Drown

Yunior tells us that his mother’s youngest sister, Yrma, had arrived in the U.S.—after implied struggle—in the year that this story takes place. Yrma and her husband, whom Yunior calls tío (English: uncle) Miguel, moved into an apartment in the Bronx. Yunior’s father has determined that the whole family should have a party, and everyone else “thought it a dope idea” (23). This tío Miguel is ostensibly the same uncle that Yunior mentions in “Ysrael”, placing “Fiesta, 1980” at a later point in the chronology of Yunior’s childhood. In “Ysrael,” Rafa and Yunior lived with their mother in Santo Domingo, and Madai, their younger sister, has not yet been born. In this story, the entire family has moved from Santo Domingo and joined Ramón in New Jersey.

Yunior narrates that on the day of the party, his father (whom he calls “Papi”, and whose real name is Ramón) comes home at six o’clock from work—right on time. Everyone is dressed and ready to go when Papi comes home: if they weren’t, he would beat them. Papi enters the house without talking to anybody—even pushing his mother aside—and heads directly to the shower. Rafa and Yunior exchange knowing looks, as they both know that Papi has just been with his mistress, a Puerto Rican woman, and that he wants to wash off the evidence quickly.

Yunior observes that his mother, whom he calls “Mamí”, looks really nice: “The United States had finally put some meat on her…she had cut her hair short and was wearing tons of cheap-ass jewelry which on her didn’t look too lousy. She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree”(24). The whole family waits for Papi to finish his shower, and Yunior observes that while Mamí expressed excitement for the party in the morning, she now seems like she just wants to get it over with. Yunior intimates that he never wants to go anywhere with his family, and that he and Rafa yearn to join the neighborhood baseball game that they can hear progressing outside. Rafa frowns and when Yunior frowns back, Rafa puts up his fist and says, “Don’t you mirror me” (25). Rafa then punches Yunior, and Yunior says that he would have punched him back if Papi had not walked into the living room at that very moment.

Papi asks Mamí if everyone has eaten yet, and Mamí says yes. Through their interaction, we are made aware that Yunior is never supposed to be given food before car trips. Yunior is supposed to know this, but he has failed to refrain from eating, or to remind his mother of this rule when she served everyone food. Papi begins to question Yunior, and Rafa inches away from his brother, a habit he employs every time Papi is going to smack Yunior. Yunior does not dare look Papi in the eye as Papi pulls him to his feet by his ear and begins to threaten him. Yunior begins to cry. Mami tells Papi that is enough, and that it’s not Yunior’s fault. Yunior observes that his toddler younger sister, Madai, has become too scared to open her eyes, as “being around Papi all her life had turned her into a major-league wuss”, and “anytime Papi raised his voice her lip would start trembling, like some specialized tuning fork” (26). Yunior intimates that he is constantly in trouble with his father, and claims that their fights don’t bother him too much. He also reveals that he still wanted his father to love him throughout his childhood, which never seemed strange or contradictory, until his father left them years later.

Mamí blesses each of her children, which is how all of their trips begin. They all get into Papi’s “brand-new, lime-green and bought to impress” Volkswagen van (27). Every time Yunior is in it and it goes over 20mph, he throws up. Mami blames the upholstery, as, in her mind, “American things—appliances, mouthwash, funny-looking upholstery—all [seem] to have an intrinsic badness about them” (27).

Once the journey begins, Mamí asks Yunior how he is doing and gives him four mints to suck on, while Yunior avoids trading glances with Papi, who has “this one look, furious and sharp, that always [leaves] him feeling bruised” (28). Yunior recalls that his mother had also thrown three mints out of the window at the beginning of their journey—as an offering to Eshú (a santería deity). Yunior sucks on the mints as they pass the Newark Airport. Yunior observes that Rafa is ignoring him—as is his habit when Yunior is in trouble. Yunior observes Madai, who is asleep, and who would be very scared of the low-flying planes if she were awake. He also notes that she looks very cute.

While Yunior concentrates on sucking the candy, Papi begins to loosen up, remarking that come evening he may not need to scrub out the VW after all. Yunior speculates that “Maybe he was thinking about that Puerto Rican woman or maybe he was just happy that we were all together. I could never tell,” (28). At the toll booth, Papi feels good enough to get out of the van and search around for dropped coins—a bit that he does to amuse Madai. As cars begin to honk, Yunior sinks down into his seat while Rafa grins and waves his hand at the motorists. Mami awakens Madai, who lets out a screech of delight that Yunior loves. As they set out again, Yunior starts feeling woozy. His mother’s hand tenses on his shoulder and Papi gives him a stern look.

