Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  She is content enough. Home is mild, benign, and, at times, pleasant. Yet, as clever as this kind of escape is, it doesn’t work for long. The same activity that comforts her also lures her brothers. With their new housekeeper around, the brothers’ infrequent visits to the cottage become more regular. They eat the food my mother cooks, and when they eat they drink. And when they get drunk, their excitement leads to sudden eruptions and outbursts; and when the outbursts get angry, Maria becomes the object of her drunken brothers’ fury. With each visit, they vociferously berate their sister with words so unsweet and insolent they have no English translation. She does nothing. There is no one to defend her.

  This is how my mother came to be what I call a Polican-American: A new school year begins and Maria returns to Jagiellonian. She gets her master’s degree; she makes it to Kraków. The Communist government gives her everything she’s been working toward: the teaching career, the apartment where she will hang her framed degree, a salary. Months pass; Maria settles in, but there is something missing from her Dream Come True. As she politely threads her way through the morning masses and evening trolleys, her routine feels hollow and her agenda feels like an egg-white omelet—buoyant and flavorless. To her, Kraków feels like some kind of skeleton city, as if dreariness has been spread throughout the city by osmosis.

  And then, along comes 1974. The exchange rate of the American dollar is so favorable that Poles—any Pole, Poles with and without advanced degrees—immigrate to the States in hordes, taking on any and every kind of menial job (as housekeepers, house cleaners, manual laborers, nannies) to make some money. Mom’s brother Matteo has moved away, married, and immigrated to Chicago. Matteo invites their brother Lolek to come to the States, but his visa application gets denied. So Matteo’s wife quietly notifies my mother of the open spot, and she takes advantage of the opportunity. With the laurels of her degree and her good looks, Maria snatches the visa her brother couldn’t.

  My mother leaves Poland with the intention of staying only long enough to pocket a couple of thousand dollars, thinking she’ll return by the year’s end. She puts one foot in front of the other, and steps away from what’s familiar and toward what she believes will be a brief stint abroad. What she doesn’t know is that she will stay forever. And that even after she leaves Poland and arrives in the United States, she will continue to be haunted by the past.

  My mother learns English by watching American soap operas. This is how I picture her: sitting in a dark and musty attic that is her first apartment in Chicago. My mother is beautiful and shy, like a deer. I can see her scooting to the edge of a crooked, quilted bed, strong legs dangling over it, Greta Garbo-face lit up from the tiny television screen. The lesson begins. Like sands through the hourglass, she repeats after the narrator, so are the days of our lives.

  Shortly after arriving in the United States, Maria Magdalena Piergies lands a job as the housekeeper of a very old and very rich, pasty-faced widow in a big museum of a home on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. During breaks, when her employer is having her nap, my mother studies English. As if her life depends on it (quite probably it does), she scribbles and struggles to keep abreast of the new language, labeling everything she’s got with pieces of paper containing the vocabulary words gathered from the week’s daytime television dramas.

  What the hell are we going to do when we get to the executive offices, Stephano, take everybody hostage? My mother’s mind is looping and stringing together new vocabulary and new phrases. In the quiet moments, she’ll recite them to herself, whispering: Meet me at Pier 14 and come alone. That little boy will know that his mother fought hard to hold on to him. I’ll distract Adam; you go to Barbara’s office and seduce her.

  Shortly after leaving Kraków and landing on the tarmac of O’Hare airport, my mother had been taken in by something of a Polish welcoming committee. They looked out for my mother and helped her by putting some starter money in her pocket, by giving her directions to the necessary places, and by translating for her—because they, too, were immigrants. Suffice it to say, they’d been there. My uncle Matteo, who was already living in Chicago, introduced Maria to his mother-in-law, Stella, the clan’s matriarch. Stella the Matriarch found my mother a place to live. Stella the Matriarch found her a job cooking and cleaning and wiping ass (if need be) and drove my mom to this new gig in a long, white Cadillac, an albino alligator. As Stella opened the alligator door and dropped Maria off at her very first day of work, she made a demand: twenty words a day. “If you want to survive in this country,” Stella told her, “you must learn twenty English words a day.”

