Brass Page 20

  During hour three in Allentown, PA, you’re certain that some particularly strong indoor draft has swept away the letter you’d written to your mother explaining that you’d left of your own volition, that you are safe, and that you are appalled at her lifelong deceptions, lack of ambition and imagination, and (though it didn’t actually make it into the letter) her culinary reliance on aluminum flavor pouches. If she doesn’t find and thus can’t read what you’d written, you will feel compelled to answer at least one of the nine thousand calls or texts she’ll soon be making to you, and the police to whom she will also make nine thousand phone calls will ping the cell towers along your route, and a fleet of barrel-chested highway patrolmen will be waiting for you at the next rest stop to deliver you back home.

  By hour nine, in Roanoke, VA, you are so sure that your reception in Texas will be one of outrage to the point of violence that you nearly ask Ahmet to turn around. You see so clearly now that you’ll be received like a poltergeist haunting your father in revenge for past transgressions. You’ll be the creepy rag doll in horror movies who won’t let that innocent family rest.

  By hour thirteen, during some stretch of Tennessee that you can’t be bothered to identify, you’ve grown as bored with panic as with Ahmet’s chatter about UConn’s chances for an NCAA title this season, and you find yourself disappointed at how much everything outside the window, even hundreds of miles from Waterbury, looks mostly like the place you just left. The exits grow farther and farther apart the farther you get from the Northeast Corridor, but the trees are the same trees, the cars are the same cars, the Exxons are still Exxons, and the McDonald’s are still hawking the same meat-like patties to the same overweight, overworked moms and their overweight, hyperactive kids. At first you’d felt briefly excited upon entering the limits of minor cities you’d vaguely heard of, as if they were celebrities of which you were hoping to catch a glimpse, but if they were celebrities they were the depressing reality-show kind, with boring jobs and bad bleached hair and family members they were embarrassed by but not better than. Now, even Ahmet seems to be out of topics to try to talk to you about, and his chivalry is tested by your body’s seeming inability to hold any food or beverage internally for more than twenty minutes.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink that Diet Coke right now,” he suggests as he pulls away from a gas station where you’d flushed the last beverage and purchased a shiny new one.

  “I need it to stay awake,” you tell him.

  “You don’t need to stay awake. I’m the one driving,” he says.

  “But I want to stay awake. I just want to, like, see.”

  “It’s too dark to see anything.”

  “Not that kind of seeing,” you say.

  “What kind of seeing?”

  “I don’t know,” you say, in a tone meant to convey that if you have to explain it, he’ll never understand, when the truth is you have no idea what you mean yourself.

  Ahmet sighs. “You’re a strange girl,” he says quietly, only this time, he sounds slightly annoyed instead of charmed, as he had when he’d said the same statement during earlier phases of a courtship he hadn’t known yet was doomed.

  —

  You’re a strange girl. You’re a strange girl, he’d said, several times over. But are you really a strange girl? The description doesn’t seem quite right, the way that so-called synonyms never seem precise enough when you look up words in the thesaurus. You recognize, objectively, that your behavior over the past several weeks has been atypical, not just of you but of generally above-average-yet-unexceptional high-school-age girls from depressed-yet-still-first-world New England cities. It is, perhaps, not what you’d call normal to manipulate a very nice, very wrong-for-you guy with a very innocent yet almost pathological crush to drive you across a large swath of the United States on short notice, only to—to what? What exactly do you plan to do with him once you get to Houston, hire him as your interpreter? Get back in his car and head right back to where you came from? You aren’t even sure you are going back. You aren’t even sure you could go back, or that there’s any point. What would the point be, an early childhood degree from Western Connecticut State University? Sharing an apartment and cannolis with your mother for the rest of your life? At this point, you’re not any more sure that your mother could forgive you than you are that you could forgive her. The kind of bitterness you’d share at your kitchen table would ruin every cannoli forevermore.

  In any case, you don’t feel strange. You feel like a run-of-the-mill shithead. By the time you check into whatever Bates Motel you manage to find when both you and Ahmet are too tired to go on, you’ve almost convinced yourself to accept this new role, and to adapt to this new transient world where you’re attached to nothing and no one. Not long ago, you used to stare at the homeless people in your neighborhood park and try to imagine them as children, when they probably shared with their fellow second graders the same dreams of becoming astronauts or presidents or veterinarians. Could the homeless people even trace what kinds of decisions had led their second-grade peers to grow up to live regular lives of pump truck operators or daycare center workers or department managers at Target, while they themselves had gone on to sip from paper sacks filled with bottles of their own doom? Probably not. They adapted. They lived on, raged on, drank on, and in short order it all became normal.

  Normal, inevitable, like your own fate. It is probably easiest to just accept that you are a turd, and parlay that self-loathing into something like a formidable narcotics addiction, so that each of the rest of your days is intensely and terribly purposeful. You are certain that you could score something instantly life-wrecking just outside the motel door. Instead, you remain in bed, tossing and turning, which means that Ahmet has remained as wide awake as you in the king-size bed you have no choice but to share, the motel having rented out all of its twin rooms to the versions of you that arrived earlier in the evening.

