Brass Page 4

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell did that animal do?” she cries. She is Elsie Kuzavinas, your mother, your own personal creator, and she rushes straight to you and runs a thumb over the swelling as if anointing you, as if her fingers are smeared with holy oil rather than the motor oil left over from the daily engine check that her Ford Contour requires. Instead of healing, though, her hand makes it feel as if every single nerve ending in your body has migrated to your face, which has then been doused in lighter fluid and set on fire.

  Despite the pain, which is acute, you feel so entirely defeated that you can’t even muster a whimper. Your mother, of course, is the one who rails, because she’s the railer, the kind of tough broad represented exclusively by natural brunettes in movies. She could have a second career as the before picture in Botox ads, because even when she smiles, which she manages to do occasionally, the parallel lines etched between her eyes remain, making it clear which of the emotions dominate her life.

  She isn’t anywhere close to smiling at Mr. DiPietro, the assistant principal. “Why is this girl allowed in school? She’s obviously a psychopath. She’s been after Luljeta for years,” she cries, her voice a half octave higher than even her usual railing voice.

  “Margarita has her issues, but she has the right to a public education, too, and until today, her outbursts haven’t been quite so violent,” Mr. DiPietro tells her. “We’re like the police: we can’t act, we have to react.”

  “That’s bullshit,” your mother says. “You acted when you set up a dress code. You acted when you brought in drug-sniffing dogs last year.”

  “I understand that you’re upset,” Mr. DiPietro says, obviously speaking exclusively to your mother, because he looks only at her when he’s talking, as if you’re not only half blind at the moment but fully deaf. You will most certainly not be mentioning your NYU rejection to her, because you can imagine her on the phone with the admissions office, doing her shrilling with them, as if the key to upward mobility were indignation instead of having enrolled you in a CCD class as an extracurricular ten years ago. She’ll try to convince you that the system is bullshit and rigged and that you’re better than all of those Long Island princesses anyway, when one look at their eighty-dollar Urban Outfitters maxi dresses and you know that’s not true. You’re fourth best at Crosby High, you’ll tell her, and she’ll think you’re bragging about it.

  You hold a cold compress over your bad eye and fix the other eye on the diploma on Mr. DiPietro’s wall, an MEd, cum laude, from some online university you’ve never heard of. Even with the stark purple bruise already forming over your right eye, you apparently disappear completely in a room. Only your mother and, in a way, Margarita ever bother to drink you in. Even your father ran back to Albania once you stopped causing trouble in the womb, as if you were superboring even to the person whose interest in you was supposed to be innate. Your mother had told you that he got mired in a green card fiasco and decided to stick around once the country formed a tenuous Balkan democracy, but you always suspected the decision was personal, not political. Your mother said he was an asshole anyway, and you were better off without him, but at least she got you out of the deal. That’s what she explained, and whenever she said it, you wondered if that last part was supposed to sound as sarcastic as it did to your ears.

  Your whole life was supposed to be about proving that you’re as unlike your loser transient father as possible.

  But you can’t beat nature, as NYU has so kindly reminded you. As Margarita’s been reminding you for years.

  Your mother and Mr. DiPietro continue to argue the nuances of Crosby High’s disciplinary policy, and you wonder, not for the first but for the most substantive time, what happened to the man responsible for your hearty gapless thighs, your mane of thick hair, which Supercuts employees admire but which can’t be controlled outside of their chairs, the well of rage that you have just begun to lower your bucket into and drink from. You’ve always known you were unlike your mother, who seems more pestered by rage than driven by it. She wants things easy. She wants you to prep for fields such as nursing and early childhood education, which will lead to the kind of life in which you’ll vocate Monday through Friday and vaguely recreate on Fri/Sat/Sun until retirement, which you’ll spend in a condo with a trio of small, goopy-eyed terriers. Your mother’s plan has been for you to be the first in the family to never have to rely on government assistance, to live a life of such comfort that when early heart disease sets in, you won’t even have the will to swallow your daily prescribed beta-blockers. Your plan, meanwhile, is to bloom into something freakish but interesting and impossible to ignore, like a corpse flower. In your room before your mother comes home from work, you’ve already experimented with the heavy eyeliner and matte lipstick you’ll wear, the shade of red on your lips becoming a signature. It’s Luljeta Red, your peers will say. Your peers will use your name as an adjective. You’ll be wild and mysterious, like the father you’re not supposed to want to resemble.