  It is a while before Mom can trust herself to speak the new language in front of others, particularly Americans, partly out of fear, and partly because of her stubborn determination to master a vast and impressive range of vocabulary skills before she puts them to use. The new words will come slowly, starting with a timid conversation at the corner grocery store about the sponges and paper towels she purchases; then she will work her way to a full-blown interview at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s—the hospital where she will research pulmonary medicine in the radiology department—put her physics degree to good use, and meet my father, who will be in his final months as a medical resident.

  On the weekends, all the immigrants gather at Stella’s apartment to cook and eat and talk up a flurry about Polish politics and this strange new land. My mother will join them, and one day, she’ll even bring my father, who will quickly realize that Mom’s life—and the life of the immigrant—is difficult. That people judge her, and treat her poorly because she is different. She has a shy disposition, which is often interpreted as being stuck-up. But my mother is tough, cautious, thrifty, and she fends for herself. She explains to my father what the workplace is like for a female immigrant. She shows him how a woman deals with it, how she endures. Because starting from scratch in a big city isn’t easy. Because even a master’s degree in physics from Jagiellonian University (“the Harvard of Poland,” as my mom still calls it) won’t guarantee you a decent living in the land of the free, home of the brave.

  But now it is twenty years later and Maria’s youngest daughter is in the kitchen of her restaurant, peeling shrimp that will be served at her Uncle Matteo’s wedding dinner tonight. Uncle Matteo and his fiancée are nowhere to be found, and the wedding was supposed to start an hour ago. Somehow, and miraculously, the minister doesn’t bail. We wait and wait, picking almond pebbles off the Roquefort grapes until finally, nearly two hours tardy, Uncle Matteo and Vladka burst through the back door to the restaurant, sharply dressed, eager to wed, and awkwardly late to their own wedding without even a phone call or a made-up excuse. The rest of us look at one another for a leaden moment until Dad clears the air, suggesting we get the show on the road before the food gets stale.

  I stand next to an old grandfather clock and when I’m given the cue, I slip my violin under my chin and start churning out “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” all by myself, even though it’s a piece for four or more instruments that requires at least two to sound halfway decent, and I still don’t know how to make vibrato. Also, my fingers smell like shrimp. Through an oval mirror, I see the faces of my cousins Marek and Maya. They’re expressionless as they watch their father tie the knot for the second time to a woman who isn’t their mother. Throughout the brief ceremony, Mom sports an unnatural smile, sad as the blues.

  I’m dispatched into the kitchen where my mother is cloaked in an apron and plating Beef Wellington. In assembly-line fashion, she hands the plate to my sister, Sabina, who plates sautéed peppers, then hands the plate to me, and I carry the hot dish very carefully into the dining room and slide it onto the table in front of each member of the wedding: ladies first, serve from the left, remove from the right. After the meal is eaten, we clear the plates and cut the cake (flourless orange chocolate rum); and after the cake, it’s business as usual: Jules and I clear the dishes, Dad washes, Sabina dries.

 
Mom is standing on the back porch, sipping on a glass of wine when Marek enters the kitchen looking for her. “Aunt Maria, my dad wants you,” Marek says. Mom tips back the glass, polishing off her wine, and mutters, “Dat man will push me to my grave.” Mom pushes through the kitchen door and I trail her into the dining room. As I pick off the used napkins from the dinner table plates, I watch my new aunt tip her head back, laughing as my uncle turns to my mom. “Marisha,” he says. “Proszę, sister, do me one more thing? Go get me some more—” And before he can finish his sentence, and with eyes looking mad and vulnerable, Mom answers, “Yes?” and goes back into the kitchen to bring out more wine.

  My mother has always had a habit of giving too much of herself, so often and to such an extent that she harms herself in pleasing others. She puts herself last. She makes sacrifices, sometimes too many. She strains and works so hard to make people happy. Then she’ll renounce her compassion, and declare that she’s going to stop putting others first, that she’ll take care of herself and herself only. She always relapses. This peculiarity is sort of a trait running in our family—the stubborn vices of guilt and pride. I see it in her. She doesn’t see this about herself and I have yet to recognize it in myself.

