By Penny Zang

Tell me you’ve never been in a bar fight without telling me you’ve never been in a bar fight.

The way you hold the bottle—upright, fingers curled around the base instead of strangling the neck—like you aren’t ready to smash it over someone’s head at a moment’s notice. How you order a drink that can’t double as a weapon. Then you duck and run when shit gets real instead of stepping up. Instead of stepping in.

I am always ready to step in. Part of the job. Or maybe part of my genetic code. That’s what happens when you’re raised in a bar. You can’t hide your rough edges.

The bar was a part of me before I was even born is what I mean. Smoke and low light and Baltimore humidity like a wet thing cleaving to my skin. Loud voices, stale beer. Laughter. A neon glow I’ve known since birth.

From behind the bar, I throw a dart to the far wall, which isn’t that far. Row houses—even the ones turned into corner pubs—aren’t much wider than a bowling alley. No one blinks when I hit Bull’s Eye. Just another Wednesday night.

You should see me shark the pool table, I say to no one, flaring my nostrils at a whiff of a mildewed bar rag. The claw machine, too. No one can beat me.

The Wednesday drinkers are too depressing to watch. These guys aren’t like the social drinkers meeting their coworkers after work. No one is clinking glasses on a first date. Just grunters with slumped shoulders, cranky, unshaven men who have already given up hope on the week before it’s even half over. Beer isn’t strong enough, but they don’t have the energy to ask for anything sharper. Thursday is when the loyal drinkers get a start on the weekend. Business doesn’t usually ramp up until then. Or lately, not at all.

I can’t really call them Regulars because Goldie’s doesn’t have Regulars anymore, not the paying kind. There’s Mr. George from across the street, who never pays for drinks because my father never made him pay for drinks, or Butchie, the man who sleeps in the alley and used to come in for samples when Luna and I tested out recipes, little fried bites, for a menu we would never finalize.

A thump upstairs, something heavy dropped onto thin carpet, makes me pause. I force myself not to text Luna and ask if everything is okay with Ma. She’ll tell me if something is wrong. Or she won’t and I’ll find it later, after Last Call. Some spilled two-liter bottle of soda sticky on the linoleum or a broken knickknack strewn across the floor. Luna draws the line at bending over to clean up messes.

Among the things Ma won’t abide includes me hiring anyone to help. So it’s just me and Luna. Not that we could afford help anyway. It took falling in her own apartment and pissing herself on the way to the bathroom before Ma finally agreed to move in with us.

I know by the sounds through the floorboards, the shuffle and stomp of two women dancing, that they’re still awake up there. Luna lets Ma fill the apartment at least once a week with the “Greats of Country Music,” remnants of a West Virginia childhood she doesn’t discuss. It’s always Loretta Lynn belting her way through “Coal Miner’s Daughter” or Woody Guthrie, if they’re in the mood for something different. I finally had to tell Luna to stop playing “This Land is Your Land.” It’s too much. Too haunting to hear Guthrie’s prophetic voice and know how he ended.

 They’ll dance either way. Like when parents take their toddlers to the park to wear them out, nights dancing with Luna never fail to sink Ma into a jerky, twitchy sleep, the kind that will soon need guardrails.

Another thing to save up for, another thing that none of us want to admit we need.

She’s not drunk, I have to tell people. The way Ma’s words slur, the way she moves. Chorea—the Greek word for dance and the other name for Huntington’s Disease. A body that never stops moving. Her erratic twitches and kicks are only the beginning. She chokes, she stutters, she falls. Yeah, it looks a little like dancing if you aren’t really looking.

It’s more like a transformation. The worst kind of chrysalis.

I don’t explain it often, but when I do, to the people who have the balls to ask instead of staring, I stick to the basics: neurological, genetic, cruel. A disease so rare, most people have never heard of it. Woody Guthrie died from Huntington’s, but most people don’t know him either.

The opening notes of Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” A17 on our old relic of a jukebox, ricochets through the bar’s nearly empty interior, louder than any of the drunk men’s beer-throated conversations, and I exhale through my teeth. A17 had been Dad’s favorite. A real Winner, he always said about that one.

