This is the thing: I like women. No, wait, I love women. I know that doesn’t sound like anything new, nothing every guy wouldn’t tell you. I mean it, though, and it’s that I can’t say so better.
This is from the opening paragraph of the opening story of the collection. It sets the tone. This particular narrator is not the unifying force of these stories, but this assertion. These are all stories about men and their relationship with women. The men vary; the women vary. And so, logically, do the relationships. If anything, the real power of this quote is that it seems easy enough to apply it to the author as well as the narrator. His mere attention to female characters in every single story is enough to strongly hint that even if he may not necessarily love women like this guy, both are intensely fascinated by them.
Everybody who grew up in El Paso hated it and left when they could, as soon as possible. There was nothing to do, and no jobs, let alone good-paying ones.
This is not the only narrator in the collection to speak about El Paso. Another story opens and closes with the narrator’s statement that he is in El Paso. Both “Heuco” and “Snow” are stories referencing the history of the city and region. El Paso becomes the metaphorical setting of record for the Chicano experience which unifies the stories on the masculine side of the gender divide. Of interest, perhaps, is that while the male narrator describes El Paso negative, it is a female character who will later on in the story admit she could quite happily live there because it is such as sweet little town.
I have two loves, Yvette and Blanca.
The narrator of this story does not have a unique problem. Or advantage. Or situation. However, one might describe the situation, he is far from the only male narrator who is juggling relationships with more than one woman in some way or another. Just as all the narrators are not the same and all the women are not alike, neither are the fundamentals of interaction between these men and their women identical. In this story, the narrator is dealing with Yvette and Blanca as well as the intrusive qualities of a female landlady, so he’s got even bigger problems. That narrator openly espousing his love of all women turns out to be a teenager who is simply acting on hormonal urges.
She gets up and takes a walk and my eyes follow her. A black bikini that fits her despite the fact that she is such a big woman. Huge woman. Gigantic in almost all aspects.
This particular story is about a woman that is very difficult not to notice under the circumstance: at least six feet tall and most of her flesh exposed. But she becomes in some ways a metaphor for all the other women in the story and, indeed, for women everywhere. They surround the male characters like the perfume worn by women on Broadway described in the opening story. Males cannot escape noticing women; even when the pool they all surround might well be described as a place for hookups. Women are just simply gigantic objects incapable of not eventually being noticed in a world filled with men.
