This Is How You Lose Her

“And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.” 

Yunior is at a resort, trying to repair his relationship with Magda. He and two men from the resort drive out to the Cave of the Jagua in the dark. The two men lower him headfirst into the cave. Yunior realizes he has lost Magda when he has visions of the beginning of the relationship in the cave.

“Nilda was my brother’s girlfriend. That’s how all these stories begin.”

“Nilda” is the second story in the book, and these are among the very first sentences. It is the first introduction to Rafa, setting the tone for Yunior’s relationship with his older brother. It implies Rafa had many girlfriends for Yunior to crush on. Yunior is 14 in this story, and his still-underdeveloped sexual persona that will become consistently unfaithful is influenced by Rafa, who harbors a multitude of hypermasculine traits.

“In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.”

Verbose and densely visual, this sentence poetically expresses the depression and isolation that cancer can create not only in its victims but in family members of those afflicted with the disease. This is also an excellent example of how Diaz captures the emotional state of his characters quickly and concisely through the use of very long sentences in very short stories. It is a trait common to many of the narratives in This Is How You Lose Her.

“One night, a couple of weeks before school started—they must have thought I was asleep—Nilda started telling Rafa about her plans for the future. I think even she knew what was about to happen. Listening to her imagining herself was about the saddest thing you ever heard. How she wanted to get away from her moms and open up a group home for runaway kids. But this one would be real cool, she said. It would be for normal kids who just got problems. She must have loved him because she went on and on. Plenty of people talk about having a flow, but that night I really heard one, something that was unbroken, that fought itself and worked together all at once. Rafa didn’t say nothing. Maybe he had his hands in her hair or maybe he was just like, Fuck you. When she finished he didn’t even say wow. I wanted to kill myself with embarrassment. About a half hour later she got up and dressed. She couldn’t see me or she would have known I thought she was beautiful. She stepped into her pants and pulled them up in one motion, sucked in her stomach while she buttoned them. I’ll see you later, she said. Yeah, he said.”

Rafa and Nilda date just one summer, and then Nilda pours out her heart to Rafa. Yunior is listening in the dark and fumes with embarrassment when Rafa doesn’t acknowledge her. Yunior’s love for her deepens. She and Rafa break up. This quote exemplifies how the intellectual and/or nurturing components for females are disavowed by hypermasculine males.

“She was from Trinidad, a cocoa pañyol, and she had this phony-as-hell English accent. It was the way we all were back then. None of us wanted to be n*****s. Not for nothing.” 

This quote speaks to the colorism implicit in much of Dominican culture. Rafa hooked up with Nilda after his other girl left. The other girl was from Trinidad and used a fake British accent to seem more exotic and less Black.

“We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went.” 

This is the final line of the story, delivered after Yunior runs into Nilda at the laundromat and she is losing her beauty. Despite being a sweet girl, Nilda is on a downward spiral early on because of her family circumstances are not good. Yunior would go to Rutgers and she would disappear, at least for Yunior. The harshness of the last few words has a resounding effect, as if she is trash, again bringing to light the notion of the Madonna-whore complex. In this instance, however, Nilda, no longer being physical attractive to Yunior, cannot remain in his world.

“Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things…and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decide. This, I told her is how I feel.” 

Yasmin’s analogy to the flickering lights represents her relationship with Ramon, a man with a wife and child back in the Dominican Republic. She cannot know if the relationship will last. Like the lights, it will be external factors that govern her fate, as opposed to her own choices or will.

“The neighborhood is not safe. Boys who know only enough Spanish to curse stand together at the street corners and scowl. They cross into traffic without looking and when we pass them a fat one says, I eat pussy better than anybody in the world.”

This is Yasmin and Ana Iris’s experience returning from the movies. The “boys” mentioned are first and perhaps second-generation Latinos. She is disgusted by them and feels isolated from them.

“That night I give Ramon the letter and I try to smile while he reads it.” 

