The Dirty Girls Social Club: A Novel

lauren

Twice a yearx, every year, the sucias show up. Me, Elizabeth, Sara, Rebecca, Usnavys, and Amber. We can be anywhere in the world—and, being sucias, we travel a lot—but we get on a plane, train, whatever, and get back to Boston for a night of food, drink (my specialty), chisme ycharla. (That’s gossip and chat, y’all.)

We’ve done this for six years, ever since we graduated from Boston University and promised each other to meet twice a year, every year, for the rest of our lives. Yeah, it’s a big commitment. But you know how melodramatic college girls can get. And, hey, so far we’ve done it, you know? So far, most of us have not missed a single meeting of the Buena Sucia Social Club. And that, my friends, is because we sucias are responsible and committed, which is way more than I can say for most of the men I’ve known and Ed the bigheaded Texican in particular.

I’ll get to that in a minute.

I’m here waiting for them now, slouched in an orange plastic window booth seat at El Caballito restaurant, a Jamaica Plain dive that serves Puerto Rican food but calls it Cuban in hopes of attracting a more upscale clientele. It hasn’t worked. The only other customers tonight are three young tigres with fade haircuts, baggy jeans, plaid Hilfiger shirts, gold hoops flashing on their earlobes. They speak slangy Spanish and keep checking their beepers. I try not to stare, but they catch my eyes a couple of times. I look away, examine my newly French-manicured acrylic nail tips. My hands fascinate me because they look so feminine and together. With one finger I trace the outline of a cartoon map of Cuba printed on the paper placemat. I linger briefly on the dot representing Havana, try to picture my dad as a schoolboy with shorts and a tiny gold watch, looking north across the sea to his future.

When I finally look up, one of the young men stares me down. What’s his problem? Doesn’t he know how gross I am? I turn my eyes toward the cars inching through the snow on Centre Street. The flakes twinkle in the yellow glow of headlights. Another dreary Boston evening. I hate November. Got dark at about four this afternoon, been spitting ice ever since. As if the wood paneling on the walls and the old buzzing refrigerator in the corner of the small restaurant weren’t depressing enough, my sighing keeps fogging up the window. It’s hot in here. Humid, too. The air smells of cheap men’s cologne and fried pork. Someone in the kitchen sings off-key to a popular salsa song while dishes crash and clang. I strain to understand the lyrics, hoping they’ll match the peppy rhythm and lift me out of my funk. When I realize they’re about a love gone so wrong the guy wants to kill his lover or himself, I stop trying. Like I need to be reminded.

I chug my warm bottle of Presidente beer, burp silently. I’m so tired I can feel my pulse in my eyeballs. They sting under dry contact lenses every time I blink. I didn’t sleep last night, or the night before, and I was too tired to take the contacts out. I forgot to feed the cat, too. Oops. She’s fat; she’ll survive. It’s Ed, of course. The thought of him makes my heart seize up and my forehead get lumpy. You can tell what stage I’m at in my doomed relationships by the state of my fingernails. Good nails: bad relationship, keeping up appearances. Ugly nails: happy Lauren letting herself go. You can also tell by how fat I am. When happy, I keep food down and stay around a size ten. When sad, I vomit like a Roman emperor and shrink to a six.

My lavender size eight Bebe pants, wool and low on the hips, are baggy tonight. If I move in my seat I can feel the space in them, rubbing. Ed, the bigheaded Texican, is a speechwriter (read: professional liar) for the mayor of New York. He is also my long-distance fiancé. According to his voicemail at work (I busted into it, I cannot tell a lie) he appears to be messing around with a chick named Lola. I joke not. Lola.

What is that? And where’s that waitress? I need another beer.

I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the universe demonstrating once more how much it hates me. I’m serious. I’ve had a crappy life, crappy childhood, crappy everything you can think of, and now, even though I’ve made something not crappy of my professional life, all the aforementioned crap keeps coming back in the form of smarmy, good-looking dudes who treat me like, you guessed it, crap. I don’t pick them, exactly. They find me, with that whacked radar they share. Attention, attention, ahead, to the right, tragic chick at the bar, sort of pretty, downing gin and tonics, weeping to self, just stuck finger down throat in bathroom—screw her. Over. Yes, screw her over.

