Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Elsie, Gjonni asked you a question.” Bashkim snapped his fingers in front of my face, like the customers that annoyed me the most at the Ross.

“Huh?” I said.

“Which is your room and which is the baby’s room?” Gjonni asked. “I will bring you the dresser we’re not using.”

“We were using it,” Yllka said. “I don’t know where we’ll put the towels and the washcloths now.”

“There is room in the closet for those. Elsie, which room?”

“Oh. Uh, the big one I guess, the one with the two windows.”

Bashkim and Gjonni walked off and left me standing outside with Yllka alone.

“Thanks for letting us have this place,” I said.

“It has a nice bathroom. You should use it to wash up or you will stink for work,” she answered.

I smiled and nodded, trying to remember that she was doing me a favor.

We showered, we screwed, we showered again. The water was freezing but it was sweltering that day, so standing in the shower felt like being in fresh air and being in air felt like wading. Bashkim loved my new swollen breasts, which weren’t boobs anymore, not tits, because now there was a point to them. They’d gotten a promotion. He teased them, pinched and bit them, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out. He came inside of me and it didn’t matter. Or it mattered, but it didn’t have any consequences. Then we slept. Not a nap, hard sleep. Our limbs twitched and jerked and even though we were aware of them, they didn’t wake us. It was the downstairs neighbors that did that, the bass shuffle intro of “Hot for Teacher” butting into our dreams. The one I’d been having was of a tiny, stampeding elephant that I held in the palm of my hand, its wildness adorable because it was small and didn’t pose any real threat, unlike the air mattress we slept on, which was doing actual nerve damage.

“God, this bed. I don’t think I can move my legs,” I said.

“Too bad you can always move your mouth.”

“When do you think we might get a real mattress?”

“There is nothing wrong with this.”

“It’s an air mattress that doesn’t hold air. It doesn’t do its job. That’s the definition of wrong.”

“There is air in there.”

“Not enough air. It looks like a taco when we’re in it. We’re like taco meat.”

“This is better than what I slept on most of my life.”

“Most of your life you lived in a zoo.”

His eyes turned animal. He was the elephant, suddenly, only not as adorable.

“I was just joking,” I said. “You were the one who said you lived like animals over there.”

“That was not a joke,” he said. He stood to pull his briefs back up. He’d slept with them around his feet, like stained white cotton shackles. Without his weight on the mattress, I sank farther down, almost to the floor.

“Sorry,” I said again. “But this isn’t going to work forever.”

He pulled on his socks.

“I mean, it’s okay for now. I’m not, like, huge yet. But.”

“But what?”

“But we should start to put some money aside.”

“Don’t worry about money. It’s not a problem.”

“Well, we don’t have any. Cash money, I mean. Like, the green stuff in our hands. And we’re going to have to get a lot of stuff for the baby.”

“I have money. I told you that.”

“But the kind of money we can use. Now. Or soon, anyway. Paper bills that stores will take as payment.”

“Elsie,” he said. He blew a puff of air through his nose, the warning before the stampede. “I told you.”

“I mean real money.”

“Real money? There is no such thing as fake money. Money is money.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Yes, you don’t know. Look at you. What would you know?”

I knew that was meant to hurt, and it did, but I didn’t understand why.

“Get ready for work,” Bashkim said. “If you’re so worried about money.”

“Five minutes,” I said.

“I am leaving in five minutes.”

“Three minutes,” I said.

He got up and stared down at me before walking off to take a piss that it sounded like he’d been holding on to for a while. He splashed around in the sink, and I hoped he’d save a dry spot on the towel for me. There was no point in us duking it out together in the bathroom at the same time, so I lay on my side and dragged my finger along the floor beside the air mattress.

“This floor is filthy. It looks like I dipped my finger in cake batter,” I said.

The toilet flushed.

He walked back in and looked at me, tucked his wife-beater into his pants, and grabbed his keys from the pocket of the pair he left lying on the floor like a police body-tape outline.

I stood up finally. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

“I’m leaving,” he answered.

“What? I’ll be ready in one minute. I just have to get dressed and brush my teeth.”

“I told you I was leaving in five minutes. That was five minutes ago.”

He started to walk away, and I sprang out of bed to follow.

“Are you serious?” I said. “I didn’t even get a chance to use the bathroom.”

The door was opening. He was walking through, going down the stairs, loping across the parking lot.

“Wait,” I said, but he kept going. I yanked my pantyhose up so fast that tiny holes appeared where my fingers had grabbed on to them. He thought he was teaching me a lesson, and he was, I thought: I learned that he had the patience of a gnat and that he needed to hydrate more, because I could smell the sharp tang of his piss all the way out in the kitchen. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I grabbed my purse and ran down the steps to catch up with him, but by the time I got there his parking space was empty except for a black rose of fresh oil on the ground.

I walked to the front of the building but he wasn’t waiting for me there, either, so I returned to the parking spot and stood there and waited for him to come back. I waited, and when the sun beat down too heavy and started burning my scalp I moved underneath the eave of Gjonni and Yllka’s porch. When I thought that Yllka might open the door and ask what I was doing standing there for twenty minutes when I should’ve been at work, I walked quietly up the stairs and cried into Bashkim’s side of the air mattress. It would dry long before he got home, and he wouldn’t ever have to know it happened. When that was over, I counted the change in my purse and took the rest of what I needed for bus fare from the pockets of the pants Bashkim had worn the day before. On the ride over to the Ross, I practiced mouthing I’m sorry, but my mouth didn’t seem to want to make the words, so when I walked through the back entrance into the kitchen and saw Bashkim, I just turned away and set a new carafe of decaf on to brew.

It seemed like a good sign that Mamie didn’t complain about the food we served her when we had her and Greta over for dinner. It was spaghetti with ground meat and a can of Manwich, which we called Bolognese, which I’d guessed was a favorite of hers because she’d served it at least once a week since I was old enough to eat solid food. That was just a guess, though, since I don’t think I’d ever heard her mention food in my life, other than asking how in the hell Greta and I managed to go through it so fast. It was just another thing essential for survival and yet always standing in the way of it. Since there was nothing standing in the way of her bottle of Blue Nun at my and Bashkim’s table that night, she kept mostly quiet through dinner, but when the food was gone, Mamie was suddenly ready to talk. I recognized that light in her eye, set off by the flint that sister hid underneath her blue habit.

“So where are you from again?” Mamie asked Bashkim. He looked like a kid eating for the first time at the grown-ups’ table, sitting on his hands because he ran out of napkins to shred. “What did Elsie say, Armenia or something?”