by Junot Díaz
We walk the length of the park without talking and then we head back across the highway, toward downtown.
She’s writing again, I say, but Ana Iris interrupts me.
I’ve been calling my children, she says. She points out the man across from the courthouse, who sells her stolen calling-card numbers. They’ve gotten so much older, she tells me, that it’s hard for me to recognize their voices.
We have to sit down after a while so that I can hold her hand and she can cry. I should say something but I don’t know where a person can start. She will bring them or she will go. That much has changed.
It gets cold. We go home. We embrace at the door for what feels like an hour.
That night I give Ramón the letter and I try to smile while he reads it.
YOUR LEFT EYE USED TO drift when you were tired or upset. It’s looking for something, you used to say and those days we saw each other it fluttered and rolled and you had to put your finger over it to stop it. You were doing this when I woke up and found you on the edge of my chair. You were still in your teacher’s gear but your jacket was off and enough buttons were open on your blouse to show me the black bra I bought you and the freckles on your chest. We didn’t know it was the last days but we should have.
I just got here, you said and I looked out where you’d parked your Civic.
Go roll up them windows.
I’m not going to be here long.
Someone’s going to steal it.
I’m almost ready to go.
You stayed in your chair and I knew better than to move closer. You had an elaborate system that you thought would keep us out of bed: you sat on the other side of the room, you didn’t let me crack your knuckles, you never stayed more than fifteen minutes. It never really worked, did it?
I brought you guys dinner, you said. I was making lasagna for my class so I brought the leftovers.
My room is hot and small, overrun by books. You never wanted to be in here (it’s like being inside a sock, you said) and anytime the boys were away we slept in the living room, out on the rug.
Your long hair was making you sweat and finally you took your hand away from your eye. You hadn’t stopped talking.
Today I was given a new student. Her mother told me to be careful with her because she had the sight.
The sight?
You nod. I asked the señora if the sight helped her in school. She said, Not really but it’s helped me with the numbers a few times.
I’m supposed to laugh but I stare outside, where a mitten-shaped leaf had stuck to your windshield. You stand beside me. When I saw you, first in our Joyce class and then at the gym, I knew I’d call you Flaca. If you’d been Dominican my family would have worried about you, brought plates of food to my door. Heaps of plátanos and yuca, smothered in liver or queso frito. Flaca. Even though your name was Veronica, Veronica Hardrada.
The boys will be home soon, I say. Maybe you should roll up your windows.
I’m going now, you say and put your hand back over your eye.
—
IT WASN’T SUPPOSED to get serious between us. I can’t see us getting married or nothing and you nodded your head and said you understood. Then we fucked so that we could pretend that nothing hurtful had just happened. This was like our fifth time together and you got dressed in a black sheath and a pair of Mexican sandals and you said I could call you when I wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. You have to decide where and when, you said. If you leave it up to me I’ll want to see you every day.
At least you were honest, which is more than I can say for me. Weekdays I never called you, didn’t even miss you. I had the boys and my job at Transactions Press to keep me busy. But Friday and Saturday nights, when I didn’t meet anybody at the clubs, I called. We talked until the silences were long, until finally you asked, Do you want to see me?
I’d say yes and while I waited for you I’d tell the boys it’s just sex, you know, nothing at all. And you’d come, with a change of clothes and a pan so you could make us breakfast, maybe cookies you baked for your class. The boys would find you in the kitchen the next morning, in one of my shirts and at first they didn’t complain, because they guessed you would just go away. And by the time they started saying something, it was late, wasn’t it?
—
I REMEMBER: THE BOYS keeping an eye on me. They figured two years ain’t no small thing, even though the entire time I never claimed you. But what was nuts was that I felt fine. I felt like summer had taken me over. I told the boys this was the best decision I’d ever made. You can’t be fucking with whitegirls all your life.
In some groups that was more than a given; in our group it was not.
In that Joyce class you never spoke but I did, all the time, and once you looked at me and I looked at you and you turned so red even the professor noticed. You were whitetrash from outside of Paterson and it showed in your no-fashion-sense and you’d dated niggers a lot. I said you had a thing about us and you said, angry, No, I do not.
But you sort of did. You were the whitegirl who danced bachata, who pledged the SLUs, who’d gone to Santo Domingo three times already.
I remember: you used to offer me rides home in your Civic.
I remember: the third time I accepted. Our hands touched in between our seats. You tried to talk to me in Spanish and I told you to stop.
We’re on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should go hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we’re still good, next week maybe.
That’s the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don’t want to let go, but don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
We drive up to Montclair, almost alone on the Parkway. Everything’s quiet and dark and the trees shine from yesterday’s rains. At one point, just south of the Oranges, the Parkway passes through a cemetery. Thousands of gravestones and cenotaphs on both sides. Imagine, you say, pointing to the nearest home, if you had to live in that place.
