This Is How You Lose Her (4 page)

But where’s she gonna stay?

I don’t know. He put his hand on my face, gently. Why ain’t you minding your business?

A week later he was seeing some other girl. She was from Trinidad, a cocoa pañyol, and she had this phony-as-hell English accent. It was the way we all were back then. None of us wanted to be niggers. Not for nothing.

—

I GUESS TWO YEARS PASSED.
My brother was gone by then, and I was on my way to becoming a nut. I was out of school most of the time and had no friends and I sat inside and watched Univision or walked down to the dump and smoked the mota I should have been selling until I couldn’t see. Nilda didn’t fare so well, either. A lot of the things that happened to her, though, had nothing to do with me or my brother. She fell in love a couple more times, really bad with this one moreno truck driver who took her to Manalapan and then abandoned her at the end of the summer. I had to drive over to get her, and the house was one of those tiny box jobs with a fifty-cent lawn and no kind of charm; she was acting like she was some Italian chick and offered me a paso in the car, but I put my hand on hers and told her to stop it. Back home she fell in with more stupid niggers, relocated kids from the City, and they came at her with drama and some of their girls beat her up, a Brick City beat-down, and she lost her bottom front teeth. She was in and out of school and for a while they put her on home instruction, and that was when she finally dropped.

My junior year she started delivering papers so she could make money, and since I was spending a lot of time outside I saw her every now and then. Broke my heart. She wasn’t at her lowest yet but she was aiming there and when we passed each other she always smiled and said hi. She was starting to put on weight and she’d cut her hair down to nothing and her moonface was heavy and alone. I always said Wassup and when I had cigarettes I gave them to her. She’d gone to the funeral, along with a couple of his other girls, and what a skirt she’d worn, like maybe she could still convince him of something, and she’d kissed my mother but the vieja hadn’t known who she was. I had to tell Mami on the ride home and all she could remember about her was that she was the one who smelled good. It wasn’t until Mami said it that I realized it was true.

—

I
T WAS ONLY ONE SUMMER
and she was nobody special, so what’s the point of all this? He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone. I’m twenty-three and I’m washing my clothes up at the mini mall on Ernston Road. She’s here with me—she’s folding her shit and smiling and showing me her missing teeth and saying, It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Yunior?

Years, I say, loading my whites. Outside, the sky is clear of gulls, and down at the apartment my moms is waiting for me with dinner. Six months earlier we were sitting in front of the TV and my mother said, Well, I think I’m finally over this place.

Nilda asks, Did you move or something?

I shake my head. Just been working.

God, it’s been a long, long time. She’s on her clothes like magic, making everything neat, making everything fit. There are four other people at the counters, broke-ass-looking niggers with kneesocks and croupier’s hats and scars snaking up their arms, and they all seem like sleepwalkers compared with her. She shakes her head, grinning. Your brother, she says.

Rafa.

She points her finger at me like my brother always did.

I miss him sometimes.

She nods. Me, too. He was a good guy to me.

I must have disbelief on my face because she finishes shaking out her towels and then stares straight through me. He treated me the best.

Nilda.

He used to sleep with my hair over his face. He used to say it made him feel safe.

What else can we say? She finishes her stacking, I hold the door open for her. The locals watch us leave. We walk back through the old neighborhood, slowed down by the bulk of our clothes. London Terrace has changed now that the landfill has shut down. Kicked-up rents and mad South Asian people and whitefolks living in the apartments, but it’s our kids you see in the streets and hanging from the porches.

Nilda is watching the ground as though she’s afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It’s all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we’re back in the world we’ve always known.

Remember the day we met? she asks.

I nod.

You wanted to play baseball.

It was summer, I say. You were wearing a tank top.

You made me put on a shirt before you’d let me be on your team. Do you remember?

I remember, I say.

We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went.

Y
OU,
Y
UNIOR, HAVE A GIRLFRIEND
named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.

Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame. Spent nearly every teenage day on the Lower East Side, thought it would always be home, but then NYU and Columbia both said nyet, and she ended up even farther from the city than before. Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable. She did give you one huge forearm.
I told you I’d get the muscles in.
The past couple of weeks, now that the warm is here, Alma has abandoned black, started wearing these nothing dresses made out of what feels like tissue paper; it wouldn’t take more than a strong wind to undress her. She says she does it for you:
I’m reclaiming my Dominican heritage
(which ain’t a complete lie—she’s even taking Spanish to better minister to your moms), and when you see her on the street, flaunting, flaunting, you know exactly what every nigger that walks by is thinking because you are thinking it, too.

