Elvis grins. Shit, no one could ever end up like you, Yunior. You’re a DR original.
His daughter throws your books onto the floor. You don’t care. Maybe it will encourage her to read, you say.
So now it’s your feet, your back, and your heart. You can’t run, you can’t do yoga. You try riding a bike, thinking you’ll turn into an Armstrong, but it kills your back. So you stick to walking. You do it one hour each morning and one hour each night. There is no rush to the head, no tearing up your lungs, no massive shock to your system, but it’s better than nothing.
A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. Translation: I got to stop fucking with old dudes. Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He’s even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He’s also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her. Two seconds later, security approaches you and asks for ID. The next day a whitekid on a bike throws a can of Diet Coke at you.
Classes start and by then the squares on your abdomen have been reabsorbed, like tiny islands in a rising sea of lard. You scan the incoming junior faculty for a possible, but there’s nothing. You watch a lot of TV. Sometimes Elvis joins you since his wife doesn’t allow him to smoke weed in the house. He’s taken up yoga now, having seen what it did for you. Lots of ho’s, too, he says, grinning. You want not to hate him.
What happened to the Cape Verdean girl?
What Cape Verdean girl? he says dryly.
You make little advances. You start doing push-ups and pull-ups and even some of your old yoga moves, but very carefully. You have dinner with a couple of girls. One of them is married and hot for days in the late-thirties Dominican middle-class woman sort of way. You can tell she’s contemplating sleeping with you and the whole time you’re eating your short ribs you feel like you’re on the dock. In Santo Domingo I’d never be able to meet you like this, she says with great generosity. Almost all her conversations start with In Santo Domingo. She’s doing a year at the business school and for how much she gushes about Boston you can tell she misses the DR, would never live anywhere else.
Boston is really racist, you offer by way of orientation.
She looks at you like you’re crazy. Boston isn’t racist, she says. She also scoffs at the idea of racism in Santo Domingo.
So Dominicans love Haitians now?
That’s not about race. She pronounces every syllable. That’s about nationality.
Of course you end up in bed and it ain’t bad except for the fact that she never never comes and she spends a lot of time complaining about her husband. She takes, if you get my meaning, and soon you are squiring her around the city and beyond: to Salem on Halloween and one weekend to the Cape. No one ever pulls you over when you are with her or asks you for ID. Everywhere you two go she shoots fotos but never any of you. She writes her kids postcards while you’re in bed.
At the end of the semester she returns home. My home, not your home, she says tetchily. She’s always trying to prove you’re not Dominican. If I’m not Dominican then no one is, you shoot back, but she laughs at that. Say that in Spanish, she challenges and of course you can’t. Last day you drive her to the airport and there is no crushing Casablanca kiss, just a smile and a little gay-ass hug and her fake breasts push against you like something irrevocable. Write, you tell her, and she says, Por supuesto, and of course neither of you do. You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
Year 4
Wedding invitations from the ex-sucias start to arrive in the mail. You have no idea how to explain this berserkería. What the fuck, you say. You reach out to Arlenny for insight. She turns over the cards. I guess it’s what Oates said: Revenge is living well, without you. Fuck Hall and Oates, Elvis says. These bitches think we’re bitches. They think we’re gonna give a shit about vaina like this. He peers at the invite. Is it me or does every Asian girl on the planet marry a white guy? Is it written on the genes or something?
That year your arms and legs begin to give you trouble, occasionally going numb, flickering in and out like a brownout back on the Island. It is a strange pins-and-needles feeling. What the fuck is this? you wonder. I hope I’m not dying. You’re probably working out too hard, Elvis says. But I’m not really working out at all, you protest. Probably just stress, the nurse at emergency care tells you. You hope so, flexing your hands, worrying. You really do hope so.