“Me, too,” said Vida. “They got into trouble, but they had so much fun.”
“We were always the good girls, huh?” said Ona.
“Yeah, we were always too scared of the nuns not to do the right thing,” added Vida.
“Yeah, why were we so scared?”
“Because those nuns were intimidating!”
Ona stood up, smiling wickedly. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go over to the Amber Tavern to see who’s left from the old days.” The tavern was where their friends went after dances or parties, but it used to terrify Ona, Vida, and Milda because they were so painfully shy. Even when they finally found the courage to go, they would stand in dark corners watching Irene and Connie laugh, flirt, and dance as if they owned the place.
In half an hour, they were standing at the tavern door waiting to get buzzed in. That was something new, the owners more careful as the neighborhood changed. As Ona entered, she still felt that bit of fizz in her stomach, a learned emotional hiccup, like Pavlov’s dogs.
The bar looked shabbier, the soccer trophies were covered with dust, the Hamm’s beer sign still twinkled over the bar, and the sentimental paintings of Lithuanian village life still hung on the walls. Valentinas Gediminas and Antanas Balys were still sitting like fixtures on their barstools in exactly the same way that Ona remembered seeing them. But the bar also had some new faces—young men and women who’d recently arrived from Lithuania. They were talking to the old crowd —Captain Eddie and Felius the Poet—who the new Lithuanians referred to as the DPs.
Ona said hello to Felius the Poet, who smiled knowingly, as if running into people he hadn’t seen in a decade or two was habitual for him. Everyone from out of town made it to the Amber Tavern sooner or later. It was a way of revisiting the past. This was a place where everyone knew your history, and there was no need to explain yourself. Before long, they fell into the same old conversations, as Valentinas bought the women a drink. Vida put a quarter in the jukebox and chose her favorite old standard, “Blue Tango.” Suddenly the whole bar came alive as men and women coupled up, dancing around the room with fancy footwork, dips, and twirls. Valentinas spun Vida around the room with the familiar flourishes. Felius the Poet asked Ona to dance, raising his eyebrows and giving her a look as if to say—tonight is my lucky night.
Silvia, of beauty shop fame, walked in and squealed with delight. “Look, everyone’s dancing!” Her husband, Captain Eddie, came to greet her, swooping the fleshy woman up in his arms as they cheek-to-cheeked around the room, his eyes closed, both of them smiling, pink-faced and cherubic.
When the door opened, and several young women walked in, Valentinas leaned over to Ona, asking for an introduction to the young ladies, disregarding the gap of thirty years between their ages. These guys were still on the prowl. She laughed at the human comedy unfolding right there in the tavern, and later, when Felius leaned over and boozily whispered in her ear that she was still a gorgeous woman, she appreciated the compliment from one of the old bachelors, a true cavalier.
Later, Ona danced with one of the beefy soccer players who hadn’t yet learned the intricacies of dips and twirls. She’d had a lot to drink and had eaten too much at Vida’s house so that the inept dipping and twirling made her dizzy and sick to her stomach. When the music stopped, she excused herself to go to the restroom. She entered the hallway in the back of the tavern just as Valentinas staggered out of the men’s room. He grabbed her by the arm and said, smooth as velvet, “Not so fast. Where are you going, my darling?”
“I’m going to be sick. Please, let me go,” Ona pleaded.
“Don’t be silly,” he said in mock seriousness as he pulled her closer to him. “We have to get to know one another better.”
Too late. Ona threw up on his tweed sports jacket, while he stood there blinking in disbelief, almost stunned into sobriety. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, apologizing over and over, but Valentinas just stood there with his arms outstretched like a helpless boy. Ona got some wet paper towels from the bathroom and started to mop up his jacket, but no matter how much she wiped, the jacket was a mess. She offered to pay the dry cleaning bill, but he just took it off and went back to the bar.
Vida, good friend that she was, took Ona to the bathroom to wash up, and when they returned to the bar, the magic was gone. Suddenly the club seemed as if it were full of life’s leftovers, trying to recapture the past while the neighborhood underwent a painful transformation.
