This Is How You Lose Her

by Junot Díaz

  What the fuck you guys doing? Trading brain waves?

  He was fingering his molars—the radiation had cost him two already.

  Ain’t she, like, married to some Polack? Doesn’t she have, like, two kids?

  He looked at me. What the fuck do you know?

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all. Entonces cállate la fucking boca.

  So this was where he should have been from the start: taking it easy, hanging around the crib, smoking all my weed (I had to hide my puffing, while he twisted his joints right in the living room), watching the tube, sleeping. Mami was ecstatic. She even beamed every now and then. Told her group that Dios Santísimo had answered her prayers.

  Alabanza, Doña Rosie said, her eyes rolling around like marbles.

  I sat with him sometimes when the Mets were playing, and he wouldn’t say a word about how he was feeling, what he was expecting to happen. It was only when he was in bed, dizzy or nauseous, that I’d hear him groaning: What the hell is happening? What do I do? What do I do?

  —

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it was the calm before the storm. Not two weeks after he recovered from the cough, he disappeared for almost the whole day, then rolled into the apartment and announced that he had scored himself a part-time job.

  A part-time job? I asked. Are you fucking nuts?

  A man has to stay busy. He grinned, showed us all the gaps. Got to make myself useful.

  It was at the Yarn Barn, of all places. At first my mom pretended to wash her hands of him. You want to kill yourself, kill yourself. But later I heard her trying to talk to him in the kitchen, a low monotonous appeal until my brother said: Ma, how about you leave me alone, yeah?

  Talk about a total mystery. Wasn’t like my brother had some incredible work ethic that needed exercising. The only job Rafa had ever had was pumping to the Old Bridge whitekids, and even on that front he’d been super chill. If he wanted to keep busy he could have gone back to that—it would have been easy, and I told him so. We still knew a lot of whitekids over in Cliffwood Beach and Laurence Harbor, a whole dirtbag clientele, but he wouldn’t do it. What kind of legacy is that?

  Legacy? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Bro, you’re working at the Yarn Barn!

  Better than being a dealer. Anybody can do that.

  And selling yarn? That’s only for the giants?

  He put his hands on his lap. Stared at them. You live your life, Yunior. I’ll live mine.

  My brother had never been the most rational of agents, but this one was the ill zinger. I chalked it up to boredom, to those eight months he had spent in the hospital. To the medicine he was taking. Maybe he just wanted to feel normal. In all honesty, he seemed pretty excited about the whole thing. Dressed up to go to the job, delicately combed that once great head of hair that had grown back sparse and pubic after the chemo. Gave himself plenty of time, too. Can’t be late. Every time he headed out, my mother would slam the door behind him, and if the Hallelujah Crew was available they’d all be at their rosaries. I might have been zooted out of my gourd most of the time or chasing that girl over in Cheesequake, but I still managed to drop in on him a few times just to be sure he wasn’t facedown in the mohair aisle. A surreal sight. The hardest dude in the nabe chasing price checks like a herb. I never stayed longer than it took to confirm that he was still alive. He pretended not to see me; I pretended not to have been seen.

  When he brought home his first check, he threw the money on the table and laughed: I’m making bank, baby.

  Oh yeah, I said, you’re killing it.

  Still, later that night I asked him for twenty. He looked at me and then gave it over. I jumped in the car and drove out to where Laura was supposed to be hanging with some friends but by the time I arrived she was gone.

  —

  THAT JOB NONSENSE DIDN’T LAST. I mean, how could it? After about three weeks of making the fat white ladies nervous with his skeletal self, he started forgetting shit, getting disoriented, handing customers the wrong change, cursing people out. And finally he just sat down in the middle of an aisle and couldn’t get up. Too sick to drive himself home, so the job people called the apartment, got me right out of bed. I found him sitting in the office, his head hanging, and when I helped him to his feet this Spanish girl who was taking care of him started bawling as if I was leading him off to the gas chamber. He had a fever like a motherfucker. I could feel the heat through the denim of his apron.

  Jesus, Rafa, I said.

  He didn’t lift his eyes. Mumbled, Nos fuimos.

  He stretched out on the back seat of his Monarch while I drove us home. I feel like I’m dying, he said.

  You ain’t dying. But if you do kick it leave me the ride, OK?

  I’m not leaving this baby to nobody. I’m going to be buried in it.

  In this piece of crap?

  Yup. With my TV and my boxing gloves.

  What, you a pharaoh now?

  He raised his thumb in the air. Bury your slave ass in the trunk.

  The fever lasted two days, but it took a week before he was close to better, before he was spending more time on the couch than in bed. I was convinced that as soon as he was mobile he was going to head right back to the Yarn Barn or try to join the Marines or something. My mother feared the same. Told him every chance she got that it wasn’t going to happen. I won’t allow it. Her eyes were shining behind her black Madres de Plaza de Mayo glasses. I won’t. Me, your mother, will not allow it.

