Amerikanka

Issue 52 • Fall 2025 • Nonfiction

LOVE MATH

Love is a riddle, one that my family has been trading back and forth, at times with our words, but more often with the brashness of our actions. Sometimes one of us is leaving, other times we are coming back, fighting and then forgiving, giving up or giving in.

This chronic unwillingness to face the truth of our darkest selves, and the knowledge that we really should, that is what I see in the eyes of those I call “my people.”

And, since we are Polish, we bring to this search for love and relief a familiarity with pain which has made us more pliable in its hands.

We are not the tense muscles of someone who didn’t see the accident coming, all broken bones from our resistance to the crash. We are the drunk who walks away bewildered and blinking slowly, dusting themselves off but surviving the accident unscathed.

With our muscles and mind and words loosely gripping the world around us, we are the drunk tempting fate to decide if we get to live or die, taking another swig before walking away, laughing.

Alcohol, administered liberally and often, is both the cause of our problems and solution to them. We know before we reach adulthood that life is going to be a whole fucking mess of tragedy, because the stories about it and tears and absent loved ones are like a thick ooze smeared all over our homes.

It is a twinkle in the eye of “my people,” a wide swath of Eastern European Slavs whose fluency in war and struggle has left even the most chaste elderly woman with a sense of humor dark enough to suck the joy out of any room.

It is the ease with which my Dziadek offers me a deadpan aside every time I am hurt or disappointed that of course, Malienka, loo-JEH sow who-YEH, “Little one, people are dicks.” Or my Babcia cackling when she drank my college boyfriend under the table on her twenty first shot, one for each year of his life, before whispering to me where I found such a pizda piedorolna “a fucking pussy.”

According to my Polish family, it’s not love that hurts.

LIFE HURTS.

So here, have a drink, and na zdrowie na zdrove-yeh (to your health). As we all chug this ethanol which will prematurely scar our livers and kill many of us in untimely tragic accidents!  Sto lat! stoh-LAHT! A hundred more!

Unfortunately, knowing that LIFE HURTS doesn’t prevent it from happening. Knowing that you are repeating a pattern doesn’t stop you from repeating it.

THE LANGUAGE

I learned Polish hearing my parents fight. I picked it up from the Holocaust bedtime stories my grandparents whispered to me, holding back their own tears while I held back my many questions, grateful to listen even if I was too young to understand. I patched together the words I didn’t know when sitting at the foot of big party tables, smiling and sneaking sips from the glasses, giddy that I was even included. I mimicked the sounds I heard from songs like sto lat^[1] sto lat niech zije nam, my lips numb from drops of vodka left in the tiny cups; even a lick of it made my mouth burn wonderfully.  The grown-ups with their wide mouthed laughs in the pictures as if thinking to themselves, “What could be the harm?” Ona taka malutka! (She’s so little.)

Polish was my first language.  In the darkness of long party nights,  the loud but muffled sounds would pound the bottom of my bedroom floor, rattle the door in its frame, shake the bolts in their hinges. These laughing intruders would sometimes get lost and fall into my room, kissing, laughing, stepping on my toys and books, sometimes even sitting on my feet before they realized I was there. The plants would get knocked over. I’d get snatched on my way to the bathroom or for a glass of water by a pale belligerent person grabbing me by the shoulders too tight, kissing me sloppily on the head, like a bulldog.

The Poland my parents grew up in was a bleak place. There was a grimace served alongside everyone’s origin story, tingeing their childhoods and futures. Parts of the family tree disappeared, shipped off to the work camps in Siberia. The lucky Polish people who survived the war always wanted to talk about it, but their children did not want to hear about it.

Regardless of who you were, being Polish in the last one hundred years will mean you have a sense of unspeakable hardship passed on from the generation before you. Regardless of the shape it takes, it will be heavy and it will be difficult to face. My parents were of a generation who met the grim realities around them with an absurdist humor. To some this may look like a joie de vivre, but it is more like the nervous laughter that comes after the graphic retelling of an atrocity. It’s a redirection of an intense energy, not discounting it, but a way to survive.

GREENPOLINA

If you think of Long Island as a fish, Montauk is the back fin, Queens would be the top of the head and Brooklyn is like the jaws. Greenpoint is just at the mouth, specifically Newton Creek is the mouth. The Midtown Tunnel spurts out there too, along with the trains spewing into and out of Manhattan. I have always thought of Manhattan as the little fish that the big fish (Long Island) is always chasing, like in those illustrations of how heavy metals are distributed through the food chain of fish.

