Clever Swine

I grew up in the house on the corner of Gallant Fox and Seabiscuit. Every street in the development was named after famous racing horses. From my bedroom window, I could see right into Valerie di Prima's bedroom when she left the lights on, and she did every night at 10:45 pm during summer.

The thing about Valerie was she liked to tease and be teased, but she never wanted satisfaction. Her whole game was seeing how far she could push us both without going over the edge. I think the real game was seeing how much I'd put up with before I left her for someone who wouldn't stop short of giving me what I wanted. I never left though. She knew exactly how to play me.

She loosened her long red hair from its bun and shook it out as it fell passed her shoulders. She sat down on the edge of her bed, framed perfectly in the center of her open window, and slowly slipped off her sandals, stretching out her long legs once they were removed. I watched her stand from the bed and pull her shirt off over her head in one swift motion, revealing her bra. Valerie was taunting, tempting, tormenting me before our date that evening, and it was working.

My eyes were lingering on her chest, silently wishing she take off the bra, but I knew Valerie all too well. She wouldn't do that. She'd never do that. She liked to get my hopes up, and if it were 10:45 pm, she might very well have delivered, but it was the middle of the afternoon. I knew this wasn't the main attraction, she was just giving me a preview.

I watched her turn her back toward the window when my father's face appeared inches from mine.

"Wojtek!"

I jumped back, startled by the moustached man poking his head through my window.

"Huh? What?"

"I need a —" He started motioning with his hand, flattening it out and moving it back and forth. "I need a —" He moved his hand faster.

"A what? Dad, I don't know what this —" I mimicked his hand gesture, "is."

"A —" He snapped his fingers, searching for the word. "A level!" he exclaimed when he remembered the word in English.

I sighed and got up from my bed to go to the garage.

It was the summer of 1987 and there was political turmoil all over the world. Reagan was yelling at Gorbachev to tear down the wall, while the threat of nuclear annihilation was still a very real fear. We were watching the Soviet bloc prepare for revolution from the safety of our living rooms, scandals on Capital Hill and the war in the Middle East had the politically invested in an uproar, and my brother had a curious beef with Margaret Thatcher for some odd reason. None of that was directly affecting me though. I was never one to get involved. The only conflict I was concerned with was the ever raging battle with my younger brother over aviator sunglasses versus Ray Bans Wayfarers, in which neither side ever won considering the argument was based solely upon which ones Tom Cruise looked cooler in.

I nearly tripped down the stairs trying to walk over the cat stretched out in the sun on one of the steps.

"Snickers, you can't lay there."

She bolted down the stairs when I stepped next to her head. She only got in my way again as I walked to the garage, darting right in front of my feet and circling around me so she could do it again. I was not in the mood to play. I’ve never even liked cats.

"Snickers," I growled at her. "Get out of the freaking way."

She plopped down in front of me and grabbed my ankle, digging her claws into my skin through my sock.

"Hey!"

I not so gently shook her off before she could bite me. She had a horrible habit of attaching herself to someone's leg and sinking both her needlelike nails and her sharp little teeth into their skin. She had gotten me a few times like that, always making me bleed, before I learned the warning signs. She spent a lot of time being punted like a football across the room during the first few years of her life.

"That's it. You're done. Get out."

I grabbed her and carried her out to the garage with me. I opened the back door, threw her as far as I could into the backyard, and slammed the door shut before she could make a mad dash back inside. I hated Snickers and I wasn't alone. Everybody hated Snickers. My family hated Snickers, our neighbors hated Snickers, Valerie hated Snickers. Everybody except my youngest brother hated that cat. I have never been able to understand why he was so fond of her.

I pulled my sock down to examine the damage. I was lightly bleeding from the claw holes she had made in my ankle.

"Stupid cat," I muttered to myself.

I rummaged through the drawers of my father's tool chest before I found a level buried in the bottom drawer under those broken Christmas lights my mother told him to get rid of the year before. He spent three years insisting he could fix them before my mom finally threw them out herself.

As I walked by the kitchen on my way upstairs, she called my name.

"Wojciech?"

"What?" I answered and stopped in the doorframe.

The whole room reeked of cigarette smoke. I remember it because I used to walk into the scene so often. The sun would beat down on the front of the house later in the day, causing this flood of light through the entrance way to the kitchen. At the right time of day, when the sun was moving toward the west to set, the light would angle and fall on the stove, so when she was standing there making dinner, she was just a faded silhouette with smoke rising around her from the cigarette in her hand. I don't remember what she was wearing. She was obviously dressed up that night, but in my mind, in that memory, all I can see is what she usually looked like in jeans and t-shirt with her hair pulled back. My mother was a casual woman. That image of her smoking in the kitchen is the one that stands out in my mind when I think of her.

