This Is How You Lose Her (6 page)

This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.

The hospital begins to build another wing; three days after the cranes surround our building as if in prayer, Samantha pulls me aside. Winter has dried her out, left her with reptile hands and lips so chapped they look like they might at any moment split. I need a loan, she whispers. My mother’s sick.

It is always the mother. I turn to go.

Please, she begs. We’re from the same country.

This is true. We are.

Someone must have helped you sometime.

Also true.

The next day I give her eight hundred. It is half my savings. Remember this.

I will, she says.

She is so happy. Happier than I was when we moved into the house. I wish I could be as free. She sings for the rest of the shift, songs from when I was younger, Adamo and that lot. But she is still Samantha. Before we punch out she tells me, Don’t wear so much lipstick. You have big enough lips as it is.

Ana Iris laughs. That girl said that to you?

Yes, she did.

Que desgraciada, she says, not without admiration.

At the end of the week, Samantha doesn’t return to work. I ask around but no one knows where she lives. I don’t remember her saying anything significant on her last day. She walked out as quietly as ever, drifting down toward the center of town, where she could catch her bus. I pray for her. I remember my own first year, how desperately I wanted to return home, how often I cried. I pray she stays, like I did.

A week. I wait a week and then I let her go. The girl who replaces her is quiet and fat and works without stopping or complaint. Sometimes, when I am in one of my moods, I imagine Samantha back home with her people. Back home where it is warm. Saying, I would never go back. Not for anything. Not for anyone.

Some nights when Ramón is working on the plumbing or sanding the floors I read the old letters and sip the rum we store under the kitchen sink, and think of course of her, the one from the other life.

—

I AM PREGNANT
when the next letter finally arrives. Sent from Ramón’s old place to our new home. I pull it from the stack of mail and stare at it. My heart is beating like it’s lonely, like there’s nothing else inside of me. I want to open it but I call Ana Iris instead; we haven’t spoken in a long time. I stare out at the bird-filled hedges while the phone rings.

I want to go for a walk, I tell her.

The buds are breaking through the tips of the branches. When I step into the old place she kisses me and sits me down at the kitchen table. Only two of the housemates I know; the rest have moved on or gone home. There are new girls from the Island. They shuffle in and out, barely look at me, exhausted by the promises they’ve made. I want to advise them: no promises can survive that sea. I am showing, and Ana Iris is thin and worn. Her hair has not been cut in months; the split ends rise out of her thick strands like a second head of hair. She can still smile, though, so brightly it is a wonder that she doesn’t set something alight. A woman is singing a bachata somewhere upstairs, and her voice in the air reminds me of the size of this house, how high the ceilings are.

Here, Ana Iris says, handing me a scarf. Let’s go for a walk.

I hold the letter in my hands. The day is the color of pigeons. Our feet crush the bits of snow that lie scattered here and there, crusted over with gravel and dust. We wait for the mash of cars to slow at the light and then we scuttle into the park. Our first months Ramón and I were in this park daily. Just to wind down after work, he said, but I painted my fingernails red every time. I remember the day before we first made love, how I already knew it would happen. He had only just told me about his wife and about his son. I was mulling over the information, saying nothing, letting my feet guide us. We met a group of boys playing baseball and he bullied the bat from them, cut at the air with it, sent the boys out deep. I thought he would embarrass himself, so I stood back, ready to pat his arm when he fell or when the ball dropped at his feet, but he connected with a sharp crack of the aluminum bat and sent the ball out beyond the children with an easy motion of his upper body. The children threw their hands up and yelled and he smiled at me over their heads.

We walk the length of the park without talking and then we head back across the highway, toward downtown.

She’s writing again, I say, but Ana Iris interrupts me.

I’ve been calling my children, she says. She points out the man across from the courthouse, who sells her stolen calling-card numbers. They’ve gotten so much older, she tells me, that it’s hard for me to recognize their voices.