As a result, I’m the kind of woman who will search a man’s wallet and pockets and kick his ass if he does me wrong. I would stop this unacceptable behavior except I almost always find evidence of his wrongdoing—a receipt from the dinner he had at the dimly-lit Italian bistro when he said he was watching the Cowboys with his buddies, a scrap of napkin from a deli with the cashier’s phone number scrawled in the bubbly blue letters of uneducated, easy women. He always does something sneaky, no matter who he is. It comes with the territory of loving the unlovable disaster of me.

Yes, I have a therapist. No, it hasn’t helped.

There’s no way a therapist can solve the crisis of chronic, mother-sanctioned infidelity among Latin men. It’s not just a stereotype. I wish. Know what my Cuban grandma in Union City says when I tell her my man is cheating? "Bueno, fight harder for him, mi vida." How’s a therapist gonna help me with that? Your man cheats, these traditional women who are supposed to be, like, your allies—they blame you. Well, abuelita asks in raspy, heavily accented English, sucking on her Virginia Slims, have you gained weight? Do you make sure you look good when you see him, or do you show up in those blue jeans? How’s your hair? Not short again, I hope. Are you fat again?

My therapist, a non-Latina with elegant scarves, thinks my problems stem from stuff like my dad’s narcissistically self-absorbed personality disorder, her diagnosis for the way he relates everything in life to himself, Fidel Castro, and Cuba. She’s never been to Miami. If she had, she’d understand that all Cuban exiles older than forty-five do the same thing Papi does. To the exiles, there is no country more fascinating and important than Cuba, a Caribbean island with a population of eleven million. That’s about two million less than live in New York City. Cuba is also the mecca to which all older exiles still seem to think they will return once that son of a bitch Castro falls. Mass delusion, I tell you. When your family lives a lie that big, living with men who lie is easy. When I explain it all to my therapist, she suggests I give myself a Cubadectomy and get on with my American life. Not a bad idea, really. But like the children of most Cuban exiles I know, I can’t figure out how. Cuba is the oozing recurrent tumor we inherit from our fathers.

Right now, I think maybe a fling with one of the pretty-boy gangsters across the room might do the trick. Look how they eat with their fingers, the garlicky oil dripping from the shrimp into their sexy goatees. That’s passion, an emotion Ed the stiff chuckler couldn’t recognize to save his life. I could do one of them for revenge, you know? Either that, or I could eat cheese fries and donuts, get bulemic until the whites of my eyes turn the red of a heartache. Or I could go to my small apartment and slurp too many homemade screwdrivers, hide under my white goosedown comforter and cry while that intense Mexican singer Ana Gabriel—the one with the Chinese mom?—wails on my Bose about the love she has for her guitar.

I need a night with my sucias, y’all. Where are those girls?

Tonight is special, too, because this (drumroll, please) is the tenth anniversary of the very first time the sucias got together. We were all freshman journalism and communications students at Boston University, drunk off peach and blueberry girly beer (hey, at least it wasn’t Zima) bought with our fake drivers’ licenses, playing pool at that dark, smoky Gillians club where everyone used to go, dancing to a throbbing Suzanne Vega Luka remix until the bouncers threw us out on our sorry and naive culitos. We clicked that night. Or cliqued, rather. Oh, and puked. Almost forgot that part.

Our Reporting 101 professor with the dyed-black comb-over told us it was the first time so many Latinas had enrolled in the communications program at once. He bared filmy yellow fangs as he said it, a smile, but trembled in his too-tight tweed blazer. We scared him, and people like him, as all things minority will—especially in Boston. (I might get to that in a minute.) Anyway, our collective power of intimidation in this increasingly Spanglish, Goya-beanified town was enough to make us instant and permanent best friends. Still is.

A lot of you probably don’t speak Spanish, and so don’t know what the hell a "sucia" is. That’s okay. No, really. Some of us sucias can’t speak Spanish, either—but don’t tell my editors at the Boston Gazette, where I am increasingly certain I was hired only to be a red-hot-‘n’-spicy clichéd chili pepper-ish cross between Charo and Lois Lane, and where, thank God, they still haven’t figured out what a fraud I am.