Yunior recalls that the first time he got sick, his father was taking him to the library. Rafa was amazed that the car had made Yunior sick, as their “third world childhood” had given him a “steel-lined stomach” (29). Mamí had fixed him a honey-and-onion concoction for his stomach when they got home, and Papi had cleaned out the van himself, which was a big deal because he never cleaned anything on his own.

It is implied that Yunior has thrown up in the present timeline. Yunior observes that, this time, his vomit was minimal and that Papi would be able to wash it off of the door with the hose. Papi, angry nonetheless, jams his finger into Yunior’s cheek. They stop only once, so that Yunior can brush his teeth. Mami had brought along his toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, and stands along the side of the road with Yunior so that he doesn’t feel alone.

The family arrives at the party. Tío Miguel is a larger-than-life, gregarious figure who gives them all a warm welcome and remarks that Yunior looks horrible. Rafa tells him that Yunior has thrown up, which Yunior is not thankful for. Miguel then tries to console Yunior, telling him that he was very ill on the plane to the U.S. He offers to get Yunior some alcohol, and Mami chides him, saying that Yunior is too young. Miguel scoffs, saying that if they were in Santo Domingo, Yunior would “be getting laid by now” (31). Yunior, egged on by this comment, asks his mother when he will get to visit the Dominican Republic. Rafa sasses him, saying that the only pussy he will ever get is in the D.R. Tía Yrma comes out and greets everyone except Papi with warmth and care. With him, she initially recoils, before giving him a kiss. She gives the Mamí and Papi a tour of the apartment, which Yunior sarcastically remarks is “furnished in Contemporary Dominican Tacky” (32).

Yunior and Rafa join the kids in the living room. The group has already started eating. There is one boy who is three years younger than Yunior—Wilquins—and two girls named Leti (Wilquins’ older sister) and Mari (their neighbor). Yunior thinks both girls are “cute as hell”, and can tell that Leti, with her “serious tetas” (English: boobs), matches Rafa’s taste in girls (32). Yunior can tell that Rafa is going to go after her. Rafa boldly sits right in between the two girls. Neither of the girls think much of Yunior, which doesn’t bother him: he is too terrified to speak to girls unless he is calling them “stupidos” (32). When he tries to speak to Wilquins, Mari informs him that Wilquins cannot speak, although he understands words. Wilquins then motions for Yunior to join him in a game of dominoes. Teamed up, Wilquins and Yunior beat Rafa and Leti at the game twice, which puts Rafa in a foul mood. Rafa begins to look like he wants to punch the other boys. Leti whispers in Wilquins’ ear, telling him it’s OK.

Yunior can hear his parents in the kitchen, “slipping into their usual modes” (33). Papi uses his loud and argumentative voice while Mami whispers. Yunior goes into the kitchen a few times—“once so the tíos could show off how much bullshit [he’d]been able to cram in [his] head the last few years”, and once to get a soda (33). He observes that his mother, as she fries pastelitos with her sister, seems happier, and that her hands move with beautiful precision. He observes the intimacy between the two women, before his mother shoos him out of the kitchen, warning him with her eyes that he should not linger long and thus incur the wrath of his father.

Back with the other children, Yunior observes that, while he is accustomed to the loudness of his father’s voice, it makes the other children shift in their seats uncomfortably. Wilquins is bold enough to turn the TV louder, but his father comes into the room with a beer in his hand and immediately demands to know if Wilquins was the one who turned up the volume. His father looks ready to beat him, but turns down the volume instead.

The story then shifts to a flashback. Yunior recounts the first time that he met his father’s mistress—right after his father got the van. His father had been taking Yunior on short trips to try to get him used to the van, and, although it wasn’t working and Yunior would become ill at the end of every trip, Yunior recounts that he was happy to spend time with his father: “These were the only times me and Papi did anything together, ” adding that, “When we were alone, he treated me much better, like maybe I was his son or something” (35).

Yunior remembers that on each of these trips, Mami would cross him and give him mints. Although Mami correctly felt that the little excursions would not cure Yunior, Papi had told her to shut up, asking her what she knew about it, anyway. On the day Yunior had met Papi’s mistress, Papi unexpectedly took him to her light blue house. She helped Yunior clean up his vomit. Yunior remembers that she had “dry, papery hands”, and was “very thin” with a “cloud of brown hair rising above her narrow face and the sharpest blackest eyes you’ve ever seen” (35). When Yunior tells her his name, she identifies him as “the smart one” and offers to let him see her books. Yunior quickly recognizes that the books are actually his father’s. Papi has Yunior watch TV while he and his mistress go upstairs. Yunior, “too scared of what was happening to poke around”, watches an hour of news while feeling ashamed and anxious (36). Papi then comes down and they leave.

