Excerpt
My Train Leaves at Three
Mejorar la raza. It’s this Dominican phrase my tía taught me when I was a kid, dark-skinned with ashy elbows and two missing front teeth. Translated to English, it means
to better the race. That’s what I’m thinking about, mostly, while Rory’s inside me. That’s what is replaying like a broken record in my mind while he pounds into me with the front of his hips despite how many times I’ve told him the Jack Rabbit™ doesn’t turn me on.
When I was a kid, I thought I’d be rich and famous by now. I thought that I’d have a record deal or a poodle or a pool somewhere out in California. Enough money in my bank account to airlift my mother out of our tiny apartment in Washington Heights, and get my frizzy hair blown out twice a week, and buy my sister, Nena, the Mercedes-Benz she always wanted. But I’m still broke, and barely even singing in the shower, and my hair is a mess, and my sister is dead, so nothing I imagined has come true.
I don’t want to think about my dead sister or my empty checking account, though. It’s my birthday today, and those thoughts don’t feel very celebratory at all.
Instead, I change positions and roll my tongue into a U shape and push it up to the roof of my mouth so that my saliva pools around it. I feel the warmth, the bubbles, the salty flavor of the platano chips I scarfed down for lunch yesterday come forward until the wet hunk of fluid smacks down onto Rory’s pink sticky skin. I wrap my legs, lanky and thin now, around his body and I move my hips up and down, faster and harder, until I see the light behind his eyes turn on and he’s finished.
“Xiomara,” Rory moans my name with wonder. Three more times then, sweetly, pronouncing every syllable like it’s a dessert. To Rory, I’ve always been some foreign delicacy. Something to be consumed after dinner. To me, though, Rory’s like a flu shot. A chore. Something that if I’m lucky, pretty soon I’m going to forget to come back to altogether.
“I have to go,” I say while Rory lies on his back and slings his arm around my waist. It weighs like a ton of bricks, and I can’t help but feel like he’s trying to drown the little life I have left out of me. “Come on.” I tap Rory’s arm twice with two fingers since he’s still not moving. “I can’t be late.”
Before my shift at Alek’s print shop today, I’m singing and waiting tables at Ellen’s Stardust Diner. It’s a kitschy ’50s-themed restaurant in Times Square full of singing servers and a nauseatingly large menu of American classics. In other words, Ellen’s is a place where I
and every other Broadway wannabee congregate to show off our talents, serve pancakes to tourists, and hope to hell we get discovered.
“Saundra will kill me if I’m late again,” I groan out. Saundra runs the show over at Ellen’s. She’s one of those women I’d hate to be, full of metallic blue eye shadow and unfulfilled dreams at age fifty.
“You’re not gonna go on like this forever . . . are you?” Rory says. His voice is cold like the bottom of Mami’s metal ice tray. I grab his arm then and toss it off the side of me. The black hair of his wrists are sweaty and stuck to his skin like they’ve been gelled down with Murray’s Edgewax.
“What do you mean?” I ask. Though I know what he means—that I’m just a girl who is hanging on by a thread to a life I dream of but will never have. Still, I want him to say it. I like when my men speak plainly to me.
“I just think it’s crazy that you like the sound of your own voice so much that you actually think the rest of the world should pay you to hear it.” He pronounces the
P in
pay hard enough so that spit flies out his mouth and onto my forehead.
“We should probably stop doing this,” I say matter-of-factly, wiping him off. My sister always said the one good thing about me was that I’m never two ways about anything at all. That once I make a decision, it’s done.
I sit up, and when I look back at Rory, he’s laughing like his dick’s so good he knows I’ll be back for more. Behind his eyes, though, I see a hurt, and I decide it’s pathetic to see him there like that, with cum on his stomach, trying to pin down his emotions through his hissing and hysteria. When he starts talking again, I can’t hear anything he’s saying. My toes are too loud, buzzing, screaming at me to get out of the bed and onto the refuge of the hardwood floor. When I finally do stand up and walk away, he doesn’t grab for me. That’s how I know for sure we’ve both had our fill.
