The Parking Lot Attendant

by Nafkote Tamirat

  I’ve developed calluses on my hands and knees from scrubbing their clothing and the stains they leave behind on the walls and floors of the houses, since they’re the only ones given license to roam as they please. On the pretext of watching them, I snoop through the others’ affairs, to see who’s still having sex, who’s reading illegally, who’s keeping a journal, and whether we’re in it.

  When my father isn’t there, the others enjoy discussing subjects that, I imagine, they hope will provoke me into revealing something of what they already seem to suspect.

  “I wonder if what they say is true.”

  “About what?”

  “About how being a taxi driver and working at a parking lot are the two most dangerous jobs in the world.”

  “What about firefighters?”

  “I’d rather deal with a fire than a man who’s about to stab me at two in the morning.”

  “What if it was at a different time?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I heard he was funneling money out of the mission to buy cars and Lucky Charms for his whores back home.”

  “Why Lucky Charms?”

  “They liked the taste.”

  This sounded dirtier than it should have.

  “I heard he was half Greek.”

  “I’ve never liked Greeks. Too much oil in their food.”

  “Give me butter every time.”

  “Butter every time.”

  Some people speak violently against Ayale, as if they suffer from personal grievances, while others say nothing at all, their silence rendering them more conspicuous. The rest of the colony prefers to talk about our eventual relocation into paradise rather than the chaos of the past. There are a few faces in each of these camps that look familiar, but I can never get close enough to know for sure. My father is distressed by how I’m treated.

  “I wish they would leave you alone.”

  “I don’t mind. I just want to know who those people are.”

  “Leave it. You were manipulated, that wasn’t your fault, but now let’s just try to stay at peace.”

  “I wasn’t manipulated into anything.”

  “Then what happened?”

  I roll toward the wall and say nothing because I can no longer shut myself into my room.

  My father has begun to kiss me on the forehead each night before going to sleep. I don’t want to admit to him how much of a comfort it is, knowing that he’s on my side, even if he’s confused as to what this means and why we’ve ended up here. Ayale always found the notion of taking sides childish and believed it contributed to most of the troubles in the world. Nonetheless, I’d always felt that he neglected to consider the inherent comfort of someone joining forces with you. No one, including—and perhaps especially—Ayale, is strong enough to thrive alone in the world. Schools and summer camps are less about education and more about kicking off the idea of community, as a survival tactic, if nothing else. I don’t mean that it isn’t an important and in some ways rewarding thing, community, only that we sometimes focus so much on what it symbolizes that we forget about what it actively does for us in the present and literal world we occupy.

  We usually play travel after our day duties. One person is chosen to stand in the middle of the circle, close his or her eyes, and name a place, real or imaginary. Egypt and China are especial favorites. Everyone begins to drift around the room, acting as if they’re in that location. These movements slowly turn into skits where one can feign meeting the natives, buying goods, being caught in a tornado. When it becomes clear which of the skits is the best—meaning the funniest—the rest of us stop to give our full attention to the winner. This is almost always a skinny boy named Teddy who studied acting. I like how fluid his movements are, one flick of a finger naturally generating a tremor in the elbow, leading directly to a shake in the torso.

  It’s always strange speaking Amharic in an environment like B______ where, before us, there were none like us. I feel as though we’re injecting the land with a quick shot of Ethiopian, a footfall of the Horn that will reverberate long after our colony has made the leap to Africa, where it will prosper and dominate for generations, eternity even, if we can swing it.

  I sometimes hate my father for bringing me to a place where we live in a cloud of notoriety, where there are no buildings and crowds to hide behind, where my ability to restore a floor to its original unblemished state is the marker of my worth as a human being. I never tell him when these moments of rage wash over me, although he must know, for I’ve never been able to control my facial expressions; they reveal all that I would prefer to conceal.

  I still don’t understand why we’re here. He insists that we have no other options, that only here will we be safe. I know I ruined everything by staying close to Ayale, but I don’t understand how or why it led us to this. I don’t hate my father the way I did in Boston, but the space where anger gave me strength hasn’t been replaced by anything, which leads me to wonder if survival on empty can be called survival at all.

  The almost-four-year-old’s new word for so much nothing inside you that you can’t breathe is minimtifat.

  PART II: ON THE SUBJECT OF WHERE WE WERE BEFORE AND WHERE WE WERE BEFORE THAT

  My father and I lived in Boston for many years, although not always together: he flew there from Addis Ababa in 1984, I was born in 1985 and lived with my mother until 1991, everything had changed by 2003, and we left forever in 2004.

  He left Addis Ababa to avoid enlistment. This was his mother’s doing. My father was her favorite child, and after his eldest brother was taken, she embarked upon a frantic search, scouring her network of friends, relatives, and neighbors for those who owed her favors, those who could be interpreted to owe her favors, those who knew people in America, those who knew people in Canada, those who knew people she didn’t know. She went through a desperate period of inviting people over for coffee, tea, lunch, dinner, gift giving. She entertained as no one had ever entertained before: the lights were never off in her house, and when she could no longer ward off rationing with bribes, she had her servants comb the black market for electrical generators, well-scented candles, people who knew the people she had never deigned to meet during her comfortable lifetime, the unsavory sort who could pull strings and levers and papers with their oily fingers and wily ways.

