Brass Page 18

  —

  “Don’t come up,” you tell Ahmet when he arrives Friday morning. “The neighbors will notice.”

  You think about the houses that sandwich the one you live in, a single-family commune of old people on one side and a triple-decker filled with four generations of the same Puerto Rican family on the other. All these years in the same place and you don’t know anybody by name, except for Hector, with whom you’ve shared a bus stop since kindergarten but never a conversation. That’s exactly the kind of thing that should’ve made getting into Ahmet’s Honda easy.

  What made it not easy was the one single person who did give a shit. This morning she almost ruined everything by giving a shit, or rather leaving a shit in the form of a new blank journal on the table with your lunch, trying to make what she thought was just a random day special, like when you were younger and she’d get up extra early to get some of those Pillsbury cinnamon buns in the oven, leaving the extra white goo out for you to slurp up. She didn’t bother to write a note to go along with the journal, because it’s pretty clear what the gift is supposed to say. Cheer up. Write out your feelings, especially if it means we won’t have to talk about them later.

  Emotional blackmail, that’s what the gift is. An emotional pacifier. It’s cheap, and it’s slightly effective, like generic cold medicine. It would’ve been much easier to leave even yesterday, before your mother went and pulled this goddamned journal crap. It’s some corny Barnes & Noble clearance thing, the kind of uninspired Brass City Mall token one would expect from a Brass City Mallrat boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, and you want to tear it to shreds for what it does to you, which is make you stop and wonder what exactly it is you think you’re doing, driving off with a near stranger to find a perfect stranger who never in his life made a trip to the mall for you, who never in his life even stopped in to say good night.

  This stupid journal, with its insulting asshole empty pages just waiting to be filled, telling you that there are stories you could find for it right here if you could only find your way in.

  Your phone buzzes. You coming? You need help?

  No, you tell yourself, I shouldn’t have to leave this way. If she’d just given you some other choice.

  Yes, and I don’t need help, you respond. You don’t know if you’ll be going forward or sideways or backward, but it’s time to make a move in some direction.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Elsie

  A week after the argument with Bashkim at the Ross—that’s what I called it, the argument, like we’d disagreed on what shape of pasta to buy, or whether the toilet paper should hang over or under—and I still hadn’t seen or talked to him, both of us pretending we were the holdout, the strong one, waiting to hear our apologies. I’d been back to the apartment just to grab enough of my things to get me through a few days at Mamie’s, where I showed up unannounced, and before she had a chance to ask me what I was doing there, I told her that the walls in our apartment were being painted and her little unborn grandchild shouldn’t be exposed to the fumes.

  “Huh,” she answered, but didn’t ask any questions.

  On the second day she asked what color the walls were being painted, and I told her ecru, a color I’d heard of but couldn’t define, realizing that if she ever stepped foot in there again she’d know straightaway that I was lying.

  On the third day, she asked why my apartment being painted meant I couldn’t go in to work, and I said I’d been feeling sick so I took a few days off.

  “You put down a lot of beef Stroganoff for someone who doesn’t feel good,” she said.

  I told her it was doctor’s orders, iron and protein and all that.

  On the fourth day, she stopped asking questions and was just happy to have someone around to keep her company while she drank, so she could convince herself it was a social habit.

  “I miss having you here,” Mamie said. The ice in her glass clinked like a meek little dinner bell, a come-and-get-it that she had already come and got. “It’s too quiet around here now.”

  “I still live here,” Greta said from the recliner.

  “Yeah, of course you do, Greta, but you’re such a goddamned mouse I don’t even know when you’re here and when you’re not. You don’t yap and burp and fart all over the house like Shamu over here,” Mamie said.

  “If you’re trying to get me to stick around, you might try saying something nice every once in a while,” I said.

  “Oh come on, you know I’m just teasing. You’re just really starting to pop. That kid of yours is gearing up to be a sumo wrestler.”

  “She’s still wearing a smaller pants size than you,” Greta said, and I smiled and realized that I missed having my sister around.

  “You hear from any colleges yet, Greta?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I don’t know, I’m not getting my hopes up.”

  “It’s not about hope for you. You’re not just getting by on wishful thinking like the rest of us,” I said.

  “Don’t speak for me. I don’t do any wishful thinking,” Mamie said.

  “Of course not,” I said, just because I didn’t want to get into it with her. Mamie didn’t do any wishful speaking, that was for sure, but of course it was some kind of secret wish that got her out of bed every morning. You’d never hear her talk about anything as pathetic as hope aloud, but she’d been known to spend her last ten dollars on a few scratch-off tickets while the milk in our refrigerator soured, and if she recouped two of those dollars she walked around glowing like Ed McMahon had just shown up on our front step with a bouquet of balloons and an oversize novelty check. Me and Bashkim weren’t so different in that way, which was another thing I didn’t want to bring up. Only Greta was really different from the rest of us, but it was in a way she couldn’t help, and in a way that wasn’t making her life any easier. But at least she had a plan. She saved every penny she earned, from the first dollar on a newspaper route she inherited when the last paperboy graduated to selling LSD, to babysitting the neighbor’s future sociopath, to her current weekly paychecks bagging endless conveyor belts of canned corn and Giggle Noodle at ShopRite. The sum total couldn’t have been near enough to pay for even a semester at the kind of college she wanted to attend, the kind of place with a quad and just enough black kids to put in a photograph on the brochure, but it had to be more than I’d ever seen in one account in my whole life.

