“Ginger,” he said. “My wife.” His voice had the pinched, slightly nasal timbre of a chronic sinus sufferer.
“That’s a scream,” Lula had said. It was funny, a woman named Ginger, like being named Salt, and funny that a woman would want something whiter than Mister Stanley.
Then Mister Stanley had told her that just before Ginger left, she’d developed—she’d begun to develop—some serious mental-health issues. He’d tilted his head toward Lula to see if she knew what he meant, if what he was saying translated into whatever Lula spoke. Lula knew, and she didn’t know. She’d found his unspoken doubts about her comprehension, like so many things in this country, at once thoughtful and insulting. An illness, Mister Stanley had said, for which no one had managed to find an effective medication, or even a diagnosis.
Christmas Eve, said Mister Stanley, would be a year since his wife’s departure. They’d managed, him and Zeke. But he worried about his son, alone for so many hours. Then he’d asked what Lula was. Meaning, from what country. He said he wouldn’t have thought Albanian. He seemed to find it amusing.
Lula said, “I grew up in Albania. But my parents were visiting my dad’s cousin in Kosovo, and they got stuck there when the war broke out and the Serbs came and tried to murder everyone. They couldn’t get home to Tirana. They were killed in the NATO bombing.” The smile dribbled off Mister Stanley’s face. It was the perfect moment to mention that her visa was running out. Mister Stanley said he had a childhood friend, Don Settebello, a famous immigration lawyer. There’d been a profile of him in the New York Times. Don was a miracle worker.
A few days after the interview, Mister Stanley drove Lula out to meet Zeke and see his brick battleship of a house with wavy leaded-glass windows and a curved porch bulging from one side, like a goiter. A gnarled tree in the front yard had purpled the sidewalk with berries. She hadn’t thought there were houses like that so near the city, nor fat crows that sat in the mulberry tree and warned her not to take the job.
“Mind your own business,” she told the crows.
“Excuse me?” said Mister Stanley.
“Albanian superstition,” a lying voice explained through Lula’s mouth.
Zeke’s hair was as black as the crows, but duller, and a thick octagonal silver bolt emptied a space in one earlobe. Zeke’s excessive smile was a mocking imitation of someone forced to communicate pleasure or harmlessness or just simple politeness. Zeke shook her hand, his long body slumped in an S curve, checking her out even as he acted too annoyed to see her. Veto power was all he had. It was easier if he liked her. And Lula was hardly the wicked-witch prison guard he’d imagined his father hiring.
Mister Stanley had left the two of them in the living room.
“What do you do now?” Zeke said.
“I’m a waitress. In the Mojito District. So is Zeke your real name?”
“Why do you ask?” Sunk in the couch across the room, Zeke peered at her from beneath his inky slick of hair.
“Because it sounds like someone frightened. Zeek zeek zeek. Or like a little bird.”
“It’s my name. How did you learn English?”
“In school. In Albania.”
“You speak perfect English. You sound like a British person.”
“Thank you. Our teacher was British. Plus I took private tutoring from an Australian.” No need to tell this innocent kid she’d paid for those lessons with blow jobs. “The next generation younger than me, they all learned English from SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“SpongeBob is gay,” said Zeke.
Lula said, “So what?”
“Ezekiel,” said Zeke. “Like in the Bible.”
Lula said, “I never read the Bible. I grew up atheist. Half Muslim, half Christian.” Normally, she never mentioned the Muslim part, so already she must have felt that Zeke could be trusted not to think she was plotting to wage jihad on McDonald’s.
Zeke said, “There’s an Iranian kid in my class. He kept getting his ass kicked in public school, so they put him in my school where everybody’s super tolerant. His dad’s a famous eye surgeon. They live in a mega-mansion.”
“Albania is the most tolerant society in the world,” said Lula.
“Good for it,” said Zeke. He turned on the TV, and together they watched a hard-looking Spanish girl make out with male and female contestants, deciding which she liked better. Lula sensed she was being tested, not on her response to the show, but on her response to Zeke watching the show. What was her reaction? Boredom passed the test.
