Frogman

“Who brought the whores?” is not a particularly kind thing to say to two young girls; but I assure you, from nine and ten-year-old ears, this is what the craggily toothed man said. My older sister and I are standing in gauzy dresses that wrap around like an ace bandage, the compression stopping at the knees. I am a pink mummy and Katya is a green mermaid. We are wearing matching jelly shoes and small pearls the size of cats’ eyes. I want to roar at the man: who brought you, fuck face, to startle him with my little girl mouth. I’ve been forced to kiss; but I’m not a whore and this is a brand new dress.

My mother is fuming. Silent smoke spills from her ears like chuffed puffs of a steam train. She whacks the green beer bottle out of the man’s dirty yellow hand. The wet amber spills in his lap and puddles into the shape of a giant kidney bean. He stands, clapping at the soggy shadow, smacking himself in the groin. “Faa-cking beetches,” sloshes from his mouth, tripping on the cracks of his jagged teeth. Yup, the party has started. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1980, at Benny and Irene’s.

It is a daily custom to gather around the kitchen table and drink until your eyes collapse into stars. Red and silver party decorations are taped to saggy strings and the glittery fringe wisps as people walk by. The metallic strips brush across heads like the side-to-side wavy cloths in a carwash. These small swaying glimmers make this a special night of boozing; otherwise, it’d be just another day.

 Vodka bottles stand in a row along the credenza. A thin reed floats in the center of each one. It is a blonde-green strand trapped in an alcohol bath. My grandmother once warned me the hair in the bottles belongs to the Rusalki—their power lies in their sexual attraction and the men who meet them die happy and sucked off. They skip on the edges of water or woods and are the spirits of young girls who’ve met an untimely or violent death.

“You don’t want to be a Rusalka, no?” my grandmother asks, as she pours vodka over a drift of crackling ice chips. I can barely hear her over the din of voices and the rattling crank of noisemakers. I know it’s not really a question, but my sister and I are pale as the moon and we have bright green eyes, and I can’t help but wonder if we are already one of them.

MUSHROOM HUNTING

[4:30 a.m. The sun cracked open and spilled into a dark blue bowl. Katya found the secret cave under the bluffs and hid. Beneath the fractured tree limbs, the family counted, raz-dwa-tzry, one-two-three, and watched as she returned from the haunted tunnel. She shelled her split almond eyes into slivered tears. Her mouth cut open, like a butchered slice of pig’s liver, and cried into the ground, and into the splintering bark, and finally into her palms. The adults shook her by the cuff, and jumbled her bones. She reached up towards the sky, and tried to climb away from all of the dirty fingers, that poked and demanded, “Where did you go, Katya? Where did you go?”  

 The prodding tribe stood, around her, wearing lawn bags punched into slickers. Katya took off across the hatched brambles, snapping twigs, and the hunters returned to stabbing the fungus sprouted at the base of the trees. They gathered the speared mushroom heads into cold silver buckets. The soggy heaps looked and smelled like shriveled noses ripped from a hundred witch faces. Katya showed me the yellow pail she’d been carrying. It was full of frogs, the luminescent color of a spotted and warty rainbow.

 “Asha, he’s real,” she whispered. “The frogman—pletowurnek—came to me.”  She took a knee before the large hollow tree. “He made me lick him,” she said, sticking her tongue out of her mouth. It was as black and swollen as a drunk leach. I touched the muscle and made it wriggle.

“Cut it out,” she said and handed me her small pocketknife. She wasn’t kidding. She opened up wide. I sliced down and released one long dark purple scream that ricocheted through the forest.

 The frogman heard the bullet-fast echoes. He came running and our ears picked up a small transistor radio playing in the background, bundled in static: Goodbye to you, my trusted friend. We've known each other since we're nine or ten. The frogman was also cloaked in a garbage bag raincoat. He balled mud in the cruxes of his hands and patted the slop into warm pies and pressed them into my eyes, into flat coins, and blessed my forehead and when he pushed I fell backwards on a heavy log and fell into a spell. I smelled worms and the moss skirts of tall trees. I woke at my sister’s boots and saw blood running down her left thigh, like her red shorts had sprung a leak.

“Katya, what happened?”

She opened her mouth and showed me her new pink tongue full of stitches that fell in a pattern of near-far-far-near. She whispered and put her soiled fingers to her mouth and pressed SHHhhhh. She pointed at the frogman paddling down the dark river, rowing farther and farther away, as we stood and watched him shrink to the size of a worry doll.

