A First Time for Everything by Michelle Reale

My mother puts on her Pennsylvania Polka record which means game is on. Our old turntable, with the penny taped to its arm for balance, is housed in a stereo cabinet that looks like a sarcophagus. She begins by tapping her foot to the Beer Barrel Polka, but pretty soon she will be full on making an ass of herself to the Pennsylvania Polka.
    My father walked out this morning after a fight with my mother. He slammed his fist on the kitchen table and their coffee cups jangled, leaving small brown puddles like a Rorschach test. I saw dark clouds predicting danger. My little sister nibbled the corner of her toast and kept her eye on the butter knife in case she would need to use it. When I asked her 'what for' she had no answer.
    My father hates polka. We know this because he has often said "I hate Polka!" Then he would hiss, with a tight grimace as if he had just eaten poop, "from my guts." Which is why we are now listening to the accordions and background frivolity on the record. I imagined many happily drunk Polish people in traditional costume eating fat sausages, drinking beer, red -cheeked, slapping thick thighs. "We are Italian, not Polish," my father has said, but my mother just laughs. "Polka is for everyone!" she says, a bon vivant right to her very core.
    Uncannily, my father usually comes back after one of their fights, just as my mother cranks up the music. This is, of course why she does it. She has always prided herself on the special knowledge that married couples have of one another. She has promised that my sister and I will know our husbands in the same way. Usually, when my father returns she is always the first to say "sorry", whether it was her fault or not. That it further enrages my father is a fact my mother has yet to grasp.
    She lights a cigarette and takes a few deep drags, with one hand on her hip. She carefully presses the cigarette into the Pocono Mountain ashtray and swigs from a plastic bottle of diet soda. She begins her dance, her long, thin arms wrapped around an imaginary partner. Her beautiful feet, arched as if she were wearing the heels that make her look like every man's dream. I am hung over from a binge with my friends the night before, something that doesn't register with my mom. When I take a drag from her cigarette, my little sister, still in her nightgown with the sagging ruffle, giggles. I hold my finger up to my lips, shhhhhhhh while the smoke unfurls from the corners of my mouth. "Magic," she whispers, in reverence, loving the secret between the two of us.
    My mother's dancing lasts most of the afternoon though it is punctuated by small naps on the couch. My sister, still in her nightgown, lies between the fold of her knees and sucks on the skin inside her wrist. I wonder where my father is and I try hard to remember details from the morning argument. I comfort myself with the fact that it sounded like thousands that had come before it. The rhythm of the needle at the end of the album sounds like a scratchy heartbeat. It soothes me so I let it skip on and on. I switch on a small light and my sister comes softly into my arms. She rubs her eyes and takes my chin, softly in her small hand. We both look at my mother, who is sleeping, but not in a restful way.
    I take out the big, flat leather world atlas that sits under the cushion of my father's LazyBoy chair. My sister and I lay on our tummies as I turn the pages. The game we like to play is that I turn a page, she points, and then that is where we both will go. I invent all sorts of details, none of them even remotely accurate, of our new location. I do funny accents, and describe local customs and costumes we will wear so that we will not look like foreigners. My sister keeps telling me to turn the page. Finally her finger lands on a place I cannot pronounce which makes me sad. She watches my face. "Will we be happy there?" she asks. I think before I answer her, because anxiety, like a brittle feather flutters in my chest. What I think is a sound at the front door is only my imagination. I glance at my mother on the couch, cigarette butts overflowing in the ashtray. Even in her sleep, her hands are clenched like claws. I listen for the sound of my father's car in the driveway, but hear nothing. I realize there is a first time for everything.

About the author:
Michelle Reale is an academic librarian working in a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Verbsap, Dogzplot, Word Riot, elimae, JMWW, Blood Orange Review, Monkeybicyle, Apt, Pequin, Freight Train, Dogmaticka, Laura Hird and others.