We have to sit down after a while so that I can hold her hand and she can cry. I should say something but I don’t know where a person can start. She will bring them or she will go. That much has changed.

It gets cold. We go home. We embrace at the door for what feels like an hour.

That night I give Ramón the letter and I try to smile while he reads it.

Y
OUR LEFT EYE USED TO
drift when you were tired or upset. It’s looking for something, you used to say and those days we saw each other it fluttered and rolled and you had to put your finger over it to stop it. You were doing this when I woke up and found you on the edge of my chair. You were still in your teacher’s gear but your jacket was off and enough buttons were open on your blouse to show me the black bra I bought you and the freckles on your chest. We didn’t know it was the last days but we should have.

I just got here, you said and I looked out where you’d parked your Civic.

Go roll up them windows.

I’m not going to be here long.

Someone’s going to steal it.

I’m almost ready to go.

You stayed in your chair and I knew better than to move closer. You had an elaborate system that you thought would keep us out of bed: you sat on the other side of the room, you didn’t let me crack your knuckles, you never stayed more than fifteen minutes. It never really worked, did it?

I brought you guys dinner, you said. I was making lasagna for my class so I brought the leftovers.

My room is hot and small, overrun by books. You never wanted to be in here (it’s like being inside a sock, you said) and anytime the boys were away we slept in the living room, out on the rug.

Your long hair was making you sweat and finally you took your hand away from your eye. You hadn’t stopped talking.

Today I was given a new student. Her mother told me to be careful with her because she had the sight.

The sight?

You nod. I asked the señora if the sight helped her in school. She said, Not really but it’s helped me with the numbers a few times.

I’m supposed to laugh but I stare outside, where a mitten-shaped leaf had stuck to your windshield. You stand beside me. When I saw you, first in our Joyce class and then at the gym, I knew I’d call you Flaca. If you’d been Dominican my family would have worried about you, brought plates of food to my door. Heaps of plátanos and yuca, smothered in liver or queso frito.
Flaca.
Even though your name was Veronica, Veronica Hardrada.

The boys will be home soon, I say. Maybe you should roll up your windows.

I’m going now, you say and put your hand back over your eye.

—

IT WASN’T SUPPOSED
to get serious between us. I can’t see us getting married or nothing and you nodded your head and said you understood. Then we fucked so that we could pretend that nothing hurtful had just happened. This was like our fifth time together and you got dressed in a black sheath and a pair of Mexican sandals and you said I could call you when I wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. You have to decide where and when, you said. If you leave it up to me I’ll want to see you every day.

At least you were honest, which is more than I can say for me. Weekdays I never called you, didn’t even miss you. I had the boys and my job at Transactions Press to keep me busy. But Friday and Saturday nights, when I didn’t meet anybody at the clubs, I called. We talked until the silences were long, until finally you asked, Do you want to see me?

I’d say yes and while I waited for you I’d tell the boys it’s just sex, you know, nothing at all. And you’d come, with a change of clothes and a pan so you could make us breakfast, maybe cookies you baked for your class. The boys would find you in the kitchen the next morning, in one of my shirts and at first they didn’t complain, because they guessed you would just go away. And by the time they started saying something, it was late, wasn’t it?

—

I REMEMBER: THE BOYS
keeping an eye on me. They figured two years ain’t no small thing, even though the entire time I never claimed you. But what was nuts was that I felt fine. I felt like summer had taken me over. I told the boys this was the best decision I’d ever made. You can’t be fucking with whitegirls all your life.

In some groups that was more than a given; in our group it was not.

In that Joyce class you never spoke but I did, all the time, and once you looked at me and I looked at you and you turned so red even the professor noticed. You were whitetrash from outside of Paterson and it showed in your no-fashion-sense and you’d dated niggers a lot. I said you had a thing about us and you said, angry, No, I do not.

But you sort of did. You were the whitegirl who danced bachata, who pledged the SLUs, who’d gone to Santo Domingo three times already.

I remember: you used to offer me rides home in your Civic.