“Why are you whispering?” I asked.

She said, “Because this is supposed to be a secret.”  

We listened to the faint tune of the radio: But the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach. We heard the frogman humming along to the song. And then he disappeared into the cold orange sun.

We hugged, little girls—pretty girls. Pitter-patter. The rain came fast and drummed on our knees. Our galoshes sounded out a drenched pound, tenderizing worms rising from the dirt, as we marched at the mouth of a very deep cave.]

“Who brought the whores?” the man with the pee stain on his pants calls out again. He’s drunk and full of laughter that sounds like a pull-tab curling back on a rusted can. My mother snarls like a cat, full-tailed and hissing. “Fucking drunks,” she says except it’s in Polish, which twists the mean words into a soft children’s rhyme you want to coo. Kurvani piani, she says, having milked the lullaby from a wicked tit.

The drunks continue smoking their cigarettes pinched between the thumb and second finger, with their hands cupped. They hide the cherry embers, but the smoke smolders from their nails and gives them away. They busy the edge of the scalloped tray with wrinkled butts. The cinder flakes fall into a ceramic seashell and gather atop a silver hotel buried in sand and palm trees. The scene quickly turns the vacation spot into an old coal town drowned in chunks of fly ash, somewhere they’ve all been.

We’ve seen enough as my mother pushes us by the shoulders into the kids’ room. There are only four of us in here and we’re all within a year of each others’ age. A large awkward lamp catches my eye. The center of the base is a naked man. He is surrounded in a cage of invisibly thin wires and oil beads up and falls along the metal spokes like syrupy rain. The man is wearing a head-wreath of wild olives. He has a smooth bronze bump where a penis should be. I lean on the octagonal end table and wet my finger in the drippy lamp. My hand feels the rough edge of peeled laminate and exposed chipboard. I plummet my knees into the sofa seat, forcing the coils to spring back and boing. The material is worn and pressed bare as an old compact powder that let’s the bottom shine through.

Beata and George are wearing their messy play clothes. I feel trapped in my flirty dress. They ignore us. Beata tucks her anemic blonde hair behind her question mark ears. She keeps her blue eyes fixed on her knees. George’s mule hair flies as his dark eyes punch holes. His tawny skin is crowded with moles and freckles. Irene is their mother. Benny is neither of their fathers; but they are now his children—mainly because Irene radiates when she’s in despair.

Most days, her skin glows like a paper lantern rocking in a warm tight breeze. She smells like cinnamon and sweet milk and parts her wheat-blonde hair down the middle. She has a habit of putting her blunt curls into her mouth and sucking on the stringy ends, especially when she’s at the stovetop frying sunny side up eggs.

One Sunday morning, she was crisping yolks in the griddle. She poked them with a spatula and forced them to spit up and break. She kept talking the whole time, licking the ends of her hair, while she stood in her bare feet and cooked. She stopped long enough to sip from her bloody mary and complain about her headache. She looked too sexy to be in pain, but she yelled at George and told him to shut the fuck up and threw down his runny breakfast and it splashed his chin. Then she turned to Katya and me and asked us if we were hungry, but her voice told us it was best to say ‘no thank you’ and wax the floor with our eyeballs.

Beata is sipping Hawaiian punch from a crappy plastic cup. She holds the white edge in her mouth and bites down a deep chalk mark. She approaches the sun-faded ottoman and reaches towards the plate of cookies and places all the ones with halves of maraschino cherries into a napkin. She holds out one of the treats she’s saved for herself and says, “I love the ones with red dots.” And she plops the cookie with its jelly eye into her mouth. Some of the powdered sugar stays on her lips.

She gulps down her drink and lets the cup drop to the carpet, next to a square pizza box with a stapled menu that covers the parlor’s name. I can make out the last three letters, SON, in bold green, and an outlined sketch of the bumpy boot of Italy. Grease stains begin to disintegrate the cardboard, forming spots that turn into soggy windows.

(“How long do you cook the onions, mom?”

“Until they look like glass, small pieces of glass.”

“But I’ll cry if I look too closely.”

“You might cry more if you don’t. You need to see more glass.”

 “But how am I supposed to know these things?”)

The pizza is cheese. I ask, “Can I have a piece?”

George stares at the gray television set, watching Batman. The antenna is fully extended and the rabbit ears poke into the ceiling, like sticks into marshmallows. George says, “It’s for everyone. Go ahead.”  He jumps from the flowered sofa to the green carpet and back again. Each leap causes the naked oily man to teeter and almost fall but George keeps yelling, “Kapow! Bam!”  He does not stop, even when the room’s door opens and the man in the shiny black tie rolls his big bowling ball head inside. The man glances around and asks, “Where’s David?” 

