Brass Read online

  “There is room in the closet for those. Elsie, which room?”

  “Oh. Uh, the big one I guess, the one with the two windows.”

  Bashkim and Gjonni walked off and left me standing outside with Yllka alone.

  “Thanks for letting us have this place,” I said.

  “It has a nice bathroom. You should use it to wash up or you will stink for work,” she answered.

  I smiled and nodded, trying to remember that she was doing me a favor.

  We showered, we screwed, we showered again. The water was freezing but it was sweltering that day, so standing in the shower felt like being in fresh air and being in air felt like wading. Bashkim loved my new swollen breasts, which weren’t boobs anymore, not tits, because now there was a point to them. They’d gotten a promotion. He teased them, pinched and bit them, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out. He came inside of me and it didn’t matter. Or it mattered, but it didn’t have any consequences. Then we slept. Not a nap, hard sleep. Our limbs twitched and jerked and even though we were aware of them, they didn’t wake us. It was the downstairs neighbors that did that, the bass shuffle intro of “Hot for Teacher” butting into our dreams. The one I’d been having was of a tiny, stampeding elephant that I held in the palm of my hand, its wildness adorable because it was small and didn’t pose any real threat, unlike the air mattress we slept on, which was doing actual nerve damage.

  “God, this bed. I don’t think I can move my legs,” I said.

  “Too bad you can always move your mouth.”

  “When do you think we might get a real mattress?”

  “There is nothing wrong with this.”

  “It’s an air mattress that doesn’t hold air. It doesn’t do its job. That’s the definition of wrong.”

  “There is air in there.”

  “Not enough air. It looks like a taco when we’re in it. We’re like taco meat.”

  “This is better than what I slept on most of my life.”

  “Most of your life you lived in a zoo.”

  His eyes turned animal. He was the elephant, suddenly, only not as adorable.

  “I was just joking,” I said. “You were the one who said you lived like animals over there.”

  “That was not a joke,” he said. He stood to pull his briefs back up. He’d slept with them around his feet, like stained white cotton shackles. Without his weight on the mattress, I sank farther down, almost to the floor.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “But this isn’t going to work forever.”

  He pulled on his socks.

  “I mean, it’s okay for now. I’m not, like, huge yet. But.”

  “But what?”

  “But we should start to put some money aside.”

  “Don’t worry about money. It’s not a problem.”

  “Well, we don’t have any. Cash money, I mean. Like, the green stuff in our hands. And we’re going to have to get a lot of stuff for the baby.”

  “I have money. I told you that.”

  “But the kind of money we can use. Now. Or soon, anyway. Paper bills that stores will take as payment.”

  “Elsie,” he said. He blew a puff of air through his nose, the warning before the stampede. “I told you.”

  “I mean real money.”

  “Real money? There is no such thing as fake money. Money is money.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, you don’t know. Look at you. What would you know?”

  I knew that was meant to hurt, and it did, but I didn’t understand why.

  “Get ready for work,” Bashkim said. “If you’re so worried about money.”

  “Five minutes,” I said.

  “I am leaving in five minutes.”

  “Three minutes,” I said.

  He got up and stared down at me before walking off to take a piss that it sounded like he’d been holding on to for a while. He splashed around in the sink, and I hoped he’d save a dry spot on the towel for me. There was no point in us duking it out together in the bathroom at the same time, so I lay on my side and dragged my finger along the floor beside the air mattress.

  “This floor is filthy. It looks like I dipped my finger in cake batter,” I said.

  The toilet flushed.

  He walked back in and looked at me, tucked his wife-beater into his pants, and grabbed his keys from the pocket of the pair he left lying on the floor like a police body-tape outline.

  I stood up finally. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  “I’m leaving,” he answered.

  “What? I’ll be ready in one minute. I just have to get dressed and brush my teeth.”

  “I told you I was leaving in five minutes. That was five minutes ago.”

  He started to walk away, and I sprang out of bed to follow.

  “Are you serious?” I said. “I didn’t even get a chance to use the bathroom.”

