Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The wind coursed along the floor, upsetting newspapers and climbing the walls to swing on curtains. A candle stood on the refrigerator. As I leaned over to pull a window shut, Rajinder pressed against me and cupped my right breast. I felt a shock of desire pass through me. As I walked around the rooms shutting windows, he touched my buttocks, pubis, stomach.

When the last window was closed, I waited for a moment before turning around, because I knew he wanted me to turn around quickly. He pulled me close, with his hands on my buttocks. I took his tongue in my mouth. We kissed like this for a long time.

The rain began falling, and we heard a roar from the people on the roofs nearby. “The clothes,” Rajinder said, and pulled away.

We ran out. We could barely see each other. Lightning bursts would illuminate an eye, an arm, some teeth, and then darkness would come again. We jerked the clothes off and let the pins fall to the ground. We deliberately brushed roughly against each other. The raindrops were like thorns, and we began laughing. Rajinder’s shirt had wrapped itself around and around the clothesline. Wiping his face, he knocked his glasses off. As I saw him crouch and fumble around helplessly for them, I felt such tenderness that I knew I would never love him as much as I did at that moment. “The wind in the trees,” I cried out, “it sounds like the sea.”

We slowly wandered back inside, kissing all the while. He entered me like a sigh. He suckled on me and moved back and forth and side to side, and I felt myself growing warm and loose. He sucked on my nipples and held my waist with both hands. We made love gently at first, but as we both neared climax, Rajinder began stabbing me with his penis and I came in waves so strong that I felt myself vanishing. When Rajinder sank on top of me, I kept saying, “I love you. I love you.”

“I love you too,” he answered. Outside, the rain came in sheets and the thunder was like explosions in caverns.

The candle had gone out while we made love, and Rajinder got up to light it. He drank some water and then lay down beside me. I wanted some water too, but did not want to say anything that would make him feel bad about his thoughtlessness. “I’ll be getting promoted soon. Minaji loves me,” Rajinder said. I rolled onto my side to look at him. He had his arms folded across his chest. “Yesterday he said, ‘Come, Rajinderji, let us go write your confidential report.’” I put my hand on his stomach, and Rajinder said, “Don’t,” and pushed it away. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know whether that would be good, sir.’ He laughed and patted me on the back. What a nincompoop. If it weren’t for the quotas, he would never be manager.” Rajinder chuckled. “I’ll be the youngest bank manager in Delhi.” I felt cold and tugged a sheet over our legs. “In college I had a schedule for where I wanted to be by the time I was thirty. By twenty-two I became an officer; soon I’ll be a manager. I wanted a car, and we’ll have that in a year. I wanted a wife, and I have that.”

“You are so smart.”

“Some people in college were smarter. But I knew exactly what I wanted. A life is like a house. One has to plan carefully where all the furniture will go.”

“Did you plan me as your wife?” I asked, smiling.

“No. I had wanted at least an M.A., and someone who worked, but Mummy didn’t approve of a daughter-in-law who worked. I was willing to change my requirements. Because I believe in moderation, I was successful. Everything in its place. And pay for everything. Other people got caught up in love and friendship. I’ve always felt that these things only became a big deal because of the movies.”

“What do you mean? You love me and your mother, don’t you?”

“There are so many people in the world that it is hard not to think that there are others you could love more.”

Seeing the shock on my face, he quickly added, “Of course I love you. I just try not to be too emotional about it.” The candle’s shadows on the wall were like the wavery bands formed by light reflected off water. “We might even be able to get a foreign car.”

The second time he took me that night, it was from behind. He pressed down heavily on my back and grabbed my breasts.

I woke at four or five. The rain scratched against the windows and a light like blue milk shone along the edges of the door. I was cold and tried to wrap myself in the sheet, but it was not large enough.

JUNOT DÍAZ was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968. At the age of six he immigrated to New Jersey. He earned his BA from Rutgers College in 1992, working his way through by washing dishes, pumping gas, and delivering pool tables.

After graduation, Díaz worked at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant and created the quasi-autobiographical character Yunior, who appeared in a story he included as part of his application to the MFA program at Cornell University. The character became central to much of his later work, including the stories in Drown, his first collection, and This Is How You Lose Her. Díaz earned his MFA in 1995.

Díaz has described his writing as “a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education.”

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008 and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Currently Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the fiction editor for The Boston Review .

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MAMI’S YOUNGEST SISTER — my Tía Yrma — finally made it to the United States that year. She and Tío Miguel got themselves an apartment in the Bronx, off the Grand Concourse, and everybody decided that we should have a party. Actually, my dad decided, but everybody — meaning Mami, Tía Yrma, Tío Miguel, and their neighbors — thought it a dope idea. On the Friday of the party Papi got back from work around six. Right on time. We were all dressed by then, which was a smart move on our part. If Papi had walked in and caught us lounging around in our underwear, man, he would have kicked our asses something serious.

He didn’t say nothing to nobody, not even to my moms. He just pushed past her, held up his hand when she tried to talk to him, and jumped into the shower. Rafa gave me the look and I gave it back to him; we both knew Papi had been out with the Puerto Rican woman he was seeing and wanted to wash off the evidence quick.

Mami looked really nice that day. The United States had finally put some meat on her; she was no longer the same flaca who had arrived here three years before. She had cut her hair short and was wearing tons of cheap-ass jewelry, which on her was kinda attractive. She smelled like herself, which meant she smelled good, like the wind through a tree. She always waited until the last possible minute to put on her perfume because she said it was a waste to spray it on early and then have to spray it on again once you got to the party.

We — meaning me, my brother, my little sister, and Mami — waited for Papi to finish his shower. Mami seemed anxious, in her usual dispassionate way. Her hands adjusted the buckle of her belt over and over again. That morning, when she had gotten us up for school, Mami told us that she wanted to have a good time at the party. I want to dance, she said, but now, with the sun sliding out of the sky like spit off a wall, she seemed ready to just get this over with.

Rafa didn’t much want to go to no party either, and me, I never wanted to go anywhere with my family. There was a baseball game in the parking lot outside and we could hear our friends yelling, Hey, and, You suck, to one another. We heard the pop of a ball as it sailed over the cars, the clatter of an aluminum bat dropping to the concrete. Not that me or Rafa loved baseball; we just liked playing with the local kids, thrashing them at anything they were doing. By the sounds of the shouting, we both knew the game was close, either of us could have made a difference. Rafa frowned, and when I frowned back, he put up his fist. Don’t you mirror me, he said.