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  “Will you not be getting married then?” Mamie asked. “Elsie, coffee?”

  “It’s coming,” I said. I swept the grinds into a filter, my shaking hands not even steadied by the counter. I shook my head at Bashkim, begging him not to tell her, but he hadn’t really looked at me all night.

  “No,” he said. “Getting married would not make things any different.”

  “Of course it would make things different. It would make it harder for Elsie to get out when she has to. If she has to, I mean.”

  “Getting married does not make someone stay. You should know that,” he said.

  “If that was supposed to hurt,” Mamie said.

  Bashkim shook his head. “If I wanted to hurt you, there would be no confusion about it. We did not have you here to hurt you. Elsie is not having a baby to hurt people. This is right, Elsie?”

  I nodded, for no reason since neither looked over at me.

  “Then why is she having a baby?”

  “Because she loves me. This is right, Elsie?”

  I didn’t bother nodding this time, and instead walked to the door. It was still hot out there, but not like inside, which was just a few degrees away from ignition. I breathed in deep and leaned against the railing, which gave a couple of inches under my weight. We were twenty feet or so up, not enough for certain death if the railing gave way, but there would be plenty of broken bones, and almost certainly a blank image on a sonogram. The doctors would say they were sorry for my loss, the way they were trained to, but they probably wouldn’t be, just like plenty of people wouldn’t be. Mamie wouldn’t be, Greta wouldn’t be, Yllka, Aggie, wherever she was, whatever she knew. I would be. Of course I would be. I’d be drugged up and broken and sorry, somewhere deep underneath all that gauze. I’d get all the plastic cups of apple juice I asked for. Magazines, balloons, The Price Is Right on Channel 3, whatever it took to make me unsorry.

  “What do you want?” Greta said. She was crouched in the corner of the porch, invisible under shadow.

  “Jesus Christ, you scared me,” I said. I pulled my weight away from the railing and felt woozy when I looked back at the twenty-foot drop. Suddenly it was cold out there. I shivered.

  “You’ve got bigger things to be scared about, if you ask me,” she said.

  “I’m not asking you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not asking anybody, in fact.”

  “They’re telling you anyway.”

  I stopped to listen to Mamie and Bashkim, but all I heard was fork scraping against plate, like they thought more cake was buried underneath the surface. It was going better than I’d thought it would. No screaming, nothing shattered. It made me nervous, though, knowing all that fuel was inside just waiting for a spark.

  The screen door popped open, nearly whacked me in the face, and slapped back against the frame. Mamie stepped out, a little unsteady on her feet, and held her purse in tight against her as if she thought we might rob her.

  “You should get a spring for that door. Greta, you’re driving. Elsie, coffee’s ready. I decided I didn’t want it after all.” She looked me up and down, nodded toward the stairs. “You want I can toss you down those. It’s not too late.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Score one for the kid, I guess.” She leaned on the rail, didn’t even notice it was loose. “Just so you know, not killing a baby isn’t even close to giving it any kind of life.”

  “It’s not an it, it’s a someone,” I said.

  “Even worse,” she said and began walking down the stairs, taking one step at a time. “Good night and good luck, sweetheart.”

  She called people sweetheart sometimes instead of asshole, so I didn’t bother echoing her goodbye. I looked instead at Greta, who ignored me and squeezed past.

  “I’ll call you,” I said to her.

  “Save your dime. You’ll need them,” she said, and then she was gone, too.

  Inside, Bashkim still sat at the table, the haze of smoke around him making him look like a dream sequence, or a low-budget version of heaven. That’s what I’d call his biography, I thought: A Low-Budget Version of Heaven, and then realized it said more about me than about him. What kind of heaven did I want? It took him an hour’s work to pay for that bottle of Blue Nun. One whole hour of his life sitting in the bottom of Mamie’s belly, and he didn’t complain once. And he had all kinds of money on the way, he said. And was a good-looking guy, underneath the ugly clothes that were either Communist issue or Salvation Army castoffs. He’d taken off his short-sleeve button-up, and look at how nice he filled out that undershirt. Strong, not just the muscles. I stepped back inside and walked over to him and kissed the top of his head.

