Then she kisses your chin.
Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind, and now it’s officiaclass="underline" you are one too. You’d hoped the gene had missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself. The blood always shows, you say to Paloma on the ride to school the next day. Yunior, she stirs from her doze, I don’t have time for your craziness, okay?
You figure you can keep it to a onetime thing. But the next day you go right back. You sit gloomily in her kitchen while she fixes you another cheeseburger.
Are you going to be okay? she asks.
I don’t know.
It’s just supposed to be fun.
I have a girlfriend.
You told me, remember?
She puts the plate on your lap, regards you critically. You know you look like your brother. I’m sure people tell you that all the time.
Some people.
I couldn’t believe how good-looking he was. He knew it too. It was like he never heard of a shirt.
This time you don’t even ask about the condom. You just come inside her. You are surprised at how pissed you are. But she kisses your face over and over, and it moves you. No one has ever done that. The girls you’ve boned were always ashamed afterward. And there was always panic. Someone heard. Fix the bed up. Open the windows. Here there is none of that.
Afterward, she sits up, her chest as unadorned as yours. So what else do you want to eat?
You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth. But you’re at her apartment every fucking night. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in. You know I work, right? I know, you say, but I dreamed that something happened to you. It’s sweet of you to lie, she sighs, and even though she is falling asleep, she lets you bone her straight in the ass. Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come. You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides. That makes me shoot like a rocket.
It should be the greatest thing, so why are your dreams worse? Why is there more blood in the sink in the morning?
You learn a lot about her life. She came up in Santo Domingo with a doctor father who was crazy. Her mother left them for an Italian waiter, fled to Rome, and that was it for Pops. Always threatening to kill himself, and at least once a day she’d had to beg him not to, and that had messed her up but good. In her youth, she’d been a gymnast, and there was even talk of making the Olympic team, but then the coach stole the money and the D.R. had to cancel for that year. I’m not claiming I would have won, she says, but I could have done something. After that bullshit, she put on a foot of height and that was it for gymnastics. Then when she was eleven her father got a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she and her three little siblings went with him. After six months he moved them in with a fat widow, una blanca asquerosa who hated Lora. She had no friends at all in school, and in ninth grade she slept with her history teacher. Ended up living in his house. His ex-wife was also a teacher at the school. You can only imagine what that was like. As soon as she graduated, she ran off with a quiet black boy to an air force base in Germany, but that hadn’t worked out either. To this day, I think he was gay, she says. And finally, after trying to make it in Berlin, teaching, of all things, she came back to the States. She moved in with a Michigan girlfriend who had an apartment in the Terrace, dated a few guys, one of her ex’s old air force buddies who visited her on his leaves, a moreno with the sweetest disposition. When the girlfriend got married and moved away, Miss Lora kept the apartment and found a teaching job. Made a conscious effort to stop moving. It was an okay life, she says, showing you the pictures. All things considered.
She is always trying to get you to talk about your brother. It will help, she says.
What is there to say? He got cancer, he died.
Well, that’s a start.
She brings home college brochures from her school. She gives them to you with half the application filled out. You really need to get out of here.
Where? you ask her.
Go anywhere. Go to Alaska, for all I care.
She sleeps with a mouth guard. And she covers her eyes with a mask.
If you have to leave, wait till I fall asleep, okay?
But after a few weeks it’s Please don’t go. And finally just: Stay.
And you do. At dawn, you slip out of her apartment and into your basement window. Your mother doesn’t have a fucking clue. In the old days, she used to know everything. She had that campesino radar. Now she is somewhere else. Her grief, tending to it, takes all her time.
You are scared stupid at what you are doing, but it is also exciting and makes you feel less lonely in the world. And you are sixteen, and you have a feeling that now the Ass Engine has started, no force on the earth will ever stop it.
Then your abuelo catches something in the D.R., and your mother has to fly home. You’ll be fine, la doña says. Miss Lora said she’d look after you.
I can cook, Ma.
No, you can’t. And don’t bring that Puerto Rican girl in here. Do you understand?
You nod. You bring the Dominican woman in instead.
She squeals with delight when she sees the plastic-covered sofa and the wooden spoons hanging on the wall. You admit to feeling a little bad for your mother.
Of course you end up downstairs in your basement. Where your brother’s things are still in evidence. She goes right for his boxing gloves.
Please put those down.
She pushes them into her face, smelling them.
You can’t relax. You keep swearing that you hear your mother or Paloma at the door. It makes you stop every five minutes. It’s unsettling to wake up in your bed with her. She makes coffee and scrambled eggs and listens not to Radio Wado but to the Morning Zoo and laughs at everything. It’s too strange. Paloma calls to see if you are going to school, and Miss Lora is walking around in a T-shirt, her flat skinny rump visible.
Then, your senior year, she gets a job at your high school. To say it is strange is to say nada. You see her in the halls, and your heart goes through you. That’s your neighbor? Paloma asks. God, she’s fucking looking at you. The old whore. At the school, the Spanish girls are the ones who give her trouble. They make fun of her accent, her clothes, her physique. They call her Miss Pat. She never complains about it—It’s a really great job, she says—but you see the nonsense firsthand. That’s just the Spanish girls, though. The white girls love her to death. She takes over the gymnastics team. She brings the girls to dance programs for inspiration. And in no time they start winning. One day, outside the school, the gymnasts are egging her on and she does a back handspring that nearly staggers you with its perfection. It is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Naturally, Mr. Everson, the science teacher, falls all over her. He’s always falling over someone. For a while it was Paloma, until she threatened to report his ass. You see them laughing in the hallway; you see them having lunch in the teachers’ room.
Paloma doesn’t stop busting. They say Mr. Everson likes to put on dresses. You think she straps it on for him?