  The door was opening. He was walking through, going down the stairs, loping across the parking lot.

  “Wait,” I said, but he kept going. I yanked my pantyhose up so fast that tiny holes appeared where my fingers had grabbed on to them. He thought he was teaching me a lesson, and he was, I thought: I learned that he had the patience of a gnat and that he needed to hydrate more, because I could smell the sharp tang of his piss all the way out in the kitchen. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I grabbed my purse and ran down the steps to catch up with him, but by the time I got there his parking space was empty except for a black rose of fresh oil on the ground.

  I walked to the front of the building but he wasn’t waiting for me there, either, so I returned to the parking spot and stood there and waited for him to come back. I waited, and when the sun beat down too heavy and started burning my scalp I moved underneath the eave of Gjonni and Yllka’s porch. When I thought that Yllka might open the door and ask what I was doing standing there for twenty minutes when I should’ve been at work, I walked quietly up the stairs and cried into Bashkim’s side of the air mattress. It would dry long before he got home, and he wouldn’t ever have to know it happened. When that was over, I counted the change in my purse and took the rest of what I needed for bus fare from the pockets of the pants Bashkim had worn the day before. On the ride over to the Ross, I practiced mouthing I’m sorry, but my mouth didn’t seem to want to make the words, so when I walked through the back entrance into the kitchen and saw Bashkim, I just turned away and set a new carafe of decaf on to brew.

  —

  It seemed like a good sign that Mamie didn’t complain about the food we served her when we had her and Greta over for dinner. It was spaghetti with ground meat and a can of Manwich, which we called Bolognese, which I’d guessed was a favorite of hers because she’d served it at least once a week since I was old enough to eat solid food. That was just a guess, though, since I don’t think I’d ever heard her mention food in my life, other than asking how in the hell Greta and I managed to go through it so fast. It was just another thing essential for survival and yet always standing in the way of it. Since there was nothing standing in the way of her bottle of Blue Nun at my and Bashkim’s table that night, she kept mostly quiet through dinner, but when the food was gone, Mamie was suddenly ready to talk. I recognized that light in her eye, set off by the flint that sister hid underneath her blue habit.

  “So where are you from again?” Mamie asked Bashkim. He looked like a kid eating for the first time at the grown-ups’ table, sitting on his hands because he ran out of napkins to shred. “What did Elsie say, Armenia or something?”

  “I live here,” he said and slid an empty fork into his mouth.

  “No, you know what I mean. Where are you from.”

  “I came from Italy,” he said.

  Greta looked up at the plate of spaghetti-art she’d been working on for the past twenty minutes. “You said he was from Albania.”

  I looked at Bashkim. “He is. Italy?”

  He shrugged. “I was there for a year before coming here.”

 
“That wasn’t the question,” I said.

  “But you’re Albanian really?” Greta asked.

  “I lived in Greece for a while, too,” he said.

  “But yes, he’s Albanian,” I said, since Bashkim didn’t seem to want to. He looked embarrassed, like I’d given something away, as if he thought Mamie wouldn’t notice his accent, or his skin, or his pinkie ring with tiny flecks of diamonds encrusted in it. Guys from around here didn’t even wear wedding rings, just thick gold ropes and brass knuckles if they were from the east side. If they were from the north side, they tattooed the names of their children’s mothers around their ring fingers. Gold rings, meanwhile, seemed to wash up on the shore of the Adriatic instead of seaweed, since every Albanian guy I’ve ever seen, including the ones who could barely afford Ring Pops from Joe’s Corner Grocery, had them wrapped around at least one of their fingers.

  “Most people don’t know of Albania. I tell them what they know,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. I know about Albania,” Mamie said. “I mean, at least I know that they’re coming over here in droves. I’ve worked with some, too. Remember, Elsie, when my hubcaps were stolen and I bought a new set from one of the guys in the shop? He was Albanian, that guy.”

  “I thought that guy was Puerto Rican,” Greta said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I just remember an accent.”

