Brass Read online

  In the end, you managed to keep one friend, Teena, who isn’t a friend so much as a carpool partner. She’s willing to drive you around to places on nights when she isn’t being driven around herself by twenty-something-year-old mall security guards in their creepy white vans or douchey Mitsubishis. You two are stuck together because she, like you, has been rejected by all the other girls you know. Unlike you, she’s been rejected because she’s been branded a superslut—really, she’s only a standard slut, not nearly as bad as the jealous girls who tend to call her that—and also unlike you, she truly does not give a shit what people have to say about it. It hasn’t yet occurred to you how awesome and advanced a thing like that is, something that aging actresses say in interviews came to them in their forties. For the time being, you’re still seventeen and kind of embarrassed to be seen with Teena at school. Since your plan is to go to Pandora’s Box, a.k.a. the Betsy Ross Diner, however, you’re happy to be with a friend who attracts the kind of attention you secretly want but from which you typically flee.

  “Ew, the Ross? Why don’t we go to Chili’s?” she’d asked when you suggested a trip there.

  “I keep hearing about how good their gravy fries are,” you’d answered.

  “Ew, gravy fries?”

  “And there’s this guy I’m kind of into who hangs out there,” you’d said.

  The guy to whom you’re referring is the one you’ve suddenly decided you can’t live without, the one who will make you make sense, the one whose failures of both nature and nurture constitute the sloppy human pieces you’ve attempted to assemble into a functional unit. Before, your father was something whose existence you were told of only so that you’d know to avoid it, like poison ivy or crystal meth. But, as with recreational drugs, you have become aware that you have not been told the whole truth about things. There’s got to be something good about something people will ruin everything for just to get ahold of, the way your mother once apparently did with your father. Finding him has, in the three days of your out-of-school suspension, become an obsession, the way Beyblades were when you were little, and making unwearable hemp jewelry was two years ago, and Fleetwood Mac secretly is to you now, after hearing “Landslide” on some classic rock station and weeping like you’d lost something instead of discovered it. It’s clear to you now that those things have all been surrogates for what you’ve actually been looking for, red herrings meant to trick you into not seeking out the one true thing. Your father, you are certain, will make everything else fall into place. You are two broken parts that must be reassembled in order to serve any purpose at all.

  At the very least, maybe he can cough up seventeen years of child support to cover a security deposit on an apartment near Washington Square, where you’ll work out a feasible Plan B and feel not even a pang of envy for the kids on the street power-walking to their classes at NYU.

  In any case, it’s nothing you can explain, and it’s not the kind of thing Teena, with her French Canadian auto mechanic father who fixed her up an Acura coupe the second she turned sixteen, would understand. So you talk instead about a random guy, and she indeed agrees to go with you one Friday evening, on the early side, before the latest of her security guards gets off for the night, in multiple senses of the phrase.

  The Ross was the only place to begin this search, not because of the gravy fries but because the place is known in Waterbury as Little Albania, staffed and frequented by guys with eagle tattoos and dark jeans with elaborate embroidery on the ass pockets, and of course their women, 100 percent of whom could serve as Pirelli calendar models but instead study chemical hair-relaxing techniques at the local cosmetology school. These are the Kosovar Albanians, the ones who began to migrate in the late nineties, when the Serbs began their ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, learned English fluently in two weeks, and briefly broke their parents’ hearts by dating Italians and Puerto Ricans before marrying, of course, fellow Kosovars. You know this type of Albanian from your school, and thus you know that they are not your people. You were descended from the ones who sponsored the Kosovars’ visas, the older crew of Albanian Albanians who run the Betsy Ross Diner, old-world people who’d come over beginning in the seventies under the false impression that there was still work in Waterbury’s brass foundries. The Albanian Albanians found the Kosovars slightly stuck up, raised as they were with a relatively benign Yugoslavian form of Communism, and put them to work cleaning bathrooms and running cheap Greek food to cheap American tippers. You knew that your mother had done the same kind of work once, before the Albanian Albanians had begun serving strictly as an employment agency for displaced Kosovars and were willing to take a second-generation Lithuanian girl on, if only to get her knocked up with one of their very own. While it had occurred to you in the past that your father’s people might perhaps still run the joint, it was a recent revelation to realize, as obvious as it should have been, that your father’s people are also your people. You have people! You do, you do, you do, and they aren’t Miguel or Latoya or Samantha, which maybe explains why things hadn’t worked out with them. You do have people, regardless of what your mother has to say about it.

  Your mother never has much to say about it, is the thing. It’s as if she believes that the blanker your slate, the more room you’ll have to fill it in with better things. It seems so naïve to you now that you once believed that, too.

  As you enter the Ross, you see people with deep pockmarks, people who likely have no Social Security numbers, people who you would guarantee have lived lives you cannot and do not want to imagine, each of them most decidedly not attractive. Funny how a tattoo goes from a cool thing to a terrifying thing once it’s applied to a face. For a moment you wonder if it might not be better to choose ignorance over these prospects.

  “Chili’s has those really good seasoned fries,” Teena says, scanning the room.

