Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “Wait here,” Mami told him, tiptoeing into her room to search for the shoes. Behind the red curtain, Papi was passed out. He was back from wherever he’d been the past month and a half, still in the shirt he’d been wearing when he left. Miguel heard the clumsy thud of keys, bottles falling on dirt. He waited, full of hatred for the doctor and Mami, who never saw people for what they were.

  “Thieving whore—you think you can trap me by hiding my keys?” Behind the red curtain, Papi’s heavy feet made hollow echoes against the dirt; Mami’s steps were too light to be heard until she burst through the fabric, black hair trailing, almost knocking Miguel over as she fled. Papi pursued her to the yard, where the neighbors on both sides were out tending their gardens: watering, weeding, gathering—things his mother, the doctor-believer, did not know how to do properly. The neighbors turned their lazy eyes to Papi. He was just violent enough to be a bit of novelty, even in their violence-splattered lives. Papi caught Mami’s hair in a fist; like a yo-yo, her face made contact with Papi’s curled knuckles, which were perpetually split and purple, like a woman’s hidden parts. Mami’s bones made a louder noise than feet on dirt, but her muffled cry was similar: an echo inside her own chest. Miguel buried his head in his knees. Let him stop now, God, let him stop now, I promise I’ll go to the doctor like Mami wants.

  Then: Isabel’s screams. Isabel, running from the front yard. Mami was on her knees, one catching the hem of her dress taut and hunching her over, the fabric too stiff to stretch. Papi held her hair at the scalp, no movement permitted. Mami had become a twig, easy to crack, from saving flour, butter, and sugar for Miguel. Through her skin, sharp bones. The crunching of knuckle on jaw, knuckle on shoulder blade, knuckle on teeth. Blood on Papi’s hand. Was that where the purple came from—dried blood and dirt, never washed from some other beating? In the past month, had Papi been at some other lady’s house, as Isabel always said, collecting blood to stain his jagged fingers? Or was the discoloration merely an aging man’s decay, waiting for Miguel someday, too? Now, Isabel in the yard, a whirlwind in bare feet, shaking the fence. The neighbors stared: the girl was too proud, she and her American mother both. Ayudenla! Ayuden a mi mami, ayudenla! Who did the child think she was, asking they get involved? That man was crazy—they had enough troubles of their own.

  “Isabel!” Mami’s voice, weak but rising like a sharp note, stilling the air. “Go in the house!” The neighbors did not comprehend English, Mami’s command a reassuring proof of her otherness, her lesser-than-their-own humanity. “Take Miguel inside—now!”

  Limbs flew. Isabel, soaring through the air with the grace of a savage ballerina in grand jeté—landing in a jumble of limbs on her father’s back, all gnarled ponytail, bare thighs, and dirty cotton underpants. Papi reeled; at thirteen, Isabel was a woman already, breasts and substance; he collapsed to his knees, flung her off by bending over so she flipped like TV kung fu: back against dirt, dress above her hips, collar still in Papi’s grip. Mami scampered to her feet, gathered Miguel tight—she did not seem to know her face was pulpy. The neighbors glanced at one another, worried. Would the snotty American lady go away and leave him to beat the girl for show? They did not want to see him beat the little girl.

  From the ground, Isabel shouted, phlegm and authority: “Mami—take him, take him!”

  By the sockets of his left arm, Mami dragged. Around to the front of the house, down the street, farther, farther. Where could they be going? Mami almost never went anywhere; her prospective destination was a mystery. Maybe she would make the doctor look at her face, too, along with Miguel’s phantomly damaged foot. They traveled away, off the block, clutching to each other, a beast with four legs—Mami did not stop pulling until Miguel was uncertain where he was. He shivered in the burning sunlight, felt boneless and floppy with exhaustion; though he was nearly as tall as she was, his mother hoisted him on her sharp hip and carried him onward, as if on legs made of steel. The color of the sun was different now, a furious light trying to break through the shadows of evening’s approach. They stood on an unknown corner, strangers glancing now and then at them, though as with the neighbors nobody approached or intervened. Mami’s face was a fighter’s, her nose broken, so much blood down the front of her that Miguel’s left side, where she’d held him, was drenched in it. For once, she was not crying.

