He had lived on Carwin’s supply of Twinkies for two weeks.
That morning he woke up after a night of unsettling dreams, and saw his body as someone else’s body. His toes were miles away; his knees were two round dunes. He looked at his hands and they raised their heads to look back at him with hostility. He didn’t know what he was. But when Andrea walked in and looked at him, he suddenly recognized himself as a foreigner—uncouth, unseemly, unpleasant body, with nowhere to go. He went to the bathroom, and shaved and washed, performing a ritual, as if celebrating his new identity.
Next day, they went to Andrea’s parents’ house for dinner.
They drove down Lake Shore Drive, the waves attacking the shore, while trees bent sideways, as if stretching their backs in an aerobic exercise. Andrea whistled and wheezed “Dear Prudence,” and after they listened to the newsbreak that talked about the imminent war in Bosnia, she said: “You should stay, you know.” “I know,” Pronek said. The street lights had glaring clarity, because of the frigid northern wind. They drove past the dark castles of the University of Chicago (“This is where they built the first nuke bomb,” she said) and entered a maze of identical red-brick buildings.
Andrea’s father vigorously shook Pronek’s hand and her mother said: “We’ve heard so much about you.” Then they presented him to an old woman, bent over a walker, holding its handles passionately, as if she were delivering a speech from a pulpit. “Nana,” Andrea’s mother said. “This is Andrea’s friend from Bosnia.”
“I never was in Boston,” Nana said.
“Bosnia, Nana, Bosnia. In Yugoslavia, near Czechoslovakia,” Andrea’s mother said, shook her head, and waved her hand as if pushing away a basketball, asking Pronek to forgive Nana. In a moment of confusion, Pronek took off his shoes. Andrea’s mother glanced at his feet, then locked her hand, pointing to the left, in front of her bosom and said: “Let’s move to the salon.”
They sat at a round table, under an illustrious lantern, with heavy pieces of crystal pending above their heads. Andrea’s father filled their glasses with wine. He stood over Pronek with the lean greenish bottle in his hand, waiting for him to try the wine. Pronek sipped, and the glass chinked against his teeth, but then he said: “It’s good. Little sweet.”
“Well, it’s a Chardonnay,” Andrea’s father said, delighted.
Nana sat across the table from Pronek, smacking her lips and wiggling her jaw, and they could all hear the dentures steadily clacking. Her face looked like a map—valleys, furrows, wrinkles, cheekbones protruding like mountains. “I want wine,” she said. “Where’s my wine?” She kept moving her mouth, as if chewing the unchewable.
“It’s not good for you, Nana,” Andrea’s mother said. “You know that.”
“What kind of wine do you have back home?” Andrea’s father asked, slanting his head to the left to signal intense interest.
“I don’t know,” Pronek said. “Local kinds.”
“Hmm,” Andrea’s father said.
“Andrea told us you were a writer,” Andrea’s mother said. She had fenestral glasses, and a pearl choker, and her teeth were white and orderly, like an ivory keyboard. Andrea’s father wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches, his ears were flappy, and when he stood against the light, Pronek could see a pink penumbra around his earlobes.
“I was,” Pronek said.
“We like good writing,” Andrea’s mother said.
“Have you ever read Richard Ford?” Andrea’s father asked.
“Sensitive middle-class macho shit,” Andrea snapped and looked at Pronek, who simply said: “No.”
“Very well written,” Andrea’s father said and shook his head, as if rattling it. “Very well written.”
“And we like Kundera,” Andrea’s mother said. “He’s from Czechoslovakia, too.”
“Who’s in the kitchen?” Nana asked, pricking up her ears, burdened by grayish clusters. She had twiggish arms from which crumpled skin hung like drying dough. She had a dim number tattooed between two veins on her right forearm.
“No one’s in the kitchen, Nana. We’re all here,” Andrea’s father said and googled his eyes at Pronek, asking for solidarity.
Andrea’s mother served a sequence of foods unknown to Pronek, with the taste and texture of minced cardboard (“This is wild rice,” she beamed at him nacreously), which he ate carefully, fearing a sudden accident, like chewing with his mouth open, or dropping a forkful of wild rice and salad “with maple-syrup-and-sunflower-seed dressing” into his lap. Pronek had a penetrating sense that his feet were about to begin exuding stench, so he covered his left-foot toes with his right foot, but then fretted that the hissing of sock friction might become too loud. He was convinced that he should move as little as possible, lest unnecessary motion release mischievous molecules of bodily odor.
