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.
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