by Alisa Valdes
“You read?” I ask. He laughs again, starts dancing a little to the music.
“I can read, sí.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way, I meant—”
“It’s okay.” He shrugs again, and starts looking at the framed photos on my windowsill. He stops on one of Ed. Oops. I forgot that one. “Who dat?” he asks in English.
“Nobody.”
“Ah, then it must be somebody,” he says in Spanish, with a wink.
“You’re good,” I say.
He scans my CDs. “Too many Puerto Ricans,” he comments.
“What?”
“No Dominicans here. All Puerto Ricans.” Then, in a mocking voice, “Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico. I’m sick of Puerto Rico, man.”
“What about this?” I ask, referring to the Olga. Again with the laugh.
“Boricua.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I had no idea. I thought she was Dominican. She sings merengue.
“Nada, nothing.”
I try to follow him, but trip as I get up and land with a thud on the floor.
“Let me guess,” he says in slow Spanish, helping me up. “That ‘nobody’ dumped you and you went to the club with your friend and now you want to get even. So you pick me, use me, right?”
“You’re really good.”
He examines me with a critical eye. Smart. Really smart, this guy. Then he kisses me, hard. I melt into him, kiss back. We move to the couch, tumble down. I stop.
“Your turn now,” I say, or rather I slur. “You’re a drug dealer and you are smart and handsome and you can get any woman you want and you use women all the time for your own thing and then you leave them like dirt.”
He shakes his head. “You not good,” he says in English. “You no know me at all.”
We continue to kiss and fumble with each other’s unfamiliar bodies. I start to rip at his clothes. He feels, smells, tastes as good as I thought he might. Salty. I grope at the zipper of his pants.
He stops me.
I try again.
He stops me.
Stops.
Me.
Me!
“What?” I ask. “You don’t like me?”
“Sí mi amor, sí me gustas tu, muchísimo,” he says. He likes me. A lot.
“So what’s the problem then?”
“You drunk,” he says in English. “I no never take advantage of no drunk womans.” Then, in Spanish, “It’s an ethical policy.”
“I’m not drunk,” I say. My wooden tongue and its slobbery rubber words imply otherwise. Oops.
He looks at his beeper again, then stands up, leans over me, and actually picks me up off the couch.
“Don’t do that!” I cry into the salty brown of his neck. “I’m too fat, you’ll hurt yourself. You’ll drop me.”
“You no fat,” he says. “Who say that? The nobody? Forget him. You beautiful.”
He carries me down to the bed, and tucks me in. I start to cry, big humid alcoholic tears. Drops of mascara-water stain the comforter.
“You think I’m ugly, huh?” I ask. “I knew it. You can get all those pretty girls at the club and I’m just stupid and fat.”
“No, no, mi amor,” he says, sitting next to me on the bed. He wipes my tears with his fingers. In English, he says, “You so beautiful.” He looks surprised and concerned.
“No, I’m not. Look at me. I’m disgusting. No one loves me. Ed hates me. I can’t believe he was with that stupid little girl.”
“Okay,” he says. “I go now. I call you later.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I love you.”
“Oh, whatever.” I collapse sobbing into my pillow, the weight of everything that has happened to me crushing me to nothing. I’m so disgusting my fiancé cheated on me, and now I can’t even have a one-night stand with a lowlife drug dealer. Even he’s too good for me, is that it? Life sucks.
“I like your books,” he says, standing in the doorway. In Spanish, “That’s why I’m leaving now. You get it?”
“What are you talking about? Get out of here.” I bury my head under a pillow.
In English, he says, “Woman got bad books, I do you once, maybe twice, you know?” He walks over, lifts the pillow, kisses my cheek, and smiles. “You, me, we got nothing to talk if you got bad books. Or don’t got no books.”
“What?”