Back in the main timeline of the story, Yunior observes that the women have laid out the food, and that no one but the children thank them. He observes that all of his favorite foods are included in the spread. However, when he joins the other kids around the serving table, Papi roughly takes the paper plate out of his hand. Tía Yrma asks what’s wrong, and Papi tells her that Yunior will not be eating, while Mami pretends to help Rafa with a dish. Yrma asks why Yunior isn’t allowed to eat, to which Papi responds, “Because I said so” (37). The other adults pretend like they don’t hear any of this conversation and duck back into the room in which bachata music is being played, while the children—with their full plates—make their way back to the living room. Papi tells Yunior that he will beat him if he eats anything, and that he will even beat Rafa, in front of everyone, if Rafa gives Yunior food. He asks Yunior if he understands. Yunior nods, although he wants to kill him. Papi then gives Yunior’s head a little shove, as if he can read the boy’s thoughts.

Back in the TV room, Leti asks Yunior what’s wrong with his father. “He’s a dick,” Yunior replies (38). Rafa tells him not to say that in front of other people, and Yunior remarks that it is easy for Rafa to say as much, with a full plate of food. Rafa then teases him for being a “pukey little baby” (38). Yunior decides not to escalate the fighting any further, and instead concentrates on the television. Tía Yrma comes into the room and asks Yunior to help her with the ice—specifying that she already asked his father for permission.

Yunior intimates that Tía Yrma “didn’t have any kids”, but that he “could tell that she wanted them” (38). Once they are outside, she gives him the first of three pastelitos that she has smuggled out of the apartment in her pocketbook. They sit down on the stairs. Yunior observes that she looks a lot like his mother, although her frequent smiling sets the two women apart. She questions him about his home life, and asks if he and his siblings are OK. Yunior recognizes it as an interrogation, and decides to stay quiet out of either protectiveness for his mother or fear of his father—he cannot quite tell which. Tía Yrma asks if there have been many fights. Yunior responds that there have been none, because Papi is at work too much. Tía Yrma then, knowingly and sarcastically, repeats the word “work” as if it is the name of someone she doesn’t like.

Yunior’s narration then shifts to flashback again, as he recalls that he and Rafa don’t talk about his father’s mistress. He intimates that his father has taken them both to eat dinner at her house, and that they have acted like nothing is wrong on those occasions: “The affair was like a hole in our living room floor, one we’d gotten so used to circumnavigating that we sometimes forgot it was there” (39-40).

By midnight, at the party, all the adults have begun “crazy dancing” (40). Rafa has forced Yunior to guard the door to a room within which Madai is sleeping, and Rafa and Leti are fooling around. Yunior observes the carousing adults, seeing that his parents appear to be enjoying themselves. Mami and Tía Yrma spend a lot of time side by side, whispering, and Yunior fully expects a brawl to break out, as he has never been out with his family without a fight breaking out. He fantasizes about his father being outed as a cheater in public during the inevitable brawl. Everything remains calm, however, and Mami and Papi share only singular dances at a time as she spends most of her time in conversation with her sister.

Yunior tries to picture his mother without his father and finds it difficult: “It seemed like Papi had always been with her, even when we were waiting in Santo Domingo for him to send for us”(41). He reminisces about the only photograph that the family has of his mother as a young woman, before she married his father. Mami notices Yunior studying her and smiles at him. He suddenly wants to go hug her, for no other reason than that he loves her. He doesn’t, however, as eleven dancing adults separate them from one another. Later, Yunior realizes that he must have fallen asleep, because, the next thing he knows, he is being woken up by Rafa and rushed through goodbyes as Papi brings the van around downstairs. Papi then bursts in and tells them “to get the hell downstairs before some pendejo  [English: asshole] cop [gives] him a ticket” (42).

Yunior switches to a flashback again, intimating that he must have been out of sorts after he first met his father’s mistress, because his mother had asked him if everything was okay, and if he and Rafa had been fighting. Incidentally, they had both been listening to their upstairs neighbors beating their children on the day she decided to ask him. He intimates that, by that point, he and Rafa had already discussed the Puerto Rican woman, whom they call Papi’s sucia, (roughly translated as “dirty girl”). Papi had already brought Rafa to meet him twice by the time the brothers discussed it, and Rafa had never brought it up with Yunior. Yunior recounts that he did not let on about anything when his mother questioned him that day. He reveals that, in retrospect, he wonders if his mother would have confronted his father if he had told her. Instead, though, he lied and told her that he was having trouble in school in order to restore normality between them.

Back in the story’s narrative present, Yunior observes that they are on the turnpike, just past Exit 11. His siblings are asleep, and, in the darkness, he observes that, although both of his parents are wide awake, they are quiet and still. He cannot see their expressions. Every now and then, the van fills with the light of headlights. He says, “Mamí”, and both of his parents look back, already knowing that he is about to be sick.