Still, somehow all of this had been good for Ona’s soul, though she couldn’t have said why. For this short time, she had stepped out of her ordinary life of grading papers, of dull rainy commutes to the college, of absent husbands and vanished dreams. Ona sat down on one of the barstools next to Felius the Poet, who said it was always good to see some of the lost flock return to the old neighborhood. It confirmed his belief in the futility of leaving home.
Ona laughed softly. Back in Portland, she used to feel the pull of home like a powerful undertow. Though she’d always resisted coming home to Chicago, she realized that, in spite of herself, it made her laugh and cry, and most importantly, remember whom she once had been. By comparison, her years in Oregon were like a fog. With a shock, she realized that even after all the years she had lived and worked there, Oregon was never really home. The truth of the matter was, she had left Chicago because everyone here knew her, and it seemed as if what they knew was etched in stone, unchangeable like the Ten Commandments. At the time, she had desperately needed to break free and redefine herself. Now, all these years later, it felt good to be back among those who knew your history, whom you didn’t have to explain yourself to.
She turned to Felius. “You know, you’re right, it’s so nice to be back home.” And quite suddenly, Ona found herself wondering how hard it would be to find a job teaching college English in Chicago. Some clockwork mechanism in her seemed to have shifted ever so slightly, allowing her to see new possibilities. She looked up at the lit Hamm’s beer sign over the bar that had been hanging there forever. “From the land of sky-blue waters,” it said. Her eyes followed the water as it trickled and flowed in waves and then fell over the edge of the waterfall, but then there it was, back again at the beginning. The blue, sunlit water kept on flowing down the same river, no matter what.
The Boarder
Irene Matas, 1987
October in Los Angeles is the month of sulfur and ash. All summer long the sun bakes the hillsides until the grasses and brush turn brown—tinder waiting for a match or a lit cigarette. It wasn’t unusual to turn on the evening news and see the hills burning.
After picking up my son, Nick, from his Salvadoran babysitter, I headed home on the San Diego freeway, trying to avoid the section that had recently been scorched by fire. We stopped at the supermarket and came home to find the light blinking on the answering machine. It was my brother, Pete, in Chicago. My mother had had another stroke. It was really bad this time. She wasn’t recognizing anyone and was paralyzed on one side.
That evening I sat in the rocking chair facing the window with my sleepy boy in my lap, as Los Angeles glittered below us. I hummed an old Lithuanian lullaby, only now it sounded like a dirge. Guilt weighed on me like an anvil. I wanted my own mother, to crawl onto her ample lap and cry.
Why had I stayed in California? Los Angeles was a city of amnesiacs where no one seemed to know how to live anymore. It was one of the most spiritually bankrupt places on the globe. My generation was doing the Great American Dance: step to the left, cut all ties, step to the right, tranquilize with TV, do-si-do, buy more stuff, turn around, pick a new partner, swing ’em round, and start all over again. We were like bad children, blaming our parents for our problems, complaining that we were never going to grow up, and endlessly playing until we trashed the planet. The old gods were dead, the old kings were dead, and we were all so lonely without them as we wandered from sea to shining sea without a clue.
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br /> I had started my dance in the heady 60s and danced myself into exhaustion. The baby boomers loved endless therapy, workshops and workouts, hoping to forestall death, remodeling and refashioning themselves so that they had no idea whom they were any longer. I wasn’t surprised when my marriage failed. Only the act of giving birth had finally woken me, like some mythical sleeping princess. Only when my son was placed in my arms did I finally grow up.
I flew to Chicago with my son to see my frail mother. By the time I got there, she had been transferred to a nursing home near the Lithuanian Center, which was not far from where my family used to go to the Ragis farm for picnics. By now the city had spread, the suburbs swallowing the farms. I took my son to meet his grandmother, wanting her blessing, but, in truth, I only prayed she would still recognize me.
