Lost Birds

by Putrius, Birute

  “You and I should go out somewhere before you leave.” He smiled and took my hand and held it.

  “Yeah, sure,” I answered, but I knew I wouldn’t go. While we had been friends since childhood, and I liked him, I wasn’t interested in anything remotely romantic with him. When he complained that the paint smell made him dizzy, I opened the kitchen door, and we moved into the living room. He took the curved pipe out of his pocket, packed it with tobacco from his pouch, and lit it, filling the room with a sweetish smell. Then the stories started, as he told us how Lithuania was so run down after thirty years of Communist repression. “The grayness of Soviet life is so depressing, and the lines for food are endless. Oh my God, I don’t know how our relatives do it.”

  We drank a shot of vodka to the bleakness of it all. Then he proposed we toast to the sadness of our poor imprisoned Lithuania. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Paul said. “The Soviets wouldn’t let me visit Lithuania unless I took a mandatory swing through Moscow first and then only five days in Vilnius at an Intourist hotel. My relatives had to come to see me because I wasn’t allowed to leave the capital, as if I would infect the populace with my Western ideas. And the worst part was the constant sense of being watched. My hotel room was bugged, I had an Intourist guide everywhere I went, and, as if that wasn’t enough, I was constantly followed by the KGB. It was like some bad Bond movie.”

  “Horrible,” said Pete.

  Vida and Jonas came in with black bread and Lithuanian sausages from the deli in our old neighborhood and announced that they had brought someone from the Amber Tavern. “Hey, look who we found on Sixty-Ninth Street.” It was Felius the Poet, the old skirt-chaser who brought every subject back to the most basic one—sex. His hair had thinned, and his ears had grown, but his smile was still infectious. He was always ready to party and have a good time.

  “Ladies, your salvation is at hand,” he said, eyeing Vida and me. “Felius is here to save you from your repressive Catholic upbringing.” He laughed his sniggering laugh, his speech already slurred, and then he saw Paul. “Hey, is it true you went to Lithuania?”

  “Yup.” Paul poured a shot of vodka.

  Felius belted down the shot and said with narrowed eyes. “So, you’re probably working for the CIA, right?”

  “Nonsense,” Paul barked a staccato laugh. “Why do you say that? Is it because I finally got permission to go to Lithuania?”

  Felius shrugged, smiling with one side of his mouth as he looked Paul over. He wasn’t buying it.

  We finally brought out the potatoes with dill and salted herring and put them on our thrift-store table. We tossed back the vodka and chased it with the food. Before long, Connie was drunk, laughing about the good old days when she was still single. “God, Irene, we used to have so much fun, remember? We were the wild girls.” Her words were slightly slurred.

  “Yeah, Connie. We had a lot of fun.” Saying that made me feel ancient.

  Joey tried to talk Connie into not drinking any more, but she wasn’t having it. She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “He wants to start a family, but I’m not ready yet, Irene. I’m too young to be a mother.” Her breath tickled my ear. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” she asked, hugging me tightly.

  “Sure, Connie.” I said, but wasn’t really sure of anything. Somehow it seemed that my friends’ lives were setting like Jell-O in a mold, but my life was as unformed as an endless fog. Now here we were—our old gang of Lithuanian refugees, partying on the North Side of Chicago, far away from our South Side lives, still hanging on to one another for solace.

  Paul poured me another shot of vodka and toasted Vida’s upcoming wedding. I drank it down. The paint fumes and the vodka had gone to my head, making me a bit tipsy. I noticed that my vanilla candle had melted the styrofoam of the dinosaur’s pelvic bones. I blew out the candle and walked over to the front windows and opened them, gulping down fresh air. It was late and the street was quiet. A cool wind blew off the lake, stirring the branches of the maple trees. The streetlights cast an amber glow, and through the tree branches, I could see the moon glowing behind a thick batting of clouds like a bandaged eye. The row of high-rises along Sheridan Road stood like phalanx along the lakeshore, blocking the never-ending wind. Someone was cooking cabbage, and the smell wafted up to the window, reminding me of home.

