but she’s granola to the core. A tree-hugging,
squirrel-feeding, astrology-following vegan.
Me? I was a fashion-loving, chess-playing negrita
who quit at the top of my game.
We both know what it’s like to have our parents look at us
like we are dressed in neon question marks.
We also know exactly what it’s like to look at the other
& see all the answers of ourselves there.
I am a girl who will notice
if your nostril hair grows long
or if your nails are cut too close to the quick.
I’d as soon compliment you
on how well you groom your edges
as I would on how smoothly you steer a debate.
Dre will turn any conversation
into one about gardening.
If you tell a dirty joke,
Dre will talk about plants that pollinate themselves.
If you talk about hoing around,
you’d see Dre blink as her mind goes down a
long winding path of tilling dirt & sowing seeds.
Here we are, with our interests in chess
& astrology & dirt & each other.
Dre has been texting me
since this morning.
She must have seen the news.
She didn’t hear it from me
because I turned off my phone.
The thought of speaking
makes me want to
uncarve myself from this skin.
But you can only ignore
your girlfriend for so long
before she knocks on the window
& sticks her head in.
“Is it true, Yaya?”
& I hear the tremble
in her voice
that threatens the wobble
in my own.
Dre loved Papi
as if he were her own family.
Would make Papi laugh
with her precise school Spanish
& North Carolina manners.
“I don’t know, Dre.
Anything is possi—”
I stop myself midway.
It feels like such a lie.
Nothing & no one feels possible anymore.
I cannot see her nodding.
But I know that she is.
I know that tears are streaming
down her clay-brown cheeks.
She tucks her long legs through
the window & folds herself onto the floor,
rests her head against my knee
& hugs my legs.
“I’m here, Yaya. I’m here.”
For hours we sit. Just like that.
Dre is originally from Raleigh.
& although she’s lived in New York
for a long time, every now & then
her accent will switch up.
Especially when she’s upset
or hurting or trying to be strong.
When New Yorkers are mad?
Our words take on an edge,
we speed talk like relay racers
struggling to pass the baton to the next snide phrase.
But Dre, when she’s upset, her words slow down,
& she becomes even more polite, & I know then
she is Dr. Johnson’s child through & through.
Dr. Johnson takes on that same precise & calm manner,
her words an unrolling ribbon that you aren’t sure
you’ll see the end of.
When Dr. Johnson is upset, her hands fold
in front of her stomach, & her head cocks to the side
as she lectures us on why we should have finished
our homework sooner, or why a certain movie or social-media clip
wasn’t actually as funny as we thought
if we put it in a larger context.
Mr. Johnson, or should I say, Senior Master Sergeant Johnson,
is in the Air Force. I’ve only met him a handful of times,
& he didn’t talk enough for me to evaluate how quick or slow,
how calm or angry the pacing of his speech was.
But Dre speaks to me slowly. Like I’ve seen her
whisper to a drooping plant. Believing that her own breath
can unfurl a dying leaf. Can sing it back to health.
Can unwilt the stalk.
The summer before seventh grade,
Dre grew tall. When extended completely,
her legs stretched beyond the bars
of the fire escape & hung over the edge
like Jordan-clad pigeon perches.
Dre wants to study speech therapy in college,
but I’ve always thought she should do agriculture.
I’ve never seen anyone make as much grow
in a small pot on a fire escape as I’ve seen
Dre coax small seeds to bud & flower here.
She has a railing planter where she grows okra;
on our side of the fire escape, which gets better light,
she’s planted tomatoes. One time she planted
these little peppers that came out green & spicy.
Although the landlord has sent notices
that her fire-escape nursery is a fire hazard,
Dre just figures out another way to stack her plants,
or hang them on the railing, or hide them in plain sight,
so she can blossom. Even when the pigeons pick at her
seedlings, or squirrels munch on fresh shoots,
Dre just laughs & puts her black hands back in the soil:
decides to grow us something good.
Papi never saw what Dre
& I were to each other. At least,
he never mentioned it.
Ma is more watchful.
& it’s not that Ma did not like
that I liked Dre. It’s that she understood
I wanted no big deal to be made.
