Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  In the beginning of Caracas, when Papi would disappear for a few days, Miguel was suffused with giddiness, like Christmas morning the one time they’d visited Abuela in Chicago, when Papi was still working and they had saved money all year for the airplane. Lately, when Papi disappeared, it was for longer, and they grew hungry. When Papi was home and beat Mami, sometimes Mami cried, but those tears made sense because she was being struck. When Papi was gone and Mami cried alone in her small room, behind the red curtain, her tears seemed more ominous. Isabel would stand twisting her hands just outside the curtain, like a bride hesitating to cross the threshold. Other times she mocked just out of Mami’s earshot, Aye, my children are starving, what will I do, they’re going to drop dead right in front of my eyes, poor me, poor me, I would go and get a job but then who would cry in my bedroom all day long, sweet Jesus, this is a full-time job, you know! until Miguel was choking with laughter. The hunger scraped in Miguel’s stomach and made concentration difficult, but he carried awareness that it was not starvation—that he was not yet willing to trade other luxuries for food.

  Once, the wicker chairs separated while Miguel tried to sleep on them, and Miguel, half-somnolent, spread his thin blanket onto the dirt floor and fell back asleep. He woke to an itching on his back that, when scratched, lurched around inside his T-shirt like a camel’s hump wanting independence. His screaming woke Mami, but she was too afraid of the rat to touch Miguel—she kept approaching, lunging back—so Isabel straddled him, yanked the garment over his head with one swift motion so forceful that, released, he fell back against the dirt with a thud. Looming above him, moonlight haloing her curls the color of dead leaves, Isabel touched his face only once before standing. The rat had scuttled away, gone before they could even think to get a broom, to corner and kill it as Papi sometimes did—not that they were up to the task. In Mami’s bedroom, Papi snored on, unconcerned with their daily trials and fears. Miguel’s back stung like being belted whenever he or Isabel misbehaved. Once, Isabel had borne the brunt, but lately Papi had noticed that she often lied for Miguel, claimed his crimes as her own, so now Papi simply beat them both, shouting that he couldn’t trust their confessions.

  When Papi didn’t come home from the bar, Miguel could crawl into the safe bed with his sister. How long did it take before that balance shifted, before his stomach’s scraping expanded, conquered the cheap, defenseless terrain of his heart so that happiness meant nothing anymore and all he could think of was food? Nights of crying in bed, Isabel alternatingly trying to comfort him and curling up in a tight ball, her knees pressed to the wall, her own sobs swallowed and muffled. Then, though every day had seemed to last a year, the hunger itself waned, and neither affection nor food compelled him anymore.

  Papi had been gone longer than a month, this time—it was nearly Miguel’s tenth birthday. They had all grown thin enough that their hipbones jutted like small missiles through their thin clothes; Miguel’s elbows and knees were wider than the limbs they held together. When there was anything to eat, Mami and Isabel both attempted to give him more than they took for themselves, but the smell of food had started to make water rise into his mouth in a tidal wave of nausea. He coughed constantly, as though the dirt had invaded his lungs, the spasms tapping his energy so that running outside with his friends seemed something he had done in another, carefree lifetime. Both Miguel and Isabel missed school for so many consecutive days that returning felt almost pointless. Toward the End of Papi, Mami took Miguel into her bed even though Isabel had long prohibited this, and Miguel began to hate Isabel a little for having made it seem like such a big deal, because now he knew, when he did not want to know, that if Mami had taken him in then something ordinarily just wrong had become dire.

  Toward the End of Papi, Mami, with her desperate city-girl mind, thought to make little fake bouquets of flowers out of cloth and paper: an entrepreneur. She filled baskets with them and cajoled Isabel to carry them door-to-door to sell like a gypsy, as if the neighbors were not almost as poor. That was the only time Miguel saw Isabel cry, refusing to go out into the street with the bouquets, humiliated. “Do you want your baby brother to starve?” Mami shouted, but Isabel sat immobile, staring at some stain on the wall. That was the only time Mami got Papi’s belt, waving it like a cowboy swinging a rodeo lasso, her hysteria contrasting Isabel’s rigid calm. She lunged at Isabel, snapping the belt without bothering to fold it over in her hand the way Papi did—even Miguel understood that she would lack precision. Her blows hit Isabel in all the wrong spots: her ear; her schoolbooks, the small of her back. Isabel yelped and swung back at the belt with her hands, though she did not try to run—Mami kept swinging until both were sobbing; Isabel curled into herself on the bed, not resisting the blows anymore, just allowing the belt to have its way.

