and the milk outside. You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again. After, she drew on the walls with her lipstick and her nail polish, stick men and stick women boning.
What was it like in there? I asked. Me and Cut drove past one night and it didn’t look good. We honked the horn for a long time, you know, thought maybe you’d hear.
She sat up and looked at me. It was a cold-ass stare.
We were just hoping.
I hit a couple of girls, she said. Stupid girls. That was a big mistake. The staff put me in the Quiet Room. Eleven days the first time. Fourteen after that. That’s the sort of shit that you can’t get used to, no matter who you are. She looked at her drawings. I made up this whole new life in there. You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing.
She ran her nails over my side. A week from then she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we’d do and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine.
AGUANTANDO
1.
I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working, and the only way I knew him was through the photographs my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned was water-stained: our clothes, Mami’s Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo’s tools, our cheap wooden furniture. It was only because of that plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived.
When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. I wasn’t even alive then; Mami had been pregnant with my first never-born brother and Abuelo could still see well enough to hold a job. You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color. On the back my moms’s cramped handwriting—the date, his name, even the street, one over from our house. He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own.
I did not think of him often. He had left for Nueva York when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life. On the days I had to imagine him—not often, since Mami didn’t much speak of him anymore—he was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he’d left behind. He was pieces of my friends’ fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know that he’d abandoned us. That this waiting for him was all a sham.
We lived south of the Cementerio Nacional in a wood-frame house with three rooms. We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation.
At least you’re not in the campo. You’d eat rocks then.
We didn’t eat rocks but we didn’t eat meat or beans, either. Almost everything on our plates was boiled: boiled yuca, boiled platano, boiled guineo, maybe with a piece of cheese or a shred of bacalao. On the best days the cheese and the platanos were fried. When me and Rafa caught our annual case of worms it was only by skimping on our dinners that Mami could afford to purchase the Verminox. I can’t remember how many times I crouched over our latrine, my teeth clenched, watching long gray parasites slide out from between my legs.
At Mauricio Baez, our school, the kids didn’t bother us too much, even though we couldn’t afford the uniforms or proper mascotas. The
What was it like in there? I asked. Me and Cut drove past one night and it didn’t look good. We honked the horn for a long time, you know, thought maybe you’d hear.
She sat up and looked at me. It was a cold-ass stare.
We were just hoping.
I hit a couple of girls, she said. Stupid girls. That was a big mistake. The staff put me in the Quiet Room. Eleven days the first time. Fourteen after that. That’s the sort of shit that you can’t get used to, no matter who you are. She looked at her drawings. I made up this whole new life in there. You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing.
She ran her nails over my side. A week from then she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we’d do and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine.
AGUANTANDO
1.
I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working, and the only way I knew him was through the photographs my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned was water-stained: our clothes, Mami’s Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo’s tools, our cheap wooden furniture. It was only because of that plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived.
When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. I wasn’t even alive then; Mami had been pregnant with my first never-born brother and Abuelo could still see well enough to hold a job. You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color. On the back my moms’s cramped handwriting—the date, his name, even the street, one over from our house. He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own.
I did not think of him often. He had left for Nueva York when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life. On the days I had to imagine him—not often, since Mami didn’t much speak of him anymore—he was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he’d left behind. He was pieces of my friends’ fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know that he’d abandoned us. That this waiting for him was all a sham.
We lived south of the Cementerio Nacional in a wood-frame house with three rooms. We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation.
At least you’re not in the campo. You’d eat rocks then.
We didn’t eat rocks but we didn’t eat meat or beans, either. Almost everything on our plates was boiled: boiled yuca, boiled platano, boiled guineo, maybe with a piece of cheese or a shred of bacalao. On the best days the cheese and the platanos were fried. When me and Rafa caught our annual case of worms it was only by skimping on our dinners that Mami could afford to purchase the Verminox. I can’t remember how many times I crouched over our latrine, my teeth clenched, watching long gray parasites slide out from between my legs.
At Mauricio Baez, our school, the kids didn’t bother us too much, even though we couldn’t afford the uniforms or proper mascotas. The
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