  But who knows, maybe your father is actually interesting, like many assholes are. For the first time, you consider this possibly worth a look.

  Mr. DiPietro tells your mother that Margarita will likely be expelled.

  “I damn well hope she’s expelled. I hope she’s arrested. I haven’t ruled out pressing charges,” your mother says.

  “Unfortunately,” Mr. DiPietro says, “Luljeta will also have to be suspended.”

  Your mother pauses, throws her right hand to her heart, and shrieks, “What?”

  “We have a zero-tolerance policy for fighting,” Mr. DiPietro says. “Believe me, I have no doubt that Margarita started this fight, but it takes two to engage.”

  “Engage? Engage? Standing there while someone rams a fist into your face is engaging?” your mother says.

  “Witnesses have told me that words were exchanged,” Mr. DiPietro says.

  “Do you even know Luljeta? Ask her teachers. Ask anyone. She would never engage,” your mother says.

  “I did engage,” you say, interrupting your mother. It stops her midsentence, and she and Mr. DiPietro stare at you, the way patrons in a Wild West saloon might when a stranger steps through the swinging doors.

  “What?” your mother says, once she can move her slack jaw again.

  “I did engage,” you repeat.

  “What do you mean, ‘engage’?” your mother says.

  “She called me a terrorist and a camel jockey and I told her she was too stupid to live if she thought there were camels in Albania,” you say. You’re aware that these words are perhaps lightly embellished, but it feels good to release them nonetheless. You’re getting the chance for a do-over, and how often does that happen?

  “And then what?” Mr. DiPietro asks.

  “And then she said she was going to do me like Osama bin Laden,” you say, though you are fairly sure that Margarita has no idea what happened to Osama bin Laden, because that would require the literacy to read a newspaper. “So I told her she was late for her post on Cherry Street and I started to walk away, and she hit me from behind.”

  “She hit you in the eye from behind?” Mr. DiPietro asks.

  “No, it spun me around when she hit me from behind, and then she got me in the eye. She had to sucker punch me because she’s a dumb sucker bitch, and if I see that dumb sucker bitch again I’m gonna kick her so hard she’ll abort her next kid before she even conceives it,” you say, and it surprises even you to hear those words from your mouth, just as the immediate endorphin high that follows surprises you. The throbbing in your skull subsides again, and it reminds you that pain, which you’ve always thought of as an exterior force introduced to the body, is in fact caused by your own nerve endings sending self-preserving Maydays to your brain. If you could just order your brain not to answer, you could win. There are entire self-help aisles in Barnes & Noble devoted to this kind of thing, and look at you, you’ve read not a single book on it, and yet there you are, feeling pleasantly numb and even slightl
y awesome.

  And then the pain rushes back, because your endorphins, frankly, are not terribly practiced things. You’re not used to acting out in ways that satisfy your most primal impulses.

  You decide right then and there that you’re going to have to work on that. It’s in your nature. It’s in there somewhere.

  —

  For the first few minutes of the drive back home, which is where you’re to spend the next three days, per the pink piece of paper signed by Mr. DiPietro, your mother is strangely quiet. It’s you, in fact, who breaks the silence, when you ask where you’re going, after your mother begins taking roads in the opposite direction of your apartment.

  “The hospital,” your mother says.

