Say Her Name

Why is Daddy so afraid to die? and my mother said quietly, Who knows, that’s just the way your father is. You know, he’s always been a hypochondriac. Was a terror of death, I wondered, a form of hypochondria?

each of us filling with a sense of mystical wonder and loneliness that merged into one mystical wonder and loneliness together

It didn’t bother me that she liked celebrity and fashion Web sites. Though that is exactly what would have bugged her, catching this glimpse of herself through my eyes, me supposedly loving it that my brainy superliterary grad student young wife could have the same enjoyments as any frivolous housewifey girl who never read anything deeper than People. That I could love that, that I presumably found that cute and sexy, that she could satisfy that cursi macho voyeurism—how embarrassing!

She hadn’t brought the ring to Mexico, not wanting to risk having it stolen. She’d never worn it regularly, anyway. It was too ostentatious to wear to school, she’d decided. She worried about giving the other grad students the impression that she was a bourgeois rich girl from the Mexican upper class, hypocritically playing at the austere life of a grad student of literature so that she could return home someday wearing her Ivy League doctorate as just another expensive bauble.

When will I ever again spend an hour and a half trailing anyone around in a Sephora or an Urban Outfitters—a seemingly trivial example, except that I almost certainly will never do anything like that again.

I rarely opposed Aura’s wishes, with the exception, I admit, of her wanting to move to a bigger apartment, or one with a garden where we could have a dog, because we really couldn’t afford to do that just yet.

But it wasn’t just the money, I knew. It was that she didn’t want me to think of her as the kind of woman who would drop so much money on a quilt—even though I knew she was—in the same way that she’d get upset whenever I noticed that she was perusing celebrity gossip or fashion Web sites on her laptop while we read or worked in bed before going to sleep at night.

But few people who’d known me or Aura before we got together would have guessed either of us had any talent for domestic life.

Hola, mi amor. But where did you go? Why were you away so long? I know you didn’t get married just to go off by yourself like that and leave me alone here!

Is this really happening, mi amor? Am I really back in Brooklyn again without you?