Yasmin has struggled the entire story to accept her boyfriend’s wife and child back in the Dominican Republic. She’s pregnant when they move into the house Ramon’s bought for them. By giving him the letter instead of sneaking to read it, she indicates she accepts Ramon’s family, thereby begrudgingly placing herself in a compromised situation.

“If you’d been Dominican my family would have worried about you, brought plates of food to my door. Heaps of plátanos and yuca, smothered in liver or queso frito. Flaca. Even though your name was Veronica, Veronica Hardrada.”

Because Flaca is White and of a different culture, she doesn’t receive the same supportive benefits from Yunior’s family that she hypothetically would, were she Dominican. Nonetheless, Yunior gives Veronica a Spanish nickname. This can at once be read as degrading or possessive and also an attempt on Yunior’s part, and after the fact, to offer Flaca the identity she sought when the two were together.

“I remember: The boys keeping an eye on me. They figured two years ain’t no small thing, even though the entire time I never claimed you. But what was nuts was that I felt fine. I felt like summer had taken me over. I told the boys this was the best decision I’d ever made. You can’t be fucking with white girls all your life.” 

This quote represents the fraternity of hypermasculine boys. Yunior was in part shaped by this fraternity. It also demonstrates his lack of commitment to Flaca, who is White and poor.

“I remember: you used to offer me ride homes in your Civic. I remember: the third time I accepted. Our hands touched in between our seats. You tried to talk to me in Spanish and I told you to stop.” 

Here, Yunior further recalls Flaca, a “whitetrash” girl he slept with for two years but never truly saw as his girlfriend. Flaca functions as Yunior’s proverbial last resort, when he cannot locate other girls to sleep with. He uses her while also exhibiting pity towards her, and only comes to respect her after she leaves him.

“What did your family do here? you asked. I looked at the night water. We had barbecues. Dominican barbecues. My pops didn’t know how to but he insisted. He would cook up this red sauce that he’d splatter on ceuletas and then he’d invite complete strangers over to eat. It was terrible. I wore an eye patch when I was a kid, you said. Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue. I doubt it, I said.” 

Here, Yunior’s father offers poor recreations of traditional Dominican food in order to impress people he doesn’t know. Veronica/Flaca, in an attempt to insert herself more into Yunior’s life and culture, offers that she might have been a part of these moments. In both Papi and Flaca, we get a sense of two characters searching for identity and failing to locate it.

“I didn’t lift a fucking finger in our apartment, male privilege baby.”

This sentence represents the machismo of Yunior’s home-life. Mami doesn’t let the boys cook or clean anything, ultimately babying them and thereby reinforcing the “saintly” side of the Madonna-whore complex. Rafa is sick with cancer, and Mami works and takes care of them both, without Papi. She also goes to church to pray for Rafa.

“I never would have guessed it would last as long as it did. My mother couldn’t resist my brother. Not ever. No matter what the fuck he pulled—and my brother pulled a lot of shit—she was always a hundred percent on his side, as only a Latin mom can be with her querido oldest hijo. If he’d come home one day and said, Hey, Ma, I exterminated half the planet, I’m sure she would have defended his ass: Well, hijo, we were overpopulated.” 

This quote further exemplifies Mami’s babying of her two sons. It also illuminates Rafa’s hypermasculine tendencies. He is wild and unwilling to rest. He steals money and furniture from his mother.

“While Rafa’s hair was straight and glided through a comb like a Caribbean grandparent’s dream, my hair still had enough of the African to condemn me to endless combings and out-of-this-world haircuts.” 

Papi doesn’t like Yunior’s hair because it has African qualities to it, despite the fact that he then in turn asserts that darker-skinned females, or “negras,” are the ideal kind of woman. This colorism arrives in a few places over the course of the collection; eventually, in “Invierno,” Papi forces Yunior to shave off his hair completely.