The dreams you’d have, I say.
You nod. The nightmares.
We park across from the map dealer and go to our bookstore. Despite the proximity of the college, we’re the only customers, us and a three-legged cat. You sit yourself down in an aisle and start searching through the boxes. The cat goes right for you. I flip through the histories. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day. When I come back to you again you have kicked off your shoes and are picking at the running calluses on your feet, reading a children’s book. I put my arms around your shoulders. Flaca, I say. Your hair drifts up and clings to my stubble. I don’t shave often enough for anybody.
This can work, you say. We just have to let it.
—
THAT LAST SUMMER you wanted to go somewhere so I took us out to Spruce Run; we’d both been there as children. You could remember the years, even the months of your visits, but the closest I came was Back When I Was Young.
Look at the Queen Anne’s lace, you said. You were leaning out the window into the night air and I had my hand on your back just in case.
We were both drunk and you had nothing but garters and stockings on under your skirt and you put my hand between your legs.
What did your family do here? you asked.
I looked at the night water. We had barbecues. Dominican barbecues. My pops didn’t know how to but he insisted. He would cook up this red sauce that he’d splatter on chuletas and then he’d invite complete strangers over to eat. It was terrible.
I wore an eye patch when I was kid, you said. Maybe we met out here and
fell in love over bad barbecue.
I doubt it, I said.
I’m just saying, Yunior.
Maybe five thousand years ago we were together.
Five thousand years ago I was in Denmark.
That’s true. And half of me was in Africa.
Doing what?
Farming, I guess. That’s what everybody does everywhere.
Maybe we were together some other time.
I can’t think when, I said.
You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.
People weren’t even people back then.
That night you lay in bed, awake, and listened to the ambulances tear down our street. The heat of your face could have kept my room warm for days. I didn’t know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face. I almost couldn’t touch you. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.
—
THAT WAS THE SUMMER I couldn’t sleep, the summer I used to run through the streets of New Brunswick at four in the morning. These were the only times I broke five miles, when there was no traffic and the halogens turned everything the color of foil, firing up every bit of moisture that was on the cars. I remember running around the Memorial Homes, along Joyce Kilmer, past Throop, where the Camelot, that crazy old bar, stands boarded and burned.
I stayed up entire nights and when the Old Man came home from UPS I was writing down the times that the trains arrived from Princeton Junction—you could hear them braking from our living room, a gnash just south of my heart. I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it’s too fucking late but the boys weren’t into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.
—
WE WENT BACK to Spruce Run once more. Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you’d be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little puños and the first time you saw us you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn’t have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.
That second trip I stood on the beach and watched you wade out, watched you rub the lake on your skinny arms and neck. Both of us were hungover and I didn’t want any of me wet. There’s a cure in the waters, you explained. The priest announced it at service. You were saving some in a bottle. For your cousin with leukemia and your aunt with the bad heart. You had on a bikini bottom and a T-shirt and there was a mist sifting down over the hills and lacing the trees. You went out to your waist and stopped. I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn’t it?
That night you came into my bed, too thin to be believed, and when I tried to kiss your nipples you put a hand across my chest. Wait, you said.
Downstairs, the boys were watching TV, screaming.
You let the water dribble out of your mouth and it was cold. You reached my knee before you had to refill from the bottle. I listened to your breathing, how slight it was, listened to the sound the water made in the bottle. And then you covered my face and my crotch and my back.
You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.
THOSE LAST MONTHS. NO WAY of wrapping it pretty or pretending otherwise: Rafa was dying. By then it was only me and Mami taking care of him and we didn’t know what the fuck to do, what the fuck to say. So we just said nothing. My mom wasn’t the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities—shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat. Me, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it even if she had been game. The few times my boys at school tried to bring it up, I told them to mind their own fucking business. To get out of my face.
I was seventeen and a half, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot.
