Read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for Free Online

visitor.
    I do?
    Yup. Lola leaned against his door frame. She’d shaved her head down to the bone, Sinéad-style, and now everybody, including their mother, was convinced she’d turned into a lesbiana.
    You might want to clean up a little. She touched his face gently. Shave those pussy hairs.
    It was Ana. Standing in his foyer, wearing a full-length leather, her trigueña skin blood-charged from the cold, her face gorgeous with eyeliner, mascara, foundation, lipstick, and blush.
    Freezing out, she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

    Hey, was all he managed to say. He could hear his sister upstairs, listening.
    What you doing? Ana asked.
    Like nothing.
    Like let’s go to a movie, then.
    Like OK, he said.
    Upstairs his sister was jumping up and down on his bed, low-screaming, It’s a date, it’s a date, and then she jumped on his back and nearly toppled them clean through the bedroom window.
    So is this some kind of date? he said as he slipped into her car.
    She smiled wanly. You could call it that.
    Ana drove a Cressida, and instead of taking them to the local theater she headed down to the Amboy Multiplex.
    I love this place, she said as she was wrangling for a parking space. My father used to take us here when it was still a drive-in. Did you ever come here back then?
    He shook his head. Though I heard they steal plenty of cars here now.
    Nobody’s stealing this baby.
    It was so hard to believe what was happening that Oscar really couldn’t take it seriously. The whole time the movie— Manhunter —was on, he kept expecting niggers to jump out with cameras and scream, Surprise! Boy, he said, trying to remain on her map, this is some movie. Ana nodded; she smelled of some perfume he could not name, and when she pressed close the heat off her body was vertiginous .
    On the ride home Ana complained about having a headache and they didn’t speak for a long time. He tried to turn on the radio but she said, No, my head’s really killing me. He joked, Would you like some crack? No, Oscar. So he sat back and watched the Hess Building and the rest of Woodbridge slide past through a snarl of overpasses. He was suddenly aware of how tired he was; the nervousness that had raged through him the entire night had exhausted his ass. The longer they went without speaking the more morose he became. It’s just a movie, he told himself. It’s not like it’s a date.
    Ana seemed unaccountably sad and she chewed her bottom lip, a real bembe, until most of her lipstick was on her teeth. He was going to make a comment about it but decided not to.
    You reading anything good?
    Nope, she said. You?
    I’m reading Dune .
    She nodded. I hate that book.
    They reached the Elizabeth exit, which is what New Jersey is really known for, industrial wastes on both sides of the turnpike. He had started holding his breath against those horrible fumes when Ana let loose a scream that threw him into his passenger door. Elizabeth! she shrieked. Close your fucking legs!
    Then she looked over at him, tipped back her head, and laughed.
    When he returned to the house his sister said, Well?
    Well what?
    Did you fuck her?
    Jesus, Lola, he said, blushing.
    Don’t lie to me.
    I do not move so precipitously. He paused and then sighed. In other words, I didn’t even get her scarf off.

    Sounds a little suspicious. I know you Dominican men. She held up her hands and flexed the fingers in playful menace. Son pulpos.
    The next day he woke up feeling like he’d been unshackled from his fat, like he’d been washed clean of his misery, and for a long time he couldn’t remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.

OSCAR IN LOVE
     
    A nd so now every week they headed out to either a movie or the mall. They talked. He learned that her ex-boyfriend, Manny, used to smack the shit out of her, which was a problem, she confessed, because she liked it when guys were a little rough with her in bed; he learned that her father had died