It's Easier to Run than Drown in it

“I want to ask her if she loves her boss but I ask instead, How do you like the States?”

    In Junot Diaz, Edison, New Jersey we are confronted with feelings of lost love and an underlying yet unfamiliar hope that creeps with it. As the narrator discusses the daily demands divided between him and his road partner, Wayne, he discusses his ex-girlfriend who he still presently refers to as  “the girlfriend.” You can tell that the decision for the two to separate stemmed from disappointment and one being braver than the other. Nonetheless, after meeting Mr. Pruitt’s maid, I realized this is a story both the narrator and the Dominican maid share. I believe the narrator realized this just the same when he considered asking the question written above.

    First, I considered the fact that neither one of the two referred to these people by name. The maid never once referred to Mr. Pruitt as such, she only calls him the “pendejo” or “her boss.” As mentioned above, the narrator seems to call his ex-girlfriend, “the girlfriend.” There is much to say here. It seems as if uttering there name would take too much energy, or it would pain a part of them that they are trying to get past. They both seem to share this. There is an underlying disappointment. Time has gone by, so his disappointment is thinly veiled by distraction but still very evident. The maid’s disappointment with what affair I speculate she and Mr. Pruitt had is also thinly veiled—but by anger. Whatever happened between the two just recently happened and she wants run from it just as the narrator runs from how he feels about his ex-girlfriend.

I also considered the clothes the maid leaves behind versus the pictures of the ex-girlfriend that the narrator neglects to tell his mother to dispose of. They both symbolize hope. The maid leaving her clothes could be a sign that she wanted nothing to do with him, not even own the clothes he may have bought for her. But, to me, it seems she left them as a hopeful gesture just as the pictures left of the narrator’s ex-girlfriend are still around his mother’s home. There is no finality in leaving them behind. In fact, there is a chance that she may return to Mr. Pruitt and the narrator’s girlfriend may come back to restore order once more, so why get rid of them? There is a shared pain and culture between the narrator and the maid. It seems that this unspoken understanding of one another is what helped him to be able to help her. It's easier for them both to run from these feelings, than sit around and drown in circumstances they have no control over.