“I like you,” he says in Spanish. “You’re a good, decent woman, a smart woman. A professional woman. I don’t want to ruin this. I could take advantage of you right now, but that would be unacceptable behavior.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
In slow Spanish so I will understand him, he says, “You’ve been drinking, too much I think. You might make a decision you will regret. And I don’t want you to make a mistake with me. I don’t want to be the man you take because you’re on the rebound. I’m not stupid. I know a good woman when I meet one. I don’t meet many. You’re a good woman.”
I don’t believe it. Mr. Danger the Drug Dealer is the good guy? He’s thinking about me? “Okay,” I say. I sit up, sniffling. “If you’re so smart, if you care so much about good books, what are you doing selling drugs? That’s not a smart thing to do.”
He moves back to the bed, sits, and leans to one side, fishing a wallet out of his back pocket. He opens it, and starts flipping through the photographs there.
“Here,” he says, stopping on a picture of a woman somewhere in her forties with an obvious resemblance to him. “Here’s why.” He points. I look at his face and I’m surprised yet again to find tears perched in the corners of his dark brown eyes. “Mami.”
“She’s pretty,” I offer.
“She beautiful,” he corrects me in English. “And she real sick, que Dios la bendiga.” He continues in Spanish, going very slowly so I can understand him. “She’s got cancer. She can’t work. And she’s raising my aunt’s children, and one of them is mentally retarded. She’s in Santo Domingo. You know how we brushed our teeth in her house? With a cup of bottled water, out in the yard.” He pantomimes this degrading ritual. “We never heard of running water where my mother lives. Things are bad there. So I do what I have to do.”
I try, but have a hard time imagining this smooth-talking, intense-eyed, powerful, gorgeous young man living in that kind of squalor. Do people like him actually come from places like that? I mean, my good leftist upbringing tells me that yes, they do, that there are smart, incredible people everywhere. But I guess part of me never really believed it.
“You could go to school, you could get a regular job.” I grab a tissue from the box on my nightstand and blow my nose, feeling somewhat better, but still fat and ugly.
He laughs again. In Spanish, “You can’t live on what they pay you here. I don’t have time to go to school. These people need money now. She’ll die before I could finish school. I tried. I had regular jobs. I couldn’t help myself, let alone anyone else, on what they pay you here. I need enough money to get her here for treatment.”
It occurs to me that he could be totally full of it, manipulating me. But there’s something to him. He’s not lying. He’s crying. Unless he’s a brilliant actor, this guy is telling the truth.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he says. “When I came here, I didn’t think I’d end up doing this. You think any of us want to do this?”
“How did you start?”
“They find you,” he says. “They look for guys like me. I didn’t always have these clothes. I came here with sandals and a woman’s coat I got from my sister. I didn’t know what cold felt like. You know? And I didn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger. I was hungry. These guys always come back, you know, they come back to Santo Domingo from New York and Boston and they have nice clothes and cell phones and they get nice things for their mothers, and they tell everyone they got jobs cleaning buildings or whatever, they lie. So when Mami got sick, I came. I’m not the first idiot to think it’d be easy here. That’s what everyone says bac
k home.”
“What about your dad?”
“I got no dad. He lives in Puerto Rico. He’s a boricua. Bastard.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugs again. In Spanish, “It makes me a citizen and I don’t have to deal with Immigration. I was young when I came, and I didn’t know. The dealers that found me made it easy, gave me some money and a car, and here I am, selling drugs.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.” I knew he was younger than I am, but I had no idea. He’s just a kid.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
“Where’d you learn about Isabel Allende?”
“Around. There’s a Spanish bookstore in Cambridge. I would have gone to school more in Santo Domingo, but you know what they do to boys like me who want to study? They shoot at you. The police. They used to shoot at me just to watch me jump when I walked to school. It’s not like here, Lauren. It’s another world. You wouldn’t understand. Everybody’s poor in Santo Domingo.”
“Can’t you just work and make a better life?”
“No. That’s what your kind of people do here. Not there. Not my kind of people.”
“Jesus.”
