Brass Page 11

  “So that’s where he ended up? Hell?”

  She shakes her head. “No. Texas. Eventually, anyway, after Albania. Houston. His wife’s brother lives there.”

  You regret the fried dough now. It’s so close to coming back up, and you have to work so hard to keep it down that you can barely talk. “He came back?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And he never even tried to see me?”

  Yllka looks embarrassed. “I guess he thought you wouldn’t want that,” she says.

  “I was a kid. What would it matter what I wanted?”

  “Well, your mother wouldn’t want it.”

  “So it’s her fault?”

  “It’s nobody’s fault, Luljeta. It’s not a fault. It’s just mistakes. Or, I don’t know, not mistakes, just decisions that led to other decisions, and on and on, and in the end the first decision seemed too far buried to get back to and change.”

  You think for a moment about the first Christmas you were old enough to remember. It was back in the Toys for Tots days, the Play-Doh-workshop-courtesy-of-the-U.S.-Marines days, the days when charitable strangers had to do the work that those charged with caring for you could not. Even then, the magic of new Play-Doh could not entirely compensate for the desertion you felt not by your family but by Santa Claus, that bastard, who you believed had forsaken you, because that was easier to explain to a child than the true source of neglect. “We don’t have a chimney, Lulu, what can we do?” your mother had said when you asked why Santa skipped over your apartment, her eyes welled with tears as if she was the one who’d failed, and man, you hated that fat man in red for making her feel like that. But it’s occurring to you just now: what if there had been an answer to that question all along? Lulu, what can we do? What if the answer was: Let your father do the job he apparently was open to doing, instead of waiting for another mythical white man to do the providing?

  Up until now, you’ve been mostly annoyed with your mother, thinking she believed you too fragile to handle the truth about your father. You’ve believed she’s been trying to protect you from him, this creature who, like a male grizzly emerging from hibernation, might tear you apart to sustain himself. Now, though, it’s becoming clear: she is the one who’s sustained herself on you. He’d never even gotten a taste before she scuttled away with you, claiming you as hers alone. Her what, though? Her cub? Her trophy? Her prey?

  “Texas,” you say, trying to get the word to sound natural in your mouth.

  “Yes, Houston,” Yllka says.

  “Texas,” you repeat. It seems as far away to you as the Balkans, and slightly more oppressive. Texas is to you a land of giant pickup trucks, tiny trailer homes, and evil oil tycoons, just like the television would have you believe. Their toast is good, though, that frozen Pepperidge Farm stuff you’d add to every meal if you could.

  “Is he a cowboy?” you ask.

  “Cowboy? No, no,” Yllka says, confused. She pauses a moment, then says, “He opened a little pizza shop. Amici’s.”

  “Pizza?”

  “Yes, pizza.”

  “Pizza? Like Italian pizza?”

  “Albanians are very good at pizza,” Yllka answers, almost defensively. “Half of us lived in Italy before we came here.”

  “Who’s Amici?”

  “It’s just a name,” Yllka says. “You can’t put Hasani on a sign for pizza. It’s not good for business.”

  Business. Not only had your father actually been excited about you at one time, but he actually has the means to care for you now the way he didn’t then. You never imagined that someone with your own blood would be able to run anything, let alone an entire business. That would make him a businessman, right, and—don’t think it, don’t even dare think it—but there it is anyway: aren’t businessmen rich? Sure, Yllka owns the Ross and still lives in a triple-decker in Waterbury just like you, but that’s because immigrants do that, save every penny under their mattresses and then make their kids millionaires when they die. It’s so, so inappropriate to think it and so, so impossible not to, but maybe your father is doing the same for you. Maybe there’s some savings account in your name that you’ll find out about at precisely the right moment, say, when it’s time to cut the cord to your mother, when it’s time to pay your own rent in a dope loft far from these triple-deckers, and generally live a life that others will envy.

  Then you remember that you were not the offspring that was chosen to thrive.