Zeke heard his father in the hall and switched off the TV. “What restaurant did you say you worked at?”
“La Changita,” Lula said. “The little monkey.”
Zeke asked if she could make mojitos.
She’d said, “We’d need fresh mint.”
Mister Stanley appeared in the doorway. “I see we’ve found plenty to talk about.”
Mister Stanley often said “we” or “one” when he meant “you” or “I.” Sometimes Zeke imitated him, but only under his breath, so his father could pretend not to hear Zeke say, “One would one might one should,” in Mister Stanley’s voice. At first Lula wondered if this usage was correct, if there was something wrong with her English. None of the younger Wall Street guys talked like that. The mystery of Mister Stanley’s career was solved when Zeke explained that his father used to be a professor of economics until he let himself get recruited by a bank, which he seriously regretted, even though he made lots more money than he had as a teacher.
Maybe nobody else applied for Lula’s job. Maybe no one wanted to live with the sad-sack father and son. Maybe Mister Stanley thought Lula was a war refugee, which strictly speaking was true, and that he was doing a good deed, which strictly speaking was true. Lula wouldn’t have hired herself to take care of a kid. She would have asked more questions, though Mister Stanley asked quite a few. It was unlike him not to require notarized letters of reference. But she had turned out to be good with Zeke, so maybe Mister Stanley had sensed some maternal feeling burbling up inside her, or the decency that Lula prided herself on maintaining despite her many character flaws and the world’s efforts to harden her heart.
Lula was twenty-six. Old, she thought on dark days. Only twenty-six, on bright ones. She had time, but she had more time if she stayed in this country. She wanted to learn that American trick, staying young till forty. Some American girls even got better looking. Not like Eastern Europeans, who started off ahead but fell off a cliff and scrambled back up a grandma. Maybe the pressure to marry aged them before their time. But there was no pressure on Lula. If her ancestors wanted grandchildren, they were keeping quiet about it.
To make everything official, Mister Stanley had taken her into his so-called library, the dank, mildew-smelling, manly lair where he hardly ever went except to pay bills. The shelves were empty but for a few rows of dusty books that Mister Stanley must have used in his university courses. He said, “ ‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly. I suppose we should talk about terms.”
Over Mister Stanley’s desk was a framed antique print of an exploding volcano. Lula had watched its sparks fly as Mister Stanley spelled out the rules. Be there when Zeke got home from school. No drinking or smoking in the house. No driving in bad weather. In fact no driving anywhere except to The Good Earth. Make Zeke eat an occasional vegetable. No overnight guests, except relatives, with Mister Stanley’s approval. Always lock up when she left. Mister Stanley used to subscribe to a burglar alarm service, but he’d had it discontinued when it turned out that the service was robbing houses.
When she’d asked Mister Stanley to pay her in cash, he assured her banks were safe. She’d said she was sorry, but Albanians had such bad history with banks . . . her voice trailed off into the economic catastrophe and massive social unrest that came after Communism, like those last scenes in the horror films when the maniac pops from the grave. “You’ve heard about our pyramid scheme? Offering investors fifty percent. What
was anyone thinking? The government was in on it, too, everybody got wiped out.”
Mister Stanley had nodded tiredly. He said, “Of course I remember. Scary stuff. It could happen anywhere. Sure, we can do this in cash.” Probably it was wiser, seeing as how Lula didn’t yet have a work visa, though Don Settebello would fix that. Mister Stanley said, “If I ever get tapped for a government job, you’ll have to deny you know me.”
“Sure,” said Lula. “We never met.”
“Joke,” said Mister Stanley.
Lula knew that some Americans cheered every time INS agents raided factories and shoved dark little chicken-packagers into the backs of trucks. She’d seen the guys on Fox News calling for every immigrant except German supermodels and Japanese baseball players to be deported, no questions asked. But others, like Mister Stanley and Don Settebello, acted as if coming from somewhere else was like having a handicap or surviving cancer. It meant you were brave and resilient. And being able to help you made them feel better about themselves and their melting-pot country. Their motives were pure, or mostly pure. They liked power and being connected, they liked knowing which strings to pull.
