Girl, Repeated

A tale of the single life that’s not so singular.

by Meredith Broussard

Loving Pedro Infante

By Denise Chávez
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 p., $24

Loving Pedro Infante, the fourth book from writer Denise Chávez, delivers a sucker punch straight to the ovaries. Chávez opens with a quick left-right combo: an epigram by Federico Garcia Lorca, "Ay, que trabajo me cuesta quererte como te quiero!/Oh, what an effort it is to love you the way I do!" followed by the equally yearning, "In the darkness of El Colon movie theater, larger than life and superimposed on a giant screen, Pedro Infante, the Mexican movie star, stares straight at me with his dark, smoldering eyes." If the "smoldering" doesn’t get the estrogen flowing, just wait a few pages; the Ya-Ya elements emerge in the form of the Saturday night dress-up session that precedes best friends Tere and Irma’s weekly trip to the same old dump of a bar.

Half bildüngsroman, half enduring-power-of-friendship tale, Loving Pedro Infante is of the genre made familiar by Bridget Jones’s Diary and its ilk. Our heroine, Tere Avila, is a slightly booze-soaked, bewildered, thirtysomething singleton with a dead-end job; she has a loving but ambivalent relationship with her mother, bad luck with men and frequently finds solace in Mr. Right Now while searching for Mr. Right. Wrapped up in her affair with a married nogoodnik, Tere fails to notice that her best friend Irma Granados is falling in love with an older man. Over the course of the book, they fight, they make up, they watch Pedro Infante movies together, they watch Pedro Infante movies with the ladies of the Pedro Infante Club de Admiradores Norteamericano #256, they cook, they eat, they go to bars. Then, all of the characters unite for an anticlimactic search for the token gay friend, who has disappeared in a Pedro Infante-related suicide attempt/search for a jilted lover.

It’s pretty standard stuff, really.

Where Chávez shines is in the dead-on descriptive details of everyday life between lifelong best friends. Teresa has a special shelf in Irma’s closet for her pajamas and sleepover pillow, and their menstrual cycles are in synch. Conversations between the two fluctuate from events that happened two days ago to twenty years ago, indiscriminately; each knows the other cold, from sexual history (broad and eclectic) to preference in pasta texture (al dente for Irma, soggy for Tere). These are the small things that mark a relationship with a powerful history. After all, shelf space isn’t for mere acquaintances.

Since Chávez rates so highly for authenticity, it’s a shame that all this ground has been traveled before. The problem is not just the fact that Bridget Jones’s Diary defined the angst-ridden neurotic-oversexed-boozy-single-girl genre; it’s that there are so many books in the genre now, like Melissa Bank’s The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Amy Sohn’s Run Catch Kiss, Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopoholic, Jennifer Belle’s Going Down and of course Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City. It gets a little tedious. The only way in which Chávez’s novel deviates from type is in the setting: her heroines aren’t overeducated white women in major urban centers, they’re culturally aware Mexicanas living in Texas. Yawn. As a minority writer myself, I laud the presence of culturally diverse voices in the literary marketplace. Unfortunately, retelling the same old story with Hispanic heroines speaks more of mainstream acculturation and assimilation than of groundbreaking "other" voices in literature.

Loving Pedro Infante’s most hysterical segment, "Pink Eye," has a decidedly Vagina Monologues bent. In it, Tere leaves her diaphragm in a hotel shower stall, and for 12 pages agonizes about its retrieval:

"Did I leave El Demonio on the nightstand in its Pepto-Bismol-pink plastic case, a peeping flesh-colored eye reverently closed? I had to have left it in its case! There was some dignity to that. The maid would pick it up, without thinking, and throw it in the wastebasket, just another thing forgotten.

"But no. Oh no! I’d left it exposed, oozing and swollen, roñoso, a running sore in the face of life, on the soap dish in the dirty shower stall of the Sands Motel, on the flea-bitten dog-assed side of town behind the tracks. A dripping reminder of my darkest shame."

Chávez’s skillful rendering certainly speaks to the more realistic, practical aspects of coitus. Sure, it’s awkward to dig around in your own uterine canal to retrieve a diaphragm, and contraceptive devices do tend to end up in the damndest places. But then, most birth control humor is funny; like Loving Pedro Infante, that’s nothing new.