Brass Read online

  “Wait,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” Marisa/Maria asked, and my face must have answered for me. “Oh, don’t worry, this doesn’t hurt. The wand just goes on top of your belly,” she said and illustrated on her own stomach, which probably hosted nothing more than an Italian grinder from Nardelli’s, nothing that could turn monstrous.

  “It’s just,” I said.

  Marisa/Maria smiled her infinitely patient smile, and I had no good response to it.

  “Never mind, I’m ready,” I said. I closed my eyes like I did for the last two clicks up the hill on the Cyclone roller coaster, the last moments of peace before the velocity of the fall would force my eyes open again.

  She was right, it didn’t hurt. It almost felt good to have someone press into my belly like that, a little massage, a little feeling that the weight there wasn’t all mine alone.

  “Do you want to open your eyes?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten that they were closed. Marisa/Maria pointed at a monitor, which was swirly and gray and came in like a premium cable channel the clinic hadn’t paid for.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  I shook my head, and she began pointing. “Arm, leg, head. See?”

  It was as if we were looking at a cloud, and she was describing a shape that wasn’t really there until it was, and then it was so obviously there that I couldn’t not see it.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  “See?”

  “Oh my god,” I said again.

  She kept moving the wand and let us sit in silence for a minute. There it was, the star of this show, up on a screen with an audience and everything. It wasn’t much of an audience, just me and an ultrasound tech, and I felt bad for the little thing, starring in a show that nobody had come out to see. And then I felt bad for me, that I was sitting alone out there, trying to muster enough applause with my two little dinky hands to reach the stage. And then I didn’t feel so bad anymore, because it was mesmerizing, that little graceful modern dance going on in front of me. There were tiny little movements you really had to focus on to see, but I did see them. My eyes trained to them pretty quick, and I felt like I suddenly understood why dancers dance, not to get a whole theater full of people to pay attention but to get just one person to really, truly see.

  “It’s two arms, right?” I asked.

  Marisa/Maria nodded.

  “And two legs?”

  “Yup, two and two and nothing extra.”

  I was relieved but not that relieved. It surprised me, because I realized that if she’d said No, something’s missing or Oh god it’s got horns, I’d still have been fixed to the seat, mesmerized.

  “Do you want to know the sex?” Marisa/Maria asked.

  “I don’t…I mean, should I?”

  “It’s up to you. Some people want to plan for it, some people want a surprise. No harm either way.”

  That didn’t seem entirely true. It felt like Bashkim already had something to lose.

  But Bashkim wasn’t there, so I guessed he didn’t get to say.

  “Yeah, I want to know,” I said.

  “Congratulations, you’ve got a baby girl!” said Marisa/Maria.

  I choked up and I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t feel sad, and I didn’t feel disappointed. Maybe I was disappointed that I wasn’t disappointed, knowing I was letting Bashkim down and not giving a shit about it. Maybe I was happy that I wasn’t carrying a Dwayne-to-be, which meant I was one step further away from ever being Dwayne’s mother, that terrifying Donette-fueled entity out in the waiting room. Everybody said girls were harder, but maybe that just meant I was going to have to try more and, for once in my goddamned life, really mean it.

  “I’ll get the doctor,” Marisa/Maria said, and I nodded. She pulled the wand away and the show on the screen was over, but really, it wasn’t. When I thought about it I realized what I saw wasn’t even the show, it was a dress rehearsal at best. Really the curtain hadn’t even gone up yet.

  —

  I was even further along than I thought, twenty-six weeks, which in real-life time meant six months, right on the cusp of the third trimester. I wasn’t ready to hear that number, and I got a little pukey when she said it, but other than that, the whole trip was fine. It was better than fine, even, it was beautiful. That’s what the doctor said: beautiful. It was a word I didn’t know could be used to describe a condition like mine. I thought the only words were pregnant or not, healthy or not. But she said beautiful, which up until then I thought was just a word someone called you when he wanted a blow job.

  “You could stand to take in a little more iron, but otherwise everything looks beautiful,” she said. She was corn-fed and tall, had to be from somewhere like Indiana sent to do mission work in a place like this, with a helmeted blond hairdo that looked like it belonged on someone twenty years older than she was. But still I wanted to tell her: No, Doctor, you’re beautiful, you’re the one who makes everything you touch okay. I felt like a moron for having been afraid of this all this time. On the way out we passed a corkboard covered with thank-you notes and pictures of newborns, and I told myself that I’d have to send a card to the clinic. It would say: Thank you, ladies, for doing what nobody else in my whole world had even attempted, for making all of this okay. Thank you, Doctor and Marisa/Maria, for showing me how to do the part that comes next, and thank you, Donette Lady, for showing me what not to do.