  Leave me alone, Ma. Leave me alone.

  You could tell he was going to pull something stupid. The good thing was he didn’t try to go back to the Barn.

  The bad thing was that he went and basically got married.

  —

  REMEMBER THE SPANISH CHICK, the one who’d been crying over him at the Yarn Barn? Well, turns out she was actually Dominican. Not Dominican like my brother or me but Dominican Dominican. As in fresh-off-the-boat-didn’t-have-no-papers Dominican. And thick as fucking shit. Before Rafa was even better, she started coming around, all solicitous and eager; would sit with him on the couch and watch Telemundo. (I don’t have a TV, she announced at least twenty times.) Lived in London Terrace, too, over in Building 22, with her little son, Adrian, stuck in a tiny room she was renting from this older Gujarati guy, so it wasn’t exactly a hardship for her to hang out with (as she put it) her gente. Even though she was trying to be all proper, keeping her legs crossed, calling my mother Señora, Rafa was on her like an octopus. By visit five, he was taking her down to the basement, whether the Hallelujah Crew was around or not.

  Pura was her name. Pura Adames.

  Pura Mierda was what Mami called her.

  OK, for the record, I didn’t think Pura was so bad; she was a hell of a lot better than most of the ho’s my brother had brought around. Guapísima as hell: tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude. A total campesina, from the way she held herself down to the way she talked, which was so demotic I couldn’t understand half of what she said—she used words like deguabinao and estribao on the regular. She’d talk your ear off if you let her, and was way too honest: within a week she’d told us her whole life story. How her father had died when she was young; how for an undisclosed sum her mother had married her off at thirteen to a stingy fifty-year-old (which was how she got her first son, Nestor); how after a couple years of that terribleness she got the chance to jump from Las Matas de Farfán to Newark, brought over by a tía who wanted her to take care of her retarded son and bedridden husband; how she had run away from her, too, because she hadn’t come to Nueba Yol to be a slave to anyone, not anymore; how she had spent the next four years more or less being blown along on the winds of necessity, passin
g through Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, Union City, Perth Amboy (where some crazy cubano knocked her up with her second son, Adrian), everybody taking advantage of her good nature; and now here she was in London Terrace, trying to stay afloat, looking for her next break. She smiled brightly at my brother when she said that.

  They don’t really marry girls off like that in the DR, do they, Ma?

  Por favor, Mami said. Don’t believe anything that puta tells you. But a week later she and the Horsefaces were lamenting how often that happened in the campo, how Mami herself had had to fight to keep her own crazy mother from trading her for a pair of goats.

  —

  NOW, MY MOTHER, she had a simple policy when it came to my brother’s “amiguitas”: since none of them were ever going to last, she didn’t even bother to learn their names, paid them no more heed than she’d paid our cats back in the DR. Mami wasn’t mean to them or anything. If a girl said hi, she would say hi back, and if a girl was courteous Mami would return the courtesy. But the vieja didn’t expend more than a watt of herself. She was unwaveringly, punishingly indifferent.

  Pura, man, was another story. Right from the beginning it was clear that Mami did not like this girl. It wasn’t just that Pura was mad obvious, dropping hints nonstop about her immigration status—how her life would be so much better, how her son’s life would be so much better, how she would finally be able to visit her poor mother and her other son in Las Matas, if only she had papers. Mami had dealt with paper bitches before, and she never got this pissy. Something about Pura’s face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit. Felt real personal. Or maybe Mami had a presentiment of what was to come.

  Whatever it was, my mother was super evil to Pura. If she wasn’t getting on her about the way she talked, the way she dressed, how she ate (with her mouth open), how she walked, about her campesina-ness, about her prieta-ness, Mami would pretend that she was invisible, would walk right through her, pushing her aside, ignoring her most basic questions. If she had to refer to Pura at all, it was to say something like Rafa, what would Puta like to eat? Even I was like Jesus, Ma, what the fuck. But what made it all the iller was that Pura seemed completely oblivious of the hostility! No matter how Mami acted or what Mami said, Pura kept trying to chat Mami up. Instead of shrinking Pura, Mami’s bitchiness seemed only to make her more present. When she and Rafa were alone, Pura was pretty quiet, but when Mami was around, homegirl had an opinion about everything, jumped in on every conversation, said shit that made no sense—like that the capital of the United States was NYC or that there were only three continents—and then would defend it to the death. You’d think with Mami stalking her she’d be careful and restrained, but nope. The girl took liberties! Búscame algo para comer, she’d say to me. No please or nothing. If I didn’t get her what she wanted, she would help herself to sodas or flan. My mother would take food out of Pura’s hands, but as soon as Mami turned around Pura would be back in the fridge helping herself. Even told Mami that she should paint the apartment. You need color in here. Esta sala está muerta.

  I shouldn’t laugh, but it was all kinda funny.

