My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  “You’ve got to put your belt on,” said Mister Stanley. “We’ll be on the highway.”

  “I’ll sit up when we’re doing forty,” said Zeke.

  “Crash test dummies implode at thirty,” Mister Stanley said. “I’ve seen their heads fly off.”

  “Please, Dad,” said Zeke. “I’m tired.”

  Mister Stanley said, “Of all the moments to regress.”

  “He’ll be okay,” said Lula.

  Turning to watch Mister Stanley’s house recede and vanish, Lula felt as if she were leaving a child who might grow so quickly as to become unrecognizable in her absence. How melancholy the house looked as it watched them go. She tried to see it through Ginger’s eyes, as a prison she was escaping, a jail guarded by those tyrannical warders, Zeke and Mister Stanley. What if it were Ginger who’d sneaked into the house and bathed in Lula’s tub? The hair in her soap was red. Ginger was a redhead, a clean freak, and probably cagey enough to misspell beauty and heal and to try to think like an Albanian male. But Ginger was in Arizona. It must have been Alvo. A warm rush melted the ice chip that had lodged briefly in Lula’s heart.

  Mister Stanley had printed out pages from MapQuest, which he handed Lula. “Ginger was the family navigator,” he said.

  Lula said, “You should get GPS.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to work it.” Mister Stanley tried to sound dismissive, as if a GPS system was a frivolous toy and anyone who used one was a frivolous toy person. But he couldn’t carry it off. The Wall Street guys who’d eaten at La Changita were all about their gadgets.

  “It’s not that difficult,” Lula said.

  “How do you know?” asked Mister Stanley. “Do you ever use that cell phone—”

  Lula said, “All the new cars in Albania, GPS comes standard.”

  “This car sucks,” said Zeke. “I wish we could take the Olds.”

  “The gas would cost more than your first year’s tuition,” said Mister Stanley.

  “Give me the money instead of school. That’s what I’ve been saying!”

  “I’m glad you’re sitting up,” said Mister Stanley. “Now please put on your seat belt.”

  One of the favorite after-hours conversations at La Changita concerned the spoiled brattiness of American children, a category in which the waitstaff included the customers. Everyone had a friend who worked as a nanny, everyone had watched some mom bribe her little monster into putting on his mittens. Lula didn’t volunteer her opinion, which was that no one knew how to raise kids, they just screwed them up differently in different places.

  “Turn that down,” said Mister Stanley. “We can hear that racket leaking through your earphones.”

  “Earbuds,” said Zeke. “Not phones.”

  The singer was screaming the same two words over and over. Back pray? Black pay? Mister Stanley gritted his teeth. Zeke disappeared into his music, and Lula felt as if she and Mister Stanley were coworkers trapped in an elevator between floors. She leaned her head against the cool window and let her mind drift back to her lunch with Alvo and its unclear conclusion. Kiss kiss. Little Sister.

  “Please, Zeke,” Mister Stanley pleaded.

  Lula had resolved to stop comparing Mister Stanley to Albanian fathers, with their overly manly approach to raising manly Albanian sons. It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world. In Tirana, university students were like neighbors in a roach-infested slum, six to a dorm room, all working the same shitty job, smoking pot, drinking cheap raki, waking up in bed with a guy you sort of recognized from English class.

  The traffic thinned as they passed oily black trees and swamps choked with russet weeds. How bleak everything was, even the new mansions like hairless patches of mange scratched from the fur of the mountains. The cold window burned Lula’s cheek. She shut her eyes and let the tires sing her to sleep.

  When she awoke, Mister Stanley was exiting the highway.

  “Some navigator,” he told Lula. “Good thing I memorized the directions.”

  “Sorry,” said Lula. Zeke’s head was tipped back, and his breath whistled in his nose. They drove past some barns and a meadow. Though she’d always hated those shooting trips with her father, now the memory of them filled her with grief. Twice her dad had slapped her for missing the target. No wonder she’d refused his offer to teach her to drive. It would upset him to know she’d never learned. Alvo had said: one lesson.

  “Zeke,” said Mister Stanley. “Wake up. Do you really want these schools to catch their first sight of you passed out?”

  “You see anybody looking?” said Zeke. “Dad, you’re getting like Lula.”

