Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

It didn’t happen overnight. Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother’s daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love. And then one day I was walking home with Karen Cepeda, who at that time was like my friend. Karen did the goth thing really well; she had spiky Robert Smith hair and wore all black and had the skin color of a ghost. Walking with her in Paterson was like walking with the bearded lady. Everybody would stare and it was the scariest thing, and that was, I guess, why I did it.

We were walking down Main and being stared at by everybody and out of nowhere I said, Karen, I want you to cut my hair. As soon as I said it I knew. The feeling in my blood, the rattle, came over me again. Karen raised her eyebrow: What about your mother? You see, it wasn’t just me, everybody was scared of Belicia de León.

Fuck her, I said.

Karen looked at me like I was being stupid—I never cursed, but that was something else that was about to change. The next day we locked ourselves in her bathroom and downstairs her father and uncles were bellowing at some soccer game. Well, how do you want it? she asked. I looked at the girl in the mirror for a long time. All I knew was that I didn’t want to see her ever again. I put the clippers in Karen’s hand, turned them on, and guided her hand until it was all gone.

So now you’re punk? Karen asked uncertainly.

Yes, I said.

The next day my mother threw the wig at me. You’re going to wear this. You’re going to wear it every day. And if I see you without it on I’m going to kill you!

I didn’t say a word. I held the wig over the burner.

Don’t do it, she swore as the burner clicked. Don’t you dare—

It went up in a flash, like gasoline, like a stupid hope, and if I hadn’t thrown it in the sink it would have taken my hand. The smell was horrible, like all of the chemicals from all the factories in Elizabeth.

That was when she slapped at me, when I struck her hand and she snatched it back, like I was the fire.

Of course everyone thought I was the worst daughter ever. My tía and our neighbors kept saying, Hija, she’s your mother, she’s dying, but I wouldn’t listen. When I caught her hand a door opened. And I wasn’t about to turn my back on it.

But God, how we fought! Sick or not, dying or not, my mother wasn’t going to go down easily. She wasn’t una pendeja. I’d seen her slap grown men, push white police officers onto their asses, curse a whole group of bochincheras. She had raised me and my brother by herself: she had worked three jobs until she could buy this house we live in, she had survived being abandoned by my father, she had come from Santo Domingo all by herself and as a young girl she claimed to have been beaten, set on fire, left for dead. There was no way she was going to let me go without killing me first. Fígurin de mierda, she called me. You think you’re someone but you ain’t nada. She dug hard, looking for my seams, wanting me to tear like always, but I didn’t weaken, I wasn’t going to. It was that feeling I had, that my life was waiting for me on the other side, that made me fearless. When she threw away my Smiths and Sisters of Mercy posters—Aquí yo no quiero maricones—I bought replacements. When she threatened to tear up my new clothes, I started keeping them in my locker and at Karen’s house. When she told me that I had to quit my job at the Greek diner I explained to my boss that my mother was starting to lose it because of her chemo, so when she called to say I couldn’t work there anymore he just handed me the phone and stared out at his customers in embarrassment. When she changed the locks on me—I had started staying out late, going to the Limelight because even though I was fourteen I looked twenty-five—I would knock on Oscar’s window and he would let me in, scared because the next day my mother would run around the house screaming, Who the hell let that hija de la gran puta in the house? Who? Who? And Oscar would be at the breakfast table, stammering, I don’t know, Mami, I don’t.

Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow. My brother didn’t know what to do. He stayed in his room, though sometimes he would lamely try to ask me what was going on. Nothing. You can tell me, Lola, he said, and I could only laugh. You need to lose weight, I told him.

In those final weeks I knew better than to walk near my mother. Most of the time she just looked at me with the stink eye, but sometimes without warning she would grab me by my throat and hang on until I pried her fingers from me. She didn’t bother talking to me unless it was to make death threats. When you grow up you’ll meet me in a dark alley when you least expect it and then I’ll kill you and nobody will know I did it! Literally gloating as she said this.

You’re crazy, I told her. You don’t call me crazy, she said, and then she sat down, panting. It was bad but no one expected what came next. So obvious when you think about it. All my life I’d been swearing that one day I would just disappear. And one day I did.

I ran off, dique, because of a boy.

What can I really tell you about him? He was like all boys: beautiful and callow, and like an insect he couldn’t sit still. Un blanquito with long hairy legs I met one night at Limelight.

His name was Aldo.

He was nineteen and lived down at the Jersey Shore with his seventy-four-year-old father. In the back of his Oldsmobile on University I pulled my leather skirt up and my fishnet stockings down and the smell of me was everywhere. That was our first date. The spring of my sophomore year we wrote and called each other at least once a day. I even drove down with Karen to visit him in Wildwood (she had a license, I didn’t). He lived and worked near the boardwalk, one of three guys who operated the bumper cars, the only one without tattoos. You should stay, he told me that night while Karen walked ahead of us on the beach. Where would I live? I asked and he smiled. With me. Don’t lie, I said, but he looked out at the surf. I want you to come, he said seriously.

He asked me three times. I counted, I know.

That summer my brother announced that he was going to dedicate his life to designing role-playing games and my mother was trying to keep a second job, for the first time since her operation. It wasn’t working out. She was coming home exhausted, and since I wasn’t helping, nothing around the house was getting done. Some weekends my tía Rubelka would help out with the cooking and cleaning and would lecture us both but she had her own family to watch after so most of the time we were on our own. Come, he said on the phone. And then in August Karen left for Slippery Rock. She had graduated from high school a year early. If I don’t see Paterson again it will be too soon, she said before she left. That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn’t do school anymore. Something inside wouldn’t let me. It didn’t help that I was reading The Fountainhead and had decided that I was Dominique and Aldo was Roark. I’m sure I could have stayed that way forever, too scared to jump, but finally what we’d all been waiting for happened. My mother announced at dinner, quietly: I want you both to listen to me: the doctor is running more tests on me.

Oscar looked like he was going to cry. He put his head down. And my reaction? I looked at her and said: Could you please pass the salt?