Brass Page 6

  —

  The next night, on yet another one of our parking lot dates, pretending the previous evening never happened, Bashkim moaned punë muti into my ear, and I’m telling you, man, I didn’t need any translation. I’d figured out a little Albanian by then: the cusses the cooks hurled at the waitresses’ wide asses, the cusses Yllka mumbled behind the waitresses’ backs for making the cooks look in the first place. I even figured out some regular words, like hurry, because Bashkim was always telling my skinny ass to do it.

  Shpejtoj, Elsie. Shift started ten minutes ago, lady.

  And I understood that punë muti meant shit when he pulled out and there was a sticky mess on my thighs, and I swear right then I felt something hitching up, moving like a squatter into my belly. No trespassing, I said, but I guess it was like me; where else was it supposed to go?

  “Did the condom break?” I asked.

  He handed me a wad of balled-up Dunkin’ Donuts napkins from the glove compartment. “Let’s go,” he said. “Inside, lady.”

  “Jesus Christ, did the condom break? Did it disintegrate? I don’t even see it,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  “Don’t worry? What the hell? You didn’t even answer me,” I said, but that was just a fact, not a prompt. Of course he didn’t answer me. I didn’t get to ask questions, just wait for him to reveal little bits of himself on his own time. When I asked questions he’d just look at me straight on, long enough for me to catch sight of the tangle of red veins in his eyes, all lit up and glowing like the electric tentacles of the Van de Graaff generator I’d spent two hours staring at on a field trip to the Boston Museum of Science a few years before: millions of currents streaking from a steel orb, a room barely containing what seemed to be the kind of storm that would take out entire third-world villages or midwestern trailer parks if the glass walls were accidentally shattered. Later on I found out that all the Van de Graaff generator could really do was make the hair on your head rise straight up from your scalp, which Mr. Wizard had shown me how to do with just a balloon and a wool sweater.

  It was a stupid parlor trick, just like when Bashkim called me pretty girl, like I was a pet parakeet, as he pulled up his brown trousers. Abracadabra, pretty girl, wink wink. I fell for it all, even though his pants had to be called trousers, they were that ugly. Even the leather huarache sandals he wore everywhere—behind the line in the kitchen even, in the passenger seat while we screwed even, his trousers bunched at his feet like elephant skin—not even the sleek leather of a real hustler, not even a slick combed mustache or a necktie as thin as fettuccini to distract me from the ripped seams and grease stains on his shirt, and still, still I fell for it. Who knew if he was a scientist or a magician or just a common con artist, but then again who cared as long as he kept streaming his gibby-gabby into my ear while we rocked the Fiero behind the Muffler Shak before the start of every shift? Who cared? Not me, because I could pretend also that when he said eja tani! eja tani! what it meant was my god, my god! instead of: come on, come on! I could pretend when he said punë muti that what it meant was: now we have started something that cannot be undone by parents or wives or time clocks instead of: shit.

  But no, it meant shit, that I was sure of. I knew it when I pulled my pantyhose back up and they were immediately glued to my legs, and I thought ahead twenty minutes to the chafing I’d get while running trays of coffee and spanakopita.

  “I’m going inside,” Bashkim said.

  “ ’K,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said and touched my chin gently, like he must have seen in some movie or another. “Don’t worry about it, okay? It will be fine.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Then why do your eyes look like that?”

  “Look like what?”

  “Like they won’t look at me.”

  “They will,” I said. “They’re just doing something else right now.” There was a raccoon out there, digging around in a pile of slop that had somehow ended up ten yards from the trash bins. That guy found himself a little Grade D nugget and waddled happily away with it, and I was searching for the lesson in that, coming up empty.

  Bashkim opened up my hand and placed something in there, a crumpled-up Dunkin’ Donuts napkin from the glove box.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “A rose,” he said. “See?”

  It was a rose, or at least a napkin origamied into a rose shape. I put it to my nose.

  “Smells like Tic Tacs,” I said.

  “The orange kind,” he said. “The best kind.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry I have the bad moods,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “So much work, you know? I get tired.”

  I nodded.

  “Not tired of you. Tired of French fries. Tired of, you know, other things. Not you, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  I nodded but didn’t budge from the driver’s seat when he slammed the passenger door behind him. I just sat there with my hand on the shifter, wondering how much money Bashkim was really down, if it was really that bad, if maybe I could just write Bashkim a check and get him over the bad moods and we could get on with our lives. Then I thought about the seventeen dollars in tips I’d made that night and realized that a check from me wouldn’t get us far, maybe just enough for gas to get us to the Poconos, the only place anyone in my family had visited since they crossed the ocean forty years before and figured they’d done enough traveling for one bloodline. There might not even be enough left for a half hour in one of those heart-shaped hot tubs Uncle Eddie said the resorts have down there. Besides, my fifteen-minute break was over, and I had to go back in at least to finish the last hour of my shift, and if I was going to go through all the trouble to go back in there then I might as well just stay a while longer and try to hustle a few more bucks. That’s how these places trap you for life. But I was still thinking at that moment, Not me, and on the walk back inside I picked up a penny, heads up, and dropped it into my apron as if anything worth finding would be lying there tossed aside on the street. Good luck, that heads-up penny, as in good luck finding a million more of these in your lifetime so maybe you could pay off, say, your mother’s mortgage, or your sister’s future tuition bills, or at least treat them to a nice steak dinner at Carmen Anthony’s if the other bills were still too high. But at least that heads-up penny proved my mother wrong after all—I wasn’t out running around like a ten-dollar whore. I was a whole lot cheaper than that.

