Brass Read online

  “I haven’t been to the doctor yet,” I said.

  Everyone seemed to understand that one. The women got more quiet, their heads shaking like they’d caught some tic from whatever was in the drinking water.

  “What? Why not?” Dardata said.

  “Nothing’s gone wrong,” I said.

  “You’re not supposed to wait for something to go wrong. You go to the doctor to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I haven’t even had a kid and I know that.”

  “I’ve been busy. Working, moving,” I said, and I realized that those things made up my entire to-do list. “And anyway, doctors are expensive.”

  “Bashkim’s got money. He’s becoming a millionaire, I hear,” Dardata said.

  I shrugged. “My mother didn’t go until the very end and everything turned out fine,” I said.

  “Did it?” Dardata said.

  “You should see a doctor,” Yllka said. “This is not the old country, you don’t have to do it like these ladies did it.”

  “And I thought we were the ones living in a time warp,” Dardata said.

  “Hesht,” Yllka said. “When you have a baby you will mess things up, too.”

  “I have to get some air,” I said.

  Bashkim’s eyes tracked me as I rushed through the kitchen, but he didn’t lay down his hand and follow me outside. It didn’t matter, though, because for once I didn’t want his attention, or anybody else’s. For just that minute I wanted to be left alone, and then my stomach cramped up and reminded me that there was a little person in there, and that I wouldn’t be alone again for a long, long time. Already it was a needy little thing: it needed me to eat so it could eat, it needed me to empty my bladder so there was more space for it inside of me. No doctor was going to be able to tell me what I really wanted to know, which wasn’t boy or girl, healthy or monster. I wanted to know just what kind of person this thing was going to be. Like, be. Muscly and quiet and serious like Bashkim, or skinny and smart and broken like Greta, or bitter and tipsy and mean like Mamie? Or would it be like me? I thought for a minute and realized that I didn’t even know what that meant, what few things I could be boiled down to. Acne-prone waitress who deferred acceptance to a community college? Was that really it? And then there was Bashkim’s whole history, a black hole that I wouldn’t even know existed except that Bashkim had to come from somewhere, he hadn’t just rolled in from nowhere like a thunderstorm, although those blue eyes did resemble storm clouds. And even if genetics didn’t determine it all, if this thing relied mostly on nurture, did that mean it had a better or worse shot of turning out okay?

  “She is right, you should go to a doctor,” Yllka said. She’d slipped outside with me silently, like a ninja. “Dardata is wrong about most things in life, but she is right about that. Babies are hard enough without something going wrong.”

  “I’m going to go,” I said, though I hadn’t really thought much about it until that night. My people weren’t doctor people; we went from healthy to dead in one fell swoop. Mamie had had to be talked into going to the hospital when she lost a finger at the knuckle, afraid that she’d get in trouble with her boss for missing work or bloodying up the machine she’d been assigned to, back when there were still a few jobs at the mills. We’d never been to the dentist, we treated strep throat with mint chocolate chip ice cream, we collected scar tissue from infected wounds like tribal body art. Mamie agreed to send Greta to the shrink only when the guidance counselor threatened to call DCF on her like she was some worthless junkie.

  “Those are all the wives inside, you know. The wives of the men in there,” Yllka said.

  “I figured,” I said.

  “So what do you think they think of you?”

  “Not much, obviously.”

  “You are here with the wives. Not the girlfriends. That happens other nights, with other girls. They don’t understand why you’re here.”

  “I’m here because I live here,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean. Why are you here, in this house, instead of the places where they keep girls like you? Those women know Bashkim is married, and it makes them wonder what kind of company their husbands kept before they made enough money to bring their wives over.”

  “That’s their problem. I’m not some dumb mistress. Agnes didn’t even want to come over. It’s done, it’s over with her, she lost her chance, and now it’s my turn. And it was his idea to move in together, anyway. I don’t see why I have to be the bad guy for the rest of my life.”

  “I think you are young and dumb. I don’t think you’re bad.”