  “He has kids, my father?” you ask. You want to know who’s the beneficiary of that savings account. “I mean real ones?”

  “Three. Two boys and a girl. Adnan is the oldest, just a couple of years younger than you.”

  “Adnan? Is that a boy or girl?”

  “Boy. Golden boy, the oldest child, a son.”

  You don’t point out that Adnan isn’t really the oldest child.

  “Do they know about me?” you ask.

  Yllka shakes her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I get into trouble, talking so much, but I have not brought it up with them. They’re just kids, and anyway it’s not my place. Maybe it’s your place,” she says, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe someday you could tell them.”

  “I have no idea what my place is,” you say.

  “You have to make your own place, i dashur.”

  “Is that true?” you ask. “Is that really true?”

  Yllka starts to nod, but her neck freezes when she lowers her head, and it stays there, seemingly unmoving, until you detect a tiny little quake. She reaches over and clutches your hand and squeezes it until it almost hurts, and she dabs her eyes with a napkin she’d crushed in her other hand, as if she was trying to make a diamond out of it.

  “This is hard. This is very hard. There is so much to tell you and now I can’t come up with any more words,” she says.

  Yllka mistakes your dead-eyed automaton stare for stoicism, like the kind your envied classmate Aisha showed throughout her bouts of diabetic ketoacidosis.

  “Look at me falling apart and you being the brave one,” she says. “You must be strong like your mother.”

  At that moment, being compared to your mother doesn’t seem terribly complimentary. Strong—that’s one way to put it. Margarita is strong. Margarita could beat any member of the football team in arm wrestling, and she doesn’t deserve admiration for it.

  “Maybe,” Yllka says, then pauses. “I would like to see her, too. I miss her. I hope she’s not angry with me. I hope that’s not why she’s stayed away.”

  “Why would she be mad at you?”

  “Oh, who knows how these things work. I hope she’s not. And will you…Will you make sure she understands that I’m not angry with her? That I understand why it might have been too hard to stay in touch with me?”

  You understand that you’re supposed to nod, but you just look straight ahead with your dull Aisha stare. A few minutes ago you’d felt like you were getting somewhere, but suddenly you’re right back to where you started, understanding nothing.

  “Never mind,” Yllka says. “That’s too much to ask of you. I’ll tell her myself, if you can just get her to visit next time. Do you think, maybe, she would?”

  “I don’t know,” you say. “I doubt it.”

  “Oh,” she says. She finds your eyes again, and cups her arms around your shoulders. “Well, in any case, you will come back? I can’t tell you how I’ve missed you.”

  “But,” you say.

  “But what, love?”

  For the first time, you’re beginning to feel annoyed with this woman for making you say everything out loud. “But what about my father?”

  Silence. Yllka doesn’t seem like a big fan of it, but it’s what she offers in response to your question.

  “So he doesn’t want to see me,” you say.

  “It’s not that,” she says.

  “That’s what it sounds like,” you say.

  “But it’s not right,” she says, dropping her head into her hands. “I just do
n’t know what to say. Maybe this is what we talk about next time? You’ll come back next weekend, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” you answer. It’s a response that seems to both encourage and devastate her, but it’s at least gentler than what you’re really thinking, which is that she’s perfectly nice, this Teto Yllka, and you could maybe make room for her someday, but you didn’t come here looking for another maternal figure, a great-aunt to supplement your mother and Greta and Mamie, even if Yllka can at least offer magical pastries and photos of people you sort of resemble. The little morsels she fed you, those pieces of sweet fried dough, don’t have the kind of sustenance you’re hungry for. There’s a whole feast for you somewhere in Texas, and like a hunter, you have to track it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Elsie

  The year before, a girl in an uppity town just down the highway from Waterbury had kept her pregnancy a secret for nine months, delivered the kid in her bathroom, left it bundled in a Starter sweatshirt outside the volunteer fire department, and went to a varsity football game that same night. That kind of denial was nuts. Me, I wasn’t nuts. I was just waiting for a good time to make my condition known. It was just that good times were so hard to come by.

