Orienting yourself to the new landscape: After leaving JFK Airport, look out the car window as you zoom along the enormously wide, open roads you’ve seen only in American movies and in the photographs your father sent with his letters. Notice that one hour passes, then another, and still you have not encountered one single traffic light. Do not get unsettled. This is called a highway.
When you look out the kitchen window of your new apartment, you will not see the familiar twelve-story bloks with colorful balconies looming all around; there will be no more view of the distant Baltic Sea. Instead, you will have to adjust to the sight of a squat, red-brick apartment building a stone’s throw from your own. Put a Pop Tart in the toaster, and when it’s done, sit with your back to the window.
Over the next few weeks, prepare to have your senses bombarded. You will find that everything in America is different—from the bright green street signs and the postal vans and the squirrels scampering outside, to the sound of lawn mowers on Sunday mornings, to the hot humid days and the hum of the air conditioning unit in your apartment. You will be introduced to crinkly packages of chewy, sugary gummy worms. The sickly sweet smell of the laundry detergent that snakes up your nose and chokes you.
Try not to listen in on the adults’ conversations, because otherwise, you will learn that there are people and places to avoid in America, like the church down the street from Babcia’s apartment, which isn’t Catholic, or the neighborhood where the Portorykanie live. You will learn to fear. You will learn that Americans are so free they have the right to shoot you if you trespass onto their property. Images of shooting scenes from movies you accidentally glimpsed will flash through your mind. You will walk past the houses with their neatly manicured lawns, wondering which of them has a gun somewhere inside it.
And when you see your mother sitting on a tree stump in Babcia’s backyard, her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking, freeze. Briefly make eye contact when she lifts her head. See the skin she moisturizes nightly with dollops of Nivea cream; register the red splotches now covering it. Quickly slink away. Coming to America was supposed to be a good thing, so pretend this never happened.
On the first day of school: Put on your Catholic school uniform while buzzing bees swarm under your skin, and in your stomach the alphabet cereal with marshmallow swirls. While your mother drives you down the streets of your new American city, practice the four English phrases you know: My name is Magda; Thank you; I’m sorry; I don’t speak English.
When you arrive, try not to get overwhelmed by the loud, pullulating mass of red plaid in front of the building. Keep your eyes focused somewhere between the ground and the curious faces as you and your mother attempt to locate your teacher. She is young and has a kind face, and although you cannot understand what she is saying, her voice is gentle, falling onto you like soft snowflakes. She calls a few names across the parking lot and soon three girls appear. “Cześć,” they say to you in Polish with smiles. The buzzing bees underneath your skin settle.
Do not panic when your mother leaves you. Fall into line and allow yourself to be led into the building, down the creaky wooden floors to your third-grade classroom. Marvel at how there is a space inside your wooden desk for all the heavy textbooks your teacher hands out. Gaze through the window when the principal’s voice sounds from the intercom, rough like the sponges your mother washes pots and pans with after dinner each night.
Sit up straight. The first activity is beginning; one of the Polish girls explains to you what it is. Watch your new American classmates go up to the front of the room one by one, and listen politely as they relate what they did over summer vacation. Try to pick out words you might know from their monologues. Pretend the boy with dimples is telling everyone about riding his bike in the woods, or that the girl with curly hair and glasses is talking about going swimming. When your interest wanes, sneak peaks at the children sitting nearby. Try to figure out who you might want to be friends with. Try not to picture the faces of your classmates back home.
When the teacher calls your name, with the a inside all stretched out like a guma that’s lost its elasticity and can no longer be used for Chinese jump rope, look up and freeze—but do not think to disobey. You are a good Polish girl who knows her manners and respects her elders. You’ve been taught well. Ignore your dry throat and your queasy stomach and your legs like cooked noodles as you make your way between the rows of desks. Frantically sift through the images of summer flashing in your mind: the excitement of the flight to America; the time you, your mother, and older sister took a shortcut through a cemetery to get to the lake and almost got lost; the picnic organized by the factory where your father works, with Coca-Cola and hot dogs, Popsicles and potato chips (such purely American treats!); an inground swimming pool with the clearest, bluest water you splashed around in for hours in your new, tie-dyed bathing suit from Kmart.