  The next week, she and Miguel would go to the doctor and the doctor would say of Mami’s nose, Sorry, nothing we can do for you, while Miguel’s healthy foot twitched in its cast.

  The week after that, Papi would be dead.

  Since being a stripper apparently wasn’t bizarre enough for Lina, now she is playing the role of a shrink in a zombie burlesque. None of the rest of the Guerra clan would be caught dead, so it is on Miguel—who has over the past decade become something like the family ambassador to the country of Crazy Lina—to purchase tickets and go watch his younger sister swath her nudity in a white sheet she maneuvers like a juggler, daring it to fall. She is the star of the play—the romantic lead.

  The play has been going on for a couple of months now, but Miguel was not exactly frantic to get here. This is the final night, so it was now or never. There have been, unfeasibly, fantastic reviews, starred recommendations everywhere. A production of the same show has started in Minneapolis, which is not exactly the same as being picked up by HBO, but is admittedly quite a bit better than the hurling of rotten tomatoes Miguel originally envisioned. There are murmurs of New York—of finding a bigger theater in Chicago and reopening . . . it may all be talk, but Miguel is still eating humble pie.

  Just as she had never shown the slightest indication of being a dyke prior to moving in with Bebe, likewise Lina, who unbeknownst to their mother started stripping when she was twenty, never mentioned any desire to act. One day, about four months ago, she was shopping at Trader Joe’s when a random man approached her and asked if she was an actress. It seemed such an obvious pickup line that Miguel objected when Lina called him afterward to say she was going to “audition” for the guy. The play itself sounded so demented, Miguel couldn’t believe it wasn’t a scam. Zombies, Lina explained (as though she were someone who often began sentences with the word zombies), attack a psychiatric hospital and naturally eat the brains of those interned there, but then the zombies begin to exhibit signs of the psychiatric diseases of the patients whose brains they devoured. “This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” Miguel kept saying. “You’re going to end up chained to a wall while this so-called writer/director does experiments on you in his basement—he’s going to eat your brain.” He’d assumed the whole shebang was taking place in the back room of a dive bar, and when Lina mentioned a smallish but reputable theater in the North Center area—one Miguel had once bought Chad a subscription to for Christmas—he scoffed, even though he knew she wasn’t lying.

  “Way to be supportive, big brother,” Lina said. “You’re going to make me crush and cook all Mami’s morphine and shoot it into my neck just to drown out your negativity.”

  “You have neck-shooting paraphernalia lying around the house, do you?” Miguel asked, what he hoped was lightly.

  “Sure,” Lina said; he heard her dragging on her cigarette. “I keep everything I need for one shot. This shit is a choice, or it isn’t real.”

  “That sounds profoundly masochistic.”

  Her laugh came as an indelicate snort.

  A generation removed when they were kids, his younger sister—thirty, twice-divorced, twelve-stepping her ass off, and living with a lesbian-chic English professor—has become his closest friend. As such, their low-level enabling of one another’s vices and weaknesses is an unspoken given, hence Miguel said nothing to the effect that taking the morphine pills their mother was supposed to use for her sciatica (but Mami would have nothing to do with them—left “perfectly good drugs” to rot) was not exactly clean. He also said nothing because he kept half the pills for himself—or what Lina, who had absconded with the original bottle, passed off as
“half.” Plus, whereas everyone else in his family has either implicitly or explicitly made clear that his homosexuality is an abomination, Lina has admiringly followed in Miguel’s footsteps in choosing a same-sex partner, the way one might go to med school if one’s successful older sibling happened to be a doctor.

  Now his baby sister is backstage, presumably engaging in last-minute tactics to keep her violently white sheet from exposing her inside holes and cracks to the audience while she pirouettes around like a lunatic. Miguel chain-smokes outside until he has no choice but to go to his seat in the front row with Chad.

  “You’re cute,” Chad says, leafing through the program without looking at it. “You’re ready to jump out of your skin. The protective papi with a baseball bat at the front door when some jerk comes to pick up your little hija for her first date.”