  In the meantime I told Mamie that I’d be moving out. I thought she’d finally be happy to be rid of one of her two beasts of burden, but instead she looked worried, even a little sad.

  “What?” she said. “How are you going to do that? You have the money for that kind of thing?”

  “It’s not going to be much more than you charge me,” I said. “And anyway, it’s time I grow up.”

  “Well, I don’t have to charge you,” she said.

  “Then why do you?”

  “To give you an idea of what it’s like out there.”

  “You did a good job. Now I know what it’s like out there, and I’m ready to take it on.”

  “Your rent here is only a hundred fifty bucks a month. That’s not going to cut it anywhere out in the real world.”

  “I’m going to be sharing the rent.”

  “With who?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “What boyfriend?”

  “The one I told you about.”

  “You never told me about any boyfriend.”

  “I did, too.”

  “When?”

  “One night. That night I was sick.”

  “Oh, that? The ‘some guy’ guy? Since when has it been that serious?”

  “Since recently,” I said. “It got serious recently.” I hoped she might know what serious implied, and then I wouldn’t have to come out with it myself. Why was I afraid to tell her I got knocked up, just like she had when she was even younger than I was? Did I think she’d pummel me until I miscarried? That she’d beg me to abort it or give my one potentially valuable thing away, when I was reserving it as a gift for Bashkim?

  I was afraid she’d shrug and say something like Of course, like I was exactly what everyone expected me to be.

  But she didn’t even shrug. She just got quiet for a minute, poured another glass of wine over a fresh ice cube, and swallowed half of that sweet nectar like it was an antidote to the poison I was always feeding her.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “Bashkim,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Bashkim. Bosh. Keem.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a name.”

  “What kind of name is that? Is he black?”

  “No,” I said, annoyed at her obvious relief. “But what if he were?”

  “I mean, I don’t care about that kind of thing, but you’d run into some trouble in the world, I bet.”

  “You wouldn’t be okay with it,” I said.

  “Of course I would,” she said.

  “No you wouldn’t. You totally wouldn’t.”

  “Stop trying to turn this around so that I’m the bad person here. You’re the one telling me you’re moving out with a guy whose name you barely know.”

  “I know his name perfectly well. I just never told you because I knew you’d say ‘What kind of a name is that?’ ”

  “What I’d say is exactly what I’m about to say, which is that it’s a really stupid idea to move in with someone who’s not even important enough to you to tell your mother about. Whatever happened to going on a few dates first?”

  “What, am I supposed to come home with his letter jacket? I’m an adult. We’re adults. We know what we’re doing.”

  “Oh, every eighteen-year-old girl in the world knows exactly what she’s doing. Yup, nobody smarter in the world than an eighteen-year-old girl.”

  “Well, smart or not, I’m an adult. You can’t stop me.”

  Mamie swirled the ice cube around in what was left of the wine in her glass. The burgundy was watered down by then but still unmistakable, like a bloodstain on bedsheets.

  “I’m not going to try to stop you,” she said, that sad look back in her face. “It’s too late for that. I’d have to go back in time to the day you decided I don’t know a thing in the world and never wanted what was best for you.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “I never said anything like that.”

  She shrugged, grabbed her jug, and walked away, and for the first time in weeks, I felt a sickness that had nothing to do with hormones.

  —

  Gjonni and Yllka were the only people not flying the red, white, and green outside the triple-decker they owned in a Sicilian compound on Harpers Ferry Road, so when the neighbors came out on their porches to clap the dust out of their welcome mats, Gjonni and Yllka got only the smallest of nods, just enough to let them know that those welcome mats wouldn’t ever be dusty from their feet. It didn’t seem to bother Gjonni and Yllka, because in Waterbury moving on up meant trading in whatever ghetto you started off in for an Italian one, where the front porches were swept three times a day and decorated for Christmas six months of the year. Those poor Italian grandmas, looking over at Gjonni and Yllka, thinking: Marone a mi, first these Turkish-coffee-drinking bastard sons of Europe wash up on the shores of Sicily, now they follow us here? But Yllka fit in just fine, greeting me from the same Welcome Wagon that her neighbors greeted her with, her arms crossed like she was fighting off a chill on that eighty-seven-degree day.