“Who’s not here?” Nana asked. She would load her mouth and then chew patiently, looking at them with weary disinterest. Her hair was platinum white, but pink patches were clearly visible under the fluff, and her skull was right under the skin, it was right there, Pronek thought.
Then they had blackberry nonfat cheese cake with low-fat kiwi frozen yogurt and French hazelnut vanilla decaf coffee.
“So what’s going on in Czechoslovakia,” Andrea’s mother asked.
“Yugoslavia, Mom, Yugoslavia,” Andrea said.
“I read about it, I tried to understand it, but I simply can’t,” Andrea’s father said. “Thousands of years of hatred, I guess.”
“It’s a sad saga,” Andrea’s mother said. “It’s hard for us to understand, because we’re so safe here.”
“It’s mind-boggling,” Andrea’s father said.
“Where is Bruno? Is Bruno there in kitchen?” Nana hollered all of a sudden. “Bruno, come here.”
“Calm down, Nana. That’s not Bruno. Bruno’s gone,” Andrea’s mother said.
“Come here, Bruno!” Nana yelled toward the kitchen. “Eat with us! We have everything now!”
“Calm down, Nana. Or you’ll have to go to your room,” Andrea’s father said and turned to Pronek. “She can be rather obstreperous sometimes.” Pronek didn’t know what “obstreperous” meant, so he just said: “It’s okay. No problem.” Nana jiggled her jaw and calmed down. Andrea’s mother was scraping off the remnants of food, little piles of mush, onto a big plate.
“What you will do with it?” asked Nana. “Don’t throw it away, Bruno is hungry. Bruno!”
“We’re not going to throw it away,” Andrea’s mother said. “We’ll save it for Bruno.” Nana’s dentures clattered, rejoicing She had a quick slurp of coffee and then looked at Pronek.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Andrea’s friend,” Pronek said.
“Good,” she said.
While Pronek was putting on his shoes, revealing the dirt at their prows, Andrea’s father was holding his coat. “You should dry clean it,” he said. “I know,” Pronek said. Andrea’s mother pressed her cheek, soft and redolent of coconut, against Pronek’s, and kissed the air around his ear. “It was nice having you,” Andrea’s father said, shaking Pronek’s hand with habitual vigor. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you stay here. This is the greatest country in the world, you just have to work hard.”
“That’s true,” Andrea’s mother said.
“Are you going to see Bruno?” Nana asked.
“No, Nana,” Pronek said. “I’m sorry.”
Romaine Lettuce,
Iceberg Lettuce
Pronek got up, put on his best clothes: a gray silk shirt, once upon a time smuggled from China by a family friend, with an amoeba-shaped grease blot in the left-nipple area, as if involuntary lactation had taken place; the well-known orange-stained beige pants; a tie with a Mickey Mouse pattern, lent and consequently tied by Carwin; a peach-colored jacket, also generously lent by Carwin, who hadn’t worn it for years, one size too small, hence rather tight in the shoulders, so Pronek, with his arms protruding, looked like a sad forklif
t. He put on his shoes, which had tufts of algae-like dirty lint, once upon a time fake fur, sticking out on the sides.
This is the attire in which Pronek entered the American labor market.
Pronek let Moskva out, then followed her down the stairs. He thought of dust speckles whirling in the sunbeams as puny angels, although they paid little attention to him. He stood behind the screen door, as if waiting for a cue to enter the stage, looking down the street: tree-crowns were all upset, swaying furiously; the wind was flipping their leaves, as if to show they were unmarked. A man with a rottweiler that looked like the man’s canine self—the same pelican chin, the same doleful trot—bagged a handful of shit and then carried it reverently like a piece of valuable evidence, following the investigative, sniffing dog. The two alcoholic sisters, with identical plum eye bags, were heading toward their morning refreshment, bickering about who was culpable for not replenishing the booze supplies, still holding hands. There was a white Cadillac jalopy parked on the street, with the sign in the windshield saying: “Don’t tow it’s mine,” signed by “Jose.” The sky grumbled, as if someone were moving furniture in the universe above. He looked at the sky’s underbelly, at the clouds pressing the anxious trees, and enthusiastically frowned—it would rain again, he reckoned. He walked down Norwood, turned north on Broadway, facing the advancing traffic. He waited to cross Broadway at Granville—DON’T WALK the street light warned him. He imagined trying to run across the street and stumbling, a yellow cab trying to avoid his fallen body, but managing to run its front left wheel over his head, crushing it. He imagined the last thing he would see: the greasy underside of a car, layers of dirt covering the axle. He looked in our direction (although we are everywhere) before—WALK—crossing, and proceeded toward the El.