  “No one will buy them from me,” Mami finally begged, all the violence in her exhausted. She leaned against the doorframe, breathing heavy. “You see the way they look at me. They’ll laugh in my face.”

  “If you send me out there,” Isabel said, panting, “I’ll throw those hideous flowers away and let some man buy my flower instead. Even that would have more dignity.”

  When he offered to take the flowers himself, Mami hesitated, but Isabel said, “No, it’s better, you’ll see,” and thrust the basket into his hand. He despised her as he trudged door-to-door, feeling himself hover above his own dizzy body, listening to himself recite what Mami had told Isabel to say and aware in some crevice of his mind that every time someone pressed a coin into his palm, it meant one thing: a nine-year-old boy peddling homemade bouquets was such a shameful thing that even his impoverished neighbors had taken pity, overcome with gratitude that they themselves had not yet fallen so low.

  When he returned home, there was enough money for butter, sugar, and corn flour: the buttered arepas were their meals, and for desert they sprinkled sugar on top.

  But aren’t these stories absurd? They’re a goddamn “Save the Children” ad, played in the middle of the night when no one is watching TV. They’re the tortured, white-guilt fantasies of the PC kids Miguel went to college with in the late eighties, who earnestly attended anti-apartheid meetings as though Midwestern teenagers possessed any ability to impact change in South Africa. Who would possibly believe this melodrama: The alcoholic, machismo father with the iron fist; long-suffering, passively weeping mother? The rat, for god’s sake! Surely Miguel’s memory is faulty, has fallen prey to embellishment.

  Yet some thirty years after standing, basket in hand, at the head of his street in Caracas, where he felt himself lift out of his body for the first time, Miguel will tell Chad, “When I was a little boy, I used to eat sticks of butter,” in some attempt at an explanation for why he does not want Gretchen’s eggs. And poor Chad will listen, rapt, probably thinking this some quaint Venezuelan custom, understanding nothing.

  All couples have their own language, and Miguel and Chad’s has become one devoid of causality. In the early years of their courtship, Chad always held Miguel’s hands across the table at restaurants, despite any protests Miguel might kick up, then flawlessly schmoozed his way into complimentary desert and champagne. His casual logic (“Why are gay patrons so afraid to show a little affection when the chef is obviously a queen and so are all the waiters?”) seemed to cause the world to click into place around them, adapting to Common Sense According to Chad. Chad called himself a “historic preservationist” by trade, but what buildings he owned—under the auspices of his real-estate-mogul father—were comprised mainly of Section 8 housing in Englewood, one of the roughest neighborhoods on the South Side: his daily work of collecting rent from tenants or supervising workmen’s restoration projects commonly consisted of having guns pulled on him, his car being vandalized, and getting punched in the face when someone couldn’t pay or when he interrupted people turning tricks or dealing drugs in his unoccupied buildings. It was work Miguel would have joined the freaking military or monkhood before undertaking, but Chad called
it his “passion,” appeared for their every date (twice with blackened eyes, several times with mangled car) flawlessly cheerful, bubbling with enthusiasm. Miguel assumed this façade would crack once they moved in together, but it . . . didn’t. Even up close and intimate, Chad really was the idealistic urban hero he was portrayed as in local newspaper and NPR-affiliate features: a crowd-pleasingly handsome blond Ken-doll half the gay community lusted after in the final summer of the 1990s when Chad, inexplicably, took an interest in moody Miguel and upended Miguel’s life for the better.