"Help Grandpa with his shirt." She pointed to his dress shirt hanging over the back of one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

My second youngest brother was sitting there, playing with my mother's lighter. I put the level down in front of him.

"Bogdan, take this to dad."

He didn't speak much when he was young. Bogdan didn't like how the kids at school made fun of him so he tried not to give them anything to make fun of. He didn't talk to anybody, not even his teachers. He just kept to himself for years and we were all happy to leave him be. There was something about him that was ghostlike, like he never looked at people, he just looked through them. He made people uncomfortable very easily, but I don't think he ever intended to do so. Bogdan wasn't like my other siblings. He never looked for attention, it just always found him.

He glanced up at me, the flame of the lighter still flickering.

"Please," I added.

He took his hand off the button of the lighter, letting the flame go out, and pocketed it as he got up from the table. He grabbed the level with a sigh and I backed up to let him pass.

"And tell him to get off the roof. He better be showered, dressed, and ready to go by five or I'll kill him," my mother said to him as he left the room. "Głupie dupa," she muttered under her breath.

My mother was always calling my father a stupid ass. It was kind of like her own little misguided term of endearment. That's as much affection as you'll ever get from a Polish woman anyway.

I grabbed the shirt off the chair and walked into the living room where my grandfather was lounging in his recliner, dressed in his slacks with his big black fuzzy slippers on his feet. They rarely ever came off unless he was trying to annoy Grandma by cutting his toenails in bed again.

He was watching the world news with my brother. The pair of them were a wondrous sight. Political bystanders yelling Down with communism! from their capitalist safe haven. How perfectly American.

My brother was sprawled out on the couch with his arms crossed over his stomach. I messed up his hair as I walked by.

He quickly slapped my hand away and twisted around to look at me over his shoulder. "Jerk."

"Freak." I noticed the television screen. "Are they rioting in England again?"

"Were." He went back to watching the T.V. like I wasn't even there. "In Leeds. This is the aftermath."

My brother was a political madman. He was personally invested in every riot, strike, protest, and problem happening in Europe, from the riots in Brixton two years earlier to the fall of communism around Central and Eastern Europe two years later. At that time, he was mainly living Solidarity vicariously through images on a television screen and words written in Polish in newspaper articles. My grandfather was right there with him, yelling about being one step away from the tanks rolling in from Moscow because Jaruzelski was just running the whole country into the ground, according to Grandpa that is. I could write a book on my grandfather's hatred for that man, but I won't. Not even I would read it.

"And you wanna live there why?" I asked.

The only dream my little brother had at that age was to pack up and move to the UK when he turned eighteen, never once thinking of how he'd survive or what he'd do once he was there, he just wanted to be there more than anything else. I blame Morrissey. He made the place sound so appealing, I couldn't imagine not wanting to live there.

He reached back to hit me, but I caught his arm and twisted it. He let out a slight yelp before manoeuvring around to punch me in my thigh.

"Knock it off!" Grandpa scolded us from his chair. "I'm watchin' the T.V. here."

At that time, our house was a civil war battleground between my brother and I, with the bloodiest battles taking place in the bathroom where chemical warfare happened every morning. I was gassed out of the room by hairspray, but I devised a complex and well thought out effective counter strategy to combat this. I locked him out. Our mother didn't necessarily approve, but she got a break from dealing with him while we were at school every day. I, on the other hand, had to pretend like I didn't know him, which wasn't convincing when we shared a pretty distinctive last name.

I let go of his arm and approached Grandpa in his chair. "Here, Grandpa, put your shirt on."

My second cousin got married that summer, to an Irishman, nonetheless. My parents and my grandparents went to the reception that evening. We were never allowed. Children were meant to be seen and not heard, but they could never shut us up, so we always had to stay home with our great-grandmother. In the beginning, she babysat us. By the end, we were babysitting her.

The glass door to the deck was open and I could hear her faintly humming to herself outside. I had no intention of spending the night sat up in the living room with her asleep in front of the television, waiting for my parents to get home to relieve me of my duties. I had plans with my girlfriend that I wasn't about to break for some familial responsibilities I never even ask for.

The sound of Grandpa putting the footrest of the recliner back down snapped my attention back to him. I stood by the side of the chair, ready to help him if he needed it as he pushed himself up to stand. He turned his back to me and let me slip his right arm into the sleeve. I slid the shirt over his shoulders and adjusted it. His right hand started on the buttons at the bottom.