  But that email from NYU flashes before your bruised and bleary eye, and it gives you courage to ignore Teena and ask for a seat. The young male host manages to convey both utter disinterest in moving from behind the counter and simultaneous rapt attention to your boobs. At least they distract from your black eye, or from the quarter inch of Maybelline cover-up you’d Pan-Caked on top of it.

  “You want to sit? Why don’t you keep me company up here?” the host says, his smile not really imbuing his tone with any charm.

  “No thanks,” you say. “Booth, please.” And you smile, because you’re still young enough to think you’re supposed to be polite to everyone, even lecherous diner hosts who must have been made aware of the statutory rape laws in this country, no matter their citizenship.

  You scan the room and notice a couple of waitresses floating around whose feathered hair and cankles give them away as Waterbury lifers rather than Albanians, and some busboys who would probably rather retain their virginity than give it away to the likes of those old broads, but nobody who fits your profile.

  “Is he here?”Teena asks.

  “I don’t think so,” you answer, and you don’t have to act to convey your disappointment. What a dumb idea this was in the first place. Your people probably sold the Ross and fled years ago, also carriers of the Hasani cut-and-run family inheritance you are well aware of despite never having met a single damn one of them. Your family’s coat of arms likely consists of a giant middle finger and the tailgate of a chariot.

  One of the ragged waitresses takes your orders—coffee and a side salad for Teena, coffee and gravy fries that you have no actual intention of eating for you—and before you can ask for a straw so you don’t have to put your lips to the plastic tumbler of water, you’re approached by two young men, who, from the neck up, are actually not un-hot, though their Fast and the Furious fashion sense, all tight T-shirts and leather jackets reinforced with yet more leather at the elbows, is not quite up your alley. You imagine yourself with an intentionally messy-hair type, with jeans that came off the rack but are clearly built to his specs at the denim factory, someone with whom yo
u can discuss the Nabokov that you’re obviously going to read someday, once the Stephen King stuff stops being so damn good. Basically, you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t hang out in alleys, never mind yours.

  “What are you girls up to tonight?” one of them asks, both of them dropping into the seats next to you uninvited, their motorcycle helmets like giant reptile eggs they’ve been charged with protecting.

  Teena sizes them up, analyzing whatever slutty data her eyeballs feed into her brain. She’s so pro about it that she actually, without ever directly looking at you, manages to convey: Nah, but we can let them pay for your fries. You instantly begin sweating under your sweatshirt—so that’s where it gets its name—because you have absolutely no idea how to talk to guys, be their hair pleasantly messy or, like that of the ones at your table, shellacked. Once again, you realize what a stupid plan this has been all along, because even if you had spotted someone who looked promising, someone who perhaps shared some obvious physical feature with you, what did you think you’d say to them? Hey, my nose looks like yours; what should I bring over for the end of Ramadan?

  You’re assigned the shorter and darker of the two, who introduces himself as Matt, though if this guy’s real given name is Matthew, yours is Rapunzel. You don’t let on much of anything, including that you’re a native English speaker yourself, because you volunteer no response to the chatter he offers.

  “What’s the matter, cat has your lips?” he asks, and you, like an idiot, nod, as if that were actually a question that warrants a response even if it had been asked correctly.

  “It’s tongue,” Teena says, interrupting the inane conversation happening on her side of the booth.

  “What’s tongue?” her guy asks.

  “It’s ‘cat got your tongue,’ ” Teena says.

  “Maybe I get your tongue later,” her guy says.

  “Ew, get the fuck out of here,” she answers, and her guy smirks because he thinks she’s flirting, whereas you know that she won’t actually put out—that’s the part of her reputation that people get wrong, that she just gives it away to whomever. You don’t quite understand what her standards are, but you understand that she has them, and these guys aren’t meeting them, which makes it even harder for you to come up with something to say. What you don’t understand is that your silence makes you into something even better than a bad girl; it makes you into a good girl, and turns Matt’s interest in you from passing and situational to one ripe with potential. This makes him nervous, and makes everything on your half of the table even more awful than it already was.

  “You need some more coffee?” Matt asks and immediately knocks over your tumbler of ice water, which somehow manages to miss the table and pour directly into your crotch. You try to stand, but Matt has you trapped in the booth, and doesn’t seem to comprehend, though you aren’t even speaking in a strange American tongue, that you need to get away from the waterfall that’s somehow still streaming into your lap. Finally you just point, while Matt repeats, “Mut mut mut,” and Teena tries not to laugh.