  “I’d rather be bad than dumb.”

  “Well, you’re off to a good start. A woman who doesn’t know enough to go to the doctor when she’s pregnant is dumb. One who knows better but still doesn’t go is bad.”

  “I am going to go to the doctor,” I said. “So after that, what will I be?”

  She shrugged. “I guess just regular.”

  “That’s a start,” I said.

  “Yes, just a start. Listen, Bashkim is family, and you are not, but that child inside of you is my family, too. And while it is inside of your belly, it eats the food you eat, but that’s not all. It feels what you feel. You feel sad, it is sad. You are hurt, it is hurt, too. I want what is good for that child, and so I don’t want you being hurt. That’s all.”

  “I’m not trying to get hurt, either. I’m not looking for pain,” I said.

  “You should be,” she said. “You should look all the time for it, so you know where it is, and you can stay far, far away.”

  She walked inside, her shadow a moment or two behind her, a ghost of rosewater perfume always the last part of her to leave. Once that faded I sat alone in the dull light that the kitchen window let out, looking at all the other dull lights in the houses to my left and right. There were lights on in most of them, and swarms of moths panicking at each. What a shitty, sad life moths led, I thought. They’d do anything to get at the warmth of the light, and as soon as they reached it they burned up and died.

  Those kinds of flaws were everywhere in nature. I wasn’t saying I had everything figured out, that I wasn’t making mistakes all over the place, I just didn’t see why I had to be singled out for it.

  —

  The next morning Bashkim collected the money his friends had shoved at me, which I’d crammed into the pockets of my jeans and looked forward to counting.

  “Where are you going with that?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Wait,” I said, sitting up on my elbows, or trying to anyway. The air mattress had deflated enough that it couldn’t support things like right angles. “I was going to use that to go to the doctor.”

  “You don’t need this to go to the doctor.”

  “Yes I do. I don’t have any other money.”

  “Why do you need money to see a doctor?”

  “Because they cost money,” I said. I watched Bashkim take in that information, process it for a second, and then reject it.

  “This is America,” I said. “Everything costs money.”

  He thought about it some more. “You don’t need to go to a fancy doctor. Nothing is wrong with you,” he said.

  “I’m not talking about a fancy doctor. Just a regular doctor, to make sure everything’s going okay with the baby.”

  He looked down at the money in his hands and sighed. “How much?”

  “I have no idea. I just know that it costs money to go to the doctor.”

  He handed me forty dollars.

  “I don’t think that’s enough,” I said. “It’s probably a couple hundred at least. Doctors are rich. They don’t get rich charging forty bucks at a time.”

  Bashkim was getting frustrated, which was probably compounded by the hangover he had to have. “Why don’t you find out how much it is going to be first?”

  “Bashkim, this is your child,” I said.

  He hesitated.

  “Your son, remember?”

  He looke
d at the knot in his hand again, then looked me up and down, wondering if my rounded belly were some kind of elaborate hoax, before he put the money back on the dresser.

  “Yes, we should make sure everything is okay,” he said, as if the whole thing were his idea.

  He stood there for a second, waiting for me to thank him, but I couldn’t get any words of gratitude to form. He eventually walked out, and I collapsed back onto the mattress, wondering how much longer it was going to be like that, me having to convince Bashkim that there was going to be a return on his investment in me.

  —

  The cheapest doctors, the clinics that advertised on billboards on the sides of buildings that were one lead brick away from being condemned, were mostly downtown, in walking distance from the most busted-up, hope-defying neighborhoods in the city. The gas tank in the car I’d borrowed from Mamie was riding E, so I shifted into neutral and coasted down the hills into the valley, rolling down East Main, past what used to be Scovill Brass Works, except it hadn’t worked in years, and was being demolished to make way for a mall that I was guessing wouldn’t work any better. I rolled past the half dozen Puerto Rican shops hawking shrink-wrapped white pleather couches on the sidewalk, rolled past open windows that piped spirituals and salsa out of speakers that’d been bought off the backs of white box vans tagged with graffiti from the Bronx.

