The Dirty Girls Social Club

by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

  The reporter says the attorney is married to an old college friend of Cruz’s, Sara Behar. “The reason for this visit is unknown,” the reporter says suggestively, “and Liz Cruz, when we caught up with her here, wasn’t talking.”

  “Just leave people alone,” Liz says to the camera as she shields her face. She is crying. “Mind your own business. Leave this poor family alone.”

  I can’t get to the bathroom in time, and throw up on the kitchen floor as I run. Roberto is already up from his seat, spitting bits of steak as he hurls every insult he can think of at me. The boys hug each other and scream. Jonah starts to follow me, screaming “Mami, Mami, no!” but Sethy grabs him and drags him under the table with him. “Hide!” he screams.

  Roberto catches me by the hair and spins me toward him. The whole kitchen smells of my vomit. “Daddy! Stop it!” one of the boys cries.

  “What did I tell you?” he asks, stabbing his finger into my face. “What did I tell you about that lesbian coming to this house?”

  “I know,” I say weakly, “I tried to stop her, but she came anyway. She was afraid, and said she didn’t have anywhere else to go. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, you tried to stop her? Is that why she was here in this house? Because you stopped her?” He shoves me into the counter. I cover my belly instinctively with my hands and back away.

  “Please, Roberto, don’t,” I beg. Vilma and Sharon are nowhere to be found. Vilma has tried to help me before, but I asked her to stay out of it. Sharon tried to help once, too, but Roberto told her that if she did not mind her own business he would have her sent back to Switzerland.

  “Our house,” he roars. “That was our house. I can’t have our house associated with that woman. Do you know what this could do to my career? Are you crazy?”

  He grabs me again as I try to run.

  “So, are you in love with her?” he asks, his face centimeters from mine. His hand twists my sweater and rips it.

  “What? No!” I struggle out of his grip and lunge away, toward the door that leads from the kitchen to the backyard, where the melting snow from the last storm of the season taps a rhythm on the wood of the porch. I’ve never seen him this angry before.

  “You heard me. Do you have something going on with her?”

  “You’re crazy!” I scream. He whacks me square between the shoulder blades and knocks the wind out of me. I fall to the tile floor and scoot away. He is knocking things from the counters, coffeemaker, blender, a porcelain cookie jar shaped like a cat that shatters near the table where my children hide. He is a monster.

  I can hear the boys crying.

  “Seth, Jonah,” I cry as he grabs my face and squeezes it hard, twisting my head around to the side and yanking me to stand again. The pain is unbearable. I scream. The boys. I have to protect the boys. “Go to Vilma’s room, and lock the door. Now!” They obey me, scattering like frightened birds.

  “It’s nothing like you think,” I say. “Besides, I’m not the one who hit on Liz in Cancún, am I? That was you.”

  “What?” he asks. “What did you say?” His face is centimeters from mine. I can smell the steak and onions on his breath. A drop of his saliva lands in my eye as he speaks.

  “You heard me. I know you love her. That’s what this is about. You’re pathetic.”

  He slaps me.

  I escape his hold once more, open the back door, and run out onto the porch, into the dark cold of the evening, crying. I can see my breath, clouds of steam. My world is falling apart. The temperature feels low enough that the melting snow might have started to freeze again, in thick, clear ice. Roberto follows me, his eyes crazed.

  “Who told you this?” he asks.

  “Liz,” I say, balancing myself against the railing.

  He is on top of me, wrangling me into a headlock of some sort. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing.” I can’t move. He pulls me out of the headlock, close to him, in a too-tight hug.

  There are tears in Roberto’s eyes. “Nothing?” he asks, stabbing a hand between my legs. “She said nothing? Did she tell you she screwed me? Eh? Right there, between the legs? Did she tell you that part? That she did me in the hotel when you were getting a massage?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Did she tell you she did me again when we got back? When you were at your mother’s?”

  “Stop lying, you sinvergüenza.”

  “It’s true. She did.” He’s smiling, the bastard. “In our bed, and she liked it.” He pumps his hips hard into my body. “She liked it hard, too, because she’s a whore just like you. No wonder the two of you lick each other all the time.”

  This time, I slap him. “Carajo,” I scream. “I hate you.” He grabs my hands and twists them back until I think they’ll snap off the wrists.

