by Junot Díaz
He looked out through the glass at Manhattan’s western flank, looked out like he was some deep nigger. Then he told her.
There were no surprises. Her eyes went soft, she put a hand on his hand, her chair scraped closer, there was a strand of yellow in her teeth. Oscar, she said gently, I have a boyfriend.
She drove him home; at the house he thanked her for her time, walked inside, lay in bed.
In June he graduated from Don Bosco. See them at graduation: his mother starting to look thin (the cancer would grab her soon enough), Rudolfo high as shit, only Lola looking her best, beaming, happy. You did it, Mister. You did it. He heard in passing that of everybody in their section of P-town only he and Olga—poor fucked-up Olga—had not attended even one prom. Dude, Miggs joked, maybe you should have asked her out.
In September he headed to Rutgers New Brunswick, his mother gave him a hundred dollars and his first kiss in five years, his tío a box of condoms: Use them all, he said, and then added: On girls. There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That, alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy. After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white-boys, and dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him, he felt the optimism wane, and before he even realized what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass. His happiest moments were genre moments, like when Akira was released (1988). Pretty sad. Twice a week he and his sister would dine at the Douglass dining hall; she was a Big Woman on Campus and knew just about everybody with any pigment, had her hand on every protest and every march, but that didn’t help his situation any: During their get-togethers she would give him advice and he would nod quietly and afterward would sit at the E bus stop and stare at all the pretty Douglass girls and wonder where he’d gone wrong in his life. He wanted to blame the books, the sci-fi, but he couldn’t—he loved them too much. Despite swearing early on to change his nerdly ways, he continued to eat, continued not to exercise, continued to use flash words, and after a couple semesters without any friends but his sister, he joined the university’s resident geek organization, RU Gamers, which met in the classrooms beneath Frelinghuysen and boasted an entirely male membership. He had thought college would be better, as far as girls were concerned, but those first years it wasn’t.
TWO
Wildwood
1982-1985
It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom. You will remember what you were doing at that precise moment for the rest of your lift: You were reading Watership Down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat and you didn’t want to stop reading, the book has to go back to your brother tomorrow, but then she called you again, louder, her I’m-not-fucking-around voice, and you mumbled irritably, Sí, señora.
She was standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her waist like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea. You want to return to your book, to pretend you didn’t hear her, but it is too late. Her eyes meet yours, the same big smoky eyes you will have in the future. Ven acá, she commanded. She is frowning at something on one of her breasts. Your mother’s breasts are immensities. One of the wonders of the world. The only ones you’ve seen that are bigger are in nudie magazines or on really fat ladies. They’re 35 triple-Ds and the aureoles are as big as saucers and black as pitch and at their edges are fierce hairs that sometimes she plucked and sometimes she didn’t. These breasts have always embarrassed you and when you walk in public with her you are always conscious of them. After her face and her hair, her chest is what she is most proud of. Your father could never get enough of them, she always brags. But given the fact that he ran off on her after their third year of marriage, it seemed in the end that he could.
You dread conversations with your mother. Those one-sided dressing-downs. You figured that she has called you in to give you another earful about your diet. Your mom’s convinced that if you eat more plátanos you will suddenly acquire her same extraordinary train-wrecking secondary sex characteristics. Even at that age you were nothing if not your mother’s daughter. You were twelve years old and already as tall as she was, a long slender-necked ibis of a girl. You had her green eyes (clearer, though) and her straight hair which makes you look more Hindu than Dominican and a behind that the boys haven’t been able to stop talking about since the fifth grade and whose appeal you do not yet understand. You have her complexion too, which means you are dark. But for all your similarities, the tides of inheritance have yet to reach your chest. You have only the slightest hint of breast; from most angles you’re flat as a board and you’re thinking she’s going to order you to stop wearing bras again because they’re suffocating your potential breasts, discouraging them from popping out of you. You’re ready to argue with her to the death because you’re as possessive of your bras as you are of the pads you now buy yourself
But no, she doesn’t say a word about eating more plátanos. Instead, she takes your right hand and guides you. Your mom is rough in all things but this time she is gentle. You did not think her capable of it.
Do you feel that? she asks in her too-familiar raspy voice.
At first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been and your breathing is what you hear.
Don’t you feel that? She turns toward you. Coño, muchacha, stop looking at me and feel.
