Dancing With the Shoes

Since moving here, Izabela and I have been picking up the pieces of our old life in California and trying to fit them into this new one. One of these, and one of the most romantic parts of our relationship according to us, is dance. In the States, we took classes in East and West Coast Swing, Country Waltz and Two-Step, Salsa, Cha-cha, and Argentinean Tango. The classes and events were queer friendly, consisting of almost all women, and it was great being enfolded in this community of kind, experienced dancers who were becoming more and more like friends. Our teacher, Zoe, was an international gold metal winner in numerous dance competitions. She wore wigs of every color with her glamorous dresses, came from Wales, and had the kindness and self command of a high priestess. She called her events “Dancing With the Queers,” the sound of which, I thought, gave queerness a magical ring. After this amazing experience in California, we, and I especially, hesitated to pick up dance here, knowing that it would be easy to make unfair comparisons. We were both concerned too about how a group of straight people in a homophobic country would respond to a gay couple. If they were mean, what would we do—leave? Keep dancing? Respond somehow? But once things were more or less on track with the stove, my assistant, and Izabela’s teaching, Izabela thought we’d better start dancing again before we forgot everything we’d learned, and I knew she was right.

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The club we found in Sopot, the affluent town not far from us, was, in my words, yuppified, or full of young professional people. The atmosphere was what you’d expect of an upscale nightclub, although the patrons were competent dancers as we were. The sense of glittery hype intrigued me, since, if anything, it was the thing I would have enjoyed a little more of in California.

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Here, for the first time, I was compelled to learn from someone speaking in Polish. The DJ kept teaching step after step, many of which we’d done before. Still, I felt out of practice, and wanted to follow his instructions like the good student I am. At first, Izabela translated a few words, but within minutes, I found myself, or maybe it was my feet, magically listening to the DJ’s words. I couldn’t help being a little proud of myself—here I was, able to speak almost no Polish, and yet I was learning along with everyone else.

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Dancing, at least for us, gets addictive. We danced Cha-Cha and Salsa over and over because those were the themes of tonight’s party. When “Smooth” by Santana came on, we started throwing in a few West Coast Swing steps, and I confess to feeling a little smug because no one else seemed to know them. No one seemed to notice us either. At the back of a dense crowd, two women dancing together, neither overtly gay, didn’t cause a stir.

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At home at our kitchen table afterward, I was still high on the thrill of dancing all night. I was willing to go back, and Izabela said that she too, up to a point, had enjoyed herself. “I think we should keep looking for a gay venue though,” she said. “There was a lot of heterosexual pressure at that club.” I was bewildered. If there was so much pressure, why had the people around us not commented?

It turned out that Izabela had been talking particularly about the DJ. Apparently, when he had asked everyone to find a dance partner, two men in the front row had jokingly embraced each other. “The DJ looked at them and used a word that translated as something like ‘we don’t do that gay stuff here.’” In the moment after she spoke, it was like the high-on-dance feeling had drained away, leaving the room a few degrees cooler. I didn't even know this was happening. I felt almost guilty
that Izabela had to be the bearer of this news. We decided, then and there, to keep researching gay spaces.

Fortunately for us, a gay club just opened up in Gdynia. We had heard about it, but not being club goers normally, we hadn’t put much thought into it. But now Izabela emailed the owner, and found out that yes, the club welcomes women, and though they hadn’t had parties themed around dance so far, they were interested in the idea. He also mentioned that they would be hosting a couple Christmas parties, and said that if we came in time, he’d be happy to sit down and get to know us a little. Izabela also discovered a new-years event organized by a man who, like Zoe, had competed in dance all over the world. The clip of him dancing we saw online showed a bald man walking on stage carrying a suitcase and wearing a suit coat, which he took off. He also took off his shoes. He next proceeded to dance wearing hardly anything next to a woman with another suitcase and red heels. Clearly, more dance adventures awaited us.

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Soon after our initial attempt at dance, the Christmas season started in earnest. I love everything to do with Christmas, especially the music which, as I discovered last year, includes quite a few East Coast Swing tunes—think country and jazz arrangements. But the beauty of the proliferation of Christmas music, although I know some people find it annoying after a couple weeks, is that there’s a song to fit just about every dance step. Last year, in the bottom-floor bedroom at my mom’s house, I danced to them all, but only by myself, wishing that Izabela could enjoy the zany festivity of it with me. This year however, I wasn’t sure how much access she and I would have to Christmas music outside of the grocery store as we don’t have a stereo system or TV.