  “Bashkim doesn’t steal hubcaps,” I said.

  “I’m not saying he does. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “It’s the Blue Nun did that,” Greta said.

  “Why would I have anything against Albanians? My parents were immigrants, too.”

  “Not Albanian immigrants,” Greta said.

  “No, they were just the regular kind,” said Mamie.

  “At least he’s not black, right, Mamie?” Greta said.

  “He’s kind of tan,” Mamie said. “But I don’t care about that. I’m not racist, is the point.”

  What Bashkim was at that moment was red, and somehow half the size he was at the beginning of dinner. I wondered if his feet could even touch the ground from his chair.

  “We have dessert,” I said. “An Entenmann’s, if anybody wants.”

  “So are you Catholic, then, or Orthodox, like the Greeks?” Mamie asked.

  “What difference does it make?” Greta said, dropping her head down to the table. “This is embarrassing.”

  “What’s embarrassing? I’m just making conversation. I’m interested. I think Bashkim is very interesting.”

  “I am nothing, really,” Bashkim said.

  “Oh, that’s not true. Everybody’s something. We’re Catholic. It was very unpopular in this country to be Catholic.”

  “Everybody in Waterbury is Catholic,” Greta said.

  “Not everybody. There used to be a lot of Jews here, too. And there’s that Jehovah’s Witness temple or whatever they call it up on North Main.”

  “Mamie, nobody here is religious. I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

  “Don’t speak for me. I’m religious,” Mamie said.

  “I’ve literally never been in a Catholic church with you except for funerals,” Greta said.

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not religious. It’s a faith thing.”

  “Anybody want coffee?” I asked. “I got Chock full o’Nuts.”

  “The Albanian kids at school are Muslim,” Greta said.

  I kicked her underneath the table. I think I grazed Mamie’s shin on the way but she didn’t notice. She held herself perfectly still, and even shut up for a second.

  “Muslim, wow,” she said. “Wow. That is really interesting.”

  “I am not really anything,” he said.

  “But I mean, is that what your family is?”

  “In Albania, you were nothing. There was no religion, except for the Party.”

  “The Party?”

  “Communist,” I said. “Like Lithuania.”

  Mamie shook her head. “No, not like Lithuania. We didn’t want to be Communist. The Russians made us. Why do you think we all ended up over here?”

  “The same reason Bashkim did,” I said.

  “And we didn’t come looking for handouts. We wanted to work.”

  “Like Bashkim. Bashkim works really hard,” I said.

  “The Russians had nothing to do with us,” Bashkim said.

  “I’m just saying, you came here because you wanted a better life, just like everybody who comes to America does,” I said.

  “And he ended up in Waterbury. God,” Greta said.

  “Yeah, with Elsie!” Mamie said. “What a gyp.”

  “Thanks. That’s great,” I said.

  We all stared down at our hands on the table like dogs playing poker. Bashkim had taken the whole night off from work for this, and instead of melting behind the grill he was melting right there before us, beads of sweat forming at the roots of his ridiculously thick hair. The strands were thick like pipe cleaners, and on other nights, nights when Mamie wasn’t there, I would shape them into whatever I wanted while we sat together on the love seat we picked up from the Salvation Army, watching the thirteen-inch Panasonic Janice at work had given us when she’d saved enough for a new twenty-seven-inch for herself. We were getting by, just like everybody else, that’s what I wanted Mamie to see, that we were no worse off than she was. We were better, even, because I had someone else’s hair to run my fingers through, at least until he got sick of it and pulled my hand away.

  He wouldn’t even look at me now.

  “I like the built-in china cabinet in the kitchen,” Mamie said, finally. “Not like there’s china in there.”

  “Thank you,” Bashkim said softly.

  “But I mean, who has china these days? I don’t have china. You don’t need fine china to heat up a can of Progresso, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  Mamie bounced her pack of Basics on the table but didn’t pull one out to smoke. “It’s not like this is the olden days. People don’t get china for their weddings, they get, I don’t know, bread machines. You ever see how many bread machines there are at Goodwill? They’ve got their own aisle. Every one of them a dead marriage.”

