by Junot Díaz
My first months were housecleaning and listening to Ramón argue. My first months were taking long walks through the city and waiting for Sunday to call my mother. During the day I stood in front of mirrors in those great houses and told myself that I’d done well and afterward I would come home and fold up in front of the small television we crowded around and I believed this was enough.
I met Ana Iris after Ramón’s business failed. Not enough ricos around here, he said without discouragement. Some friends set up the meeting and I met her at the fish market. Ana Iris was cutting and preparing fish as we spoke. I thought she was a boricua, but later she told me she was half boricua and half dominicana. The best of the Caribbean and the worst, she said. She had fast, accurate hands and her fillets were not ragged as were some of the others on the bed of crushed ice. Can you work at a hospital? she wanted to know.
I can do anything, I said.
There’ll be blood.
If you can do that, I can work in a hospital.
She was the one who took the first pictures that I mailed home, weak fotos of me grinning, well dressed and uncertain. One in front of the McDonald’s, because I knew my mother would appreciate how American it was. Another one in a bookstore. I’m pretending to read, even though the book is in English. My hair is pinned up and the skin behind my ears looks pale and underused. I’m so skinny I look sick. The best picture is of me in front of a building at the university. There are no students but hundreds of metal folding chairs have been arranged in front of the building for an event and I’m facing those chairs and they’re facing me and in the light my hands are startling on the blue fabric of my dress.
—
THREE NIGHTS A WEEK we look at houses. The houses are in terrible condition; they are homes for ghosts and for cockroaches and for us, los hispanos. Even so, few people will sell to us. They treat us well enough in person but in the end we never hear from them, and the next time Ramón drives by other people are living there, usually blanquitos, tending the lawn that should have been ours, scaring crows out of our mulberry trees. Today a grandfather, with red tints in his gray hair, tells us he likes us. He served in our country during the Guerra Civil. Nice people, he says. Beautiful people. The house is not entirely a ruin and we’re both nervous. Ramón stalks about like a cat searching for a place to whelp. He steps into closets and bangs against walls and spends close to five minutes running his finger around the basement’s wet seams. He smells the air for a hint of mold. In the bathroom I flush the toilet while he holds his hand under the full torrent of the shower. We both search the kitchen cabinets for roaches. In the next room the grandfather calls our references and laughs at something somebody has said.
He hangs up and says something to Ramón that I don’t understand. With these people I cannot even rely on their voices. The blancos will call your mother a puta in the same voice they greet you with. I wait without hoping until Ramón leans close and tells me it looks good.
That’s wonderful, I say, still sure Ramón will change his mind. He trusts very little. Out in the car he starts in, certain the old man is trying to trick him.
Why? Did you see anything wrong?
They make it look good. That’s part of the trick. You watch, in two weeks the roof will start falling in.
Won’t he fix it?
He says he will, but would you trust an old man like that? I’m surprised that viejo can still get around.
We say nothing more. He screws his head down into his shoulders and the cords in his neck pop out. I know he will yell if I talk. He stops at the house, the tires sliding on the snow.
Do you work tonight? I ask.
Of course I do.
He settles back into the Buick, tired. The windshield is streaked and sooty and the margins that the wipers cannot reach have a crust of dirt on them. We watch two kids pound a third with snowballs and I feel Ramón sadden and I know he’s thinking about his son and right then I want to put my arm around him, tell him it will be fine.
Will you be coming by?
Depends on how the work goes.
OK, I say.
My housemates trade phony smiles over the greasy tablecloth when I tell them about the house. Sounds like you’re going to be bien cómoda, Marisol says.
No worries for you.
None at all. You should be proud.
Yes, I say.
Later I lie in bed and listen to the trucks outside, their beds rattling with salt and sand. In the middle of the night I wake up and realize that he has not returned but not until morning am I angry. Ana Iris’s bed is made, the netting folded neatly at its foot, a gauze. I hear her gargling in the bathroom. My hands and feet are blue from the cold and I cannot see through the window for the frost and icicles. When Ana Iris starts praying, I say, Please, just not today.
She lowers her hands. I dress.
—
HE’S TALKING AGAIN about the man who fell from the rafters. What would you do if that was me? he asks once more.
I would find another man, I tell him.
He smiles. Would you? Where would you find one?
You have friends, don’t you?
What man would touch a dead man’s novia?
I don’t know, I said. I wouldn’t have to tell anyone. I could find a man the way I found you.
They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes.
A person doesn’t mourn forever.
Some do. He kisses me. I bet you would. I am a hard man to replace. They tell me so at work.
How long did you mourn for your son?
He stops kissing me. Enriquillo. I mourned him a long time. I am still missing him.
I couldn’t tell that by looking at you.
You don’t look carefully enough.
It doesn’t show, I don’t think.
He puts his hand down at his side. You are not a clever woman.
I’m just saying it doesn’t show.
I can see that now, he says. You are not a clever woman.
