My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  “I think she’s pretty cracked.”

  “Cracks get mended,” said Lula.

  “Some do, some don’t,” Zeke said.

  “Now you sound like me,” Lula said.

  That night, when Mister Stanley asked how Zeke was, Lula told him he’d gotten a postcard from his mother.

  “What did it say?”

  “It said maybe Zeke would go to college out West, where she is.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Mister Stanley.

  “That’s what Zeke said,” said Lula.

  “Good.” Without turning to face Lula, Mister Stanley glided from the refrigerator to the window and stared into the darkness.

  After a while he said, “You know, there are some pictures one really wishes did not exist in one’s head. The problem is, they crowd out all the other pictures, the good pictures, the memories from when one was young and happy. Or anyway, from when one was young. So one must have been happy. Do you know that Ginger taught second grade and, though I begged her not to, she quit to take care of Zeke? Do you know that Ginger used to be a beautiful, caring person?”

  Lula shook her head. She didn’t ask what Mister Stanley’s mental pictures were, the good ones or the bad. She thought of Zeke’s lip quivering when he’d tried to look like his mother, and of him saying he missed a feeling from before his mother got sick.

  She said, “Young doesn’t always mean happy.”

  Mister Stanley said, “One forgets sometimes. Thank you. Good night, Lula.”

  The next morning, the black Lexus pulled up to the curb. Partly from nervousness and partly from superstition, Lula ran through a series of disappointing scenarios, beginning with it being some other Lexus—unlikely!—and progressing through the scene in which Alvo waited in the car while Hoodie and Leather Jacket, Guri and Genti, came in and retrieved the gun.

  Alvo and the G-Men ambled up the path. Lula straightened her sweater and skirt. She’d been putting on makeup since the first time they came. She ran downstairs, then waited to open the door until they rang three times. Hoodie and Leather Jacket shook her hand. Alvo gave her a brotherly kiss on both cheeks. He smelled like smoke and beach sand.

  She said, “Can I get you guys coffee?”

  The other two watched Alvo nod.

  “Please,” she said. “No smoking this time.”

  “We just smoked in the car,” said Hoodie.

  Lula took her time in the kitchen brewing the muddy coffee. They thanked her, then Leather Jacket said, “No one here smokes? No one in this house eats or sleeps or breathes or fucks? Or farts?”

  Lula said, “They eat and sleep and breathe. No, wait. I don’t know if the boss eats.”

  “What’s their problem?” asked Hoodie.

  “Shell-shocked. Before she left, the mom tried to poison them.” Why had Lula said that? Because the true story of their loneliness, of Ginger’s housewifely discontent shading into a mentally ill obsession with dirt, made the Larches seem even sadder and more pitiful than they were.

  “No shit? What with?” asked Leather Jacket.

  “Dishwashing liquid,” Lula improvised.

  “Stomach ache,” Hoodie said. “Not fatal.”

  Alvo regarded his cup. “Maybe we should feed the coffee to the dog first.”

  “There is no dog,” said Lula.

  “Is the dog dead too?” said Alvo.

  “I don’t think there was a dog,” said Lula.

  “We know there’s no dog,” said Alvo. Had he factored that information in when he’d sneaked into the house? Or was he simply remarking that he’d noticed there was no dog?

  Lula said, “You guys want your gun back?”

  Alvo said, “Little Sister, we are not here about the gun. The truth is, we worry that you don’t get out of the house enough.”

  Did she look pale? Tired? Sick? She needed to check herself out in the mirror.

  Alvo said, “Because we are family, practically cousins of your Cousin George, we’ve come to take you for a ride, so you can breathe the fresh air.”

  Lula loved how he talked.

  Hoodie said, “The fresh New Jersey air. You’re a comedian, boss.”

  Lula said, “Is this the part where I wake up tomorrow morning in some sheik’s harem in Dubai?” How could she joke about such things with Dunia out there, lost?

  Ha ha, the three men laughed. Then Alvo asked Lula, “Is something wrong?”

  Lula said, “I have this friend—”

  “Those sheiks want twelve-year-old virgins,” said Hoodie. “Little Sister is overqualified.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Lula.