  Lula said, “Meaning what?”

  Mister Stanley said, “Here we are. Harmonia College.”

  “Great. The gay one,” said Zeke.

  “Mrs. Sullivan suggested that you and Harmonia would be a good fit,” said Mister Stanley. “And that with your grades and SAT scores you’d have a decent shot.”

  “Mrs. Sullivan is gay,” said Zeke.

  Lula had expected something brick and ivy-covered. A college in a movie. This one looked like Albania. Windowless, half buried in sod like the dictator’s bunkers.

  Mister Stanley said, “This place had a rough time during the sixties. Prehistory to you guys. But when they rebuilt, they figured they’d skip the breakable glass. In case the students rebelled again.”

  “Rebelled against what?” said Zeke. “The skyrocketing price of weed and K-Y Jelly?”

  Mister Stanley sighed. “Mrs. Sullivan mentioned that it used to have a reputation as a druggy school, but all that’s long past.”

  Zeke said, “Let me get this right. We’re begging them to let us blow one hundred and twenty grand so I can smoke grass and have gay sex.”

  “Look,” said Mister Stanley. “There’s the admissions office. Visitor parking.”

  “Should I wait in the car?” asked Lula. Two young women in identical parkas and jeans walked past the windshield, holding hands.

  “What did I tell you?” said Zeke.

  “You might as well come along, Lula,” said Mister Stanley. “I don’t think they’d mind if we bring a friend.”

  A friend? Was that what Lula was? Friend-of-the-family Lula.

  Friend was not how the admissions secretary assessed Lula’s situation. The girl in harlequin glasses and a pencil skirt gave her a long, icy stare. Was Lula the dad’s young Russian mistress, the son’s pedophile older girlfriend? Or was Zeke correct about it being a gay school?

  “Ezekiel Larch,” said Mister Stanley. The secretary asked if they’d taken the tour. Mister Stanley said no, they hadn’t.

  “They left about five minutes ago. You can probably catch them if you hang a left and head up the path toward the arts building.”

  “Thank you,” said Mister Stanley, grabbing Zeke’s elbow and hustling him toward the door, with Lula following close behind.

  “Have fun,” called the receptionist. “Let us know if Zeke is still planning to stay over.”

  Stay over? Zeke looked at his father as if he’d just heard he was being put up for adoption.

  “Applicants can stay overnight,” explained Mister Stanley.

  Zeke said, “Thanks but no thanks. We’re leaving right after the tour.”

  It was easy to find the gaggle of parents and teenagers shifting from foot to foot in the cold as they listened to a Viking maiden in a Peruvian poncho. A peaked, striped knitted wool cap with earflaps ended in hairy blue strings that vanished in the tangle of her yellow curls.

  “Welcome,” she said. “I’m Bethany. I’m a sophomore. Concentrating in theater.”

  Everyone in the group checked Zeke out, sizing up the competition and concluding that Zeke was unlikely to offer much competition, so they didn’t have to bother checking out Mister Stanley or Lula, although some of the dads checked out Lula a
nd then looked guilty in case she was Zeke’s older sister.

  Bethany said, “And you’re—?”

  Zeke tried to think of a way not to answer, but at last gave up his name.

  “What a beautiful name. Welcome to Harmonia, Zeke. You’ll love it.”

  “This is like science fiction,” Zeke whispered to Lula. But within moments he’d surrendered, dazzled by the high beams of Bethany’s smile.

  Lula and Mister Stanley trailed behind as Zeke followed on Bethany’s heels—sandals in this weather!—into the eggy smelling, overheated cafeteria, past the organic salad bar, the troughs of mystery chunks bubbling in thick ochre sauce, the plastic canisters excreting coils of peanut butter. They toured the sunlit art studios where a group of students were spraying newspapers with red paint, then a theater in which another group was painting a backdrop of a red desert crisscrossed with white picket fences, which, Bethany explained, was for a production of Our Town set in outer space.

  Bethany extolled the range of vegan dietary choices, the enviable art careers of the faculty, the deep spiritual beauty of the ninety-year-old Egyptian poet with an endowed chair who had mostly quit teaching but who lent his super-beautiful spiritual vibe to college events. It seemed to Lula that Bethany was directing much of this at Zeke, interrupting her monologue with questions designed to draw him out.