  “No!” I scream. “Don’t! Roberto!”

  He is growling, cursing, insulting me in every way he can think of. The wood of the porch is slick, and I am careful not to fall. I hold the banister for dear life.

  “Please, Roberto, I’m pregnant,” I cry. “I can’t afford a fall right now.”

  He stops and stares.

  “You better not be lying,” he says.

  “No, I swear to you I’m not lying. Why do you think I’ve been gaining weight? I hardly eat anything anymore! Why do you think I run to the bathroom every ten seconds? It’s to throw up, Roberto.”

  “Nice try,” he says. “That’s not going to help you now. Lies won’t help you anymore with me, you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I’m not lying. I am pregnant. I was waiting for our anniversary to tell you, to surprise you. I was going to tell you next week in Argentina. Please.”

  The tears come hot and heavy from my eyes, millions of them. The sight of them excites him.

  Roberto shakes me. “Tell me the truth, Sara,” he demands. “This isn’t a game.”

  “I’m telling the truth. We’re going to have a little girl.”

  “A little girl?” He still holds me in a painful grip, but his eyes are softening a bit, hopeful.

  “Let’s go inside,” I say. “I’ll show you the pregnancy test. I’ve been hiding it in the closet.”

  “You better not be lying about this,” he says again.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Are you lying? Did you really sleep with her?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Do you love her?”

  “I did,” he says. “But I’m over it now. I love you, Sarita. And I can’t stand the thought of you and her as a couple. It makes me crazy. It’s the worst insult a man can think of.” He is panting, red-faced, furious.

  “I’m not a lesbian,” I tell him. “I’m your wife. I love you. You’re the only man I’ve ever loved. Why do we do this to each other? To the kids? Ay, Roberto. For the love of God. We need professional help.”

  “Are you really pregnant?” His voice is smooth, his mouth almost curling into the sweet smile that makes my heart melt.

  I run my hand along the side of his face, feeling sorry for him the way I do every time he apologizes after hitting me. “I swear I am.”

  He yanks my arm in what I think is a move to pull me close, but something happens. I slip on the ice, lose his hand, and then time slows, and I feel each step as I hit it, falling first on my tailbone, then my back, and then rolling right onto my stomach. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I hit all eight steps, and land on the sharp ice down below. Did he push me? Or did I slip? I don’t know.

  I can’t move. The pain in my back is too intense. My head is bleeding into my eyes, and my mouth is full of hot, salty liquid. Blood. I hope that it is over, but it isn’t. He follows me, cursing and screaming in terror. I want to tell him to be careful on the steps, but I can’t talk.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he cries. “What are you doing falling down the stairs if you’re pregnant? You better not be lying to me. Is this how you cover your lies? By falling down the
stairs?”

  The pain in my uterus comes instantly. I feel a pop, the same way you do when your water breaks and you go into labor. Only this time, it’s six months too soon, and the pain is in my entire body. I am paralyzed, either by fear or by injury. I don’t know. He kneels next to me, and when I don’t move or speak, he squeezes my cheeks, hard. “Get up,” he hisses. He’s lost his mind. He slaps me again. “This is no time to play games with me, woman. Get up. If you’re really pregnant, get up.” Then he does something unthinkable: He kicks me, again and again, in the side, and I feel the blood come in cramping waves. Not my baby.

  “Please, Roberto, for the love of God,” I cry inside my head. “Stop, please.”

  Then he kicks me again, in the head. I hear a crunch inside my face. In a burst of stars and red, I see Vilma rush down the steps and jump on top of him from behind, a kitchen knife flashing in her hand.

  She is screaming, “You killed her, you son of a bitch, you killed her this time!” I see her swollen legs in their knee-high hose fly into the air as he lifts her up, and body slams her to the ground next to me. I hear the knife clatter onto the ice.

  It’s the last thing I remember.

  A new study to be published next week, in the March 24 issue of the BOSTON JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH, shows that the most successful people in our society also happen to be the best liars. The better you are at lying, the study says, the further you go in your career and personal life. I have to admit, I lie a lot—don’t you? Boss asks how you’re doing, and you say fine. Friend with ugly haircut asks your opinion and you say, Looks great. The more we care about someone, it seems, the more apt we are to lie to that person. Is it any wonder people are always disappointed in love? We evolved to trust liars most of all.

  from “My Life,” by Lauren Fernández

  usnavys

  NAVI, I KNOW you’re there. Pick up. Please. We need to talk.”

