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Remembering Paincha

The thing I used to hate most about going to Piancha's house was the smell.

A wall of mould-saturated air mixed with moth-balls and angst bombarded us when my dad and I would visit her shabby, war-time house near the corner on the way to the rink in our small Saskatchewan town. I later came to identify that particular olfactory assault in a highly unkind way as "old lady smell." When you're at the cruel age of five, you don't imagine that you will ever get old and that smells will start to creep up on you, much like advancing years, wrinkles and an apathy about the cleanliness of your surroundings.

But visit Piancha I did, despite my objections, with my father. My mom either joined us or took the opportunity to go grocery shopping. Either way, these infrequent visits occurred out of his sense of duty, I presume. Piancha was my father's stepmother, although most of his childhood had been spent with his biological mother. Piancha was joined in holy matrimony to his family somewhat later in his life, so she would not have had the chance to bond with him in a maternal way. Yet, as she became a widow and progressively aged, he visited her, me in tow, bringing news and baked goods, speaking in the declining Polish he used only with this last parental representative of his family of origin.

So, I sat in Piancha's house during these short visits that seemed long and loathed her, all the while examining her things with the scrutiny of a vicious appraiser. The blue melamine table with the silver-colored legs is one of the few things I can recall. Another is the trunk that carried her things on the boat that delivered her, like so many other immigrants, to a new life in Canada. The trunk that was jostled over railway lines, jammed into cargo spaces and finally set down in the small town in eastern Saskatchewan that would become her final resting place. I had a mild interest in that trunk. After she died, my dad inherited it. My sister and I used it to hold our toys in our basement play space.

Occasionally, Piancha would also put on a record for me to listen to using her ancient wind-up gramophone. This artifact also held additional amusement for me as I listened to mazurkas and polkas that magically spun themselves into the needle and out the speaker. I imagine now that I was listening to something as high-brow as Chopin, but really, I'm not clear on what I heard. The music in my memory had a lively pace matched with sounds unheard in most of the music I played on my parents much-more-modern stereo. At the time, I just thought it was entertaining and novel.

Piancha's things served as mitigating factors against my hatred for her, which, by the way, was completely undeserved. In addition to the smell, my other main reason for hating her with such malevolence was the way she spoke. Yes, as much as it shames me now to admit it, I hated her for her accent. I inhabited a world where everyone spoke English in a completely unaccented (I thought) way. The Canadian accents to which I had become accustomed seemed the norm and perfection to me. Piancha's loud approximations of words vexed me.

"Come here, lily girl," I remember her saying during visits.

"I am NOT a LILY girl," I spat out to my father later in the car.

"She's trying to say "little," he explained, "she has trouble speaking English."

Sympathetic, I was not. I felt entitled to having each word spoken in the way I had grown used to, a feeling not terribly uncommon among English first-language speakers even now.

I wonder whether Piancha had vision problems and her attempts to get close to me were just to have a clearer look. I wonder if she was looking for some small family resemblance, some indication of my father's genes and by connection, his father's immortality. Unfortunately for her, my mother's WASP genes seemed to have dominated in my face. Most people said I was the (now mostly-unused term) spitting image of her. But occasionally, people who had known my dad's family well said they could see a little Polish in me. I loved hearing that. I loved having this unique aspect to my identity. I didn't want to be the spitting image of anyone. I wanted to be exotic and European. And yet, I hated Paincha, who was all of this, so much.

Truth is, children are monsters, but they get some help from the ethnocentric, sexist and ageist cultures they inhabit. I hated Paincha because she was, to me, an Other. I didn't recognize this until many years later, but I hated her because she was old and because she spoke with an accent. I hated her because she was not part of the dominant culture I saw around me, the one that I so wanted to be a part of, yet so wanted to be distinct from. This maelstrom of hate and conflict took me, and most kids of immigrants, a long time to sort through.

When I consider the mechanics of her life now, I regret my hate. I imagine that if anyone could have used one of Oprah's random acts of kindness, she could. I feel proud of my dad and his regular visits. I admire his willingness to drag along a reluctant child for the interest and amusement of a step-mother he didn't really know well. I also regret that I can no longer get many answers to my questions about Paincha, now that my dad has passed away. Who was this woman who lived amidst a cloud of smell-able decline, with a few of her precious items stored in a trunk, living with a collection of records from a happier time in her home country? What does her name mean? My search through online Polish-English dictionaries has been unfruitful. Paincha, according to my mother, may have just been her first name.

Whatever Paincha (pronounced [PINE-chuh]) means, her life and impact remain mostly a mystery to me now. I can be dramatic and imagine she was a ballerina who came to Canada for an adventure in her later years and fell in love with my widower grandfather. But, that's just too sad and unbelievable considering her last years in decline. No, most likely Paincha was just another ordinary woman, like me, in search of a meaningful life. She became connected to my grandfather through an ad in a Toronto newspaper, my mother tells me. A mail-order bride? Someone looking for love in the personals? I don't know. But my father's father predeceased her and she lived out her remaining years near the skating rink in her small house with an overgrown yard.

I hadn't thought about Paincha for years and I cannot recall what her face looked like. However, one day I saw a neighbor and something about her triggered these Paincha memories. My neighbor was on the street, with her dog, walking alone. I heard her speak and noted her accent, much slighter than Paincha's but similar. Fortunately, I felt none of my old repulsion and I noticed, remarkably, that all my Paincha hate is gone. I wondered instead about this neighbor. Is she lonely? Does she miss her country? Does she feel isolated and alienated like so many newcomer women, trapped in her house by her own fears or a heavy household workload of making everything from scratch to replicate the taste of home? I wonder if she listens to music and what she prefers. I wonder if she has a trunk of precious items that help to preserve her identity in a place where she is mostly unknown.

I wondered about her, and at the same time, I felt a strong emotion for Paincha. I felt empathy. I felt her aloneness. Perhaps I even felt something like affection or love for that sad, isolated old woman who I had shunned so blithely all those years ago.

The circle is closing. It won't be long. A few more years and I may be someone just like Paincha myself: Othered and living with the smell of a life that has passed its best-before date, children loathing me for reasons that are unfair and unkind.