  “Thank you for dealing with my mother,” I said.

  “Go clean that mess up,” he said, pulling a cigarette to his lips. “The flies are going for it.”

  I thought about arguing for a second, but decided that it was a fair trade, him taking care of me in exchange for me taking care of everything else.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Luljeta

  The addition of your mother’s boyfriend, the postanarchist Professor Robbie, brings the total number of guests gathered for Christmas dinner to five, one more than the quartet of you, your mother, Mamie, and Greta, which had gathered for Thanksgiving and all other previous holidays you’ve sat through your entire life. Even with the addition of a Y chromosome, your Noel looks mostly like a nativity scene staged by a militant women’s separatist group.

  “Ooh, where’d you get these?” Mamie asks, pointing to the holly berry–printed napkins that, you’ve been warned, are for display purposes only.

  “T.J.Maxx,” your mother answers, though she doesn’t add the comment about caving in to the commercial holiday bullshit like some consumerist blue blood, as she had when she suffered through the twenty-minute line to purchase them two weeks before.

  Blue blood was one of the terms your mother picked up in Robbie’s class at Mattatuck Community College, and from what you can tell, it’s used to describe the class of New Englanders whose families had settled here long, long ago. These are the people who had come to control things like local government and who had things like “money” and attended events called functions. But because neither you nor your mother has ever ventured farther outside of Waterbury than Six Flags New England in Agawam, Massachusetts, Misquamicut State Beach in Misquamicut, Rhode Island, and annual trips to visit Aunt Greta in Queens, New York, you believe the Italian-Americans who dominate Waterbury constitute blue bloods, since they make up nearly all the elected officials in City Hall and run the classy eating joints like Carmen Anthony’s and the Pontelandolfo Club. This perhaps explains why your Christmas meal begins with a breakfast lasagna, served up with coffee at 11:00 A.M. while the ShopRite turkey roasts to 170 degrees, a full thirty higher, and thus, to your mother, better, than the minimum internal temp recommended by the USDA.

  Hosting a holiday that encourages the cooking of nonboxed food products means that your mother has been too consumed with prep and chores to notice the silent treatment you’ve given her since your trip to Yllka’s a few days prior. Robbie is there to dice celery and onions and shake up the Good Seasonings while your mother twirls the Pillsbury dough from triangles to crescents, because she wants full credit for what is invariably everyone’s secret favorite part of the meal. You’ve been tasked with making the salad, which essentially consists of opening a plastic bag of iceberg and shredded carrots and dumping in a few cucumber chunks and black olives to solidify its place as the least desirable foodstuff at the table.

  “Take it easy on the olives, Lu,” your mother says to you. “It’s a salad, not a pizza.”

  You briefly think about telling your mother where she can put the Good Seasonings cruet, but Mamie will be arriving from the train station with Aunt Greta momentarily, and you don’t want the sole Kuzavinas who has a clue to think of you as an asshole.

  What you want, in fa
ct, is for Greta to think of you as amazing, because she’s the only one you could think of who might have any idea of what amazing means. Greta’s going to be the first and possibly only person you tell about your meeting with Yllka, because if anyone knows what it means to feel homeless in your own bed, to be an explorer without a vessel, it’s Greta Kuzavinas. Greta is the Kuzavinas family’s pilgrim: first ever to go to college, first of the American-born to leave Waterbury, and not even for one of the boring little suburbs where some of your second cousins had settled after they’d been promoted to foreman or head purchasing agent at Highland Manufacturing, maker of little stamped metal parts for a variety of industries in which you’re not interested. Greta lives in New York—not the upstate part, which is no different than Waterbury, but the New York City part, which is different from all other places in the world—where you still hang on to the hope that you belong, just not in the cheater NYU way you’d previously planned, lounging in dorm rooms among the sons and daughters of packaged Greek food scions. No, this whole NYU rejection was for the best, because now you can prove that you’re still smart enough to do New York right, like Greta does it: counting Bloody Marys as meals, having friends who work in things like media, having friends at all. You’ll be living, per your plan, your mother’s worst nightmare. All the streets and buildings, and worse, all the people—it’s just too much, your mother frequently says, reminding her, like a Neil deGrasse Tyson special on PBS, of just how inconsequential each one of us is in the grand scheme of things. In contrast to your mother, that kind of thing is comforting to you, who would rather be inconsequential in a context so great your smallness isn’t even registered.