  I needed a plan. I needed to be more like Greta. It was too late for me to get a paper route or a scholarship or anything like that, but I decided then that there could be no more impulse trashy-magazine purchases at the checkout line at ShopRite, no more cans of black beans when a bag of dried ones would go twice as far for half as much. All I had to do was tighten the belt a little, and in about five more years, I might have enough put away to strike out on my own, and then there’d be no more tiptoeing around Bashkim or loitering at Mamie’s. The kid would be almost old enough to chip in at that point. It could use its nimble little fingers to darn the socks I fumbled over.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “What?” Greta said.

  “Watch your mouth,” Mamie said.

  I shook my head. “I need to find some new work. Something better than what I’ve been doing. These nickel-and-dime tips aren’t going to cut it.”

  Greta nodded and smiled a little, and Mamie bit into her wine-slicked ice cube and spit the little broken slivers back into the glass.

  “Good luck with that,” Mamie said. “If you come across anyone handing out real jobs to people with no skills or experience, make sure you let me know.”

  “I’m going to talk to Uncle Eddie. He always seems to be able to hook somebody up with something.”

  “Entry-level factory jobs don’t pay any better than the Ross,” Mamie said. “Believe me, I’ve done ’em.”

  “Not at first, but at least you can move up. At least there’s overtime.”

  “I think it sounds like a good idea,” Greta said.

  �
��Yeah, look at the lifestyle manufacturing work has afforded us,” Mamie said. “Sitting in this place is like winning a Showcase Showdown.”

  “It affords you that box of wine you’re hooked up to. It affords you cable TV.”

  “Wine’s got grapes. It’s vitamin C,” Mamie said.

  “A new job’s a start,” Greta said. “And it doesn’t have to be the end if you don’t want it to be.”

  “The two of you, I swear, you got everything figured out,” Mamie said. She nearly spit out the last of her wine before she walked away to refill it, this time taking her glass into her bedroom so we couldn’t bust her cozy little merlot bubble.

  “So, uh, how’s everything going?” Greta asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Still getting sick?”

  “Nah, morning sickness is gone.” There was another kind of sickness I was feeling, a ferocious heartburn I got when I thought about facing Bashkim again, or when I wondered why he hadn’t even bothered to look for me here, the sole place in the world he knew I could go. But Greta was only asking about the kid, just like everyone else. She was asking about the thing that still had a chance of turning out okay.

  “That’s good,” Greta said.

  “Yeah, it’s good. How about you? How are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean how are you doing? What’s up with you?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Fine, I guess. Pretty good.”

  “You look good,” I said, and I wasn’t even lying. Her cheeks had a little color to them, maybe because Mamie’s thermostat was set perpetually at sixty-four, but maybe not. Maybe it was the glow of the light at the end of her tunnel. She was almost there. She was almost ready to tell the rest of us what else was out there.

  “Oh,” Greta said. She was blushing a little, and I realized what I said was probably the nicest compliment she’d gotten in years, maybe ever, and it made me want to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry for what?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I just mean I’m proud of you.”

  Greta did me the favor of not asking what those things had to do with each other. She just wrapped her arms around her legs and said, into her knees, “Thanks.”

  We sat like that, curled up like conch shells, like we were waiting for someone, anyone, to put their ears to us.

  “Things are hard,” I said eventually, when the pasta maker infomercial faded into basic cable oblivion, replaced by the easy, soothing voices of a soft rock compilation.

  “I’m sure they are,” Greta said.

  “I know you’re sure. You told me that before all this even started.”

  “All what? Did something happen?”

  “No,” I said. It was an automatic response, to deny. “It’s just the usual stuff. No money. We haven’t even started putting together the baby’s room yet. I don’t even want to think about the hospital bill that’s coming.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s just a bill. They can’t put you in prison for not paying them.”

  “They can’t?”

  “What? No. Not anymore, anyway. Not in this country.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then what are we all so afraid of?”

  “I don’t know, but it works. I’m afraid.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Reunited and it feels so good, the infomercial sang.

  “If you need anything, just like for now, I could lend you some, like, money or something,” Greta said.

  “What? No, that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t hinting at anything. I’m just saying it’s hard.”

  “I know, and it’s not gonna get any easier before the kid is born, so…”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” She was getting defensive, or maybe excited. “I have like six thousand dollars in the bank just sitting there right now.”

  Six thousand dollars. I tried to wrap my head around that number. How the hell had she managed that? I wondered if she was sneaking off to Foxwoods on the weekends, straddling three or four slot machines, but then I realized she wouldn’t risk losing. She did it the old-fashioned way, the way I didn’t think actually worked: she’d earned it.

  “That’s for school,” I said. “For you.”

  “I don’t need it until next year. You could pay it back by then, right?”