  “Shut up, shithead,” Alvo said. “Come on, Lula. We’ve got errands. Business. Come for the ride.”

  What girl wasn’t a sucker for male business errands? Not the former little girl whose papa had taken her into the homes of tribal warlords up north from whom he’d bought vintage muskets. Not the former teenager whose boyfriend had brought her to pick up an ounce of dirt weed he cut with wild parsley to resell at the bunker-field raves. It was pleasant to tag along, hardly noticed but there, subtly raising the temperature with your female physical presence.

  She said, “I need to be back before Zeke gets home.”

  Hoodie looked exasperated. “You think we have all day for joyrides?”

  They had places to go, people to see. Important things to do besides chauffeuring some loser Albanian nanny around northern New Jersey. But if they weren’t kidnapping her, then what? That Alvo might want to spend time with her was too much to hope for.

  “Let me get my coat,” she said.

  “Don’t leave any notes,” said Hoodie. “And we’ll need to take your SIM card.”

  Lula knew he was kidding. Still, closing the door to her room, she had the sickening feeling she would never see it again. When you prepare for a journey, her granny used to say, prepare for death. What gloomy people she came from! No wonder her glass was half empty. But what if Zeke and Mister Stanley came home to find her gone? They would think it was their special curse. Or just something women did. Maybe Lula too had vanished in search of greater whiteness. In this case, the white sands of the emirates.

  Hoodie paced as she took the coffee cups into the kitchen and washed them. Another mistake. In hiding the traces of her secret life, she had destroyed precious DNA evidence that might help the authorities find her. Get a grip, Lula told herself. Three friends of her Cousin George’s were taking her out in a Lexus.

  Leather Jacket and Hoodie lunged for the doorknob, but Alvo said, “After you.” There was a pile-up, almost a scuffle, as the two guys stepped back and let Lula, then Alvo, through.

  “Albanian cavemen,” muttered Alvo. As Lula scrabbled in her purse, searching for her keys, Hoodie patrolled the front walk until Alvo said, “Cut that shit out,” and Hoodie waited under the mulberry tree, where Leather Jacket joined him.

  Alvo said, “Neanderthals. They still think women should follow five paces behind. Like my granny, rest in peace. Fifty years of eating my grandpa’s dust.”

  “My granny too,” said Lula. “My keys are in here somewhere.” Did Alvo wonder why she was bothering to lock the door when guys like him could stroll in and shower whenever they wanted?

  “Our friend Spiro,” said Alvo, “he finds this high-powered Albanian girl, Columbia B-School graduate, no one believes such a smart girl would marry Spiro. But women are desperate, I guess. They get engaged, fly up to meet his family in Toronto, and he asks her if she could walk into the house behind him. Just this once. So this girl gets behind Spiro and takes off her nine-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahniks and smashes the high heel into his skull so hard he bled like a goat.”

  “I guess that ended the engagement,” Lula said.

  “They’re married! They hold hands now. They both work on Wall Street. The modern Albanian couple. My granny should have done that. She didn’t have the right shoes.”

  “I got the keys!” sang out Lula. Alvo was carefu
l to walk beside her and not hurry ahead, a positive sign of reconstructed Balkan male behavior. That Lula should even register—and appreciate—this was depressing. But comforting, in a way. She liked being with someone who knew what it was like to watch your genius granny tag after your birdbrain grandpa. It was so hard to live among strangers with whom you shared no history, no knowledge of a way of life that went back and back.

  Halfway to the car, Alvo put out his arm. “Let them get in first.”

  “In case the car blows up?”

  Alvo’s smile was all tolerance at her failure to appreciate his gesture of macho courtesy, making sure the vehicle was warmed up for the lady. Beneath the grin was a question. Why was Lula so jumpy? Lula’s smile said, No reason. Really, no reason at all!

  Alvo opened the door for her, and Lula slipped inside. On the dashboard was a TV screen, and as Leather Jacket left the curb, a blinking violet cursor imitated everything they did. Albanian hip-hop boomed out of the speakers.

  “What group is that?” asked Lula.

  “Keep It Bloody,” said Hoodie. “You know them?”

  “Sort of,” Lula said. Regardless of the language, it was always the same guys yelling about how tough they were. The difference was the bitches whose asses these guys were going to kick were Serbs.