So you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you’re thinking of Helen Keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nun-ish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something. A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change. You become light-headed and you can feel a throbbing in your blood, a beat, a rhythm, a drum. Bright lights zoom through you like photon torpedoes, like comets. You don’t know how or why you know this thing but you know it cannot be doubted. It is exhilarating. For as long as you’ve been alive you’ve had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tía’s winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative. That was before Santo Domingo, before you knew about the Great Power of God.
I feel it, you say, too loudly. Lo siento.
And like that, everything changes. Before the winter is out the doctors remove that breast you were kneading, along with the axillary lymph node. Because of the operations she will have trouble lifting her arm over her head for the rest of her life. Her hair begins to fallout, and one day she pulls it all out herself and puts it inside a plastic bag. You change too. Not right away, but it happens. And it’s in that bathroom where it all begins. Where you begin.
A punk chick. That’s what I became. A Siouxsie and the Banshees-loving punk chick. The puertorican kids on the block couldn’t stop laughing when they saw my hair, they called me Blacula, and the morenos, they didn’t know what to say: they just called me devil-bitch. Yo, devil-bitch, yo, yo! My tía Rubelka thought it was some kind of mental illness. Hija, she said while frying pastelitos, maybe you need help. But my mother was the worst. It’s the last straw, she screamed. The. Last. Straw. But it always was with her. Mornings when I came downstairs she’d be in the kitc
hen making her coffee in la greca and listening to Radio WADO and when she saw me and my hair she’d get mad all over again, as if during the night she’d forgotten who I was. My mother was one of the tallest women in Paterson, and her anger was just as tall. It pincered you in its long arms, and if you showed any weakness you were finished. Que muchacha tan fea, she said in disgust, splashing the rest of her coffee in the sink. Fea’s become my new name. Nothing new, really. She’s been saying stuff like that all our lives. My mother would never win any awards, believe me. You could call her an absentee parent: if she wasn’t at work she was sleeping, and when she was around it seemed all she did was scream and hit. As kids, me and Oscar were more scared of our mother than we were of the dark or el cuco. She would hit us anywhere, in front of anyone, always free with the chanclas and the correa, but now with her cancer there’s not much she can do anymore. The last time she tried to whale on me it was because of my hair, but instead of cringing or running I punched her hand. It was a reflex more than anything, but once it happened I knew I couldn’t take it back, not ever, and so I just kept my fist clenched, waiting for whatever came next, for her to attack me with her teeth like she did to this one lady in the Pathmark. But she just stood there shaking, in her stupid wig and her stupid bata, with two huge foam prostheses in her bra, the smell of burning wig all around us. I almost felt sorry for her. This is how you treat your mother? she cried. And if I could have I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face, but instead I screamed back, And this is how you treat your daughter?
Things had been bad between us all year. How could they not have been? She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter, the one she had raised up herself with the help of nobody, which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel. I was fourteen and desperate for my own patch of world that had nothing to do with her. I wanted the life that I used to see when I watched Big Blue Marble as a kid, the life that drove me to make pen pals and to take atlases home from school. The life that existed beyond Paterson, beyond my family, beyond Spanish. And as soon as she became sick I saw my chance, and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and eventually I took it. If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge. You don’t know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around—especially the ones that are never around. What it’s like to be the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice way of saying a perfect Dominican slave. You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone’s going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn’t write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself who would wipe you out if you let her. But I’m not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her. I was a fea, I was a worthless, I was an idiota. From ages two to thirteen I believed her and because I believed her I was the perfect hija. I was the one cooking, cleaning, doing the wash, buying groceries, writing letters to the bank to explain why a house payment was going to be late, translating. I had the best grades in my class. I never caused trouble, even when the morenas used to come after me with scissors because of my straight-straight hair. I stayed at home and made sure Oscar was fed and that everything ran right while she was at work. I raised him and I raised me. I was the one. You’re my hija, she said, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. When that thing happened to me when I was eight and I finally told her what he had done, she told me to shut my mouth and stop crying, and I did exactly that, I shut my mouth and clenched my legs, and my mind, and within a year I couldn’t have told you what that neighbor looked like, or even his name. All you do is complain, she said to me. But you have no idea what life really is. Sí, señora. When she told me that I could go on my sixth grade sleep-away to Bear Mountain and I bought a backpack with my own paper-route money and wrote Bobby Santos notes because he was promising to break into my cabin and kiss me in front of everyone I believed her, and when on the morning of the trip she announced that I wasn’t going and I said, But you promised, and she said, Muchacha del diablo, I promised you nothing, I didn’t throw my backpack at her or pull out my eyes, and when it was Laura Saenz who ended up kissing Bobby Santos, not me, I didn’t say anything, either. I just lay in my room with stupid Bear-Bear and sang under my breath, imagining where I would run away to when I grew up. To Japan maybe, where I would track down Tomoko, or to Austria, where my singing would inspire a remake of The Sound of Music. All my favorite books from that period were about runaways. Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, My Side of the Mountain, and when Bon Jovi’s ‘Runaway’ came out I imagined it was me they were singing about. No one had any idea. I was the tallest, dorkiest girl in the school, the one who dressed up as Wonder Woman every Halloween, the one who never said a word. People saw me in my glasses and my hand-me-down clothes and could not have imagined what I was capable of. And then when I was twelve I got that feeling, the scary witchy one, and before I knew it my mother was sick and the wildness that had been in me all along, that I tried to tamp down with chores and with homework and with promises that once I reached college I would be able to do whatever I pleased, burst out. I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.