  By the time I had to shift back into gear, I’d managed to roll almost all the way to the town green and into a spot that could make you believe, for two or three minutes anyway, that Waterbury was still somewhere you might actually want to be. For three or four square blocks municipal buildings and bank headquarters made this place look like an actual city, the kind that casts heavy shadows over one-way streets. It could have been a set from Hill Street Blues, the kind of cop show set in some generic northeastern city where crimes are committed and solved in time for happy hour. All that marble, all those men in suits as gray as the steps of the courthouse, lawyers stuffing thick wedges of salami on Portuguese rolls into their mouths, not even pausing from their conversations to do it. A block away, inscribed into the marble above the entrance to City Hall, it said Quid Aere Perennius? What is more lasting than brass?

  That’s what my sixth-grade teacher had told us it meant, but she hadn’t told us the answer. Nobody had. It was a trick question, see, because once your eyes stopped being dazzled by all the slate and those Revolutionary War memorials, it turned out almost everything in the city was more lasting than brass. The toxic mud the mall was being built on was more lasting than brass. The hunger of the wailing baby in the stroller outside the social services office was more lasting than brass. The rubber on my sneakers, secondhand New Balances with still a good inch left to the soles, I bet even they would be more lasting than brass. Everybody here was more lasting than brass, and that made us stronger, didn’t it, wasn’t that what we learned in biology? All of us who came from ancestors who survived the bubonic plague, famines, those constantly finding new means of survival, moving from farms to villages, villages to cities, cities to different cities in new countries half a world away. We were a hearty brand of people and we had reached the end of the line, right? What was even left for the next generations?

  In the waiting room at the clinic I was surrounded by women who didn’t look like they wanted to think a day ahead into the future, never mind a generation. There were girls younger than me in there, with scabs on their knees as if they’d come straight from the jungle gym, and some women who, if not for the bulges beneath their muumuus, could’ve been young grandmas. There was a lady in a baggy puff-painted sweatshirt and thick eyeglasses who looked like she’d been planning her baby since meeting her husband at a Christian mixer a year or two before, and another woman with an electronic monitoring bracelet around her ankle sitting next to a stern lady who was either her mother or her parole officer. We all picked up parenting magazines, traded them in for Highlights for Children magazines, traded those in for pamphlets about smoking and fetal alcohol syndrome and low birth weights. Nobody touched the adoption pamphlets, because none of us were prepared to give anything of potential value away.

  I was trying to fill out the paperwork, on the question that asked whether I was using or had ever used intravenous drugs, when a little boy wobbled over and took the pen from my hand. He brought it to the woman who I guessed was his mother, who huffed and banged the pen down on the coffee table and closed her eyes again. He picked the pen back up and handed it to another woman, who slipped it into her purse. I stood up and asked the lady at the desk for another.

  “I don’t know if we have any more,” she answered. I saw at least two other Bics within grabbing distance of her hand. “What happened to the other one?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, and as she slid over another pen she sighed like she regretted every moment of her life, up to and including that day.

  Do you have other children? the form asked. I checked off no, and for good measure filled in a zero when the next question asked how many. The little boy reached for my pen again, but I held on tighter and looked at his mother. Her eyes were closed and her mouth open. Her purse was balanced on a stomach so enormous it must have housed more than just a fetus.

  The boy was cute, in a feral kind of way. His hair made him at least three inches taller than the two and a half feet he actually was, and it was orange—not red like a redhead but orange like rust, like he’d been left out in the rain. When he walked he kicked his legs straight out instead of bending them at the knee. He sang something with words that meant nothing but followed pretty closely the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.”

  I smiled at him a little when he looked at me, but he turned back to the stack of magazines he was streaming to the floor.

  “Dwayne, sit down and quiet up,” the woman said. She didn’t open her eyes.

  I went back to the questionnaire. Has your partner ever hit you, kicked you, or threatened to harm you?