  When Mamie and Greta walk through the door, though, you’re reminded of just how unlike Greta you are, at least in any obvious physical way. Even in the black military-style puffy coat that’s pretty much standard issue for people of a certain demographic in the city, Greta is someone people look at. Her hair is buzzed, because despite having fled Waterbury and her family, the two main triggers for her trich, the only real treatment has been removing the target, which is somewhat akin to quitting a nail-biting habit by removing your hands. She’d explained this to you during one of your annual visits, while you two squeezed into a counter space for one at brunch in Greenpoint, the neighborhood she’d told you Williamsburg hipsters go to to retire. For you, it was like watching Sex and the City in a foreign language: you had no idea what she was talking about, but you were sure that it was glamorous.

  “Lulu!” Greta says, and when you lean in for a hug you wonder for a moment if Greta has eaten anything since that long-ago brunch, because you can feel her sharp ribs beneath her puffy military jacket. In Waterbury, her kind of skinny is mostly seen on late-stage drug abusers, but in New York it’s just how you look awesome in clothes that are bizarre outside of the boroughs. This is perhaps why, with your thigh juncture instead of gap, your clothes never seem to hang quite right on you.

  “Lasagna!” Greta cries when she notices the pan, and you wonder if maybe she’s been starving herself to fit into those teeny jeans, because, to your disappointment, Greta appears as excited to see a casserole as she does to see you.

  “Look at this girl, right?” Mamie says. “She looks like a cancer patient.”

  “Jesus, Mamie, that’s not nice,” your mother says.

  “What did I tell you about saying His name like that?” Mamie says.

  “That only you get to do it?” Greta says.

  “Hi, baby,” Mamie says to you. “You look healthy, baby.” This is Mamie’s way of saying you look chubby, though not saying it explicitly is Mamie’s way of being nice, so you force yourself to say thank you and quickly run for a celery stick before Mamie reminds you again that your ample bosom and butt don’t come from the Kuzavinas line.

  “Turkey will be ready in an hour or so,” your mother says. “Help yourself to some lasagna.”

  But Greta is already helping herself to some lasagna, and Mamie to some of the coffee that she makes very clear is to be kept ready at all times during her visits, lest she be forced to wet her whistle with the Carlo Rossi your mother keeps hidden from Mamie to avert any relapses, which your mother still braces for even three years into her sobriety. Your mother sits with them at the kitchen table, picking out the stray hairs or particles of dust that have fallen into the raw crescent rolls, which she has shaped into something more like the twisted claws of a neglected junkyard Rottweiler. Robbie is in the fourth chair, compulsively shaking the Good Seasons dressing every twenty seconds, the panic on his face apparent whenever the oil and vinegar even hints at separation. They all look right together, you think, even Greta, back in her regressed, anxious state, and the too-tall, too-skinny interloper who is the first-ever male at your family’s annual Christmas Day showdown. Each of the four chairs at the table is already filled, and from where you stand it looks like they are on the bow of a ship, a little Mayflower setting off for some land where a bunch of freaks would be able to piece a collective life together.

  “Ah, crap,” your mother says, looking up at you. “We’re gonna need another chair.”

  “I’ll stand,” you answer.

