by Junot Díaz
She had big stupid lips and a sad moonface and the driest skin. Always rubbing lotion on it and cursing the moreno father who’d given it to her.
It seemed like she was forever waiting for my brother. Nights she’d knock and I’d let her in and we’d sit on the couch while Rafa was off at his job at the carpet factory or working out at the gym. I’d show her my newest comics and she’d read them real close, but as soon as Rafa showed up she’d throw them in my lap and jump into his arms. I missed you, she’d say in a little-girl voice, and Rafa would laugh. You should have seen him in those days: he had the face bones of a saint. Then Mami’s door would open and Rafa would detach himself and cowboy-saunter over to Mami and say, You got something for me to eat, vieja? Claro que sí, Mami’d say, trying to put her glasses on.
He had us all, the way only a pretty nigger can.
Once when Rafa was late from the job and we were alone in the apartment a long time, I asked Nilda about the group home. It was three weeks before the end of the school year and everybody had entered the do-nothing stage. I was fourteen and reading Dhalgren for the second time; I had an IQ that would have broken you in two but I would have traded it in for a halfway decent face in a second.
It was pretty cool up there, she said. She was pulling on the front of her halter top, trying to air her chest out. The food was bad but there were a lot of cute guys in the house with me. They all wanted me.
She started chewing on a nail. Even the guys who worked there were calling me after I left, she said.
—
THE ONLY REASON Rafa went after her was because his last full-time girlfriend had gone back to Guyana—she was this dougla girl with a single eyebrow and skin to die for—and because Nilda had pushed up to him. She’d only been back from the group home a couple of months, but by then she’d already gotten a rep as a cuero. A lot of the Dominican girls in town were on some serious lockdown—we saw them on the bus and at school and maybe at the Pathmark, but since most families knew exactly what kind of tígueres were roaming the neighborhood these girls weren’t allowed to hang out. Nilda was different. She was what we called in those days brown trash. Her moms was a mean-ass drunk and always running around South Amboy with her white boyfriends—which is a way of saying Nilda could hang and, man, did she ever. Always out in the world, always cars rolling up beside her. Before I even knew she was back from the group home she got scooped up by this older nigger from the back apartments. He kept her on his dick for almost four months, and I used to see them driving around in his fucked-up rust-eaten Sunbird while I delivered my papers. Motherfucker was like three hundred years old, but because he had a car and a record collection and foto albums from his Vietnam days and because he bought her clothes to replace the old shit she was wearing, Nilda was all lost on him.
I hated this nigger with a passion, but when it came to guys there was no talking to Nilda. I used to ask her, What’s up with Wrinkle Dick? And she would get so mad she wouldn’t speak to me for days, and then I’d get this note, I want you to respect my man. Whatever, I’d write back. Then the old dude bounced, no one knew where, the usual scenario in my neighborhood, and for a couple of months she got tossed by those cats from Parkwood. On Thursdays, which was comic-book day, she’d drop in to see what I’d picked up and she’d talk to me about how unhappy she was. We’d sit together until it got dark and then her beeper would fire up and she’d peer into its display and say, I have to go. Sometimes I could grab her and pull her back on the couch, and we’d stay there a long time, me waiting for her to fall in love with me, her waiting for whatever, but other times she’d be serious. I have to go see my man, she’d say.
One of those comic-book days what she saw was my brother coming back from his five-mile run. Rafa was still boxing then and he was cut up like crazy, the muscles on his chest and abdomen so striated they looked like something out of a Frazetta drawing. He noticed her because she was wearing these ridiculous shorts and this tank that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze and a thin roll of stomach was poking from between the fabrics and he smiled at her and she got real serious and uncomfortable and he told her to fix him some iced tea and she told him to fix it himself. You a guest here, he said. You should be earning your fucking keep. He went into the shower and as soon as he did she was in the kitchen stirring and I told her to leave it, but she said, I might as well. We drank all of it.
I wanted to warn her, tell her he was a monster, but she was already headed for him at the speed of light.
The next day Rafa’s car turned up broken—what a coincidence—so he took the bus to school and when he was walking past our seat he took her hand and pulled her to her feet and she said, Get off me. Her eyes were pointed straight at the floor. I just want to show you something, he said. She was pulling with her arm but the rest of her was ready to go. Come on, Rafa said, and finally she went. Save my seat, she said over her shoulder, and I was like, Don’t worry about it. Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother’s lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what’s wrong with women.
You couldn’t get anywhere near Nilda for the rest of the day. She had her hair pulled back and was glorious with triumph. Even the whitegirls knew about my overmuscled about-to-be-a-senior brother and were impressed. And while Nilda sat at the end of our lunch table and whispered to some girls, me and my boys ate our crap sandwiches and talked about the X-Men—this was back when the X-Men still made some kind of sense—and even if we didn’t want to admit it the truth was now patent and awful: all the real dope girls were headed up to the high school, like moths to a light, and there was nothing any of us younger cats could do about it. My man José Negrón—aka Joe Black—took Nilda’s defection the hardest, since he’d actually imagined he had a chance with her. Right after she got back from the group home he’d held her hand on the bus, and even though she’d gone off with other guys, he’d never forgotten it.