  “I cannot believe this is happening,” Miguel says.

  “I don’t understand how you can not see how awesome this is,” Chad says sadly.

  The house lights have dimmed and people are mildly quiet. Suddenly, Miguel feels a repeated whacking on his shoulder. He turns around.

  “Mike!” The woman behind him stage-whispers, shaking his shoulder now. “Holy smoke! I can’t believe it’s you.”

  Miguel knows her; it isn’t that he doesn’t know her. It is only that he can’t place anything that matters about this fact, like how they are acquainted, or her name.

  “Heeey,” he drawls, quiet but with an upward lilt to his voice, cautious. “So great to see you. Uh.” He elbows Chad, taking a chance. “This is my husband, Chad.”

  “Oh my god,” the woman says, laughing. “The stud of Lane Tech, secretly batting for the other team all along. Wow, what a relief—I was so in love with you—I was going to have to go home and cry into my pillow tonight now that I’d seen you and you’re still so hot!”

  Jesus Christ. It is Emily.

  Miguel fights a sudden impulse to stand up, half fling himself across the chair backs that separate them, and embrace her.

  Someone has come out onstage. Emily pats his shoulder, nodding, gesturing with quick sweeping motions of her fingers that he should look forward, at the stage. In this gesture he sees that she is a mother now, and wonders how many children she has.

  Emily—a mother. Emily, a grown woman. Not that Miguel has thought of her often, but on the occasions he has, she was of course locked into his memory as a teenage girl. Never exactly beautiful, there was something about her at seventeen, a wounded charm that men universally find appealing. Her skirts were always too short, and she was endlessly pulling them down as though someone else had dressed her and she was surprised by their length. When harsh winds blew, as they all walked west on Addison past the stadium to hang in the McDonald’s parking lot, pouring stolen booze into soda cups and getting shit-faced through straws, Emily used to hold on to his arm, and once, in the most evil stretch of winter, he’d seen a gust blow her on her stupid, precarious heels along an ice patch until she fell on her bony ass, literally knocked over by the wind. Her best friend, a flagrantly confident and intellectual girl of that rare high school breed that makes bookish asexuality look chic, had been a closer friend of his, but that girl had disappeared east after high school, into the kind of bright new Ivy League life that entails dropping all your spic and white-trash friends from the Midwest. Without her as the glue, he and Emily quickly lost touch. Miguel has a sudden flash of one night at an underage dance club, letting Emily give him hickeys all over his neck while they were both drunk on watermelon schnapps. He is pretty certain they never had sex, as he doled out intercourse judiciously, only when something needed to be proven beyond a doubt. Emily was not that kind of girl: the kind who demanded proof of anything. She was the sort who waited to be taken—who seemed, in the way so many young girls do, that it was not worthy of particular speculation, somewhat destined for ruin. She drank a lot in the daytime, did more cocaine than the rest of their crowd, though it was 1985, 1986, and of course when it came to cocaine, everyone did some, then. He turns to face the stage, but in his mind there is still Emily, wearing her adult skin. The new Her doesn’t suit her. He feels discombobulated, wants to turn around to verify that it is her: her Emily-bones under this new, expansive flesh and Earth Mama attire. Her hair, which was short, spikey, and dark when he knew her, is long and flaxen, and he realizes with some alarm that this is her real hair—that the dark version was just some Goth kid thing, and his Emily is a blonde.

  His Emily? Well, no one was ever really “his,” back then. He was in the closet, his life a general fraud. He recalls one cringingly embarrassing phone call with Emily, in which he attempted to “open up” and ended up talking about how he wanted to kill himself. He had the conversation while sitting on the bathroom floor of his mother’s house, the phone cord smashed in the closed door. His suicidal ideation could not have had any sensible context to Emily, since nobody knew he was gay. He was handsome (even he can see this in retrospect), got straight As, had friends and girlfriends, was scholarship bound. But his vague past in Venezuela, his dead father, his too-religious Latino family—four generations of women—all crammed together in one apartment with a perpetually barking, enraged Chihuahua, apparently seemed context enough. He remembers it being strange to him that she never questioned why he might wish to die. Perhaps there was some fundamental lack in him that was visible to others, even if he himself thought the trouble lay elsewhere, in mere sexual preference. Even now, he blushes in the dark theater, hoping Emily does not remember that call.