  After three exhausting months, my father’s mother found a heretofore ignored uncle, who had a daughter, who knew a hairdresser, who was on fairly good terms with a former radio host, who currently lived in a place or a condition called “Fall River.” After the obligatory calls, letters, threats, promises to God to later build cathedrals, my father was equipped with legal permission to live in America for six months. His mother trained him for what he was to do once he arrived.

  “You will ask this woman about other Ethiopians in Fall River.”

  “I will meet these other Ethiopians and befriend them.”

  “You will go out with them and ask questions without seeming to ask questions.”

  “I will find out which of the women have green cards.”

  “You will marry whichever woman that is.”

  “I will get a green card.”

  “You will leave her.”

  “Unless I love her.”

  “Well.”

  “Then I will get papers for you and my brothers.”

  “But first me.”

  “And then we will live in America.”

  “We will move to California.”

  “Unless we love Fall River and decide to stay there.”

  “There is nothing better than California in America. Any American will tell you this.”

  “How do you know? Do you know any Americans?”

  “Well.”

  My father’s father was a soldier and died while fighting the Italians. My father’s mother dedicated her life to unmaking in her son all that was, in her opinion, his father’s doing. She shielded him from the unpleasant and the violent, so that whi
le his brothers rehearsed battle games and killing sprees in the front and back gardens, my father preferred to sit at the window by his mother as she smiled benevolently upon her golden child.

  My father has never liked drinking, dancing, crying (his or other people’s), or fighting. He was comfortable in his discomfort with others and stuck close to the corpulent sides of his mother, who was cheered by the little stick boy she thought would never leave her. He read at a frenzied pace, and it was in this way that he knew about airplanes, falling in love, love at first sight, Latin America, Moscow, work camps in Siberia, fruit pickers in California, California itself, freedom of the press, aqueducts. My father had a great understanding of a great many things, but ultimately, it was a shallow kind of insight; he was not a boy or an adolescent or an adult who took any pleasure in real-world experience. Truth be told, it frightened the living shit out of him. In the real world, one could get hurt, one had to interact with people, one had to listen and be considerate, even of the rampant stupidity by which he was already disgusted, as early as the age of seven when he saw how the servants would cry after accidentally spilling boiling water on the floor, convinced that they had burned the dead, who had apparently taken up residence directly beneath the kitchen floorboards.

  When the emperor was suffocated and the military took his power only to lovingly confer it upon Mengistu Haile Mariam, who smashed three bottles of red paint and then began the killings, his mother feared only for her youngest. The others would make do; they always had.

  All arrangements made, my father was accompanied to the airport by his mother. The streets were quiet even though it was morning, and he was eating a banana, the last he would eat until B______ because he found the size of American bananas repulsive. When they arrived at the airport, he realized that his mother was crying. She squeezed him to her, made the sign of the cross three times over his face and body, pressed a damp clump of American dollars from Lord knows whom into his hand, and then saw him into the boarding line, where they had to separate. As my father settled into his window seat and accepted the complimentary headphones, he reflected upon his mother. Her makeup had clotted where her tears had run down her face. There had been hair coming out of her moles, which made a half-circle on her left cheek. The growing distance between them soothed him.

  When he arrived at Logan Airport, he was met by the former radio host, who had replaced her teeth with dentures so brilliant that my father still believes they were the catalyst for the sudden deterioration of his until-then perfect eyesight. She had a white husband named Sam, who hugged him. This agitated my father so badly that he had trouble forming sentences for the rest of the baggage claim and car ride ordeal, which was fine because Sam had a lot to say about highways, Sam Adams (“No relation, ha, ha”), Quincy Market, the race question (“Because it is a question”), and the Common. They brought him to a neat white house in a place that made him think of wilderness and suicide. Decades later, upon first seeing Fall River, I would have an identical reaction; the haunted evil of the place is not an easy one to forget. They asked him if he was hungry, and my father said no. He was sure that he could never be hungry in front of them. The former radio host finally asked him if he spoke English, and he said yes.

  They found a job for my father as an elevator boy at a nearby hotel. Later he would move on to being a cab driver but would be fired for falling asleep at the wheel. It was fall now, and he couldn’t understand why everyone was going on and on about the leaves changing color; it was beautiful to be sure, but of more immediate import was that he was never warm, not even by accident. When winter came, and with it the worst snowfall in two decades, my father prayed for the first time in his life: if God took away the snow, he would stop smoking. He’s still ready to give it up once God starts pulling his weight. Everything is a two-way street, he often reminds me, not least because he knows I hate that expression.