Pete helped me push Nick’s stroller into the red-brick building that looked clean enough, but which underneath the harsh cleansers still smelled of urine. It was difficult to find my mother—all those white heads and withered faces, those clouded fisheyes. We finally found her in the communal room, asleep in a wheelchair, her chin resting on her chest, in front of a TV with other old and withered people. I hardly recognized her. Her hair had turned completely white. It was strange how old people start to look alike, both the men and women, almost genderless, like babies. It was as if old age and infirmity were a country that they all came from. They came into this world helpless and helpless they would leave it.
This was the mother I had tried so hard to please when I was little, the mother I had rebelled against so harshly in my adolescence, the mother I had left in my adulthood. She looked so vulnerable here, washed clean of our shared histories. Funny to realize, after all this time, that I still wanted to please her, be her little girl, be loved and petted. “Everything will be all right,” she would lie, the way adults often lie to their children. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. I remembered those hands raw from cleaning office buildings. She had been pampered in Lithuania and wasn’t used to such hard work. She would slather Nivea cream on to soothe her chapped knuckles. They looked healed now.
Why were our parents here? I couldn’t imagine the crime for which they were being punished, a penance of old age and infirmity. Where was the life my mother grew up with, filled with all the generations tending one another? She would die and be buried so far away from where she was born and raised. Who will tend her grave in this Chicago suburb? Grief took the air out of the room.
When Pete woke her, she recognized neither of us. As he wheeled her, vacant-eyed, to her room, I bit my lip to fight tears. We sat down and began to speak in Lithuanian, but she made no answer, no gesture of recognition, only smiling politely. I hugged her, kissed her, held her hand, and stroked her white hair, but it was only when Nick started fussing and crying that she finally turned to me. “Where did you pull this one from?” she asked, reaching out for Nick’s hand and smiling as if I had produced a rabbit out of a hat. My brother turned to me, smiling at the bluntness of the question. Yes, from where had I pulled this child? She had been too sick, too confused from her previous stroke to know what had happened to me in the last years, so far away in Los Angeles, while she was far from her home in Lithuania. My mother hadn’t known that I was pregnant, so where had this child come from? I told her he was my son, and she took his tiny hand and smiled and then I saw her fading again into that wrecked body. I had wanted her blessing. I guess that was it.
I finally ran out of things to say, so I sat quietly, holding her hand, hardly able to breathe, hot tears running down my cheeks. We said goodbye an hour later and like survivors, we stumbled over to the elevator. I held Nick and kissed his forehead, wanting to plead with him not to put me in such a place when I got old and feeble.
While waiting for the elevator, I noticed a bulletin board with a photo of Al Vitkus and Magda as the volunteers of the month. I felt an ache to see them both. I had loved Al for years, but he had come back from Vietnam changed. I guess I had also changed while he was away. He was quiet and sullen. The war had done something to him. It seemed he no longer cared for me. Maybe if Al hadn’t gone to war, if we had married, life might have turned out more comprehensible.
It seemed as if I was always waiting for life to begin. Life was not what was happening now, but what would happen in some mythical future. Maybe if I had married an ordinary guy who might not have been exciting, but he would have been decent. Someone who might watch too many ball games on TV instead of doing yard work, or who would never want to see foreign movies or the ballet, but would be there for me year after year—solid, dependable like the wonderful husbands of my friends. A man like my brother or Jonas Janulis, nerdy engineer-types who used to have slide rules in their pockets, but who now made such good solid fathers and husbands. Al might have been such a man.
My brother stood by the elevator, pointing to another sign on the bulletin board that read, “This month’s birthdays,” just like in elementary school. He recognized one of the names on the list. It was Antanas Balys, who had lived with us for many years as one of our boarders.
“It can’t be him, can it?” asked Pete. When we asked the attendant where Mr. Balys was, we were shown a room. The attendant knocked on the door and walked in. “So, Mr. Balys, you finally have some visitors.” We watched as he thrashed around in his bed, muttering to himself. We recognized him at once, though he had grown older and gray. The attendant checked his arms and legs, which were moving back and forth as if walking. Then I saw that he was tied to his bed: restrained by strips of cloth tied to his wrists and ankles. The attendant explained that he would walk out into the street otherwise. “He walks in his bed all day and night.” She made finger circles on her temple. We walked over to his bed and introduced ourselves.