I’m a pretty good journalist. I’m just not a good Latina, at least not the way they expect. This afternoon an editor stopped by my desk and asked me where she might go to buy Mexican jumping beans for her son’s birthday party. Even if I were a Mexican-American (and here’s a hint: I want to wax Frida Kahlo’s furry caterpillar unibrow and I’m thoroughly uninterested in anything with the words boxer and East L.A. in it) I wouldn’t have known something that stupid.

You might have imagined by now—thanks to TV and Hollywood—that a sucia is something beautiful and curvy and foreign, something really super Latina, you know, like the mysterious name of a tortured-looking, bloody-haired Catholic saint, or a treasured recipe from a short, fat, wrinkled old abuelita who works erotic magic with chocolate and all her secret herbs and spices while the mariachis wail, Salma Hayek flutters castanets, and Antonio Banderas romps a white snarfling horse through the cactus with, like, I don’t know what, a winged pig or some crap in his embroidered knapsack, and all of it directed by Gregory Nava and produced by Edward James Olmos. Get freaking over it, lames. It’s, like, so not.

Sucia means dirty girl. Usnavys came up with it. "Buena sucia is actually pretty offensive to most Spanish-speaking people, akin to big smelly ‘ho." So Buena Sucia Social Club is, how do you say, irreverent. Right? And obnoxious. It’s a pun, too, see, taken from the name of those old-as-dirt Cuban musicians who record with Ry Cooder and star in German documentaries, who every non-Latino I know thinks I am genetically predisposed to like. (I’m not.) We’re clever and, like, hip when it comes to pop culture, we sucias. Okay, fine. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe we’re stupid. But we think it’s funny, okay? Well, Rebecca doesn’t, but she’s about as funny as Hitler’s hemorrhoids. (You didn’t hear that from me.)

I check my Movado watch, a gift from three boyfriends ago. The watch has a blank face, like mine when the man who gave it to me told me he was going back to his ex. Ed thinks I shouldn’t wear it anymore, says it upsets him. But I’m, like, Dude, if you bought me anything halfway decent I’d throw it out. It’s a nice watch. Reliable. Predictable. Not like Ed. I’m still early, according to it. I don’t need to get so nervous, then. All I need is another beer to calm my nerves. Where’s that waitress?

They’ll be here in a few minutes. I’m always early. It’s the reporter training—come late, lose the story. Lose the story, risk having some envious and mediocre white guy in the newsroom accuse you of not deserving your job. She’s Latina, all she has to do is shake her butt and she gets what she wants around here. One of them actually said that once, loud, so I could hear. He was in charge of compiling the TV listings, and hadn’t written an original sentence in about fifty-seven years. He was sure his fate was due to affirmative action, especially after the editor in chief of the paper had me and four other minorities (read: coloreds) stand up during a company briefing in the auditorium, just so he could say, "Take a good look at the faces of the future of the Gazette." I think he felt quite politically correct at that moment, as all those blue and green eyes turned to me in—what was it?—in horror.

Here’s how my job interview went: You’re a Latina? How … neat. You must speak Spanish, then? When you’ve got $15.32 in your bank account and student loans coming due in a month, what do you say to a question like that, even when the answer is no? Do you say, Hey, I noticed your last name is Gadreau, you must speak French then? Nah. You play along. I wanted that gig so bad I would have tried speaking Mandarin. With a name like Lauren Fernández, they figured Spanish was part of the package. But that’s the American disease as I see it: rampant, illogical stereotyping. We would not be America without it.

I admit I didn’t tell them I was half white trash, born and raised in New Orleans. My mom’s people are bayou swamp monsters with oil under their fingernails and a rusty olive-green washing machine in front of the double-wide, the kind of people you see on Cops, where the guy is skinny as a week-dead kitten, covered with swastika tattoos and crying because the police blew up his meth lab.

Those are my people. Them, and New Jersey Cubans with shiny white shoes.

