Love War Stories Page 7

  A radio turns on on the first floor, Kenny starts to talk about what we should do, the gypsy cabs start honking, a lady is yelling at her man. The world wakes up.

  SOME SPRINGS GIRLS DO DIE

  “I am going to die today,” she must’ve said as she leaned over to turn off her alarm, pulled herself up, and studied herself in the mirror knowing that this was the last morning of her life. Her final shower, the last time she would brush her teeth, wash her hair. And all these actions must’ve felt like the first time because she knew they would never occur again.

  I wake up before him and go to my 7:30 a.m. aerobics class. I feel energized, like I can scale mountains by virtue of him lying in my bed. Days without him, and there are many, are not the same. I must mirror her sometimes: sullen and on the edge. But not today. For once, I can follow the routine. I kick my legs up high.

  When I reenter my room, I stare at him sleep with his mouth slightly open.

  I want to run my fingers over his skin because he is always so hot and I am always so cold, press my lips against his so that he’ll open those apple-green eyes that I so dearly want to pluck. Crawl inside him, so we’ll never be apart.

  But I just observe.

  And when he opens his eyes, it is to watch me undress.

  The rudimentary elements of my day remain unchanged—work, classes, the same things I’ve done all semester—but he is here today and that makes all the difference in the world. I am dancing: turning, turning, turning.

  Her steps must’ve been light today. Death always seems to come heavy in the night, but it awoke her with a kiss this morning. And surely he was all that she saw before her vivid brown eyes.

  My outfit is exceptional because of him. A light-blue tank top that only reveals so much because what I really want to say is “See here, I am lovely to behold.” But words so truth-bearing do not pass my lips.

  She must have worn delicate spring colors on her last day of life. Gone to work and classes. Done the things she had carried out all semester long, but today was memorable. And that made all the difference in the world.

  But that seems wasteful. What would I do if I knew that at some point in the day I was going to take my own life? I would go to Central Park, or even the steps of Low Library, let the spring sun penetrate and warm me all over. Remembering all that was bottled inside, I would instead let these revelatory letters fly into the wind in exchange for hearing my laugh resonate throughout the campus. Hear my voice one last time.

  But no. Today was too cold, so she couldn’t have gone, I wouldn’t have gone to the steps or Central Park. I think I would have simply said goodbye, given people the chance to later imagine the things they would regret not saying.

  She must’ve passed some of her friends on campus, said hello, and parted as if tomorrow were another day. I might have whooshed by her on my way back to my room, and she, knowing what I was rushing back to must’ve turned away, letting her hello absorb into the ground, knowing we were heading in the same direction. And what about the ones she didn’t turn away from? Did she wrap Cathy in a hug? Did she mirthfully laugh and bitch about our take-home exam for Soto’s class, proclaiming that she didn’t know how she’d ever get it done?

  She must’ve cleaned her room. Put on new underwear. Perhaps she considered all the times hands touched her panties, how indistinguishable they all were. She must’ve remembered well those who battered her heart. Those who made her feel that the stretchmarks on her arms were not fit to be seen. She must’ve reminded herself of the sorrows of life, made a catalog, gone down each one. Pulled out all the atrocities that assured her her life was a tragedy.

  I return to my room in the afternoon to find him asleep again. He’s cleaned my room and I laugh because I don’t recognize it as my own. When I close the door it’s just me and him in this world, and it brings me delight that he is my little prisoner. And I begin that long journey to reach him. I worry about how I look and if I can satisfy him with this body of mine. I consider hope—my hope that sustains us, keeps us bound. How I wish words could change him, open his heart in two, some for me.

  But as always, all I end up with is his hot skin at my fingertips when what I really want is to enter him and touch the skin beneath the skin.

  His words smack me and pummel my heart. When I ask for a relationship, he shakes his head and raises his voice. I know he loathes me and if he were a different kind of man, he would use his fists instead of his words, and the rejection seeps in through the fissures he has created. But before he leaves, it is the same as every other time: we make up in hurried kisses, as if our lives depended on them.