  Years later, I will wonder what difference it would have made if she had learned English from something other than a soap opera. What if she had simply set her TV to another channel, like The Price Is Right, or an infomercial, or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ? Could a different program have altered the way she spoke, influenced her way of seeing the world, the way of seeing her place in it? Could a different channel have changed the kind of woman she became and, in turn, raised me to be? Would turning the dial on the tube have set us all in a different motion?

  Maybe these traits would have been passed on to me regardless, maybe not. But one thing is clear: anyone, any Pole, Kenyan, Korean, anyone who learns English through the dialogue of soap operas develops very potent diction, and an intense way of looking at the universe. And the fact that my mother’s sharp-accented English comes out of her mouth slightly butchered only adds a more dramatic flair to it all. Soap opera plots are beyond realistic; their storylines generally circumnavigate amnesiacs, resurrections from the dead, cheating lovers, and switched paternity tests. An episode can switch between several themes at a time and intersect with other narratives by chance meetings, coincidences, missed meetings, and last-minute rescues. They’re like tapestries that never end. When one thread ends, there is always another that slithers in, before you’ve even fully made sense of the one that came before it.

  six

  June. New York City.

  I’m next in line to see Dr. Reich for a checkup. I’m hopeful that she can get me out of here in time to meet Andrew during his lunch break. We’re going to ride our bikes to Chinatown, and if we’re lucky, we’ll return with two white-gold wedding bands that are within our budget. Then he’ll be back at work before his lunch hour is over. I’ve never sat in Phillips Family Practice’s waiting room for less than an hour before making it into the examination room. And once you make it to the exam room, you wait again. Dr. Reich told me that a patient of hers once drew a giant mural covering the entire exam room wall while he waited to be seen. When Danya finally knocked on the door, the guy was nowhere to be seen but left in his place a colossal pencil sketch of a human skeleton sitting on an examination table with his skull in his phalanges and a handwritten caption: You will die before you are ever seen at Phillips Family Practice.

  Twelve weeks pregnant. Things are blossoming so quickly, life is moving along so steadily, so seamlessly that I almost can’t recognize I am any different than I was before. But I know things have changed: the size of my torso, the volume of my uterus, my feelings toward being pregnant. There is a flicker of joy in me somewhere, slowly growing more intense by the day. Underneath all the anxiety, I know somewhere there is joy and love ahead. But it’s hard to be joyful when you’re still just getting used to the idea of the cost of daycare or when you know you’ve shocked the hell out of your parents, and there are probably points throughout the day when they think about you and your situation and cry alone, secretly, then quickly move on to other things.

  I like my doctor but I hate where she works. Andrew and I picked this place because it was one of the few Medicaid options, and because they have sliding-scale fees. It’s what we can afford. It’s what everyone can afford. You don’t need health insurance or loads of money to see someone here. Well, maybe some money, and those bills will come later. Andrew originally found Phillips because it was close to his office and easy to get a last-minute appointment, because most of the appointments here are walk-ins. The place doesn’t have much of a system or order. Even if you did make an appointment, there is no guarantee you will be seen. Rather, there’s a slim chance you’ll be seen by a medical specialist and a strong likelihood that both the clinic and your place of employment—if you’re employed—will close up shop before you even make it into an examination room. Andrew and I briefly considered going elsewhere but haven’t done much research, mostly because we’re planning on going in another direction: skip the medical facilities all together.

  A few weeks ago, we watched a documentary about the business of being born, and it asked us, Should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potentially catastrophic medical emergency? The film made me realize that I’d like to do things the natural way—no painkillers, no C-section, no epidural. Maybe a home birth, maybe in the bathtub. Maybe a midwife or a doula. But we haven’t gotten to that stage yet. I’m still in the first trimester. I am waiting to pass into the safety zone of the pregnancy before I make better plans. I imagine after the ultrasound will be a good time to start looking for doulas. So we’ll keep going here for now, or maybe we’ll stay here until the end—who knows? I like Dr. Reich. I don’t want to insult her.