Alma is slender as a reed, you a steroid-addicted block; Alma loves driving, you books; Alma owns a Saturn, you have no points on your license; Alma’s nails are too dirty for cooking, your spaghetti con pollo is the best in the land. You are so very different—she rolls her eyes every time you turn on the news and says she can’t “stand” politics. She won’t even call herself Hispanic. She brags to her girls that you’re a “radical” and a real Dominican (even though on the Plátano Index you wouldn’t rank, Alma being only the third Latina you’ve ever really dated). You brag to your boys that she has more albums than any of them do, that she says terrible whitegirl things while you fuck. She’s more adventurous in bed than any girl you’ve had; on your first date she asked you if you wanted to come on her tits or her face, and maybe during boy training you didn’t get one of the memos but you were, like, umm, neither. And at least once a week she will kneel on the mattress before you and, with one hand pulling at her dark nipples, will play with herself, not letting you touch at all, fingers whisking the soft of her and her face looking desperately, furiously happy. She loves to talk while she’s being dirty, too, will whisper, You like watching me don’t you, you like listening to me come, and when she finishes lets out this long demolished groan and only then will she allow you to pull her into an embrace as she wipes her gummy fingers on your chest.

Yes—it’s an opposites-attract sort of thing, it’s a great-sex sort of thing, it’s a no-thinking sort of thing. It’s wonderful! Wonderful! Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness. Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertible knowledge that she will never forgive you. You stare at her incredible legs and between them, to that even more incredible pópola you’ve loved so inconstantly these past eight months. Only when she starts walking over in anger do you finally step out. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüencería. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter? She calls you:

a cocksucker

a punk motherfucker

a fake-ass Dominican.

She claims:

you have a little penis

no penis

and worst of all that you like curried pussy.

(which really is unfair, you try to say, since Laxmi is from Guyana, but Alma isn’t listening.)

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her.

H
E SITS ON THE MATTRESS,
the fat spread of his ass popping my fitted sheets from their corners. His clothes are stiff from the cold, and the splatter of dried paint on his pants has frozen into rivets. He smells of bread. He’s been talking about the house he wants to buy, how hard it is to find one when you’re Latino. When I ask him to stand up so I can fix the bed, he walks over to the window. So much snow, he says. I nod and wish he would be quiet. Ana Iris is trying to sleep on the other side of the room. She has spent half the night praying for her children back in Samaná, and I know that in the morning she has to work at the fábrica. She moves uneasily, buried beneath comforters, her head beneath a pillow. Even here in the States she drapes mosquito netting over her bed.

There’s a truck trying to turn the corner, he tells me. I wouldn’t want to be that chamaco.

It’s a busy street, I say, and it is. Mornings I find the salt and cut rock that the trucks spill onto the front lawn, little piles of treasure in the snow. Lie down, I tell him, and he comes to me, slipping under the covers. His clothes are rough and I wait until it is warm enough under the sheets before I release the buckle to his pants. We shiver together and he does not touch me until we stop.

Yasmin, he says. His mustache is against my ear, sawing at me. We had a man die today at the bread factory. He doesn’t speak for a moment, as if the silence is the elastic that will bring his next words forward. Este tipo fell from the rafters. Héctor found him between the conveyors.

Was he a friend?

This one. I recruited him at a bar. Told him he wouldn’t get cheated.

That’s too bad, I say. I hope he doesn’t have a family.

Probably does.

Did you see him?

What do you mean?

Did you see him dead?

No. I called the manager and he told me not to let anyone near. He crosses his arms. I do that roof work all the time.

You’re a lucky man, Ramón.

Yes, but what if it had been me?

That’s a stupid question.

What would you have done?

I set my face against him; he has known the wrong women if he expects more. I want to say, Exactly what your wife’s doing in Santo Domingo. Ana Iris mutters in the corner loudly, but she’s just pretending. Bailing me out of trouble. He goes quiet because he doesn’t want to wake her. After a while he gets up and sits by the window. The snow has started falling again. Radio WADO says this winter will be worse than the last four, maybe the worst in ten years. I watch him: he’s smoking, his fingers tracing the thin bones around his eyes, the slack of skin around his mouth. I wonder who he’s thinking about. His wife, Virta, or maybe his child. He has a house in Villa Juana; I’ve seen the fotos Virta sent. She looks thin and sad, the dead son at her side. He keeps the pictures in a jar under his bed, very tightly sealed.

We fall asleep without kissing. Later I wake up and so does he. I ask him if he’s going back to his place and he says no. The next time I wake up he doesn’t. In the cold and darkness of this room he could almost be anybody. I lift his meaty hand. It is heavy and has flour under each nail. Sometimes at night I kiss his knuckles, crinkled as prunes. His hands have tasted of crackers and bread the whole three years we’ve been together.

