Brass Read online

  “Because the people who run the places we all work for send their kids there, and they never think to call them name-brand colleges.”

  “Those people. Who even wants to be one of those people?” Mamie says.

  “We should want Lulu to be one of those people,” Greta says.

  “I do,” your mother answers. “I think she can be one of those people no matter where she goes to school.”

  “Anyway, they shove college down all these kids’ throats nowadays, and yet half of ’em don’t know how to work worth a damn. They don’t know how to do anything without Mommy and Daddy holding their hand,” Mamie says.

  “I never have to worry about that,” you say, but nobody seems to hear it.

  “We’re just doing what we were told to do,” your mother says. “I mean, how many applications is she supposed to send out?”

  “That’s up to Lulu. Five or six, maybe? Did you look into any other places?” she asks you.

  You don’t respond. It’s what happens instead of saying no, which is the real answer, which you figured out recently was the wrong one, and you feel a bit like Greta has ganged up with NYU and Margarita to remind you of what an idiot you’ve been. In truth, your criteria in selecting NYU had been, in this order: location; having heard of it; and it not being Columbia, an ivy where in a million years you wouldn’t have dreamed of applying. You hadn’t let yourself consider what would happen if you weren’t admitted to NYU, since you never really considered the other option an alternative. Western Connecticut isn’t really a safety, it’s a freebie, a school that practically guarantees admission to anyone with a high school diploma and the willingness to drive I-84 west at least a few days a week.

  “I wish you would’ve told us this a little bit sooner,” your mother says, looking first at Greta, and then turning to Robbie. “You, too. Aren’t you supposed to know about this stuff?”

  Robbie looks deeply embarrassed, and is clearly regretting turning down Christmas in Bay Ridge, where the meal would be served cacciatore style and suffused with the kind of Italian-mother guilt to which he had long ago become inured. “I mean, I’m happy to answer any questions, but I didn’t want to overstep my bounds. She’s not my,” he begins, but doesn’t finish what obviously doesn’t need finishing.

  “Daughter. I’m not his daughter. It’s not his job,” you say. “And it’s not Greta’s job, either, and it’s not a stupid guidance counselor’s job.”

  “No, actually, it is a guidance counselor’s job,” your mother interrupts.

  “No, actually, not really,” you say.

  “Are you telling me I’m supposed to have done everything? I am one person, if you haven’t noticed,” your mother says.

  “No, you weren’t supposed to have done everything. You just decided to,” you say.

  “Really,” she says, though there is emphatically no question mark at the end of it. “I decided to make both of our lives as difficult as possible.”

  You shrug, your shoulders rolling high in the pantomime of a shrug, a shrug that the people at the back of the theater would tell you to tone down.

  “Guys, come on, it’s Christmas. I wasn’t trying to start anything. I was just trying to make conversation,” Greta says.

  “That’s what happens when you make conversation about the rest of us being idiots,” Mamie says.

  “I never said you were idiots, I just said don’t rely on people around here for academic guidance.”

  “Well, who is she supposed to rely on, you? You who checks in once or twice a year when there’s free food on the table?”

  “Yeah, I wonder why I would possibly want to not come back here,” Greta says, finally pushing her plate away.

  “I know, it’s so awful here, and it’s so great where you are. You’re doing so much better than the rest of us with your name-brand college degrees.”

  Greta appears shocked that her well-being is not apparent to Mamie.

  “I’m happy,” Greta says. “I’m so happy.”

  “In any case, it’s not like it’s too late. She can still send out more applications if she needs to,” your mother says.

  “No, I can’t. It’s like seventy-five dollars for each one,” you remind her.

  “They’ll waive the application fee for some people,” Robbie says, deciding to be helpful now that you’ve decided there’s no point in bothering with any of it.

  “Really?” your mother says.

  “Some people. That means poor people,” Mamie says.

  For a moment the silence that everyone was hoping for comes to be, and it brings none of the relief that, seconds ago, it had seemed to promise.

