Lauren Kardos
Chruściki
We learned through Aunt Julia, shrieking through the phone: JaJa died in his assisted living apartment across the state. I remember Mom held the receiver away from her ear, plucked a cicada that had gotten inside off the kitchen windowsill and held that in her other palm. Too far away to be useful for arrangements, we waited in hushed limbo, ate nothing but French bread pizzas and freezer-burnt appetizers from the Schwan's man. I crept from kitchen to bedroom, a fieldmouse in the tall grass, avoiding the talons of Mom’s grief. She didn’t want hugs. She didn’t want to share memories of the grandfather I met few enough times to forget the color of his eyes. She wouldn’t answer questions about the relatives my father and I would have to identify by dusty album photos. “What should I pack,” I asked Dad. He shrugged and said, “Whatever will make them think we’re mourning.”
JaJa was born in Warsaw, like his parents and his grandparents and their parents and grandparents, all the way back. Something I learned through Mom, since JaJa never talked much when we visited. Though his English sagged with a Philadelphian accent, he preferred to speak Polish to Mom and Aunt Julia, who mostly understood but could only respond in English. At fourteen-years-old, I stopped wondering if JaJa was knowable: his thoughts on Babcie’s snow-sky perm, what age he coughed through his first Marlboro, how he chose the cologne that still haunts his pink recliner I inherited from the care facility.
“Why do we have to make the six-hour drive when they hate us?”
Dad couldn’t answer.
Each trip ended the same when I was younger. JaJa yelling at Mom over some small thing, under-scrambled eggs, an errant sock I’d left on the living room couch. Babcie pretending Dad wasn’t there when he stepped in to defend us. Aunt Julia would sit at the kitchen table, chain smoking more than JaJa ever did, staring at me like I was some many-eyed bug. She’d turn to prophesy. I’d turn out exactly like her sister. I’d never leave the shitstain town Dad moved us to. Silent treatments followed the shouting, so the three of us would play tourist, leaving Mom’s family to stew. I swear we sampled every cheesesteak in the city over the years and one time I raced up those museum stairs faster than Rocky. Often we returned home days ahead of schedule. Visits spaced out and, eventually, Mom let go of those annual road trips. JaJa, Babcie, and Aunt Julia rarely called.
“Aside from us, kiddo, they’re the only family your mom has,” Dad said as we packed our bags and helped Mom with her laundry.
The day before our long drive to the service, I woke to a clanging and clattering around the kitchen. Oil splatters on her dingy bathrobe and her forehead slick, Mom stood over a sizzling Dutch oven. A rolling pin and pie cloth decorated the kitchen table. Powdered sugar and eggs formed a countertop mountain by the microwave.
“Want to help me make these Polish cookies you’ve never tried? Angels’ wings?” Mom asked, but her eyes said something like, I couldn’t bear to make them until now.
All day, we flattened dough until our biceps ached, laced the paper-thin strips through tiny central wounds, fried our feelings and everything we wanted to speak but never did and probably never would, because Mom wasn’t like her parents but in some ways she was. When she took the first bite of the cooled dough, she didn’t wipe away her tears but said, “It tastes like home.”
Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. Cold Signal, Milk Candy Review, Flash Fiction Online, Lost Balloon, and Best Microfiction 2022 are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems. You can find more of her work at www.laurenkardos.co.
