My New American Life

HarperCollins

Chapter One

The day after Lula’s lawyer called to tell her she was legal,
three Albanian guys showed up in a brand-new black Lexus SUV.
She had been staring out her window at the drizzly afternoon and
thinking that the mulberry tree on Mister Stanley’s front lawn
had waited to drop its last few leaves until it knew she was watch-
ing. Obviously, this was paranoid and also egocentric, but in the
journal that her immigration lawyer and her boss had suggested
that she keep, she wrote: “October, 2005. Does a leaf fall in New
Jersey if no one is there to see?”

Don Settebello and Mister Stanley would go nuts for a line like
that. They were always telling Lula she should write a memoir
about her old Albanian life and now her new one in the United
States. Don even had a title, My New American Life. Lula had a
better title, Stranger in a Strange Land, but she’d already seen it
in the public library. Maybe she could still use it. Maybe no one
would notice.

Raindrops beaded the SUV as it trawled past the house where
Lula lived and worked, taking care of Mister Stanley’s son Zeke,
a high school senior who only needed minimal caretaking. In fact
Zeke could do many things that Lula couldn’t, such as drive a
car. But since Mister Stanley believed that teenagers shouldn’t be
left on their own, and since he went off to Wall Street at dawn
and didn’t return until late, he had hired Lula to make sure that
Zeke ate and slept and did his homework. Mister Stanley was
very safety-conscious, which Lula found very admirable but
also dangerously American. No Albanian father would do that
to his son and risk turning him gay.

Lula’s duties included making sure there was food in the
house. Most afternoons, Zeke drove Lula to the supermar-
ket in his vintage 1970 Oldsmobile. Considering how little
they bought and how much of it was frozen, they could have
shopped once a month, but they enjoyed the ritual. On the way,
Zeke gave Lula driving tips: who went first at an intersection,
how to speak the silent language that kept drivers from killing
each other like they did constantly in Tirana. Zeke might have
been explaining the principles of astrophysics, but Lula appre-
ciated the gesture, just as Zeke liked feeling superior to Lula and
better about having a nanny only nine years older than he was.
The word nanny was never mentioned. Lula explained to Zeke
that in her native country only party bigwigs were allowed to
own the black deathmobiles that sped through Tirana in packs,
and then the economy tanked and no one could afford a car,
so now Albanians drove their hot or secondhand Mercedes like
kids who’d had their licenses for about five minutes.

As had Zeke, who still wasn’t legal to drive at night. But he’d
grown up in a car culture, driving was his birthright. Every
country had problems, but when Lula saw how Americans
drove, how American children drove, she couldn’t help feeling
cheated for not having been born here. Her dad used to borrow
her uncle’s car, and then he sort of stole it and smuggled it over
the border from Albania into Kosovo, where both her parents
were killed in a car wreck. Lula had never mentioned this sad
fact to Mister Stanley or Zeke. It would only have upset Mister
Stanley and made Zeke suspect that his driving lessons might
not be enough to put Lula on the road.

Mister Stanley said Zeke could have the gas-guzzling-pig
Olds if he hardly ever drove it. If he had to drive at all, his
dad preferred him in a tank. Zeke was so in love with the Olds
that he kept it in the garage and rode the bus back and forth
to school, and Mister Stanley parked his seven-year-old Acura
minivan at the end of the driveway. Officially, Zeke was only
allowed to drive to The Good Earth Market, which his father
liked, because it was close and had organic choices, and which
Zeke also liked (it was practically the only thing he and his
father agreed on) because he believed in staying small and
locally owned and off the corporate grid, though his actual food
tastes ran to mesquite-flavored corn chips and microwavable
ramen. Zeke didn’t notice the other shoppers looking down
their rich straight suburban noses at what he and Lula bought.
Probably theirs was the only household in which the Albanian
girl let the American teen decide. Lula had cooked vegetables,
many times, but Zeke refused to eat them. Let his wife worry
some day.

After she and Zeke got back from the market, Lula mixed
them each a mojito, a splash of alcohol in Zeke’s, a healthy
splash in her own, heavy on the sugar and mint. Zeke sat on a
kitchen stool and watched Lula make dinner. Most nights they
ate pizza with frozen crust, tomato sauce from a jar, and moz-
zarella that, refrigerated, would outlive them both. Sometimes
Lula unpeeled tiny ice-dusted hamburgers, which, steamed in
the microwave, were surprisingly delicious, surprisingly like a
street snack you could buy in Tirana. Bad food made Zeke feel
rebellious, which every teenager needed. The better Zeke felt
about himself, the more secure Lula’s job was, and the likelier
her chances of staying in this country, though Mister Stanley
and Don Settebello had made it clear that their helping Lula
was not about her working for Mister Stanley and being good
for Zeke.

And now, hooray, she was legal! Lula inhaled and shuddered,
half at the shiny black Lexus still patrolling the block, the other
half at her daily life. The life of an elderly person!
Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten
dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening
news, educational for them both. The president had come on
the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird
flu. The word avian was hard for him. His forehead stitched
each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he’d been
instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.
“At home,” Lula marveled, “that man is a god.”
“You say that every night,” Zeke said.
“I’m reminding myself,” she’d said. Her country’s love affair
with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton
and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescu-
ing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic’s death squads. Even
at home she’d had her doubts about the streets paved with gold,
but when she finally got to New York and started working at La
Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about
the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feel-
ings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion
everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula’s
opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.