  No, I responded.

  It asked all about my health history. I had never had diabetes, cancer, gallstones, hepatitis, anemia. I didn’t know if it was panic attacks or indigestion keeping me up at night, so I left the questions about those blank. Depression? What a stupid question to ask in a place like this, I thought, so again I left it blank.

  “Dwayne, you hear me?” the woman said. Dwayne kept singing, picking up the magazines he’d pushed to the floor so he could do it again.

  The questionnaire asked if my partner had had any of those conditions, or my parents. I left those blank, too.

  Dwayne’s mother opened her eyes and lunged forward so fast that it seemed like she was waking from a nightmare, and she grabbed on to the boy’s arms as if bracing herself.

  “You shut that mouth up or I will punch it. I will punch you in the fucking mouth,” she said. Her purse had fallen off of her belly when she leaned forward but she didn’t make a move to pick it up, and a Vicks inhaler and a quarter pack of powdered Hostess Donettes rolled out. The boy dropped to his butt and wasn’t singing anymore, but his lips still moved, opening and closing and making spit bubbles that popped just before they could float away.

  Nobody else in the room looked up during the outburst or after it, and that made me want to run.

  “Elsie?” a nurse called, and I was surprised to find that I was already on my feet, halfway to the door. I stopped in my tracks, caught in the middle of my jailbreak, and I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a jail, it was just a gyno’s office, one that didn’t seem to care whether you were insured or not. What was I so afraid of? Wasn’t this the easy part?

  —

  I was an amateur. I giggled when the nurse moved the little bud of her stethoscope over my back.

  “Sorry, it tickles,” I said.

  “One more deep breath,” she answered.

  I stared when she poked a needle into my arm, watching the cylinder turn crimson as it sucked up blood.

  “You have good veins,” she said, and I felt proud, l
ike all these years, when people said I was busy doing nothing worth talking about, what I was really doing was working on my veins, making them nice and plump for overworked phlebotomists.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “What’s what say?”

  “My blood.”

  “I don’t know yet. We have to send it out for testing.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But it’s red like it should be,” she said, trying to help me feel not stupid. “I bet it’s got all of what it’s supposed to have and not too much of what it shouldn’t.”

  Unlike the ladies in reception, the nurses were cheerful, kindergarten teacherish. They must have been used to dum-dums like me, baby incubators too young or too stupid or in need of twelve steps to be mothers. I didn’t trust their soothing voices, their Snoopy and Woodstock scrubs. They’d play peekaboo with us, and then, by the time we uncovered our hands from our eyes, DCF would be waiting with a net to scoop up our litters.

  “The doctor will be right with you,” the nurse said.

  The doctor wasn’t right with me. It took another twenty minutes for that, and in between another white-smocked woman came in, short and smiling, and I thought I recognized her from back at Crosby High School, someone who graduated a few years before me. I looked at her name tag and it was no help, because it just said Marisa or Maria or something, one of the names that was assigned to every third baby girl that went through the maternity ward at St. Mary’s Hospital between the years of 1974 and 1983. Marisa or Maria was doing all right for herself. She had the money for a spiral perm and acrylic nails and something put a smile on her face that wasn’t fake. It must’ve been a good field to get into, ultrasound tech, and I put it down on my mental to-do list as a career to look into once things were settled down.

  Marisa/Maria smeared some cold jelly over my stomach.

  “Cold, right?” she asked.

  But I wasn’t shivering from the cold. This was the moment, just like that, when everyone would really get to see whether I had done this whole thing wrong. The Albanian ladies—the gruas, Bashkim called them—they would probably be happy to see tentacles on that screen instead of arms and legs. They’d remind me of those Marlboro Reds I’d taken drags from before I realized I was knocked up, those swigs of Mamie’s Carlo Rossi. This is what can happen, this is what you go to the doctor for, they’d say, the behind-the-scenes, the coming attraction, the sneak peek at the mess you’ll be cleaning for the rest of your life.