  —

  Mamie had never gotten the second shift she used to work out of her system, even though that pink slip from Waterbury Buckle had come long ago. She’d been working a daytime gig at the Almond Joy factory a little down Route 8 for a couple of years, but she still lived at nighttime as if she didn’t have to rise until afternoon the next day, staying up for news she perked up for only during the weather, and then late-night talk shows with guests she’d never heard of, because the only actors she ever remembered the names of were the ones nobody else on earth did, people like Joel Grey and Ben Gazzara, guys who were celebrities when life stopped for her right around the time of my birth. After the talk shows were over, the TV went off but the lamp stayed on, with no books or magazines for the light to shine on, except for a Ladies’ Home Journal with pages dog-eared on recipes none of us had ever tasted. I used to look at the chicken piccata page and wonder who would use wine as an ingredient and not a religion.

  The condensed chicken soup I’d eaten for dinner used mostly salt as an ingredient, so the puke I’d just dropped into the toilet tasted pickled and burned my throat on the way up. I licked my lips until they turned in on themselves and somehow still believed, when another typhoon of nausea swirled up in my stomach, that only a sleeve of saltines could save my life. It was my body working against its own best interests, trying to turn itself into dust.

  Then David Letterma
n said something that tore up his live studio audience, and it reminded me of the life that still existed outside of the bathroom. When we were little and Greta and I got sick, Mamie gave us Tupperware bowls to puke in and spoonfuls of brandy to make us sleepy. She’d scratch our heads and do the watusi at the foot of our beds until we cracked a smile, then she’d declare our fevers broken and make us sit up and watch Indiana Jones. That Tupperware puke bowl was long gone by then, ruined when the acids finally ate a hole through the plastic, and the closest things to brandy in our house that night were the caramelized bottoms of the empty Carlo Rossi jugs that lined our kitchen floorboards like buoys keeping our house afloat. I pulled away from the rim of the toilet and dragged myself to the doorway of the living room.

  “Mamie, I’m sick,” I said.

  It came out so soft that I could barely hear it, and right after the words hit the ether I hoped that the television had gobbled them up. At first I thought I’d gotten my wish, because it was half a commercial break before she even acknowledged my presence, and it was less an acknowledgment than a twitch, one of the deeper shakes that I usually made out only when I looked at her for more than a few seconds at a time, which meant not often, because it was confusing to see her start to look old. She was thirty-five. She might’ve had the beginnings of some palsy, but I wouldn’t know, because she hadn’t seen a doctor since she delivered Greta, and I’d bet money that she had to be talked into it then. It was in her hair that I noticed the twitch first, the fluffy grown-out bangs of a grown-out Ogilvie home perm swaying just a little as if there were a ceiling fan over her head. One silver ribbon ran through her brown hair like a streaker. She had the kind of soul-deep fatigue that looked sexy in photographs but in real life meant she hadn’t thought of sex in a decade.

  “What do you mean, sick?” she said. Looking at her made it worse. The light from the television was changing color with each scene, so she looked like she were under a strobe light at a disco, like somehow she’d found a bouncer to overlook her elastic-waist jeans.

  “Puke-sick,” I said.

  “What’d you get into?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Would it help?” She shook her empty glass at me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I curled up on the sofa next to her, and she pulled her knees away.

  “Well, don’t get me sick. I can’t afford to be sick, I’m working doubles all week,” she said. She pressed her palm against my forehead. “You don’t feel hot. You feel cool.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” she asked.

  I thought about Indiana Jones, how long it’d been since we’d sat down and watched it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Is it a stomach bug?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I bet it’s food poisoning. That crap you eat at the Ross.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you pregnant?” she asked. “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

  “What? No. I mean, no I’m not pregnant. I kind of have a boyfriend.”

  “Then how do you know you’re not pregnant?”

  “Because having a kind-of boyfriend doesn’t mean you’re automatically pregnant.”

  “Shows how much you know,” she said.

  With that I almost retched again. I wondered if there was a chance she was right, because if Mamie could speak with authority about anything, it was hangover remedies and getting knocked up by accident. But it was impossible; that broken condom incident was weeks ago. I’d stopped freaking out about it after a few days, once I convinced myself that the taupe oval on my underpants was a light period and not an old period stain. I hadn’t even introduced Bashkim to Mamie or Greta, I hadn’t even gotten that birthday necklace he promised me yet.

  “No, I’m not pregnant,” I said again.

  “Who is this guy, anyway?”

