Xhenet Aliu - Brass

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?