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 go, wait till I fall asleep, OK? 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 that the Ass Engine has started, no force on the earth will ever stop it.
Then your abuelo catches something in the DR 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 sofas 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. Of course. 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. It’s just the Spanish girls, though. The whitegirls love her to death. She takes over the gymnastics team. She brings them to dance programs for inspiration. And in no time at all they start winning. One day outside the school the gymnasts are all egging her on and she does a back handspring that nearly staggers you with its perfection. It is the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Of course 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 hallways, 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?
You girls are nuts.
She probably does strap it on.
It all makes you very tense. But it does make the sex that much 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 house 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 underneath matching underwear. Afterward she drives you both to Perth Amboy for a Mexican dinner. Paloma can’t come along because her mother is sick. But you see her late that night in front of her apartment.
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 — there are no more make-out sessions. She’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 ain’t in it and you tell her, Not right now. She’s taking night classes herself at Montclair. She’s thinking of getting her Ph.D. Then you’ll have to call me doctora.
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.