  “Yeah, of course, but—”

  “But what? You can’t put the baby on an air mattress. You can’t dress it in your hand-me-downs.”

  “But you said you weren’t going to help me,” I said. “Back when this started.”

  She stared back at the TV screen. Just call me angel of the morning, angel. “It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”

  Then it wasn’t up to me to say yes or no, was it?

  “Okay,” I said. “If you really really want to. But you don’t have to.”

  “Someone has to,” she said.

  She was so right that I didn’t even have to confirm it. “Maybe just a thousand. Or two, tops. I’ll start paying you back next week. I promise,” I said.

  —

  I’d finally hit the age where I could legally work on heavy equipment, even if I couldn’t legally go out for a beer afterward, so it was probably about time I did what my forebears crossed the ocean for and took a job at a factory. It was in our nature, the way royalty or sickle-cell anemia was for other bloodlines. The Ferruccis at Ferrucci Manufacturing respected that Great-Uncle Eddie had refused to join the union, which to him was Communist like Russia and full of either winos or whiners—it was hard to tell with his accent—and so they’d made him foreman years before. In turn he’d acted like our family employment agency, scoring jobs for a bunch of cousins I wouldn’t recognize in a police lineup.

  Uncle Eddie had kissed me on the mouth when I stopped by the next day to ask him about any openings at Ferrucci. He was happier at that moment than he was when I made my first communion, and told me to show up at five.

  “Third shift?” I asked.

  “No, first, Elsie. Five A.M.”

  “Five A.M.?” I said. I usually went to bed closer to that hour than rose at it. “There’s nothing that starts in the actual daytime?”

  “Yes, for people who have earned it. Your cousin Steve was here two years before he could come in at seven. And I’m not gonna put you on the third shift, not with the kind of people who work overnight.”

  From what Mamie had told me, Steve was a cousin who’d actually been in a couple of police lineups. I figured if he could do this job then I could, too, and probably well enough to make it to shift boss before the end of the year.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  I thought that at a real job there’d be some kind of application, an interview, a permed human resources lady named Sherri to fill out paperwork with before finally winding up on the floor, but somehow Uncle Eddie cut through that commie bullshit and I had a box of widgets and a metal folding chair ten minutes after walking into the shop the next day. I was an inspector, a job that sounded like it should come with a tan overcoat and tobacco pipe, but all it meant was that I had to look at the little metal ferrules Ferrucci manufactured and decide whether they were deformed or not. I didn’t even know what a ferrule was until that day, and it turned out they were just little metal rings that wrap around other things to keep them from splitting. They didn’t even get to be their own things, just tiny little parts of something better. Still, I was kind of excited. I thought about all the little round stickers I found on the inside of my clothes back when they were new: INSPECTED BY 54, INSPECTED BY 7, and it occurred to me that 54 was a person, and 7 was a person, and those people got their own stickers that made it from Indonesia or wherever they lived all the way to the Kmart in Waterbury, which made them seem a little famous, like they had their own little autographs that went out all over the world. The ferrules I’d be inspecting wouldn’t get any stickers, but they’d at least have my fingerprints on them, and they could end up anywh
ere, on a pencil in Egypt or an electric guitar in California.

  “Eddie said we’re supposed to train you, but you don’t look like a sea monkey so you could probably figure it out yourself,” one of the three ladies at the table said when I sat down. “But just in case, I’ll show you what you need to know. I’m Deena, by the way.”

  “Rini,” said another.

  “Margot,” said another.

  “Elsie,” I said. Deena was a black lady with the ruddy sort of orangey red hair that came from years of abusing drugstore dye, probably buying whatever shade happened to be on clearance that day. The ladies next to her, Rini and Margot, both had sandy, fluffy perms and eyeliner just slightly more purple than the circles under their eyes. They were white, but they didn’t look any more like Rosie the Riveter than Deena did. None of them had neat pin curls tucked beneath cotton kerchiefs, and they didn’t wear blue jumpsuits like in World War II–era photos of factory women, back when ladies wore Pan-Cake makeup and lipstick even to work on heavy machinery, because who knew when a news camera might show up to make stars out of them? These ladies were all in dungarees and sweatshirts that their sons had probably outgrown, Giants or Raiders logos splashed across their chests, thin gold cross necklaces tucked safely away under the neckbands.

  “How old are you, Elsie? You look like you could be one of my daughter’s friends,” Rini said.

  “Almost twenty. I don’t really have friends, though, so.”

  The three of them thought that was a hoot. Margot laughed so hard she sprayed her grape soda over a boxful of ferrules.

  “You don’t need friends when you got co-workers, lady. There’s no time for anything else,” Deena said.

  “Seriously, I see more of you guys than I do my husband,” said Rini.

  “You’re welcome for that,” said Margot.

  “All right, quiet down already. Let’s not scare her off. Let’s let the job itself do that,” Deena said.

  Deena wasn’t just giving me credit when she said I could figure out the job on my own—either the threads on the ferrules were right or they weren’t, they either screwed in or didn’t, and there was a box for the dids and a box for the didn’ts. So long as I could twist my wrist and remember which box was on the right and which on the left, I could be Helen Keller and pass my performance review.