In Oscar Casares' Brownsville, a collection of short stories, "Yolanda" revolves around an adolescent narrator's interaction with the beautiful woman next door. Married to an abusive and controlling husband, the beautiful neighbor takes refuge in the boy's home on many occasions. The narrator often hears the lovemaking noises of his neighbors, but mistakes Yolanda's passion for pain. Surrounded by sexual activity and enduring a failed opportunity to get into bed with Yolanda; Yolanda serves as the narrator's initiation into adult sexual awakening.
The young male narrator in "Yolanda" is taken with the gorgeous wife of his next door neighbor. There is little denying she serves as his initiation into his awakening sexual longings. He seems obsessed with her. As the story opens, she is the first thing he tells us about: "When I can't sleep at night I think of Yolanda Castro" (Casares 157). The narrator's experiences with Yolanda make him yearn for her in ways he is unaware of at first. An adolescent, he is not yet aware of his adult sexual desires. Yolanda serves as the physical manifestation of the adolescent male's idealized female form that brings these desires out of him. As the narrator tells us in what seems humorous except for its adolescent sincerity, "The only girl I'd ever seen that even came close to being as beautiful as Yolanda was in a Playboy I found under my parents' bed the summer before" (Casares 160). Yolanda stirs passions in the twelve-year-old he is only just beginning to sense.
Yolanda is a form of refuge for the narrator. She amuses him, fills him with pleasure, and cares for him when he is sick. He watches TV shows with her and is amazed at her ability to guess the price right on The Price is Right. During these innocent encounters, something deeper seems to emerge inside the narrator where his interaction with Yolanda is concerned that
...