Katya and I shrug our shoulders and shake our heads into don’t ask us, we don’t know.

“He’s too little to be in here,” George yells back at the man who is perched half-in and half-out of the doorway, his eyes caught in red nets. His shirt is tucked in and his pants are securely looped with a black leather belt. He is dressed like a chauffer or the best man hours into a boozy wedding.

“I think he’s taking a nap in George’s room,” Beata says with a smile.

George howls when he gets this news and shouts, “He better not pee in my bed.”

The tired looking man shuts the door.

George gets up and locks it. “No more grown ups,” he says and returns to yelling so hard the exclamations splatter the walls. The words land smack dab and settle stiff and loud like they do in cartoon clouds. I stare at the invisible letters sprayed like graffiti from George’s big can mouth. “Zap! Bam! Holy cow, Batman!” 

Beata looks at him with shuttered eyes ready to close. She is balancing a photo album across her lap. The cover is white padded vinyl with two gold bells ringing out a wedding hymn. Beata turns her glare on me and asks, “Want to see my mom?”

“Sure,” I say and sit next to her, carefully pulling down the cocoon tight sides of my dress.

Beata is giggling and running her fingers along the gold metal edges of the pages. Each time she flips, the thin layers of plastic crinkle over the faces and places the tacky backing keeps trying to keep grounded in place. Everyone looks drowned and faded beneath the clear sheets. Beata peels back the film and releases a cold suction and forces the images to rise from their murky waterbeds. “Look,” she says, smiling, and stifling back a curdled laugh cusped in her throat.

There are eight images, four to a page. Each scene is vivid against the backdrop of red velvet drapes. These are not from a wedding, I realize as I turn my eyes to the curtains behind the sofa where I’m sitting. I want to crawl into the curved brown folds, and hide, and show only my feet. These are pictures from my father’s funeral. My mother’s hair is sprayed into a silver-gray beehive that ages her eighteen-year-old face. She is veiled in black tulle and is holding my sister on her hip which means I’m inside the bump of her stomach wrapped in a dark sheath dress.

There are red and white flowers bunched together on a tripod with a sash. The casket is front and center. My father is a white vampire with overripe lips and pink cheeks and perfectly greased coffin hair. His hands are laced together and a crystal rosary is wound tightly around them, keeping them locked in prayer. I see people kneeling in their smart suits and the backs of their mournful heads.

(“Do you think of him a lot, mom?”

“Every day, Asha. Every day.”)

I look into Beata’s mouth. I can’t even look at her buttery eyes. “Why are you showing me this?” I ask, uncomfortably curling my toes.

“I thought it’d be funny.” She shrugs one shoulder matter-of-fact and then quickly flips to the back of the album and spreads it flat. She places the book in my lap and says, “This is what I really wanted to show you.”

“But why,” I say, still afraid to look down.

“Look at my mom. Isn’t she funny?”

My eyes drop to Irene’s flowing hair. The strands are rippled like honey wrapped inside the curved groove of a dipper, and then slowly dripped and twirled to her waist. She is wearing a man’s white long-sleeved shirt that is unbuttoned, exposing perfect breasts with nipples small as candy corn, ready to be fingered and tossed into a mouth—sweet pieces you’d devour so you wouldn’t have to share. A tangle of camel-colored twigs covers the spot between her legs and a small pink beak peeps through the hairy nest, ready to sing.

In the next photo she is leaning back and completely naked. Her face is tightened up and her eyes drip like glazed donuts, like someone has just punched the lights out of her sweet face.

And in the next set, Irene has a yellow cord coiled around her thigh and the end of a telephone receiver is cushioned between her legs. Her soft mound is whispering words to someone on the other end and I want to press my ear in and listen to what she’s saying. In these shots, Irene shows how big her eyes can smile for the camera and how deep she can push into her flesh.

The last photo makes my eyes squint into a tight hurt. It is my father in denim cut offs, shirtless, and kissing Irene’s perfect neck. I lean in closer to see if there is anything else in the frame. Nothing. Just my father buried in her skin.

Beata starts laughing. She is hunched and gumdrop chuckles fall from her mouth. Her arms barrel me into a grizzly hug. “We might be sisters,” she says and lets out the last rip of her sneaky laugh.

“I guess,” is all I can say. I didn’t really know my father and Beata didn’t know hers.