  The doctor sent me off with vitamins and the name of a book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which she said would answer most of my questions and teach me how to eat actual food and do actual yoga like a California hippie and continue to enjoy sex with my partner without harming the baby. I guess it was the book she recommended to all of her literate patients, because all three copies were checked out of the Silas Bronson Library by the time I got there. But no worries, because there were shelves of instruction manuals to get me through this. Pregnancy for Dummies, even, a book written just for me. I guess I was feeling smarter by then, after the doctor’s visit, so I chose a serious hardcover published right around the year of my birth, something with footnotes and illustrations instead of photos, tables and charts instead of stupid jokes and cartoon lightbulbs with bright ideas for pregnant dummy readers. I checked out a VHS copy of The Miracle of Life and popped it in as soon as I got home, and I fell asleep for most of it but woke up for the most important part, the delivery, when a woman with the feathered stoner hair of all early eighties women breathed deep a couple of times, scrunched her face up, and pushed a squirmy purple extraterrestrial out of her vagina. The whole thing was wetter than I thought, and the baby bigger than I could have imagined, but it all took less than two minutes, and everyone was smiling and relaxed and possibly even high. And the mother didn’t look so extraspecial, and except for the mustache and the forearm tattoo, the father didn’t look so different from Bashkim. The video was telling us that anyone could do this. And the book, too, said in many, many words—so many goddamned words, I barely skimmed a quarter of them—that it was no big deal. Some British doctor had figured out early in the century that it isn’t childbirth that hurts, it’s fear. We scare ourselves into feeling contraction pain. The doctor had a penis and never felt so much as a menstrual cramp in his life, but he lived in a world alongside women, so I guess that meant he could know what they felt, right? He was the one who’d gone to medical school in England and I graduated middle of the class from a public high school in one of the crappiest cities in America, so who was I to question him?

  I was excited to see Bashkim and tell him that we’d done it. The baby was beautiful, the doctor said it herself. We were actually doing okay for ourselves.

  —

  Yllka was outside of the Ross smoking a cigarette when I got to work. I tried to pretend I didn’t see her, to save both of us the trouble, but it was hard to hide my ballooning body.

  “Elsie,” she said. She looked surprised at the sight of me, as if it was impossible that
I could show up to my shift on time. She stubbed out her cigarette and straightened her skirt, which wasn’t wrinkled in the first place.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “What? Oh, hi, Elsie.”

  She looked back at the employee entrance. It seemed like she was waiting for somebody but nobody went in or came out.

  “Chilly outside, huh?” I said.

  “It’s cold, yes. Did you get to your doctor’s appointment?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine. It’s good, actually. Really good.”

  “That’s good, it’s good,” she said. She started to head for the door, and I was disappointed that she didn’t seem to want to know more, even though it was her and the Albanian wives who’d shamed me into seeing the doctor in the first place. Why didn’t she want to know that she was right, and that I was stupid for having been afraid? That her precious little grandniece was beautiful, as verified by a bona fide blond doctor?

  Yllka took a few steps and leaned against a car that didn’t belong to her or, as far as I could tell, anyone she knew. She lit up another cigarette just seconds after stubbing out the first.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She exhaled. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but her shivering didn’t seem like it came from the cold.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Okay, then. Just checking,” I said and turned and headed for the door.

  “I’m fine, Gjonni’s fine. Twenty-five years in this country and we’re fine. We started in this country with nothing—with less than nothing—and now look at this.” She waved her hand toward the neon lights and fake rock facade, and it was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic or for real.

  I looked, but I didn’t risk saying anything back, in case my answer was the wrong one.

  “We went hungry for a long time so we could have this place. I mean, what did it matter, we were used to hunger. Big deal. It takes a lot of hunger to die from it. We knew that. You Americans don’t know that. You think five minutes without a cheeseburger will kill you, the way some of these customers complain.”

  “I know, I’m usually the one they’re complaining to,” I said.

  “Me? I would rather be a little hungry for a week and then buy a steak. Anyway.” She ashed her cigarette. “I don’t expect you Americans to know how to go without for five minutes, but these people.” She shook her head. “We try to help them, you know? We try to set an example, but a week after they’re here they want their cars and their swimming pools and their hearts’ desires.”

  “Umm-hmm,” I said.

  “Fatmir in there, he was going to bring his wife over this month. They have a little baby, a little boy. And where’s the money for the passage now? In some gypsy’s pocket, that’s where. Not even blown on a car. At least that he could sell back. Silly. Just so silly.”

  “I don’t, like, really know,” I said.

  “Oh, the money’s coming, it’s coming, they say. From where? I want to know. You fall for that gypsy magic, you’re even worse than the gypsies.”

  “What gypsies?”

  “Not even gypsies, that’s the worst part. Our own people. Our own people would do this to each other.”

  “Do what? I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, exactly, you don’t.” She looked at me pityingly. “Aggie wrote to me. Bashkim had her sell their apartment. For what, to bring her over here, or at least to Greece with her parents? No, no, of course not. For more money for him to put into those stupid investments. Just like Fatmir, except Bashkim is in there feeling bad for Fatmir like everybody else, shaking his head, not realizing that when it’s time for him to cash out, he’ll be in the same position as Fatmir. ‘No, no, no, Fatmir just made the wrong investments,’ he says. My god, the skulls on these men.”

