Zha Zha

Zha Zha was fat Georgy’s and Monaca’s mother. Zha Zha was not her real name, but I don’t remember her being called anything else.

“Here comes Zha Zha,” my uncle Paul would announce with a smile and a leer that sometimes got him in trouble with my aunt Lor. You couldn’t blame him. She was a statuesque, brick shithouse Polish blonde; poured into whatever she was wearing, stretch pants and flats with a button down top. She carried a snooty, aristocratic air out of place for the gritty, industrial neighborhood.

She was always calling the fire department for locking her self out of her flat on the second story above the butchers.

“Looks like Zha Zha locked herself out again,” uncle Paul said, commenting about the fire truck in front of the butcher’s and a ladder leaned up against a second story window. Her husband was a fat balding man it a suit. The firemen were lean and muscular. Zha Zha locked her self out a lot. I could hear the innuendo in my uncle’s voice, the speculation of possibilities, wistfulness when he announced, “Here comes Zha Zha.”

Playing at Fat Georgy’s, her presence filled their modest, neat apartment, Her musky perfume mixing with the sauerkraut smell of all my friends’ homes. She had a heavy earthiness about her and I was always aware of where she was in the flat, aware of the swell of her breast, the curve of her generous hips, the solidity of her stance. She often touched when she talked to me, tousled my hair, leaning down to touch my shoulder, asking me in her Polish accent if I wanted to say for lunch. She was hypnotic, mesmerizing.

She worried about her son and the streets he played in. She fed him too much and made him a momma’s boy in his neat to clean short pant and shirts.

“I’m not supposed to get dirty. I’m not supposed to play in the truck lots. I’m not supposed to leave the block.”

He chafed under her perpetual watching and leaning out of her window and calling when she didn’t know where he was. I dreamed of her calling me, of being a fireman when I grew up.

I watched her daughter, nine-year-old Monica, out of the corner of eight-year-old eyes. Unlike fat Georgy, Monica, with her red cheeks, pale skin and blond pixie-cut hair, took after her mother. I blushed and deigned vehemently liking her when the other kid sang,

“Mikey and Monica sitting in a tree,
K I S S I N G.
First came love, then came marriage,
Then came Monica with a baby carriage.

Secretly, when I grew up, I planed to marry both of them.