The Parking Lot Attendant

by Nafkote Tamirat

  “Do you have any children—”

  I could tell he wanted to give Ayale a title, at least the traditional Ato, but Ayale laughed too hard to let him finish.

  “Everyone calls me Ayale. I don’t think I could take a sudden surge in respectability; it might kill me.”

  Ayale smiled as my father finally, almost grudgingly, chuckled.

  “I don’t have any children. Luckily, it’s only too late for us men when we die, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “I’ve always wanted a daughter…”Ayale trailed off. I had never heard anyone sound wistful before. He recovered quickly.

  “I’ll see you both soon?”

  My father nodded, and I kissed Ayale on both cheeks before he drove off, coming to a halt at the corner stop sign.

  “Had you met him before?” I asked my father.

  “Only heard of him.”

  His tone was abrupt, forbidding further comment. As he walked behind me along the hallway, I kept turning to look at him, trying to slow down the military pace he’d set, but the obscurity never left his features, and his insistent speed never lessened. With the door closed behind us, he put on the kettle, still not looking at me.

  “Do you see my khakis on the back of the chair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take the belt off.”

  I didn’t understand. I handed it to him. It was black leather and surprisingly heavy.

  “I’m going to beat you.”

  The announcement sounded mislaid in the stuffiness of the room. I stared at him, confused, as he turned on the fan. It didn’t help.

  “But … why?”

  “You were late coming home. You didn’t call to tell me where you were. I’ve been worried sick. I went over to the school. I went to all the hospitals that I could think of. I bet you didn’t even think about me, not once. You must have passed so many pay phones. You always remember to call. You could have asked Ayale. He’s the kind that has a cell phone.”

  Each sentence was a right hook to my gut; later, I was surprised to not find any bruises.

  “I’m sorry! It’s the first time! I won’t do it again!”

  It seems silly now that I was so scared, hardly able to speak for the tears that were choking me. After all, he wasn’t wrong: these were the rules, and the rules had been broken. I was guilty; I had to suffer the consequences. I can only offer up the explanation that he had never told me what punishment would ensue from going against his word. I had simply always done as told, a gag reflex, a lack of imagination.

  He allowed me to finish my babbling and turned the kettle off when it began to whine its dirge of completion. He poured himself a mug of tea and set it on the countertop. When I had tired myself out into whimpering, he told me to pull down my jeans. I did. He told me to lean against the couch, which served as the dividing line between the living room and the kitchen. I did. In that eternal moment between the first downstroke of the belt and the crack-snap sound it made upon contact with my skin, I closed my eyes. When I screamed, I opened them and saw that his mug was no longer steaming; I remember thinking it was the fastest-cooling tea I had ever seen.

  Five strokes later, he was done. He told me to pull up my jeans and go to the bathroom, where I discovered that I had wet myself. I threw my clothing on the floor and then took a long bath, the kind I used to take when I lived with my mother. Unlike my father, she didn’t care or perhaps didn’t understand the concepts of heating bills and water conservation. He didn’t knock on the door or shout from the kitchen to get out before I melted all my skin off, like he usually did. I heard nothing when I finally slunk into my room to put on my pajamas.

  When I came back out, he was watching television. Without turning, he said that my portion of macaroni and cheese was still hot if I wanted it, and I realized that I was ravenous. He reached out for his interminable tea, and I saw that he was having trouble grasping the handle, his hands shaking. I passed the mug to him. He took it, still not turning, and I helped myself. This was before restaurants saw macaroni and cheese as something to specialize in, charging ridiculous prices because it was covered with bread crumbs, bacon, gorgonzola-wrapped apple slices, diamond flecks, mother-of-pearl crustaceans. Real macaroni and cheese will always come from a blue-and-yellow box, with a separate packet of bright orange to be squeezed onto the tubes of pasta, a fluorescent mayonnaise. When I had finished, he stopped me before I went to my room.

  “Don’t ever make me do that again.”

  I nodded.

  ON THE SUBJECT OF THE RIGHT OF KINGS

  I couldn’t make out if Ayale was extraordinarily wealthy or just putting on a front of extraordinary wealth. He didn’t seem to own a credit card; when clients asked for the nearest ATM, he’d hesitate before pointing in the direction with the most stores. It was as if he’d never been inside a bank. He used cash exclusively, pulling out bills from rubber-banded rolls of hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, always with a bemused smile, as if he, too, was puzzled by these hidden centers of abundance.

  He often overestimated how much was needed for an excursion. He’d sometimes hand me two fifties and a five for the movies, and if I protested, he’d murmur, For popcorn, as if I might be asked to replenish Eastern Europe’s supply. He hated it when people tried to pay him back.

  Ayale’s parking lot was not the largest in Boston. The maximum legal capacity of forty cars had been painted onto two gigantic signs by the entrance, so there could be no room for ambiguity and, thus, for mistakes. What was not mentioned was that these forty cars could fit into their designated forty spaces only if they were midsize sedans or smaller. Anything bigger, and the number dropped significantly.