There is an artist my mother loved,
Juan Gabriel, who was once asked
in an interview if he was gay.
His reply: What’s understood need not be said.
I remember how Mami’s eyes
fluttered to me
like a bee on a flower
acknowledging the pollen is sweet.
I have never had to tell
Mami I like girls.
She knew. & she knew that Dre was special.
Last year, for Valentine’s Day, before I left for school,
Mami handed me an envelope
with a twenty-dollar bill inside,
stirring a pot of something fragrant
while she said, “Pa que le compre algo nice a Andreita.”
With her, I did not have to pretend
my best friend was just a friend.
The girl next door being the girl for you
is the kind of trope my English teacher
would have us write essays about in class.
But that’s how it happened for Dre & me.
One day we were best friends,
& the next day we were best friends
who stared at each other’s mouths
when we shared lip gloss.
I don’t think I understood the word
W O N D E R
until the day our tongues touched
& we both wanted
to have them touch again. This girl
felt about me how I felt about her.
The day we first kissed,
I walked into my parents’ bedroom
& offered thanks to the little porcelain saint
Papi kept on his armoire:
thank you, thank you.
I whispered to everything that listened.
The only thing about Dre
that gets on my nerves
is that Dre is sometimes
too good. She has a scale
for doing what’s right
that always balances out
nice & evenly
for her.
Which is why she was
so disappointed that I
didn’t “come out” in
the way she wanted me to.
She said we shouldn’t hide
what we are to each other.
& I told her I wasn’t hiding,
I just wasn’t making
a loudspeaker announcement
to my parents or anyone.
People who know me, know.
Dre’s quirks come out
in other ways too.
Sometimes Dre wants me
to have a clear opinion
on plastic straws, or
water rights, or my feelings
about Papi, & she doesn’t
always see I need time
to watch the board,
to come to terms with
the possibilities.
I’m telling you about my skin,
& my home, & mostly about Dre,
because it’s easier than telling you
Papiisdead.
If I say those words,
if I snap apart the air with them,
whatever is binding me together
will split too.
The house phone has been ringing
off the hook all day.
Reporters from American
& Latin American channels
& newspapers & magazines
& podcasts & websites.
Family members
from the Bronx & DR.
The neighborhood association,
which invites us to grief counseling,
special sessions that will be
held at the church.
The phone rings & rings,
& Mami’s voice,
raw as unprocessed sugar,
responds & responds
but does not answer
where we’ll go from here.
Here is a thing that no one knows,
& probably wouldn’t believe if I told them.
The night before Papi got on the plane,
I almost asked him not to go.
It would have been the first full sentence
I’d spoken to him in almost a year.
We haven’t been close, not like we were,
since I stopped playing chess,
since he tried to force me to go back,
since I saw the certificate in the sealed envelope.
When I quit playing chess,
he told me I broke his heart.
I never told him he’d broken mine.
In the Dominican Republic,
before he met Mami & came here
& started this life for us
Papi was an accountant,
a man of numbers & money,
but here he hustled his way into
owning a billiards on Dyckman Street.
I don’t believe in magic
or premonitions. Not like Papi,
who crossed himself every time he left the house.
Not like Mami, who tries to interpret dreams.
But on the night before Papi left for DR,
something yanked on my heart,
& I wanted to ask him to stay.
But I never said the words.
& Papi did something
he hadn’t done in over a year:
came to my room to say good night
& tangled his hand in my hair
while I was two-strand twisting my curls.
I hate when he messes up my fresh wash,
but I also missed him. My fingers caught in his. Held.
Before I moved away. Removed myself from his reach.
“Me tengo que ir, los negocios. Ya tú sabes.”
He’s always back right before my birthday in September,
but every year around this time,
Mami’s spine becomes rigid, her lips pulled tight
as sneaker laces biting into the tongue.
As his departure nears it seems like I can see
the space between my parents stretch & grow.
& she refuses to drive him to the airport
despite how much I beg her so that I can be there when he leaves.
Papi stopped trying to joke her out of her ill humor years ago,
& I wonder if she now regrets that his last few days
here, at home, alive,
were spent in bed with her anger.