  His too.

  She must have felt like I do today, disembodied, with a continual squeeze in her chest. For me, because of his presence but absence, and how he can see right past me but all I can see is him, and how nothing matters, not this degree, not my “bright future,” and how neither one of us focuses on me but rather on his future or his impending departure that surely must play somewhere behind me.

  And when he leaves, I am left with the ordinariness of my life.

  Only later, when I am alone, do I wonder what I had been doing at the moment of her death. Was I breathing hard into his ear? Fingers pressing into his back as if Bernini had sculpted us? Me, more Hades than Persephone. Was I going down on him? His cock in my mouth and me thinking the seasons could come and go and there would be no better place for me?

  But in that instant, with the news still in my ears, I just wanted to wrap my legs around him. Arms twisting around his neck like one thousand ropes. A girl, ready to die.

  THE BELINDAS

  It is in the middle of my third week working at Columbia Law School’s career services office when he finally comes in. I’m standing in front of the brown filing cabinet—the one that has a dent in the top right corner because a law student flipped out a few years ago and threw one of those heavy-ass case law books at it—and I smell his cologne. Obsession. And when I turn around, there he is. David.

  My heart remains flatlined; my anger, like his, is private. I had made half-hearted attempts to find him. Vanessa, my old college roommate, told me he had transferred to Columbia as an L2. When we were undergrads here, I was pleased that he hadn’t been accepted into a first-tier law school. Things would not be well for him either. I walked around campus hoping to spot him, but I knew sooner or later he’d have to come in here. He stands in front of me now, and all I want to do is catalog how much he’s changed.

  Or. Or, remained the same.

  He is five foot eight, light-skinned, and stocky. He’s wearing J.Crew khakis, a striped blue-and-white shirt from Brooks Brothers that he probably got on sale, and a navy peacoat. Like everything else about him, he dresses for the man he thinks he should be, not for the man he is. He no longer has the fade he had in college or the goatee. The scar over his left eyebrow is barely discernible. His fingers are still stubby, but his nails are now clipped, clean, and I imagine he has spent his morning rubbing lotion into his hands. When he first started Columbia as an undergrad, he wore Timbs, wifebeaters, and a small diamond stud in each ear. David is now a law student here, but a year and a half ago we were inseparable. Incredibly, he looks untarnished, he is still very attractive, and I am unrecognizable.

  Even though Lala’s voice changed when he came into the room—more giggles and uh-huhs—she is clearly on a long call, so David just comes up to my desk. His heart doesn’t skip a beat; his thoughts don’t fuse two contradictory images. I am begrudgingly pleased that the face I once had has melted away under these layers upon layers of fat.

  “I know it’s kind of early, but do you know what clinics are going to be offered in the fall?” he asks. His voice remains unchanged. It’s the voice that tells you he is from East Harlem, hard and raspy, a voice I imagine won’t bode well in Corporate America.

  “I want to plan my schedule early because . . .”

  I lean forward a bit. Does he really not recognize me?

  My
heart accelerates because the more he talks, the more I realize my answer cannot be a simple yes or no, and I begin to wish Lala would get off the phone. I always imagined this confrontation, but never past this point. He finishes his questions; I look at Lala. I know he will recognize my voice. I open my mouth wondering if I should attempt to disguise it and shuffle some files around my desk. He stares at my silence; he looks at Lala. I can hear him cracking his knuckles in the pocket of his peacoat, a nervous habit when he is annoyed. Old Belinda reappears and smiles at him. Then the tiniest smirk appears on his face as he steps back and slightly rolls his eyes. Even though that breaks the standoff, I realize he thinks I’m flirting with him. I eye him rudely.