  I would sometimes happen upon Ayale, in mid-whisper, with one or more of the other attendants, who would scatter upon my arrival. When I asked what was going on, he would gravely explain that they had been discussing my beauty and were put to shame by its unexpected appearance in their sordid midst. While I smirked, he would quiz me on what I had read in that day’s Globe.

  Ayale’s supervision became crucial to the way I saw the world. I still find myself quoting from articles, debates, and essays that were explained, contested, or provided by him. Fiction was the only area in which he faltered, claiming that it existed for the privileged alone, those who were so wealthy that they could erect glass walls to shut out reality, to reflect back upon them their own smooth exteriors, allowing them to concoct peoples, situations, and places that were more to their liking. But couldn’t reality itself be a collective fiction? I earnestly asked. Ayale just as earnestly noted that such observations were best shared with the other hippies at school, exclusively.

  At the beginning, Ayale hid his insults behind a smoke screen of funny. My father once noted that if Ayale took the time to find friends closer to his own level of intelligence, he’d soon be left with no one; they’d ditch him after the first round of verbal offenses, too well concealed to wound any of his usual minions. Upon seeing my expression, my father kindly added that he was just talking about the other attendants—one could hardly call me a friend. This only made it worse.

  For the first few months of our acquaintanceship, I tried to space out my visits to Ayale’s lot; I was mortified lest he suspect that I actively looked forward to his company. Everyone knew what happened to people who clung too hard: they were left with nothing. Unasked, I would provide reasons for my being in the area: a doctor’s appointment, the only dry cleaner my father trusted, a friend who’d canceled at the last minute, yet another school report on Trinity Church (“Make sure you include how the whole thing’s a French plot to get rid of America,” rasped one parking lot client, who wouldn’t leave until she’d seen that I’d written down her exact words). He accepted each and every one of these explanations, immediately drawing me into whatever article, book, or conversation he’d been engrossed in before my arrival. After seeing how he barely heard my excuses—I was there because I was supposed to be�
��I stopped saying anything. I simply started on my homework in the booth or in his unlocked car, waiting for him to take notice of my presence.

  If it was a slow day, he’d let me drive the expensive cars around the lot. I am a skittish driver, sweaty and sure of death behind the wheel, a fear that intensified after an attendant from across town collided with a brick wall in his own lot. Ayale assured me the attendant had been prone to drinking, but I felt far from comforted as I pulled off shaky three-point turns in my first Mercedes. We agreed that Jaguars were uncomfortable. It was more that I agreed with him.

  Ayale’s preferred eating style was to wolf down as much as possible with as large a group as could be mustered. He ate alone only when hunger overtook his ability to find someone with whom to satiate it; solitary consumption made food taste like something shameful. He had a highly developed palate for junk food but was also an exacting connoisseur of quality, pinpointing when the meat wasn’t the right grade or the lettuce in his Hilltop Steakhouse salad was on the verge of wilting. This was perhaps linked to his formidable sense of smell; some mocked him for his fussiness, even in the lot, hardly a model of cleanliness. What they failed to see was that Ayale’s nose picked up not on unpleasant smells but, rather, unexpected ones. When he sniffed out the putrid banana at the bottom of Tadele’s gym bag, hidden under a mountain of sweaty boxing gear, this was less due to distaste and more to his awareness that something was present which should not have been. Ayale ordered Tadele to dump out his bag’s contents right then, to the delight of the small audience of men who were as much staples of the lot as the cars themselves. I barely smiled, eyes fixed on the humiliation in Tadele’s face. Ayale’s silent glare seemed to indicate that, like the banana, something had gone bad in Tadele himself. The two stayed locked in the booth for an hour; then Tadele left, and I never saw him again.

  Ayale would often stand in the street as his attendants drove around the lot, directing them with shouted commands and large gestures as they assembled themselves into angled horizontals and verticals, ignoring the white lines intended to provide simple but firm guidance for vehicle placement. I didn’t understand—surely this was the opposite of what they were meant to do?—but didn’t ask. Not knowing means you don’t belong.

  Ayale liked giving presents when presents weren’t expected. Christmas was a wash, but if he saw a sweater that matched the color of your eyes, it was yours.

  He was able to identify 100 percent Italian wool, on sight. I was given to understand that he had a closet full of unworn elegance, all of it awaiting the day sartorial splendor would be required. Each Sunday was dedicated to trying on selected items, in order to confirm their fit and suitability. The solemnity with which this ceremony was conducted seemed no less than that which accompanied the preparation of Holy Communion. Ayale may have been a holier man than anyone realized, although his gods and laws were unknown to the rest of us.

  I once heard a woman’s testimonial about visiting a prison in Ethiopia immediately after the Red Terror. She described the horrid conditions, the boredom that drove the young guards to unpredictable violence, how profoundly her heart went out to those who had spent the prime of their lives within those walls. She mentioned how easy it was to identify the sons and relations of the former emperor. According to her, the blood of Haile Selassie set these individuals apart so that something, perhaps the knowledge of being wronged, of deserving better, emanated from their bodies. Even mired in that squalor, they could never be mistaken for just another prisoner. She called it “an invisible but blazing coat of arms, imprinted upon the very matter of their bodies.”