I remember: the third time I accepted. Our hands touched in between our seats. You tried to talk to me in Spanish and I told you to stop.

We’re on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should go hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we’re still good, next week maybe.

That’s the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don’t want to let go, but don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

We drive up to Montclair, almost alone on the Parkway. Everything’s quiet and dark and the trees shine from yesterday’s rains. At one point, just south of the Oranges, the Parkway passes through a cemetery. Thousands of gravestones and cenotaphs on both sides. Imagine, you say, pointing to the nearest home, if you had to live in that place.

The dreams you’d have, I say.

You nod. The nightmares.

We park across from the map dealer and go to our bookstore. Despite the proximity of the college, we’re the only customers, us and a three-legged cat. You sit yourself down in an aisle and start searching through the boxes. The cat goes right for you. I flip through the histories. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day. When I come back to you again you have kicked off your shoes and are picking at the running calluses on your feet, reading a children’s book. I put my arms around your shoulders. Flaca, I say. Your hair drifts up and clings to my stubble. I don’t shave often enough for anybody.

This can work, you say. We just have to let it.

—

T
HAT LAST SUMMER
you wanted to go somewhere so I took us out to Spruce Run; we’d both been there as children. You could remember the years, even the months of your visits, but the closest I came was Back When I Was Young.

Look at the Queen Anne’s lace, you said. You were leaning out the window into the night air and I had my hand on your back just in case.

We were both drunk and you had nothing but garters and stockings on under your skirt and you put my hand between your legs.

What did your family do here? you asked.

I looked at the night water. We had barbecues. Dominican barbecues. My pops didn’t know how to but he insisted. He would cook up this red sauce that he’d splatter on chuletas and then he’d invite complete strangers over to eat. It was terrible.

I wore an eye patch when I was kid, you said. Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.

I doubt it, I said.

I’m just saying, Yunior.

Maybe five thousand years ago we were together.

Five thousand years ago I was in Denmark.

That’s true. And half of me was in Africa.

Doing what?

Farming, I guess. That’s what everybody does everywhere.

Maybe we were together some other time.

I can’t think when, I said.

You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.

People weren’t even people back then.

That night you lay in bed, awake, and listened to the ambulances tear down our street. The heat of your face could have kept my room warm for days. I didn’t know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face. I almost couldn’t touch you. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.

—

T
HAT WAS THE SUMMER
I couldn’t sleep, the summer I used to run through the streets of New Brunswick at four in the morning. These were the only times I broke five miles, when there was no traffic and the halogens turned everything the color of foil, firing up every bit of moisture that was on the cars. I remember running around the Memorial Homes, along Joyce Kilmer, past Throop, where the Camelot, that crazy old bar, stands boarded and burned.

I stayed up entire nights and when the Old Man came home from UPS I was writing down the times that the trains arrived from Princeton Junction—you could hear them braking from our living room, a gnash just south of my heart. I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was
loss
or
love
or some other word that we say when it’s too fucking late but the boys weren’t into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.

—

WE WENT BACK
to Spruce Run once more. Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you’d be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little puños and the first time you saw us you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn’t have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.

That second trip I stood on the beach and watched you wade out, watched you rub the lake on your skinny arms and neck. Both of us were hungover and I didn’t want any of me wet. There’s a cure in the waters, you explained. The priest announced it at service. You were saving some in a bottle. For your cousin with leukemia and your aunt with the bad heart. You had on a bikini bottom and a T-shirt and there was a mist sifting down over the hills and lacing the trees. You went out to your waist and stopped. I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn’t it?

That night you came into my bed, too thin to be believed, and when I tried to kiss your nipples you put a hand across my chest. Wait, you said.

Downstairs, the boys were watching TV, screaming.

You let the water dribble out of your mouth and it was cold. You reached my knee before you had to refill from the bottle. I listened to your breathing, how slight it was, listened to the sound the water made in the bottle. And then you covered my face and my crotch and my back.

You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.