I don’t know what else to say. He’s telling the truth, and his truth is ugly. I don’t want to hear it. I just wanted a pretty hoodlum to use and discard. Now I can’t do that. I still think he’s handsome, only now I feel sorry for him, too.
And I like him. What’s wrong with me?
“You go to bed now,” he says, checking that beeper again. Then, in English: “I got to go. I come tomorrow, okay, baby? I come see you again tomorrow.”
Against my better judgment for the second time tonight, I say yes.
He kisses me good night.
And so begins my relationship with Amaury Pimentel, the literate drug dealer.
Just two weeks to go until baseball season starts. All in favor of the Red Sox moving out of Fenway Park, raise your hands. What’s that? You all agree with me that there’s no better place to catch a ball game than the great green monster in the heart of Back Bay? There are many things I love about spring in this town—the cherry blossoms on Newbury Street, the street festivals—but the thing I love most is April at Fenway Park. I love the crisp scent of spring in the air. I love the hot dogs, smothered in chili and cheese. I love the beer in plastic cups. Most of all, though, I love Nomar Garciaparra’s butt in those tight baseball pants. (Nomar, anytime you’re free, I’m free, okay?) Three cheers for the Red Sox, Fenway Park, and tight baseball pants! Sometimes, it’s best to move on when something has gotten old and tired. But in the case of our wonderful ballpark, it’s better to stay put.
—from “My Life,” by Lauren Fernández
rebecca
I TWIST MY key in the door, push it open, and call out.
“Brad?”
No answer.
I hang the crimson coat on the brass hook behind the door, drop my briefcase and purse on the wood floor of the entry, check the usual places: dining table, refrigerator, the message pad on my desk. He has not left a note. The pain in my eye disappears. My neck and shoulders relax. I inhale, deeply, smooth my fists into hands again. He’s not home. Forgive me, Jesus, I think, but I’m relieved. He hasn’t been here in almost a week.
It’s almost too good to be true.
The steamy hot shower feels fine. I linger, lean against the white tiles, close my eyes. And breathe, deeply. I shampoo my hair, feeling my fingers on my scalp for the first time in a long while, really feeling them. I wash my body, taking my time. There’s an electricity to my skin today. I can’t explain it. I feel good, young.
We have to take hold of our own images, because no one is going to do it for us. I go over the words to tonight’s speech in my head. I’m not unique. There are thousands like me. They just need a chance. I’m prepared. Tonight will be perfect.
Once I’m clean, I turn off the shower, insert the white rubber stopper in the drain, toss a few orange spice-scented bath cubes into the tub, and fill it with hot water. I add a dash of pink watermelon bubble bath to the running water, push PLAY on the bath stereo to start my Toni Braxton CD. I know all the lyrics by heart now. I slip into the bubbles, lean my head against the peach-colored bath pillow, and listen to my thoughts.
Annulment. Annulment. Annulment.
My stomach flutters with anticipation of being finished with Brad.
I close my eyes, slide down, submerge myself completely in the water, and try to drown out all negative thoughts. Is an annulment a negative thought under these circumstances? I don’t think so.
Annulment.
I come up for air, look at my hopeful red toenails peeking out of the bubbles, laugh out loud. It feels good. That can’t be a negative thought. I have met Marion Wright Edelman, Colin Powell, and Cristina Saralegui. To a person, all of the successful people I admire have one thing in common: positive attitudes. I think positive thoughts, all the ones I can imagine. But there’s something coiled in my belly. I can’t concentrate.
My hands run along my skin under the water, the fingers seeking out the pleasure parts I’ve ignored for too long. I touch myself. I feel guilty, but I always feel guilty when I do this.
For some reason, Andre’s face keeps appearing on the inside of my eyelids, smiling. Dimples. I move my finger in slow small circles on my secret spot, and feel my legs tense with delicious pressure. Andre, big strong Andre. How would he move a woman on a bed? I almost say his name out loud. He called again at the office today, and left another message with my assistant, this time: “You Will Dance.” It’s forward, and inappropriate.
