Story -Amor es…Love is…

From My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories

Amor es… Love is…1/26/74 – Dia de la Virgen de La Altagracia

Julia, our housekeeper, has prepared breakfast. A cafe con leche six pan de aguas con mantequilla, our daily bread. Apan de agua is a small Dominican baguette the size of the palm of my hand. Its shape reminds me of a miniature woman’s private part. It’s the way the Dominican panaderos fold the bread with such tenderness, oval shaped with a slit in the middle. I suppose to make them look like they have two labias just like a vagina. Before I eat, I pray, un padre nuestro.

Julia thinks I am too skinny for Dominican standards and so she brings three more of those little breads and fills my cup with warm coffee. I touch the bread, and they are warm and soft to the touch like love when it is new and forbidden. I take one and open it right in the middle and I can see a little steam come out of it forming in the air like a genie.  I praise God and bless the vagina bread I am given every morning when others have very little to eat.  I take a knife and spread Dominican butter right in the middle and I watch how the butter melts and penetrate all of the crevices of the warm bread and then I bite into it very slowly and oh its crunchy feel, and softness unfolds inside of my mouth like longing.

My father is eating breakfast and calmly reading his  Listin Diario, his daily bread. He reads that newspaper every day and sometimes the next day. He’s draped with it like an umbrella so that you can’t see him. My mother is arguing with me over whom I can and can’t hang out with. She doesn’t’ like some of my friends.   “I know what’s up with Rica and Estanly,” Mami says, “tell me the truth, tell me,” she urges.  Rica is my best friend from the Bronx she’s like a sister to me. Rica lives with her aunt here in Santo Domingo because her parents are afraid she’ll get pregnant in the Bronx. What they don’t know is that she does what ever she wants in Santo Domingo because her aunt is always depressed, and her grandparents who live three blocks away dote on her.  

Rica’s grandparents live a few blocks away, with their adopted youngest son, twenty two years old, Estanly.  Technically this makes him Rica’s uncle, but not really because they just met this year and they are not blood related.  Rica says he’s the man of her dreams, her soul mate.  Estanly is cool.  He’s the DJ for a radio station that brings the greatest American music to the island, if it isn’t censored by the President. Estanly is cool, handsome, tall, thin young man with long, light brown hair that waves in the humid hot air and light colored eyes. He lives two blocks from Rica and three blocks from me. He reminds me of this boy I once knew whose name iwas snake. 

Story Behind the Story…

I came to the USA when I was about 3 years old, and returned to the Dominican Republic when I was 13 years old. I returned to the US when I was 15 years old to finish school and go to college. While in the DR during thos adolescent years, I attended the Colegio Santo Domingo, read a lot of books because I was not allowed to do very much, and I loved reading the newspapers and cutting stuff out and pasting them on my journals.

Back then, I would read the newspapers and collect the Amor es.. quotes as I ponder on love and relationships. Like many young Dominican girls, I lived in a loving, but often too strict, authoritarian household. While the adults created their strict rules, everything was done in secret to the detriment of many young people who were often mistreated by their older boyfriends. Amor es.. the painful ideas of love where created by the novelas, the daily soap operas, or whatever one could get a hold of, or the undeveloped ideas of our peers. Adults were suspect.