Xhenet Aliu - Brass

I looked at Bashkim and did my best to smile.

“I didn’t know people were coming over,” I said.

“It’s friends,” he said. His smile was distorted behind a bottle of Heineken, so many empties scattered on the table that the light in the room was tinted green, the way it looks when a storm is coming. “I wanted them to meet the mother of my child.”

One of the men held a bottle to the ceiling. Cameras were pulled from nowhere. Pictures were snapped.

“Të lindtënjëdjalë,” he said, and the others followed. Të lindtënjëdjalë, they said, not really in unison, so it circled the room like some weird school chorus round.

“It means, ‘May a son be born,’ ” Yllka said. She was standing beside me, and I noticed then for the first time the women seated in the living room, presumably the wives of the men in the kitchen, a bowl of potato chips towering untouched in the center of the coffee table. They stared at me with eyes that were bored and vicious at once.

“Go introduce yourself to the girls. Yllka, go introduce Elsie,” Gjonni said.

It was a den of lions in there. Except for an old lady in a babushka, they had thick manes hairsprayed around their hungry faces, and their noses twitched as I got closer. I stared at Bashkim, but he wouldn’t even look over. He was concentrating on the playing cards splayed in his hand, wearing a poker face that could run Atlantic City.

“I was actually just on my way out,” I said.

“Go on, go on,” Gjonni said.

Yllka sighed. She pulled the money from my arms, ironed it smooth with her hands, and folded the wad neatly into my pocket. “Come,” she said and pulled me into the living room. It looked like the women had gotten palms full of money before, too, and had spent it all at Kay Jewelers. There were gold bands wrapped around their index fingers and thin gold hoops hanging from their lobes. The old lady wore a gold plate over her right front tooth, which I could see because her lip was curled back into something that was not a smile.

“This is Elsie,” Yllka said. They nodded and stared at my stomach. I recognized the youngest one in the room, a girl maybe my age, from the Ross. She sometimes stood in the lobby for an hour at a time trying to pluck a stuffed toy with a metal claw for twenty-five cents a shot, even though she had to have known that those things were wedged so tight that she’d have been lucky to grab some fuzzy dice with a pair of pliers. A New Kids on the Block pin was fastened to her denim jacket, not ironically as far as I could tell.

Yllka nudged me and started pointing at the women. “This is Klarita, Lindita, Dardata,” she said, and I remembered that I heard the young one, Dardata, called Dottie by her friends in the parking lot. After that the names fell apart into clumsy syllables that I’d never remember, and I figured it wouldn’t be worth trying, since chances were slim they’d be inviting me over for Tupperware dems anytime soon. When the introductions were over, the golden-toothed woman rose from her seat and took hold of my belly with both hands, keeping her eyes on me but cocking her head to aim whatever she was saying at the rest of them.

“Vajzë,” the lady said.

“She thinks she knows what kind of baby everybody is going to have, even though she’s wrong half the time,” Dardata said.

“She doesn’t think she knows, she tries to make the baby whatever she wants it to be. If she likes you she says boy, if she doesn’t she says girl,” Yllka said.

“What does she want me to have?” I asked.

“A girl,” said Yllka.

I tried my best to smile and waved the smoke snaking in from the kitchen away from my eyes so I could pretend that was why they were glazed over.

“I wish Bashkim would’ve told me that you were coming over,” I said. “I could’ve been prepared.”

“What’s there to prepare? We got chips.” Dardata waved her hand over the coffee table like a model on The Price Is Right . “It’s like a king’s spread.”

“Just prepare,” I said.

“You’d think he’d tell his wife those things, right? Oh, wait, but you’re not his wife…”

“She’s joking,” Yllka said and said something to Dardata that sounded more like a warning than a joke.

Our eyes moved in circles around the room. Yllka said something to the woman in the recliner, and the woman reluctantly stood up and shuffled over to the arm of the couch, where she sat on one cheek and resumed a blank stare. “Sit,” Yllka told me, and I didn’t argue about it.

“Thanks,” I said. “My dogs are barking.”

“What?” Dardata said. “What dogs? I don’t hear any dogs.”

“It’s just an expression. When your feet are tired, your dogs are barking.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Feet don’t make sound.”

“It’s just a saying,” I said.

“It still doesn’t make sense. No wonder half of us never learn English. It’s full of nonsense.”

“Every language has expressions that don’t make sense,” Yllka said. “Mos më shit pordhë.”

Dardata rolled her eyes, and a couple other women covered their mouths as if holding back a cough.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“ ‘Don’t sell me farts,’ ” Yllka said. “In other words, ‘Don’t mess with me.’ ”

I pitied the soul who ever dared to sell Yllka farts.

Dardata began looping her hair around a finger. “So, are you having a boy or a girl?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Can’t they tell yet? Aren’t you going to find out?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said.

“Don’t find out,” Yllka said. “It’s bad luck to know.”

“How is it bad luck? It just gives you time to get ready. So you know what color things to buy,” Dardata said.

“Fine, not bad luck, just bad. Some people might stop caring if they found out the baby wasn’t what they wanted,” Yllka said. She looked into the kitchen, straight at Bashkim, but we didn’t exist anymore to the men out there. They pulled on bottles of Heineken as if they contained mothers’ milk and kept backup cigarettes behind their ears, the rest of the loosies scattered across the table to use as poker chips. Bashkim was ahead by at least a pack.

“They won’t stop caring altogether,” Dardata said. “Even men know not everybody can have a boy.”

“We don’t really care about that kind of thing,” I said.

Yllka cocked her head at me. “ ‘We’ don’t, or you don’t?”

“We,” I said. “It’s not something we talk about.”

Yllka folded her arms and leaned against the wall. “Of course it doesn’t matter one way or another. Mothers know that.”

A woman on the sofa reached for a potato chip. The rest just sat there and looked at us, like they were watching a foreign movie without subtitles. Yllka said something to them in Albanian, and they leaned back and nodded and kept watching.

“Well, how much longer before we all find out?” Dardata asked.

“Huh?” I said.

“How far along are you? How long before we know if it’s a boy or girl?”

“Oh,” I said. “I think about four or five months.”

“You think?” Dardata said. “What does the doctor say?”

It was too hot in that room. No air. The windows had been painted shut, and the ceiling fan just recycled our own breath back down into our lungs.

“I haven’t been to the doctor yet,” I said.

Everyone seemed to understand that one. The women got more quiet, their heads shaking like they’d caught some tic from whatever was in the drinking water.

“What? Why not?” Dardata said.

“Nothing’s gone wrong,” I said.

“You’re not supposed to wait for something to go wrong. You go to the doctor to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I haven’t even had a kid and I know that.”