The Dirty Girls Social Club Read online

  “Sucia!” I call as she walks in the door. She looks over at me and gives a distracted smile and keeps chattering on the phone. Oh, excuse me. All the Dominican women working the deep-fry vats behind the front counter look over at her with their tired horse eyes, and slip a little lower in their despair. The owner looks up from the Spanish-language newspaper he’s reading behind the cash register. His eyes run up and down Usnavys, and his eyebrows rise up, like What is this marvelous creature that has stumbled in from the cold? She holds one leather-gloved hand up to me, as if stopping traffic, and I notice the tiny Fendi handbag dangling from her arm. She has this choreographed, I think, for full effect. As she tiptoes toward me, I notice she’s wearing sharp little Blahnik pumps—in this snow! And I don’t mean sharp as in “fashionable,” I mean sharp as in “could poke your eyes out.” Not that I would know a Blahnik pump from a gas pump, but she told me all about them on the phone yesterday. They’re winter white with gold stripes. These couldn’t be any others. I listen as well as I can to her end of the conversation and marvel that she can fit her big girl feet into those little dainty shoes. It reminds me of those ballerina elephants leaping across the screen in Fantasia.

  Earlier, when I said I didn’t speak any Spanish during my job interview I was exaggerating a little. I picked up a bit, mostly when my dad was pissed off or in pain. The good news is he was pissed off pretty much every day, so I got plenty of Spanish lessons, and with my mom cheating on him every other weekend until he finally dumped her, there was plenty of pain to go around too. We mostly spoke English at home before Mom left, because my mom wasn’t willing to learn my dad’s language any more than she was willing to say “no” the first time my brother asked her to buy him pot. Later, when Mom was in prison already and my brother was grown up and gone, Dad and I spoke English because it was just easier and he wasn’t angry as much anymore. Now that I’m, like, Miss Berlitz the Token Hispanic in the name of employability, Papi and I speak only Spanish. Oh, Jesus. I’m talking about him again, aren’t I? Forgive me. He raised me to think he was the most important thing in the world, with Cuba a close second; and as with any religion, the faith is hard to shake, even when you secretly doubt its validity.

  I wonder if they give anesthesia for Cubadectomies? Anesthesia other than beer, I mean.

  From the sounds of it, Usnavys is ordering one of her assistants to schedule a very important press conference for next month, and she’s rattling off the details of what needs to be supplied, counting them off on her meticulous, chubby fingers. Usnavys has so far hired only Latinas for the assistant jobs under her, including ones less qualified than other applicants. I tell her this is not legal. She laughs and says the white boys do it all the time and she’s just making up for past injustices. “My goal,” she says, pointing directly in my face, “is to get it to the point that they need affirmative action to work for us. Got it?”

  “Whew!” she says, finally hanging up and slipping out of her coat in a crafty way that tells me she has, indeed, left the price tag inside and doesn’t want anyone to notice. Beneath the coat she’s wearing yet another elegant pantsuit, this time in a pretty pale green wool. I’m amazed she can find these things in her size, which I’m guessing has fluctuated between an eighteen and a twenty-four for the past five years.

  Don’t let this fool you, though. She’s gorgeous. Her face is delicate, with the kind of nose other women pay lots of money to achieve, and big, expressive brown eyes she likes to hide with green contact lenses. She gets her brows waxed at a salon near the projects every three or four days (she swears the hoochie girls working there are the only ones who get it right) and her makeup is always perfect, a fact I attribute to her constant, uncontrollable impulse to pull out her Bobbi Brown compact in public so everyone knows that a Puerto Rican has arrived, y’all. She eats with the grace and appetite of a woodland deer; you’d think she lived on grass, she’s that hungry all the time. She calls herself “the fat girl” in front of the rest of us, and laughs about it. We don’t soothe her with lies to the contrary. Her upper arm is bigger around than Rebecca’s thigh.