"Got it?" I asked. I tried to help, but he smacked my hand away.

"I've been doin' this for forty-five years. Don't need two arms to button a shirt."

My grandfather fought in World War II on the Western Front. I dare say he was never more proud of anything he did in his life than fight for his country. When the government was exiled in 1939 after Germany invaded, they and a portion of the army fled to France. My grandfather wound up evacuating to Great Britain once France fell, but before then, he was shot in battle. Refusing to stop for a bullet to the left arm, my grandfather wrapped up the bleeding wound and pushed forward. Later on he removed the bullet himself with his military issued knife and cleaned the hole in his arm with alcohol. I don't know whether it was removing the bullet with a filthy knife or the unsanitary conditions in which he lived that caused it, but potentially both led to an infection and gangrene spread through most of his arm by the time he received proper medical attention. They had to amputate. That didn't deter him though. He participated in the rest of the war missing a limb any way he could, and when he returned home, he just was never the same according to Grandma.

I backed off. "Okay."

"Don't need two arms for nothin'."

"Need two to drive a stick," my brother piped up from his resting place on the couch.

"Smart ass," Grandpa mumbled.

My brother was like a shipwrecked British school boy on an uninhabited island, or a Lost Boy at the very least. I often described him as a pirate to people: a foul-mouthed weapon-wielding troublemaker who wouldn't listen to authority, always thought he was right, and would shoot someone with a cannon if given the chance.

The humming coming from the deck suddenly stopped and I heard her stir.

"Rostek?" she called softly. Without a response, she spoke louder. "Rostek?"

I was helping Grandpa tuck his shirt into his dress pants and buckle his belt. I glanced over at my brother still lounging on the couch.

"Rościsław!" she called into the house.

He still didn't move from his position.

"Ros, Nanni wants you," I told him.

Nanni didn't speak more than thirty or so words in English that she randomly picked up over the years. She knew all the easy stuff like hello, goodbye, my name is. She could swear, she knew how to ask for cigarettes, and she repeated things that she had heard off television. At home, she spoke only Polish, but we mainly spoke English. When my parents went to work, they spoke English. When my brothers and I went to school, everything we learned was in English. Everything we watched, read, and heard was in English. We didn't really know Polish that well. My parents were a different story. They spoke Polish better than English, but we grew up in America for the most part. It was my first language, but without the constant exposure that I had to it when we lived in Poland, it was just slipping away. I couldn't understand a full conversation between my grandparents and I couldn't even begin to read a book in Polish at that age. I could get by, but I was by no means fluent anymore and I simply didn't care to be. I lived in America. What use did I have for Polish? Nanni always scolded me for not speaking it though. She thought I brought shame upon my Polish heritage when I couldn't understand what she was saying to me most of the time. Trust me, if I knew how to tell her off in Polish, I would have.

"Co?" Ros answered her.

"Chodź tu."

He reluctantly got off the couch and joined her on the deck. I never made an effort to conceal the fact that I didn't like Nanni. Something about her was just harrowing. I've never been able to explain it, but it was like she carried this heavy sadness on her back that was just there, staring at whoever looked at her. The funny thing is, when I was little, I remember Nanni differently than I did when I was seventeen. She was happier. She was fun. She used to babysit all the time and we loved when she did. But when I grew up and I could understand the bad things in life, the great-grandmother that I loved simply vanished from existence. She wasn't the same person to me. She had been replaced by tragedy wrapped in the wrinkled and scarred skin of a little old Polish lady. Her very presence made me uncomfortable.

I watched her talking to Ros on the deck, but I couldn't follow what they were saying. For years I had slowly become more and more disdainful toward my family. Every stupid tradition and lame family activity annoyed me to the point where I just didn't want to be related to them anymore. I didn't want to be Polish; I wanted to be American. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to go to school on the first day and have at least one teacher not massacre my first name. I was just sick of it all and I thought she was the cause. She insisted on the dumb things like celebrating name days over birthdays and opening presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas day. Maybe that one I didn't mind so much, but I minded that no one ever went against her word. No one ever told Nanni that we don't live in Poland anymore and we're not going to act like we do just because she says so.

She slowly got up from her chair, clinging to Ros' arm for support. Her vibrant red nails dug into his arm and I could see the scratches she had left behind. Claws. They weren't fingernails, they were claws tearing into his flesh like tiny knives. She was like Snickers. She was annoying, she scratched people, and I had no patience for her.

All I could do was watch her as Ros helped her into the house, wishing she'd just go back to Poland and leave us alone once and for all.

There's a reason they say be careful what you wish for.