It was where Tata had his construction business  in a warehouse on a street between the East River and McCarren Park. Today the small gray building would be in the shadows of immense high-rises, if it hasn’t already been replaced by one. The streets had no people on them and the noise from the warehouses was all consuming, giving a chaotic texture to every interaction. How can you get anything done with all this noise, I remember wondering. Each of the industrial spaces had heavy machinery blasting and welding and hammering. Tata gave me special construction worker earmuffs, but they slid off the side of my face and were slimy with sweat and grease. I used my fingers instead, curled up on a chair in the corner or out on the roof. From the roof you could see the whole of the downtown Manhattan skyline to one side, and the tops of the trees at the park the other way.

At the warehouse there were people cutting up materials and carrying stuff, and Tata was mean to all of them. He yelled and they nodded and listened, and he would bring me into his small office where the papers and fax machine and his jeans and collared shirt made him look like an executive compared to the dusty workers below. People would come and go, he would give them cash, call everyone a robber, and kick them out of the office. Everyone was Polish, everyone was a man, and I felt completely lost in his world.

I was so impressed by how Tata managed all this chaos. Having little conversations on the street, loading and unloading his van with a smile, telling one of his workers to hurry up or his daughter would beat them up, to which I would crumple with embarrassment, hiding my head in my hands or sulking to the passenger seat to wait there instead. Watching the sunset from that rooftop, we could see little fires starting at the end of streets in improvised oil drum barbecues, the workers resting for a moment, or those returning from work coming to have a break and take in the beautiful view. It was in the evenings that the din would die down a bit, the thunderous roar of metal gates closing and cars starting and driving away; children laughing at the park, dogs howling at the drone of a siren, church bells ringing, subway cars screeching on the tracks below, the chirp of bird song.

The complexity and layers of all these sounds was just as overwhelming to me as the machines, even though they were in a completely different register. It was difficult to hide my stunned expression in response to the barrage of sound and activity that surrounded the shop, and so most of the people who met me then met a mute, trembling, version of me.

Tata called it Greenpolina, a clever mix of the word Polonia, meaning polish diaspora, and Greenpoint.

It’s the center of all my family’s pain and I try to avoid it as much as possible.

TA-TEW-SHEW

I could tell my dad was charming by the way people looked at him. He would make people laugh and guffaw, they would grab his arm and give him hugs. He was funny, always gesticulating, and a great storyteller.  The men respected him, asking his advice, running hypotheticals by him, listening intently to his answers. He controlled a room, interrupted conversations and talked over the speaker if they were being boring. He would say the quiet part out loud, “Your husband is a fucking idiot.” But he was also a master at defusing a situation, calming down the husband he had just insulted with a drink, a pat on the back, let’s go have a chat.

“Spokajne stary,” (take it easy old man) “Your wife is a handful.” He was a master at playing both sides.

He would talk shop about cars. He was quick to chop up plans for a bathroom or kitchen remodel on a napkin, always having projects going and employing many of our friends along the way.

When I was little I missed my dad even when I was sitting in his lap.  He had a way of choosing who he was going to charm and ignoring everyone else.  He was in reach and yet felt unreachable to me, like I didn’t have the right words to capture his interest. This wasn’t a father who picked me up from daycare or gave me pep talks when I was sad that someone was mean to me. I had the feeling that he truly did not like being around me or my mom, and the air was electric with his negativity whenever we tried to just be together.  When he was gone it was a relief, we could slouch and soften up and do our own thing. I learned that our job was to try to be invisible. I bit my tongue, afraid he would snap at me for saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing but at the wrong time. I yearned for his hugs and often went to hug his leg only to feel him just shift away and leave instead of picking me up and holding me.

I got a good night story and kiss from my mom every night. But my dad would often come home after I went to sleep or not come home for days at a time. He would often still be asleep when I went to school, so I whispered as I got dressed, hoping I wouldn’t wake him, trying to get a peek at him if I could. The drama and joy of each day felt like it relied on whether he would or wouldn’t be there.

He would stiffen up when I was around, side eye me and talk around me. It seemed I was always in his way as he would reach past me for his glass, or to ash his cigarette. At those tables, where the men talked and the women cleaned up, I wished that I wasn’t a girl, because in all of Tata’s stories and jokes women were crazy or stupid and they all belonged in the kitchen.

