“America I get wrong,” she says, “Everybody does, Americans worst of all.”

              “How can you not know what country you’re from?” I say. “Are borders that uncertain?”

              “People are uncertain. They move where governments or gangs or gangsters say. My family is somewhere. My husband-who-is-always-right” – she says it like a title – “says my family is stucked in Walachia, which stopped existing long ago. Walachia, defeated country of the Vlachs, who lost every war they got in, and many wars they did not get in. Borders are infernal.”

              I think she means borders are eternal. Or maybe internal, or infernal, why not? I never ask. I like that she talks to me a language I understand but she doesn’t. I like not needing to understand. She lifts her head defiantly.

              “My poor, poor husband,” she says. Her eyes are black in this dark room, her hair dark red. She sticks out her tongue. She’s going to say something she thinks is funny because I’ll think it’s disgusting. “My husband will beat me when he finds out.”

              “He beats you?”

              “What’s one more beat? You think he is American? You think I, I am American?”

              She grins, walking me to bed. She slaps me lightly, slap, slap, harder, dodging me. I’m grabbing, it’s fast. She climbs on top, hitting. “My little American. Beat-ba, Beat-ba-ba. What do you know? What do you think you think when you think? You are human? You don’t even smoke cigarette!” She swings at me hard, I catch her arm. She spits, we roll, tangled in sheets, make love.

              “You call it make love, as if love is what you make, or do.”

              “Love is what you make, love is what you do,” I say. Sounds good, might be right.

3

  

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