My mother was checked out in her own way. She wore herself down—between my brother and the factory and taking care of the household I’m not sure she slept. (I didn’t lift a fucking finger in our apartment, male privilege, baby.) Lady still managed to scrounge a couple hours here and there to hang with her new main man, Jehovah. I had my yerba, she had hers. She’d never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she’d had one handy. That last year she was especially Ave Maria. Had her prayer group over to our apartment two, three times a day. The Four Horsefaces of the Apocalypse, I called them. The youngest and the most horsefaced was Gladys—diagnosed with breast cancer the year before, and right in the middle of her treatment her evil husband had run off to Colombia and married one of her cousins. Hallelujah! Another lady, whose name I could never remember, was only forty-five but looked ninety, a complete ghettowreck: overweight, with a bad back, bad kidneys, bad knees, diabetes, and maybe sciatica. Hallelujah! The chief rocker, though, was Doña Rosie, our upstairs neighbor, this real nice boricua lady, happiest person you’ve ever seen even though she was blind. Hallelujah! You had to be careful with her because she had a habit of sitting down without even checking if there was anything remotely chairlike underneath her, and twice already she’d missed the couch and busted her ass—the last time hollering, Dios mío, qué me has hecho?—and I had to drag myself out of the basement to help her to her feet. These viejas were my mother’s only friends—even our relatives had gotten scarce after year two—and when they were over was the only time Mami seemed somewhat like her old self. Loved to tell her stupid campo jokes. Wouldn’t serve them coffee until she was sure each tacita contained the exact same amount. And when one of the Four was fooling herself she let her know it with a simple extended Bueeeeennnnoooo. The rest of the time, she was beyond inscrutable, in perpetual motion: cleaning, organizing, cooking meals, going to the store to return this, pick up that. The few occasions I saw her pause she would put a hand over her eyes and that was when I knew she was exhausted.
But of all of us Rafa took the cake. When he’d come home from the hospital this second go-round, he fronted like nothing had happened. Which was kinda nuts, considering that half the time he didn’t know where the fuck he was because of what the radiation had done to his brain and the other half he was too tired to even fart. Dude had lost eighty pounds to the chemo, looked like a break-dancing ghoul (my brother was the last motherfucker in the Jerz to give up his tracksuit and rope chain), had a back laced with spinal-tap scars, but his swagger was more or less where it had been before the illness: a hundred percent loco. He prided himself on being the neighborhood lunatic, wasn’t going to let a little thing like cancer get in the way of his official duties. Not a week out of the hospital, he cracked this illegal Peruvian kid in the face with a hammer and two hours later threw down at the Pathmark because he thought some fool was talking shit about him, popped said fool in the piehole with a weak overhand right before a bunch of us could break it up. What the fuck, he kept yelling, as if we were doing the craziest thing ever. The bruises he gave himself fighting us were purple buzz saws, infant hurricanes.
Dude was figureando hard. Had always been a papi chulo, so of course he dove right back into the grip of his old sucias, snuck them down into the basement whether my mother was home or not. Once, right in the middle of one of Mami’s prayer sessions, he strolled in with this Parkwood girl who had t
he hugest donkey on the planet, and later I said, Rafa, un chín de respeto. He shrugged. Can’t let them think I’m slipping. He’d hang out at Honda Hill and come home so garbled that he sounded as if he was speaking Aramaic. Anybody who didn’t know better would have thought homeboy was on the mend. I’ll put the weight back on, you’ll see, was what he told folks. Had my mother making him all these nasty protein shakes.
Mami tried to keep his ass home. Remember what your doctor said, hijo. But he just said, Ta to, Mom, ta to, and danced right out the door. She never could control him. With me she yelled and cursed and hit, but with him she sounded as if she was auditioning for a role in a Mexican novela. Ay mi hijito, ay mi tesoro. I was all focused on this little whitegirl in Cheesequake but I tried to get him to slow his roll, too—Yo, shouldn’t you be convalescing or something?—but he just stared at me with his dead eyes.
Anyway, after a few weeks on overdrive motherfucker hit a wall. Developed this dynamite cough from being out all night and ended up back at the hospital for two days—which after his last stint (eight months) didn’t really count as nothing—and when he got out you could see the change. Stopped breaking night and drinking until he puked. Stopped with the Iceberg Slim thing, too. No more chicks crying over him on the couch or gobbling the rabo downstairs. The only one who hung tough was this ex of his, Tammy Franco, whom he’d pretty much physically abused their whole relationship. Bad, too. A two-year-long public-service announcement. He’d get so mad at her sometimes that he dragged her around the parking lot by her hair. Once her pants came unbuttoned and got yanked down to her ankles, and we could all see her toto and everything. That was the image I still had of her. After my brother, she had hopped on a whiteboy and gotten married faster than you can say I do. A beautiful girl. You remember that José Chinga jam “Fly Tetas”? That was Tammy. Married and beautiful and still after my brother. What was strange was that on the days she dropped by she wouldn’t come into the apartment, not at all. She’d pull her Camry up in front and he would go out and sit with her in the bitch seat. I’d just started summer vacation and while I waited for the whitegirl to answer my phone calls, I’d watch them from the kitchen window, waiting for him to palm her head down into his lap, but nothing like that ever happened. It didn’t even look like they were talking. After fifteen, twenty minutes, he’d climb out and she’d drive away and that would be that.