  I thought for a second and realized I didn’t really know how to answer that question. Mamie wasn’t going to like that he was a foreigner, unless he was Lithuanian like Bobu and Grandpa, because once her parents made it into the U.S. the whole family assumed every other immigrant was just there to mooch off the system. But Bashkim was a hard worker, which she’d be okay with, especially since the thing he worked hard at was manual, thankless, low-paying labor, and Mamie didn’t trust any other kind. He was married: that was a bad thing. He dreamed of a better life: also a bad thing. Anyway, once I made it through high school without getting knocked up she stopped being interested in who I was dating, so none of that seemed worth mentioning.

  “Just some guy I work with,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “Sounds like a winner.”

  “I mean, he’s more than just that.”

  “What is he, then?”

  I pulled the afghan from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around my shoulders. The afghan wasn’t finished, one of Mamie’s monthlong hobbies, so you had to choose the part of you that felt the coldest, then move it to the other parts later. It didn’t help much, but it helped more than nothing at all.

  “He has a really broad chest. It looks like he’s been breaking horses,” I said, finally, during the commercial break. “And nice eyes.”

  “Oh Christ,” Mamie said. “You’re done for.”

  She was seventeen when she’d had me. I’d seen a picture of her eight months along, in a bikini, cannonballing off a dock at Scovill’s Dam. Dad used a cooler as a bench, his denim shorts soaked because he’d already taken his turn, maybe shown her how to land just so in the water to make the biggest splash. He held a can of Schaefer in his hand, but he hadn’t yet drunk enough of it for his belly to be swollen with a half keg, the way it looked in pictures taken a few years later. His arms were swollen instead, biceps that were ready to be used, one of them tattooed with a cobra, its head puffed out at the widest part of his arm.

  “Anyway,” I said.

  “We don’t even have a flight of stairs to throw yourself down,” Mamie said.

  “I’d probably just break a leg anyway, with my luck,” I said. Then I’d have to ask Bashkim for help, and it was not the right time for that, with his mind on his money in another part of the world. Sometimes I understood what a burden I could be, and why I seemed to line Bashkim’s blue eyes red, which really just made them prettier, those two primary colors dueling with each other.

  Mamie had blue eyes, too. According to the Punnett squares in biology class, if I had an offspring with a blue-eyed man, it’d have a 25 percent chance of having blue eyes, too.

  But I wasn’t pregnant, I reminded myself, so never mind about that.

  “I don’t know what happened to you two. I really don’t,” Mamie said. She was looking at Greta’s latest progress report from the school social worker, and apparently progress wasn’t really the right word to use to describe how she was doing.

  “No idea?” I said.

  “I don’t know who’s worse. Your sister tests like a genius, and look at her, pulling her hair out in chunks like a crazy person. I mean, I broke the vacuum following her around. The thing literally choked on hair.”

  “It’s a sickness. She can’t help it.”

  “She can’t help being sick, you can’t help being sick. I don’t know how I’m supposed to help it. There comes a point, you know?”

  “When?” I said. “When does the point come?”

  Mamie looked at me. The television had gone dim for a moment, so she was half-shadowed, her right eye just a dark socket, the jawline of her square face an abyss. She looked beautiful and harsh like that, in a way fashion photographers try to stage.

  “What are you talking about?” Mamie said. “You really must have a fever.”

  I nodded, draped the afghan over the back of the couch, and headed off to bed.

  By morning, I was seized with sickness, though there was no fever to break, and it hur
t me to think she might be right. I might have gone and gotten myself pregnant.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Luljeta

  Once upon a time, before school administrators were gently persuaded to reconsider their annual superlative categories, you’d swept the A.M. Kindergarten Award Day, taking home construction-paper blue ribbons in the prime categories of Prettiest, Nicest, Smartest, and something else—you can’t remember the last one, but you’re sure it was a good one, and that your prizes totaled four, one for each of the still-gangly skinny girl limbs you kept until approximately age nine. At recess on at least two occasions, different boys grabbed on to your arms and declared Mine!, No, mine!, and because this was years before third-wave feminism blogs and because their testes were still years from dropping, it was flattering and exhilarating. You sat daily in a pod with Miguel, Latoya, and Samantha, imagining the world was made of the Cool Ranch Doritos on which you wished to subsist entirely, and you never bothered to disrupt the fantasy to voice your fear that this world would literally crumble and become overrun with cockroaches, the creatures that had chased you and your mother out of two previous apartments before you landed in the one it seemed like you’d never get to leave. And anyway, you didn’t even need a fantasy Dorito world. Your real world was amazing. It was perfect. You were warm and stuffed with blocks of melted, delicious government-surplus cheese, your mother let you watch all the television you wanted, you were admired and respected but not feared by your classmates, and your teachers were sure they’d read about you in the paper years later, in one of the good Civic sections, surely, not the police blotter, where they were equally sure they’d read about some of your peers.

  You don’t remember one moment where it all ended, though by the time you’d had your first menstrual period, at age eleven, your glory days were long over. It wasn’t like an explosion had rocked the school and sent you all flying up into the air and landed you down in a place where you surely were not meant to be, estranged from your friends and ignored by teachers who felt they didn’t need to worry about you and thus didn’t. There wasn’t one specific day where Miguel up and left to run exclusively with a crew of Puerto Rican boys, and Latoya with black girls, and Samantha, who was a white girl like you, with one black boy at a time.