  “Who needs bread machines? There’s a Hostess outlet right down the road. Bag of Wonder bread for ninety-nine cents,” I said.

  “Who needs bread machines is right. Who needs china. Christ, who even needs marriage. Don’t need a husband for a family, right? Look at us. Me and my girls. We did all right, eh? You guys never wanted for nothing, right?”

  Greta looked at me from across the table, and shook her head just enough for me to see it.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” Mamie said. “You wanted for everything. You still want for everything.”

  “Mamie,” Greta said.

  “No. I know I fucked this all up. I can admit that. I know I wasn’t sitting at home with you, helping out with your homework and dragging you to Girl Scouts and whatnot, but I really thought you’d learn something from that. You both wanted so bad to get away from me. And for what? For this?”

  My hands were asleep from sitting on them. My neck was strained from looking down. “There’s nothing wrong with this place. You said you liked the china cabinet,” I said.

  Mamie pressed her palms into her eyes. “I do. I love the china cabinet. I love the big empty china cabinet.”

  “We keep our plates in there,” I said.

  She slapped her palms down on the table. “Just, god. When are you going to come out with it?”

  I shrugged. There was no point in denying anything, it was why we had her over in the first place, to come out with it all. But I didn’t come out with anything. It oozed out of me somehow, but I couldn’t come out and say it.

  “I mean, I guess at this point you’re having it, right?” Mamie said.

  “Yes,” Bashkim said. His voice was confident again, his again. “We are having it.”

  “W
hat?” Greta said. “You mean keeping it? You told me you took care of this weeks ago.”

  “We did take care of it. We decided to have it,” I said.

  Greta stood up from the table and stomped toward the door. “You’re a liar, Elsie,” she said and slammed the screen door behind her. “A stupid liar. Have fun, is all I have to say. I’m not going to be helping you out in nine months, if that’s what you think.”

  “Nine months?” Mamie said. She finally lit up that Basic. “Six months, if you’re lucky. Isn’t that about right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My face stung as if she’d slapped it, but she was sitting there perfectly calm, her crossed leg bouncing over the other the only sign of what was bubbling inside. “I haven’t gone to the doctor yet.”

  She laughed as she exhaled. “Perfect.”

  “Well, nothing’s been wrong yet. I haven’t had to breathe any secondhand smoke yet,” I said, swatting her Basic stream away from my nose. Finally I looked up, and Bashkim was smoking, too, blowing perfect rings of Marlboro wisps that floated like tilted halos over our heads. “He usually goes outside for that,” I said.

  “I do, yes. Tonight, no. Tonight I will smoke here, because this is my home, and I decided that I would like to do it in here,” he said.

  “It’s only your home so long as you don’t run off and leave her alone in it,” Mamie said.

  “Mamie, it’s not going to be like that. Not every guy is like that.”

  “Even then, it would still be my home,” Bashkim said.

  Mamie smiled a little and stubbed out her cigarette only halfway through it. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll take some cake now, Elsie. And some coffee if you got it.”

  I looked at her but didn’t move, thinking I’d be walking into a booby trap.

  “Go ahead. Better get used to serving people,” she said.

  “I will have some, too,” Bashkim said, looking at Mamie.

  It was definitely a booby trap, then, but I stood up anyway and walked to the counter, where it at least felt safer. I waited for it to start, it being Mamie crashing the empty bottle of wine over Bashkim’s head, it being Bashkim pushing Mamie to the door, still in her chair, as if she were a patient and he the orderly, it being the ultimatum: it’s him/her or me. But they only watched each other, Mamie’s hands folded under her chin, her head cradled in there like a hammock; Bashkim’s arms folded over his chest, his biceps round like ripe fruit. I dropped saucers of cake off in front of both of them and drew back, scooped spoonfuls of coffee onto the counter because I couldn’t stop watching them. They took delicate bites, as if at a tea party.