Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [11]
AI and Miggs traded glances over their character sheets. I don’t think so, dude.
And right there he learned something about his friends he’d never known (or at least never admitted to himself). Right there he had an epiphany that echoed through his fat self: He realized his fucked-up comic-book-reading, role-playing-game-loving, no-sports-playing friends were embarrassed by him.
Knocked the architecture right out of his legs. He closed the game early, the Exterminators found the Destroyers’ hideout right away — That was bogus, AI groused. After he showed them out he locked himself in his room, lay in bed for a couple of stunned hours, then got up, undressed in the bathroom he no longer had to share because his sister was at Rutgers, and examined himself in the mirror. The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Or like the fat blackish kid in Beto Hernández’s Palomar.
Jesus Christ, he whispered. I’m a Morlock.
The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly?
She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take after me.
Dominican parents! You got to love them!
Spent a week looking at himself in the mirror, turning every which way, taking stock, not flinching, and decided at last to be like Roberto Duran: No más. That Sunday he went to Chucho’s and had the barber shave his Puerto Rican ‘fro off (Wait a minute, Chucho’s partner said. You’re Dominican?) Oscar lost the mustache next, and then the glasses, bought contacts with the money he was making at the lumberyard and tried to polish up what remained of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer. But he was really too far gone for quick fixes. The next time AI and Miggs saw him he’d been starving himself for three days straight. Miggs said, Dude, what’s the matter with you?
Changes, Oscar said pseudo-cryptically:
What, are you some album cover now?
He shook his head solemnly. I’m embarking on a new cycle of my life. Listen to the guy. He already sounds like he’s in college.
That summer his mother sent him and his sister to Santo Domingo, and this time he didn’t fight it like he had in the recent past. It’s not like he had much in the States keeping him.
He arrived in Baní with a stack of notebooks and a plan to fill them all up. Since he could no longer be a game master he decided to try his hand at being a real writer. The trip turned out to be something of a turning point for him. Instead of discouraging his writing, chasing him out of the house like his mother used to, his abuela, Nena Inca, let him be. Allowed him to sit in the back of the house as long as he wanted, didn’t insist that he should be ‘out in the world’. (She had always been overprotective of him and his sister. Too much bad luck in this family, she sniffed.) Kept the music off and brought him his meals at exactly the same time every day. His sister ran around with her hot Island friends, always jumping out of the house in a bikini and going off to different parts of the Island for overnight trips, but he stayed put. When any family members came looking for him his abuela chased them off with a single imperial sweep of her hand. Can’t you see the muchacho’s working? What’s he doing? his cousins asked, confused. He’s being a genius is what, La Inca replied haughtily. Now váyanse. (Later when he thought about it he realized that these very cousins could probably have gotten him laid if only he’d bothered to hang out with them. But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.) In the afternoons, when he couldn’t write another word, he’d sit out in front of the house with his abuela and watch the street scene, listen to the raucous exchanges between the neighbors. One evening, at the end of his trip, his abuela confided: Your mother could have been a doctor just