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A few days ago, we found ourselves surrounded by the trappings of Christmas as we made our usual Sunday visit to Real, what I call the Polish version of Wal-Mart. All the time we were buying chocolates and festive drinks and other more practical things, I couldn’t help but notice the Christmas music playing overhead, and once we reached the shoe section, our last stop, I couldn’t keep the excitement in any longer. “Listen, Christmas Music,” I said to Izabela. She started speculating on what dances could be done to the song in question, a version of “Jingle Bell Rock” by someone I didn’t recognize. I started stepping in place, then, unable to resist, took Izabela’s hands, and we started dancing. We two stepped to Tammie Wynette’s “White Christmas,” danced East Coast Swing to Mariah Carey’s “Santa Clause Is Coming to Town,” and waltzed to John Lenon’s “Merry Christmas.” We danced on and on, practicing as seriously as if we were in a class or our own living room. No one interrupted us, and one little boy was particularly intent, unable to take his eyes off us. “Maybe he thinks we’re connected with Santa,” I said. “Or maybe he’s gay,” said Izabela. It was a little like Zoe’s parties—music of all kinds, a wonderful atmosphere—lots of people. But this was our own ballet kingdom, where magical female lovers danced for the thousands of boots and heels, slippers and Christmas shoppers, all gathered to adore them and drink in the sight. When we finally left Real, a heaviness seemed to have lifted. We were determined to practice more often, insuring we would be ready for whatever song played next.

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Tomorrow, though I can hardly believe it, is Christmas Eve. We’re going to the gay club after the sumptuous Polish supper Izabela has planned. Then, on New-year’s Eve, we’ll meet the bald, suitcase-carrying DJ. We don’t know what will happen, but you can be sure that once the music starts moving, so will our dancing shoes.

The Indispensable Man

I hear this concern expressed more than once, when our Bay Area friends learn of our plans: a lesbian couple moving to Poland? But surely, there are some living here already. In the weeks following her arrival, Lilly-Marie tends to be invariably confused as to when we can and when we cannot be out (yes in all kinds of artsy settings; no in front of teenagers and their mothers for fear of being suspected of wanting to recruit either); other than that, the challenge we face is insidious. Living the way we do, at the end of a hard-to-find street in the residential area of town, we blend in; we often stay home, mend whatever we can, and hope soon to be able to relax among all our recent improvements. What sets us apart and seems to raise alarm in people we have random encounters with is not a gay lifestyle, as our lives don’t match any government-induced ideas about it, but rather the mere notion of women living without a man.

“You must admit,” my sister-in-law, a widow, tells me when I visit her in the summer, some weeks after she learns about Lilly-Marie’s arrival, “that a man in the house is not a bad thing when it comes to minor repairs.”

I nod; sure, leaking faucets and defunct radiators pose a problem. But why would you want to have a live-in handyman?

"I assume there will be a man here to manage the stove," pan Henryk, who comes over to tune it up, says at our first encounter. We are in the basement; I wait for him to absorb the news that there will be no one else to instruct on our stove's well-being.

"Does pani Filipiak have a husband?" Lilly-Marie's new assistant, Olga, inquires on her first day. “Has she ever been married?” She asks on her second day. When send out shopping, she buys a roll of trash bags produced by a company named Jan Niezbedny (Johnny Indispensable). Its logo shows a guy flashing an I-know-it-all smile.

As more products of that sort (water-down dishwashing liquid, for instance, named after a waiter) weigh down supermarkets’ shelves, I begin to wonder. Do women really desire support from these gigolo-like, fantastic figures? Do these men lessen discomfort, or produce a message that a woman cannot make it at home on her own? I suspect an undefined subscript to the national subconscious to be operating here; in any case, it results in a humongous waste of time. It takes me a full week to convince pan Henryk that whatever is wrong with the temperature reader in my library must affect the performance of the stove. When I try to inculcate this piece of knowledge into him, he appears not to listen. When at last he arrives on Tuesday morning, he goes directly to the basement and spends an hour there, staring at the electronic panel of the stove as if it were a crystal ball. No matter how much I try to persuade him to come upstairs, he resists the idea.

At last he blurts out that he doesn’t want to infringe on my privacy. “You may have people sleeping up there, and I don’t want to interfere.”

I sincerely don’t know what he is talking about.

“There is no one asleep in my library at present,” I tell him. “Can we go?”

“If you believe that your temperature reader doesn’t work,” he sighs.

In confusion, I growl at him: “What do you mean – I believe? Can’t you just accept this as a fact?”

“You seem a bit nervous,” he observes.

“By saying ‘if you believe’ you undermine the veracity of what I’m telling you.” Pan Henryk, usually well-mannered, appears to have fallen into the quagmire of linguistic absurdity, so I try to recall him. “How can you manipulate language like that?"

At last, he follows me upstairs. Once he takes a closer look at the damned gizmo, he finds the cause of the problem in fifteen seconds.