  “What?” Mamie says. “That’s not us. We’re not poor. All of us work. All any of us have ever done is work. We don’t need handouts.”

  “It’s not a handout. It’s like a scholarship to apply,” Greta says.

  A need-based scholarship, which you earn by being a docile, poor, free-to-reduced-lunch–getting bastard child. You think that, but you don’t say it aloud. You’ve stopped saying anything aloud, in fact, and once again, it doesn’t even matter. Everyone else is doing the talking for you, deciding what’s right or wrong for the Luljeta Hasani they decided is sitting with them at the table, whether or not she should be proud or ashamed of being an aspirational charity case. You don’t even have the same name as these people. You resent being their obligation as much as you suspect they secretly resent you for the same. You don’t even want the parents of some packaged food product heir to cover your application fee to Wesleyan or Bucknell via their contributions to the school’s never-ending capital campaign, so happy were they that the school found no hard evidence of the trumped-up allegations lodged against their son the second semester of his freshman year. Their boy was a good boy, their boy was a gift bestowed upon them late in life, after eight rounds of fertility treatments and, ultimately, the egg of a well-compensated nonsmoking Bucknell coed with no family history of heart disease, addiction, mental illness, or brunettes. It’s dumb, maybe, but you wonder what it would be like to be a gift to your family instead of a burden. You wonder what it would feel like to be a happy surprise, the kind a father celebrates in a smoky room among friends who’d never seen him smile quite like that, instead of the kind a mother doesn’t really know what to do with when she wants to go bowling with some co-workers on a Tuesday night.

  Your phone buzzes in your pocket. There’s a message from Yllka: This year my present was you, it reads. And another from Teena informing you that she’s told her parents she was with you, in case they call looking for her. And another from Ahmet, not really a message but a series of seemingly unrelated emoticons that you’d have to be an Egyptologist to decipher. Three texts from three different people in a day; it’s possibly a record for you. Meanwhile, the people whom you sit among continue shrilling at each other, supposedly over your future but obviously really about their own histories, begrudging each other for past betrayals and ingratitude and dinner conversations turned ugly.

  “Well, don’t worry about me ruining everything, I have to catch the six-twenty train back anyway,” Greta says.

  “What?” you say. “I thought you were staying overnight.” Six-twenty is three hours away, not enough time to clean up, eat dessert, clean up again, watch two hours of NCIS reruns on TV, and confide in Greta that you were on the verge of something big, that you’d received an invitation to explore your past and, you assume, form a future that is tenable on account of a stronger, reinforced foundation.

  “I’m sorry, Lulu, I’ve got a thing I have to go to that I really can’t get out of,” Greta says.

  “But you can get out of being with your family? Lulu’s been counting down the days till you got here,” your mother says.

  Greta looks at you with the same smile she always gives you, which previously felt tender and affirming and seemed to say: Save yourself. We are not your sole progenitors and we are not your sole fate. Only now it feels condescending and o
bligatory, as if, in addition to learning how to be cool from her stupid rich friends, she also learned how to smile in the gracious, empty way of well-bred rich people, mimicking the smiles her friends give their doormen when they hand over a Christmas card with a pathetic twenty-dollar tip at Christmas. You realize that you’ve had Greta wrong this whole time: the lesson hasn’t been look what you can do when you apply yourself, it’s look what happens when you don’t stop running: you turn around to find that the life you thought you abandoned has been only one crescent roll behind you this whole time.

  “It’s fine. I don’t feel good, anyway,” you say.

  “Don’t be like that, Lu. I wish I didn’t have to go,” she says. “You should come see me next weekend, okay? And we’ll see each other all the time once you’re at NYU, right?”

  “Yup,” you answer. “All the time.”

  “Well, silly me, I thought I’d get to spend a whole holiday with my family,” Mamie says.

  “If we don’t get to spend the whole day together, then let’s just not be assholes for the time we do have, okay?” your mother says. “Now who wants cake?”

