Brass Page 9

  “You said that two weeks ago. You’re going to be ready to pop in two weeks.”

  “I’m telling him tomorrow, okay? Lay off already.”

  But once again, last night’s tomorrow was already the past. Once again, I’d shown up too late for Bashkim to sneak out to the Fiero before my shift, and once again, he didn’t get mad, or corner me in dry storage because he couldn’t live without me, or at least without it, for one more night.

  “Slowpoke,” he finally said one night while I waited for him to scrape the blackened cinder off a burnt grilled cheese. “I rang that bell two minutes ago.”

  “Who do you think I am, Pavlov’s dog?” I said.

  “You’re getting fat,” he said.

  “You’re getting bald,” I said. “We’re even.”

  “You look better. You look better with boobies,” he said.

  I almost smiled before I remembered there was nothing to smile about.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said. “When you’re finished tonight. You’re running away on me all the time now.”

  “I’m not running away,” I said, right before I ran out of the kitchen and into the bathroom to purge the latest round of sick.

  After my shift I went outside, hoping for a few minutes alone to air out my pits and figure out what the hell I was supposed to tell him. What new could I come up with about the oldest story in the book? Whatever, I got knocked up, I’d say, it was bound to happen at some point when you buy your rubbers from the clearance aisle at Joey’z Shopping Spree. But Bashkim was already outside waiting for me, leaning with one arm against the wall of the Ross. Dust and asbestos stuck to his skin when he pulled his weight away, like confectioners’ sugar over the pink dough of his forearm. I wanted to gum it, even if it would infect me with something worse than the bug he’d already made me come down with.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I answered.

  “You, ah. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” I said. I pressed my palm hard against my stomach to shut it up.

  “You are acting funny lately. Tired. Sick.” He pulled me toward him and kissed me on the mouth, but I must’ve forgotten how to do it, because I couldn’t breathe while his lips were on mine, and I had to come up for air.

  “See? Like that. Pulling away from me,” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said. “You’re the one who’s been pulling away.”

  “Look at me. Is this called pulling away?”

  “I mean, not tonight you’re not.”

  “I’m right here,” he said.

  “Well, I’m here, too,” I said. “I’ve just been busy.”

  “Busy doing what?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Not busy, really. Distracted. Thinking about other stuff.”

  He shook his head. “You are sick. You have been a long time sick.”

  “Maybe it’s cancer,” I said.

  He didn’t laugh. “It’s not cancer. Don’t be dumb, Elsie.”

  “It was a joke,” I said.

  “For you everything is a joke.”

  “Take my wife. Please.”

  I knew Bashkim didn’t get the punch line but he didn’t bother asking me to explain. Nobody wants to admit they’re not in on the joke, right? We just stared at each other for a minute, waiting to see who would draw first.

  “Yllka says you have to tell me something,” he said finally.

  I felt my skin catch fire. “Yllka doesn’t know anything about me. And she definitely doesn’t speak for me.”

  “You should thank her when she does the dirty work. You don’t speak for yourself. You say things against other people, not things for yourself.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “You’re having a baby,” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “You can’t pretend that.”

  “How does Yllka know anyway?”

  “Everybody knows. Nobody here is blind.”

  “I’m not having a baby,” I said. “I’m pregnant. It’s not the same thing.”

  He looked sucker-punched for a second, his lips pursed out as if they’d swelled instantly from a perfectly landed uppercut, but then he recovered, like he always did, and said, “It is the same thing. What did they teach you in high school?”

  “They didn’t teach me anything at school. This is the kind of thing you learn on the bus on the way there.”

  He stared at my feet, and I shifted my weight to disguise my pigeon toes. I was embarrassed about them, suddenly, among all the deformities I had.

  “I think it is not the right thing to do,” he said.

  “It’s a little late for that,” I said.

  He looked up at me finally with those salesman’s eyes, those big blue things that could sell words as big and combustible as the Hindenburg. “It’s not too late,” he said. “Right? You haven’t.”

  “Doing it, I mean. Having sex. Getting pregnant. I meant it’s a little late for that.”

  “Oh,” Bashkim said. “It is, yes.”

  I kicked more sand over the wad of spit he laid into the ground after he’d said those last words. If I was crossing the desert, if I was dying of thirst, I bet I could’ve found it again and drunk from it. It looked like an ocean to me.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you for anything,” I said.

  “Ask me,” he said.

  “I can’t. You need your money. Or should I say Aggie needs your money.”

  “I would say yes,” he said.

  “Yes to what?” I asked, but I didn’t want him to answer that. It was like uncovering the last number on a scratch-off ticket: it was the last part that would kill the dream.

  “Yes to—”

  “To what, now?”

  “Yes, I will be your father.”

  “You’ll be my father?”

  “The father to your baby. Our baby. I will have this baby with you. I want to have this baby with you.”

  Oh, I meant to say, but I just breathed out a spit bubble instead. It coated my lips like cheap gloss and it didn’t taste like Bonne Bell, like cherry or root beer or peppermint, just recycled dirty spit. I could taste my own breath on it, oily and flat like shortening.