At the blackboard, turn around to face your classmates whose eyes pin you in place like an insect on display. Stare down at the worn carpeting. Wishing you could sink down into it as if it were a lake will not help you, so think. Just think. Try as hard as you can while your heart thuds madly in your ears and your face grows hotter and hotter.
Accept that you cannot conjure a language you do not know from thin air. It is as if the teacher is expecting you to perform a magic trick you haven’t yet learned. In your mind there is a brick wall. You are expected to get words through it but no one has given you the instructions yet. All that you are, all that you’ve seen, everything you have to say is stuck behind this wall.
Look timidly up at the front row of desks, where one of the Polish girls sits, her hair blond and crimped. The name tag on her desk reads Caroline but her real name is Karolina. She is watching you with sympathy, and the understanding in her eyes is a lifeline. Take two steps forward and lean down to her. Whisper, “Jak powiedzieć że spałam w namiocie?”
Stand up straight and try to repeat her words to the class.
“I…slept…in tent.”
Do not worry that this isn’t exactly true. Do not worry that this isn’t true at all. Because at least there was a tent, pitched by your father on the narrow strip of grass behind your apartment building. There was a tent, in which you spent a few happy afternoons playing alone with your Barbies. There was a tent, in which one day you found a strange girl with your dolls and got scared, because the girl was speaking in English and you did not know what to do, so you yelled for your mother, who rushed down from the apartment and shouted in Polish at the intruder to get out, to leave, right now.
But of course, like the rest of your summer experiences, this is too complicated to try to explain in English.
So settle for the half-truth because it is easier to translate.
Settle for the half-truth because you will need to learn how to be less than whole for a long while.
But there was a tent.
There was a tent.
There was a green tent.
Snack time and recess: Open your blue Mickey Mouse lunch box and take out the pasztetowa sandwich your mother prepared. The liverwurst is from the Polish deli in town and not nearly as good as the homemade kind in jars back in Poland, with white fat solidifying on top and needing to be scooped out with a spoon. Look around at your classmates, at their alien foods: bags of unnaturally orange, crunchy triangles; small plastic barrels filled with green liquid; rolls of stretchy red stuff. See them looking at you and your sandwich. See them looking and snickering. Learn your first lesson: in America, a liverwurst sandwich is not an acceptable snack choice.
The next day, open your Mickey Mouse lunch box and stuff the sandwich into your desk, between your phonics and math books. Plan to throw it out later. Turn around when you hear your name. Into your empty stomach, swallow the humiliation as a girl sitting diagonally behind you points to the sandwich sticking out from your desk and laughs.
Outside on the strip of pavement between the school and the small grassy hill leading up to the convent, attempt to join a game of what looks like tag. Try not to notice that you do not get chased. Smile in relief when one of the Polish-speaking girls approaches. Listen as she tells you that you are not allowed to play the game since, unlike her, you do not know how to speak English.
Go ahead, start to hate her. You are too young to know that she is only trying to diminish her own sense of otherness.
How to learn English: When your teacher finishes speaking and everyone around you springs into action, do not let the awful, sinking shame of being the only one who is clueless drag you under. Look around. Observe. Take out the same book as your classmates. If they are writing on paper, look at the blackboard and copy down whatever you see there, no matter if it doesn’t make sense. Stand up if they stand up. Line up when they line up, and don’t worry about where you are going.
Do not long for your old school in Gdańsk, where you sat with your best friend Dominika and excelled at every assignment Pani Walczyńska gave. Do not open the book of poems by Jan Brzechwa your teacher gave you, nor read what she wrote inside the front cover: To my best student… Do not cry alone in your room after school. Do not tell your mother that you do not want to go back.