  Maybe it’s because she’s always been heavy, and is now at her heaviest, but she’s also the most outgoing of us. We used to go clubbing, ending up at some cheesy all-night pancake place afterward, and by the end of the night, or rather by the time the sun came up, Usnavys would have managed to make everyone in the room friends with everyone else. I saw her do this with a collection of silent, bucktoothed chess players from Wentworth Institute of Technology and a pack of pretty sorority girls from Brandeis. She had everyone singing songs and telling jokes and playing charades. That’s why she practically runs the public affairs department at the biggest nonprofit agency in the state. You’ve never met a friendlier, smarter, more organized, and more sincerely kind—and materialistic, yes—woman than Usnavys Rivera.

  Usnavys has no problem getting men, either. Of all of us, she seems to attract the most men. She’s aloof with them, and that makes them love her more. They follow her, call her all the time, beg her to marry them, threaten to kill themselves if she doesn’t reciprocate their affections. We’re not talking shady characters, either. We’re talking doctors and lawyers and international spies. Yes, spies. She dates no fewer than three men at a time, but not in a sleazy way. She doesn’t sleep with most of them. She uses them for backup, plays one off the other. Usnavys’s men trail her like pound puppies. Does she want them, though? No. All she wants is Juan. Juan Vásquez, even if she won’t admit it in public.

  I got nothing against Juan, either. I like the guy.

  But the sucias? I can’t say they feel the same way. Some sucias think Juan, with his congested old Volkswagen Rabbit, doesn’t make enough money to do right by a woman like Usnavys. Juan heads a small nonprofit agency in Mattapan that mainly helps rehabilitate and employ drug-addicted Latino men. He has an amazing success rate, as many articles in my own newspaper have documented. So what that he doesn’t make much money? I know deep inside Usnavys feels the same way, but she’s got what you might call “issues” about money, as you might have guessed from looking at the long white fur coat and the BMW. Juan, who’s actually really good-looking—for a short man—could care less about all that. The one time I met the guy was at a black-tie fund-raiser for the Democratic candidate for mayor of Boston; he showed up in a faded black T-shirt with a tuxedo silkscreened in white on it, black jeans, and ripped, snow-stained, red high-top sneakers, with a seven-hundred-pound Che Guevara biography under his arm. Usnavys, in her sparkly gown and jewels, pretended she didn’t know him, even though she had spent the night at his place the weekend before. She ended up leaving with a floppy, damp-faced Argentine doctor she met at the cheese and pâté table. Juan had only come to see Usnavys; he wanted to show her he supported the candidate she raved about all the time. She didn’t even return his initial enthusiastic wave. When he finally approached and said hello, head hanging down like a whipped dog, she pretended she didn’t remember who he was, and then introduced her ugly pâté man as “Doctor Hiram Gardél,” shooting Juan the iciest stare this side of Greenland before prancing off on the medico’s squishy arm. It’s the dance they do, Usnavys and Juan, and have been doing since college.

  Rebecca comes next, driving cautiously in her brand-new burgundy Jeep Grand Cherokee. All the spaces on the curb are now taken. I watch her circle the restaurant three times before she pulls into the discount grocery store parking lot across the street. She does not make nearly the fuss getting out of her car that Usnavys did, though I can see from the nervous way she peers around as she trots through the snow toward us that she’s not exactly comfortable in this part of town. She smiles, like she always does, but I can see the evil tiger crouching within her, ready to bite.