Winners, Duds, Scratchers—that’s what Dad used to call them. Play me a Winner, Kat, he’d say, pressing two quarters into my itchy palm. Which meant Paul Anka or The Commodores. Sometimes The Supremes. But if I gave the second quarter to Luna, she’d play one of his Duds, something by The Spice Girls or Eminem, songs Dad said had no soul, just to see his jaw clench.

He hated the hell out of half the songs on the jukebox, but he was also smart enough to know that the late-night crowd wanted something to sing along to before closing time.

Cue Journey and Bon Jovi.  Cue one last pitcher of beer or tequila, with or without the lime.

I scan the back room of the bar, past the pool table, to see who played the song, but no one is there. Sometimes people exit through the alley door. Sometimes they go out to smoke and never return. Luna likes to say the jukebox is haunted. I just remind her that the machine is older than both of us. It doesn’t work the way it used to.

Scratchers were the scratched 45s, the ones we have to listen out for. When Dad replaced a Scratcher, we were allowed to add the scratched version to our collection at home. But I haven’t seen that old record player in years. Probably collecting mold in Ma’s storage unit. We aren’t a family that gets rid of things just because they’re old.

I shake my head to one side like I need to clear water from my ears, then change the channel to the O’s game. Dad would have insisted. No one ever complains about watching the Orioles lose again, even on that little TV above the bar. Baltimore fans are loyal no matter what.

If Ma falls asleep first, Luna might drift into the bar at some point in the night, barefoot in one of her long nightgowns, dirty-hemmed, her face painted in bright colors like a glitter-winged butterfly, like she used to paint for kids during the neighborhood block party. Or, depending on her mood, I could count on her to storm the bar in a mini-skirt and red lipstick, her hair hot-rolled into large, loose curls. Go out with me, Kat, she would pout. Like we used to.

More often than not lately, she goes alone, staying out all night, spending all of her tip money, while I tuck myself in beside Ma and try to sleep.

It’s the curse of the oldest daughter, always the responsible one. I’ve turned into the kind of person who drinks black coffee all day long and buys groceries with specific meals in mind. Ground meat and rice to fill bell peppers. Vegetables that I can steam into mush. No one else is going to do it. It has to be me. I’m one step away from cutting my curly hair as short as Ma’s, not because it looks particularly good but because it requires less maintenance.

I turn up the volume on the TV to drown out the strumming Woody Guthrie guitar coming from upstairs, probably too faint for anyone else to hear but me. If Luna is asleep first, Ma will play that song over and over.

Woody Guthrie is my grandfather. That’s the story I used to tell.

From his album covers, he looked so much like early photos of my granddad, the one with Huntington’s Disease who we used to visit at the nursing home in West Virginia. Not a single person ever called me out on the lie. My classmates had never heard of him, didn’t listen to folk music. Most adults didn’t even know who he was, only a vague recognition when I mentioned one of his hits. It felt like an honest story each time I told it, the kind of lie that couldn’t hurt anyone but signaled something true about me and my family that I couldn’t pinpoint otherwise.

We tell different stories now.

***

The commotion outside startles only me. It’s the sound of a crowd cooing, like a collective flight of mourning doves rippling with surprise. I stand on my toes to see out the high bar window and sure enough, a swarm of what look like tourists gathers on the sidewalk, necks craned to stare at the apartment upstairs. With their phones aimed up like lighters at a concert, they flash photos. They flash more than once.

The spiky agitation that’s been lingering at the edge of my eyesight all night finally has a target. A figure weaves through the crowd too fast for me to see, someone shifting away from the streetlights, and I squint, hopeless to make out who it is. It reminds me of what happened two weeks ago, when some vandals bombed the front of the bar with rotten eggs after writing “eat shit and die” on the brick exterior in red spray paint. Teenagers from the neighborhood, it turned out. It wasn’t even the worst thing they had ever written.

I grab the baseball bat perched up against the ice machine—every bar has at least that much for protection—and force myself to breathe. I got this temper from Ma, but it belongs to me now.

Dad’s voice in my ear: Stand down Katerina. Every fight doesn’t belong to you.

