In Rooms with Boys

Nora watched Darío work on his algebra homework at the dinner table as if nothing had happened.

Wrapped in her fuchsia housecoat, wearing a constellation of foam hair rollers and sipping from a glass of soursop, she studied her son’s developing body: how he seemed to be lifting out of the ambiguous, doughy soft features of boyhood and settling into the hard-lined, angular shapes of adolescent manhood. Although he was becoming a man, his voice still had a needful tenderness, a babyness, a quality that linked them as mother and child, giver and receiver. He was Nora’s baby.

Nora tried to forget the incident, the flash of flesh and her son rushing at her to close his bedroom door. Nora had never seen that girl before. Not that Darío introduced her to any of his friends. They were usually locked in his room playing Halo or watching MTV’s Wild Boyz, and only came out to use the bathroom or raid her fridge, ignoring her as if Darío had told them she was harmless and didn’t need to be considered.

The girl, sprawled on the twin bed with the Bugs Bunny sheets and comforter, had been crying. Nora watched her dab her eyes as Darío screamed at his mother to leave. He shoved his mother past the threshold of his door. Nora could still feel the impact of his touch on her stomach. She was certain he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.

She thought she’d been mistaken, but tears were beaded in the girl’s long lashes. Had her son made her cry? Shoved the girl onto the bed?

“You skipped number four,” Nora said. She noticed a scratch on his neck—was that from earlier?

“I’ll do it later.”

“You’ll forget,” Nora insisted. “I’m not going to do it for you.”

“You don’t have to be here,” Darío said, deepening his voice, but the effect undermined the message. When he tried to sound grown, he sounded younger than thirteen—the aural equivalent of a toddler wearing a parent’s size-twelve loafers.

“I have to check your answers.”

“Pssh, whatever.”

Nora helped him with his math homework, the one subject where she felt comfortable and didn’t need English proficiency. Every time Darío had asked her for help with his language arts or history homework, she demurred and had to admit that she couldn’t proofread his writing or confidently tell him if his grammar was right or wrong. His knowledge would eventually surpass her own. There would come a time when the math would become too complicated, and she wouldn’t be able to guide him. But for now they still had Algebra I. They could still solve for X together.

“That’s wrong,” Nora said, hoping she didn’t sound too critical. “Tenemos que hallar el valor de X.”

“Ok, ok, ok.” He erased so intensely he ripped a hole at the top of his worksheet, which made the paper look shocked.

Nora sighed. “Gently.”

Was it wrong for him to have girls in his room? Wasn't he too young? Had their sex talk, the year prior, been helpful? The girl seemed relieved when Nora came in, saved from what would have followed with Darío. She’d hurried out, the bangles on her delicate wrists rattling like coins in a beggar’s can, and when Nora checked the porch, the girl was already down the block, turning onto Bird Road.

“Who was that girl?” Nora asked, while he scribbled in the worksheet’s margins.

The lead clicked against the paper as Darío impatiently subtracted in the margins. “A friend.”

“Why did she look…so frightened?” Nora dug her nails into her palm.

Darío shrugged. “Beats me.”

The girl’s face reminded Nora of her own: too many freckles (not the simple splattering across the nose that was played as attractive on models), dark deep-set eyes, loose curls, and a thinness that bordered on fragility. The girl’s body, too, occupied the liminal territories of childhood and adolescence. Nora had also recognized the fear in the girl’s face: that, too, had been her own. Nora had started working at eleven years old. She sold tamarinds, chirimoyas, and guavas near Plaza Cibeles, and later entertained tourists when they wanted a different type of fruit.

She wondered if those tourists came to her country to allow themselves to misbehave. In their own lands they were probably upright, law-abiding, and genteel. What if they came to her island to test the limits of their strength and see whether they were intentionally good (as a choice) or simply harmless (by default). Girls like her died all the time, usually strung across the bed and tangled in the yellowed sheets. Nora couldn’t forget the men. They’d transform into something different, looming and dangerous, when the door closed. Those moments were singed in her memory: the men’s sweat beating down on her face, their nails buried in the pudge of her modest hips, the squealing of the bed springs, the knocking of the headboard against the drywall, and the stale panting breath against her ear.