  Rebecca’s been here many times, as we all have, and though she has never come out and said she dislikes this neighborhood—and all others like it—any person with a shred of sensitivity would realize it from the strained secondary look she
gets at the mention of “El Caballito,” as if you just stuck a pile of steaming excrement under her nose and she’s too polite to turn away. I say “secondary” because Rebecca always seems to have two facial expressions—the one everyone else sees, and the one I see. Most people who know her think Rebecca is one of the most charming and motivated people in the universe. No one but me seems to notice how much Rebecca hates and fears everything around her. Everyone I know thinks she’s this wonderful humanitarian. And I admit, no one works a room the way Rebecca does, with her slightly tilted head and her faux concern, and few people I know give away as much money as she does, to battered women’s shelters and runaway youth homes, or spend as much time on volunteer activities, like reading to the blind, even with her packed schedule. But the cynic in me thinks she does it out of Catholic guilt and a need to end up in heaven. Sue me. People think Rebecca is this über-Latina, a role model who can roll her Rs, but I think she’s just a skilled politician, that’s all. I grew up surrounded by my mom’s people, and I’ve got antennae for dangerous phonies. Either that, or I’m extraordinarily jealous of her, the way she controls her emotions and wins friends. I’m, like, the opposite of that.

  As she runs across the street, shielding her eyes from the snow with a white-gloved hand, her face twists with stress. She’d be pretty if she didn’t always look like she was smiling through a mouthful of lime juice. Don’t get me wrong: Rebecca likes to have fun as much as the next person—as long as everything has been taken care of and all the rules have been followed and it’s perfectly safe. Sure, Rebecca Baca (or Becca Baca, as I like to call her—she hates that) likes to have fun—in an orderly fashion.

  I’m relieved to see she has come alone. Sometimes Brad, her moron of a husband, insists on joining her for our outings. Don’t ask me why. We’ve asked her to stop bringing him to sucias gatherings. He still shows up every now and then. He’s a tall non-Latino white guy from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, who has been working on the same doctoral thesis for the past eight years, at Cambridge University in England. I can’t remember the exact topic, but it’s got something to do with philosophy and stern, dead German authors with bushy eyebrows. Bunch of useless crap if you ask me. He spends a couple of months a year in England, and the rest of the time going to lectures and reading and writing in Boston. Eight years.

  I hope my therapist will forgive me for mentioning him again, but Papi was able to get his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in a total of six years, in a language he learned when he was fifteen, all the while working as a night janitor and raising two kids and trying to figure out just why he’d had the misfortune to marry a sociopath in a Marilyn Monroe costume. Why it’s taking this Brad joker so long to finish school I do not understand. I’ve told Rebecca as much, and she just gives me that look, like it’s none of my business. Withering stare, you might say. (Remind me never to use the word “withering” in a column.) Why doesn’t anyone else notice when she gets that face going? Everyone else, asked to describe Rebecca, would say “nice and sweet.” Not me. I’d say, “ice queen.” I get the feeling Rebecca tolerates me as if I were a family pet that pees on the floor. She doesn’t have the heart to get rid of me, but she wouldn’t be devastated if, say, someone “accidentally” left the door open and I got hit by, like, a UPS truck. I think she comes to these meetings of ours mostly to catch up with Sara and Elizabeth. I know it’s not to see me. And God knows it’s not to see Amber.

  As she enters the restaurant, Rebecca gracefully shakes the snowflakes out of her short, shiny black hair, then smooths it back into place. I don’t know how she manages it, but she always looks perfect. One year, she dragged all the sucias to a business etiquette seminar at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Newbury Street, so we could learn what to do with a fish fork and how to scoop our creamy corn chowder away from us in the bowl. It’s the only time I’ve really seen her face light up with unbridled joy. She sat in the front row, too, taking notes on everything and nodding furiously. When the speaker, a former debutante from my hometown, running down a list of things a professional woman should avoid if she wants to make it to the top, wrote “hair that falls below the shoulder” in neat black letters on the spotless white marker board, Rebecca turned and shot me a look that said “I told you so.” For years she has helpfully suggested that all sucias keep their hair short, yet feminine, and, in the worst case, at least wear it up around the office. “No one will take you seriously with all that Thalia nonsense,” she told me recently, smiling warm and friendly, as she will when she has something critical to say, lifting my long, curly hair off my shoulders like it was something she found clogging her drain. I like my hair. I need all the bouncy size of it to cover up my fat face and round nose. So, like, leave me alone.