  Because of the pain, her words take a little longer to process, but then you remember what a hospital is. Hospital is a place people go to detox or die. It handles cases outside of the purview of the walk-in clinic, such as brain tumors, and that’s about it, as far as your mother is concerned. You’ve never had a brain tumor, and thus you’ve never been anywhere but a walk-in clinic, and even that was reserved for cases of strep bad enough for the white phlegmy spots to travel from your tonsils to your tongue. Everything else is manageable with children’s aspirin or NyQuil, and she always buys the unswallowable green liquid kind of the latter, to ensure that you really, really need it.

  “What do you mean, ‘hospital’?” you say.

  Instead of looking at you, she glances in the rearview mirror. “Just in case,” she answers.

  “Just in case what?”

  “In case you have a concussion.”

  “A concussion? But I don’t. I’m fine. I’m awake, I’m fine.”

  “They don’t always just knock you completely out. You’re obviously acting weird.”

  “I’m fine,” you say again.

  “You’re not yourself.”

  “But I am.”

  “You’re absolutely not. That person in Mr. DiPietro’s office, that wasn’t Luljeta.”

  “But it was,” you say.

  “Oh no it was not. Don’t try to tell me. I’m her mother. You think I don’t know Luljeta?”

  “Why are you talking about me in the third person?”

  “Because that’s the person I know, and it wasn’t the person sitting in that office,” she says.

  “Well,” you say. “I guess you don’t know all of her. I mean me. You don’t know all of me, because that was me, too.”

  She stops at a green light, and the cars behind you honk like a flock of geese headed south. It appears, for a moment, that she’s the confused one, as if she were the one who’s had her frontal lobe knocked against her skull.

  “Go,” you say, and even more strangely, she does what you tell her to.

  It takes a few more minutes to convince her that you don’t need a brain scan, just a sofa and a cup of tea, that beverage that she thought was reserved for people on the Titanic. Drinking anything besides a cup of burnt Dunkin’ Donuts is evidence of putting on airs. It’s just one more example of her not knowing all of Luljeta, such as the part of you that thinks Dunkin’ Donuts tastes like the carpet of the basement rec room where your grandmother’s AA meetings are held.

  Your freezer has never held either ice-blue gel packs or bags of peas, since chemical goo and most green vegetables are considered equally inedible by your mother, so back at home, she hands you a frozen box of eggplant Parmesan Lean Cuisine to press against your eye, and she paces around while the water in the kettle heats up. It’s not that she yells at you often, but you’re certain it’s coming, the traditional kind of scolding and punishment that you’ve largely avoided your whole life, though you aren’t sure how much punishment a grounding will be, since you aren’t exactly managing a packed social calendar and can watch whatever TV shows you miss on the Internet before she comes home from work. You’ve already planned your defense, one that, on its surface, seems pretty banal, but that underneath, you think, has a nice little zing to it: What kind of person would just stand there and take it? Is that the kind of person you want to have raised?

  But she isn’t yelling. She isn’t talking. She’s barely looking at you, until finally, after the kettle whistles and she hands you a cup of fancy Lipton tea, she holds her face in her hands and says, “What did I do?”

  Which, of course, is a response you don’t understand, and so you go to your planned defense, to try to steer things back on course.

  “What kind of person would just stand there and take it? Is that the kind of person you want to have raised?”

  And that only makes things worse. She looks at you as if you’re speaking some foreign language and raises her arms up in questioning, which makes her look like a portrait of Mary on a dollar store novena candle.

  “I mean, what happened? How could this happen?” she says, though you’re pretty sure she isn’t even directing the question at you, the only other person in the room.

  You realize that she’s not going to take away your TV privileges or keep you from your nonexistent crew of friends, but you also realize that she’s going to look at this as a thing, which, really, it is, only she’s going to make it her thing, and you feel the same surge in your chest that you felt staring at that message from NYU on the library computer screen, and in facing Margarita earlier that day: rage. Finally you have a name for the thing that’s been pressing against your chest when you watch perfectly regular people in the checkout line at the grocery store buying perfectly regular things, like paperback books written by members of the Duck Dynasty, things that make you feel incomprehensibly lonely. It’s the thing that you feel more toward Long Island girls who’ll be taking your place at NYU next fall than toward the admissions counselors who rejected you, more toward the kids who walked away in the aftermath of the fight, their backpacks sagging down past their butts like colostomy bags in need of emptying, than toward Margarita. It’s what your mother triggers in you by insisting you like mushrooms instead of asking if you do—the answer has always been, and will always be, no—and the thing somehow absent when you think about your father, even though he had walked away just like those kids at school. Maybe it was admirable, what he did. Brave. Badass. There are songs written about non-fuck-givers like that.