Since our service men wish to appear chivalrous but end up plain rude, I’m happy to discover that one top-shelf pellet company is managed by ladies. I complete an order with them by the internet; they call me back promptly to arrange the delivery. I’m relieved to think that a certain period in my life will soon be over.

But when the delivery truck arrives on Wednesday at noon, the driver’s first words are: “I’ll appreciate if you send me some men.”

He needs men to help him drag our tone of pellets onto the lift because, as he explains, he cannot afford to work with an assistant. As I cannot provide him with any, he looks dismayed. "The whole day of work before me, and I'm being detained here," he mouths.

I offer to look for a friendly neighbor whom I used to have conversations with over the fence in the summer. In his sixties, my neighbor can’t be much help anyway, but I want to appease the driver. The neighbor, however, is gone shopping. In despair, I gaze at the empty windows of other houses; at noon, all able-bodied men must be busy working or studying. Some unemployed specimens can be discovered perhaps in the housing projects closer to the woods, but I wouldn’t know how to find them on such short notice. The driver looks at me expectantly, and I feel the impending rain; the desolate sky above remains deadly still. The world is about to collapse due to the lack of men.

In the end, the driver leaves us with half of the shipment strewn on the grass and the rest of it blocking the driveway. I ask Lilly-Marie to elicit Magda, her assistant, to help us carry the pellet bags inside. Considering that we have been taken by surprise, we manage: Magda loads pellets onto a wheelbarrow; Lilly-Marie carries pellet bags in her arms; I arrange the load in the boiler room.

"Now all your neighbors are going to know that there are only two women living here." Magda complains all of a sudden as she unloads the wheelbarrow in the garage. She says it as if she has just discovered that we live without a lock on our front door.

"They know it already," I tell her.

The following day at breakfast, Lilly-Marie and I spend time unraveling what Magda supposed our neighbors would do with this amazing about us. We examine all available pieces of evidence: the words she used and the tone of her voice.

“She sounded as if she was pointing out negligence on our part,” I notice.

“And it was as if she feared for our well being,” Lilly-Marie contemplates.

Did Magda mean to imply that our courteous neighbors would turn into beasts and gang-rape us? I wondered. Or did she think they might break into our house and steal our possessions? Lilly-Marie mused.

In any case, the subject was instantly closed and Magda would say no more.

Celsius 9/11

I’m sure you’ve heard about the kind of stoves used to heat people’s homes—maybe in an old book, a movie, or from your grandmother. Well, we have one. First, know that our stove isn’t the old fashion type you’re thinking of. It’s a new-age, computerized contraption with a temperature reader you can keep anywhere in your house, a screen with menus, and the kind of manual that only the most attentive people, (Izabela among them), ever read. It burns only certain things—pellets, ecocoal, and, of course, wood. Pellets, which we’d been using for the first six weeks of the stove’s life, are honey-colored, about the size and shape of a half-used stick of chalk, and surprisingly civilized compared to coal or wood. We liked them, but we had discovered, upon moving in, that half the basement, as well as the space under the terrace outside, was filled with well seasoned kindling—the kind that would cost a fortune in California, and that many home owners would kill to have for their fireplaces. We were determined to make use of it—how could we not? To switch from pellets to wood, you had to clean up the pellet remnants and change the settings on the stove, which meant that Izabela spent Thursday night and all of Friday just getting the stove ready. Friday morning, I woke up to what sounded like the banging of a hammer. “It’s impossible,” I thought, “nobody here does construction.” But to my surprise, I soon learned that what I’d been hearing was indeed a hammer. It turned out that once the pellets were all gone, Izabela discovered that they had left a hard, black substance on the inside of the stove—not so civilized of them after all.

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I grocery shopped all afternoon and arrived home to the smell of smoke, and the service man, Pan Henryk, in the basement talking to Izabela. It appeared that, between the two of them, the wood was finally starting to burn.

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For the first evening, the wood seemed to be working fine. Yes, we had to check the stove a lot more often—every few hours instead of every couple days, and yes, there was a little smoke, but apart from that, it wasn’t so bad. We were not only saving money, but we were getting rid of this mass of kindling in the basement, and, as Izabela pointed out, doing our duty to the environment. Saturday, the temperature dropped in the house, and I started feeling cold. One important thing to know about me is that I am a complete ninny when it comes to cold—I fuss and complain my head off if the temperature drops below about 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The wood, unfortunately, was not interested in my temperature needs. The house got colder and colder, and no matter what we did, the stove temperature refused to rise.