  Needless to say, Rebecca’s dark hair is impeccable, stylish, and short without being overly so, the best Newbury Street has to offer. It brings out her big, beautiful brown eyes, accented with only a touch of black mascara and a glow of mauve eye shadow. She always has tiny, perfect earrings, and neatly knotted neck scarves in conservative patterns. She reminds me of that woman Benjamin Bratt married, Talisa Soto. Her. But with short hair. She hates to shop, so she hires a personal shopper named Alberto to do it for her. Rebecca has never to my knowledge worn a skirt that came anywhere above the knee, and all her heels are the sensible things you’d expect to see on Janet Reno. She’s only twenty-eight, but Alberto shops for all her clothes at Talbots or Lord & Taylor. Conservative in appearance, austere when it comes to real emotions, though the fake emotions she hangs out like laundry for all to see.

  To his credit, bizarre Brad has a cute, boyish face and messy short blond hair. He’s tall. But he dresses like a freaking hobo. If you saw this dude rattling around on the street, you’d think he was some kind of parolee, down on his luck and sinking lower by the minute. I think he’d have a beard if he were capable, but he’s got that weirdo yellow patchwork fuzz instead, like a mutt with the mange. With his round face it makes him look like a teenager, until he smiles and you see the crow’s-feet and you realize this loser is going nowhere fast, a tattered hamster slogging on his rusty wheel. He wears round wire-framed glasses that are always sort of smudgy and lopsided, as if he’d sat on them a few times. It shocked us all that this was the guy Rebecca planned to marry. When she introduced him to us the first time, we all sort of scratched our heads and tried to be polite. He attempted to talk to us, but what came out of his mouth was incomprehensible, robotic bull. In a five-minute span, he quoted Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche and, it seems to me, got most of it wrong. (Yes, we sucias took a few philosophy courses, too.) I think I corrected him, and he didn’t like it much; he got this faraway look in his eyes, stared up at the ceiling, cocked his head to the side, and then stood up and spun around one time before sitting down again. All I could think was, Telegram to self: “Dahmer, stop. Jeffrey, stop.” When Amber, never one to hide her feelings, said, “What the hell you doing, man? Spinning on your axis?” he said he had an eye problem and had to do that every so often to keep his balance. “Only one eye works at a time,” he said in that electronic voice, “and they switch with no warning.” Ohhhhkaaayyy. I was, like, Becca, girl, I love you like my own sister, or at least as much as a first cousin—okay, maybe a second cousin—but what do you see in that guy?

  It took a couple more weeks to draw out of her that rotating Brad was Bradford T. Atkins, son of Henry Atkins, a wealthy real estate developer in the Midwest, maker of the kind of strip malls that carry upscale coffee places, juice bars, and video rental chains. Brad, it turns out, is the black sheep of the Atkins family, and attended Cambridge only because his old man built a library for the school when the son couldn’t get in on smarts. The old man’s estate is estimated to be worth a little more than a billion dollars, and Brad is slated to inherit one-third of that when the geezer croaks, which should be any day now because dear Henry is pushing ninety. Meanwhile, Brad, who says he despises material goods and believes we should “kill all the capitalists,” is
happily living off a trust fund allowance that gives him about $60,000 a year just for breathing with an open mouth. That’s not as much as it used to be, Rebecca told me. Brad got $200,000 a year before he married her. The old man and his wife both believe they can punish Brad out of marrying an “immigrant” by slowly cutting him off. So Brad, weirdo that he is, comes to our gatherings and sits a few feet away from the rest of us, listening with that gaping rich-boy maw to our conversation as if he were Jane Goodall and we were the goddamned gorillas, taking notes. Notes, chica. We fascinate him, apparently, especially when we speak Spanish. I think that’s why he watches Elizabeth the hardest. Soon as that freak hears Spanish, his face gets all red and flushed and he looks like he’s hiding a hard-on. Total certified weirdo. We’re waiting for Rebecca to snap out of it, but with more than $333 million staring you in the face, it could be mighty hard.