This Is How You Lose Her(20)

I remember: you used to offer me rides home in your Civic.

I remember: the third time I accepted. Our hands touched in between our seats. You tried to talk to me in Spanish and I told you to stop.

We’re on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should go hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we’re still good, next week maybe.

That’s the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don’t want to let go, but don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

We drive up to Montclair, almost alone on the Parkway. Everything’s quiet and dark and the trees shine from yesterday’s rains. At one point, just south of the Oranges, the Parkway passes through a cemetery. Thousands of gravestones and cenotaphs on both sides. Imagine, you say, pointing to the nearest home, if you had to live in that place.

The dreams you’d have, I say.

You nod. The nightmares.

We park across from the map dealer and go to our bookstore. Despite the proximity of the college, we’re the only customers, us and a three-legged cat. You sit yourself down in an aisle and start searching through the boxes. The cat goes right for you. I flip through the histories. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day. When I come back to you again you have kicked off your shoes and are picking at the running calluses on your feet, reading a children’s book. I put my arms around your shoulders. Flaca, I say. Your hair drifts up and clings to my stubble. I don’t shave often enough for anybody.

This can work, you say. We just have to let it.

—

THAT LAST SUMMER you wanted to go somewhere so I took us out to Spruce Run; we’d both been there as children. You could remember the years, even the months of your visits, but the closest I came was Back When I Was Young.

Look at the Queen Anne’s lace, you said. You were leaning out the window into the night air and I had my hand on your back just in case.

We were both drunk and you had nothing but garters and stockings on under your skirt and you put my hand between your legs.

What did your family do here? you asked.

I looked at the night water. We had barbecues. Dominican barbecues. My pops didn’t know how to but he insisted. He would cook up this red sauce that he’d splatter on chuletas and then he’d invite complete strangers over to eat. It was terrible.

I wore an eye patch when I was kid, you said. Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.

I doubt it, I said.

I’m just saying, Yunior.

Maybe five thousand years ago we were together.

Five thousand years ago I was in Denmark.

That’s true. And half of me was in Africa.

Doing what?

Farming, I guess. That’s what everybody does everywhere.

Maybe we were together some other time.

I can’t think when, I said.

You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.

People weren’t even people back then.

That night you lay in bed, awake, and listened to the ambulances tear down our street. The heat of your face could have kept my room warm for days. I didn’t know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face. I almost couldn’t touch you. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.

—

THAT WAS THE SUMMER I couldn’t sleep, the summer I used to run through the streets of New Brunswick at four in the morning. These were the only times I broke five miles, when there was no traffic and the halogens turned everything the color of foil, firing up every bit of moisture that was on the cars. I remember running around the Memorial Homes, along Joyce Kilmer, past Throop, where the Camelot, that crazy old bar, stands boarded and burned.

I stayed up entire nights and when the Old Man came home from UPS I was writing down the times that the trains arrived from Princeton Junction — you could hear them braking from our living room, a gnash just south of my heart. I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it’s too fucking late but the boys weren’t into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.

—

WE WENT BACK to Spruce Run once more. Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you’d be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little puños and the first time you saw us you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn’t have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.