  I will have this baby with you, he’d said.

  I want to have this baby with you, he’d said.

  He wanted anything from me at all.

  I tried speaking again. “Oh,” I said. The veins in Bashkim’s forearms filled thick with fluid and bulged from his skin like garter snakes. My father used to kill them when he caught them sunbathing on the front porch even though Mamie said they weren’t poisonous, they were good for the yard, even, feeding on the stuff nobody wanted around. Then Bashkim pulled his arms tight to his chest and tangled the snakes together, the way they look on a medical bracelet, when they’re warning you about something.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “But that’s crazy, this is a problem we can solve. I wasn’t going to ask you for anything like that,” I said.

  “Why crazy? Why a problem? I want this. I didn’t know that I wanted it but now I have it and I don’t want to give it back.”

  “You don’t?” I said.

  He pulled in close to me and took my hands. “No. You don’t, either. I know you don’t. If you did you would not have let it come this far.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who you are. The person I thought you were wouldn’t be saying these things to me right now.”

  “You will have to get to learn, then. You will have to let me take care of you. Isn’t that what you want?”

  I couldn’t remember wanting that exactly, but then again, wanting for me was mostly a feeling that didn’t have anything specific attached to it, other than stupid things like a used car or that bag of Bugles by the checkout line at the Pathmark. Bashkim seemed so sure of himself that I thought maybe I should trust him
with my wants, too. I just had to train myself to ignore my instincts, which, I reminded myself, had not ever been terribly reliable things.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “See?” he said. I would’ve thought seeing him smile like that would settle my stomach, but for some reason it kept churning, a tornado brewing in there. It’s hormones, I thought, a body all out of whack. The heart palpitations, the sweat, the terror: all biology.

  He pulled me close, and I said into his chest, “Where will we live? How am I going to keep working like this?”

  “Shh,” he said.

  “Your wife—”

  “It’s not for you to worry about my wife,” he said.

  “And what about school? I was going to apply for that dental tech program at Mattatuck. I’ll never make it through the year.”

  “You don’t care about school,” he said.

  I nodded as if that were an order, and I thought that it was probably a good thing, not having to make up my own mind about anything. I was getting nowhere doing that.

  “My mother is not going to like this,” I said finally. “This will kill her dead.”

  “You have me now. You don’t need anyone,” Bashkim said. “This is what I want. This is what I came here for. To make a son, an American son so he can do whatever he wants to do from the day he is born.”

  “A son?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that what you want?”

  I couldn’t make my head move up and down in agreement, so I just rested it against his chest, listening to his heart in case it was giving anything away. It sounded like it was beating uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, the droning pulse of a dirge, and that made me feel a little better. That dread was the same kind I felt the first time I saw Bashkim, the same kind I felt when I listened to the best minor-key ballads, and that inspired the kind of love that was easier to nurture than kudzu. It didn’t even need light to grow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Luljeta

  Yllka gave you her address and told you to come see her anytime, the sooner the better, the next day if you could. The next day is Saturday and so you can, at least feasibly, though you have no way to get there other than walking or biking, neither of which is considered, in Waterbury at least, a valid method of transportation for people who aren’t hookers or have fewer than three DUIs. You brainstorm reasons you can tell your mother you need to borrow the car: school project (but you would have already told her about that); a date with a boy (but you would never have told her about that); a trip to the mall just to get out of the house (but you’d explicitly sworn off the mall because it held essentially the same human contents as Crosby High, only walking around in a fog of kush and vanilla-scented Yankee Candle napalm). By the time you emerge from your bedroom with some excuse about needing to drop off a book or a sweater that you’d told Teena you’d let her borrow, it’s too late: your mother has already taken the car, a note on the table in her surprisingly meticulous penmanship explaining that she had to catch up on some paperwork at the office and that you’d have pizza for dinner that night.

  You don’t need a note to tell you about dinner. You’ve had pizza for dinner every Saturday night for the past six years, a tradition that began at the intersection of your Student of the Month honors and your mother’s first hire to the front office rather than the manufacturing side of a factory, a move that was more titular than remunerative, just enough extra in her paycheck to spring for a weekly to-go order from Dominec’s. It’s like she’d never stopped celebrating, and last year, when she started adding two cannolis to the pizza order to celebrate her finally getting her associate’s degree from Mattatuck Community College after five years of talking about it and five more years of actually going for it, you weren’t sure whether to find her triumph in such small victories adorable or depressing. Not like getting a degree isn’t a big deal, but what next? She still works at some barely-hanging-on car parts manufacturer, the latest in a long line of jobs at factories a year or two from relocating to Georgia or Mexico. It’s still just the two of you in your little second-floor apartment, which she always mentions is near a bus line that neither one of you ever uses. The most substantively positive development was when she began dating one of her former Mattatuck professors after he tried and failed to get her to switch from accounting to poli-sci, even though she did meet him halfway and switched to sociology, which was how she got stuck forever as a clerk in accounts payable, the department where no-bullshit women with a head for numbers and a preference for husbands in motorcycle gangs go to die. Those were her exact words, the same ones that made Professor Robbie fall for her, even though the two of them are still, after a year, just casual, because your mother doesn’t want to take anything with him too far, too fast. Robbie’s got a thick Brooklyn accent and a denim jacket full of crusty-punk pins and you think for somebody who’d willingly moved to Waterbury from the 718 area code of your dreams, he’s pretty all right. And what does your mother say about him?