—

HE DOES NOT TALK
to me or Ana Iris as he dresses. In his top jacket pocket he carries a blue disposable razor that has begun to show rust on its sharp lip. He soaps his cheeks and chin, the water cold from the pipes, and then scrapes his face clean, trading stubble for scabs. I watch, my naked chest covered with goose bumps. He stomps downstairs and out of the house, a bit of toothpaste on his teeth. As soon as he leaves, I can hear my housemates complaining about him. Doesn’t he have his own place to sleep, they’ll ask me when I go into the kitchen. And I’ll say yes, and smile. From the frosted window I watch him pull up his hood and hitch the triple layer of shirt, sweater, and coat onto his shoulders.

Ana Iris kicks back her covers. What are you doing? she asks me.

Nothing, I say. She watches me dress from under the craziness of her hair.

You have to learn to trust your men, she says.

I trust.

She kisses my nose, heads downstairs. I comb out my hair, sweep the crumbs and pubic hairs from my covers. Ana Iris doesn’t think he’ll leave me; she thinks he’s too settled here, that we’ve been together too long. He’s the sort of man who’ll go to the airport but won’t be able to get on board, she says. Ana Iris left her own children back on the Island, hasn’t seen her three boys in nearly seven years. She understands what has to be sacrificed on a voyage.

In the bathroom I stare into my own eyes. His stubble quivers in beads of water, compass needles.

I work two blocks away, at St. Peter’s Hospital. Never late. Never leave the laundry room. Never leave the heat. I load washers, I load dryers, peel the lint skin from the traps, measure out heaping scoops of crystal detergent. I’m in charge of four other workers, I make an American wage, but it’s a donkey job. I sort through piles of sheets with gloved hands. The dirties are brought down by orderlies, morenas mostly. I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying. A lot of the time the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper. One of the girls from Baitoa tells me she’s heard that everything in the hamper gets incinerated. Because of the sida, she whispers. Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.

My girls are not exactly reliable, but I enjoy working with them. They play music, they feud, they tell me funny stories. And because I don’t yell or bully them they like me. They’re young, sent to the States by their parents. The same age I was when I arrived; they see me now, twenty-eight, five years here, as a veteran, a rock, but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

A few of the girls have boyfriends and they’re the ones I’m careful about depending on. They show up late or miss weeks at a time; they move to Nueva York or Union City without warning. When that happens I have to go to the manager’s office. He’s a little man, a thin man, a bird-looking man; has no hair on his face, but a thatch grows on his chest and up his neck. I tell him what happened and he pulls the girl’s application and rips it in half, the cleanest of sounds. In less than an hour one of the other girls has sent a friend to me for an application.

The newest girl’s called Samantha and she’s a problem. She’s dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass—when you least expect it she cuts you. Walked onto the job after one of the other girls ran off to Delaware. She’s been in the States only six weeks and can’t believe the cold. Twice she’s tipped over the detergent barrels and she has a bad habit of working without gloves and then rubbing her eyes. She tells me that she’s been sick, that she’s had to move twice, that her housemates have stolen her money. She has the scared, hunted look of the unlucky. Work is work, I tell her, but I loan her enough for her lunches, let her do personal laundry in our machines. I expect her to thank me, but instead she says that I talk like a man.

Does it get any better? I hear her ask the others. Just worse, they say. Wait for the freezing rain. She looks over at me, half smiling, uncertain. She’s fifteen, maybe, and too thin to have mothered a child, but she’s already shown me the pictures of her fat boy, Manolo. She’s waiting for me to answer, me in particular because I’m the veterana, but I turn to the next load. I’ve tried to explain to her the trick of working hard but she doesn’t seem to care. She cracks her gum and smiles at me like I’m seventy. I unfold the next sheet and like a flower the bloodstain’s there, no bigger than my hand. Hamper, I say, and Samantha throws it open. I ball the sheet up and toss. Slops right in, the loose ends dragged in by the center.

—

NINE HOURS OF SMOOTHING
linen and I am home, eating cold yuca with hot oil, waiting for Ramón to come for me in the car he has borrowed. He is taking me to look at another house. It’s been his dream since he first set foot in the States, and now, with all the jobs he’s had and the money he’s saved, it’s possible. How many get to this point? Only the ones who never swerve, who never make mistakes, who are never unlucky. And that more or less is Ramón. He’s serious about the house, which means I have to be serious about it, too. Each week we go out into the world and look. He makes an event of it, dressing like he’s interviewing for a visa, drives us around the quieter sections of Paterson, where the trees have spread over roofs and garages. It’s important, he says, to be careful, and I agree. He takes me with him whenever he can, but even I can tell that I’m not much help. I’m not one for change, I tell him, and I see only what’s wrong with the places he wants, and later, in the car, he accuses me of sabotaging his dream, of being dura.