But then he saw a sign in the misty window of the ice cream parlor saying COME IN, so he decided to have some ice cream. He greeted the owner (in English), a Russian man who grew his mustache in proportion to the growth of his business.
At this particular moment, it was the thin mustache of a passionate toreador.
Pronek got a large scoop of rainbow sorbet, and began licking it with ardor immediately, careful to devote equal attention to each color, his tongue becoming multicolored in the process. He foolishly glanced at the corner drug dealer, who mad-dogged him for an intense moment. Pronek collected himself enough to look down at the tips of his shoes, which were habitually uncomfortable, while his tormented big toe occasionally wiggled in pain.
As the train was stopping, he licked away the rainbow and munched away the cone. A sliding door opened right before him (“Open Sesame,” he thought). He entered the car and the door closed behind him. “Twenty-two minutes to downtown,” said a sign. The car was empty, except for the man who talked to his hands. Pronek had seen him before: the man gibbering into his palms, his hands supine in his lap, every now and then poking the center of his left palm with his right index finger, pressing a magic button. The clatter and murmur of the speeding train made Pronek drowsy, so he closed his eyes. He heard the hum of his blood, and for reasons not known to us, a rather meaningless sequence of words reached the spawny surface of his mind: “Split my head like a watermelon.” He opened his eyes and saw the new passengers, just materialized around him, inconspicuously surrounding him. The man who talked to his palms was collecting every piece of paper he could find: he would slide under the seats to retrieve a leaflet saying: “Lord is with you”; he would empty McDonald’s bags on the floor, and then fold them up; he would stuff newspaper pages into his trench coat, covered with different shades of filth. Finally, he sat in front of Pronek and began peeling off a Guardian Angels sticker on the window, as if his job were to collect evidence of a vast crime. The man kept refrowning, waves of worries slamming against the inside of his forehead. Pronek watched his long yellow nails with a crescent of gray dirt clawing the sticker, then he panned to the man’s temple and saw (zoom) a louse crawling through the man’s ashen hair.
Split my head like a watermelon.
Downtown Chicago had streets named after deceased presidents, and Pronek thought that it was built as the presidents played monopoly in heaven (or hell, let us not be presumptuous), and then piled up buildings on their streets after a favorable roll of the dice. Pronek went eastward down Jackson to Michigan Avenue, and then walked north, until he found the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery.
A woman, labeled Dawn Wyman by a little steel name tag on her semitransparent shirt, was waiting for him. Her hair was puffed up, as if there was a steady stream of warm air coming out of her skull. Her eyelids were efficiently blue, echoing the hue of her skirt. She had eyeball-shaped earrings, whose quaking pupils glared at Pronek.
“Where are you from?” Dawn asked.
“Bosnia,” Pronek said.
“That’s in Russia, right?”
“It was in Yugoslavia.”
“Right. Well, tell me why you would like to work for us.”
A man with a white cowboy hat was sitting in the corner, under a picture of the first Boudin Bakery, established in San Francisco in the black-and-white times. He was excavating shit-brown spoonfuls of something from a round loaf of bread. Then he determinedly shoved the plastic spoon into his mouth.
“I like European touch here,” Pronek said.
“Right,” Dawn said and routinely smiled. There was a shade of lipstick on her white teeth. “We like to provide something different, something for the customer with sophisticated taste and international experience.”
“Right,” Pronek said.
“What do you think you can offer to the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery?”