I slip my jeans on, long and baggy to hide the subtlety of my hips, and jam my naked, unpedicured toes inside my Nike Dunks, the Girls Don’t Cry limited edition, which feels, in a twisted way, almost too fitting for this moment, then grab my jacket from off the back of a black office chair full of clean and dirty clothes. I’m loud when I walk out of his bedroom, quiet when I’m in the hallway, where I skip down the stairs and breathe out another thing gone for good. I’m not afraid of losing anything anymore. Grief lives all over my body.
Bennett Park is cold in the winter. Like hell with a chill that never quits. It’s still dark outside when I open the door and the Fort Washington air slaps me in the face. I like these small sensations—the wind and the frostbite, the tingling at my ears. They bring me back inside my body after spending so much time on Rory’s wretched planet.
I cut through the grass to get to the A train. Pedro, my old neighbor, is running past me with a black JanSport backpack that he’s had since we were in seventh grade and a coffee dripping down the side of a blue-and-white to-go cup. He sucks his teeth while the hot drink burns the whites under his fingernails. He’s probably late for work again. We all are.
Even without the sun, the Heights has already turned on. The echoes of Aventura and my people screaming “Flaca!” at me as I pass by pinches at my shoulders. The melody of our rhythms, urgent and desperate, rings down my eardrums and into my belly.
Ice clings onto the blades of grass in the park, which is otherwise brown and muddy. Everything in Washington Heights feels lived in. Sometimes I imagine that when it’s all said and done, after climate change ravages the Earth and women become barren from poison and pesticides, this will be the only place that survives. The aliens will come down from their green goblin planet and say, “Yes, there were people here once—people who lived, people who loved, people who played dominoes instead of paying their water bills.”
My stomach makes a sound so loud that it startles me. I haven’t eaten in what feels like days, and my body is starving, screaming at me for some sort of sustenance. I double back around the park to pop into Carlos’s bodega. I watch my feet as they dodge dog shit and peanuts. I find a MetroCard stuck on the ground and pray I’ve hit the lotto, leaning down and shoving it in my pocket. Inside the bodega, it smells like cat litter and coffee. Every type of chip or cracker or condom you could imagine hangs down the walls. When I ask Carlos for a breakfast sandwich and coffee, the Spanish clumsily rolls off my tongue. I get why Mami hated it when I answered her in English. I’ve lost some of it, my culture, by drilling down so hard on what I could be if only I were an American.
Carlos hands me a piece of warm bread folded with cheddar cheese toasted between it and a coffee with two sugars and a boatload of condensed milk. One day I’ll drop dead from all the dairy, but today I live to fight another New York morning. I hand him my ATM card and cross my fingers. I can feel my heart racing, praying for the dollars I know aren’t there to magically appear when he swipes it. When my card declines, I pull three loose dollars out of my pocket and fold them over before I place them onto the counter. Carlos puts one finger over his lips to say
shhh and looks away so I can see only the whites in the corner of his eyes. I say thank-you three times then shove the change back into my pockets. Washington Heights is our own little planet, our own little proof of life, and here, we keep each other’s secrets.
The night Nena found out I could sing she grabbed my arm so hard it almost turned blue.
“Do it,” she insisted, throwing me in front of Mami, whose back was turned toward us, her hands wet and sticky and busy making pasteles at Christmastime. The lights in the apartment were red and white, and it was cold because the heater had gone out, so we wore our scarves inside while the voice of Juan Luis Guerra filled our cardboard-thin walls.
“Do what you just did for me for Mami,” Nena insisted while Mami rummaged through the drawer, searching for the wooden spoon, ready to slap us both across the backside for making such a scene on a Sunday.
“Do it, coño!” Nena pleaded, shooting me daggers with her eyes and slamming the drawer, nearly ripping off one of Mami’s fingers.
Mami raised her hand, but before she could make contact with my sister’s skin for swearing, I was singing. When I was through, Mami’s hand still hung in the air, but she had forgotten all about Nena’s filthy mouth.