Because of all of this and more that I won’t bore you with right now, I have molded myself into a chronic overachiever, and have focused my entire existence on a singular goal: succeed at life—meaning work, friends, and family—in spite of it all. Wherever possible, I dress as though I sprang from a completely different and much more normal set of circumstances. Nothing thrills me more than when people who don’t know me assume I’m from a typical, moneyed Cuban family in Miami.

Sometimes I think I’ve made it to the other side, where well-balanced people without issues live; but then a bigheaded Texican like Ed comes along and I’m paralyzed yet again with the realization that no matter how perfect I make myself, I’ll never be as important as a Harley beer bong to my mom; no matter how much I sock away in my 401(k) or how many writing prizes I bring home, I’ll never be near as important to my dad as pre-1959 Cuba, where the sky was bluer and tomatoes tasted better. Men like Ed find me, because they smell the hidden truth of Lauren on the wind: I hate myself because no one else has ever bothered to love me.

I ask again: What the heck kind of therapist can help someone like me?

I sat in the editorial offices during that interview in my navy blue discount Barami suit and three-year-old pumps with a hole in the sole, and told them what they wanted to hear: Sí, sí, I will be your spicy Carmen Miranda. I will dance the lambada in your dismal gray broadsheet. But what I thought was: Just hire me. I’ll learn Spanish later.

First week on the job an editor strolled past my desk and said in the deliberate, too-loud English they would all come to use on me, I’m so glad you’re here representing your people. I wanted to ask him just who he thought my people were, but I already knew the answer. My people, as far as his people are concerned, are stereotypes: brown of face and hair, uniformly poor and uneducated, swarming across the border from down there countries with all their belongings in plastic grocery bags.

I need another beer. Bad.

Oye, I call to the waitress. "Traeme otra." She leans into her big hip and pushes the long black hair out of her pretty eyes. Como? she asks, looking confused. She was watching a Mexican soap opera on a small TV behind the counter and looks annoyed to be bothered with, you know, work. I have to repeat the request for another drink because my accent is so thick. Still confused. Crud. I finally hold the empty beer bottle upside down and lift my eyebrows. Sign language of a poseur. She nods, chews her cud, and moseys to the back for another cerveza. I learned Spanish later, all right, on the job. But the Puerto Rican waitress can tell I’m a fraud.

I watch the street again, and wait for a familiar suciamobile. You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by the cars in it, right? It’s an even mix around here these days. You got your short, crummy Honda and Toyota lowriders with the FEAR THIS decals and peeing Calvins in the back window, scraping along the gutters with ice all up in the engines (please, someone tell me why Puerto Ricans think Japanese lowriders are a good idea in New England) and you got your newish Volvo sedans transporting some mom to the pharmacy for meds while her ADD triplets rip chunks of hair from their scalps.

I myself don’t have a car. I could afford one, okay, so don’t laugh. I’m past the fabled six-figure mark, thanks to that little national writing prize. But I got used to the city’s public transit system when I was a student, and I like the rumble of it in my life. Plus, in my position, it’s cool to get out and listen to the way people really talk.

I write a new weekly Lifestyles section column mercifully called My Life, created originally by Chuck Spring as Mi Vida Loca, a way, he told me, to connect to the Latina people or whatever.

It’s supposed to be confessional, my column, a (Latina) diary with punch. Would I rather run to the woods in stained coveralls and live like Annie Dillard, examining the brutal life of—what lives in the woods? Ants?—ants when I see Chuck Spring, bounding toward me with that golly-gee look on his face, dressed for another meeting of his Harvard Final Club, where square-jawed men drink martinis and throw change at strippers? Yes. Do I need this job too much to flee or complain? Double yes, with a cherry on top. So I make the best of it.

It’s not that I’m not appreciated at the Gazette. Chuck and the other editors value my diversity, as long as I think like they do, write like they do, and agree with them on everything. Far as I can tell, Gazette newsroom diversity means hiring team players, compliant as beaten dogs yet different enough in skin tone, last name, or national origin to be shut out of the little silly things, like promotion. It means sending the only black guy in the news department to Haiti to cover unrest, even though there’s a white woman reporter who sits ten feet from him and happens to be fluent in Haitian Creole; it also means labeling said woman an ungrateful, vitriolic banshee if she complains. I don’t want to talk about it right now. Ow, ow, headache in my eye.