  At the time, I wanted to strangle her: another white woman using Ethiopia to measure the length and strength of her heartstrings. I don’t feel that way anymore. I’ve realized that since meeting Ayale, I, too, have used Ethiopia and my Ethiopianness to measure my worth, to feel that I had proof of being different from or better than others. At least that woman did something. She got herself to a place that must have been as much unlike her home as anything else, looked at death with both eyes open, and lived to tell the tale. I just puffed myself up with borrowed grandeur.

  About a year after meeting Ayale, I was lying in bed and got to thinking about her again. I was sifting through what I remembered from her talk when I shot up and sat for a long time, looking at nothing. Was it all just romantic fancy? Could royalty be distinguished by the imperceptible? Had anyone else thought about this? Had everyone else thought about this? Was I the sole person who hadn’t grasped how natural our gravitation toward Ayale was, marked as he was by the sign of the emperor, bestowed upon those whom God Himself has elected? I lay back. This was absurd; boredom and adolescence were loosening my grip on reality. I didn’t even believe in God.

  But did my believing in something render it true? Doesn’t the truth remain the truth, regardless of what I think?

  I realized that be it sooner, be it later, Ayale was liable to drive me out of my goddamn mind.

  ON THE SUBJECT OF HOW MY FATHER AND I CAME TO LEARN ABOUT B—

  Two streets over from our apartment, there lived a monk in a wretched house that seemed forgotten by the Boston Housing Authority and civilization itself. It had been blue in better days but was now filthy white, with navy patches that I sometimes thought were where the house was finally and irrevocably losing feeling. It was a one-story, with a porch that had become the resting place for the tops of the overgrown weeds in the yard. Half of the stairs leading up to the porch were missing something which was crucial to the essential nature of being a stair, and one of the banisters had been removed.

  We’d assumed that no one could possibly be living in such a wreck. There were never any lights on—at least, none that were visible from the outside—and we’d yet to see someone enter or exit. My father believed it condemned: whatever enigma had made the previous owners leave in such a hurry had clearly required immediate evacuation. I didn’t like the look or feel of the place. I closed my eyes and held my breath when we passed it in the car, something I had never done anywhere else, even when passing a cemetery. I liked cemeteries when the library was closed and I wanted a quiet place to read. I didn’t like cemeteries when a Baptist funeral party had gotten there first.

  Two Sundays after I’d met Ayale, my father decided that we should go to church. These holy impulses came upon him about twice a year. He had explained to me, carefully, that he believed in God, of course he did, but he didn’t believe in churchgoing, at least not for himself.

  “Too much hypocrisy. Most of the people you see there every Sunday are the worst sinners that you’ll ever meet, you mark my words.”

  I tried to believe in God when I was a child but soon gave up. On the scant Sundays that church was suggested, I would shrug into one of my dresses, which my father kept impeccably ironed. We would arrive and instantly separate, since men and women sit apart from each other in the Ethiopian Orthodox church, a system I’d initially believed he’d orchestrated so that he wouldn’t have to sit with me. I’d choose a seat in the farthest-back row (the church was never full, as people had overnight shifts at the parking lot, the twenty-four-hour Dunkin’ Donuts, the 7-Eleven) and promptly fall asleep. I would be nudged awake by one of the unbearable altar boys, who would glare as he shook his velvet umbrella for a donation. I would fork over the dollar with which my father had entrusted me before going to his side of the church (and it was always “his side” for me, never “the men’s side”), the boy in question would look disgusted, I would discreetly check for drool.

  On this particular Sunday, as I tried to find a comfortable spot in my empty pew, the priest went up to the lectern and said a few words about God, the importance of attending church, and the importance of giving money to the church even if one couldn’t attend. (I sleepily wondered if he’d had to hold himself back from saying that giving money would be preferable to empty-handed attendance.) Then the priest (who bore the cross of a heavy Oromo accent and a mostly Amhara congregation) ann
ounced that today’s sermon would be given by a young monk, newly arrived from Jerusalem. A murmur arose from a group of women in front of me. I tried to sit up as the monk took the priest’s place. He thanked the priest, the congregation, the walls, for their indulgence of a poor man who had so little to offer by way of enlightenment. I was drifting off again when he finally began.

  It wasn’t so much that he had new information to offer as that he was funny, even while discussing the Bible, a defiantly uncomical text. True, the funniest parts seemed unintentional, but one still had to give points for energy. His was a pleasantly deep voice, a far cry from the priest’s uncertain stutter, and when he had finished, my father turned and raised his eyebrows at me.

  As usual, we didn’t stay for the food that the women had prepared, and as we walked toward our car, we heard footsteps behind us. Turning, we saw the monk, attempting to run but failing, apparently because no one had ever taught him how to do so. He appeared to be mimicking the motions of a rabbit on a treadmill.

  “Good morning!”

  He beamed as he shook hands with first my father and then me. We mumbled our replies, unused to speaking to other people. My father thought to thank him for his sermon. He waved this away with an embarrassed laugh.

  “I’m sure it’s clear that I have no learning. My family was too poor to put my brothers and me through school, and when my mother died, we all had to separate and find our own ways of moving ahead in the world. I haven’t seen anyone from my family since I was a child.”