Instead, sit at your desk and soak in the words your teacher speaks in that quiet, gentle way of hers. Gather them like the pink daisies you used to search for in the grass in front of your blok. Weave them together and soon, you will be able to raise your hand and participate, show your teacher that you are smart after all. Soon, she will move you up to the best reading group in the class. Soon, you will be asked to read at the Thanksgiving mass to showcase how much you’ve learned.
But for now, take the first-grade phonics workbook your teacher gives you. Open its bright red cover and try to ignore the fact that it singles you out in the sea of honey yellow workbooks your classmates are using. Look at the pictures inside. Color the ones that begin with a w. Color the ones with a short e in the middle. Skip the ones for which you don’t have names even in Polish.
In the evenings, lie in the bathtub and repeat your favorite new words. To-ge-ther. To-gether. Together. Relish how the word rolls off your tongue, especially the sound inside it, which Polish does not have. Try to teach your parents to form it. Tell them to just put their tongues in between their teeth and say th. Tell them it’s easy. Laugh along with them when they cannot do it. Feel a nugget of pride settle inside you because you can.
Your first school fundraiser: Like everyone else, take home the big white envelope stuffed with papers, which your teacher placed on your desk at dismissal. Hand it to your mother when you get home and proceed to your room to play Super Mario on your brand new Nintendo. Forget about the envelope. Make Mario run and jump and stomp on the brown mushroom men. Run. Jump. Stomp. Repeat.
Over the next week, notice students bringing their big envelopes stuffed with papers back to school and handing them to the teacher. Notice that each time this happens, an exchange occurs—one envelope for one small toy: a fuzzy, sparkly ball with googly eyes, antennae, and sticker-bottomed feet.
At home, ask your mother for the envelope. Put it in your backpack and, eyes shining bright, give it to your teacher. Watch her take out the papers, which have not been filled out by your parents. Concentrate very hard on the words coming out of her mouth as she points to the blank spaces on the white pages. She is saying something about selling magazines.
Selling magazines. Do not strain your mind trying to understand what selling magazines could possibly have to do with school; you have no schema for this concept. In Poland, magazines were sold in kiosks by sullen women, not by children. In Poland, children did not have to sell anything to raise money for school.
Besides, who would buy a subscription from you, even if you did understand how to do it. Your Polish aunts and uncles? Your Babcia?
Forget it. Just take the envelope home and throw it into the trash.
Halloween: You will find out about this American holiday at the last minute. When your Ciocia Zuzia, who lives next door, knocks on the apartment door and asks if you want to go collect candy with your cousin and some of the neighborhood kids, jump up and down and say yes. Take your aunt’s advice and run up to your room to see if you can find something to use for a costume. Spot the art project you brought home from school the other day—a three-dimensional jack-o-lantern made out of strips of orange construction paper, with triangular black eyes and a mouth with two pointy teeth pasted on. Have your mother cut open the back and fit the pumpkin over your head, affixing it with safety pins so that it will stay on.
Do not be embarrassed by your incomplete, improvised costume, or by the fact that instead of the orange Halloween buckets everyone else has, you collect your Milky Ways and Kit-Kats in a plastic shopping bag from the grocery store. Stand there with the other kids. Mumble, in your Polish accent, “Trikotreet,” whenever someone opens the door.
Learning new handwriting: Forget completely the cursive Pani Walczyńska taught you. Forget the beautiful, almost perfectly formed letters nestled politely between the lines on each page of your small Polish notebook, their loops and swirls and edges stopping exactly where they are supposed to. Forget the eloquent descriptions of spring and the May holidays and Mother’s Day poems.
Forget all of that.
Open your American notebook with its solid and dotted lines spaced too widely. Watch your teacher forming alien letters in white chalk on the board. Figure out an entirely new system of connecting those letters, some of which don’t even resemble their printed counterparts. Retrain your muscle memory, so that your hand will not constantly want to write the r and the z the way you have been for the past two years. Retrain the pathway from your eyes to your brain so that you can recognize, once again, a capital I and a capital G.