It excites me.
I hear Consuelo bumping the vacuum against the door, cleaning the bedroom. I muffle my thoughts, freeze my hands, afraid she might catch me. I squeeze my legs together again, wait without breathing, so quiet I can hear tiny bubbles popping on the surface of the water. When the sound of the motor retreats, I begin again. I wonder if Brad finds Consuelo “earthy.” Negative thought. Zap, zap.
Submerged again in the orange and watermelon water, and there’s Andre. Sexy. Zap. It’s no use. My body sings for him. I thrum, faster and faster, until my body bursts into a million stars.
I open my eyes. What have I done? The light seems too bright. The air too still. I am flooded with guilt. As always, I move quickly forward, try to forget.
I change the scenery to the Sandia mountains after a snowstorm, clean and crisp. I breathe in the color of the sky in my hometown, a bright, clear, and soothing blue. I flip the lever that releases the drain and remove myself from the hot, scented water, wrap my body in a thick white cotton towel, and move into my large, meticulously organized walk-in closet.
If I were not scheduled to speak, I would wear something a little bit sparkly, perhaps my long black dress with the velvet embroidered jacket. But tonight I need something that conveys strength, dignity, and the spirit of successful minority entrepreneurship.
Alberto, my personal shopper, chose an elegant flowing pants suit, in black, cut in a style that makes me look taller than I really am. He took it to a tailor and had a few understated Mexican motifs in bright red and yellow sewn along the cuffs. He has also chosen the shoes and handbag, buoyant and not overly sexy. The accessories are small and folk-arty. They must come from somewhere south of the border. Nice touches.
The outfits some women choose to wear to the Minority Business Association events amaze me. Unfortunately, many Hispanic women embarrass themselves—and the rest of us—by showing up in prom dresses. The ones with the worst taste are from the Caribbean. They like colors as loud as their voices, and think cleavage is a business asset.
You could take a random sampling of the outfits worn by the women at these Minority Business Association events and I could accurately attach the outfit to the ethnic group without seeing the actual person wearing the clothes. A tight dress with a ruffle around the bottom would be a Latina. Any kind of suit or dress
with an elaborate boxy hat or excessively showy brooch would be African-American. The most conservative suits would belong to the Asian-American women. A skintight catsuit with puffy boudoir slippers would belong to a Hispana, sadly. I do not lie when I say I have seen women at our events in this type of costume.
I ARRIVE AT the hotel early and check in with the organizers. I will give the keynote address during the meal, which is a relief because I am often uncomfortable eating in front of others. Few people understand my eating habits, and I am tired of explaining my reasons for avoiding caffeine, sugar, fat, meat, and dairy. The organizer tells me I will sit in the main hall, at a table headed by Andre Cartier, at Andre’s request. At the mention of his name my pulse quickens.
I make an appearance at the informal cocktail party in one of the smaller conference rooms down the hall. I work the crowd, shaking hands and memorizing the names, quickly moving on to meet others. I find it amazing how many people seem to misunderstand the purpose of a cocktail party. You do not go to a business cocktail party in order to socialize with your friends and other people you already know. You do not go to a cocktail party to enjoy the food and drink. You do not go in order to shrink in social terror against the wall and watch all the other people talking to one another.
The purpose of a cocktail party is to meet potential business contacts and to have them meet you. I can’t believe how many people still go to these things with their friends from the office and stand around with their cold drinks in their right hands. You are supposed to hold your drink in your left hand, because the right hand is the one you will be using to shake hands with the people you are supposed to be meeting. You do not make a good impression on someone by shaking hands when yours is cold and clammy.
People begin to arrive in the large hall and take their places at the tables. I join them. Many make mistakes regarding the appropriate time to unfold the napkin and put it in their laps or, worse, forget to put the napkin in their laps at all. The proper time to put your napkin in your lap, of course, is after the head of your table has done so—not, as many people seem to think, as soon as you sit down.