I wanted to contort myself into the form of something he would find worth spending time with. I could feel him leaving before he did.  There was the uncomfortable spiky air after the fights. An awkwardness would follow him into every room as my mother’s questions rained down.  I didn’t know they were reasonable questions like “Why didn’t you come home last night?” Or “Why are you hitting me in front of our daughter?”  I just knew that he didn’t like being asked questions and that every time she did there was a fight and he would grab his briefcase and a few jackets from his closet, leaving the hangers swaying and clinking together as he slammed the door, opened the garage and sped off.

I sat by the window with our dog, my arm draped around her and playing with the fabric on the curtains or tearing up a piece of palm and looking out at the street every day after school, and then again after dinner. I don’t even think I missed him that much, since he didn’t really talk to me when he was home anyway, but I think I wanted my mom to see how much I loved him, in some way trying to punish her for pushing him away. She was actually just heartbroken to see me miss someone who was hurting me so much. Each night I held vigil and would fall asleep amongst the plush curtains, and she’d carry me back to my room, her hatred for Tata gaining more strength and momentum every time, so that the vitriol that was waiting for him became more and more potent.

When he stopped coming home at night on a regular basis, not just once or twice a month, but most of each week, I could hear her sanity start to crumble. A guttural scream, a hurled crystal ashtray, a rolodex set on fire, a bag of envelopes in a garbage bag on the side of the bed. The less he was around the more the monster came out, and the more the monster came out of her, the more it seemed to keep him away. She would beg him to think of Patti and I would barge in furious, and I’d tell her to leave me out of it and grab his hand and tell her to stop screaming at him, that he wasn’t hurting me.

Until one fight which was so loud that even when I tried to rub the sheets against my ears to mute the sound, I could hear them. The house seemed to shake. My mom screamed and I ran into their room just as Tata picked up the rolling chair from Mama’s vanity, a large armchair with a tall back and heavy wheels. His back was to me and he lifted it over his head and threw it across the room at her. I ran in front of him screaming for him to stop. Her cheek was swollen, and he looked a bit scraped up too.  I could see my mom had taken hold of a vase, ready to throw it at him. She collapsed into hysterics on the beige plush carpet, and he staggered back, drunk, wiping his mouth, seething.

“Fuck this Patki, your mama is crazy. I can’t do this anymore, look what she made me do.” I kissed the top of Mama’s head and told him to get away from me when he tried to come closer. I felt my heart harden to him and suddenly felt so terrible for how I had been punishing my mom for his bad behavior. From then on I promised myself to protect her from him instead of the other way around.

THE EMPTY CLOSET

I waited for some news about where Tata went but was scared to ask. I watched for him from my perch by the window. I would count the cars that passed, tally their colors; there were blue cars, and white cars and green cars, new cars and old cars. I watched the snow fall, I watched the kids walk by and the buses come and go. But my dad’s brown car wasn’t there anymore.  It had been gone since the night of the thrown chair.

In the morning on the school bus, I watched a dad with a big belly walk his daughter onto the bus. He gave her a big kiss, and she skipped down the aisle and bounced into her seat, her little arms wrapped around her little backpack.  Through the blurry tears in my eyes, I watched her smiling parents waving goodbye to her and hid my face in the backpack on my lap.

Over the phone Tata said he was gone and he wasn’t coming back. He’d told my mom that it was her fault he left, that she closed him off after I was born, that she drove him away. That she did this to us, not him.

She responded with a maniacal laugh. High pitched at first and ending with a growl, she spat the insult back at him. “Mojo winna? Ty Skurwysinnu.” (My fault, you fucking son of a bitch?)

The curses in Polish were whispered and hissed. She began tearing down Tata’s clothes from the hangers in his closet and stuffing them into garbage bags,  so consumed with rage and hysterics that she was talking to the absent husband out loud. She worked as if she were casting spells or imbuing the objects with a curse. The hangers caught on the edges of the plastic bags, causing them to tear, scratching her arms and legs, but she kept going faster, her words sharper and more biting as their shared bedroom began to empty of evidence of him.

THE DUNES

The winter he left,  I didn’t see him for months. When he finally showed up, he picked me up and we drove  mostly in silence.  I asked him questions about how he was doing, and he said not good. He asked me the same and I also said not good. Even that seemed to be too far for both of us, holding back tears as I looked out the backseat and he glanced back at me with eyes moist in the rear-view mirror.