  And the Horsefaces? They could have moderated things a little, don’t you think, but they were, like, Fuck that, what are friendships for if not for instigating? They beat the anti-Pura drums daily. Ella es prieta. Ella es fea. Ella dejó un hijo en Santo Domingo. Ella tiene otro aquí. No tiene hombre. No tiene dinero. No tiene papeles. Qué tú crees que ella busca por aquí? They menaced Mami with the scenario of Pura getting pregnant with my brother’s citizen sperm and Mami having to support her and her kids and her people in Santo Domingo forever, and Mami, the same woman who now prayed to God on a Mecca timetable, told the Horsefaces that if that happened she’d cut the baby out of Pura herself.

  Ten mucho cuidado, she said to my brother. I don’t want a mono in this house.

  Too late, Rafa said, eyeing me.

  My brother could have made life easier by not having Pura over so much or by limiting her to when Mami was at the factory, but when had he ever done the reasonable thing? He’d sit on the couch in the middle of all that tension, and he actually seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Did he like her as much as he was claiming? Hard to say. He was definitely more caballero with Pura than he’d been with his other girls. Opening doors. Talking all polite. Even making nice with her cross-eyed boy. A lot of his ex-girls would have died to see this Rafa. This was the Rafa they’d all been waiting for.

  Romeo or not, I still didn’t think the relationship was going to last. I mean, my brother never kept a girl, ever; dude had thrown away better bitches than Pura on the regular.

  And that was the way it seemed to go. After a month or so, Pura just disappeared. My mom didn’t celebrate or anything but she wasn’t unhappy, either. A couple weeks after that, though, my brother disappeared. Took the Monarch and vanished. Gone for one day, gone for two. By then Mami was starting to flip seriously out. Had the Four Horsefaces putting out an APB on the godline. I was starting to worry, too, remembering that when he was first diagnosed he’d jumped into his ride and tried to drive to Miami, where he had some boy or another. He hadn’t made it past Philly before his car broke down. I got worried enough that I walked over to Tammy Franco’s house, but when her Polack husband answered the door I lost my nerve. I turned around and walked away.

  On the third night we were in the apartment just waiting when the Monarch pulled up. My mother ran over to the window. Holding the curtains until her knuckles were white. He’s here, she said finally.

  Rafa stomped in with Pura in tow. He was clearly drunk, and Pura was dressed as if they’d just been at a club.

  Welcome home, Mami said quietly.

  Check it out, Rafa said, holding out both his and Pura’s hands.

  They had rings on.

  We got married!

  It’s official, Pura said giddily, pulling the license from her purse.

  My mother went from annoyed-relieved to utterly unreadable.

  Is she pregnant? she asked.

  Not yet, Pura said.

  Is she pregnant? My mother looked straight at my brother.

  No, Rafa said.

  Let’s have a drink, my brother said.

  My mother said: No one is drinking in my house.

  I’m having a drink. My brother walked toward the kitchen but my mother stiff-armed him.

  Ma, Rafa said.

  No one is drinking in this house. She pushed Rafa back. If this—she threw her hand in Pura’s direction—is how you want to spend the rest of your life, then, Rafael Urbano, I have nothing more to say to you. Please, I would like you and your puta to leave my house.

  My brother’s eyes went flat. I ain’t going anywhere.

  I want you both out of here.

  For a second I thought my brother was going to put his hands on her. I really did. But then all the swolt went out of him. He put his arm around Pura (who, for once, looked as if she understood that something was wrong). I’ll see you later, Ma, he said. Then he got back into the Monarch and drove away.

  Lock the door, was all she said before she went back to her room.

  —

  I NEVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED it would last as long as it did. My mother couldn’t resist my brother. Not ever. No matter what the fuck he pulled—and my brother pulled a lot of shit—she was always a hundred percent on his side, as only a Latin mom can be with her querido oldest hijo. If he’d come home one day and said, Hey, Ma, I exterminated half the planet, I’m sure she would have defended his ass: Well, hijo, we were overpopulated. There was the cultural stuff, and the cancer stuff, of course, but you also got to factor in that Mami had miscarried her first two pregnancies and by the time she’d gotten knocked up with Rafa she’d been told for years she’d never have children again; my brother himself almost died at birth, and for the fir
st two years of his life Mami had this morbid fear (so my tías tell me) that someone was going to kidnap him. Factor in, too, that he had always been the most beautiful of boys—her total consentido—and you begin to get a sense of how she felt about the lunatic. You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn’t have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic.

  So yeah, I figured that after a few days she’d crack, and then there’d be hugs and kisses (maybe a kick to Pura’s head), and it would be all love again. But my mother wasn’t playing, and she told him as much the next time Rafa came to the door.

  I don’t want you in here. Mami shook her head firmly. Go live with your wife.

  You think I was surprised? You should have seen my brother. He looked shitsmacked. Fuck you then, he said to Mami, and when I told him not to talk to my mom like that he said, Fuck you, too.

  Rafa, come on, I said, following him into the street. You can’t be serious—you don’t even know that chick.