Xhenet Aliu: Brass

“What about them?” I said. “And he hasn’t promised me the world. I don’t even want the world. I don’t even like the world that much.”

“I told him, ‘Bashkim, you don’t know anything about capitalism. There is nothing wrong with just putting money in a piggy bank.’ ”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you don’t, Elsie. You two, it’s like they call it, the blind leading the blind.”

Not too blind to see the reinforced toe of your pantyhose under your sandals, lady, I wanted to say, but because I needed the job, I just repeated, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not leading Bashkim or vice versa.”

“Okay then, why do you have one foot out the door to follow him? Maybe instead you should get out to your tables,” she said, even though she was the one who sent me into the kitchen in the first place.

For the rest of the night I tried to catch Bashkim’s eye every time I walked through the kitchen, letting a plate sit in the window when I was right there to run it, asking for a fresh hamburger bun when the drippy coleslaw seeped all over the plate. “It’s fine,” he said to me, or “What are you waiting for?” Or he’d say nothing at all, wouldn’t even glance up, wouldn’t even wink an eye with a face so serious that he either meant that wink more than anything on earth or he didn’t mean it at all, it was nothing more than a twitch.

Finally I followed him into the walk-in cooler, his arms full of frozen meat. Never had a rump roast looked so much like the skinned dead creature that it was as when it was cradled in his arms.

“Hey,” I said. “We need some honey mustard out there.”

“You know where it is.”

“What’s up with you tonight? What did I do?”

“You did nothing. This isn’t about you. Not everything is about you,” he said.

“Well then what’s up with you ? Your whatever, your investment.”

He flinched when I asked it. Those goose pimples on his arm were not just from the cold.

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried about it, I’m worried about you. I don’t care about your money.”

“Then don’t worry about me at all. I will be fine. The money will be fine.”

“Jesus, I don’t care about the money! I never thought you had any to begin with. Why would I be with a line cook if I was looking for someone with money?”

“Because you like losers.”

“No,” I said, after a second.

“But I am not a loser.”

“I know,” I said. “I never said you were.”

“It will be fine, it’s not a big problem. It’s just a little, what you say, burp.”

“Hiccup.”

“What?”

“You mean hiccup, not burp .”

He looked at me long and hard, and then he said it again. “I am not a loser, Elsie.”

“I know,” I said.

“So let’s get back to work. We’re wasting time.”

“Wait. Can you just kiss me first?”

“Kissing is not what we’re paid for.”

“It’ll just take a second. Gjonni can dock it from my check.”

“Don’t be a child. This is for later, this kind of thing.”

And he didn’t kiss me. He didn’t look at me when he opened the door and left me in there alone, surely didn’t wonder why I didn’t follow him out, why I instead sat on a stack of six dozen frozen beef patties with labels that read GRADE D BUT EDIBLE. Those boxes were shredded before they were thrown into the dumpster outside, because no customer would accept Grade D, even if the package explicitly said no really, it’s fine, what grade do you think you deserve?

I tried to cry but in that cold the tears just froze and iced over my eyes. It was for the best, really, because nobody would then notice my eyes were red and swollen and have to ask me what was wrong, and that worked out perfectly since nobody was going to anyway.

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.”