“How are you, Mr. Balys?” my brother asked in Lithuanian.
“Fine, fine,” he answered in a gritty voice. “How are you?” He spoke in the old dialect of Samogitia, his corner of Lithuania. How was it he was here and none of us knew?
“I walked too far, you see,” said Antanas, suddenly frightened. “I shouldn’t have gone past the bridge. I should have stayed closer to home.”
Pete and I looked at each other, puzzled.
“They came for me,” he continued. “Those Germans. My wife didn’t know.” We watched his labored movements and listened to his strained mutterings, realizing he was in another place, another time. Reality had telescoped for him as he relived some portion of the war.
My brother tried to explain how he had been my father’s neighbor in their village in Lithuania, how he had lived with us for many years as our boarder after we came to America. Pete asked him if he needed anything.
Antanas raised his voice. “They say the Americans are coming soon. Don’t eat the bread, they put sawdust in it. Hurts your stomach.” He thrashed about in his bed and then turned to Pete. “Where is he? Did they send him away?” Pete looked at me and shrugged, neither of us knowing what to do. “I shouldn’t have walked there. Tell him not to go too far. It’s dangerous,” he said without looking at us, his eyes wide as he looked beyond us into his own version of hell.
“OK, sure, we’ll tell him, don’t worry,” I said, patting his arm, which was still jerking back and forth. We told him that my mother was down the hall. Maybe they could visit each other. None of it seemed to register with him.
“When will I go home?” he asked, turning toward the window. We knew he didn’t mean Chicago.
That evening, after Nick fell asleep, my father and I sat quietly, talking over cups of tea. He said I reminded him of some tropical bird that flies into Chicago once a year and then flies back to the tropics. I nodded sadly. Of course, he was right; I was no longer part of their everyday life. I had mutated into some lost bird.
We talked about my mother. I told my father about our visit and asked him about Antanas.
Shaking his head sadly, he said, “Poor man
left a wife and four children behind in Lithuania. He was a small farmer in my village, and we were friends before I went to school in Kaunas. During the war, the Germans were seizing able-bodied men for the forced labor. They took Antanas and his brother Jurgis right out of their oat fields while they were working. Antanas survived the war but broke down completely when his brother was killed. Near the end of the war, when the Soviets were returning to Lithuania, we all ran to the West. We already knew what to expect because of the first Soviet occupation in 1940—confiscated property, jail, executions, and mass deportation to Siberia. And that was repeated in 1944.
“The rest of Europe rejoiced when the war ended, while those behind the Iron Curtain suffered a long occupation, forgotten by the West, which seemed indifferent to what went on there.” My father stopped to drink his tea. I could see this conversation was difficult for him, bringing up old memories he’d rather forget.
“After the war we ended up in a displaced-persons camp that was run by American GIs and found Antanas in the camp hospital. When we realized we couldn’t go home because the Soviets weren’t leaving their conquered countries, it was a blow to us all. Later, when the refugees in the camps could finally apply to go to America, Canada, and Australia, they wouldn’t let Antanas leave because of his nervous breakdown. What could I do? I signed papers saying I would take care of him. We couldn’t just leave him there alone.”
All of these war-torn lives. I was the lucky child who was born post-war. But I was born with the taste of ash, my mother singing dirges for lullabies in the displaced persons camp. When we finally came to America, we lived in a storefront. Later, we moved to a house filled with the boarders we took in to help pay expenses. We all ate our meals together. Sometimes Sunday dinner meant ten people eating my mother’s pot roast and discussing politics, telling anecdotes, drinking cognac, and laughing or crying depending on the mood and the amount of liquor. There seemed to be rooms everywhere in that old house that various members of the household retreated to. Half of the basement had been turned into rooms for the boarders. The other half held the laundry and the coal chute with the large black furnace. I’d come down the stairs and run past the stove, sure that something horrible was chasing me in the dark.
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