  At what point did my life begin to diverge from the path of friends and family? I felt adrift, filled with doubts about my future.

  As I looked out the window, a gentle rain started to fall outside, and a sadness fell over me. I was leaving my tribe. Opening the window a bit wider, I sat looking out over the city, and for a brief moment that feeling returned, as it had so often in the last weeks— the shock of fear as the cool blade of the knife pressed against my neck. As I touched my throat, feeling for the small scar, and closing my eyes, I could feel that familiar trembling start deep inside.

  Vida came over to the windowsill and sat down, putting her arm around me. We had all had too much vodka. “Oh, Irene, I will miss you so much.” She kissed me on the cheek. “What will I do without you?”

  “You’ll have a husband, remember?” I smiled sadly, realizing how much I’d miss her too.

  “True, but he’ll never replace you,” she said, taking my hand.

  “Thanks,” I said, tears gathering, “I’ll miss you too, Vida.” I was grateful when our attention turned to the kitchen, where Paul was teaching our friends a bawdy Lithuanian song. It kept me from crying in earnest as Vida and I turned to look at them in the tiny Chinese-red kitchen, glowing in the candlelight, warm and cozy. Vida held my hand tightly, telling me we’d be friends forever. And with a deep sigh, I smiled sadly, already painfully nostalgic for what I was about to lose.

  The Pull of Home

  Ona Janulis, 1987

  As her plane approached O’Hare, Ona Janulis-Tucker watched the city come into view. There it was again, Chicago—former hog butcher to the world, the hub of the nation’s railroads, and home to the largest group of Lithuanians outside of Lithuania, and Ona’s recently mugged mother was one of them. Guilt sat in the seat between Ona and her daughter, Amy. But even the heavy burden of guilt couldn’t get Ona to move back to Chicago, and her mother refused to move to Portland.

  At O’Hare, Ona rented a car and drove the Eisenhower Expressway to the Dan Ryan into the heart of the South Side, where she had grown up, showing Amy places of interest along the way.

  “There’s the Prudential Building, where your grandmother used to clean offices when she first came to America. Here’s the University of Illinois, where I went to school,” she said, pointing to her old Chicago Circle campus. “And this used to be the stockyards where your grandfather worked. And that neighborhood was called ‘Back of the Yards’ because it was downwind from the stockyards. The smell would make you gag.” The deeper they got into the South Side, the more depressing it looked—old blue-collar neighborhoods dominated by gritty brick factories and the rusting equipment alongside them, the railroad boxcars that stopped traffic at the crossings, the broken-glass-strewn empty lots they used to call prairies, and the ubiquitous neighborhood taverns.

  Even though the city was home to her family and friends, Ona had never liked Chicago. The South Side had once been filled with ethnic European pockets: the Irish, the Polish, the Bohemians, the Italians, and the Lithuanians. And the black neighborhood that moved a little closer every year, like a slow tide. From what Ona could tell, the tide had recently swelled to engulf her old neighborhood and, from what she could see, there were other newcomers from Asia and Central America as well.

  Her parents had moved into their house on Talman Street the day Stalin died in 1953, the year it had rained for weeks. The stately elms that had once arched over the street had since been thinned by Dutch elm disease, so that now the block look shabbier, like a derelict with lost teeth.

  When Ona pulled up in front of the
brick two-flat, she knew her mother was behind the lace curtains waiting for her. In fact, she knew her mother had been waiting for her to come home ever since she had gone to Oregon for graduate school, hoping Ona would move into the flat upstairs to take care of her in her old age. She hated to think of her widowed mother so vulnerable and alone. Stepping out of the car, she looked up at the clouds floating by like tattered gauze.

  After dragging their suitcases up the concrete stairs of the front stoop, Ona finally collapsed into her mother’s soft embrace, suddenly realizing how much she had missed her.

  “Why do you have to live so far away?” her mother asked, turning to embrace Amy.