  No, huh-uh. I don’t think so. Not until he apologizes for Rome. I pull the throw blanket around me and let him tell it to the machine.

  Three months, and he hasn’t had the nerve. Then, last week, he starts calling me again, out of the blue, like nothing happened. I’m not falling for it this time, m’ija. What does he think I am, a masochist?

  Plus, I stopped at the hospital this afternoon, after Rebecca called and told me what happened to Sara, and I just stared at her bruised-up face with all those tubes in and out of her, and I couldn’t believe what the doctor told me: She might never wake up. Her husband did that to her. Rebecca was as surprised as I was by the whole thing. You think you know someone, and then something like this happens, and it’s obvious, m’ija, that you never knew them at all. Who wants to get married after seeing that? I am so disappointed in the male race.

  I hate them all.

  I lie back on my green leather sofa and press the remote to change the channel on the big-screen TV across the room. The radiator comes on with a comforting hiss, and where the lace curtains have pulled away in the bay window I can see that rain has started to fall again. It’s warmed up a lot, m’ija, but some nights you just want the heater on anyway, you know what I mean? Comfort. You need some comfort. I arrange the takeout containers on my lap, and dig in. Soupy chicken, rice, red beans, salad. Comfort food. Two orders of everything. They never give you enough when you order it to go.

  I need to get a bigger rug for this room. In this damp cold, it isn’t enough. I need warm, tonight. It’s one of those nights, m’ija, where all you want to do is cuddle with someone big and strong, unless you’re me and you can’t find anyone big and strong worth cuddling with. It’s been like that all my life. I’m feeling so sorry for myself right now I could just cry. I need a good cry. I can cry alone, and I can cry in front of my girlfriends. But I can’t cry in front of a man.

  Men suck.

  It all goes back to that man from Baní who got my mom pregnant in Puerto Rico twenty-nine years ago. Four years later, in Boston, he decided fatherhood was too much work. He went back to the Dominican Republic and left us here with nothing. You’d think I wouldn’t remember him, I was so little when he left, but I do. I remember him very clearly. He was a large, dark man. Large as in heavy, but not tall. He was short, stocky, black, and had a thick Spanish accent. He used to have to roll up the bottoms of his pants. That must have been hard for him, you know? I don’t think Boston was kind to him. He worked hard while he was here, and never got ahead. And that made him angry. I remember sitting there on the floor by his feet and looking up at him and him talking to me in a cartoon voice that he did to make me smile. It made me laugh. He was so thick and his arms were so strong when he picked me up and held me.

  You might think I wouldn’t remember the way he smelled in his neck area but I do, I remember he smelled like wood. He used to work as a mover on one of those trucks, lifting people’s pianos up stairs all day long, and he came home smelling of wood and sweat. I remember all that like it was yesterday. I honestly do. My mom says there’s no way I can remember all that about him, but I remember all right.

  I remember my brother Carlos, too. He looked like our dad, and he started working for the movers, too, bringing money home. He made sure I did my homework and he sang me to sleep. I remember that those guys his age didn’t like him much because he told the police about them robbing a store. The first chance they got they shot him. That first chance happened when I was there, when he was walking me home from the bus that used to take me to seventh grade across town at the white school. They killed him in front of me. I remember what it sounded like and looked like and smelled like, but I don’t want to tell you now. I don’t want to think about it. I’ve had to wake up out of that dream so many times, the one where it’s happening all over again and I’m screaming so loud I wake myself up.

  That’s two men who loved me that I lost and I don’t think my heart can take it again. You look at me and you think I’m happy and cheerful all the time, and you don’t really know. No one can ever really know about loss the way I know about loss, you know what I’m saying? I finally told the sucias about it and they couldn’t believe it. I waited eight years of knowing them to tell them about my dad and my brother, and they were shocked, m’ija, just totally and completely shocked. They thought they knew me, and that’s how it is with me. People think they know me. They don’t.