  —

  You don’t stand. You end up on a twenty-five-dollar Office Max office chair that rolls away from the table every time the anchors of your feet lift off the floor as you reach for another crescent roll.

  “I just don’t understand where you put all that food,” Mamie says to Greta. “You haven’t stopped eating since you walked in the door.”

  “It’s Christmas,” your mother says. “Let her enjoy herself.”

  “You’re like that hot dog–eating lady who weighs about ninety pounds. Do you just hollow yourself out so you can eat once a year?” Mamie says.

  “First you tell me I’m too skinny and then you won’t lay off me for eating. What is it that’s going to make you happy?” Greta says.

  “I am happy. What makes you think I’m not happy, just because I’m concerned? Would you be happy if I wasn’t concerned?”

  “Yes,” Greta answers.

  “So how’s work?” Robbie asks Greta. He’d assured you and your mother that his own family’s holiday dinners had primed him for whatever the Kuzavinas family would dish out in addition to food, but he’s been sitting at the table silently throughout dinner, responding to every line of conversation with the same weird, tight smile that makes him look a little Botoxed, as if he’s an out-of-work talk-show host instead of a gainfully employed community college instructor.

  “It’s great. Last week a patron stabbed himself in the stomach in the bathroom and then came to the reference desk asking for help putting his intestines back in,” Greta answers through a mouthful of candied yams.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting,” Mamie says.

  “You have to say that at the dinner table?” your mother says.

  “I’m the only one still eating,” Greta answers, looking truly a little pleased with herself. “And Robbie asked.”

  “Vet?” Robbie asks. “Homeless?”

  “Both, probably. You know how it is, it’s a public library. Part daycare center, part VA hospital, part sex shop for middle-aged moms who don’t want to pay the fifteen bucks for their own copy of Fifty Shades.”

  You sometimes almost forget that Greta is a librarian, because you think of her so exclusively as Greta, as if that is itself an occupation: buzz-cutted, lesbian bar–hopping, get-the-fuck-out-of-Dodger. Her apartment is the kind of place where there’s only room to sit on the floor, which is dingy enough to be the last place you want to sit, but she goes to parties in breathtaking lofts owned by rich people who dress like poor people and raise organic chickens on their rooftops. When rent and student loan payments eat her paychecks three hours after she receives them, she makes do on slices of Ray’s and appetizers made by chef friends who’ve been on TV and don’t even make a thing of it, as if being on TV is something as natural as having a thigh gap. You admire her so much it hurts.r />
  But you’re just her kid niece, she reminds you, when she asks, “So, Lu, have you sent in your college applications yet?”

  Instantly you regret stuffing down that last crescent roll.

  “Yeah, a couple weeks ago,” you lie.

  “Exciting,” she says. “Where did you apply?”

  “Western Connecticut State University and, you know, NYU,” you say.

  “And where else are you going to apply?”

  “What do you mean, where else?”

  “That’s it? Two schools?”

  “A reach and a safety. That’s what the guidance counselor said to do.”

  “Yeah, a reach and a safety. What’s wrong with that?” your mother asks, not rhetorically.

  “You’re going to listen to a guidance counselor?”

  “That’s their job. Yeah, we listened to them,” your mother says.

  “Please, the guidance counselors here basically just feed people into the military. Why do you think they offer the ASVAB instead of SAT prep at school? And the kids who can’t pass the military fitness test get pushed into Mattatuck. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Robbie says.

  “Some taken,” your mother says. “I went to Mattatuck. What’s wrong with Mattatuck?”

  “She owes a whole lot less on her student loans than you,” Mamie chimes in.

  “I’m sorry, I know that sounded douchey. I’m just saying that it’s not what you want for Lulu, right? And Lulu, it’s not what you want, right?”

  “No,” you say.

  “No,” your mother echoes, though she seems to be waiting to be told whether or not she answered correctly.

  “Well, why not? Why do you think everybody has to go to some name-brand college?” Mamie says.