  “Labas, bobute.” Amy knew a handful of Lithuanian words and “hello, grandma” was part of her repertoire. Amy spent part of each summer with her Lithuanian grandmother, and she loved her softness and gentleness. She often asked her mother why her bobute seemed so lost in America, why she spoke such broken English, and why she had to live alone. Ona had no answers for her daughter, only the familiar choking guilt.

  Agota took them to the bedroom and folded back the flowered bedspreads. “Your old room’s waiting for you.” Ona’s bedroom still had the old fifties blond furniture, covered with crocheted doilies. It even smelled the same. The sunlight came in through the window at the same slant like a fat wedge of yellow cheese.

  That evening her brother, Jonas, his wife, Vida, and their eight-year-old son, Alex came to dinner. Ona noticed that Vida had gained about forty pounds. They talked of old days, the picnics at Ragis farm and dancing under the stars, of Easter processions, scout camps, weddings, and funerals. All of this was so that they could knit together for a time, remember their shared history and give it to Amy and Alex so that they could be part of the tapestry of their past. That was what families did.

  Before Vida left, she invited Ona over for a get-together with her old friends.

  “Am I invited?” joked Jonas. “I’ll bring the guys.”

  Vida choked out a laugh. “Are you kidding? Heck, no, this is a girls’ night out. I’ll invite Connie and Milda. Too bad Irene’s in LA,” she said, hugging Ona as she said her good-byes.

  After Amy had gone to sleep, Agota poured her daughter a last cup of tea and asked her about her husband, Richard. “Why didn’t he come?”

  “He had to work.” The lie slid off her tongue so easily. The truth was, Richard was having an affair. She hadn’t told anyone about this, wanting some distance from him to think about what to do next. A physical distance was more tolerable than the emotional distance that had grown between them. It was almost a relief to find out about the other woman. Strangely enough, it didn’t upset her as much as she’d thought it might. It felt more like lancing a painful boil.

  “Too bad,” said her mother, offering Ona another slice of her homemade lingonberry coffee cake.

  “Maybe next time,” Ona lied again, staring into her cup as if it would tell her why each year her husband felt more like a stranger. She taught her English classes while he taught his psychology classes. Each night she slept close to her edge of the bed, not even wanting to touch him. For a long time, she had wondered why they had so little to talk about. Now, it seems, there was an answer.

  On Sunday, her mother insisted they go to Mass at Nativity. Ona wondered if the nuns who taught her had retired or left the convent. When they entered the church, it was almost empty, only a few gray heads here and there. The priest droned on in the front while Ona’s mind drifted to her past. This was where she’d had her First Communion, where she’d gotten married. After Mass, she was happy to see Irene’s mother, Mrs. Matas.

  “Ona, how good to see you, my dear. It reminds me of the old days when all of you girls were still living in Chicago. But children grow up and go on to have their own lives. You’re all young and educated and have your eyes set on better homes and schools in the suburbs. Where are you living now? I forget.”

  “I live in Portland, Oregon.”

  “So far?”

  Ona shrugged helplessly and smiled, thinking that Mrs. Matas’ daughter Irene now lived in LA.

  Mrs. Matas turned to Ona’s mother. “Someone told me you were mugged. Is that true?” She took Agota’s hand in hers.

  Agota raised her eyebrows, remembering her alarm. “Right on the corner, near my house. They grabbed my purse, and when I started screaming, they pushed me down. I’m lucky I didn’t break a bone.”

  “How awful. I tell you, these colored gangs are just terrible. I’ve heard that Mr. Vitkus’ car was stolen, and someone said that a girl was raped in an alley behind Western Avenue. It’s getting more and more dangerous around here. The businesses are moving to the suburbs.” Mrs. Matas shook her head, looking around.

  “They weren’t colored,” Agota said flatly. “They were Lithuanian. The new ones who came after Gorbachev declared glasnost. I think they’re with the Russian mafia. Didn’t you hear about the Lithuanian prostitutes who were arrested on Sixty-Ninth Street last month?”

  “No, it can’t be true.” Mrs. Matas sucked in her breath.

  “You know, it was two colored boys who helped me out. Good boys from Kennedy-King College. They chased those hooligans down until they caught them. I was screaming the whole time.”