  And so, as years went by, Miguel continued to speak in light sentences, as he would to a lover of a different tongue. It has proven a relief, really, to present this partial version of himself, to live on the bright surface of things instead of the ugly, murky depths. “I was the first in my family to go to college,” Miguel says, omitting, I’d already slashed my wrists twice and hoped a dose of university liberalism could save me. “Then I moved to Barcelona to improve my Spanish,” he continues, without, Travel or Prozac—the only two things that could get me out of bed after college. “But I ran out of money, so I came home,” he concludes, instead of, I failed in starving myself to death or catching AIDS, and I’d lost the balls for outright suicide, so I didn’t know what else to do. “Love you,” he dutifully chirps every night before bed, even adding, “honey,” though once he would not have been caught dead.

  Behind every word, every half-truth is: Help—teach me how to be like you.

  How a man decides to become a father: because the best thing he has ever known in his life—his partner of ten years—wants it with such a boundless exuberance that eventually Miguel relents, against all his better judgments, against all his mountainous superstitions of something secretly rotten at his genetic core. How a man decides to become a father: when the will to oppose has been worn out of him for so many years that he capitulates, just as he did to that basket of chintzy bouquets—succumbs to Chad’s coaxing hands under the blanket, to Chad’s laughter, to Chad’s plans for a nursery, to Chad’s gentle mocking of Miguel’s “adorable” third-world guilt over hiring a nanny. One day, Miguel comes home with a book of baby names A-Z, and says only, with twinges of joy and terror in equal measure, “Oh, fuck it. Why the hell not?”

  A series of dinners with potential carriers ensues. But it is 2008 and everyone these days is having babies; it’s hard to find an empty womb. The first Lesbian Couple they approach have spit out two already, alternating the load between them, and the moment Miguel and Chad broach the topic, it’s revealed that they are knocked up with a third, skewing the balance. “We should do it next year,” one member of the Lesbian Couple quips, “just to even things out,” but of course they are joking. More smiles, more laughs, Oh you’ll be such great dads! The first Single Woman they ask, teetering precariously at the tipping point between party girl and spinster, squeals over an expensive sushi dinner, gushing, “I’ve always wanted to experience pregnancy!” She has had a lot of sake and her cheeks are pink, her voice a breathless combination of 1940s films and faux-British accent à la Madonna, although she was raised on the west side of Chicago. She strikes Miguel as a bad actress cast in the role of their lives. Chad presses her, “You could move in with us if you wanted, while you were pregnant. Save money on rent, besides what we’d pay you. You could be like an aunt to the baby—we’d all be like family—we already are.” This isn’t technically true. She is a peripheral friend; they see her at parties—it is only that, being childless, parties are plentiful. She doesn’t live in their house. But the train is moving too fast to slam on the brakes now without doing significant damage. It rolls on its own momentum such that locking down a womb for Gretchen’s egg (and Miguel’s sperm, obviously: it can’t be Chad’s or the baby would have two heads) has started to seem essential to the very fate of the world. At home they no longer debate whether they should be doing this, but fall into bed frantic with plotting, each day a womb has failed to be procured. The Single Woman’s enthusiasm is a good sign; her pink cheeks are a good sign; her demented desire to go through the medieval hell of pregnancy is definitely a good sign, if not a great indicator of sanity, irrelevant since her genes are not involved. Chad can promise her a Mormon marriage and all Miguel will do is nod and smile.

  Everyone they’ve asked is really too old, but they don’t know any young people other than Lina, Miguel’s notoriously unstable younger sister, who Chad vetoed out of the gate. “Listen,” he said, though he didn’t have to say it, Miguel knew. “I love Lina, but she’s a drug addict. There is no fucking way, honey. Please don’t take offense.” Miguel was, frankly, relieved. It wasn’t that he thought Lina would run out to score heroin with their child in her womb—that was a brief period (what was it about that was a brief period that Chad failed to understand?), and she has been her version of clean for almost six years. It’s more that because Lina’s body is her trade—stripping, now this crazy burlesque thing—Miguel is afraid she would flat out say no. Lina is the only member of his family who has never rejected him outright, and he is embarrassed to admit how badly he needs to keep it that way. They can’t ask Lina’s lover Bebe. She and Lina have been together since Lina was Bebe’s student at UIC, dazzled by Bebe’s proficiency with French feminist theory—then, before the term was over, by Bebe’s even greater proficiency with restraints and riding crops. Still, even if after five years Bebe is family, Miguel has the impression that any kinship she nurses toward him does not extend to her body being treated as a waiting room by “the patriarchy.” On a list of women they know, scrawled in Chad’s neat-yet-immature handwriting, Miguel sees next to Bebe’s name: femi-nazi. (Next to Angelina’s, simply: crazy.) To ask them both—the ideologue and the stripper—could constitute a double rejection beyond endurance.