  From what I’ve seen in this life, it’s the poor men that get shot or leave you. The men with money look happy with their wives and babies. You don’t find many men in the projects, you know what I mean? Where I’m from, you find boys, then later you either find them dead, in prison, or they go back to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic or wherever and you never hear from them again. Where I come from, the men break your heart.

  Sometimes when I get to thinking about it too hard I feel like I can’t go on. As crazy as it sounds, days like this—when all the little buds start popping up on the tree branches everywhere, cheerful and hopeful and ready for spring and love, days like this bring me down so low I don’t think I’ll get up again. But I have to try, if for no other reason than I’m a landlord with responsibilities.

  My tenant is making noise upstairs again. Renting out the top floor was the smartest thing I ever did. His rent covers my entire mortgage, minus one hundred dollars. But I have to listen to his life. He moves furniture, I hear it. He flushes the toilet, I hear it. I hear him brush his teeth, wash his clothes. When he accidentally drops a glass and it breaks, I hear it.

  The money I save is worth it. The house is an old three-story Victorian that I’m still fixing up. There’s a missing step on the way up the back stairs. And I have to fix that leak in my upstairs bathroom. But I’m a home owner, and I get the tax breaks.

  I have my part of the house decorated the way I like it, with mirrors in gold frames, Art Deco vases on the floor with big pastel grasses and feathers in them. I’ve got shiny black sculptures of tall, thin cats in the doorways to some of the rooms, and a canopy bed in my room. I’ve got a glass di
ning table with black chairs. I have everything I need here, and I’m going next weekend and buying a whole bedroom set for the guest room even though my mother tells me it’s pointless to make such big purchases for the home until I’ve found a good man. What if I never do? I ask her. She doesn’t even answer that. I try to explain to her that I’m happy the way I am, perfectly content living in this house I own all by myself, filling the rooms with things I like, but I think she can tell it’s a lie.

  I’m not happy here all alone. I need me a man. A good Puerto Rican man.

  Don’t tell Lauren this, though. She’ll get that pissed-off look of hers and she’ll start to lecture me about how I have that guy right here and now but I can’t get over how poor he is. I know it, okay? I know. But I did poor already. I don’t want to do it again. Sue me! Lauren doesn’t know the first thing about being poor. I don’t mean poor like she thinks of poor, where you may not be able to go to private school or something. I mean poor where your mom has you looking through the cushions on the sofa to scrape up enough change to buy milk for the week after the food stamps run out and you’re all hungry and irritable. Poor like that. I don’t want to think about those times. I want to think about now.

  This block is pretty nice, but I’m close enough to Jackson Square to worry about my car. The only BMWs you see around here are from the chop shop. You can hear guns going off in the night, and I can’t tell you how many times a bleeping car alarm has kept me from my beauty rest. You hear the kids roaming around in packs, too, hooting like owls and yelling at their friends. We’ve got a new coffee bar down the block, and a French café with umbrellas on the tables outside in the summer. We’re gente-fying the neighborhood, me and all the other Latino yuppies. Almost fast enough.

  I flip through the stations, looking for a good romance movie. There has to be something, some cinematic fantasy I can watch where the men are good and decent.

  The doctor keeps forgetting to show up for our dates. For two weeks it’s like that. He calls to apologize a few times, sends me flowers to make it up, and then I’m shopping for gourmet cheese at that shop over by Symphony Hall after work one night and guess who walks in with some old Celia Cruz–looking witch in a red wig? Him! He was all dressed up like all the other people who had just come out of the symphony, you know? Long black wool coat and that nice cashmere scarf. I took my little shopping cart and went and stood behind them in line—they were buying organic eggs and whole wheat bread and the kind of orange juice that comes in a clear plastic container with a handle—and I bumped into him and cleared my throat all loud. He turned to see me and you could actually see drops of sweat popping up on the tip of his big nose like mushrooms after the rain. “Do I know you?” he asks with that thick Argentine accent of his. Does he know me? The woman smiles politely and puts her hand on his shoulder. She has claws like Cruella de Vil and she’s wearing a big white rock on her ring finger. It’s his damn wife, m’ija. He was married. “No,” I said, “you don’t know me. You must have mistaken me for a run-of-the-mill whore.”