I was in the basement three nights later when she and Rafa did it. That first time neither of them made a sound.
—
THEY WENT OUT that whole summer. I don’t remember anyone doing anything big. Me and my pathetic little crew hiked over to Morgan Creek and swam around in water stinking of leachate from the landfill; we were just getting serious about the licks that year and Joe Black was stealing bottles out of his father’s stash and we were drinking them down to the corners on the swings behind the apartments. Because of the heat and because of what I felt inside my chest a lot, I often just sat in the crib with my brother and Nilda. Rafa was tired all the time and pale: this had happened in a matter of days. I used to say, Look at you, whiteboy, and he used to say, Look at you, you black ugly nigger. He didn’t feel like doing much, and besides his car had finally broken down for real, so we would all sit in the air-conditioned apartment and watch TV. Rafa had decided he wasn’t going back to school for his senior year, and even though my moms was heartbroken and trying to guilt him into it five times a day, this was all he talked about. School had never been his gig, and after my pops left us for his twenty-five-year-old Rafa didn’t feel he needed to pretend any longer. I’d like to take a long fucking trip, he told us. See California before it slides into the ocean. California, I said. California, he said. A nigger could make a showing out there. I’d like to go there, too, Nilda said, but Rafa didn’t answer her. He had closed his eyes and you could see he was in pain.
We rarely talked about our father. Me, I was just happy not to be getting my ass kicked in anymore but once right at the beginning of the Last Great Absence I asked my brother where he thought he was, and Rafa said, Like I fucking care.
End of conversation. World without end.
On days niggers were really out of their minds with boredom we trooped down to the pool and got i
n for free because Rafa was boys with one of the lifeguards. I swam, Nilda went on missions around the pool just so she could show off how tight she looked in her bikini, and Rafa sprawled under the awning and took it all in. Sometimes he called me over and we’d sit together for a while and he’d close his eyes and I’d watch the water dry on my ashy legs and then he’d tell me to go back to the pool. When Nilda finished promenading and came back to where Rafa was chilling she kneeled at his side and he would kiss her real long, his hands playing up and down the length of her back. Ain’t nothing like a fifteen-year-old with a banging body, those hands seemed to be saying, at least to me.
Joe Black was always watching them. Man, he muttered, she’s so fine I’d lick her asshole and tell you niggers about it.
Maybe I would have thought they were cute if I hadn’t known Rafa. He might have seemed enamorao with Nilda but he also had mad girls in orbit. Like this one piece of white trash from Sayreville, and this morena from Nieuw Amsterdam Village who also slept over and sounded like a freight train when they did it. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember how her perm shone in the glow of our night-light.
In August Rafa quit his job at the carpet factory—I’m too fucking tired, he complained, and some mornings his leg bones hurt so much he couldn’t get out of bed right away. The Romans used to shatter these with iron clubs, I told him while I massaged his shins. The pain would kill you instantly. Great, he said. Cheer me up some more, you fucking bastard. One day Mami took him to the hospital for a checkup and afterward I found them sitting on the couch, both of them dressed up, watching TV like nothing had happened. They were holding hands and Mami appeared tiny next to him.
Well?
Rafa shrugged. The doc thinks I’m anemic.
Anemic ain’t bad.
Yeah, Rafa said, laughing bitterly. God bless Medicaid.
In the light of the TV, he looked terrible.
—
THAT WAS THE SUMMER when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads. Girls were starting to take notice of me; I wasn’t good-looking but I listened and had boxing muscles in my arms. In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
One night, a couple of weeks before school started—they must have thought I was asleep—Nilda started telling Rafa about her plans for the future. I think even she knew what was about to happen. Listening to her imagining herself was about the saddest thing you ever heard. How she wanted to get away from her moms and open up a group home for runaway kids. But this one would be real cool, she said. It would be for normal kids who just got problems. She must have loved him because she went on and on. Plenty of people talk about having a flow, but that night I really heard one, something that was unbroken, that fought itself and worked together all at once. Rafa didn’t say nothing. Maybe he had his hands in her hair or maybe he was just like, Fuck you. When she finished he didn’t even say wow. I wanted to kill myself with embarrassment. About a half hour later she got up and dressed. She couldn’t see me or she would have known that I thought she was beautiful. She stepped into her pants and pulled them up in one motion, sucked in her stomach while she buttoned them. I’ll see you later, she said.
Yeah, he said.
After she walked out he put on the radio and started on the speed bag. I stopped pretending I was asleep; I sat up and watched him.
Did you guys have a fight or something?
No, he said.
Why’d she leave?
He sat down on my bed. His chest was sweating. She had to go.
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.
—
IT 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 be
ating 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.
YOU, YUNIOR, 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.