  “What kind of food do you like, Zeke?”

  “Pizza.” Nervous laughter.

  “This one cook, Mario, makes this amazing three-cheese-and-pineapple pizza.”

  “Awesome,” said Zeke.

  “Do you paint, Zeke? Have you ever been in a play?”

  “No, but I’d like to,” Zeke said. The other kids glared at Zeke as if he’d pushed his way to the front of the line and had already been admitted.

  After they’d trekked through a suite of rooms, each containing a grand piano, Bethany said, “Everybody at Harmonia is some kind of artist.”

  “I like music,” said Zeke.

  “What bands do you listen to?” Bethany asked.

  The parents had begun making discontented clucking noises. Perhaps some sort of protest might have erupted, but Bethany or no Bethany, their kids might still want to go here.

  “My Chemical Romance?” said Zeke. “Ever heard of them?”

  “I totally love them,” Bethany said. “There’s this great jazz class here called Noise. Last year one kid put his drumsticks through the snare drum, and the teacher, Bob Jeffers, gave the kid an A.”

  “Bob Jeffers teaches here?” said one of the fathers. “I used to go hear him years ago—”

  Bethany ignored him.

  “A class called Noise?” said Zeke. “That is superior.”

  Lula tried not to wonder why Bethany had fixed on Zeke, hardly the most attractive boy among the prospective students. Maybe she saw something in him. His sweetness, his vulnerability. Love was strange, everyone knew.

  Sure enough, at the end of the tour, as they stood before the chapel where, Bethany told them, Harmonia graduates were always returning to marry each other, she reminded them about the Day and Night at Harmonia admissions option, which enabled applicants to go through a day of classes and have dinner and stay in a dorm, if they’d reserved in advance.

  “Did we reserve?” Zeke asked Mister Stanley.

  “Actually, yes,” said his father, for which he was rewarded with the first grateful look Lula had ever seen Mister Stanley receive from his son.

  Was Mister Stanley really going to hand over his child to this predatory female? He wanted Zeke to go to college. And this might be the only college that wanted him, a fear that Mrs. Sullivan seemed to have planted in Mister Stanley’s mind.

  Three other kids, two boys and a girl, stepped forward. That they had also made arrangements to stay made Zeke’s going with Bethany seem less like a kidnapping than like an admissions option.

  “Everybody have cell phones?” asked Bethany.

  Everybody did.

  “Your kids will call you first thing in the morning. We’ll take good care of them. Don’t worry.” Then she thanked everyone and repeated what an awesome school Harmonia was, and left with her captives in tow.

  “Let’s go,” Mister Stanley told Lula. “Before Zeke changes his mind.”

  Lula thought, He won’t.

  Mister Stanley must have memorized this segment of the directions. Because without much trouble he found the chain motel by the side of the highway where they had reservations.

  “Nothing luxurious,” he told Lula. “But it’s the only game in town.”

  Glass doors glided open, admitting them to the lobby. A nervous boy, perhaps a Harmonia student, regarded them fearfully from the front desk. Mister Stanley had reserved two rooms, just as Lula expected. The clerk apologized because the rooms were on different floors.

  After they got their key cards, Mister Stanley said he needed a nap. Lula was probably tired too. In the elevator he mentioned that, if she wished, they could meet downstairs for dinner at seven. Well, yes, in fact she did wish. She hadn’t eaten anything all day except for one low-fat cheese sandwich. Lula continued up to her floor, where her key card didn’t work. Red light, red light. Buzz buzz. Don’t panic, try again. Green arrow, green light. A chimpanzee could do it. Not until she entered her room did she realize it was almost dark outside. The best thing about the shortest days of the year was the promise that the days would get longer. There was nowhere to go but up. The key in a slot made the lights go on. Cheap energy-saving bastards! Be thankful, Lula told herself. They were trying to save the planet.

  She flopped down on the spongy bed, grateful to be safe in this simple, more or less clean room among hundreds of simple, more or less clean rooms, a bed, a deadbolt lock, a phone, towels, TV. No flat screen, but big enough. And most important, all hers.

