You girls are nuts.
She probably does strap it on.
It all makes you very tense. But it makes the sex even better.
A few times you see Mr. Everson’s car outside her apartment. Looks like Mr. Everson is in the hood, one of your boys laughs. You suddenly find yourself weak with fury. You think about fucking up his car. You think about knocking on the door. You think a thousand things. But you stay at home, lifting, until he leaves. When she opens the door, you stalk in without saying a word to her. The apartment reeks of cigarettes.
You smell like shit, you say.
You walk into her bedroom, but the bed is made.
Ay mi pobre, she laughs. No seas celoso.
But of course you are.
You graduate in June, and she is there with your mother, clapping. She is wearing a red dress, because you once told her it was your favorite color, and matching underwear underneath. Afterward, she drives you both to Perth Amboy for a Mexican dinner. Paloma can’t come along because her mother is sick. But you saw her at graduation.
I did it, Paloma says, cheesing.
I’m proud of you, you say. And then you add, uncharacteristically, You are an extraordinary young woman.
That summer, you and Paloma see each other maybe twice, and there are no more make-out sessions. Paloma’s already gone. In August, she leaves for the University of Delaware. You are not surprised when after about a week on campus she writes you a letter with the header “Moving On.” You don’t even bother finishing it. You think about driving all the way down there to talk to her, but you realize how hopeless that is. As might be expected, she never comes back.
You stay in the neighborhood. You land a job at Raritan River Steel. At first you have to fight the Pennsylvania hillbillies, but eventually you find your footing and they leave you alone. At night, you go to the bars with some of the other idiots who stuck around the neighborhood, get seriously faded, and show up at Miss Lora’s door with your dick in your hand. She’s still pushing the college thing, offers to pay all the admission fees, but your heart isn’t in it and you tell her, Not right now. Occasionally you two meet up in Perth Amboy, where people don’t know either of you. You have dinner like normal folks. You look too young for her, and it kills you when she touches you in public, but what can you do? She’s always happy to be out with you. You know this ain’t going to last, you tell her, and she nods. I just want what’s best for you. You try your damnedest to meet other girls, telling yourself they’ll help you transition, but you never meet anyone you really like.
Sometimes after you leave her apartment you walk out to the landfill where you and your brother played as children and sit on the swings. This is also the spot where Mr. del Orbe threatened to shoot your brother in the nuts. Go ahead, Rafa said, and then my brother here will shoot you in the pussy. Behind you in the distance hums New York City. The world, you tell yourself, will never end.
It takes a long time to get over it. To get used to a life without a Secret. Even after it’s behind you and you’ve blocked her completely, you’re still afraid you’ll slip back to it. At Rutgers, where you’ve finally landed, you date like crazy, and every time it doesn’t work out, you’re convinced that you have trouble with girls your own age. Because of her.
You certainly never talk about it. Until senior year, when you meet the mujerón of your dreams, the one who leaves her moreno boyfriend to date you, who drives all your little chickies out of the coop. She’s the one you finally trust. The one you finally tell.
They should arrest that crazy bitch.
It wasn’t like that.
They should arrest her ass today.
Still, it is good to tell someone. In your heart you thought she would hate you—that they would all hate you.
I don’t hate you. Tú eres mi hombre, she says proudly.
When you two visit your mother, she brings it up. Doña, es verdad que tu hijo taba rapando una vieja?
Your mother shakes her head in disgust. He’s just like his father and his brother.
Dominican men, right, doña?
These three are worse than the rest.
Afterward, she makes you walk past Miss Lora’s building. There is a light on.
I’m going to go have a word with her, the mujerón says.
Don’t. Please.
I’m going to go.
She bangs on the door.
Negra, please don’t.
Answer the door! she yells.
No one does.
You don’t speak to the mujerón for a few weeks after that. It’s one of your big breakups. But finally you’re both at a Tribe Called Quest show and she sees you dancing with another girl and she waves at you and that does it. You go up to where she’s seated with all her evil sorority sisters. She has shaved her head again.
Negra, you say.
She pulls you over to a corner. I’m sorry I got carried away. I just wanted to protect you.
You shake your head. She steps into your arms.
Graduation: it’s not a surprise to see her there. What surprises you is that you didn’t predict it. The instant before you and the mujerón join the procession, you see Miss Lora standing alone in a red dress. She is finally starting to put on weight; it looks good on her. Afterward, you spot her walking alone across the lawn of Old Queens, carrying a mortarboard she picked up. Your mother grabbed one too. Hung it up on her wall.
What happens is that in the end she moves away from London Terrace. Prices are going up. The Banglas and the Pakistanis are moving in. In a few years, your mother moves too, up to the Bergenline.
Later, after you and the mujerón are over, you will type her name into the computer, but she never turns up. On one D.R. trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked.
KARL TARO GREENFELD
Horned Men
BOB WAS IN THE DARK. He was looking down at his new home through the gap in the ceiling near the edge of the crawlspace, seeking where he could drop a coaxial line into his living room. His jeans and T-shirt were caked in dust, his Nikes were discolored, and he realized, as he squirmed between beams closer to the corner, that he had misjudged the location of the living room wall and was now above his thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. He could make out a sliver of her stuff—a red plastic lampshade, a pair of old Converses—through the loose seals around an HVAC duct. There was also a sixteenth-inch hole he found drilled near the smoke alarm. From here, through an imperfect semicircle, as if he were staring through pinpricked cardboard at a solar eclipse, he could discern the area above his daughter’s bed where he had put up a wall-mount Ikea shelf. He had imagined that Becca would set out her crystals or KidRobots or some other colorful, youthful collectibles. But Becca hadn’t even bothered to unpack her boxes; his wife, Minnie, had been in several arguments with Becca over that subject. If he cocked his head, he could just make out the base of the monolithic pile of books and linen boxes with the moving company’s red-and-white logo on them. They stood in the center of her room, a monument to family discord.
What he had initially chosen to interpret as a sign of Becca’s inner strength—her indifference to moving to a new city and school even though she was in a phase of early adolescence her pediatrician labeled “the first change o’ life”—was actually confirmation of what Bob had silently suspected all along: Becca didn’t have any friends. Bob, who didn’t have many friends himself but tried to be an optimist, told her she would make plenty of friends at her new school. Becca just nodded and said, “Really? REALLY? That school, just a hundred miles away from my old school, will be so completely and totally different, in terms of people, personalities, demographics, THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM, that my whole, entire life will be MAGICALLY transformed?”