I did not reply to him. Whenever he left,
he said it was for business. I now knew he was lying.
He fiddled with the light switch in my room.
“Negra bella, te quiero. I know things haven’t been normal
between us, but I hope when I come back, we can talk about it.”
I peeked at him from the mirror
while my fingers twirled & twirled my hair.
I remember how I started to say something,
then yanked the words before they could get loose.
He shook his head as if changing his mind.
“While I’m gone, cúidate, negra.”
& I never said a word.
Once, when I was still young to chess competitions,
I was in a tournament with all older kids.
I’d made it to one of the last rounds
& had been playing well the whole time.
I was convinced I was going to win the whole thing.
But I missed an opponent’s trap & was put in check.
My hands shook, tears welled up in my eyes,
the clock kept ticking, but I wouldn’t move.
When I finally looked up, I could see Papi watching
through the glass of the double doors.
He didn’t blink, he didn’t shake his head,
he didn’t do anything, but somehow I knew.
I straightened my back; I wiped my eyes.
I knocked down my king.
The train ride home was silent.
But before we got off at our stop,
Papi turned to my nine-year-old self & said:
“Never, ever, let them see you sweat, negra.
Fight until you can’t breathe, & if you have to forfeit,
you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.”
Four Days After
on the news
blunt force
trauma on impact
medical examiner
unidentifiable
extreme forces
not intact
unconfirmed
dental records
anthropological forensics
tattoos fingerprints
teeth personal items
I watch video footage
of the plane spearing into the ocean.
The waves rising open arms welcome.
I wait for news that the passengers
got their life jackets on.
That there were previously unreported life rafts.
That their initial assessment was wrong
That the Coast Guard found someone breathing.
The news only repeats the same words:
No survivors found. The number of dead: unconfirmed.
Where the plane went down is 120 feet deep.
Divers have been jumping into the water,
fifteen-minute intervals at a time,
trying to pull up what might be left.
I tell Mami we need to go to Queens,
the closest shore to where the plane fell.
Dozens of people have been lighting candles
by the water. The small hope inside me is illogical.
I know this. But it urges me to go. If I
can just be as close as possible to the crash site,
my presence might change the outcome.
All Mami does is drag herself to her room
where she denies my request
with a sharp but quiet click.
Papi sat me in front of a chessboard
when I was three years old.
He patie
ntly explained all the pieces,
but I still treated each one like a pawn.
He loved . . . loves to tell the story
of how I would give up my king
all willy-nilly but would protect my knight
because “Me gustan los caballitos!”
(In my defense, why would a three-year-old
pick a dry-ass-looking king over a pony?)
But even when I was bored, I was also good
at memorizing the patterns for openings
& closings, for when to castle & when to capture.
I was fascinated by the rhythm of the game;
it came as naturally to my body as when Papi
taught me how to dance. It’s all just steps & patterns.
By the time I was four,
I could beat Papi if he wasn’t paying attention.
On my fifth birthday, I defeated him
in just six moves.
After that, he would take me downtown on the C train
to compete against the Washington Square Park hustlers
who played for money. They were straight sharks
& thought the little girl too cute to beat.
But Papi would put a twenty-dollar bill down, & those dudes
learned quick: shorty had patient fingers & played three moves ahead.
Most important, I loved how much
Papi loved to watch me win.
I began competing in chess tournaments
when I was in second grade.
From September to June,
Papi never missed one of my matches.
Never complained about picking me up from
late team meetings or the cost of additional coaching,
even though I knew he must have cut funds
from other places & people to afford both.
Every couple of years
he built a new shelf with his own hands
& put up my trophies & plaques,
pinned up my ribbons & awards.
“Negra bella, lo vas a ganar todo.”
& so I did. I won everything for him.
Until I couldn’t. Until I didn’t know why
or how I should.
Did I love chess?
I did chess.
But love? Like I love
watching beauty tutorials?
Love, like I love when
something I say catches Dre
by surprise & her laugh is Mount Vesuvius—
an eruption that unsettles & shakes
me to my core? Love, like I love the scent
of Mami cooking mangú & frying salami?
Or how I love Papi’s brother, Tío Jorge,
Clap When You Land Page 4