“Do you like Negras, my father asked. I turned my head to look at the women we had just passed. I turned back and realized that he was waiting for an answer, that he wanted to know, and while I wanted to blurt that I didn’t like girls in any denomination, I said instead, Oh yes, and he smiled. They’re beautiful, he said, and lit a cigarette. They’ll take care of you better than anyone.” 

Here, we see both Papi’s misogyny and colorism in full light. It’s important to note that one of the main reasons Papi likes darker-skinned women is that he perceives them as taking care of him well. This allows his hypermasculinity to not be challenged.

“And then Papi would come out of his room, his shorts unbuttoned, and say, What did I tell you? How many times have I told you to keep it quiet? He was free with his smacks and we spent whole afternoons on Punishment Row—our bedroom—where we had to lay on our bends and not get off, because if he burst in and caught us staring out at the beautiful snow, he would pull our ears and smack us, and then we would have to kneel in the corner for a few hours. If we messed that up, joking around or cheating, he would force us to kneel down on the cutting side of a coconut grater, and only when we were bleeding and whimpering could he let us up.” 

Yunior, Mami and Rafa emigrate from the Dominican Republic and move to London Terrace in New Jersey with Papi after five years apart. Papi works a lot and has other girlfriends on the side. When he’s home he wants the boys quiet. If they’re not, Papi gets angry and comes to their room. He doesn’t let the boys outside and he doesn’t take them anywhere. It’s snowing and the boys have never seen snow because they’re from the Dominican Republic, and Papi is angered by their enjoyment of it. One lens through which to view the subtext of this scene is that the boys are assimilating to life in America in a way that Papi never could or doesn’t want them to—the new, natural environment, replete with an element (snow) not native to their native culture, is, for Papi, an antagonist.

“From the top of Westminster, our main strip, you could see the thinnest sliver of oceans cresting the horizon to the east. My father had been shown that sight—the management showed everyone—but as he drove us in from JFK he didn’t stop to point it out. The ocean might have made us feel better, considering what else there was to see.” 

This is from the story “Invierno.” Yunior, Mami, and Rafa have just joined Papi in the U.S. after five years apart. Papi doesn’t care for his family enough to point out the ocean and this sets the tone for the relationship Papi has with his wife and sons. Yunior is approximately seven years old, and he is already disappointed and aware of his father’s indifference to him. Later, Papi would disappear, and Yunior, perhaps out of a desire to figuratively return Papi to him, begins to womanize in a manner similar to his father.

“We even saw the ocean, up there at the top of Westminster, like the blade of a long, curved knife. Mami was crying but we pretended not to notice.” 

In contrast to the above quote, here readers see Mami weeping at sight of the ocean—a visual image and element of nature that would remind her of the Dominican Republic, where she is from. That the boys ignore her emotions lends further credence to their role in a hypermasculine family dynamic. To acknowledge weakness is to have oneself be weak as well.

“Maybe she just doesn’t like children. Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.” 

Despite his girlfriend Paloma, Yunior finds himself attracted to a middle-aged neighbor, Miss Lora. She’s never been married and has no kids. Mami says Miss Lora must have met a calamity to not have children. Yunior tries to think of other reasons, but his mother is confident. Soon, a long secret affair begins between Yunior and Miss Lora.

“Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into the cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it’s official: you are one, too. You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself.” 

16-year-old Yunior just cheated on his girlfriend Paloma, who doesn’t have sex with him, with Miss Lora, his mature neighbor. His genetic link to cheating is a theme throughout the story collection. Yunior laments his womanizing DNA, and his brother and father’s influences are named as sources of blame for his cheating.

“You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you were smiling. Both of you blinked.” 

Beaches are both literally and figuratively liminal spaces in the collection; creating the precipice between land and sea, they also function in the collection as a sort of limbo between the past and the future in the various relationships Yunior is in. In most moments, the beach functions as a happy space, especially on American beaches. In other instances, the beach functions as a space in which to attempt to repair a broken past and move forward. But once away from this setting, such reconciliatory attempts fail.