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By Sunday, the smell of smoke was starting to make it seem as if we were barbecuing inside the house. “How long will this pile of wood last?” I asked Izabela. “For probably half the winter and we can buy more for almost nothing.” I was crushed. How were we going to survive an entire winter with all this smoke, cold, and general filth that wood created since we tracked ash up from the basement. Still, the experiment was making Izabela happy, and she was right—the wood was environmental, cheap, and already here.

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Sunday was also the beginning of the end, as it turned out. I hadn’t been down to the basement since we started the experiment, but on the way to adding more wood to the stove what did I see, but the pellets, waiting, ignored, in their huge plastic bags. This was too much—dropping the wood I was carrying, I ran to Izabela, throwing my arms around her. “I miss the pellets,” I wailed into her sweater. “I do too,” she said. I was shocked. “You mean you don’t want to burn wood forever?” “No,” said Izabela. “I thought you wanted us to burn wood so we could get these great savings.” We agreed to burn through as much of the kindling as we could by Thursday, then switch back.

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By Tuesday night, things had gone from bad to worse. Our poor stove, which had begun leaking an ominous-looking, tar-like substance starting Monday, was now covered with the stuff. Our rugs were dirty from the ash, and you couldn’t spend a minute in the basement without smelling like an arsonist. Now, when Izabela opened the stove, flames leapt up at her. We knew that there was nothing for it but to turn off the stove, clean it out as best we could, and reprogram it for pellets. We cleaned the tar from the inside for three hours, not getting nearly all of it off. By the end, Izabela’s hands were too sore even to cut bread, I looked like a fourteen-year-old chimney sweep with grey hair, and we had no hot water. We had a visit each from the plumber, the service man, and the chimney sweep; we still don’t know why by burning the wood we produced tar. Maybe there was glue in the wood--maybe the chimney is at the wrong angle… we have no idea. I spoke to my mom on Thursday night, and her contribution was “next time, you should burn what the stove is meant to burn,” which would make sense except that it has settings and a compartment designed especially for wood. Oh well—we ordered more pellets, cleaned up the basement, and gave the wood to some kind gentlemen who, so far, are making use of it just fine.

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Now that the wood was gone, we were sure the drama was over. But, like the Iraq war, things just got more bizarre. The temperature reader, which we’d counted on to make sure we were warm enough and that the stove was working okay, had quit. The stove was refusing to process the pellets, the house was still an icebox, and the upstairs, two floors above the basement, strangely enough, smelled like smoke more than ever. We soon discovered the cause—some of the tar, in route to the chimney, had worked its way into our wall where it created a leak, discoloring it and making us worry about what would happen when the predicted rain began.

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Because I don’t speak Polish yet, Izabela was forced to deal with everyone we consulted about the situation. The service man, Pan Henryk, told her to raise the temperature on the stove so it would clean itself of tar. Pan Karol, the plumber, said he’d never heard of such a thing, and that it would make the stove explode. Pan Hanryk started bad-mouthing Pan Karol. The chimney sweep agreed with pan Henryk about inducing higher temperature. It was Pan Wieslaw, our handy man, who finally fixed the temperature reader when Pan Karol stood us up for the second time in a week. Pan Henryk said we needed a different valve for the stove. Pan Karol said the one we had was fine. “All these guys are in love with you,” I said to Izabela, “they just all handle it differently.”

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After a few days, though, the stove seemed to come back to itself. The temperature rose, the tar started drying up. After two weeks, life was finally turning normal again. The Iraq war was over.

After the Deluge

Last two months seemed more like being swamped. The semester began in October, and I expected all kinds of things to surprise me - new arrival to the English Department at the University of Gdansk. First of all, I wanted to learn about the internet platform so I wouldn't spend my life making photocopies for students who didn't have textbooks. Then I wanted to learn how to communicate with them and make things work. Nevertheless, I agreed to come to the post-Soviet conference at the University of Kansas because this was the first time an American University would invite me as a keynote speaker. I also thought it would be neat if Lilly-Mare and I could fly from the States at the same time and meet at Gdansk Airport. I did everything humanly possible to have all house repairs done before the said event. Our wonderful new furnace was installed and happily burning pellets away in the basement, but the upstairs windows still needed new shades, and the entrance door came only a week after we did. I had a fantasy of having a shower curtain creating an oval enclosure over our antique bathtub since I saw a similar kind of arrangement in Santa Rosa B&B (where we spent our first vacation in 2008). But it took Pan Karol, my adorably supportive plumber at the time, two weeks to understand what I meant. All I recall now from the past two months are glimpses of a normal life that we were about to have and which kept eluding us. Last Thursday, when the stove was adjusted at last after the wood disaster, Lilly-Marie said that something felt different. I noticed it, too, and we quickly diagnosed the change: the normal life had started. And if we were then instantly swamped by my students' essays, it was just part of this new normalcy, nothing more.