Forgive your teacher, someday, for giving you a C+ in handwriting on your first report card.
Writing letters to your older cousin Irena in Poland: Ask your mother for help with the Polish orthography. Fill pages of stationery with cheerful descriptions of your new life. Leave out the parts about how hard it has been to fit in and how lonely you are. Instead, tell your cousin about all the wonderful things in your room. A pink-and-purple Lego house. A red Walkman. The double cassette player your sister bought for your birthday. Your closet inside the wall, your white boots with a silver buckle, your faux fur coat. Don’t forget to mention the assortment of Barbie furniture and vehicles you now own, like the red Corvette and the pink camper.
But do not tell your older cousin Irena, for instance, about the birthday card you received from your Ciocia Terenia in Poland last week. Do not tell her how, when you opened the card and a tinny, melancholy tune began playing, it pulled at your heart so intensely that your entire body flooded with sadness and a strange, aching yearning. Do not tell her that you ran up to your room and shut the door as hot tears streamed down your face. That you sat there looking out at the foreignness of the landscape outside—the parking lot with its big American cars and beyond that, the houses with their clapboard siding and those porch windows side by side that all of a sudden looked terribly ugly—listening to that heart-wrenching melody and crying.
Calling an English-speaking friend: Ask your sister if you can use the phone in her bedroom. Sit on the pink bedspread with the slip of paper your friend gave you. Practice what you will say, then grab the receiver and dial. Wait while your heart pounds and the ringing pulses in your ear.
When a man’s voice answers, panic. You haven’t rehearsed what you would say in this situation. Search your brain for the English equivalent of, Czy mogę poprosić Jennifer do telefonu? Strain with all your might to find it, only to realize it’s like squinting your eyes to see something that is too far away to be discerned anyway.
Finally, stammer, “Can I…can I have Jennifer?” Feel your face burning as the man repeats your words back to you. “Can you have Jennifer?”
Do not imagine him raising his eyebrows and smirking. Quietly say, “Yes, please.”
Your First Holy Communion: On a sunny Sunday in May, put on a lacy white dress and a veil, just like the bride you can’t wait to be someday. Take the fat, yellow candle your mother thrusts into your hands—your Baptismal candle from Poland—and enter the church.
The pews are overflowing. The First Communion class is already up at the altar, facing the parishioners in three neat rows. Rush up the aisle to join them as shutters click and light flashes, feeling the weight of eyes on your back.
Slip into the back row. Notice that you are the only one with a candle. Lower it as far down as you can.
Remember that moment of rushing up the church aisle. This will be the way it will be—always a step behind, struggling to catch up, desperately wanting to understand and be a part of the American world.
Moving into your first house: All your life you have lived in apartments. Now your parents have bought a house, a ranch with cream siding and a large grassy backyard at the end of a long, quiet street.
Marvel at the turquoise carpet you were allowed to pick out for your room. Feel its soft plushness with your bare feet. Make the space your own.
Go outside and run down the deck steps. Run up the small sandy hill that borders your yard. Run through the thicket of knee-high pine saplings to the shadows of the woods beyond. Find a tree with a ladder of branches and a thick trunk, its gnarled roots forming a sort of ledge on the small incline where the tree grows.
Sit on this slope. Look up at the tree towering over you, almost as high as the bloks of your past. Touch the rough bark, so solid and old, so permanent. Feel the quiet, sacred wisdom vibrating deep within. Lean your body into the trunk.
Breathe.
There is no America to contend with here. There is only the tree tethering you to the earth. The sunlight filtering through pine needle branches.
Magdalena Bartkowska was born in Gdańsk, Poland, and raised in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her family. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Apple Valley Review, Barnstorm Journal, and The Sun. Currently, she is almost done with her essay collection exploring the intersection of being a woman and an immigrant. Magda loves old stuff, travel, and singing in chamber choir. You can find her at www.magdalenabartkowska.com.
Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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