The man in the cowboy hat dropped the spoon in the loaf, smacked his lips, then took off his big hat and wiped his melon, with a bulbous wart above the right eyebrow. He put his hat back on, stood up, pulled his pants to the middle of his belly, then emptied the tray into a garbage bin. The loaf slid into the black gaping orifice of the bin, and Pronek heard the whump.
“I can offer hard work and life experience. I am hard worker and I like to work with people. I used to be journalist and communicated very much,” he said.
“Right,” Dawn said, looking at the application, uninterested. “What do you expect your wage to be?”
“I don’t know. Ten dollars for hour.”
“We can offer you five, and maybe later you can work your way up. Here everyone has a fair chance.”
“Good,” Pronek said.
Thus Pronek became a member of the large Boudin French Sourdough family, and was consequently given the respectable and responsible duty of kitchen help.
He cut croissants open, spread Dijon mustard all over their insides (“Not too much,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and then pass them on to the sandwich person (“This is the sandwich person. This is the kitchen help,” Dawn introduced them to each other). He was taken off that job, after he nearly sliced off his left thumb and passed on a sequence of blood-soaked croissants to the sandwich person. He would cut tomatoes into thin slices (“Thinner,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and he would sprinkle cheese crumbles over a platoon of mini-pizzas. He would fill up styrofoam bowls with the reduced-sodium, fat-free Cajun gumbo soup, and pass them on to the soup person, until he dipped his incised thumb into a scorching jumbo gumbo (“Small bowl—large gumbo. Big bowl—jumbo gumbo,” Dawn succinctly explained the essence of the gumbo situation), whereupon he dropped the bowl on the floor, earning a couple of burns on his ankles. He would cut off the top of a sourdough loaf, and then disembowel it, throwing the soft yeast-smelling viscera into a garbage can, feeling dreadfully guilty for some reason, so he ate a lot of it the first day, and received gut-wrenching cramps as a punishment. Then he would fill up the hollow with reduced-fat chili.
The first time he went to the safe-like Frigidaire to get a lettuce head, the doors closed slowly behind him and he found himself in the midst of an immutable gelid hum, feebly lit by a solitary bulb. He imagined freezing to death, bein
g found frosted, his eyes wide open, minuscule icicles on his eyelashes, lying with his pate stuck in a crate of lettuce. He began pounding the door, yelping for help, but no one was out there, no one could hear him. He leaned his head against the door in moribund desperation, and his forehead stuck to the icy surface. He tried to peel it off, but it was painful and he was overwhelmed by fatalistic weakness.
So when Dawn opened the door, he stumbled out, his forehead pulled by the force of Dawn, and then stood before her with a scarlet mark across his forehead.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her plucked eyebrows rising into two symmetrical nail clips.
“I was closed there,” Pronek said.
“You can open the door from the inside, you just have to push it a little,” she said.
“Oh, I know,” Pronek said and hastened toward the safety of dish-washing duties.
From that point on in his food-service career, Pronek was firmly in charge of garbage disposal. He became an apprentice to a man named Hemon. Pronek didn’t know whether Hemon was the man’s first or the man’s last name, but he was from the Dominican Republic, and came to the United States to become a professional soccer player. Pronek inferred Hemon’s soccer dream, after he pointed at himself and kept repeating: “McMannaman,” and then made the motion of kicking a soccer ball. Hemon was tall and, Pronek thought, not particularly intelligent, although he would say nothing, since he spoke no English. They would empty abandoned trays with hollowed-out loaves, mauled croissants, desiccated bowls, into garbage bins; they would pull out loaded garbage bags, tie a knot around the bag’s throat and drag them like corpses (“Hurry,” Dawn would suggest in passing) to the garbage cart in a back nook of the kitchen. Pronek would push the cart with Hemon, who did it with habitual despondency, down the hall beyond the kitchen, through the mean swinging doors that would always slam their backs or heels, then wait for the elevator. There was a little camera above the door, glaring down at them. They would stare at the elevator door in silence, waiting for it to slide open. They would press the lowest button and stand by the garbage, separated by the cart, as if they were honorary guards saluting an important casket. They would go all the way to the bottom, sinking into the molasses of silence, and when the door would slide open, a billow of cold, putrescent air would slap their faces. They would push the cart into a low-ceilinged grotto with a humongous garbage container, often brimming over with the black garbage bags, in its center.
The Question of Bruno Page 15
