Xhenet Aliu: Brass

I nodded, even though I only kind of got it.

“Good. Now pull out onto the street. Make sure you’re in first. Always start in first.”

It wasn’t graceful, but I managed to do what he said. For the first few minutes, he had to direct every move that each of my limbs made: left leg over the clutch, now press down onto it, relax your right hand, now pull the shifter to the right, now push it to the left, slower now, faster now, all acting and reacting and going against instinct. My left hand had to steer the car alone, and my bicep ached after only a few minutes of guiding it without the help of power steering. Driving the Fiero was nothing like driving my mother’s LTD, which felt passive, like it was the road that was moving while I sat still. Bashkim navigated me through streets that I’d never driven down even though I’d spent my whole life in Waterbury.

“This is so awesome,” I said, once I’d gotten used enough to the movements that Bashkim didn’t have to prompt them step by step.

“Yes, and it will be more awesome when you can drive it over twenty-five miles per hour. Always it was my dream to have an American sports car.”

I didn’t tell him that no American had ever dreamed of owning a Fiero, that at best they’d settled for it.

“Now pull into that parking lot up there on the right,” he said, guiding me to another tucked-away warehouse. “Put the shifter in neutral and turn the car off.”

After a minute he still hadn’t given me the next direction, so I turned to him and asked silently for it. The glow from the nearest streetlamp barely lit the car, but even so, I could make out the lines around Bashkim’s eyes, radiating like the beams of a sun in a child’s drawing. He smiled, and it filled in the creases around his lips. Before that night I wondered how those lines had even gotten there, when I’d never once seen him smile.

“Now come over here.” He patted his lap. “I want to teach you something else.”

I obeyed. After all, he’d gotten me this far.

For weeks Bashkim and I dated in the front seat of that Fiero. He never let me drive it again, and I took that for another act of chivalry, that he wanted to chauffeur me around, because why would I want to take it for anything else?

But eventually I started complaining about the stick shift leaving a dent in my lower back, and that I was starting to feel like one of those two-dollar whores we sometimes cruised past on Cherry Street on our way to the Burger King. Finally he caved one night, negotiated with Gjonni to work a single instead of a double, and drove us to the dozen-room Queen Anne he shared with two dozen other people. The house was like most of them at the top of Hillside Avenue, all clapboards and gables and places for Rapunzel to let down her hair, but nobody thought to call them mansions anymore, not since the brass executives who used to live there fled down to Georgia and the maids moved into the places they used to clean.

“Like 90210, right?” Bashkim said.

“Yeah, it’s, you know, big,” I said. And it was, only those epic ceilings you couldn’t reach even with a step stool just made extra room for all the sadness, all those lace curtains draped over foyer windows like widows’ veils. It was a house built for pipe tobacco that reeked instead of Marlboro Reds.

“It needs soap and water,” Bashkim said, looking at the three women leaning against a banister. It was obvious they didn’t speak English, but they knew they were being accused of something, and they stared at me like I was the one who’d tattled. They scattered when we walked past but came back together when we closed the door to Bashkim’s room behind us. Even if I didn’t understand any of the words they used, I understood perfectly well what they were saying. Other than their outdated denim and the babushka that the oldest one among them wore, they were just the same as the girls back at Crosby High.

“They don’t like me,” I said to Bashkim.

“They don’t like nobody, not even their husbands,” he said.

“Do you like me?”

“I love you,” he said, and it was a good thing there was a doorframe to lean against, because hearing him say that almost took me down. Bashkim had misused words with me before, like blow work when he meant blow job, but then again, I had been promoted from car girlfriend to bedroom girlfriend, so I thought: Well, maybe he means it?

So I said to him—whispered, really—“I love you, too,” and he answered in Albanian, a word I never learned the meaning of but now assume meant something along the lines of oops .

There were tiny thumbtack holes all over the walls in Bashkim’s room, little scars where the snapshots of his wife had obviously been the day before. I probably should’ve chosen to think of it as courtesy that Bashkim had shoved them all into a drawer with his underwear and tube socks, but instead it made me feel like one of those two-dollar whores down on Cherry Street all over again, which even my skank stretch jeans with the lace panels up and down the legs didn’t make me do. Having something to hide made it seem like we were doing something wrong, when up until that point I was feeling like everything was pretty damn right.

“What was up here?” I asked.

“Up where?”

“On the wall. What was hanging? All the holes. Looks like you had pictures tacked up.”

“There is nothing,” he said and went back to work on me, which took so much effort on the air mattress that we finally just finished off on the floor.

But once he was done, I went back to thinking about the pictures that should’ve been hanging. A lady in a babushka and no smile, like the lady outside Bashkim’s door. A lady dressed in gray even on her wedding day.

“What’s the matter with you today?” Bashkim asked, after I passed on a cigarette and ignored him jabbing his thumb into my armpit. He flirted like a kindergartner, jabbing and poking and running away.

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said.

“Liar,” he said.

“It’s just.”

Another thumb in the pit. “Spit it out, dum-dum,” he said.

“It’s just what’s the story with your wife?”

“Ach,” Bashkim said. He swung around and pulled up his BVDs, but I grabbed on to his arm before he could put on his trousers. I planted my face into his back, which was hot and full of pimples that I had never noticed before.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

“I told you not to ask about my wife.”

“We have to talk about it sometime,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m lying here naked in your room and you’re telling me that you love me and you’re going to have to leave me someday.”

“I am not leaving anything ever anymore,” he said. He pulled away, but he dropped his pants back on the floor and sat down on the mattress, and we sat there looking at our own useless limbs.

“Don’t worry about Agnes,” he said, finally. It was the first time he’d spoken her name aloud to me, and even though I was the one who brought it up, I wanted him to take it back.

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I know how this is going to end.”

“You don’t know nothing. She is not leaving Albania and I am not going back. What does that sound like to you?”

“It doesn’t sound like anything. It sounds like exactly how things are right now.”

“And that is not enough? You want more?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but I did know: of course it wasn’t enough. I still needed a car and a ticket out of my mother’s house and an epic sort of love you can get tattooed across your forearm without thinking twice about it.

“You want more?” he asked again, this time a little disgusted, and I was about to change my mind and tell him, No, of course not, this is all I need, because I was afraid that he would take even that away. But then he said, “She does not want more. She wants nothing,” and I saw that the disgust wasn’t directed at me, and I felt so much relief that I had to smile, even though I knew that wasn’t appropriate, like laughing at a funeral.