All about Skin (15 page)

In our height, we heard about other girls fighting against their mothers in other neighborhoods. Storms of girls, bursting into their mother's meetings, and pouring out into the streets. And even though it was rare for us to meet any of these other girls, we were filled with hope, awe, bravado that we had been able to accomplish these feats. By the end of it, we became heroes, and I think we surpassed our mothers in terms of our stature. Nonetheless, I think they looked forward to our fighting because we raised their profile. They were able to spread their word because we spread ours.

I wake up and I'm surrounded by my friends. I had fallen asleep in my mother's living room.

Yahira takes my place among the girls. “We want to talk to you,” they might as well say in unison.

I'm too tired to fight, plus Alexa has blocked the doorway, so I feebly nod my head. “What's up?” I say in an overly chipper voice.

“We want to tell you our stories.”

I want to dearly roll my eyes, but I feel like these furious girls might smack me down. “Fine, tell me your stories,” I say instead.

“You know, when Hugo walked out on me, Rosie. For the first time, I felt what your mother felt.”

Punch one. The last bit of sleep rolls off of me. “I doubt that. You would compare yourself to that woman?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“How can you even say that?”

“Rosie … I wish I could explain what it feels like to have someone leave you. It's like someone ripped out your heart. Stomped on it, bruised it all up, and shoved it back into your chest.”

“This happened one time, and all of a sudden what we believed in and fought for is disappeared?”

“Yeah, Rosie. Once is enough.”

All the girls nod in agreement.

Yahira continues, “For almost a year he told me he loved me. One day, he just changes his story. You're watching marble crack, Rosie. Something you thought was so solid, isn't.” Yahira sits down, exhausted.

Ruthie picks up, “Everything, including me, especially me, he drops. And he moves to Alaska. Moved me out of his life so easily.” She shakes her head. “And that's probably how your mom felt when your father left.”

I stare at Ruthie hard. But I don't say anything. I just listen.

Alexa finishes off, “It's pathetic. I stare at the phone and will him to call, but he doesn't. One day he loved me, the next day he won't speak to me, and there is just no way that I could ever make sense of that. I feel like I'm banging on this door. I can see him and he just refuses to open. So, I think I know what your mother felt when your father crossed her out of his life—confused, lonely, and like I am falling off a cliff.”

Yahira then speaks. “We don't expect you to understand, but we wanted to tell you.”

“You don't want to hear what I have to say?”

“No, we know what you'll say, and this is not about you anymore. Think about what we said instead.”

“No, I'm going to state my piece too. Love, I never said it was easy, but I wanted us to believe in it because I thought it could be a balm on future hurt. I thought it would make us better people. To be so cold, to be so joyless, to be like our mothers … I didn't want us to be them. I mean, no, I wasn't in a relationship, and maybe that's what allowed me to keep believing in love. Maybe you won't always find the love you are looking for in a relationship, so I say, separate those two things. Are they really the same thing?”

“In the end, Rosie, they are the same things as that is where we get love. So until we find a different mode of loving, then love is going to continue to suck.” They get up to go, but as they walk by my mother's bookcase, Yahira turns around and delivers her coup de grâce: “We didn't even need a boogie-woman to come.”

“Betsy, can you believe this? Can you believe these traitors?” I had tried to talk to my friends again yesterday, but they refused to listen to me. Baby Ruthie called me quixotic. (Me? How did she think she got her name?) Angry Alexa said I didn't know shit about shit. And Yahira said I was
Jane Eyre
–delusional and didn't live in the world that she and the girls lived in. Then. Then, they said absolutely, under no conditions, would they come out to war and they stomped away.

“Rosie, they're hurt. What do you expect from them?”

“I expect them to get up and start fighting again.”

“Like they have reason to. Rosie … please. The problem is that you don't know how they feel. Maybe you need to go find a boyfriend, have him break your heart, then come back and tell me how you feel.”

“Ha. Very funny. How come no one sees my side?”

“Cause as far as everyone is concerned, you don't have a side. At least not a valid one.”

“Okay, can you just be a big sister and tell me how I can fix this?”

“Yeah, I have the magic answer. See their side of it. Seriously.”

My father.
El Malo
.

He looks thinner than I remembered, but I haven't seen him too often over the years. He has dishes in the sink and shuffles around the apartment in his house slippers. His black skin that used to be firm folds on his cheeks now. His short brown Afro has sporadic gray hairs and he has started to smoke again. Something that he had always joked he had given up for my mother and her love. When he sees me looking at his lit cigarette, he reminds me of the time I was eight, and I had pleaded with my uncle to give up smoking the day after someone had come to school and told us of the dangers of smoking. My father laughs now and tousles my hair like I am eight again.

He starts to reminisce about the old times, even though I am sure he knows why I am here. He tells me about when they first met, and for the first time I can imagine my parents as young people. My mother with long hair and long legs in a completely different world. How she snuck out to San Juan to hear El Gran Combo. And how those were the happiest days of their lives and they couldn't be reproduced for all the love in the world.

Then, he sits around and tells me jokes in Spanish that I figure only people who have lived in Puerto Rico all their lives can figure out. And he laughs to himself when he delivers his punch line and I in turn give him a strained smile.

I try to be as patient as I can be, but I finally interrupt him. “Pop, I wanted to talk to you about something. You know we've been having this love war, and now my friends don't want to fight anymore because their boyfriends left them. I figure if I can tell them why, then they'll fight again. And well …” I shift in my seat, not sure how to get the last words out.

“And you want to know from me how you stop loving someone?”

I nod my head.

Even though I'm sure he knew this was coming, he has an uncomfortable smile on his face. He's quiet for the first time today. He leans back in his chair and interlaces his fingers behind his head. He exhales and finally says, “That's a tough question. Really tough.”