  Robbie’s great, Lu, I love him, but I don’t need all that in my life.

  She doesn’t need all what in her life, love? Then what does she need instead, cannolis?

  She needs you. She’s said as much herself—she didn’t necessarily ask for you, and she doesn’t always know what to do with you, but you’re what kept her waking up in the morning to go to dead-end jobs and sign up for the classes from which she’d previously withdrawn two or three times. It’s sweet enough to give you pause now momentarily, and feel bad about stalking the other unknown half of your family line, because you know it would break her heart to learn that, despite all of the pizzas and Italian pastries and crappy jobs and associate’s degrees, you do need that in your life, whatever that is. You can’t define it, but you can feel it; there’s a hole somewhere in you that nothing has thus far even begun to fill, even that whole box of cinnamon Life you ate one time for dinner when your mother and Robbie went on a date to Bosco’s and you insisted you didn’t want to go. You don’t know what dating entails, but you’re certain it isn’t a teenage daughter gnawing on bread sticks off to the side like some pathetic street urchin in a Dickens novel.

  And then it’s infuriating, your mother’s need for you, because it feels manipulative at worst and a little creepy at best. It’s not fair that you should serve as her primary motivation for getting out of bed in the morning, especially considering that you have no idea what the hell you want from your own life, other than to get out of this crap town and figure it out elsewhere. And you’ll be doing that soon, really soon, even without stupid NYU. You’re determined you’ll still find your way to New York, the only city that matters, where Aunt Greta will tell you where to find the good Chinese joints, if not the answers to all of life’s questions. And it isn’t fair to deny other people a shot at knowing you, because what if it turns out you’re the hole in someone else’s life, the way Yllka, ever so briefly, made you feel last night? Maybe your father is suffering from the same condition as you. Maybe you’re the two jagged edges of a best friends locket, designed from the start to fit perfectly together, each side kind of meaningless and tacky without the other.

  Three miles to Yllka’s. For seventeen years you’ve been three miles from an alternate version of your life, and now you have the Google Maps route pulled up on your phone and no way to get to it.

  There are barely enough contacts saved on your phone for you to be able to scroll through, and none are people you can call for a ride without having to explain where you’re going, including Teena, who’d caught on at some point that you weren’t hanging out at the Ross because of some mystery messy-haired boy, which meant she lost interest in driving you around. There’s your mother, Mamie, Greta, and a dozen or so schoolmates with whom your friendships either have fizzled or were only circumstantial to begin with, group-work partners who paired up with you knowing that you’d do 90 percent of the assignment yourself. It’s depressing to even look at your phone as anything other than a handheld gaming device, a silent Scrabble pa
rtner. You have to play against the computer, even. You don’t even bother with Words with Friends.

  God, you can’t wait to get out of this shithole.

  Except there is Matt/Ahmet, that guy with the Kawasaki motorcycle, someone whose number you’d forgotten to delete and who would be more than happy to shuttle you back to your Albanian roots on a Japanese machine weaving through the Italian part of town. Huh. How about that.

  You call. He can’t believe you called, but he plays off his shock by coughing for a few seconds. Radiator heat, so dry, you know? He says he’ll be there in an hour, which seems, after already having waited approximately 149,000 hours, like an ungodly amount of time.

  —

  He arrives in a Civic hatchback with ridiculous rims but no ridiculous spoilers or the faux-carbon vinyl wraps wannabe dragster drivers apply to their four-cylinder Japanese automobiles. He must’ve run out of money before he got around to installing a noisemaker exhaust pipe and a decal of Calvin pissing on a Toyota. But still, he has both a motorcycle and a car, whereas you don’t even have a bicycle without a bent wheel, so either he or his parents are doing something right. On the drive he explains to you he’s a sophomore at UConn, no doubt referring to the auxiliary Waterbury campus, where students wear UCLA sweatshirts because California feels just about as far away to them as UConn’s main campus in Storrs, and you nod and say cool without asking what his major is or what he wants to be. You don’t want to give him the wrong idea, or at least more of the wrong idea than you’d already given him by calling him out of nowhere the day after he poured ice water onto your crotch. He’s been a gentleman, opening the door for you and offering to buy you Dunkin’ Donuts or a breakfast McWrap, both of which you decline, but he’s also just a ride. He is not the Albanian man you are looking for, not even an acceptable surrogate.

  “So Yllka is what, your aunt or something?” he asks in a small-talky kind of way, as if he were remarking about the rain that’s expected later in the day.

  “Something like that. It’s hard to explain,” you answer, and, gentleman that he is, he doesn’t press you to explain hard things.