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The Mirabal sisters are not known there, for which she is also sorry for it is a crime that they should be forgotten, these unsung heroines of the underground, et cetera.
Before she knows it, she is setting up her life as if it were an exhibit labeled neatly for those who can read: THE SISTER WHO SURVIVED.
Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?
Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.
Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.
The other bedroom she does not say was her father’s after he and Mamá stopped sleeping together.
There are the three pictures of the girls, old favorites that are now emblazoned on the posters every November, making these once intimate snapshots seem too famous to be the sisters she knew.
You can’t be a modern woman and insist on the old sentimentalities.
Dedé looks up at those young faces, and she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.
If you multiply by zero, you still get zero, and a thousand heartaches.
“Just what we need, skirts in the law!”
Words repeated, distorted, words recreated by those who might bear them a grudge, words stitched to words until they are the winding sheet the family will be buried in when their bodies are found dumped in a ditch, their tongues cut off for speaking too much.
I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her, insisting she be free. Silly bunny, I thought. You’re nothing at all like me.
Sinita’s story spilled out like blood from a cut.
The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer.
“But do you love him?” Sinita asked Lina one time. Sinita’s voice sounded as disgusted as if she were asking Lina if she had fallen in love with a tarantula. “With all my heart,” Lina sighed. “More than my life.”
She was born a queen, not by dynastic right, but by the right of beauty whom divinity sends to the world only rarely.
Lina Lovatón is just a sad case, because she really does love him, pobrecita.”
She lived all alone now, waiting for him to call her up. I guess there was a whole other pretty girl now taking up his attention. “Pobrecita,” we chorused, like an amen.
I felt my breath coming short again. At first, I had thought it was caused by the cotton bandages I had started tying around my chest so my breasts wouldn’t grow. I wanted to be sure what had happened to Lina Lovatón would never happen to me.
I was looking at the world through a curtain of tears.
And you might not know this, Little Book, but I always cry when people laugh at me.
Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.
She’s always telling me to stand up for myself, but I guess she didn’t figure I’d stand up to her.
I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.
He could not love me very much, I protested, because all he said was that he loved me. According to Minerva, those truly in love spoke poetry to their beloved.
“You’re not getting a fancy, high-talking man in Pedrito González,” he said rather fiercely. “But you are getting a man who adores you like he does this rich soil we’re standing on.”
And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.
After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende, For Sale. Any vagrant thought could take me.
she wants them to know the living breathing women their mothers were. They get enough of the heroines from everyone else.
“I don’t play,” she says rather more meekly than she intends. “I just watch.” The truth of her words strikes Dedé as she remembers how she stood back and watched the young man open the back door for whoever wanted to sit by him. And Minerva slipped in!
something always made me turn the car around and head back home, something I’d seen from the corner of my eye.
I felt a pang of jealousy seeing them treat Papá in the same way my sisters and I had.
“Cosas de los hombres,” he said. Things a man does. So that was supposed to excuse him, macho that he was!
“You know as well as I do that without schooling we women have even fewer choices open to us.”
“Ay, m’ijita” she says. “You’re going to fight everyone’s fight, aren’t you?” “It’s all the same fight, Mamá,” I tell her.
She says she has not been kissed for years! I guess there are some bad parts to being somebody everybody respects.
her fear of spiders, worms, noodles in her soup,