It didn’t happen overnight. Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother’s daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love. And then one day I was walking home with Karen Cepeda, who at that time was like my friend. Karen did the goth thing really well; she had spiky Robert Smith hair and wore all black and had the skin color of a ghost. Walking with her in Paterson was like walking with the bearded lady. Everybody would stare and it was the scariest thing, and that was, I guess, why I did it.
We were walking down Main and being stared at by everybody and out of nowhere I said, Karen, I want you to cut my hair. As soon as I said it I knew. The feeling in my blood, the rattle, came over me again. Karen raised her eyebrow: What about your mother? You see, it wasn’t just me, everybody was scared of Belicia de León.
Fuck her, I said.
Karen looked at me like I was being stupid—I never cursed, but that was something else that was about to change. The next day we locked ourselves in her bathroom and downstairs her father and uncles were bellowing at some soccer game. Well, how do you want it? she asked. I looked at the girl in the mirror for a long time. All I knew was that I didn’t want to see her ever again. I put the clippers in Karen’s hand, turned them on, and guided her hand until it was all gone.
So now you’re punk? Karen asked uncertainly.
Yes, I said.
The next day my mother threw the wig at me. You’re going to wear this. You’re going to wear it every day. And if I see you without it on I’m going to kill you!
I didn’t say a word. I held the wig over the burner.
Don’t do it, she swore as the burner clicked. Don’t you dare—
It went up in a flash, like gasoline, like a stupid hope, and if I hadn’t thrown it in the sink it would have taken my hand. The smell was horrible, like all of the chemicals from all the factories in Elizabeth.
That was when she slapped at m
e, when I struck her hand and she snatched it back, like I was the fire.
Of course everyone thought I was the worst daughter ever. My tía and our neighbors kept saying, Hija, she’s your mother, she’s dying, but I wouldn’t listen. When I caught her hand a door opened. And I wasn’t about to turn my back on it.
But God, how we fought! Sick or not, dying or not, my mother wasn’t going to go down easily. She wasn’t una pendeja. I’d seen her slap grown men, push white police officers onto their asses, curse a whole group of bochincheras. She had raised me and my brother by herself: she had worked three jobs until she could buy this house we live in, she had survived being abandoned by my father, she had come from Santo Domingo all by herself and as a young girl she claimed to have been beaten, set on fire, left for dead. There was no way she was going to let me go without killing me first. Fígurin de mierda, she called me. You think you’re someone but you ain’t nada. She dug hard, looking for my seams, wanting me to tear like always, but I didn’t weaken, I wasn’t going to. It was that feeling I had, that my life was waiting for me on the other side, that made me fearless. When she threw away my Smiths and Sisters of Mercy posters—Aquí yo no quiero maricones—I bought replacements. When she threatened to tear up my new clothes, I started keeping them in my locker and at Karen’s house. When she told me that I had to quit my job at the Greek diner I explained to my boss that my mother was starting to lose it because of her chemo, so when she called to say I couldn’t work there anymore he just handed me the phone and stared out at his customers in embarrassment. When she changed the locks on me—I had started staying out late, going to the Limelight because even though I was fourteen I looked twenty-five—I would knock on Oscar’s window and he would let me in, scared because the next day my mother would run around the house screaming, Who the hell let that hija de la gran puta in the house? Who? Who? And Oscar would be at the breakfast table, stammering, I don’t know, Mami, I don’t.