Right now, me want beer. Ooga ooga.

It’s getting a little harder to take public transit because the Gazette recently put up billboards all over town with my huge red-brown curly hair and grinning freckled face on them, accompanied by the idiotic words Lauren Fernández: Her Casa Is Your Casa, Boston. This happened, of course, right after all those new census stories came out about how Hispanics are the biggest minority in the nation now. Before everyone published that oxymoron on the front page, the mainstream media could not have given a Chihuahua chalupa about Hispanics. I couldn’t get Chuck Spring interested in any stories about Hispanics to save my life. Now that Hispanics are big business, that’s all he wants me to write about.

Money talks, see. Hispanics are no longer seen as a foreign unwashed menace taking over the public schools with that dirty little language of theirs; we are a domestic market. To be marketed to. Thus, me. My column. And my billboards. Greed makes people do crazy things. Craziest thing of all is the way the promotions department had my face darkened in the picture so I looked more like what they probably think a Latina is supposed to look like. You know, brown. First day those ads popped up next to Route 93 and in the T stations the sucias started calling. Hey, Cubana, when did you get Chicana on us? Answer: When I became useful to the Gazette, apparently.

In honor of Usnavys having christened us, we allowed her to choose the venue for tonight’s anniversary celebration dinner. In keeping with her general need to return to the ‘hood and prove she has made something bigger and better with her life than anyone there ever can or will, she picked El Caballito. A gray-haired Cuban guy with a warm smile owns it, and I swear he looks exactly—exactly, girl—like Papi. That means he’s five-six, so pale you can see the blue veins in his bowed legs, balding, and with a nose that reminds you of that Sesame Street Count Muppet. Every time I see that dude I get the sinking feeling I’m the product of centuries of enthusiastic tropical inbreeding.

Anyway, Usnavys—not a small girl by any stretch of the imagination—also likes El Caballito because each order comes with—no lie—four album-sized plastic plates. You get your meat or fish on one. You get your mountain of white rice on another. You get your soupy black or red beans on a third. And a plate of greasy fried plantains, either maduros, which are ripe, squishy, and sweet as candy, or tostones, which are green, fried in slices then smashed flat, fried again, and tossed in garlic.

Refried plantains, if you will.

That’s how we had to explain them to Amber, anyway, because she thinks all Latinas are just like her. She thinks we all eat the same dishes she grew up eating in Oceanside, California. She thinks all Latinas give a rat’s rear about menudo, a soup they voluntarily make with tripe, a line of little Mexican ladies rinsing corpse poop out of the pig intestines in the kitchen sink. Uh, no. Sorry. Not for me. She honestly thinks California-style Mexican food is universal among Latinas and so the only bananas she’d ever seen before coming to Boston were the ones her mom got at the Albertson’s and chopped over her corn flakes before taking her to marching band practice in the minivan.

She should know better by now, but I honestly can’t tell if she really gets it yet. She’s still always up in my face with all that dated, 1970s Chicano movement, brown and proud, West Coast Que viva la raza jive. And when she’s not up in my face, she’s up in Rebecca’s face. Rebecca is her cause. Amber’s a trip. You’ll see.

Sometimes you get a fifth plate at El Caballito, too, filled with something we Caribbean Latinos call salad, a couple slices of avocado, raw onion, and tomato; to this you add salt, vinegar, and oil. There’s a reason, my friends, that all the Puerto Rican ladies you see on the street are wide as a damn bus. There’s a reason the Cubans down in Union City argue about politics while those sausage fingers jab the air. Cubans and Puerto Ricans don’t dig salad much, but they love anything fried, especially meat that once oinked. The people on those islands, isolated, you would think, for tens of thousands of years, seem to believe puerco makes you strong and healthy. I went to Cuba a while back, to meet my relatives, and they slaughtered a scrawny little sad-eyed yard pig for me, and I was, like, ick, and they were, all, what’s wrong with you, don’t you eat meat? You’re going to die de