  “What’s the world coming to?” Mrs. Matas shrugged. “Who would think that your own countrymen would do such a thing? And that those colored boys helped you.”

  Agota reassured her friend. “Oh, not all the new Lithuanians are like that, but you know what the Americans say about a rotten apple in every barrel.”

  Bushel, thought Ona, but didn’t correct her mother.

  Agota continued, “Most of the Lithuanians coming in this third wave of immigrants are good people, not exactly like us because they grew up under the Soviets, but good people nonetheless.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Mrs. Matas, somewhat relieved.

  Ona interrupted, taking her mother by the arm. “Well, we better go, Mama. I’m sure Amy is hungry.” She wanted to cry, thinking of her mother being attacked. What would she do if her mother died?

  “Ona, is this your daughter?” Mrs. Matas asked, opening her purse to pull out a dollar. “Buy yourself some chocolate, dear.” She snapped her purse shut and looked around to see if there were any Mafia types hanging around before leaving.

  As they walked to the Little Touch of Kretinga restaurant, Ona noticed that many of the stores were boarded up. Silvia’s House of Beauty was now Darlene’s and it advertised hair weaving. The Sinclair station was gone, but Ona was happy to see that their old hangout, the Amber Tavern, was still standing.

  At the restaurant, Ona ordered potato dumplings and cold borscht. Her mother ordered potato kugelis and sauerkraut soup, and Amy ordered the combo plate so she could taste all of the Lithuanian specialties. They greeted Felius the Poet, who sat in a maroon vinyl booth at the other end of the restaurant. Mr. Jankus smoked his cigar at the counter while Antanas Balys paid his bill at the cash register. This was a favorite hangout for all of the regulars of the Amber Tavern.

  Amy ate her cold borscht and was left with a red mustache. “Why don’t you come live with us, bobute? It’s much safer there. No one robs you.”

  “I don’t know Portland, Amy. All I know is Lithuania and this little corner of Chicago. You’ll see when you get older how hard it is to change or start all over again.”

  “Then why don’t you go back to Lithuania?” Amy asked, as if all of life’s answers were simple.

  “Some of my friends have visited Lithuania. But I’ll tell you, Lithuania is not the same and neither am I. And besides, how could I leave my children and my granddaughter here in America?” They all stared out the window at the four black girls playing double Dutch across the street. They saw Mrs. Gudauskas slowly wheeling her grocery cart behind her.

  “When I grow up, I’m going to visit your old home in
Lithuania,” said Amy.

  Agota smiled. “You know what? Maybe I’ll take you there myself.” She brightened. “That’s a wonderful idea. Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  Sunday evening, Ona drove to Vida’s house. All of her old friends who hadn’t moved out of state now lived in the suburbs. Connie O’Connor, who used to be such a hippie, now looked hopelessly middle class. And Milda, who was always such a mouse, now resembled a smart ad for Barneys. Milda looked Ona over and smiled. “I see life has agreed with you. You look great!” Ona smiled, hoping her regular workouts had kept her looking fit, at least. She never wanted to be called “Fat Ona” again in her life. The wine was opened, and soon they began to talk about the old days and all of their friends.

  “Whatever happened to Irene?” asked Ona.

  “She’s still in LA, married a producer,” said Milda.

  “What does he produce?”

  “Nothing much, from what I hear. Irene’s not happy.”

  Vida shook her head and laughed. “But that Irene was something else in high school, huh?” she marveled.

  “God, I only wish I could have had half the nerve and guts she had,” Ona said, as if reproaching herself. “I would have had a different life.”

  “I wonder…” said Connie dreamily.

  Ona looked puzzled at Connie’s vague reply. “Well, you should know, Connie. You were right there in the trenches with her.”

  Connie looked stricken. “Yeah, it’s true, and I miss it to this day. Irene was such a blast.”

  As the evening wore on, Connie and Milda got their coats and said their reluctant good-byes, explaining that children were waiting at home.

  Vida and Ona continued drinking. “You know,” Ona confessed, “I guess I always wanted to be like Connie or Irene.”