“I know. I didn't come to blame you or anything.”

“Well, one thing I want you to know is that people think that because you're the one who leaves, it's easy for you, but it wasn't easy to leave your mother. I know it's harder for the one who's left, but it wasn't right to stay anymore.”

I sit silent for a second waiting for him to continue. “Yeah, but how do you get to that point? You left a woman you were married to for twenty-six years.”

“Sometimes, oftentimes, you just stop loving people. That's the truth. But when I loved your mother, I loved her.”

Crash into the concrete. “What do you mean?” I try to scramble back up. “How do you just stop loving someone?”

“It happens over time. One day, one week, one month, one year, I didn't feel the same way.”

“Did mom do something? I mean she must have done something to make you stop loving her.”

“I'm sure your mother and her friends tore us apart, said we were this and that, but you're not
bad
because you don't love someone anymore. It'd be easy to blame her, like she blamed me, but loving someone or not loving someone doesn't really say anything about who you are as a person, or even if you did something wrong.”

“But don't you think if you love someone you love them forever?” At this point, I feel like I am eight again.

“I bet you think love is all you need, huh?” He pauses and takes a deep breath, and is about to continue but I cut him off.

“Yeah, I mean, if you love someone, you make it work. Doesn't loving someone mean you do anything to stay together? That your love has some value other than just words.” And all of a sudden I feel like I am channeling my mother and asking the questions she would ask. Asking for the things she must know. And I start to wonder what her side of the story is.

He laughs. “Love gets forgotten in daily living. When you are in the midst of a fight, trust me, the last thing on your mind is whether or not you love someone. You know, we all say we want love, and we get there, and then, one day it's like it doesn't matter, like it never mattered.”

“Did you really love Mom?” I strangle out. I am aware that my chest is heaving like my mother's all those years ago.

“Of course I did. Of course. But, Rosie, I don't know if love can possibly last forever, and I don't know if it should have to, but I think you're right in thinking one should try.” He pauses and scratches his head. “People make too much of love. People think it's all you need, but love is a starting point. There is so much that comes after love, so much that you can't even imagine.”

He pauses then and looks at me to see if I understand.

I picture him and his buddies, sitting in their living rooms for the past six years, drinking Coronas or Bacardi Limón. They sit around a table and play dominoes and each time they throw a domino down—Smack!—it is as if they are scattering the past. “I still remember how she looked back in 1963, how I thought I could live off of her smile,” my father may say. And he sweats through his
guayabera
, the one that my mother bought from the Dominican man who used to live down the street. Lamenting the loss of these women, maybe they look at each other and judge who has suffered a greater loss and who is stronger for suffering less. Or perhaps, they think too that they were told that marriage was forever and they never imagined themselves walking out doors.

Anna Karenina, The Color Purple, Medea, The Joy Luck Club, The Odyssey, Madame Bovary, Native Son, The Scarlet Letter
. Boogie-woman Carmencita. My father,
El Malo
. My mother's library plaits together different cultures, different eras. No part of the world is left unscathed, unturned. How my mother has made her case.

I sit in my mother's living room—where her and so many of the neighborhood women spent so much time living, breathing, fighting. I remember how this room was normally closed off to us. How it was their gathering place and at one point we had superstitions of coming into this room. It was almost like catching the cooties if we even touched the door. Even after a year away, though, I can still feel all the ghosts of women suffocate me.

Looking at my mother's bookcase, I no longer even focus on the texts. I can only pinpoint what woman in that text has been abandoned, mistreated, rejected—all those adjectives for the way women are treated—none of them good. I almost want to eulogize over these women. Dearly departed, here lies Anna Karenina, here lies Bessie, here lies Hester Prynne. Women who loved. Women who were wronged. Women dead in books, mere words etched in cotton. How my mother has breathed life into them.

I think back to all those years we spent at war. How every night, to stave off her life, I lay in bed and listened to the beating of my heart. Sometimes I could not wait to get to bed, to be alone with my heart. I loved how it heaved and spread a tingling joy throughout my body. And it was in those few minutes with my hand on my heart that I felt the most absolute delight. And I always wondered how my mother could tell me not to believe, how she could have forgotten that this is how she once felt for my father.

But I didn't fall in love on purpose this year. I didn't fall in love because I wanted to love love for a little bit longer, hold onto it in ways that the broken-hearted cannot. I would visit Yahira at UMass on the weekends and every time I did, I was always reminded that boys existed in this world too. I met and met boys, sometimes I thought they would catch me, but I continued to cycle past them. All year. Because I worried that if I ended up broken-hearted, I couldn't be here to stand up for love. I almost knew that we would be here this summer. That this would be our new battle. And regardless of how the rest of this summer turns out, I know I am ready for love. But right now, to save my girls, I know what I must do. I climb the steps to go to my mother's room.

Last summer, the night before we went off to college, she came into my room to help me pack. As I had gotten older, our day-to-day interaction had become stiff. Two rivals in one house. But that night, we laid down our arms. It was a truce. She smoked in my room even though she knew I hated the smell of cigarettes and was superconcerned about secondhand smoke. And I chewed gum, even though she hated the noise and always said I sounded like a cow. She sat on my bed and watched me fold my clothes into my suitcase.

“I want you to be careful,” she said.

“Be careful of what?”

“Life. Boys.”

I smirked. “I think I can handle that,” I said as I folded my clothes. “There won't even be any boys at my school.” I was going to Smith College.

“There are always boys.”

“I suppose so.”

“Even if you are not going to be bothered with boys. Take care of your friends. Don't be surprised if you need to mend a few broken hearts this year.”