Just as my shoulders start to relax, another camera flashes.

Nope. Not tonight. 

I march out the giant wood door, ready to swing. A few people jump back while others edge and lurk, waiting to see what I’ll do next. Just like Ma and Luna and every woman in our family, I’m not tall or broad enough to intimidate anyone, but these people don’t know about my precise aim.

Don’t swing, I tell myself, very aware of the phones and cameras ready to record me instead of whatever they were gawking at before. I just want to scare them away, make them stop staring. This is my home, is what they don’t understand. If I don’t protect it, no one will. But then I notice the grocery bag looped over some dude’s wrist, and I grip the bat even harder. More eggs probably. More spray paint I’ll have to pay someone to help me remove.

The air doesn’t shift, muggy, and the thick, hot smell of garbage somewhere close. A distant siren bleeds through every other noise and Mozzarella Stick, the old roaming cat named after her favorite trash food, slinks into the alley, half curious, half eager to get the hell away. Mozzarella being a name Luna used to call her dolls because she thought it sounded pretty. Like Cinderella but saucier. That cat has been around longer than most of the new restaurants in South Baltimore.

“There she is again,” a woman in the crowd yells, moving forward instead of back, her eyes wide and unafraid of the bat hanging at my side. “Up in the window.”

“Fuck back, lady,” I shout instead of “get the fuck back,” because my mouth is working faster than my brain. My voice sounds as brittle as Ma’s, the same phlegmy cough trapped in the vocal cords that only gets worse with age.

Things we didn’t talk about in our family: the past or the future. Ma has stopped asking if we’re dating someone special or jokingly guilting us into having kids. No kids. I used to have a life. Not that I ever had a calendar full of invitations, but I used to have dates, sex. Luna still has both, I’m sure. All I do is work. And scowl. I’ve gotten better at both.

Luna and I haven’t been tested. We didn’t even know the disease existed a year ago. We either have the gene, or we don’t. Fifty percent chance of a death sentence, but I figure we all have one of those anyway.

The woman stops approaching, though she keeps her arm, the one holding her phone, outstretched. She wears neon pink sneakers, even the laces.

“Upstairs in the window,” another lurker calls in the kind of excited trill that borders on mania. “There’s a ghost in the window.”

The woman with the pink sneakers shudders and drops her phone to her side. “She’s dancing.”

I don’t need to look up to picture it. With Luna asleep on the couch, Ma is in the window again, tangled up in the gauzy fabric we call curtains.

My fist tightens around the bat out of instinct, or maybe because there is nothing else to cling to. What would Dad do, I have to wonder, if faced with this exact situation? He’d look up at the starless city sky and distract everyone by claiming to see a shooting star. Or he’d tell a joke. Make a friend. He would put on the charm, invite everyone in for a drink.

He wouldn’t have needed a bat.

Whatever gibberish I yell to the crowd finally seems to work. In small clusters, they head back down the sidewalk to a different bar, one with drink specials and live music.

There is no ghost in the upstairs window, I want to scream. She isn’t dancing and she isn’t dead.

It could be worse. I know this. And one day it will be. Like the bag of rotting potatoes it once took me and Luna a week to discover. At least seven days of sniffing at our kitchen, not doing much more than complaining, “Do you smell that?” When we finally noticed the thin ooze seeping out of the cabinet, the bag of jutting spuds with rank liquid filling the stretched plastic, we both gagged. We scolded ourselves for our stupidity and opened all the windows, stupefied at the mini disaster of our home. We repeated the same question in varying degrees of melodrama and disgust and finally resignation: how did it get so bad so fast?

There’s more than one way to tell a story, you see. My version only leaves out the parts I’m not ready to tell.

In my version, I swing and keep swinging.

~~~~~

Penny Zang is from Baltimore, Maryland and now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she teaches English at Greenville Technical College. Her work has appeared in The Louisville Review, New Ohio Review, Superstition Review, among others. She can be found online via her Substack newsletter, Mourning Pages. Her debut novel, Doll Parts, is forthcoming from Sourcebooks in 2025.