Shards of Porcelain

Manhattans

You eye the box of Manhattans, the silver sliver of foil wrapped tightly around the soaring white skyscrapers against all that impossible blue, and you wonder briefly if you should save it, if the place you are going to, the place that shares the name with the brand of cigarettes you'd been smoking for over a year now, you wonder, stupidly, if you'll ever buy them again.

You can picture it in your head, the city of stark white skyscrapers, taller than any building you'd ever been in, and clean, shiny, glossy. The people, too, you can almost picture them, white teeth, glossy hair, a brightly colored mass of humanity smiling at you, looking you over, but not unkindly, telling you that you belong with just their eyes, their gleaming mouths too busy smiling at you.

You break the seal and light up, waiting outside the door to the terminal, your free hand wrapped tightly around the bouquet of almost black roses the one you are in love with brought for you, a last small gift from this side of the Atlantic, a gift you are told by a sweaty guard you couldn't take with you. You inhale the blue of the smoke and let it out. Slowly. You wait for the taste of it to be gone, or as gone as you can make it, and you drop your face into the mutilated heads of your black roses and you sniff, and sniff and sniff all of it in, the silky veins of them, the softness, and you know you'll never buy these for yourself where you are going.

You spend thirteen hours on a PanAm Boing reading a tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to block the incessant arguing of your parents and the screams of little kids, playful at first, and then not, and you read, hating the man who wrote it for making you feel the kind of alone you can't describe, the kind you know there are no words for in any language.

You grip the box of Manhattans tighter just as the plane starts its descent over your new city, the one with the white skyscrapers and shiny people, so many people you are suddenly afraid you'd blend in, become invisible.

You are finally on an escalator, your fingers playing with the cigarette you are dying to smoke, your parents' voices sounding too loud, too foreign, too embarrassingly Russian and you run from them, taking the escalator two steps at a time, trying not to think of the way everyone is staring at you, at your mom and dad, at your hapless brother.

You open the door to the outside, the walls stained yellow and gray and dirty, and your hand is shaking too hard to light the cigarette, but you keep striking the match again and again as you feel the eyes of everyone on you, because you were too stupid, or too poor, or too foreign to have thought to bring a lighter, and you know, in that moment, you know you don't belong here, and the too white, too white, too white skyscrapers on your box of Manhattans was a lie.

And you don't see a tanned, gold ringed hand light your cigarette, because your eyes are full of water. And you don't notice the too-white handkerchief that is offered to you by that same hand, not until you hear it, faintly, through all the trying to keep the tears in, but you hear it nonetheless, your first welcome into the new world spoken in rapid Italian or something that sounds like it, but you wouldn't know, because you never did learn to speak anything but the language you left on the other side of the Atlantic with all your books, and the man with the roses, and the dirty buildings that smelled of piss and melting snow and home....

"It's gonna be okay, bambino, it's gonna be okay," the man whispers to you, over and over again, until you take the handkerchief from his soft, soft hand, and mouth something you hope sounds or looks a lot like "thank you."