  “Sort of?” said Hoodie. “Either you know them or you don’t.”

  “Let it go, dumbass,” said Alvo.

  Lula said, “A bunch of guys driving a Lexus with black windows, and you play this music, this loud? How often do you get pulled over?”

  Alvo said, “Good question. I like how this girl thinks.”

  Leather Jacket said, “Never. New Jersey’s finest know better than to fuck with us.” He took the prettiest streets, past mansions with white pillars and brick facades veined with dead ivy. They floated so high above the road they could have been in a balloon. Lula touched a button, and her window slid down to admit a gust of chill air, perfumed with leaf mold.

  Leather Jacket pulled into a strip mall and parked in front of a supermarket with hand-lettered signs in the window.

  “Need anything?” said Alvo.

  “No, thank you,” Lula said.

  “Want to come in?” Alvo asked.

  As Lula and Alvo crossed the parking lot, she felt buoyed by an updraft of something like exultation. Everything seemed natural, effortless, as if she and Alvo were a couple, young, in love, enjoying their courtship freedom before they had the two kids and bought the brownstone in Brooklyn. Where had this fantasy come from?

  The few elderly shoppers stared at Lula and Alvo as if they were celebrities they couldn’t quite place. The dying fluorescent light and sour-milk smell were happy reminders of Tirana. Alvo paced the aisles, checking out the cans and packages but also the walls and the ceiling. He said, “We are in construction. I mentioned that, right? I notice construction details.”

  “What kind of construction?” said Lula.

  “Commercial only,” said Alvo. “Residential is asking for headaches. First the client wants wallpaper, then she wants it ripped out. Businesses, they know what they want. Aisles, cash registers, shelves. Especially cash registers.”

  Alvo seemed to know what he was talking about, and the sound of the words—commercial construction—was honest, industrious, solid. And the gun? This was New Jersey. You’d be crazy to be in the building trades and not carry a weapon. Alvo picked up a quart of orange juice and a carton of Camels. So that was his sales receipt Estrelia found in the cushions. Lula had saved it in her desk. Alvo’s shoulder brushed against hers as they—ladies first—left the market.

  But as they approached the SUV, Lula felt the temperature between them drop. She said something lame—testing, testing—about the weather, but Alvo didn’t answer. This time he opened the door on his side and let her open hers. This time Hoodie took the wheel with Leather Jacket beside him. Alvo frowned into space. Lula had no idea what had gone wrong, or how she could fix it.

  Hoodie’s aggressive driving style matched the new mood inside the Lexus. The cursor on the GPS danced across the screen, and its female voice cried plaintively, “Reconfiguring, reconfiguring.”

  After a while, Alvo said, “My friend Spiro, the one with the stiletto heel in his head? That’s why you don’t want an Albanian boyfriend, Little Sister.”

  Little Sister. Alvo’s fraternal romantic advice made her heart hurt. But why had she even thought that Alvo wanted to be her boyfriend? Maybe Lula was losing her charms. Welcome to twenty-six.

  Lula said, “I dated this Argentinean guy, Franco, he was ten times crazier and more jealous than the worst Albanian shithead.”

  Alvo said, “What did he do, this Franco? For a living.”

  “An artist,” Lula said.

  Alvo glared at her. “Let me get this straight. You fucked an Argentinean?”

  “No,” lied Lula. “I said dated.” First he’d told her not to go out with Albanian guys, and now he seemed ready to honor-kill her for dating an Argentinean.

  “Glad to hear it. Dated.” Alvo nodded at the front seat. “My gorilla pals here get very upset when they see Albanian girls going outside the community.”

  Lula said, “Good luck telling an Albanian girl what to do.”

  “Funny,” said Alvo, mirthlessly. “Here we are. Home sweet home.” How had Hoodie managed to find all new streets and arrive at her house without her realizing they were close? The SUV jerked to a stop. No one spoke. No one mentioned seeing Lula again, and the Lexus roared away before she’d unlocked Mister Stanley’s front door.