  “I do,” Robbie chimes in.

  You think, Yeah, who wants cake indeed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elsie

  It looked like I was the only person on the East End who didn’t get an invitation to the party happening in our apartment when I walked in after my double shift at the Ross. Bashkim and Gjonni were sitting at the heads of the kitchen table, the other chairs filled with guys I’d never met, all of them leather-brown, all of them with scars across their brows or cheeks or necks, like factory seconds from a set of dishware. A few others improvised seats, like an Igloo cooler that wasn’t ours, a stack of telephone books stolen off of every front step in the neighborhood, a case of industrial-size stewed tomatoes stood upright, obviously borrowed from dry storage at the Ross and almost certainly going back there afterward.

  “Beautiful, beautiful!” the men called out, so I turned behind me to see what they were looking at before I realized they meant me. When I turned back to face the room, I was surrounded by wet lips searching for my cheeks. They grabbed my hands and shoved wrinkled dollars into my palms, which I wasn’t ready for, so the bills floated to the floor.

  “Look at her, just like a woman, throwing away money,” Gjonni said. He gathered the bills in his hand and pressed the pile into my arms, and I cradled it tight like a child against my chest. “But see, a good woman, a natural mother,” he said, pressing his hand into my belly, which was as puffy from Pepsi bloat as it was from the future human living in there. The men laughed, and then somebody said something I couldn’t understand, which made them laugh harder, and made me want to run.

  I looked at Bashkim and did my best to smile.

  “I didn’t know people were coming over,” I said.

  “It’s friends,” he said. His smile was distorted behind a bottle of Heineken, so many empties scattered on the table that the light in the room was tinted green, the way it looks when a storm is coming. “I wanted them to meet the mother of my child.”

  One of the men held a bottle to the ceiling. Cameras were pulled from nowhere. Pictures were snapped.

  “Të lindtënjëdjalë,” he said, and the others followed. Të lindtënjëdjalë, they said, not really in unison, so it circled the room like some weird school chorus round.

  “It means, ‘May a son be born,’ ” Yllka said. She was standing beside me, and I noticed then for the first time the women seated in the living room, presumably the wives of the men in the kitchen, a bowl of potato chips towering untouched in the center of the coffee table. They stared at me with eyes that were bored and vicious at once.

  “Go introduce yourself to the girls. Yllka, go introduce Elsie,” Gjonni said.

  It was a den of lions in there. Except for an old lady in a babushka, they had thick manes hairsprayed around their hungry faces, and their noses twitched as I got closer. I stared at Bashkim, but he wouldn’t even look over. He was concentrating on the playing cards splayed in his hand, wearing a poker face that could run Atlantic City.

  “I was actually just on my way out,” I said.

  “Go on, go on,” Gjonni said.

  Yllka sighed. She pulled the money from my arms, ironed it smooth with her hands, and folded the wad neatly into my pocket. “Come,” she said and pulled me into the living room. It looked like the women had gotten palms full of money before, too, and had spent it all at Kay Jewelers. There were gold bands wrapped around their index fingers and thin gold hoops hanging from their lobes. The old lady wore a gold plate over her right front tooth, which I could see because her lip was curled back into something that was not a smile.

  “This is Elsie,” Yllka said. They nodded and stared at my stomach. I recognized the youngest one in the room, a girl maybe my age, from the Ross. She sometimes stood in the lobby for an hour at a time trying to pluck a stuffed toy with a metal claw for twenty-five cents a shot, even though she had to have known that those things were wedged so tight that she’d have been lucky to grab some fuzzy dice with a pair of pliers. A New Kids on the Block pin was fastened to her denim jacket, not ironically as far as I could tell.