The men looked as though they were on the verge of death, as if they’d slip out of their bodies, just as she had, and plummet limply onto the mattress. However, and unfortunately, they always lived. Some, perhaps assuming it had been pleasurable for her, acted shocked when she asked for the money. Oh, well, I see, some would awkwardly say. They were so unaware of Nora that many mistook her low sobs into her pillow as moans, endorsements of the act.

Did her own son mistake a girl’s tears for joy?

“What were you two doing?”

Darío had developed muscles, and the curves of his defined biceps and shoulders, like a mountain range in the distance, frightened Nora. His body, larger and looming, had an understated violence. He could make her shut up.

“Nothing,” Darío grunted. “Damn.”

“Did you… You didn’t hurt her, right?”

Darío sucked his teeth. “Bruh, stop.”

“Are you having sex?”

“Stop!” Darío hammered his fist down on the table runner.

Darío had been rough and bruto with the Quaker parrot, Sissy, they used to own. When he was six years old, he’d grab its beak and hold it shut, sometimes covering Sissy’s small nostrils. Other times he’d reach into the cage and pluck out feathers until the parrot was whipped into a frenzy. Sissy would hover anxiously around the bars, kicking up old seeds and newspaper bits, trying to escape. In these attacks, the parrot realized it was trapped and flapped harder and tried squeezing itself through the curved bars.

Were those signs that Darío wasn’t right? Or regular childhood mischief? Nora didn’t know what to ignore and what to address.

“Why was she on your bed? Why was the door closed? Do you have condoms?”

“Can you leave me alone?” he said, forcefully, and pounded his fist again on the table, causing the soursop glass to tremble.

“Why was she crying?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“She just started crying out of nowhere?”

“Yup. Girls are crazy.”

“Did you do something to make her act crazy?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Why did it look like…” Nora struggled explaining what she saw—the X she had to solve for now. “Were your knees on her legs?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“Nothing. I didn’t do nothing.”

“If she says ‘no’ you have to—”

“God fucking damn! Stop!”

Darío sounded like his father, Armando, before he had left them. Armando and Nora fought nightly—his shift at the sewage plant ended at four, but he always turned up at around one in the morning, reeking of gin and having left the family Toyota in some bar’s parking lot. Nora would demand he grow up and Armando would scream that some woman at the bar had offered to “suck him off,” but instead he came home and deserved praise for his chasteness and fidelity. Nora would try to hush him so Darío wouldn’t wake up, but Armando would shout even louder. Sometimes he would pull Darío out of bed and bring him into the fight. Darío would rub his eyes and stare blankly at both parents, standing there in his baggy, second-hand Space Jam pajamas. “Women ain’t shit,” Armando would say to his son while glaring at Nora. “They nothing.”

Surely, he’d have disregarded everything that deadbeat said once he stopped coming around and calling Darío on his birthdays. Or was it too late? Had his father’s beliefs nested in the boy’s heart? Did he believe his mother was nothing?

“What’s the girl’s name?”

“Why?”

“Why is not her name. Tell me.”

Darío slid the worksheet across the table and twisted toward Nora. His left hand gripped the back of the slat-back chair, and the other hand rested at a right angle on the table. This position made his muscles appear larger. The green veins in his forearm bulged as he slowly made a fist. Would he raise it? Bring it close to her face, then stop? Or openly pummel her? Maybe he knew she wouldn’t call the cops on him, and that she couldn’t bear to ruin his future.

Nora scooted a few inches away. “I’m not making a request, boy—”

“I don’t gotta do shit.”

“It’s a simple question.”

“Why do you want to know?” Darío tensed his other fist. He had drawn in blue ink LOVE and HATE on his knuckles. If he did hit her, would it be love or hate that would be imprinted on her cheek?

“I want to talk to her.”

“She ain’t your kid.”

“I know that—”

“So then what do you care about some girl you don’t even know?”

