The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk

empathy have a fucking expiration date? I invited her to my premiere but she didn’t come.I was there for only five fucking days, Ben! It was a business trip. Business!”
    “I don’t buy it, Annie. Poland was never business for you.”
    “What the hell are you saying? I’m not allowed to be upset because we aren’t pen pals anymore?”
    “Stop talking to me like that! I’m not the enemy. What happened to your friend is horrible, but get a goddamn grip!”
    “ ‘What happened to my friend’? Tell me, Ben—what ‘happened’ to her?”
    “I’m going back to sleep. I have a job to go to. Remember what that’s like, Annie, to actually have to rise and shine?” He’s pleading now, he wants to call time-out, but Anna is persistent. She wants to hurt.
    “Say it. Name the thing.” Anna’s fist pounds the side of the bed.
    “Her husband died.”
    Anna makes the sound of a game-show buzzer. “Wrong! Sorry, Bob, the correct answer is: her husband was killed. He did not die. Big difference, right?”
    Anna leans across the bed, bringing her face close to his. “Murder and death are two very different things, my love. Or have you already forgotten?”
    She pulls back swiftly, so that his fingers barely graze the surface of her cheek, and runs out of the room.
    Anna’s version of mourning includes slamming doors and throwing objects across the room. Her grief is the kind that makes noise. She knows that Ben used to love that about her; those mercurial moods, her passionate bellows. He used to tell their friends, in the beginning, that Anna Baran roused him like no one else had ever done. Now, Anna and Ben are just an argument waiting to happen. Two months ago, on Ben’s birthday, they’d come back from a bar and had drunken sex. Ben hadn’t meant to come inside her and a few weeks later, when Anna’s period never turned up and, instead, two pink lines on a stick did, there was no discussion of the next step. In a moment Anna knew; not now, and not with Ben.
    The afternoon Anna spent at Planned Parenthood was burned into her memory. She sat in a waiting room, in a green paper gown, with fiveother women. She’d felt sheepish about her engagement ring. One of the girls had a belly that was probably swollen into its fifth month and Anna fixated on it. “What?” the girl asked and stared Anna down, before going back to her
People
magazine. Anna flushed, embarrassed by her own hypocrisy; she’d wanted to leap out of the chair and run. But Anna had stayed put until the nurse called her name and managed a small goodbye smile to the women.
    Ever since that day Anna’s been withering. Ben would come home from work to find her on the couch, staring at the ceiling. “You look like your dad,” he told her one day.
    “Fuck you,” she whispered, without turning her head.
    When Ben leaves for work after their fight, Anna is on the couch, eating Cheetos.
    “This is all getting out of hand” is the only thing he says, right before he closes the door. Anna spends the entire day in the same spot on the couch, thinking about Justyna, and about breaking free.
    The next morning, Anna gets out of bed without waking Ben. In the kitchen, she boils water in a saucepan and scoops a tablespoon of Jacobs Krönung into a mug. She sips the milky instant coffee—the same kind she drank in Poland with her
babcia
—which she buys for four bucks at a deli in Greenpoint. No Starbucks in the world could ever replace it.
    Anna climbs out onto the fire escape, mug in hand. It’s cold but sunny. She stares across the rooftops and remembers a day, weeks after their engagement, when she had been waiting for the B43 bus after she returned from an audition in the city. It was drizzling and her hair was damp. Anna stood at the bus stop and fished out a pack of smokes from her purse, and that’s when she noticed him: a young man in a leather jacket, with thick, wavy hair like Michelangelo’s
David
. He looked like he was from Montenegro or