  Yllka nudged me and started pointing at the women. “This is Klarita, Lindita, Dardata,” she said, and I remembered that I heard the young one, Dardata, called Dottie by her friends in the parking lot. After that the names fell apart into clumsy syllables that I’d never remember, and I figured it wouldn’t be worth trying, since chances were slim they’d be inviting me over for Tupperware dems anytime soon. When the introductions were over, the golden-toothed woman rose from her seat and took hold of my belly with both hands, keeping her eyes on me but cocking her head to aim whatever she was saying at the rest of them.

  “Vajzë,” the lady said.

  “She thinks she knows what kind of baby everybody is going to have, even though she’s wrong half the time,” Dardata said.

  “She doesn’t think she knows, she tries to make the baby whatever she wants it to be. If she likes you she says boy, if she doesn’t she says girl,” Yllka said.

  “What does she want me to have?” I asked.

  “A girl,” said Yllka.

  I tried my best to smile and waved the smoke snaking in from the kitchen away from my eyes so I could pretend that was why they were glazed over.

  “I wish Bashkim would’ve told me that you were coming over,” I said. “I could’ve been prepared.”

  “What’s there to prepare? We got chips.” Dardata waved her hand over the coffee table like a model on The Price Is Right. “It’s like a king’s spread.”

  “Just prepare,” I said.

  “You’d think he’d tell his wife those things, right? Oh, wait, but you’re not his wife…”

  “She’s joking,” Yllka said and said something to Dardata that sounded more like a warning than a joke.

  Our eyes moved in circles around the room. Yllka said something to the woman in the recliner, and the woman reluctantly stood up and shuffled over to the arm of the couch, where she sat on one cheek and resumed a blank stare. “Sit,” Yllka told me, and I didn’t argue about it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “My dogs are barking.”

  “What?” Dardata said. “What dogs? I don’t hear any dogs.”

  “It’s just an expression. When your feet are tired, your dogs are barking.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Feet don’t make sound.”

  “It’s just a saying,” I said.

  “It still doesn’t make sense. No wonder half of us never learn English. It’s full of nonsense.”

  “Every language has expressions that don’t make sense,” Yllka said. “Mos më shit pordhë.”

  Dardata rolled her eyes, and a couple other women covered their mouths as if holding back a cough.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “ ‘Don’t sell me farts,’ ” Yllka said. “In other words, ‘Don’t me
ss with me.’ ”

  I pitied the soul who ever dared to sell Yllka farts.

  Dardata began looping her hair around a finger. “So, are you having a boy or a girl?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Can’t they tell yet? Aren’t you going to find out?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said.

  “Don’t find out,” Yllka said. “It’s bad luck to know.”

  “How is it bad luck? It just gives you time to get ready. So you know what color things to buy,” Dardata said.

  “Fine, not bad luck, just bad. Some people might stop caring if they found out the baby wasn’t what they wanted,” Yllka said. She looked into the kitchen, straight at Bashkim, but we didn’t exist anymore to the men out there. They pulled on bottles of Heineken as if they contained mothers’ milk and kept backup cigarettes behind their ears, the rest of the loosies scattered across the table to use as poker chips. Bashkim was ahead by at least a pack.

  “They won’t stop caring altogether,” Dardata said. “Even men know not everybody can have a boy.”

  “We don’t really care about that kind of thing,” I said.

  Yllka cocked her head at me. “ ‘We’ don’t, or you don’t?”

  “We,” I said. “It’s not something we talk about.”

  Yllka folded her arms and leaned against the wall. “Of course it doesn’t matter one way or another. Mothers know that.”

  A woman on the sofa reached for a potato chip. The rest just sat there and looked at us, like they were watching a foreign movie without subtitles. Yllka said something to them in Albanian, and they leaned back and nodded and kept watching.

  “Well, how much longer before we all find out?” Dardata asked.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “How far along are you? How long before we know if it’s a boy or girl?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I think about four or five months.”

  “You think?” Dardata said. “What does the doctor say?”

  It was too hot in that room. No air. The windows had been painted shut, and the ceiling fan just recycled our own breath back down into our lungs.