Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her

JUNOT DAZ

RIVERHEAD BOOKS a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York 2012

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright 2012 by Junot Daz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint an excerpt from My Wicked Wicked Ways. Copyright 1987 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Third Woman Press and in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf. By permission of Third Woman Press and Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, New York, and Lamy, New Mexico. All rights reserved.

The following stories have been previously published, in a slightly different form: in The New Yorker, The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, Otravida, Otravez, The Pura Principle, Alma, and Nilda; in Glimmer Train, Invierno; and in Story, Flaca.

ISBN 978-1-101-59695-1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Marilyn Ducksworth and Mih-Ho Cha
in honor of your friendship, your fierceness, your grace

Okay, we didnt work, and all

memories to tell you the truth arent good.

But sometimes there were good times.

Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep

beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars

like ours.

SANDRA CISNEROS

I M NOT A BAD GUY. I know how that soundsdefensive, unscrupulousbut its true. Im like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good. Magdalena disagrees though. She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole. See, many months ago, when Magda was still my girl, when I didnt have to be careful about almost anything, I cheated on her with this chick who had tons of eighties freestyle hair. Didnt tell Magda about it, either. You know how it is. A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life. Magda only found out because homegirl wrote her a fucking letter. And the letter had details. Shit you wouldnt even tell your boys drunk.

The thing is, that particular bit of stupidity had been over for months. Me and Magda were on an upswing. We werent as distant as wed been the winter I was cheating. The freeze was over. She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boysme smoking, her bored out of her skullwe were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where shes smiling so much youd think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each others family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going. But then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me. It dont matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like hes strangling himself with the cord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says. I see one of Magdas girlfriends at the Woodbridge mallClaribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyesand she treats me like I ate somebodys favorite kid.

You dont even want to hear how it went down with Magda. Like a five-train collision. She threw Cassandras letter at meit missed and landed under a Volvoand then she sat down on the curb and started hyperventilating. Oh, God, she wailed. Oh, my God.

This is when my boys claim they would have pulled a Total Fucking Denial. Cassandra who? I was too sick to my stomach even to try. I sat down next to her, grabbed her flailing arms, and said some dumb shit like You have to listen to me, Magda. Or you wont understand.

L ET ME TELL YOU about Magda. Shes a Bergenline original: short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in. Her fathers a baker, her mother sells kids clothes door to door. She might be nobodys pendeja but shes also a forgiving soul. A Catholic. Dragged me into church every Sunday for Spanish Mass, and when one of her relatives is sick, especially the ones in Cuba, she writes letters to some nuns in Pennsylvania, asks the sisters to pray for her family. Shes the nerd every librarian in town knows, a teacher whose students love her. Always cutting shit out for me from the newspapers, Dominican shit. I see her like, what, every week, and she still sends me corny little notes in the mail: So you wont forget me. You couldnt think of anybody worse to screw than Magda.

Anyway I wont bore you with what happens after she finds out. The begging, the crawling over glass, the crying. Lets just say that after two weeks of this, of my driving out to her house, sending her letters, and calling her at all hours of the night, we put it back together. Didnt mean I ever ate with her family again or that her girlfriends were celebrating. Those cabronas, they were like, No, jams, never. Even Magda wasnt too hot on the rapprochement at first, but I had the momentum of the past on my side. When she asked me, Why dont you leave me alone? I told her the truth: Its because I love you, mami. I know this sounds like a load of doo-doo, but its true: Magdas my heart. I didnt want her to leave me; I wasnt about to start looking for a girlfriend because Id fucked up one lousy time.

Dont think it was a cakewalk, because it wasnt. Magdas stubborn; back when we first started dating, she said she wouldnt sleep with me until wed been together at least a month, and homegirl stuck to it, no matter how hard I tried to get into her knickknacks. Shes sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper. You cant imagine how many times she asked (especially after we finished fucking), Were you ever going to tell me? This and Why? were her favorite questions. My favorite answers were Yes and It was a stupid mistake. I wasnt thinking.