I don’t want to say that I ever really gave poor George Vardon a whole lot of serious thought. It’s just that once in a while his story, his terrible fate, would secretly animate a day for me as I walked around, and I would wonder what I was supposed to do with what I knew about him—with the whole fact of his sad life as I understood it. It was not the saddest life ever lived, of course, but it was enough so I would wonder: What are we supposed to do with what we know? What is George Vardon to me?
And these days it strikes me that possibly these aren’t exactly the questions. Maybe we’re not supposed to do anything. Maybe this is just a story of something that happened to me, and not even really to me at all. It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.
JUNOT DÍAZ
Miss Lora
YEARS LATER, YOU would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother, would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.
You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.
And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.
Your brother. Dead from the cancer, and sometimes you still felt a fulgurating sadness over it, even though he really was a super asshole at the end. He didn’t die easy at all. Those last months, he just steady kept trying to run away. He’d be caught trying to hail a cab outside Beth Israel or walking down some Newark street in his greens. Once he conned an ex-girlfriend into driving him to California, but outside of Camden he started having convulsions and she called you in a panic. Was it some atavistic impulse to die alone, out of sight? Or was he just trying to fulfill something that had always been inside him? Why do you keep doing that? you asked, but he just laughed. Doing what?
In those last weeks, when he finally became too feeble to run away, he refused to talk to you or your mother. Didn’t utter a single word until he died. Your mother didn’t care. She loved him and prayed over him and talked to him like he was still okay. But it wounded you, that stubborn silence. His last fucking days and he wouldn’t say a word. You’d ask him something straight up, How are you feeling today, and Rafa would turn his head. Like you all didn’t deserve an answer. Like no one did.
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.
That’s what happened with Miss Lora too.
It was 1985. You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced—like totally, utterly convinced—that the world was going to blow itself to pieces. Almost every night you had dreams that made the ones the president was having in Dreamscape look like pussy play. In your dreams the bombs were always going off, evaporating you while you walked, while you ate a chicken wing, while you rode the bus to school, while you fucked Paloma. You would wake up biting your own tongue in terror, the blood dribbling down your chin.
Someone should have medicated you.
Paloma thought you were being ridiculous. She didn’t want to hear about mutual assured destruction, The Late Great Planet Earth, “We begin bombing in five minutes,” SALT II, The Day After, Threads, Red Dawn, WarGames, Gamma World—any of it. She called you Mr. Depressing. And she didn’t need any more depressing than she had already. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four younger siblings and a disabled mom, and she was taking care of all of them. That and honors classes. She didn’t have time for anything and mostly stayed with you, you suspected, because she felt bad about what had happened with your brother. It’s not like you ever spent much time together or had sex or anything. Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason. I can’t, she said. I can’t make any mistakes. Why is sex with me a mistake, you demanded, but she just shook her head, pulled your hand out of her pants. Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don’t get in anywhere, she said. You’d still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable.
So you talked about the coming apocalypse to whoever would listen—to your history teacher, who claimed he was building a survival cabin in the Poconos, to your boy who was stationed in Panama (in those days you still wrote letters), to your around-the-corner neighbor, Miss Lora. That was what connected you two at first. She listened. Better still, she had read Alas, Babylon and had seen part of The Day After, and both had scared her monga.
The Day After wasn’t scary, you complained. It was crap. You can’t survive an air burst by ducking under a dashboard.
Maybe it was a miracle, she said, playing.
A miracle? That was just dumbness. What you need to see is Threads. Now, that is some real shit.
I probably wouldn’t be able to stand it, she said. And then she put her hand on your shoulder.
People always touched you. You were used to it. You were an amateur weight lifter, something else you did to keep your mind off the shit of your life. You must have had a mutant gene somewhere in the DNA, because all the lifting had turned you into a goddamn circus freak. Most of the time it didn’t bother you, the way girls and sometimes guys felt you up. But with Miss Lora you could tell something was different.
Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.
Of course you knew her; she lived in the building behind, taught over at Sayreville H.S. But it was only in the past months that she’d snapped into focus. There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn’t have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammeled calamity.
Maybe she just doesn’t like children.
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.
Miss Lora wasn’t anything exciting. There were about a thousand viejas in the neighborhood who were way hotter, like Mrs. del Orbe, whom your brother had fucked silly until her husband found out and moved the whole family away. Miss Lora was too skinny. Had no hips whatsoever. No breasts, either, no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade. She had her eyes, sure, but what she was most famous for in the neighborhood was her muscles. Not that she had huge ones like you—chick was just wiry like a motherfucker, every single fiber standing out in outlandish definition. Bitch made Iggy Pop look chub, and every summer she caused a serious commotion at the pool. Always in a bikini despite her curvelessness, the top stretching over these corded pectorals and the bottom cupping a rippling fan of haunch muscles. Always swimming underwater, the black waves of her hair flowing behind her like a school of eels. Always tanning herself (which none of the other women did) into the deep lacquered walnut of an old shoe. That woman needs to keep her clothes on, the mothers complained. She’s like a plastic bag full of worms. But who could take their eyes off her? Not you or your brother. The kids would ask her, Are you a bodybuilder, Miss Lora? and she would shake her head behind her paperback. Sorry, guys, I was just born this way.