  Lala hurries off the phone and eagerly steps up to help him. “Oh, she’s new,” she says as she points to the stupid “Hi My Name Is” sticker she’s had me wear. I touch it, remembering it says “Carmen.” I have told everyone to call me by my middle name. I gave them no options; I didn’t even mention Belinda.

  I lower my head and try to read through the files on my desk, but everything in me is in tune to his movements, his sounds. I feel him looking at me, seeing a large hump of a humiliated girl. Forcing myself not to stare at him, I train my eyes on the student files in front of me instead. I try to focus on the names, on separating the applicants based on if they are going to spend part of their summer doing pro bono work. He unwraps a piece of gum, and I hear him smile when he talks to Lala. He lowers his voice, and I can imagine the brightness in his eyes. His body is masculine, but his eyes are feminine. Sharp brown eyes, outlined with shiny lashes—as if wet with tears—that curl up.

  I remember how he used to love me . . .

  I shuffle and reshuffle the applications, and when he leaves I mumble something, anything, to Lala and trail behind him.

  He treks across College Walk, crosses 116th Street, and waits outside of Ollie’s. I follow him to the benches in the median between the downtown and uptown sides of Broadway, knowing I shouldn’t get closer, and I hunker down and watch.

  I started calling him five months ago. Some days he’d pick up, but it was rare. When he picked up on his birthday, he sounded like he always did—joyful. There was a crowd of revelers in the background, and I imagined pretty, slim girls and the whole of New York on his side. And it was like after a funeral, how you can’t imagine how everyone else can go on with their lives.

  But like anything overused, the effects of the calls started to wear off and the shame started to dissipate. I didn’t want to forget the pain. That Belinda. Old Belinda could come skipping back and who knew what she would let happen to us. And I thought that if I was around David, if I went back to New York and found him, the shame would come back. Running scared.

  The hood of my black North Face jacket tightly sandwiches my face. Unlike most overweight Latinas, I have not decided to sass it up and be big and beautiful; instead, I have chosen the conventional TV look for fat people, big and ugly. It’s the look that most suits me. I wear the most nondescript clothing I can find: no-name khaki pants, bland unicolored T-shirts that cascade over the distorted orbs that are now my breasts. I’ll never enter Lane Bryant, Ashley Stewart, or a sassy store called Torrid. I butchered my hair last week. Long, sturdy brown hair reduced to boyish strokes. David used to love when I lay on top of him and my hair would fall in his face.

  I wanted all traces of hope gone.

  David picks up his phone and when an unremarkable Latina gushes by me a few minutes later, I recognize the look of his body when he answered the phone—it was smiling. She might as well squeal and clap her hands when she gets to him. Their newness is evident. They rush toward Ollie’s, hand in hand, but then he stops her by the door and gives her a kiss.

  She has no body: thin, flat chest, no ass.

  My body grieves down my breasts, my hips, my thighs.

  Watching her in his arms, I know he could crumple her. She touches his face, and I am sure she’s thinking, watching the traffic going down Broadway, that she is part of this moment, that the excitement of New York City is not just relegated to those people in those taxis. She has no reason to envy the passengers. She has what all those people heading downtown are looking for. They, her and David, are part of the world, the wide wider world.

  I gain about two pounds a week.

  My mother doesn’t understand why I came home after college, why I didn’t stay in New York, why I seem so unhappy, and ultimately why and how I am gaining so much weight. She works all night, and I have developed a routine. I lay a blanket out on her white couches and spread myself onto the sofa. I note how much space I take up each night. It gives me a sense of power, like I am destroying this person, the one he has created.

  I tell my mother it’s normal to gain weight after one leaves college. That the weight will be lost once I really start my life. Since I have been home, I’ve gained fifteen pounds, and she has redecorated the house, put away the pictures of me as a little girl in favor of photos of me when I first entered college—when I was average.

  She thinks I don’t know what she is doing, but I don’t need her reminders. All I think about is the person I used to be. She has so much stacked against me to be disappointed by. Every night I roll in my disappointment.

