This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz Read Free Book Online Page B

for a stroll.
    —
    T HE TRUTH IS I am lucky to have a friend like Ana Iris. She’s like my sister. Most of the people I know in the States have no friends here; they’re crowded together in apartments. They’re cold, they’re lonely, they’re worn. I’ve seen the lines at the phone places, the men who sell stolen card numbers, the cuarto they carry in their pockets.
    When I first reached the States I was like that, alone, living over a bar with nine other women. At night no one could go to bed because of the screams and the exploding bottles from downstairs. Most of my housemates were fighting with each other over who owed who what or who had stolen money. When I myself had extra I went to the phones and called my mother, just so I could hear the voices of the people in my barrio as they passed the phone from hand to hand, like I was good luck. I was working for Ramón at that time; we weren’t going out yet—that wouldn’t happen for another two years. He had a housekeeping guiso then, mostly in Piscataway. The day we met he looked at me critically. Which pueblo are you from?
    Moca.
    Mata dictador, he said, and then a little while later he asked me which team I supported.
    Águilas, I told him, not really caring.
    Licey, he boomed. The only real team on the Island.
    That was the same voice he used to tell me to swab a toilet or scrub an oven. I didn’t like him then; he was too arrogant and too loud and I took to humming when I heard him discussing fees with the owners of the houses. But at least he didn’t try to rape you like many of the other bosses. At least there was that. He kept his eyes and his hands mostly to himself. He had other plans, important plans, he told us, and just watching him you could believe it.
    My first months were housecleaning and listening to Ramón argue. My first months were taking long walks through the city and waiting for Sunday to call my mother. During the day I stood in front of mirrors in those great houses and told myself that I’d done well and afterward I would come home and fold up in front of the small television we crowded around and I believed this was enough.
    I met Ana Iris after Ramón’s business failed. Not enough ricos around here, he said without discouragement. Some friends set up the meeting and I met her at the fish market. Ana Iris was cutting and preparing fish as we spoke. I thought she was a boricua, but later she told me she was half boricua and half dominicana. The best of the Caribbean and the worst, she said. She had fast, accurate hands and her fillets were not ragged as were some of the others on the bed of crushed ice. Can you work at a hospital? she wanted to know.
    I can do anything, I said.
    There’ll be blood.
    If you can do that, I can work in a hospital.
    She was the one who took the first pictures that I mailed home, weak fotos of me grinning, well dressed and uncertain. One in front of the McDonald’s, because I knew my mother would appreciate how American it was. Another one in a bookstore. I’m pretending to read, even though the book is in English. My hair is pinned up and the skin behind my ears looks pale and underused. I’m so skinny I look sick. The best picture is of me in front of a building at the university. There are no students but hundreds of metal folding chairs have been arranged in front of the building for an event and I’m facing those chairs and they’re facing me and in the light my hands are startling on the blue fabric of my dress.
    —
    THREE NIGHTS A WEEK we look at houses. The houses are in terrible condition; they are homes for ghosts and for cockroaches and for us, los hispanos. Even so, few people will sell to us. They treat us well enough in person but in the end we never hear from them, and the next time Ramón drives by other people are living there, usually blanquitos, tending the lawn that should have been ours, scaring crows out of our mulberry trees. Today a grandfather, with red tints in his gray