Junot Diaz: This Is How You Lose Her

She walks to the kitchen and starts to pour herself a shot and you find yourself pulling the bottle out of her hand and pouring its contents into the sink. This is ridiculous, you say. More bad TV.

She doesn’t speak to you again for two whole fucking weeks. You spend as much time as you can either at your office or over at Elvis’s house. Whenever you enter a room she snaps shut her laptop. I’m not fucking snooping, you say. But she waits for you to move on before she returns to typing whatever she was typing.

You can’t throw out your baby’s mom, Elvis reminds you. It would fuck that kid up for life. Plus, it’s bad karma. Just wait till the baby comes. She’ll fucking straighten out.

A month passes, two months pass. You’re afraid to tell anybody else, to share the — what? Good news? Arlenny you know would march right in and boot her ass out on the street. Your back is agony and the numbness in your arms is starting to become pretty steady. In the shower, the only place in the apartment you can be alone, you whisper to yourself: Hell, Netley. We’re in Hell.

—

LATER IT WILL all come back to you as a terrible fever dream but at the time it moved so very slowly, felt so very concrete. You take her to her appointments. You help her with the vitamins and shit. You pay for almost everything. She is not speaking to her mother so all she has are two friends who are in the apartment almost as much as you are. They are all part of the Biracial Identity Crisis Support Group and look at you with little warmth. You wait for her to melt, but she keeps her distance. Some days while she is sleeping and you are trying to work you allow yourself the indulgence of wondering what kind of child you will have. Whether it will be a boy or a girl, smart or withdrawn. Like you or like her.

Have you thought up any names? Elvis’s wife asks.

Not yet.

Taína for a girl, she suggests. And Elvis for a boy. She throws a taunting glance at her husband and laughs.

I like my name, Elvis says. I would give it to a boy.

Over my dead body, his wife says. And besides, this oven is closed for business.

At night while you’re trying to sleep you see the glow of her computer through the open door of the bedroom, hear her fingers on the keyboard.

Do you need anything?

I’m fine, thank you.

You come to the door a few times and watch her, wanting to be called in, but she always glares and asks you, What the fuck do you want?

Just checking.

Five month, six month, seventh month. You are in class teaching Intro to Fiction when you get a text from one of her girlfriends saying she has gone into labor, six weeks early. All sorts of terrible fears race around inside of you. You keep trying her cell phone but she doesn’t answer. You call Elvis but he doesn’t answer either, so you drive over to the hospital by yourself.

Are you the father? the woman at the desk asks.

I am, you say diffidently.

You are led around the corridors and finally given some scrubs and told to wash your hands and given instructions where you should stand and warned about the procedure but as soon as you walk into the birthing room the law student shrieks: I don’t want him in here. I don’t want him in here. He’s not the father.

You didn’t think anything could hurt so bad. Her two girlfriends rush at you but you have already exited. You saw her thin ashy legs and the doctor’s back and little else. You’re glad you didn’t see anything more. You would have felt like you’d violated her safety or something. You take off the scrubs; you wait around for a bit and then you realize what you’re doing and finally you drive home.

—

YOU DON’T HEAR from her but from her girlfriend, the same one who texted you about the labor. I’ll come pick up her bags, OK? When she arrives, she glances around the apartment warily. You’re not going to go psycho on me, are you?

No, I’m not. After a pause you demand: Why would you say that? I’ve never hurt a woman in my life. Then you realize how you sound — like a dude who hurts women all the time. Everything goes back into the three suitcases and then you help her wrestle them down to her SUV.

You must be relieved, she says.

You don’t answer.

And that’s the end of it. Later you hear that the Kenyan visited her in the hospital, and when he saw the baby a teary reconciliation occurred, all was forgiven.

That was your mistake, Elvis said. You should have had a baby with that ex of yours. Then she wouldn’t have left you.

She would have left you, Arlenny says. Believe it.

The rest of the semester ends up being a super-duper clusterfuck. Lowest evaluations in your six years as a professor. Your only student of color for that semester writes: He claims that we don’t know anything but doesn’t show us any way to address these deficiencies. One night you call your ex and when the voice mail clicks on you say: We should have had a kid. And then you hang up, ashamed. Why did you say that? you ask yourself. Now she’ll definitely never speak to you again.

I don’t think the phone call is the problem, Arlenny says.

Check it out. Elvis produces a picture of Elvis Jr. holding a bat. This kid is going to be a monster.

On winter break you fly to the DR with Elvis. What the hell else are you going to do? You ain’t got shit going on, outside of waving your arms around every time they go numb.

Elvis is beyond excited. He has three suitcases of shit for the boy, including his first glove, his first ball, his first Bosox jersey. About eighty kilos of clothes and shit for the baby mama. Hid them all in your apartment, too. You are at his house when he bids his wife and mother-in-law and daughter goodbye. His daughter doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening but when the door shuts she lets out a wail that coils about you like constantine wire. Elvis stays cool as fuck. This used to be me, you’re thinking. Me me me.

Of course you look for her on the flight. You can’t help yourself.

You assume that the baby mama will live somewhere poor like Capotillo or Los Alcarrizos but you didn’t imagine she would live in the Nadalands. You’ve been to the Nadalands a couple of times before; shit, your family came up out of those spaces. Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody’s slapdash house is on top of everybody else’s, where it’s all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin smiling motherfuckers everywhere without end, like falling off the rim of civilization. You have to leave the rental jípeta on the last bit of paved road and jump on the back of motoconchos with all the luggage balanced on your backs. Nobody stares because those ain’t real loads you’re carrying: You’ve seen a single moto carry a family of five and their pig.

You finally pull up to a tiny little house and out comes Baby Mama — cue happy homecoming. You wish you could say you remember Baby Mama from that long-ago trip, but you do not. She is tall and very thick, exactly how Elvis always likes them. She is no older than twenty-one, twenty-two, with an irresistible Georgina Duluc smile, and when she sees you she gives you a huge abrazo. So the padrino finally decides to visit, she declaims in one of those loud ronca campesina voices. You also meet her mother, her grandmother, her brother, her sister, her three uncles. Seems like everybody is missing teeth.

Elvis picks up the boy. Mi hijo, he sings. Mi hijo.

The boy starts crying.

Baby Mama’s place is barely two rooms, one bed, one chair, a little table, a single bulb overhead. More mosquitoes than a refugee camp. Raw sewage in the back. You look at Elvis like what the fuck. The few family fotos hanging on the walls are water-stained. When it rains — Baby Mama lifts up her hands — everything goes.