Xhenet Aliu - Brass

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what kept her waking up in the morning to go to dead-end jobs and sign up for the classes from which she’d previously withdrawn two or three times.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 partner. 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.

The ride to Yllka’s is mercifully and maddeningly short: mercifully because what are you supposed to say to Ahmet other than thank you or no thank you a dozen times, and maddeningly because really? That’s it? Yllka—and the rest of the Hasanis, as far as you know—has seriously been ten minutes with traffic from you all this time?

“So, should I come up, then, or just wait?” Ahmet asks.

“Um, could you just, like, wait outside? Or, like, I could text you when I’m done?” you say, knowing that all he’ll hear is that you’ll be in contact again and thus of course will agree. For someone with no experience with boys, you’re surprised at how easily you’re able to navigate this whole Ahmet situation. Who even needs to read all those Cosmo advice columns instructing women on how to keep a man under your thumb, in between all the other Cosmo advice columns instructing women on how to keep the man from seeking out other younger, hotter thumbs? You aren’t even wearing a push-up bra or terrifying fuck-me pumps and yet there’s Ahmet, glancing back at you on the walk to his car, pretending the sun is in his eyes and he can’t see you.

But it isn’t only eager young men on whom you can cast a spell, you see when Yllka flings open the door before you can even tap the knocker a second time.

“Oh, it’s you!” she declares, full exclamation-mark declares, as if she’s waited for you all night and yet was convinced you wouldn’t really come. And suddenly you wonder, once again, if you should have, if this whole thing is going to prove to be a horrible mistake. There’s a good chance this woman is a nutjob who wants to sell you out to some underground network of skeezy Albanians, according to the rumors you’ve heard. You’ve heard these people marry off their daughters at age fourteen, or if the daughters refuse, human-traffic them to fat sweaty businessmen in industrial parks off the highway. In an hour you might find yourself in a Chevy Suburban with some pork-fingered Budweiser executive with a secret penchant for girls not much older than his own chubby, spoiled children.

Yllka doesn’t look like a pimp, though. Pimps probably wouldn’t cry tears of joy at the sight of you the way that Yllka does. She grabs you and pulls you to her bosom—it can only be called a bosom when it’s so in-your-face like that—and tells you to come in, but you can’t move, and in fact can hardly breathe, with her holding on to you so tightly. Eventually she releases her arms and steers you by the shoulders into the apartment, the first floor of a triple-decker a lot like the one you live in with your mother, if only because half the people in Waterbury live in triple-deckers that are essentially identical to the one you live in with your mother. Yllka’s is spotless, though, not a speck of dust anywhere, which is particularly notable since nothing in there appears to be any less than sixty years old, from the china to the doilies to a Frigidaire that’s possibly one model year past icebox. There are so many crystal and porcelain knickknacks lined up on the shelves that if you squint your eyes it all melts together into some ornate wallpaper, and behind all of that stuff is actual ornate wallpaper, the kind you’d seen at elementary school birthday parties thrown by kids being raised by their off-the-boat grandparents. Even the functional stuff on the dining table is some kind of knick-knack-paddy-whackery: the salt and pepper shakers are doves, the napkin holders are brass trumpets, the pot holders are the same angel’s wings that Mamie has in her kitchen, which is surprising to you since you assume that Yllka, like most of the Albanian kids at school, is a Muslim, while Mamie is a Catholic who’d been reborn somewhere between her fourth and fifth steps in AA.