Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman [best story books to read .txt] 📗

inside; the rural poor’s residences all over the world, in Mexico for sure, the Amazon, too, in every jungle environment I’ve been to, way more children than windows. “Every child represents infinite windows, querida Lulú. So does love. Questions open windows.” I thumb these words into my phone, hit Send, sit back. Jesus fucking Christ, did I just write that corniness? Did I just tell Lulú that I love her? I quickly type: “80 percent of the world’s children live in poverty, so more children than windows. Though really, not sure.” And: “Miss you.” Send.

Phone María Xum, I remind myself, here on the station platform where I’ve just gotten off. Find out what’s so urgent. In the middle of the first ring, she answers: Hello? Hello? I resist the urge to hang up. María, it’s Frankie. How silly yet automatic it feels to identify myself by my boyhood name to this woman I haven’t seen since I was about twelve. Frankeeee! María Xum responds. I’m so happy you phoned. I was worried you didn’t receive my message. I’m a little surprised that María’s accent isn’t so strong. Sure, she’s lived in the Boston area some forty years, but Feli has been here longer and doesn’t sound as fluent. I am at work in the laundry, she says. We listened to you on the radio last night, and oh, it was so interesting, Frankie. That’s why I had to phone the radio station. Frankie, do you want to come to my laundromat? We can speak there. It is in East Boston. Yes, I want to tell you something. I know you will be interested. Frankie, how is Doña Yoli? And Mr. Goldberg? I tell her: María, my father left us four years ago, but he had a long life. I’m meeting Feli tomorrow, so I agree to see her Sunday, in her laundromat. I’m the only person on the platform. A small redbrick station, which seems to have been locked up for years. Approaching on the train, you see old factories like bombed castles among the dead-looking swamplands on the outskirts of this town. Though it’s about thirty miles inland, this is the closest commuter train stop to where Lexi lives. There are no taxis waiting, but it’s only a half hour or so walk to my mother’s nursing home.

Last night, at the restaurant, I told Marianne about Lexi buying that old ship captain’s house in New Bedford as an investment. Marianne thought it was eccentric of my sister to have bought a house there, even an old ship captain’s house; her impression was that it was a depressed postindustrial city, even its seafood business in distress. I told her that I didn’t know much about it, only that supposedly the commuter train is finally coming there and that yuppies who work in Boston and Providence are going to want to buy up the beautiful old houses.

Grander houses, I imagine, than these I’m walking past on the uneven sidewalk of this long avenue into town, pulling my wheeled suitcase and carrying a tin of French butter cookies.

So, doing that to my hair, did it really change my life? I have to say that it did. Having long, straight hair really suited me. Suddenly I was at least a little bit good-looking, and that was confusing, partly because it was a lie, partly because I was still me. It was the first weekend at Broener College after the orientation week, our first football home game, the only one I ever went to. I was sitting in the stands that weren’t any bigger than those at my high school, though these, on the home side of the field, were packed with students. The stadium was located behind the hill where the girls’ dormitories were. The boys’ dorms, including mine, were on the other side of campus around the quad. A pretty girl, fairly petite, with a head of shimmery blonde ringlets and nearly sapphire-blue eyes sitting in the next section of the stands seemed to be keeping her gaze fixed on me, and every time I glanced her way her smile widened. Needless to say, I could hardly believe this was happening. Her father was an executive at Bloomingdale’s, and she was from Syosset, Long Island, a classic JAP, Frecky Papperman from my dorm told me. He’d already scoped Abbie Schneider out, thought she was one of the prettiest girls in the freshman class. What do you mean a classic JAP? I asked. Frecky explained about Jewish American princesses. I’d never heard Jewish girls called that in my town. Broener was known as a JAP school, Frecky told me. By that night, Abbie was my girlfriend. For the first time since Arlene Fertig I made out with a girl—on a lawn and in the dark again—on the quad. Abbie was sweet natured and fairly reticent, a conventional suburban teenager of the sort I would have stood no chance with in my town. She had a strong Long Island accent and was a chain-smoker too. I filled many of our silences with made-up stories, total lies, about what I’d been like in high school.

We’d been going out a little more than a month on the afternoon when her roommate, a WASP preppie, a severe beauty with a flinty stare, intercepted me on the autumn-foliage-carpeted lawn outside their dorm and told me that Abbie didn’t want to see me anymore. She asked me to tell you, said the roommate, and also to please just leave her alone. Her Clint Eastwood squint, flickering with disdainful comprehension, had fastened on my straightened hair, which was beginning to lift at the sides like desiccated wings, pushed out by the not-yet-quite-visible new growth of curls underneath. Imagine the conversations Abbie and her roommate must have had about me: How’s the sex going? Is he good in bed? Well, no. He hasn’t even tried to touch me … my … Oh God, please stop, I promise to dig