Yesterday night, as always, she’d felt sorry for the president,
so like a dim little boy who’d told a lie that had set off a war, and
then he’d let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and
now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was
about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice presi-
dent, who scared Lula, too, with his cold little eyes not blinking
when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.
“There is no bird flu,” Lula had told Zeke. “A war in Iraq,
Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a
sore throat and a fever.”
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen
to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange
because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York sub-
way system.
Lula said, “There is no threat.”
“How do you know everything?” Zeke asked. “Not that I
don’t agree it’s all bullshit.”
She’d been about to tell Zeke—again!—about having
grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in
Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha,
who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his
mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy
thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he’d had built in a
country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a
chance to repeat herself, she’d been distracted by an advertise-
ment for the new season of ER.
“Look, Zeke,” she’d said, “see that gurney rushing in and
doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the
patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at
you till you figure out who to pay off.”

As a reward for sitting through the news, Zeke got to watch
his favorite channel, which showed grainy reruns of a cheap
black-and-white 1970s series about a small-town mom and
daughter both in love with the same cop who grew fangs and
bit girls’ necks. Zeke was obsessed with vampires and with the
1970s. He predicted that vampires were going to be huge.
“One problem with vampires,” Lula told Zeke, “in my part
of the world, harmless people are always being burned at the
stake because their neighbors think they are blood-sucking
bats.” She hated lying to Zeke. But vampire lynchings had hap-
pened. She’d just changed one little phrase, always instead of
used to, and put it in the present tense. She never, or hardly ever,
used to lie at home, where for decades mass lying had been a
way of life, where you agreed that day was night if you thought
it might help keep your children safe. She’d almost never lied
at all until she’d applied for her U.S. tourist visa. But ever since
she got here, she couldn’t seem to stop.
Zeke said, “Why would people do evil shit like that?”
“Because they wanted their neighbor’s house or husband or wife?”
Zeke said, “That doesn’t happen here. Vampires are a meta-phor.”
“A metaphor for what?” Lula asked.
“For everything,” Zeke replied.
After dinner, Lula plastic-wrapped the leftover pizza in case
Mister Stanley came home hungry, which he never did. She’d
worked for Mister Stanley for almost a year and still had no idea
what he did for food and sex. Maybe he was a vampire. Mister
Stanley’s milky skin was so translucent that, until she tired of it,
Lula liked standing where she could see him backlit so that his
bat ears glowed like a pair of night lamps.

Now as she watched the brand-new SUV prowl the suburban
street, she was sure, or almost sure, it had nothing to do with
her. For one thing, she didn’t know anyone in this snooty town,
and no one knew her. Mama dead, Papa dead, may their souls
rest in peace, not that she believed in the soul. She hoped they
were in a heaven (which she also didn’t believe in) that was as
little as possible like Albania. But would they have wanted that?
When her dad drank, which was constantly, he said he would
die for his homeland, and in his own way, he had.
Lula still had a few aunts, uncles, and cousins sprinkled
around Albania and Kosovo, but they’d lost touch. An Alba-
nian without a family was a walking contradiction. Of course
she hadn’t said this to the embassy officer in Tirana who’d
approved her tourist visa. She’d brought in pictures of neigh-
bor kids, whom she’d claimed were nephews and nieces she
could hardly bear to leave for that last-fling vacation before
she came home and married her childhood sweetheart. She said
“Christmas wedding” a dozen times so the guy wouldn’t sus-
pect she was half Muslim. Dad’s mom, her granny, was Chris-
tian. Wasn’t that enough? Anyway, Muslim meant nothing in
Communist post-Communist Albania. An American wouldn’t
know that. Muslim meant Muslim to him.

She’d said, “I want to see the world, starting with Detroit,
where my aunt lives.” The officer smiled. How cute! His heart
flopped for the Albanian girl so innocent she thought Detroit
was the world. One look at Detroit, she’d jump on the first plane
home and shrivel into a raisin before she was thirty-five. Lula
crossed and uncrossed her legs. On the visa officer’s wall was a
poster of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses. Lula had to convince him that she wasn’t
planning to stay. Everyone lied to the embassy. It didn’t count as
a lie. Since 9/11 they made you lie, but that hadn’t stopped one
Albanian girl or boy from wanting to come to New York.
The Lexus turned and passed the house.

Mister Stanley had given Lula a cell phone that he liked her to
keep charged, though she never called anyone, and no one had
called her, not since her best friend Dunia had left the country
and gone home. Mister Stanley had programmed in their home
phone number, Mister Stanley’s cell and work phones, Zeke’s
cell phone, and Don Settebello’s office. She was the only person
on earth with five numbers on her phone!

She was like the girl in the fairy tale. The princess in the
tower. One of the made-up “traditional” folk stories she’d
written for Mister Stanley and Don Settebello was about a
beautiful maiden imprisoned in a castle. A prince sees her at
the window, falls in love, and, unable to reach her, transplants
a strong, quick-growing vine from his native region. The good
news is, he climbs the vine and rescues her; the bad news is that
the vine grows and grows and wipes out the local farmers, their
punishment for locking up the princess in the first place. Don
especially liked that one, which, he said, proved that indige-
nous folk cultures foresaw the threat of species importation and
genetic engineering.

Next fall, Zeke would leave for college, and Lula would
have to figure out the next phase of her new American life.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from My New American Life by Francine Prose Copyright © 2011 by Francine Prose. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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