  There are no songs written about your mother.

  “God,” she says, invoking an entity she uses only as a pinboard for things that make her angry.

  “What does God have to do with this?” you say.

  “It’s just a word, Luljeta. I don’t understand why you’re being such a bitch to me. I’m not the one who punched you in the face.”

  “You’re not the one who got punched in the face, either, but you’re acting like you are. You haven’t even asked me how I am.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve done nothing but ask you how you feel.”

  “No, you’ve done nothing but tell me how I feel.”

  “That’s not true.”

  You attempt to look at her wryly with your one good eye.

  “Well,” she says. “It’s pretty obvious how you feel. You feel serious throbbing in your face and you feel freaked out about what being suspended is going to mean for your transcript.”

  Transcript. Ha.

  “And what else?” you ask.

  “You’re embarrassed that you got hit in front of so many people,” she says.

  “What else?”

  “You think Mr. DiPietro is a damn idiot.”

  “What else?”

  “You’re mad at me for some reason, even though I’m not the one who did this to you.”

  You have to stop to think about this last one. You’re clearly mad at her, but did she do this to you? It’s not like she tried to have no clue. Margarita may have targeted you because of the things you have that she doesn’t, such as an intact hymen and at least a single person in the world who gives a shit about you, but is that your mother’s fault? It isn’t that you want to be altogether unloved and neglected, like Marg
arita and so many of her remedial peers, it’s that often the love your mother gives feels like it’s being rejected by your body, as if you’re the B-positive recipient of an A-negative blood donation.

  “You’re crying,” your mother says.

  “No, I’m not. The Lean Cuisine is melting,” you answer. And then you say, “What I felt most was free.”

  “Free,” your mother repeats.

  “Yes, free.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to ask me why?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Probably not.”

  “See?” you yell. “You just want to hear me repeat what you say. You don’t even want to know what I’m really thinking.”

  “Fine, fine,” she says. “Why did you feel free?”

  You have to compose yourself to answer, and when you do, it doesn’t have quite the eloquence you’d hoped it would.

  “Because I did something, and something happened,” you finally say. “Something outside of my head. It wasn’t just some stupid promise of being good and something one day paying off.”

  Your mother thinks about this, and you wait for a look of contrition, if not an outright apology. She opens her mouth for a second, then closes it, swallowing whatever she was about to say. The suspense is awful, worse for a moment than the physical pain, or the smell of freezer against your face. You hadn’t even realized before then that freezer had a smell, and it was that of delayed decay: a cavern that your mother seemed to believe would revive once-fresh things, and where they instead rested in perpetuity, encapsulated in an ever-thickening shell of frost.

  “Luljeta,” she says, almost gently.

  “Yeah?” you answer.

  “But you didn’t win the fight.”

  And with that you do burst into tears and run into your room, not because she reminded you of the obvious, but because she isn’t anywhere close to getting the point. It isn’t about winning or losing. It isn’t even about truth or lies, since your point was premised on an embellished story about standing up to Margarita, when all you really did was call out a factual error in her ethnic slurring. The point was about doing and being, making the little butterfly ripple that would eventually cause a tornado somewhere on the other side of the ocean, or at least a little chatter on the other side of the baseball field at Crosby High School. It’s almost better that it was all based on a lie, because it makes you realize that you can go back and revise your own history, and isn’t that almost as good as making your own future, being able to invent your own past as well? You almost want to thank NYU and Margarita for helping you see that, even if you can see it with only one eye for the time being.