“Who raised you? Who’s teaching you to cuss?”

“Whatever.”

“I need to make sure she’s okay. She ran out of here in tears. What if she calls the school, dummy?”

“And says what?”

“That you hurt her…or made her do something she didn’t want.”

He smirked, then shook his head. “No one’s going to be believe her.”

“Why?”

“That girl gets with everybody.”

“And because of her reputation, you tried to get—”

“I told you already! I didn’t do anything.”

“Why was she crying? Girls don’t cry for no reason, Darío.”

“You do.”

He was right: she’d cry while washing dishes or hanging towels on the clothesline. Sometimes, Nora couldn’t tell what she was feeling or recognize herself in the mirror. Sometimes, Nora felt as though she, too, were borrowing her body, just like the countless men who slipped in and out of her bedroom.

Sometimes, when Nora was alone in the house, she’d press her index finger against the hot stovetop element. Her finger only burned when she looked at it. The logical part of her brain recognized it as painful and only then did it react. But with closed eyes, she could hold it for almost a minute. She could endure what she couldn’t see.

“Please tell me what you did.”

Darío’s face changed—it contorted into something that could never return to childhood, sinister and secretive, a face that schemed and designed, glaring eyes that looked to provoke her. “I tried to finger her, but she was being a prude.”

He turned back to his homework, and Nora covered her face. She felt shame for him, for the girl, for herself. Was he like this because of her?

“You’re just a kid,” Nora said, her throat tightening. “A child.”

Nora touched Darío’s curls and smelled the No-Tears shampoo, a baby shampoo. Darío recoiled from her touch. “Stop,” he said, scooting away from her.

Nora studied the large body hunched over the table. If something ever happened, an allegation, she’d have to defend him. She’d have to take her son’s side, or risk losing him. She rose, wrapped her satin robe tightly around her waist, and walked to the kitchen. She rinsed her glass, then watched the water foam over the top and rush down the edges.

Maybe nothing had happened in the room.

Maybe the girl wasn’t even crying but had a naturally ruddy face.

Maybe her son was fine.

“Mami!” The word cut through her. It undid her. Motherhood had hijacked her brain and made every other identity secondary. She didn’t feel like she was Nora or a woman or a receptionist or a survivor. She was Darío’s mom. She was his before she was her own. He sounded like the little boy who was too shy to ask the Chuck E. Cheese mascot for a hug.

“Ma! Check my answers.”

She heard him push the chair against the laminate tiles and plod back to his room, slamming the door. Nora felt relief at his departure. She draped the dish rag over the sink’s spigot and took a breath before leaving the kitchen. 

In the living room, she picked up the raggedy worksheet. Most of his answers were wrong. Clearly, he was struggling with algebra. He’d left blank the questions where both a positive and negative integer were possible substitutes for X. On some questions, he’d clearly guessed what X stood for, and in some areas wrote a vague symbol that could be interpreted as a three or eight or crooked nine. The X reminded Nora of pirate maps, where a dotted line curved and dipped and eddied before reaching treasure.

She looked into the hallway, wondering if she should tell him his answers were wrong. No. He would rage at her or, worse, stop coming to her at all. He’d silently fail and then be held back. This was the only area of his life where he invited her input. Only here did he acknowledge her wisdom. In every other part of his life, she was a nagging mother who couldn’t possibly understand him.

How could she tell him he was wrong? How could she push him away? How could she live without him?

The scent of Darío’s strawberry No Tears shampoo and Axe Body Spray lingered at the table. He was still her baby. Nora picked up his pencil and eraser and changed his answers. She wrote with her left hand to match his slack, shaky handwriting, and hoped he’d appreciate the gesture, if he even noticed. Nora wouldn’t do it again. He’d learn. One assignment didn’t matter, she thought. One never mattered.

MADARI PENDAS

Madari Pendas is a Cuban-American writer and visual artist. She received her MFA from Florida International University, where she was a Lawrence Sanders Fellow. Her work has appeared in Craft, The Masters Review, PANK Magazine, and more. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (2021).