The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,19

a board and you’re thinking she’s going to order you to stop wearing bras again because they’re suffocating your potential breasts, discouraging them from popping out of you. You’re ready to argue with her to the death because you’re as possessive of your bras as you are of the pads you now buy yourself

But no, she doesn’t say a word about eating more plátanos. Instead, she takes your right hand and guides you. Your mom is rough in all things but this time she is gentle. You did not think her capable of it.

Do you feel that? she asks in her too-familiar raspy voice.

At first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been and your breathing is what you hear.

Don’t you feel that? She turns toward you. Coño, muchacha, stop looking at me and feel.

So you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you’re thinking of Helen Keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nun-ish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something. A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change. You become light-headed and you can feel a throbbing in your blood, a beat, a rhythm, a drum. Bright lights zoom through you like photon torpedoes, like comets. You don’t know how or why you know this thing but you know it cannot be doubted. It is exhilarating. For as long as you’ve been alive you’ve had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tía’s winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative. That was before Santo Domingo, before you knew about the Great Power of God.

I feel it, you say, too loudly. Lo siento.

And like that, everything changes. Before the winter is out the doctors remove that breast you were kneading, along with the axillary lymph node. Because of the operations she will have trouble lifting her arm over her head for the rest of her life. Her hair begins to fallout, and one day she pulls it all out herself and puts it inside a plastic bag. You change too. Not right away, but it happens. And it’s in that bathroom where it all begins. Where you begin.

A punk chick. That’s what I became. A Siouxsie and the Banshees-loving punk chick. The puertorican kids on the block couldn’t stop laughing when they saw my hair, they called me Blacula, and the morenos, they didn’t know what to say: they just called me devil-bitch. Yo, devil-bitch, yo, yo! My tía Rubelka thought it was some kind of mental illness. Hija, she said while frying pastelitos, maybe you need help. But my mother was the worst. It’s the last straw, she screamed. The. Last. Straw. But it always was with her. Mornings when I came downstairs she’d be in the kitchen making her coffee in la greca and listening to Radio WADO and when she saw me and my hair she’d get mad all over again, as if during the night she’d forgotten who I was. My mother was one of the tallest women in Paterson, and her anger was just as tall. It pincered you in its long arms, and if you showed any weakness you were finished. Que muchacha tan fea, she said in disgust, splashing the rest of her coffee in the sink. Fea’s become my new name. Nothing new, really. She’s been saying stuff like that all our lives. My mother would never win any awards, believe me. You could call her an absentee parent: if she wasn’t at work she was sleeping, and when she was around it seemed all she did was scream and hit. As kids, me and Oscar were more scared of our mother than we were of the dark or el cuco. She would hit us anywhere, in front of anyone, always free with the chanclas and the correa, but now with her cancer there’s not much she can do anymore. The last time she tried to whale on me it was because of my hair, but instead of cringing or running I punched her