It was still cold and not many people were out on the boats. We walked to the end of the long dock where there was a sailboat waiting for us. He helped me on and asked me what I thought. “Looks nice,” I said meekly.

He started the engine and after we left the marina. He shut it off and unfurled the sail. He placed his hand against his ear, listening. “Hear that, Patka? It’s silence.” There were seagulls and the wind moving through the sails and clinking all the lines and the little flags were all flapping. We sailed for a while around the bend of land to the east and then dropped anchor near a small beach surrounded by dunes. He pointed to the top and challenged me to race him there.

We sat overlooking the harbor, the wind whipping at the sweat on our foreheads from the climb. We were panting and laughing and gulping water and wind between breaths. My mom told me not to ask why he left us or where he went, so I pretended like nothing was wrong. There was so much I wasn’t allowed to do or say so I didn’t do or say anything. I just tried to smile and not touch him too much. His tan skin was equal parts familiar and uninviting. I had spent so little time alone with him in my life, I felt strange not having my mom’s fingers to cling to for support and an understanding squeeze when he said something mean or dismissive.

Sitting there on the dunes with him it felt like something important was supposed to happen between us. Remorse and confusion bloomed in my chest. I wanted to show him how mature I was now, even though I was just six years old. I was trying to formulate the perfect line, to seem smart, to let him know I understood. When I looked up at him squinting at the horizon, I saw trails of water from the creases of his eyes, streaking down to his neck. Stiffening and using the back of his hands to wipe his face, he took turns smiling, wincing, making o’s with his mouth. He seemed to be struggling to speak, and he never did. He just cried. And cried. After a while I said, “I understand” and put my hand on his forearm, which was very warm, and I felt the strong muscles stretch and tighten under his skin. He wrapped me in his arms awkwardly. The sudden wetness of his face and armpits so close to me made me go stiff. He muffled some Polish words into the top of my head, which I think he was kissing. “No, Patulki, you have no idea.”

Before I could make sense of the limbs and affection and words, we were laughing and rolling down the dunes and back to his dinghy. Once we reached the shore I wanted to ask him, what just happened, what do you want to say to me? Why did you go? But he handed me the life vest and pointed to the dinghy and just said, “It’s time to go.”

My time next to him was always painful, and somehow there was never enough of it.

SIX YEARS LATER

My hair felt like an underwater mermaid and laughter filled my body, like bubbles of joy blowing up my throat. I closed my eyes and spun around and around. A child on a merry go round. My friends were laughing and then they were yelling.

A friend brought us to her grandma’s empty house- she was out and had a cool  basement she wanted to show us. There was a key inside a fake rock next to the back door, and we giggled as we walked into the new tantalizing world of a home without supervision. There was a big sunken den basement, with a thick mint green carpet. At the bar, which had a few stools in front of it, was a Smirnoff bottle I instantly recognized. Instead of a bottle cap the top of it was like a bottle of soap. I could literally just squeeze a shot into my mouth, the height of the bar and the bottle was right at eye level. Only a few sips of that and I was down on the shag carpet which had become a cloud. The yelling came into focus as words. “Patti, get up!”

Their grandma was home! They were trying to get me to stand. I felt their hands but couldn’t put my weight against them, I could only smile and laugh. I felt so heavy on the outside and so light on the inside. This feeling is home, I thought. This is me falling in love, this is God. I felt a light glow in my chest. I hadn’t felt the liquid-light of love in so long, but it felt familiar. I couldn’t believe that all this time the love was hidden away in those bottles. I was back in conversation with my dad. In my mind I spoke to him and said, “I get it now. I would leave me for this too.”

Then suddenly I was in a shower, the peach tiles spinning around me, my hands slipping down the walls as I tried to stand. The people all melting, jabbing me with hands that couldn’t seem to grab me. Somehow, I was outside now, walking sideways on the bushes to the ambulance, falling on the flagstone path and dragging my knees and feet against them, laughing, my body stretching in opposite directions.

I woke up with my arms tied to the metal sides of a hospital bed, the nurse asking me if I had calmed down yet. I didn’t understand. My mouth was parched, my knees hurt, my eyes stung, and my stomach felt like I had been punched and kicked. “You put up a big fight for a little shrimp,” she told me angrily as she filled out paperwork. Mama was whispering to the ceiling of the hospital room “Matka Boska” (mother of God) What did I do to deserve this? Why are you punishing me?”