While he sits by the window and smokes I pull the last letter his wife wrote him out of my purse and open it in front of him. He doesn’t know how brazen I can be. One sheet, smelling of violet water. Please, Virta has written neatly in the center of the page. That’s all. I smile at Ramón and place the letter back in the envelope.
Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.
—
HERE IS WHAT the wife looks like. She is small with enormous hips and has the grave seriousness of a woman who will be called doña before she’s forty. I suspect if we were in the same life we would not be friends.
—
I HOLD UP the blue hospital sheets in front of me and close my eyes, but the bloodstains float in the darkness in front of me. Can we save this one with bleach? Samantha asks. She is back, but I don’t know for how much longer. I don’t know why I don’t fire her. Maybe because I want to give her a chance. Maybe because I want to see if she will stay or if she will go. What will this tell me? Very little, I suspect. In the bag at my feet I have his clothes and I wash them all together with the hospital things. For a day he will smell of my job, but I know that bread is stronger than blood.
I have not stopped watching for signs that he misses her. You must not think on these things, Ana Iris tells me. Keep them out of your mind. You do not want to go crazy from them.
This is how Ana Iris survives here, how she keeps from losing her mind over her children. How in part we all survive here. I’ve seen a picture of her three sons, three little boys tumbled out in the Jardín
Japonés, near a pine tree, smiling, the smallest a saffron blur trying to shy away from the camera. I listen to her advice and on my way to and from work I concentrate on the other sleepwalkers around me, the men who sweep the streets and those who stand around in the backs of restaurants, with uncut hair, smoking cigarettes; the people in suits who stumble from the trains—a good many will stop at a lover’s and that is all they will think about while they’re eating their cold meals at home, while they’re in bed with their spouses. I think of my mother, who kept with a married man when I was seven, a man with a handsome beard and craggy cheeks, who was so black that he was called Noche by everyone who knew him. He worked stringing wires for Codetel out in the campo but he lived in our barrio and had two children with a woman he had married in Pedernales. His wife was very pretty, and when I think of Ramón’s wife I see her, in heels, flashing yards of brown leg, a woman warmer than the air around her. Una jeva buena. I do not imagine Ramón’s wife as uneducated. She watches the telenovelas simply to pass the time. In her letters she mentions a child she tends who she loves almost as much as she had loved her own. In the beginning, when Ramón had not been gone long, she believed they could have another son, one like this Victor, her amorcito. He plays baseball like you, Virta wrote. She never mentions Enriquillo.
—
HERE THERE ARE CALAMITIES without end—but sometimes I can clearly see us in the future, and it is good. We will live in his house and I will cook for him and when he leaves food out on the counter I will call him a zángano. I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other times I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it’s all wrong. He will wash his face and then turn to me. I’m sorry, he’ll say. I have to leave now.
Samantha comes in sick with the flu; I feel like I’m dying, she says. She drags herself from task to task, she leans against the wall to rest, she doesn’t eat anything, and the day after I have it, too. I pass it to Ramón; he calls me a fool for doing so. You think I can take a day off from work? he demands.
I say nothing; it will only irritate him.
He never stays angry for long. He has too many other things on his mind.
On Friday he comes by to update me on the house. The old man wants to sell to us, he says. He shows me some paperwork that I do not understand. He is excited but he is also scared. This is something I know, a place I’ve been.
What do you think I should do? His eyes are not watching me, they’re looking out the window.
I think you should buy yourself a home. You deserve it.
He nods. I need to break him down on the price though. He takes out his cigarettes. Do you know how long I’ve waited for this? To own a house in this country is to begin to live.
I try to bring up Virta but he kills it, like always.
I already told you it’s over, he snaps. What else do you want? A maldito corpse? You women never know how to leave things alone. You never know how to let go.
That night Ana Iris and I go to a movie. We cannot understand the English but we both like the new theater’s clean rugs. Blue and pink neon stripes zag across the walls like lightning. We buy a popcorn to share and smuggle in cans of tamarind juice from the bodega. The people around us talk; we talk as well.
You’re lucky to be getting out, she says. Those cueros are going to drive me crazy.
It’s a little early for this but I say: I’m going to miss you, and she laughs.
You are on your way to another life. You won’t have time to miss me.
Yes, I will. I’ll probably be over to visit you every day.
You won’t have the time.
I will if I make time. Are you trying to get rid of me?
Of course not, Yasmin. Don’t be stupid.
It won’t be for a while anyway. I remember what Ramón had said over and over again. Anything can happen.
We sit quietly for the rest of the movie. I have not asked her what she thinks of my move and she has not offered her opinion. We respect each other’s silence about certain things, the way I never ask if she intends to send for her children someday. I cannot tell what she will do. She has had men and they, too, have slept in our room, but she never kept any for long.
We walk back from the theater close together, careful of the shiny ice that scars the snow. The neighborhood is not safe. Boys who know only enough Spanish to curse stand together at the street corners and scowl. They cross into traffic without looking and when we pass them a fat one says, I eat pussy better than anybody in the world. Cochino, Ana Iris hisses, putting her hand on me. We pass the old apartment where I used to live, the one over the bar, and I stare up at it, trying to remember which window I used to stare out of. Come on, Ana Iris says. It’s freezing.