Now Lula would be able to stay. Everyone would be happy. The Balkans had no expression for “win-win situation.” In the Balkans they said, No problem, and the translation was, You’re fucked.
Watching the black Lexus SUV turn and crawl down the block, Lula wondered if Zeke was in trouble. In her opinion, he was just a semi-depressed American teen, but American TV survived on the blood spilled by semi-depressed teens. As the shooters’ neighbors always said, Zeke was a good boy. Quiet. But that unlikely piece of bad news would arrive in a police car.
Her next thought was immigration. Then she thought, with joy and relief, Since yesterday I’m legal! Then she remembered, Big deal. This was Dick Cheney America. Native-born citizens worried. It was just a matter of time before someone on Fox News got the bright idea of sending back the Pilgrims who’d landed on Plymouth Rock.
Lula’s lawyer, Don Settebello, had grown up in the same apartment building as Mister Stanley. The first time Lula went to Don’s office, she gave a long impassioned speech, all true, about how she loved this country and how badly she wanted to stay here. Don held up his hand. Time was not money but something more precious than money. Time was time. All his clients told him how much they loved it here. He could make it happen. And he had. He’d called in favors, done the impossible. Lula had a visa. Heroes could do that, said Mister Stanley, who several times said he worried that Don would push too hard and ruin his career, or worse.
Probably everywhere was the same. You paid and paid, and when you stopped paying, the favors stopped. Also this was New Jersey, the Mafia’s home state. Lula watched The Sopranos with Zeke and Mister Stanley. Maybe the black SUV had come because Mister Stanley or Don quit paying a few months early.
The SUV reached the end of the block and pulled into a driveway. Lula watched it turn again and head back down the street. She wished she weren’t alone in the house. Why was she so edgy? Could it be the residue of her Communist early childhood? Blame her delicate nervous system on growing up under a system that thought the Soviet Union was too liberal and was best friends with China until the dictator decided that China was too liberal, and China cut them loose. Blame it on the neighbor woman in Tirana who got sent away because her son rotated the roof antenna so he could hear a chesty Italian girl sing his favorite song. The reception was too fuzzy to see, but the audio was enough to get his mom dragged off in broad daylight. It was one of Lula’s first memories. Everyone was afraid. Her dad was taken away for one night. But the next day, he came home.
Even though Lula’s immigration status was secure for now, she felt her future depended on the web of lies she had started spinning the first time she’d met Mister Stanley. It was Mister Stanley’s fault for asking her a question he could have answered, though she knew it was something any prospective employer might wonder.
“Why did you leave Albania?”
She’d gazed into her Frappuccino. “Listen. Mister Stanley, you have to understand.”
“Call me Stanley.”
Of course. Stanley. Mister Stanley had to understand that in the part of Albania where Lula grew up, blood feuds still raged for generations. Revenges. Bride kidnappings. Their idea of courtship was still the fireman-carry and rape. Her Cousin George was involved in one such case. The couple holed up in a cave and the girl’s relatives blocked the mouth of the cave with stones, and the lovers suffocated. Lula thought it was smart to emigrate while she was several rungs down the hit list.
“Dear God,” said Mister Stanley.
So it really was his fault, falling for such a story. Hadn’t he been a professor? Shouldn’t he have known better? She did have a Cousin George. But the story happened in the time of her great-great-grandfather, when the family slept in the same room with their donkey on a mountaintop in Shkodër. Her actual Cousin George had one of the bigger Mercedes dealerships in Tirana, and when she imagined him holed up in a cave, she saw him yelling about bad cell phone reception and blaming his wife, who looked like a fatter, older Donatella Versace. Besides, no one considered a woman or child worth the bullets and ill will. A woman’s blood was worth less than a man’s. Now the blood feuds were all about real estate. Very unromantic.
Mister Stanley should go to Albania if he wondered why she’d left. Who would choose Tirana over a city where half-naked fashion models and their stockbroker boyfriends drank mojitos from pitchers decorated with dancing monkeys? The land of opportunity. Hadn’t Mister Stanley heard? But America was like Communism and post-Communism combined. You weren’t supposed to be materialistic until you got successful, after which it was practically your duty to flaunt it in everyone’s face.