  She took off the floral bedspread they couldn’t wash between guests and lay down on the sheet that, she hoped, they could. The pillows were comfortable, and the remote was placed precisely where a mind-reader had imagined Lula’s hand reaching. Lula clicked through the channels, pausing at a talk show on which today’s subject was marriage. The middle-class couples confessed their infidelities and cried, the poor couples refused to confess and then got trapped into telling the truth when their lovers appeared onstage. Then they cried and shouted. Some of the poor women cried, but none of the poor men. None of the middle-class women yelled, but many of them cried. Had Mister Stanley cried over Ginger? One night, on her way upstairs, Lula had heard a sound like someone sobbing from Mister Stanley’s room. Just the possibility that it might be Mister Stanley had upset her so badly that she’d convinced herself she must have dreamed it. But now she thought, Who wouldn’t cry? No wife, no fun, no girlfriends, a job he hated, a son who seemed to despise him.

  Lula must have slept. Stadium lights from the parking lot shone into her window. Trucks whined past on the highway. She switched on the news and watched a congressman apologizing for his adulterous affair, then a group of senators calling for an investigation into charges that U.S. soldiers tortured prisoners in Iraq, then the president telling the press that the United States didn’t torture. It was interesting how everyone lied and only the adulterers got caught. She was lucky to be in this warm motel and not in a smoldering ruin in Baghdad. No sooner had she thought this than another story came on, about a family of refugees from Katrina still living, eight to a room, in a motel outside Denver.

  In the desk drawer was a flyer from a pizza delivery chain. Lula hoped the restaurant served steak. At two minutes to seven she left her room and found Mister Stanley waiting at one of a few tables in an area lit by the glowing juice and milk machines. Very Eastern European. Mister Stanley raised his glass of something golden in an uncharacteristically effusive greeting.

  “Good evening,” Lula said.

  On the wall a shrimp and a lobster wearing top hats and tuxedos were jitterbugging to the notes of a song whose lyrics were “Surf and Turf Tonite!”

&n
bsp; “We’re pretty far inland for the surf,” Mister Stanley said.

  “I was thinking that too,” said Lula. But the pride they took in their wise decision to skip the catch of the day evaporated when the bruised-looking Harmonia-student waitress informed them that their only choice was between spaghetti Bolognese and fried shrimp. She thought the kitchen could do a vegetarian Bolognese, but she wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll have the spaghetti,” Lula said.

  “Make that two,” said Mister Stanley. “And bring us your best bottle of red. For once I’m not driving.”

  “The wine’s forty-eight bucks,” the waitress said. “For which it will suck, I guarantee.”

  “Bring it, please,” said Mister Stanley.

  Lula said, “There were places like this at home. In the mountains. The cook only prepares one thing, but it’s always great, and there’s usually a goat or even a cow turning on a spit out back—”

  Mister Stanley said, “We can assume with some confidence, there is no goat outside.”

  The waitress brought the wine, already opened. That wouldn’t have flown at La Changita. Lula wanted to object on Mister Stanley’s behalf. But that would only make the situation more awkward. Mister Stanley poured Lula a glass, then filled his own and said, “No ceremony here.” He seemed disappointed by the spaghetti’s rapid arrival and gave the waitress a sullen look, which went unnoticed. She plunked down a shaker of grated cheese and stalked back to the kitchen. Mister Stanley let his pasta cool as he drank the wine, and Lula did the same.

  “Have you heard from Zeke?”

  “Why would I?” said Lula. “He’s having fun.”

  “What did you think of that Bethany?”

  “Super friendly,” said Lula.

  “It’s so strange,” said Mister Stanley.

  “What’s so strange, Mister Stanley?”

  “Call me Stanley, please. It’s strange how alone I feel. And Zeke isn’t even gone yet. Maybe if my marriage had lasted, I could be looking forward to a new phase of life. Ginger and I could be traveling. Poor Ginger! I have nightmares about her drowning and not being able to save her. If she’d been happy with us and hadn’t . . . fallen ill, I’d have someone to talk to, someone to share the heartbreak of losing the boy—the young man!—who five minutes ago was an infant in our arms. Have you ever had those dreams in which you’re trying to walk or drive and everything’s dark and you can’t see?”