My New American Life Read Free

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.
    â€œGinger,” he said. “My wife.” His voice had the pinched, slightly nasal timbre of a chronic sinus sufferer.
    â€œThat’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