Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her

I don’t know, Rafa said. I don’t know anything about snow. I was spooking him. He went over to the window and peered out.

We’ll be fine, Mami said. As long as we’re warm. She went over and raised the heat again.

But what if we get buried?

You can’t have that much snow.

How do you know?

Because twelve inches isn’t going to bury anybody, even a pain in the ass like you.

I went out on the porch and watched the first snow begin to fall like finely sifted ash. If we die, Papi’s going to feel bad, I said.

Mami turned away and laughed.

Four inches fell in an hour and the snow kept falling.

Mami waited until we were in bed, but I heard the door and woke Rafa. She’s at it again, I said.

Outside?

Yes.

He put on his boots grimly. He paused at the door and then looked back at the empty apartment. Let’s go, he said.

She was standing on the edge of the parking lot, ready to cross Westminster. The apartment lamps glared on the frozen ground and our breath was white in the night air. The snow was gusting.

Go home, she said.

We didn’t move.

Did you at least lock the front door? she asked.

Rafa shook his head.

It’s too cold for thieves anyway, I said.

Mami smiled and nearly slipped on the sidewalk. I’m not good at walking on this vaina.

I’m real good, I said. Just hold on to me.

We crossed Westminster. The cars were moving very slowly and the wind was loud and full of snow.

This isn’t too bad, I said. These people should see a hurricane.

Where should we go? Rafa asked. He was blinking a lot to keep the snow out of his eyes.

Go straight, Mami said. That way we don’t get lost.

We should mark the ice.

She put her hands around us both. It’s easier if we go straight.

We went down to the edge of the apartments and looked out over the landfill, a misshapen, shadowy mound that abutted the Raritan. Rubbish fires burned all over it like sores and the dump trucks and bulldozers slept quietly and reverently at its base. It smelled like something the river had tossed out from its floor, something moist and heaving. We found the basketball courts next and the pool, empty of water, and Parkwood, the next neighborhood over, which was all moved in and full of kids.

We even saw the ocean, up there at the top of Westminster, like the blade of a long, curved knife. Mami was crying but we pretended not to notice. We threw snowballs at the sliding cars and once I removed my cap just to feel the snowflakes scatter across my cold, hard scalp.

Years later you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You 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 now a year and sometimes you still feel 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. They would catch him trying to hail a cab outside of 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 of him? Why are you 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 did not care. She loved him and prayed over him and talked to him like he was still OK. 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 just 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, over 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 also were convinced — like totally utterly convinced — that the world was going to blow itself to pieces. Almost every night you had nightmares that made the ones the president was having in Dreamscape look like pussyplay. In your dreams the bombs were always going off, evaporating you while you walked, while you ate a chicken wing, while you took 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 really 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 for 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 Doomsday 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 airburst 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 weightlifter, 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 on her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.