the damp Maków station: her brown hair springs loose and free as she tumbles down the steps and leaps onto the platform before the train comes to a complete stop. In her mind she’s rewinding and replaying the transcription of the morning’s telephone call: Come home immediately. She is dying. Go straight to the hospital.

  It’s not supposed to happen this way. They have a plan. “Mother,” she had promised, “when I am awarded my master’s, I will take you far away from here.” They’d already set things in motion, begun executing the plan. A tedious one, but still, it was as simple as a glass of water on a hot day: physics degree, then Kraków. Steeples. Autos. Libraries. Poets. Cobblestone. Freedom. She would make her mother happy again.

  March 3, 1968. With the Communist government limiting the number of people who could live in the larger cities like Kraków, the spiritual heart of Poland, she’d need to earn a government-sponsored position to earn her mother and herself a place in the coveted city. She’d need to make herself employable.

  There has been a lot of saving and working and waiting. She is so close to their ticket out: the final exam for her master’s degree is tomorrow, the last procedure before she will be given the liberties she yearns for. Once this is done, her mother will be waiting on the front porch, bags packed, and the two will finally be able to break free . . . to the cathedrals! St. Peter’s, St. Andrew’s, Church of the Virgin Mary’s Annunciation. The people in Maków sulk to church as if they were on their way to a funeral, but in Kraków the people bring life to the cathedrals.

  But now my mother is running. The distance is about a mile. The sun has gone down; it is cold and dark and raining. Run. She might be racing across a field of edelweiss or forget-me-nots to get to the hospital. Just run. She’s not thinking of the mathematical equations in the schoolbooks sprawled open on her dormitory desk, books as lifeless as the nerves in her mother’s arthritic limbs. She’s not thinking of the past, nor of the future. Nothing. Just the wind and the rain blowing in her face and the sixth-sense knot in her stomach telling her that if she runs fast enough, soon enough she will get an answer. And then, sopping wet, she arrives at the gates of the Mazowiecki Hospital.

  At first, my mother doesn’t notice the expression on the hospital guard as he looks her up and down from the gate. The sight of wet stockings and muddy, heeled leather shoes; a wild, drenched woman standing in the center of a puddle like a soggy, stray cat—that might have done something to him. As she bangs on the window of his booth, the man says nothing, only watches.

  Then something. He speaks. She’s arrived too late. It’s three minutes past hospital visiting hours. This presents an opportunity for him: solicit a bribe. “If you pay me, I’ll let you see your mother,” he spits. But the only thing my mother can gather from her pocket is a soggy handkerchief, her return ticket, and collected rain.

  “Please let me pass,” she begs. “My mother is dying in there.”

  He asks for a better reason.

  With a smeared look of exasperation, my mother pleads. The rain catches her tears and the more she cries, the more satisfied the little man, insulated in apathy, seems to become. Then finally, the last of her energy gone, she turns around and walks home in the frozen lines of rain and the lifeless night, defeated.

  Early the next morning, after staring at the ceiling all night with spring-loaded eyes, the sting of th
e doorbell gets my mother out of bed. A telegram from the hospital: Henrika is getting worse, she should come back and be prepared to say goodbye. Upon arriving at Mazowiecki Hospital for the second time, she finds her mother already dead on a gurney, wrapped in a white sheet in the hospital hallway. And not just dead, but parked in the middle of a lane like a broken-down automobile.

  She will watch the body being lowered into the stiff soil. Her brothers, Matteo and Lolek, will be speechless; Karol will be brooding. The physics department at Jagiellonian University will have already conducted their master’s degree final evaluations without her.

  The next day, my mother will wear black, and again the day after that, and she’ll continue to wear black for another year. After the funeral, my mother will learn she cannot resume her studies until the next year, so she will return to Maków to her mother’s cottage. She will work as its new caretaker, because the men there will not.

  After her mother’s death, after crying herself nearly to the point of dehydration, my mother inherits what’s left: the cottage, the domesticity, and the men.

  She is alone. And without the complex mathematical equations and academic pressure clogging her attention, my mother quietly fills her time with soft, uncomplicated musings: Food. Laundry. Nature.

  With Karol, Matteo, and Lolek off following their own bearings, Maria mashes, marinates, and pours. Inside the cottage, she mixes and spreads, creating a new landscape, an understandable, controlled environment. She builds mountains of sweet potato and pumpkin kale pie, pierogies and sauerkraut, and fields yielding harvests of gołąbki and hunter’s stew.