—
RAMÓN MUST HAVE TOLD Virta something, because the letters stop. I guess it’s true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
As for the house, it takes longer than even I could have imagined. He almost walks away a half dozen times, slams phones, throws his drink against a wall and I expect it to fall away, not to happen. But then like a miracle it does.
Look, he says, holding up the paperwork. Look. He is almost pleading.
I’m truly happy for him. You did it, mi amor.
We did it, he says quietly. Now we can begin.
Then he puts his head down on the table and cries.
In December we move into the house. It’s a half-ruin and only two rooms are habitable. It resembles the first place I lived when I arrived in this country. We don’t have heat for the entire winter, and for a month we have to bathe from a bucket. Casa de Campo, I call the place in jest, but he doesn’t take kindly to any criticism of his “niño.” Not everyone can own a home, he reminds me. I saved eight years for this. He works on the house ceaselessly, raiding the abandoned properties on the block for materials. Every floorboard he reclaims, he boasts, is money saved. Despite all the trees, the neighborhood is not easy and we have to make sure to keep everything locked all the time.
For a few weeks people knock on the door, asking if the house is still for sale. Some of them are couples as hopeful as we must have looked. Ramón slams the door on them, as if afraid that they might haul him back to where they are. But when it’s me I let them down softly. It’s not, I say. Good luck with your search.
This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.
The hospital begins to build another wing; three days after the cranes surround our building as if in prayer, Samantha pulls me aside. Winter has dried her out, left her with reptile hands and lips so chapped they look like they might at any moment split. I need a loan, she whispers. My mother’s sick.
It is always the mother. I turn to go.
Please, she begs. We’re from the same country.
This is true. We are.
Someone must have helped you sometime.
Also true.
The next day I give her eight hundred. It is half my savings. Remember this.
I will, she says.
She is so happy. Happier than I was when we moved into the house. I wish I could be as free. She sings for the rest of the shift, songs from when I was younger, Adamo and that lot. But she is still Samantha. Before we punch out she tells me, Don’t wear so much lipstick. You have big enough lips as it is.
Ana Iris laughs. That girl said that to you?
Yes, she did.
Que desgraciada, she says, not without admiration.
At the end of the week, Samantha doesn’t return to work. I ask around but no one knows where she lives. I don’t remember her saying anything significant on her last day. She walked out as quietly as ever, drifting down toward the center of town, where she could catch her bus. I pray for her. I remember
my own first year, how desperately I wanted to return home, how often I cried. I pray she stays, like I did.
A week. I wait a week and then I let her go. The girl who replaces her is quiet and fat and works without stopping or complaint. Sometimes, when I am in one of my moods, I imagine Samantha back home with her people. Back home where it is warm. Saying, I would never go back. Not for anything. Not for anyone.
Some nights when Ramón is working on the plumbing or sanding the floors I read the old letters and sip the rum we store under the kitchen sink, and think of course of her, the one from the other life.
—
I AM PREGNANT when the next letter finally arrives. Sent from Ramón’s old place to our new home. I pull it from the stack of mail and stare at it. My heart is beating like it’s lonely, like there’s nothing else inside of me. I want to open it but I call Ana Iris instead; we haven’t spoken in a long time. I stare out at the bird-filled hedges while the phone rings.
I want to go for a walk, I tell her.
The buds are breaking through the tips of the branches. When I step into the old place she kisses me and sits me down at the kitchen table. Only two of the housemates I know; the rest have moved on or gone home. There are new girls from the Island. They shuffle in and out, barely look at me, exhausted by the promises they’ve made. I want to advise them: no promises can survive that sea. I am showing, and Ana Iris is thin and worn. Her hair has not been cut in months; the split ends rise out of her thick strands like a second head of hair. She can still smile, though, so brightly it is a wonder that she doesn’t set something alight. A woman is singing a bachata somewhere upstairs, and her voice in the air reminds me of the size of this house, how high the ceilings are.
Here, Ana Iris says, handing me a scarf. Let’s go for a walk.
I hold the letter in my hands. The day is the color of pigeons. Our feet crush the bits of snow that lie scattered here and there, crusted over with gravel and dust. We wait for the mash of cars to slow at the light and then we scuttle into the park. Our first months Ramón and I were in this park daily. Just to wind down after work, he said, but I painted my fingernails red every time. I remember the day before we first made love, how I already knew it would happen. He had only just told me about his wife and about his son. I was mulling over the information, saying nothing, letting my feet guide us. We met a group of boys playing baseball and he bullied the bat from them, cut at the air with it, sent the boys out deep. I thought he would embarrass himself, so I stood back, ready to pat his arm when he fell or when the ball dropped at his feet, but he connected with a sharp crack of the aluminum bat and sent the ball out beyond the children with an easy motion of his upper body. The children threw their hands up and yelled and he smiled at me over their heads.