(“What do I do now?”

“You beat the eggs and squeeze them into the ground pork.”

“With my hands?”

“Of course with your hands.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Is Beata my sister?”

“Why would you think that?”

“There’s this picture of Irene and dad.”

“What picture?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a picture and he’s kissing,”

My mother puts down her knife, her eyes search into a corner. She wipes her hands on the nubby dishtowel and speaks.

“Your father and Irene dated once.”

“For how long?”

“Once, I just told you.”

“One night?”

“Yes and that’s probably the picture you saw. One night far back. Believe me, you and Beata are not sisters.”   I was relieved.)

Boom! Boom! Pounds on the door. It is the hammering of an angry gavel. George gets up and unlocks it. The drunk from the kitchen table rushes into the kids’ room and quickly locks the door behind him. He flaps his hands in the air instructing us to quiet down. His fingers come up to his lips and he says, “Shhh.”  There is blood trickling down his forearm and into the white and blue checkers of his shirt, like spaghetti sauce dripped on a tablecloth.

“Don’t open this door or I’ll kill you,” he says. We stay seated and watch as he takes deep breaths and his chest heaves beneath his bloody smock. The man slides open the closet and pushes the hangars to the side. The metal clangs and his hands fly up as he quickly tries to quiet the cluttered ringing. He crouches behind a row of winter coats and hides. The door quietly hisses closed as he glides it shut with his foot.

Another round of pounding begins, along with a stiff plea:  Open up. Open the door. Open the goddamn door. No one moves. We hear police sirens and the red and blue lights striate between the curtain and the wall, illuminating George’s magical words. Bam. Whoosh. Zap.

The doorframe splinters as my mother breaks her way into the kids room. She is holding a small boy on her hip. It is the sleeping boy, David. He is only three years old and he is crying and wearing pajamas dappled in blood. People are pushing and screaming. Mom grabs my dress and I grab Katya’s dress and we flee from the room. The man in the closet hasn’t moved.

(“Why did they let us leave?”

“Who?”

“The police.”

“I just took you. The police came by the house later that night. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Sort of.”)

“Cover your eyes,” my mother says as she pushes us through the hallway, out of the house, toward the white cone of the streetlight. David has already seen everything, but my mom still holds her hands tightly across his lids. I peek through my fingers as we pass George’s bedroom. Mom struggles to keep David’s eyes covered, but he shakes free and screams, “Daddy! Daddy!”

I look at the man slumped at the foot of the twin-sized bed, hands at his sides. The wooden handle of a butcher knife shows. The blade stays hidden inside his chest. His black tie sits off to the side, like a flat kite and the silk is dulled with tiny red flecks. “Daddy!” David screams as we walk past. The drunk has killed David’s father. David’s drunken grandfather has just killed his own son.

My mom buckles us into the backseat of the car. David cries and cries fat tears the size of dollhouse plates. He knows his father is hurt and maybe even dead. And my sister and I know our father is dead and here we are, the three of us, our fathers turned into ghosts without anyone asking us if we’ll ever be okay. We each take one of David’s hands into our laps and we all crunch together.

Mom carries David into the house and sets him on the toilet. She slides the shower curtain, the rings grow like a slinky and scrape along the metal pole, and water begins to still around the plugged stopper. The steam fogs the room into a cup of buttermilk. Mom strips David and rests him inside the tub. She pours in a cap full of soap and we splash the bubbles over him and watch, as they foam pink and pop and disappear.

I pull some old pajamas from the bottom drawer. They are covered in faded stars and moons and they are too big for David, so mom rolls up the cuffss of the arms and legs. Katya and I unhook the clasps of our dress claws and start unwinding the filmy strips, spinning and shedding the party skins into coiled snakes. We are tucked into one big bed beneath a waffle blanket and a crisp blue sheet.

David won’t stop crying. He calls out to his father and we try and pretend his dad is still with us. We keep telling him that everything’s okay. Katya leans over and strokes his head and whispers, “David, please stop crying, please.”

He snivels and keeps a steady pace of small pants and wails.

Finally, my sister says, “David, if you stop, I will tell you about the frogman. Okay?” 

“You’ll scare him,” I say.

(“Mom, did she ever tell you what happened in the cave?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cave. The frogman in Wilderness Park.”

“I don’t know. Frogman. One of her fantasies.”

“What about the wolfman? Grandma says he drowns children in the river when they don’t behave?”

“That’s different,” she says.

In a quieter voice she adds,

“That’s real and you shouldn’t talk of such things.”)