My New American Life (2 page)

They knew it wasn't funny. The day after Eduardo the busboy didn't show up for his shift, his wife came into the restaurant, crying. Eduardo had gone to settle a parking ticket, and now he was somewhere (his wife hoped) between New York and Guerrero. Tears bubbled through the curtain of her little son's lashes. Bleeding heart Lula and Dunia had to talk each other out of adopting Eduardo's family and bringing them home to share the tiny Ludlow Street walk-up that wasn't even theirs.

By that point Lula's visa problem was keeping her up at night. She told herself not to worry, the government had plenty of people to deport before they got around to her. Busboys like Eduardo, Arab engineering students, hordes of cabdrivers and cleaners. On the other hand, who would a bored horny INS dude rather have in detention: Eduardo, some Yemeni geezer in a skullcap, or two twenty-six-year-old Albanian girls with shiny hair and good tits?

Lula and Dunia had shared a one-bedroom on the Lower East Side with a Ukrainian girl, an unemployed dental assistant who was never home, and a beanpole from Belarus who wanted to be a runway model and gave them a break on the rent if they pretended not to hear her puking in the bathroom. Lula said they had to do something about their immigration status, but Dunia said if they did nothing, something good would happen. Dunia's mother was a Christian Scientist, a rarity in Albania, and sometimes Lula heard the mother's soft prayerful voice under the daughter's raucous smoker's croak. Lula believed in watching out, in contingency plans, common sense. Dunia had often told Lula that she should try being a half-full-glass person instead of half-empty-glass person. In Lula's opinion, she and Dunia traded off, half-emptiness and half-fullness, but you couldn't argue with Dunia, so she'd let it go.

When Lula showed Dunia Mister Stanley's Craigslist ad, “Divorced man looking for companion for teenage son, Baywater, New Jersey, ten miles from downtown Manhattan,” Dunia said ten miles if you swam. Dunia also said that a Slovakian girl she knew answered an ad like that, and it was an escort service. Genius Dunia was back in Tirana now. Or so Lula hoped. Not long after Lula moved to New Jersey, Dunia phoned, yelling above the La Changita racket, babbling in Albanian (which they'd mostly stopped speaking by then) that two men in black suits had come looking for her at the restaurant, and she was going home before they deported her. Since then, Lula's e-mails had bounced back, and no one answered when she called Dunia's mom in Berat. She'd looked on Facebook and MySpace, but Dunia wasn't there. She tried not to think about the things that could have happened to her friend. What if the men in black suits were worse than INS agents? Lula didn't know how to look for Dunia, short of going back to Albania and hiring a detective.

Lula and Mister Stanley had arranged to meet for the first time in the Financial district, for coffee. Even in the Starbucks gloom it was clear that Mister Stanley wasn't looking for a girlfriend or even occasional sex but, like his listing said, for a responsible person to watch his kid. From a distance, Lula had tagged him as a depressed mid-level accountant, but up close he turned out to be a depressed something higher up, which meant he could pay Lula very well for doing almost nothing. At the interview, Mister Stanley explained that his wife had left—abandoned—him and Zeke and traveled to the Norwegian fjords because she wanted to start over, somewhere clean and white.

“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.

W
atching 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.