  “We can get more money for that apartment. We’re losing money on it now,” she said, in English, so that I could understand clearly how little she wanted me there.

  “Beh, family is not for making money,” Gjonni said, while Bashkim walked by us all with the last of the four boxes I’d packed. All of my worldly possessions had fit in the trunk of the Fiero, and Bashkim didn’t even break a sweat carrying them up three flights of stairs. It would’ve depressed me if I thought about it, but I was drinking from the half-full cup that day, and thought instead how easy it would be to unpack and settle in.

  Bashkim and I were moving into the third floor of Gjonni and Yllka’s triple-decker. It was a glorified attic, twelve degrees hotter than the ground floor, and most of the square footage was cut off by sloping walls at every corner. But it was ours, even if it was really Gjonni and Yllka’s, even if Yllka probably wanted us to be late with the rent so she’d have a reason to evict us. I very nearly wept when Gjonni handed over the keys to us. “You will be happy here. The water is good, the electricity is strong. You could run an air conditioner in here no problem,” he said.

  I nodded. We didn’t have an air conditioner to prove it, or even a box fan. We didn’t have a toaster, a fry pan, a can opener, a television, a spare blanket, or a single piece of silverware. We had one bath towel between us and a glove box full of sporks from Lee’s Famous Recipe. We had each other and the makings of a country song.

  We also had an almost-set of old dishware and a scratch-off ticket from Mamie, which she left along with a note on the table that morning: You can come back here if it doesn’t work out. Love, Mamie. It was nice of her; Love was a word Mamie didn’t use much.
She signed our Christmas cards Sincerely. She still hadn’t met Bashkim and she didn’t know yet she’d soon be signing cards Sincerely, Grandma, but I took it as a good omen that the scratch-off was a winner, sixty dollars, so I could invite her over for a spaghetti dinner and afford the saucepan and the box of pasta both. I figured we could borrow silverware from the Ross until we could get ourselves a cheap cutlery set sometime before the baby was born, although the baby wouldn’t come out using a fork and a knife, so maybe we could buy some time on that, too.

  How much time, I didn’t know. I had no idea when a baby learned how to eat with something other than its hands, if it was before or after the first words, and if the first words were before or after the first step. This was assuming, too, that we made a baby that would be able to speak and walk. There was a whole lot that could go wrong. I hadn’t been to a doctor yet, but I’d been to health class in high school and paid attention every once in a while. Plus I’d seen the canisters collecting money for the Ronald McDonald Houses or worse, Jerry’s Kids, the ones that never even had a chance to be Regular Kids first. They were the kids that didn’t even get to run and play and be tormented for their overbites before being stricken by lymphoma at age four.

  I told myself to stop. Our baby would be fine. It would call me Mama and run to hold me when it scraped its knee, or else it would scrape its knee and just point because it hadn’t learned how to say Mama yet. God, when did that happen again? It didn’t matter. I knew what tears meant, and when the baby came I would know what to do about them, just like I would know how to wrap a present with perfectly crisp corners like all moms, even Mamie, seem to be able to do. I figured they taught those things in the maternity ward after you gave birth.

  “Elsie, Gjonni asked you a question.” Bashkim snapped his fingers in front of my face, like the customers that annoyed me the most at the Ross.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Which is your room and which is the baby’s room?” Gjonni asked. “I will bring you the dresser we’re not using.”

  “We were using it,” Yllka said. “I don’t know where we’ll put the towels and the washcloths now.”