  With a month left on his visa, he still hadn’t met any of the green card–carrying girls for whom he’d been coached. The former radio host didn’t have any Ethiopian friends, her friends were Sam and his friends, and my father became practiced in the art of slipping into the house unnoticed and running upstairs to his room, where he would smoke and fry hot dogs on the Bunsen burner he had smuggled up there to avoid meals with them. The Ethiopian girls he met through work could see that he was green and laughed at the way he dressed and talked. He was only too glad to be left alone, but he didn’t want to go back. He bore no love for Fall River, town of dust and depression, but at the same time, he didn’t want to return to his mother or Addis Ababa. He had become indifferent, his letters perfunctory, often no more than three lines. He was tired of where he came from: whenever he smelled trash in Fall River, he recognized the ubiquitous stench of home, and this shamed him. I’ve never understood how this happened to him, and all he will say is that any love he felt for mother and country was washed away by the snow.

  He met the woman who would be my mother on the Commuter Rail: he was going to Brookline to see a movie and she was a legal American resident, thanks to a distant uncle’s connections. He now had a favorite movie theater and a favorite pizza place. He liked the movie theater because it showed Spanish and Indian movies, and he liked the pizza place because it was next door. It was snowing on this April day, with Boston’s usual genius for weather patterns designed to cause the greatest amount of human anguish. He was wearing a denim jacket that fit him perfectly, because he requires this quality from all his clothing. (My father’s wardrobe is minuscule, especially compared to those of other grown men; he is a petite human being.) My mother was wearing a dress whose color he no longer remembers. They were sitting two seats apart on the train. He asked if she was Ethiopian, she said yes, she left. A week later, they saw each other again. He asked if she liked movies, she said yes—I’ve noted that my mother’s role in these early stories is one of constant affirmation but he abstains from comment—they saw Mother India together, he treated her to pizza, she left. This began a month-long period of seeing each other almost every day, barring their erratic work schedules and my father’s equally erratic withdrawals of affection.

  Mid-month, my mother confessed that she was pregnant; it was his, and she didn’t want an abortion. My father said he didn’t want an abortion either, he wanted to stay by her side, to marry her—tomorrow if she wasn’t too busy—so that he could stay forever. The marriage was conducted two days later in a small civil ceremony, where the former radio host and her husband were witnesses, smiling serenely for the entirety of the ten minutes. My mother cried, the flowers were fake, and no pictures remain because someone forgot the disposable camera in the park that served as a backdrop for the post-nuptial photographs. Soon after, my father paid ninety dollars and received a brand-spanking-new green card. He then ditched Fall River, leaving a note and some cash for the former radio host and Sam—they would relocate to California, where she would star in an ill-conceived Ethiopian soap opera that was supposed to revive her long-stagnant career—and moved to a tiny apartment in Roxbury. My mother moved in with him. Around her eighth month, my father left and didn’t come back for six years.

  To be fair, he had a lot to deal with. He hadn’t seen his family for the longest period of time in his life, he was barely twenty, facing fatherhood, and stuck with a woman whose last name he sometimes forgot. He didn’t like Roxbury, he didn’t like children, he didn’t like America. I understand. I really fucking do.

  I lived with my mother for the first six years of my life. I’ve inherited her tight black curls, which have started falling out since I moved to B______, and her unmitigated love for Robert Redford. We moved from Roxbury to an attic in Dorchester, then a basement in Brighton, which we believed was giving me chronic earaches, until a doctor discovered that I’d stuck a stud earring into my ear canal, no big deal. My mother never spoke about my father except to bemoan how just like him I was when I did something wrong. He would later uphold this tradition, attributing my evil ten
dencies to my mother’s mysterious genetic pool. Taken together, it would seem that my lineage could be traced back to the two most morally polluted families in Ethiopia.

  I remember that I loved my mother, in that I was happy to see her and disappointed when she went to one of her three jobs and I’d be left with the inevitable next-door spinster. My mother rarely laughed, but when she did, she went all out. She would get on a scale only if I let her hold me at the same time. When my father came back, we were in Scituate, Massachusetts, in a house my mother was taking care of for the summer, which meant that we didn’t touch anything for fear of breakage and wreckage. I still don’t know how he found us. He came in, she gasped, and I was glad for the distraction: Scituate sucks if you don’t like boating and scallops.

  “How are you? It’s been a long time.”

  My father is understatement personified.

  “Who are you?”

  “Your father.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you doing here?” My mother’s voice signaled a slow and shaken recovery.

  “I came to see how you were doing. If you needed any help.”

  “Get out.”

  “I regret what happened. You have no idea.”

  “I truly don’t. Get out.”

  “Let me help; it’s the least I can do.”

  “Have I ever asked you for help?”

  “Of course not, but that makes it better, doesn’t it? You’re not asking for charity, it’s just me offering to do what I should have done this whole time.” He sounded exhausted.

  “Did you just now remember that you had a daughter?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you both for a while.”

  He cautiously smiled at me; I didn’t return the gesture.