  I go to the CVS down the street when my mother closes the door behind her. I calculate how much money will take me through September, how much I can use to feed myself before there is nothing left. I try to get something new every day, so by the end of the summer, I will have eaten every candy bar that lines the shelves of the CVS in Springfield, Massachusetts. Then I will move on to chips, cookies, and hard candy. I like the order of it all. These nights alone on the couch, feeding myself, I know I am safe. My life is in my hands.

  I squeeze into a seat in the back of the room as inconspicuously as possible. Every time I think that, I want to laugh, because let’s be real. But, as I have learned over the past year and a half, the bigger I become, the more invisible I am. In public spaces, people’s eyes usually slide off me.

  I’m sitting in David’s third class of the day which is hopefully the last. At least sitting in his class beats all the time I had to wait for him at the gym this morning. I half jumped out of bed at 6:00 a.m. and spent about half an hour trying to figure out what to wear. That was probably the most time I’ve spent on my wardrobe since graduating college. I decided on all black, though it would be daytime. I pulled on some black sweatpants over long johns, a loose black hoodie, and my black North Face. I squeezed the hood around my face as much as I could, so you could see as little of me as possible. Then, before heading outside, I left a sleepy/sick voicemail for Lala.

  In each class, he’s raised his hand, made himself visible, challenged the professor, and kept on and on when the professors tried to shut him down. My eyes are sore from all the rolling. I can only gauge how well he does by the counterarguments, his professors’ responses, and, actually, by how pleased he seems with himself. I had hoped that this was the place where his overreaching would be exposed, but no, here he excels. Nothing has gotten in the way of where he invariably sees himself: always shining, always in the future. Fairness rises up like a soap bubble and promptly pops.

  As this class winds down, I jot down his schedule and all the dos and don’ts of stalking I’ve learned today. NO LONG JOHNS!!!! I write in capital letters.

  Almost two years ago, when I was an undergrad at Columbia, I interviewed at places like Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, Smith Barney; but after graduation that wasn’t a life I could face. All I could do was stay at the bottom of the pool. Glug glug.

  When the class is over, I scramble outside and wait for him and his friends to pass me on by. All day, I’ve had to hustle behind him. He walks so fast and the long johns have made me super sweaty, so I am glad the distance is short when they end up at Wien Hall.

  His friends encircle him. They wouldn’t believe it if I told them who he had been.

  I was so much smarter than him in undergrad;
there would have been no question as to how well I would have done in grad school. I even did his math homework, at first eagerly and then under the yoke of righteous demands.

  They take over the place as soon as they get there. I stand by the entrance to the dining hall, watching David and his friends. My body bisected by the cement wall, so if he looked my way, he’d only see half of me. More students converge on their table.

  Stunning, invigorated women.

  Bright-future men.

  They are gregarious. Loud.

  In love with life.

  I marvel. How seamless he has transitioned into life.

  And I am puzzle pieces scattered on the floor.

  I take off my gloves, so that I can feel the greasy heat spread on my hands. Whenever I step into Koronet Pizza, calm begins to descend over me.

  Following him is what I needed. He is so unchanged it hurts.

  Every day, there has been a new memory, something I had long forgotten, that comes up and taps on my heart and pushes in till it hurts. This terrain, this campus, is a reminder of where, who, and what we used to be. The overall disappointment with my life and the ultimate realization that nothing has turned out like it was supposed to. That everything has been a lie—the guaranteed love, the expectant future, the reputable profession.

  When I follow him, I look for the slightest bit of sadness, remorse in his body, actions, or speech, but I have found none of that. But still night after night, I follow him hoping a different evening will garner a different answer.

  These moments, walking back home with my food, and those initial bites, remind me so much of love, so much of what I felt with David early on. When I see him, time waits and stops, even though the past is in the present. My mind an inadvertent View-Master clicking through memories on its own.