  It had been hours since I’d eaten, and Yllka was right, my American blood couldn’t handle it. I was beginning to feel woozy.

  “Where would Albanians have learned how to run a bank?” she said. “Albanians think they can put money into a bank and then the next month they have twice as much money, like it’s magicians who run banks instead of regular people. This is how they think capitalism works. You put a little in, you get more and more out.”

  She was rambling on, and even lighting another cigarette didn’t slow her down.

  “So I say to Bashkim, ‘Where do you think this money is coming from?’ But he doesn’t care, because the number in his account is going up, up, up. He sends Aggie all this money from his job here to put in the account, to invest, he says. But I say, ‘What are you investing in? What is being built with this money? What is going to be built and sold so that you get your money back?’ And he says, ‘The government.’ The government, he says! Albania’s government! You believe the government now because it’s a democracy, supposedly? Where did all of these democratic politicians come from, huh? They weren’t shipped in from America. They were the same people in power before, now with a different name.”

  “Yllka,” I said. “Slow down.”

  “How is Aggie supposed to live? She has no husband, no money, no apartment. Where is his heart?”

  I winced when Yllka talked about Aggie like that, like a wife instead of an ex-wife-to-be.

  “His heart is here,” I said. “With me.”

  “Oh god,” she said. “You’re just as far gone as him.”

  “I’ll talk to him. But he’s not working this hard for nothing. He’s obviously onto something.”

  “You really don’t know this man, do you?”

  “Of course I do. He’s my,” I said, but I couldn’t think of the word to put at the end of that sentence.

  “Do you know what Bashkim said when Gjonni and I picked him up from JFK a year ago? He said, ‘The streets are black.’ And we said, ‘Of course the streets are black. The streets are paved,’ thinking he was surprised that they weren’t dirt. And he said, ‘I thought the streets here were gold.’ Do you understand that? He thought the streets here were made of gold. He thought that was true, not just an expression. A grown man believed that. We laughed so much at that time, but it turns out that wasn’t funny after all.”

  I thought then that she must have been confusing Bashkim for Adem or Fatmir. Bashkim wasn’t any kind of naïve. That’s one of the things that made me fall for him, that he already knew everything, or at least wasn’t surprised by anything. That’s how he got that swagger, the kind where he’d walk out to his car and start it so he could light a cigarette off the engine, when using the lighter that was always in his pocket would’ve been just fine. He’d pose against the hood like some kind of greaser, except the grease he modeled was all lard and vegetable oil instead of 10W-30.

  And all of this was just occurring to me now, and I wondered who really was the naïve one.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  “Don’t talk, just do,” she said. “Talking is not going to put clothes on your baby. Just make sure you have something put aside. Promise me, Elsie. Promise.”

  “I promise,” I said, but I said it the classic American way, which was to get someone to shut up. I didn’t want to be the one making promises, I wanted to be the one hearing them.

  —

  Fatmir was manning the deep fryer as usual. He seemed more serious about his job that night, like he suspected Gjonni and Yllka would be watching him extrahard, working like he was paid by the cheese stick and could make back all the money he lost with a couple of good tables of pregaming middle schoolers en route to a Seven Minutes in Heaven party. But there weren’t going to be any raises that night or in the near future, and if he had left out a coffee can for his own charity fundraiser, it would’ve stayed as empty as the one out front for MS. I thought about saying hello but didn’t have the guts to pretend that everything was normal or, worse, to tell him everything would work out in the end. Instead I looked past him to Bashkim, who seemed calm enough from where I was standing, or rather the same as he always did, a little hunched over, lips pres
sed tight together to keep flies and his own sweat out while he worked the grill.

  “Hey, babe,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said, his lips opening up just enough to let the word out.

  See, I thought, it can’t be that bad. When he was in a real mood he wouldn’t even bother to answer. He’d just look at me like he stepped right off the boat and forgot all of his English, like the Atlantic was still wedged between him and me.

  “What’s up?”

  He shrugged. “Work,” he said.

  “As usual, right?”

  “Always work.”

  “This kid’s gonna pop out of me wearing orthopedic sneakers, I swear.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Well, the kid’s got the feet for them, at least,” I said. “I saw them at the doctor’s office today. It was.” I closed my eyes for a second and remembered her little dance, her slow, soft kicks. “It was pretty amazing.”

  He scraped charred bits of fat from the grill with his spatula. They dropped through the grates and caught fire and burned out almost immediately.

  “I wish you would’ve been there,” I said.

  Scrape, scrape, sizzle.

  “I mean, I know you had to work.”

  “You should not have to be working like this,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta do it. No use complaining about it.”

  “I know how to work,” Bashkim said.

  “I know you do.”

  “I don’t complain about it.”

  “I know.”

  “But you.”

  “But me what?”

  “Look at you,” he said. “You hang out of that uniform. It doesn’t even fit you anymore.”