  Plus, Bebe is a decade older than Lina, adding to their constituent of the middle-aged.

  Beside Miguel’s older sister Isabel’s name, Chad has written: pushing menopause + thinks we’re going to hell.

  What to leave in and what to omit? The logistics of planning consume them.

  The baby track, it turns out, is a virtual labyrinth of tracks: soon they have gone to see six properties for sale, and Chad has zeroed in obsessively on one historic mansion in Wicker Park selling for “about a million dollars less than it’s worth” because of the small matter of a termite infestation. The floors will need to be gutted, but most of the vintage features are restorable and could remain intact: Chad’s wet dream. The $1.5 million asking price is so far beyond what they can afford that at first Miguel thinks Chad is joking. Of course, he thought this when Gretchen offered them her eggs, too. Gutting eggs from a woman; gutting floors from a house: same difference. Miguel’s sense of humor is failing him—he can no longer trust it as a gauge of reality.

  “As soon as I inherit the business,” Chad reasons, “we’ll be collecting about two million dollars a month.”

  Chad’s father, Charles Merry, is not even seventy. He still puts in a full day’s work on every day he doesn’t put in a full day’s golf. He hosts Republican fundraisers at which he smokes pot in the bathroom. Chad’s paternal grandmother is 101 years old. On this trajectory, Miguel reasons they will be inheriting the Merry’s realty empire around the time their hypothetical baby hits college.

  The Single Woman gets back to them on the same day Chad puts in an offer on Termite Mansion. “I thought I could do it,” she weeps into the phone, and Miguel curses Chad silently for working late, as usual, so that he had to take this call—“but I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” he tells her, though it is anything but okay and he hates her now: How dare she not want to waste the next year of her life for his convenience? He finds himself unsavory. “Please don’t worry about it . . . it’s a lot to ask.”

  “I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never have a baby,” she says, sniffing what he cannot help but believe is theatrically. People do not need to sniff that loud.

  “I’m sorr
y to have brought all this up for you,” Miguel manages. The alarm signals that come with open displays of emotion flash so bright behind his eyes that Chad may come home to find him passed out, still holding the phone. “We’ll pursue our other options. You were just the first person we wanted to ask,” he tacks on, because Chad has stipulated that they should tell everybody that.

  What to leave in, what to omit? This track plays on repeat for weeks. Requests, met with incredulously awkward giggles or tearful refusals. It is as though they are collecting every “no” a man would normally receive from women over a lifetime of trying to bed them, all at once—it is as though a man cannot get out of this life without his quota of Nos. Meanwhile, Miguel has never seen so many pregnant women. They are everywhere: at Starbuck’s, in restaurants, even at the Board of Trade where Miguel works, and where women are a rare exotic breed.

  Miguel’s sonofabitch father, Javier Guerra, had no trouble making babies. Rumor was he had bastards all over Caracas. And although the situations are not remotely similar, something in Miguel that has been seething for thirty-one years, since the End of Papi, begins, slowly, to give way to grief.

  Mami was looking for Miguel’s shoes. Why she thought they’d be in her bedroom, Miguel couldn’t guess. She had to take Miguel to the doctor to have his foot put in a cast; now that they had food at home, Mami was determined to send him back to school, so Miguel claimed a hurt foot to avoid it. When he kept the story going, Mami dragged him to the clinic. None of Miguel’s friends ever went to the doctor; why did he have to be the one with a crazy mother from Chicago? Over Miguel’s squirming protests, the doctor pried at him with fingers greasy from other people’s sweat, proclaimed the cartilage on the ball of his foot “cracked.” Mami, bubbling with doctor-faith that would later become minister-faith, meant to drag Miguel back to have his foot obscured in plaster so the doctor could grow more fat and rich.