The scrapes on my knees reminded me of the fall. The green carpet. The bottle with the dispenser. The thought of it brought the taste back to my mouth and the smell of vomit and it turned my stomach. I had never been able to taste my own mouth before this.  As the story of how I got to the hospital came back to me I also began the lie. “Mamusiu I think I was poisoned…” I tried to tell her. I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“The things you were saying Patti, like a monster. You were kicking and punching everyone. Please apologize to the nurses and the doctor when they come in.” Instead, the door opened, and Tata came in. Oh my god, I thought. “They told me you could have died Patki” Mama cried, looking my way as he came in. I hadn’t seen him in such a long time, I tried to sit up but couldn’t. He sat down in one of the chairs next to my mom and started laughing, shaking his head.

“Janusz it’s not funny. This is your fault,” my mom said, twisting her mouth.

My dad leaned in close to me and I closed my eyes, thinking he was going to yell at me and call me stupid. But when I opened them, he was already moving back towards the door. He had pinned a blinking Bacardi pin to my hospital gown. “Congratulations,” he said with a thin smile, clearly irritated, hands shaking. “You’ve made your mother and me very proud today. Exceptional daughter. Twelve years old! Must be a world record.” and he left.

Under my headache and shame and nausea was a glowing bit of warmth from how the vodka made me feel, and as I was untied from the bed and leaving the hospital I felt a molting of some kind occur, an imperviousness to what people thought or felt about me. The notion that what my parents thought of me didn’t actually matter pulsed through me.  The first taste of armor, as if I had entered the hospital a writhing caterpillar and left a butterfly: I knew exactly what to do next. I had to find more nectar.

THE RIDDLE

I kept the Bacardi pin in a little bowl of shells in my room. I wondered about the message my dad  was trying to send me, but I couldn’t decipher it. By the time I was fourteen I had been hospitalized a handful of times.  My discovery of drinking meant I didn’t need to search and pine for my parents’ love anymore. I presented a good enough version of a person to them and was indifferent to whatever love they did or didn’t give me. After a while I was pretty sure I had never needed it at all. Drunk and high, I felt so incredibly alive. It felt like I was falling in love with my own self.

I started middle school with a big group of girlfriends who knew me from Spanish class or the school newspaper or playing lacrosse.  By seventh grade I had started to pressure them one by one to sneak into their parents’ bags, to steal something with me from the mall, to go to  third base with a boy. I ended up with a smaller circle, just a few kids who like me were looking for thrills. We would sneak off in middle school and smoke cigarette butts we found on the ground outside. The local supermarket would hire kids as young as thirteen to bag groceries, and we would steal caffeine pills and cough syrups and wine coolers, making revolting concoctions far away from any adults and waiting for the feelings of the chemicals to wash over us. It became a sort of dare between the other girls each time we went; who could do something crazier? Wear something sluttier? Get away with having more makeup on or getting the attention of an older boy?

My mom blamed my withdrawal from sports and clubs and schools on herself since she worked long hours in the diamond district and wasn’t around to supervise me. Every time I quit one activity, she would sign me up for another. I tried tennis, cheerleading, horse-back riding, playing the violin, dance, and gymnastics. Each effort was expensive, time consuming for my mom, and ultimately a dead-end.

By eighth grade I had a split personality. When needed I could be sweet and nice. But being around my mom and my Polish family I was tense and annoyed.  My mom would cry on the phone with her friends, and I would overhear her try to brainstorm a way to get through to me, to get me to change. But when she tried, she was met with a rage that even I did not see coming. If she challenged me, I’d be slamming the closet doors shut so hard they broke off the hinges and grabbing her by the shoulders and threatening to push her downstairs. When she came too close to enforcing a boundary, taking away my phone or not letting me out of the house, I’d punch myself in the face until my nose bled and my eyes would swell. I threatened that I’d call Child Protective Services and tell them she beat me up. She looked like the victim in a horror movie, and I was the monster.

I remember a flash of deep shame at that moment, of knowing what I was doing was wrong. It was as if we both had the thought at the same time; “You are just like your father, “ she hissed at me, slamming the door on her way out.  How did I become him? And there again was that flash of strength  that I remembered drinking gave me. The monster was my father when I was little. The thing that I didn’t realize until I became one myself was what the monster really is about: power. And being powerful felt amazing.

^[1]. Sto Lat Zdrowia  One hundred Years of Health is sung at many Polish celebrations.

Issue 52 • Fall 2025

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry