The Dirty Girls Social Club

by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

  Amaury laughs. “Wish I could. Sorry.” He climbs out of bed, and I stare at the Valentine of his back. He is strong, works out. Solid. “I’ll take a bath,” he says in English. “You come, Mami?”

  “I want to sleep,” I say, drowsy. “Just a few more minutes.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  I close my eyes and float in happiness while the water runs upstairs.

  I didn’t set out to love Amaury Pimentel, drug dealer. I admit when I first started seeing him I was undoubtedly on the furious rebound from that bigheaded Texican cowboy. But it happened. Suddenly, I found myself staring at my blinking green cursor, unable to come up with a decent sentence because Amaury danced on my brain. Then one day Jovan came by the way he always does, with his dreadlocks bouncing, wanting to flirt. And I had no interest. Not in Jovan, not in Ed, not in any of them.

  All I could think about was the way Amaury folds his clothes lovingly with his rough, scarred hands. I daydream about the fringed penny-shaped bullet scar in his shoulder from the drive-by, and the way he cries when he hears a sad song. I think of the multicolored beads he wears around his neck, how he holds them in his hand like a single, droopy flower when he undresses. He makes the sign of the cross with them, brings them to his lips with his head bowed in a prayer for deliverance and safety on the streets and for the health and well-being of his beloved mother. Que Dios la bendiga, he always says. May God bless her.

  Amaury surprises me all the time. He figures out math in his head that I can’t even do on a pad of paper. He has more common sense about things than I’ve ever had in all my life, and he isn’t afraid to tell me when I’m being illogical. He reads while I watch TV, says life is too short for the “idiot box,” as he calls it. All I want to do these days is file my column, and go home, because in a few hours Amaury will come to the door, ring the buzzer, and enter my world like the most beautiful, challenging puzzle ever. And I love the way he moves in bed, the power in his arms, the fearlessness of his explorations. He never thinks I smell bad, even when I do. He never seems bothered when I don’t shave. He never thinks I look fat.

  Do I still call Ed a few times a day and hang up on him? Yes, I do. Does he call back and tell me he has caller ID and say that if I don’t stop stalking him he’ll take out a restraining order on me? I’m not proud of it, but yes. I don’t care. I hate that man so much I could kill him with my bare hands.

  Amaury returns to the bedroom, puts on his designer boxers, his baggy jeans, his T-shirt and button-down, his beads, his boots, his sunglasses. His cologne. Man smell. I love that man smell. He taps me on the shoulder to rouse me from my dozing. “I’m going,” he says. He kisses me. I cling, close my eyes, and nibble my way along his cheek and neck with my lips.

  “You coming back?”

  “Right after class. You want me to pick anything up?”

  “Oatmeal,” I say. I’m eating better, and for the first time have not gained weight while happy in love. Amaury suggested I eat more frequently, smaller meals, and drink a lot of water. It’s working. If I forget, he’s there to remind me, with a glass of water and a slice of whole wheat toast. Who would have thought?

  Amaury’s taking English as a second language and Spanish literature classes at Roxbury Community College in the mornings. When I told the sucias they didn’t believe me. He’s smart. They just don’t understand.

  Technically, Amaury lives with his sister, here in Jamaica Plain, not too far from me, actually, on the Franklin Park side of Washington Street. She lives in that skinny little patch of neighborhood where all the triple-deckers look like the one she and her family live in—saggy, splintery, and sad, like someone sat on them. The wooden porch crumbles, covered with graffiti. Empty cans and candy wrappers seem to grow from the dark black dirt in the yard. There are a few scrubby shrubs around, but they’re not for aesthetic pleasure, they’re for hiding in when the cops come looking for hoodlums. He has driven past with me, but I’ve yet to meet them.

  For the record, Amaury does not live in the projects, like Usnavys thinks, and he doesn’t have any children. I asked him about all of that, and he shook his head. “She thinks I’m El Arabe,” he says. “There’s a guy over in the projects who looks like me, and they used to get us confused all the time. We look the same, and it makes big problems for me. He’s an idiot. I hate him. People stop me all the time over there and think I owe them money, but it’s that guy they want.”

  LATER IN THE day, Amaury picks me up from work in his black Accord with the green apple air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

  “I have to stop at my sister’s,” he says. “You want to go?”

  “Sure.” He has never invited me to meet his family before. I’m flattered. I check my reflection in the sunvisor mirror, adjust what needs adjusting.

  The ride is smooth, the car smells good. I’ve never seen someone take better care of a car than Amaury takes care of that thing. You’d think it was a living being, the way he talks to it, pets it, feeds it and waters it, cleans it out, vacuums it with that little old DustBuster he keeps in the trunk.

  He has a cassette tape in the car stereo, and sings along with a song that always makes him sad. You’d think a big macho Dominican like that, a guy from a country where the men seem to think it is their God-given right to have four different women going all the time, you’d think he wouldn’t start tearing up at every little thing. But Amaury is different. He cries all the time.

  He drives to his sister’s, singing that song and looking dejected, with one hand on the wheel. He whips the other around dramatically, as if he were performing for a crowd of thousands. Los caminos de la vida, no son como yo pensaba, no son como imaginaba, no son como yo creía. The roads of life are not how I thought they’d be, are not how I imagined they’d be, are not how I believed they’d be.

  “I was so young when I got here,” he says when the song is over. “It’s not fair.” At that moment, we drive past the men’s homeless shelter at the Jamaica Plain end of Franklin Park, and Amaury looks at the guys sitting on the cement picnic table out front, smoking their cigarettes and wearing their thin charity-issue zcoats.

  “Ay, Dios mío,” he says, gesturing toward them. “Eso, sí, me da mucha vergüenza.”

  The sight of them makes him so sad he almost starts to cry again. Then, in Spanish, he asks, “Do you see now? You see how it is for people like me? These are the choices we have.”

  When we pull up to the brown, raggedy triple-decker his sister lives in, I see a young boy standing on the second-floor balcony, watching us. He’s wearing just a T-shirt and underwear, and starts to jump up and down when he sees Amaury.

  “Hey, Osvaldo,” Amaury says as we walk from the car to the front door. “Get inside before you catch cold. What are you doing out here?”

  I’ve only been to apartments like this on assignment, usually when someone was shot or arrested. We walk through the front “door,” which can’t really even be called that because it’s missing the actual door part. It’s a rectangular hole in the wall with rusty hinges where the door used to be attached. The communal stairwell smells strongly of bleach and urine, and is dark. Still, I can see that the old wallpaper has peeled off and left patches of what I’m sure is lead paint chipping onto the steps. “That cabrón landlord still hasn’t fixed the light,” Amaury says, punching the wall. “He should be in prison the way he treats the people who live here. He thinks we’re animals. I tell my sister not to pay the rent until he fixes things, but she pays him anyway. She’s afraid of him.”

  Amaury’s sister lives on the second floor. When we arrive, she is sweeping the landing near her front door. Her ample body is stuffed into a pair of very tight red jeans, and she wears a white sweatshirt with a faded Santo Domingo decal on the front. Her hair is pulled in a tight ponytail, and she looks like the oldest young woman I’ve ever seen, with dark circles under her pretty hazel eyes.

  “Hola, Nancy,” he says, and gives her a hug. She hugs him back.
Then, in Spanish, he says, “I want to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

  I reach out to shake her hand, and she looks surprised. She takes her hand from behind her back, where she is massaging out a knot, and shakes, uncertainly.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Allí,” she answers. There. It’s a sad answer, from a sad woman.

  Osvaldo runs through the splintery door leading from the landing to the balcony where we saw him earlier. He’s wearing socks with his shirt and skivvies, and holds a small, mewling kitten in one hand. Its eye is full of pus. I want to cry. In the other hand he holds a plastic robot toy, with both arms missing. He smiles, and I can see that this boy is going to be even more handsome than his uncle someday.

  “What did I tell you?” Amaury yells at him, holding one hand up as if he might strike the boy. “Get in the house! You’re going to get sick.” Then, to his sister, “What are you doing letting him run around like that? It’s cold. I bought him clothes, use them. That cat looks diseased. Get rid of it, or take it to a vet. What’s wrong with you?”

  Nancy ignores him and continues her sweeping. If this woman ever had energy or happiness to her, it’s long gone. Amaury and I enter the apartment.

  There isn’t much to it, just a long, lopsided hallway with a series of rooms opening on either side. There are three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The floors are wood, dull and old. An older boy, heavy and wheezy, sits on the living-room floor playing with marbles. He drops them on the floor and watches them roll to one side of the room. He doesn’t have to push them to make them do this; gravity does it. The whole apartment leans, and gives me the dizzy feeling that I’ve stepped into a carnival funhouse.

  “Jonathan,” Amaury scolds the boy. “Get up and go clean your room. You do your homework yet today?”

  The boy looks up at him with the flat, wet eyes of a cow. He does not look bright, I’m sorry to say. He breathes with his mouth open, and looks at me. “Who’s the pretty lady?” he asks. Amaury raises his hand again, as if he will strike the boy. “Don’t be rude,” he says. “This is Lauren, my girlfriend. Now you go do your homework.”

  Jonathan gets up and plods in his tight sweatpants and Bugs Bunny shirt to the kitchen. We follow him there. An older woman with bright red hair with gray roots, black hot pants, and a leopard-print sweater stands at a narrow old stove, stirring a few pots of delicious-smelling food. Her wrinkled cleavage pours over the top of the shirt. She smiles, parting her painted red lips to reveal lipstick decorating her yellow teeth.

  “Cuca,” Amaury says, leaning toward her with a kiss. “How are you today?”

  The woman returns the kiss with a jangle of cheap bracelets and turns her eye toward me.

  “This is my girlfriend, Lauren,” Amaury says. He’s smiling like a kid who brought home an “A” on a math test.

  “Nice to meet you,” Cuca says in Spanish. She has the gruff voice of a long-time smoker.

  “Likewise,” I answer, in Spanish.

  “You American?” she asks.

  “My dad is from Cuba,” I say in awkward, accented Spanish. “I’m a Latina.” She and Amaury both laugh out loud.

  “You’re American,” Cuca says with a patronizing pat to my arm.

  “My little American beauty.” He kisses me.

  Jonathan is standing in front of the open refrigerator, eating generic American cheese slices out of the flat palm of his hand, chewing with his mouth open. He is a large boy whose lips close over food like a horse’s. Amaury pushes him out of the way and slams the door closed. “Give me that,” he says, taking the cheese from the boy. “Quit eating so much. You’re getting fat. Go do your homework like I told you.” The boy laughs, though I can tell from the look in his slow eyes that he is hurt.

  “You don’t have to say that to him,” I say, after the boy has left the room.

  “Yes I do,” Amaury says. “He’s fat. Look at him.”

  “You’ll hurt his self-esteem.” Auto estima. I learned that phrase watching a Spanish-language talk show on TV.

  Amaury ignores my comments. “You want something to drink?” he asks. He opens one of the cabinets, and I’m shocked to see right through to the tender green leaves of a tree outside.

  “My God,” I say. “There’s a hole in the wall.”

  “Yes,” Amaury says with a know-it-all smile. “That’s what I was telling you before. The landlord here is no good.”

  He pours a generic brand of grape soda into a couple of squeaky clean jars that serve as glasses, and we return to the living room. A teenage girl appears, talking on a cordless phone. She is very pretty, too. She’s speaking in English, giggling with a friend. She comes to the black leather sofa and sits down. She wears baggy jeans, a tight, striped sweater, and large gold hoop earrings, and something about her reminds me of Amber when I first met her, back in college. Her long, dark hair is highlighted blond and red in the front, in large chunks. Her hazel eyes are large and beautiful. She wears no makeup at all. Her skin is smooth and perfect. I don’t know what went down in the Dominican Republic, but some beautiful people come from there.

  The furniture in the room is very nice, in that new immigrant kind of way. Leather furniture, glass coffee table—it’s a lot like Usnavys’s furniture. Why is it that immigrants, no matter where they’re from, always buy furniture like this and cover it with clear plastic? They can be from anywhere in the world, but they always have those curio cabinets with those cheesy little figurines in them, and those brass floor lamps that look like flowers on long stalks, opening into a blossom filled with a light bulb. They always have those bedroom sets made out of lacquered wood, white with gold trim. The curtains are pink, lace, and everything is spotless and tidy. An entertainment center holds a TV, which is off, and a stereo, which Amaury turns on, blasting an Oro Sólido merengue disc.

  “Turn it down, you big stupid,” the teenage girl shouts, in the sort of rough and clumsy English that will help her defend herself on the streets someday, but that will never help her find a good job or get into a good college—or even finish high school. She covers her free ear in an attempt to better hear what is being said through the phone into her other.

  “Go to your room,” Amaury says. “And get off the phone. You talk too much on that phone.”

  He grabs the phone from her and starts talking to the person on the other end of the line. He makes a furious face and hangs up.

  “What you doing?” she cries, reaching out to him with her thin arms and long manicured fingernails with all those gold rings and bangles.

  “I told you, I don’t want you talking to boys. No boys, you hear me? You’re too young. Focus on your school.” He speaks Spanish, she speaks English.

  “I hate you,” the girl says, trying to get the phone from him. He holds it up over his head.

  “What did I tell you? Go to your room.”

  The girl obeys, but with the angriest look I’ve seen in a long time.

  “Are you always so rough with them?” I ask in English.

  He answers in Spanish. “That’s one of the things I hate the most about this country. You raise a hand to a child here, and they throw you in jail. In Santo Domingo, children have respect. Here, they have no respect because you can’t discipline them.”

  “Hitting a child doesn’t teach them anything but fear,” I say. “And being overly strict with a teenager is inviting rebellion.”

  “Anyway, this is where I live. You like it?” Another thing that amazes me about Amaury: He never argues, or holds a grudge. He lets things go. Allows us to disagree.

  “It’s very nice,” I say.

  “Come here.”

  He leads me to the front bedroom, a tiny room with three twin beds crammed into it. “This is where I sleep,” he says. “I share the room with Osvaldo and Jonathan. You think that’s nice?”

  I don’t. It’s dreary, and small. But clean. There are hundreds of Spanish-language books piled in one corner. The whole apar
tment is lovingly tended to, decorated to the best of this family’s ability, filled with the warm smells of good food cooking, and music.

  “It could be much worse,” I say.

  “Why do you think we’re here, tonta?” he asks. “We come from much worse. Those kids out there? They think this is a palace. This is all they know. They have never seen those houses where my customers live, over in Newton. They’ve never seen an apartment like yours.”

  We return to the living room, and Nancy reappears, shuffling off to her bedroom. She emerges wearing a polyester security uniform, her hair wet and plastered against her head.

  “I’m going,” she says to us, sighing in her exhaustion and rattling her keys. Then, she calls to Cuca, “I’m going. Ya me voy.”

  After she leaves, Amaury tells me that she works two jobs, back to back, every day except Sunday. She cleans a building in the mornings, comes home for an hour to do housework, leaves for her evening job watching the door of a building at Northeastern University. She gets home at midnight.

  “Her husband does the same thing. And I still had to buy this furniture for them, and some food. I still have to help them make the rent every month. You see what I’m saying? This country is ruthless.”

  “My God.”

  “Nancy’s studying computers in her free time. And English. But they’re gone so much the kids are going bad. That’s why I’m hard on them, mi amor, because they don’t have anyone around to teach them right from wrong, except Cuca.” His voice drops to a whisper and he rolls his eyes. “Cuca is Nancy’s mother-in-law, and she’s a little bit crazy.” He points to his ear with a finger, and paints a circle with it.

  Osvaldo comes in the room with an empty raisin box. He has ripped the back of it in such a way that he is able to hang it on the waistband of the pants he has just put on. He struts into the room, a little boy no more than eight years old, and stops in front of us with a big smile on his face. He pretends the box is a beeper, and takes it off in the same way I have seen Amaury do many times. “Que lo que,” he says, pretending to be on the phone. He puts his tiny hand over his tiny crotch.