  Like most of the doctors at this office, Danya is doing her residency, and she tells me that, like me, she’s getting tired of the place, too. It’s wearing her out. “Don’t I look haggard?” she asks me each time I see her, but she doesn’t. Even though she’s almost over the hill, Dr. Reich is as youthful and spirited as a college basketball player. She’s alert, and her mouth is always open and slightly turned up in a smirk. “This place sucks,” she whispers during our appointments. She says it’s lessening her desire to be a doctor, making her feel less compassionate.

  I’ve been here since 10:15 this morning. My appointment was scheduled for 10:30. It’s almost 11:20. I am pregnant. I am hormonal. I’m trying very hard to be Zen, to do that thing where you step out of your body and take a look at the thoughts running through your mind and consider them as objects just passing by—labeling them as “thoughts and thoughts only” and not getting attached to them—but right now it’s very difficult to step out of my body because I just cannot get over my body. Right now, my body is a completely foreign terrain of which I’m both terrified and in awe. It is in constant flux, and although Andrew is amazed by my breast size, I still feel like it’s a joke, or a fluke. I don’t have control of anything. It’s like I’m trying to catch the wind. The morning sickness has subsided a little, but mostly because it’s been trumped by heartburn. I’m hungry, but can never decide what I want to eat because I know it’s something specific, but there are too many things that it’s not, and only one thing that I do desire. I don’t know who to talk to about this—I still feel embarrassed to talk about it with my mother, and I have no pregnant friends. They are all aspiring academics, and they are all on summer vacation. I’m just figuring this out on my own. I don’t want anyone to see me come off as unsure, I don’t want to complain, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself. Here’s what I did recently: I added new items to the list of foods and smells that make me nauseous: broccoli, Andrew’s breath, oranges, Greek food. And what I want to eat: tacos, peanut butter ice cream, potatoes.

  Andrew and I are als
o in the process of putting our lives together. We’re still getting to know each other while we’re buying baby books. We are students, coworkers, teammates. We’re having sex a little, but in the back of my mind I can sense that I am not comfortable. Part of me feels that there isn’t much of a point to it now, and part of me feels that we have a third party that is too young to be exposed to it. Part of me imagines that he might poke the baby inside me. It’s a bizarre notion that makes just as much sense as my desire for taffy, but still. Part of me doesn’t recognize what sex is anymore, what it means. It has taken on a completely different meaning.

  My wardrobe has started shrinking. I’m having trouble fitting into my clothes and this upsets me. It’s like my pants have a vendetta. Luckily school is out of session; I have no reason to dress up for anything or impress anyone. Summer in New York and all one really needs is a thin dress and plenty of water to remain cool and calm. I have my water and I’m trying to remain cool and calm, but right now everyone is pushing my buttons. Like this guy next to me in the waiting room. He’s talking loudly on his cell phone. I get angry, I get mean. I ask myself, how can someone pay for a cell phone when he can’t even afford medical bills? He is talking as if we’re in the middle of a construction site. This is what I have learned about him: he recently passed a kidney stone (“the most painful fucking thing in the world, man”). I know and the rest of the waiting room knows what his urine looked like when he passed it. We know the last time he pooped, and we know what that looked like as well. I want to tell him to shut his mouth, have some respect, and that he has no idea what giving birth feels like, so suck it up. But then again, neither do I.

  “Mr. Ross?” A nurse appears and calls the name. I look around the waiting room, wishing Andrew were sitting here with me, but I remind myself that I don’t want to be a bother, a nag, weak, too dependent. We’re not even married yet. “Is there a Mr. Ross next in line?” the nurse asks but gets no response. I’m hoping Mr. Ross just gave up and left. “Mr. Ross?” she repeats. And then, from behind the bathroom right next to her, a voice calls out, “I’M GOING TO THE BATHROOM!” It’s the kidney stone guy. “Jeeeeezus,” Mr. Ross says, “just hold your horses, lady.” The toilet flushes.