  Chapter Five

  Days passed, then more days, with no sign of Alvo. What did Lula have to look forward to? The college trip with Zeke and his dad? Zeke’s departure for school promised deliverance, of a sort. But Mister Stanley would find a reason to keep Lula around. He would pay to have another human watch him sip his water. How would Lula break away? Home comfort was seductive.

  Oddly, the gun reassured her. But was that really so odd? Lots of people felt that way. For example, her father. Lula told herself that the three guys would return, if only to pick up the pistol. Handguns were costly, hard to obtain. Meanwhile her challenge was to keep busy and stave off worry about her future.

  One morning, frustration drove Lula to travel into the city and check out the supermarket from which Alvo’s receipt had come. Useless, as she’d known it would be. What did she think would happen? That destiny would deliver them both there at the same moment? What a coincidence, our meeting here like this! So now it was her turn to be the stalker in this romance.

  Parked outside the supermarket was a construction van. From the door she could see that repair work was being done. She peeked through a gap in the plastic curtain. The workers were Chinese. Maybe her friends were in charge. She knew that a lot of Albanian guys ran construction crews. She’d met some of them in a bar on Second Avenue on the night Albania competed in the World Cup.

  She walked down the supermarket aisles, pretending to look at food, until she saw a checker watching her in the security mirror. She bought the costliest peanut butter, hand-shelled on a farm in Georgia, along with a jar of organic strawberry jam from Vermont.

  She was taking off her coat when Zeke walked in the door.

  “What’s this?” Pointing accusingly at the peanut butter and jelly, he seemed upset that Lula had gone grocery shopping without him.

  “I went into the city,” Lula said.

  “You went into the city to get peanut butter and jelly?”

  “I got it especially for you. I read about this brand in the paper. Try it. Trust me, okay?”

  Zeke said, “Did you get crackers?”

  “Use a spoon,” Lula said.

  The weather turned even more dismal, and after a week of gloom, Lula powered up Zeke’s computer and closed out a cascade of girls in bikinis wanting to chat. She imagined her own cascade, snapshots of lost keepsakes and loved ones gone forever. Back home in ’97, when the economy tanked, ever
ything went missing: doorknobs, letterboxes, public toilets, storm drains. Thieves would come in the night and steal the swings from the children’s playground, the drinking fountains from the park. But who would want to read about that? Who would care about the neighbor who almost got lynched for stealing paper from the communal toilet?

  The true stories of her childhood were tales of grubby misery without the kick of romance, just suffering and more suffering, betrayal and petty greed. It was nicer to mine the mythical past. Wasn’t that the Albanian way? Five minutes into a conversation, Albanians were telling you how they’d descended from the ancient Greeks. The Illyrians. Those folktales had come from somewhere. Hoodie said they were all related. Every Albanian fairy tale was someone’s great-granny’s life story. Little Sister, they’d called her. For all Lula knew, it was true.

  She could write the most famous legends and pretend they were family stories. For example, the tale of the heartless girl everyone called Earthly Beauty, who put her prince through hell before he could make her his wife. Lula wrote, “My grandfather’s half brother fell in love with a woman known as the Earthly Beauty. She charged him money for peeks at her—a finger, a hand, an arm. He paid for every inch of flesh he saw, he spent his dead papa’s fortune. And every inch, every beautiful inch, made him want her more.”

  Don and Mister Stanley were so good to her. It was sinful that fooling them should be easy and even entertaining.

  Oops. Now came a part about the boy finding a hat that made him invisible. Lula would have to leave that out if she wanted her story to have any credibility whatsoever. The same thing went for the bottle from which genies appeared and threatened Earthly Beauty on our hero’s behalf, genies whose power she turned against him by making them work for her. Lula imagined Earthly Beauty looking like Angelina Jolie. She turned the genies into thugs whom Earthly Beauty seduced, but ended the scene just short of her having gang-bang sex.

  But still the tale had one final twist. The hero finds some enchanted grapes, red and green. The red grapes make horns grown on Earthly Beauty’s face. The green grapes make the horns drop off. Magic cosmetic surgery. So the red grapes let the prince wreck his beloved’s looks, and the green grapes turn her back into Earthly Beauty. After which she’s so grateful she marries him, even though he was the one who destroyed her face in the first place. But then he fixed it. And he loves her.