The lie about the blood feud had been a mistake. Mister Stanley asked if those vendettas ever carried over here. Lula said her clan was superstitious about crossing water. Anyway, her family hadn’t lived in that part of Albania for generations. Her great-grandparents, rest in peace, had left the north for the capital, where she’d studied English at the university. When her parents got caught in Kosovo, she’d stayed behind at school in Tirana. After they died in the war, she’d graduated from university and lived with her aunt and uncle and taken more English lessons until she’d figured out what to do next.
Mister Stanley complimented her English. He’d said, “That story about the cave . . . you should write it down.”
Lula said, “That’s what I should do when your son is at school.”
Maybe that was part of the reason she was hired. Mister Stanley got a babysitter and his own private art colony for the same low price. The Lorenzo de Medici of Baywater, New Jersey.
Mister Stanley was all business, working and doing his job. He slept through most of Saturdays, which Zeke spent with his friends, girls and boys, all with dyed black hair and facial hardware. Neither Mister Stanley nor Zeke was big on family life, but Lula felt it was only friendly to offer to cook them Sunday breakfast. Mister Stanley said, Thank you, that would be nice, but no bacon, egg whites only. Cheerios or oatmeal. His bad cholesterol numbers were high.
No one talked at these Sunday meals. Zeke’s chair was not even a dining room chair but an armchair pushed to the table, so Zeke could nod off, or pretend to. It was awkward, eating egg-white omelets with silent Mister Stanley and his snoozing son. It was as if there were two Zekes: the agreeable boy he was with Lula, and the furious troll he became around his father. Lula told Zeke he should be nicer to his dad, and Zeke agreed, but he couldn’t. It would have meant going against his culture.
Sometimes Mister Stanley got annoyed at his son. But his impatience or disappointment or hurt (it was hard to tell) expressed itself as sadness rather than anger. By Albanian standards and even, Lula suspected, by American ones, Mister Stanley had a narrow emotional range. Nothing in Lula’s past had prepared her for his baby-bottle lukewarmness. Especially when they’d been drinking, her father and h
er uncle believed that pointless yelling was not just the prerogative but the proof of maleness. Because they did so much shouting, no one paid attention, so the end result wasn’t so different from the end result of Mister Stanley’s composure.
At home, family parties always ended in fights, but never once was there anything like a family gathering at Mister Stanley’s. Wasn’t there an Albanian-style widowed aunt or grandma who could have moved in with the dad and son and kept house? Mister Stanley had neither parents nor siblings, and on those rare occasions when Ginger’s parents phoned from Indiana to speak to their grandson, Zeke instructed Lula to tell them he was out.
On Sunday afternoons, father and son did father-son things—baseball, tennis, the park—inspired, Lula sensed, by their need to prove something to the disappeared mom: how well they were doing without her. Mister Stanley had a boyish love for buying sports equipment, and he was at his most cheerful (not very) when he and Zeke left to try out a new racket or catcher’s mitt. Each time they returned, Zeke had sustained some minor injury that required a bandage or ice pack, which his father seemed to enjoy providing. The happiest moment of the week arrived on Sunday nights when Lula and Zeke and Mister Stanley watched Tony Soprano and his even more messed-up family drive their gigantic vehicles through neighborhoods flatteringly near Baywater.
Mister Stanley had mentioned his Sunday outings with Zeke at Lula’s job interview. Meaning he wasn’t adopting Lula, she shouldn’t expect to be invited. That was fine, Lula said. That was when she mentioned that she didn’t drive. Mister Stanley had said that was fine, but she might feel trapped in the suburbs, and she’d said, No, that was fine, she was a big reader, it was how she’d learned English, and Mister Stanley said that was excellent. Zeke wasn’t much of a reader, maybe it would rub off. The sweet little public library was within walking distance. Lula worried she would be expected to have books around the house. She was reassured when Mister Stanley didn’t ask what she liked to read.
Lula had told Mister Stanley she wanted structure. Well, structure was what she’d got. Walls, a roof. A front yard. Be careful what you ask for.
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