  “What? Oh,” Matt says, and goddammit, maybe you are a stupid good girl, because as you squeeze past him to run to the bathroom, you’re the one who offers an apology, and when you get to the bathroom, you’re the one who begins to die from embarrassment in the stall instead of trying to dry yourself off under the hot-air blower, which doesn’t even have enough power to get hands past damp. You were an idiot for coming here in the first place, for pretending you have any kind of heritage to salvage. Did you think you were going to fill in the holes with anything other than gravy fries and ice water? This trip has already turned into the kind of failure you’d always avoided by not attempting anything too risky. You want to cry, but if you do the tears will make the Maybelline run and your eyes will become bloodshot, and your face will be layered in pink and purple and red, a colorscape that’s mesmerizing during a sunset but would be hideous on your face, so you manage to hold back the tears. Instead you punch yourself in the thighs to replace your disappointment with quiet rage. When the quiet rage rises to a respectable level you release it by kicking the stall door. So this is what agency is really about: going out and making yourself look like an idiot instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

  The bathroom door swings open just as you’re ready to emerge from your stall, so you stay in there, hoping to avoid as much humiliation as possible on the walk back from the bathroom to the table. The person who enters stands by the sinks, her feet pointed toward yours. The shoes don’t belong to Teena (not sensible enough; that’s another unexpected thing about Teena, she wears the most sensible shoes, sneakers and ugly slip-ons with too much sole, shoes meant to be worn by home health workers and grocery baggers instead of part-time skanks), and after a minute or so, the person literally begins tapping one of her pumps up and down, as if in a bad movie where the director told her to telegraph impatience.

  “There’s another stall,” you say.

  “I know how many stalls there are here. Are you going to stay in there all night?” the voice says. The accent sounds like a gypsy’s, almost exaggerated compared to the vague Eastern European lilt of the guys at your table. Your stomach drops, and you try to get a look at her in the crack between the door and the framework, but all you can make out is the impatient folded arms to match her impatient, poorly directed tapping toe. Who really does that, other than someone mimicking an adopted language? Someone who’d been in this country long enough to learn idiomatic English expressions but will never call this place home?

  “I can’t leave yet,” you say. “I’m not ready.”

  “It’s just water, sweetheart. Ahmet knows it’s his fault. He’s more embarrassed than you.”

  Ahmet. Ha. You knew it wasn’t Matt, just like you know that this woman out there could be the key to your entire shrouded family history, the person who could double your DNA’s helix, which heretofore has just been a limp noodle with some random kinks and coils. It really had been as easy as you secretly believe nothing ever is; just think, you could’ve done this years ago, since at least age twelve, when your breasts had grown enough to attract the sloppy attention of the young men of the Ross. And yet the bravery you’d walked in with seems to have been extinguished with that douse of water, because there you are, inches away from—what, your grandmother? Your third cousin twice removed?—and you’re paralyzed, wondering what episode of Grey’s Anatomy your mother is on by now, questioning just what the hell you hope to accomplish by opening this can of worms. It’s not that ignorance has been bliss for you, really, but it’s been okay. It’s been a low-fat pound cake, not entirely satisfying but better than bread and water.

  “I need another minute,” you say. Yes, another minute. Seventeen years hasn’t been quite long enough: seventeen years and one minute, that’s just the right amount of time.

  The lady sighs, another cue from the bad-acting handbook. “Fine, take your time, stay for hours. What difference does it make, we’ll be open. We’re always open,” she says, before she clicks away on what may actually be tap shoes.

  After she walks out, you bend over the commode but don’t quite retch. You try to retch; your stomach seems swirly enough, and the drama heightened enough, but nothing happens, and it occurs to you that you’re simply pantomiming what you think someone might do in a situation like this, which is freak out, cry, hit your head on the porcelain, wake up in the hospital with a new perspective and an inexplicably British accent, like you saw on an episode of Mystery ER a while before. What you feel instead, after a minute kneeling before the bowl with your sweaty head in your hands, is the same old slightly pissed and mildly panicked feeling you feel pretty much every day at one point or another. What is wrong with you? Besides looking a wreck, with your poorly concealed black eye and a bottom half that looks as if you’ve pissed yourself, what the hell is wrong with you? You’re right here. You traveled the entire three miles to get the first sentence in your origin story, and you’re
going to walk out of here with nothing to show for it but some clammy denim and the phone number of a surrogate Albanian dude who might just let you call him daddy?

  No. No, that is not going to happen. You rise to your feet and fling open the stall door without even stopping to look for the screw that drops from the handle. You check the mirror and smooth out the makeup that’s settled into creases you don’t even have, and you cup some water from the tap into your mouth. You give yourself the kind of pep talk that you imagine varsity wrestlers give themselves before meeting their middleweight nemeses: You can do this. You are stronger than them. You do not give a mighty fuck about how dumb you look for the next ten minutes.

  You glance over at your table, where Teena is waving you back with a pleading look that means she’s ready to get out of there. Matt/Ahmet & Co., meanwhile, are avoiding all eye contact with both you and Teena, which is just as well. You wave back at Teena, though she doesn’t know it’s a wave goodbye. You have work to do now, lives to disrupt, starting with your own and radiating outward. You march straight over to the counter, where the lady from the bathroom is staring through drugstore readers at a scroll of receipts, and you tell her, “I’m ready for the check.”

  The lady barely glances up, then throws her eyes over to your table. She says, “You don’t need to pay for this. Ahmet will pay for this.”

  “No, I don’t want him to pay for it,” you say.

  “He is going to pay. He’s an idiot, but he’s not a jerk.”

  You’re glad that Matt/Ahmet is a gentleman idiot, but that’s not the point, so you pull your debit card from your wallet and place it on the counter. “No, really. Please. I need to pay.”