  “I’m sorry,” you whisper. If you’re not yet capable of utter self-annihilation, you think that perhaps you should make one last attempt at decency.

  He doesn’t answer at first, while he mulls over whether or not to continue feigning sleep, but then answers, also in a whisper, “Sorry for what?”

  “For keeping you awake,” you say, now in a normal speaking volume. “And for peeing so much. And not buying your Whopper. I should’ve got lunch for you. I should get all the lunches from now on.”

  He rolls over on his side to face you. You recognize this as an intimate moment, and you work to correct the recoil your body instinctively makes, so that when he says, “It’s okay, I can buy my own Whoppers,” your mouths are actually not a foot from each other on your respective pillows, each breathing in the air the other breathes out. You can smell just vaguely the essence of that evening’s dinner, which for him had been a carton of Muscle Milk and a sleeve of sunflower seeds, and it’s just short of repulsive, just enough that you’re able to hold your position and smile uselessly because it’s too dark for you to be seen. You know that there’s something wrong with you when pulling away comes so easy but lying still with someone sets off a panic, and you think that it probably isn’t Ahmet’s cheesy leather jacket or the startling amount of product he uses to maintain what looks to be fairly acquiescent hair that kept you from allowing him to ever touch you. It’s been all you, babe. Your body—and, in fact, the brain that controls it, keeping its motions awkward and rigid and the skin perpetually goose-pimpled—is messed up, designed as a barrier to the outside world rather than a vessel with which to experience it. If humans are actually social creatures, as you’d been taught, then you are possibly not even human.

  And yet maybe you could reprogram yourself to appear human, like the very best cyborgs of the future would one day be.

  “Thank you for doing this for me,” you say. “Driving with me and everything. It’s crazy. I mean, it’s crazy that you would just take off like this for me.”

  He doesn’t disagree that
it was crazy. You can tell that it’s something he’s been thinking about for a while, the first little seeds of regret beginning to sprout way back in Pennsylvania, making his attempts at conversation a little more stilted, so that the volume of the music had subtly crept up over the course of the hours in the car, until finally there was no point in even attempting to hold a conversation while it played. But it matters to him, what you just said, you can tell that, too. You aren’t sure whether it makes you feel better or worse that it matters so much, but it makes you feel something, and you decide to run with that. You decide it’s time to repay his generosity by giving him the thing for which he’s been so patiently waiting. You reach out and find his hand, and it’s cold and slightly jarring to feel it, because you were expecting something warm, the way you expect coffee to be warm no matter how long you’ve neglected the mug on the counter. He’s jarred, too, because he jumps a little at your touch before relaxing into it, grabbing your hand back and holding just a little too hard.

  “You needed someone,” he says. “It’s not right that you should be alone. I mean, that your mother doesn’t even care that you left with a guy she doesn’t even know? It’s messed up. How does she know I’m not a murderer? How can a mother not care about that?”

  By not knowing, you think, but that would ruin the moment you’re trying to create. So far this isn’t making you feel better, but you tell yourself that that’s because you just aren’t used to it. It’s always uncomfortable to try something new: shoes, running long distances, speaking in a foreign language that relies on parts of the mouth not utilized by English speakers.

  “I’m sorry,” you say again.

  “Why are you sorry? I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that your people didn’t care more about you.”

  “It’s not like nobody cared at all,” you say, though that was indeed what you had spent many sleepless nights convincing yourself of.

  “The way your father just left? What kind of man would do that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Nothing could ever make me do that. Nothing.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” he says. “I do.”

  “Well,” you say.

  “And your mother just let him go? Just like she let you go? I couldn’t even tell my parents that I’m with you. I’m a twenty-year-old man and I had to tell them that I’m with friends in Myrtle Beach.”

  Your instinct is to defend your mother, despite having been the one to convince him of the things he has just said about her. It is true that a week before, you had omitted certain representative facts that might have weakened your case to hit the highway. You never mentioned, for example, the celebratory pizza nights and that time she took you to the Beardsley Zoo on a Saturday because you’d been down with a stomach bug on the day of your third-grade field trip. You perhaps didn’t mention that though you often felt more like a responsibility than like an object of affection, you were a responsibility your mother took seriously, when there were plenty of people like Margarita around to remind you that there was no responsibility that a truly negligent human would find too great to shirk. Yet you didn’t feel like you were lying to Ahmet a week ago. You seem to remember feeling completely justified, just absolutely, 100 percent right.

  The thread that carries between then and now is your inherent shittiness, and that’s the thing, really, you’ve been trying to flee from.

  You curl your shoulder to move in a little closer to Ahmet. “You’re a good person,” you say.

  “So are you,” he says.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Don’t say that. Of course you are.”

  “Name one nice thing I’ve done for you,” you say.

  He’s quiet.

  “See?”

  “You invited me on this trip,” he says.

  Christ, you think. Jesus fucking Christ.