Tonight we’re supposed to see another. He walks into the kitchen clapping his chapped hands, but I’m in no mood and he can tell. He sits down next to me. He puts his hand on my knee. You’re not going?

I’m sick.

How sick?

Bad enough.

He rubs at his stubble. What if I find the place? You want me to make the decision myself?

I don’t think it will happen.

And if it does?

You know you’ll never move me there.

He scowls. He checks the clock. He leaves.

Ana Iris is working her second job, so I spend my evening alone, listening to this whole country going cold on the radio. I try to keep still, but by nine I have the things he stores in my closet spread before me, the things he tells me never to touch. His books and some of his clothes, an old pair of glasses in a cardboard case, and two beaten chancletas. Hundreds of dead lottery tickets, crimped together in thick wads that fall apart at the touch. Dozens of baseball cards, Dominican players, Guzmán, Fernández, the Alous, swatting balls, winding up and fielding hard line drives just beyond the baseline. He has left me some of his dirties to wash, but I haven’t had the time, and tonight I lay them out, the yeast still strong on the cuffs of his pants and work shirts.

In a box on the top shelf of the closet he has a stack of Virta’s letters, cinched in a fat brown rubber band. Nearly eight years’ worth. Each envelope is worn and frail and I think he’s forgotten they’re here. I found them a month after he stored his things, right at the start of our relationship, couldn’t resist, and afterward I wished I had.

He claims that he stopped writing to her the year before, but that’s not true. Every month I drop by his apartment with his laundry and read the new letters she has sent, the ones he stashes under his bed. I know Virta’s name, her address, I know she works at a chocolate factory; I know that he hasn’t told her about me.

The letters have grown beautiful over the years and now the handwriting has changed as well—each letter loops down, drooping into the next line like a rudder.
Please, please, mi querido husband, tell me what it is. How long did it take before your wife stopped mattering?

After reading her letters I always feel better. I don’t think this says good things about me.

—

WE ARE NOT HERE
for fun, Ana Iris told me the day we met, and I said, Yes, you’re right, even though I did not want to admit it.

Today I say these same things to Samantha and she looks at me with hatred. This morning when I arrived at the job I found her in the bathroom crying and I wish I could let her rest for an hour but we don’t have those kinds of bosses. I put her on the folding and now her hands are shaking and she looks like she’s going to cry again. I watch her for a long time and then I ask her what’s wrong and she says, What isn’t wrong?

This, Ana Iris said, is not an easy country. A lot of girls don’t make it through their first year.

You need to concentrate on work, I tell Samantha. It helps.

She nods, her little girl’s face vacant. It is probably her son she misses, or the father. Or our whole country, which you never think of until it’s gone, which you never love until you’re no longer there. I squeeze her arm and go upstairs to report in and when I come back she’s gone. The other girls pretend not to notice. I check the bathroom, find a bunch of crumpled-up paper towels on the floor. I smooth them out and put them on the edge of the sink.

Even after lunch I keep expecting her to walk in and say, Here I am. I just went for a stroll.

—

T
HE TRUTH IS
I am lucky to have a friend like Ana Iris. She’s like my sister. Most of the people I know in the States have no friends here; they’re crowded together in apartments. They’re cold, they’re lonely, they’re worn. I’ve seen the lines at the phone places, the men who sell stolen card numbers, the cuarto they carry in their pockets.

When I first reached the States I was like that, alone, living over a bar with nine other women. At night no one could go to bed because of the screams and the exploding bottles from downstairs. Most of my housemates were fighting with each other over who owed who what or who had stolen money. When I myself had extra I went to the phones and called my mother, just so I could hear the voices of the people in my barrio as they passed the phone from hand to hand, like I was good luck. I was working for Ramón at that time; we weren’t going out yet—that wouldn’t happen for another two years. He had a housekeeping guiso then, mostly in Piscataway. The day we met he looked at me critically. Which pueblo are you from?

Moca.

Mata dictador, he said, and then a little while later he asked me which team I supported.

Águilas, I told him, not really caring.

Licey, he boomed. The only real team on the Island.

That was the same voice he used to tell me to swab a toilet or scrub an oven. I didn’t like him then; he was too arrogant and too loud and I took to humming when I heard him discussing fees with the owners of the houses. But at least he didn’t try to rape you like many of the other bosses. At least there was that. He kept his eyes and his hands mostly to himself. He had other plans, important plans, he told us, and just watching him you could believe it.