  You will your arm to reach for Ahmet’s back, to pull him closer to you, since he seems not to understand that you want to pay his generosity back. His boner is instantaneous and, even to someone entirely inexperienced with boners, rather impressive. Still, his arms feel rigid under you, like those of an unwilling partner at a middle school dance. You scoot your body closer to his, until you’re pressed together on your sides, two tectonic plates just beginning to move. His lips find yours and his tongue is also colder than you’d expected it to be, and it tastes of nothing despite its smell of several somethings. Still, it’s not unpleasant. It’s soft, and you like the feel of his breath on your neck when he pulls back for air. His hand begins moving up and down the length of your back, but his arm remains stiff, so you grasp it and squeeze, willing it to loosen up. You’re doing this for him, after all. This isn’t a thing that you want, except that your body does seem to begin moving on its own, pressing harder into his and—there’s no other term for it known to you—grinding on him. You pull his top leg in between the two of yours and move over it, and without even meaning to, without having had to plan an exhibition of desire, you moan softly. Though you haven’t even learned to masturbate successfully yet, the pressure there feels familiar, and you instinctively seek release.

  “You’re nice,” you breathe into his ear, and he responds by releasing the tight grip he has on the flesh of your back, which makes you regret what you said. You liked the not-nice touch more than the soft circles he begins rubbing over your neck. Even his cock, as stiff as it is, feels like it’s tentatively pressing into your belly. You curl your hand over it, first over his boxers, then under them. But first you take your shirt off, because you think that’s what he would want. After all, you’re doing this for him, you tell yourself. This is a gift to him, and he seems to not know how to unwrap it, so you have to do it yourself.

  “Luljeta,” he says, and you notice that he uses your real full name, which almost nobody does, and it sends a strange vibration down your spine and makes you grasp onto his cock harder.

  “Ow,” he says.

  “Sorry,” you say and let go of his cock altogether, though you quickly replace your hand with your mouth. That’s when his tight grip on your shoulder returns, while his other hand grabs a handful of your hair and pulls hard enough that you wait to feel pain that never comes.

  “Luljeta,” he says, and then says it again, though he must know that you can’t very well answer.

  You moan something like “Hm?” with his dick still in your mouth.

  He pulls your hair again, which makes you feel briefly like a marionette. It’s your turn to say ow, but you manage to stifle it.

  “You don’t have to,” he says.

  You pull away from him just long enough to answer, “What?”

  “You don’t have to do this for me,” he says.

  Again you pull back. “I. I know. I want to.”

  He’s silent, except for a deep quick breath, when you put him back in your mouth. Then he pulls on your hair again, then both of your shoulders, steering you away.

  “Come up here,” he says.

  “Why?” you ask.

  “I want to see you,” he says.

  “You don’t like it?” you say.

  “No, no, I do.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He lets go an impressive lungful of air, a breath that could’ve gotten him deep under the surface in a free dive. “You don’t have to do this,” he says again.

  “I want to,” you repeat.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “Oh,” you say.

  “I mean, like, I want it, but I don’t want it from you.”

  His dick is still hard in your hand.

  “I mean, I want it from you, but not like this.”

  You don’t know what to do with your hand at that moment. You don’t even recognize it as your hand.

  “It’s just, like,” he says. “A girl’s supposed to be in love first.”

  Penises are so ugly, you realize. They’re skinned, weird baby a
nimals.

  “I like that you’re a nice girl,” he says.

  “I told you I wasn’t,” you say. “I’m so not nice that I thought sucking your dick was being nice.”

  Finally he seems to understand, because he doesn’t say anything after that.

  You feel such a sudden, deep embarrassment that you have to wonder whether it’s mere embarrassment or some new viral form of it. And as if you’ve come down with a virus, you begin shivering, and you pull away to your side of the bed and smooth the covers back over you. Still you feel cold, and apparently it’s contagious, because you feel Ahmet all the way on the other side of the bed shivering, too. You lie there, huddled and contorting and rubbing your own limbs with your own hands, wishing you were made of wood so that the friction would start a fire.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Elsie

  Funny thing about getting accidentally knocked up, everyone tells you what a mistake you made and then goes out of their way to be nicer to you than they’ve ever been.

  Yllka began bringing me tea when she intercepted me on the way up the steps, and I always sat with her and drank it even though what I really wanted was to crawl into bed and pick up where I’d left off at 4:15 A.M.

  “It’s çaj mali, mountain tea, it’s good for the baby. It won’t keep you up,” she’d said.

  The only thing keeping me up was Yllka herself, but I didn’t say that. It was good to have her on my side, or more likely the baby’s side, with me there just by proxy. Babies make people softer, at least while the babies are tucked away in wombs not crying or wanting for much. Homeless men downtown turned and smiled at me when I walked by. Mamie kept stumbling upon baby clothes at tag sales and buying them because she might as well, and Greta was doing the same with picture books and mobiles, and Yllka and Gjonni were forgetting to forward our gas and electric bills along to us.

  “What is this?” Yllka asked the last time I stopped by with the rent check, as if she’d never seen one before.