  Later, he stands outside the theater smoking with Emily’s husband, Nick—the dude who picked up Lina in a Trader Joe’s. Nick wrote this . . . play, if that’s the right word . . . this cacophonously hilarious, possibly slightly brilliant thing they have just seen. He collaborated with an all-female burlesque troupe on the choreography, but the stage play is all his, and after spending some fifteen minutes with Nick, this no longer seems surprising. Nick also acts, playing not the co-lead—the zombie with whom Lina’s shrink falls in love, who coincidentally has bipolar disorder, like Lina herself—but a more minor character, an agoraphobic zombie who convinces the others to remain in the hospital indefinitely, sitting out the apocalypse raging outside its walls until an angry mob of humans finally shows up in the final act, attacking the zombies, who have come to only want to paint and read poetry and have sex.

  “So do the zombies take their meds?” Miguel asks.

  “That’s what they need the shrink for, mate, it’s why they originally keep her alive when she shows up!” Nick answers in a near brogue, despite the fact that, being married to Emily, he has probably lived in Chicago for a damn long time. He proceeds to give Miguel a chronicle of the various zombies’ prescription cocktails, none of which Miguel can recall actually being mentioned in the play, lighting one cigarette off the other the entire time until Miguel thinks his own lungs may spontaneously begin to bleed.

  He isn’t sure if Nick’s hair always looks like this, or if it’s a short-term thing, for the part.

  Though they’ve been standing together for less than half an hour, Miguel feels a strange fondness for Nick that people, especially heterosexual men, rarely elicit in him. In a decade of working at the Federal Reserve building, he has not once had a smoking buddy whose company he actually sought on breaks, whose cigarette habits he would time his own around, but if Nick worked with him, he would go outside to smoke when Nick did. This surprises him, though it is not exactly unsettling. Maybe it’s the accent. Though it isn’t that he wants to fuck Nick; hippie boys were never his thing, even in college—even in Barcelona. Nick seems like the kind of androgynous man who once got a lot of pussy. His hair is the deep auburn of a woman or an Irish Setter, his eyes green as gems; he’s elvish in an Orlando Bloom rather than a Santa’s helper kind of way. He and Emily must have made an unsettlingly sexy couple, once upon a time. They have two sons now, one almost fifteen—as old as the marriage—and the other only seven, and every time
either boy is mentioned in conversation, Nick’s already-animated face brightens like a floodlight. He has an ease around fags uncommon in straight men, irrespective of their politics; maybe he used to blow guys on a Dublin commune in the name of free love, if that hair isn’t just for this part.

  “I’m quitting smoking tomorrow,” Nick says, sucking on the cigarette like a joint. He rolls his own. Miguel is smoking one of his, too, and it is giving him a beautiful head rush.

  “Sure you are. Yep. Me too.”

  “Seriously. Em gave me until the closing. My number’s up.”

  “I told Chad I’ll quit smoking when he loses twenty pounds,” Miguel says. A wave of anxiety instantly washes over him. Chad is less overweight than Emily’s become, and Nick may think he’s making a dig.

  “Well,” says Nick, not biting, “if I end up with a tracheotomy, Jay’ll start taking me in for show-and-tell.” He laughs to himself. “They call it show-and-share now.” He presses his throat, which is encircled with two chunky necklaces, and mimics a trach voice: “Hi, kids, I’m here for show-and-share. Just say no to smoking, or you’ll end up with a glory hole in your neck.” He flicks his butt to the curb. “Seriously, Em’ll refuse to fuck me if I don’t quit. The candy store or the tobacco store is closing down—you know, man, no contest.”

  Miguel feels his eyes blinking rapidly, bats away some smoke.

  Emily and Chad come outside together arm in arm, like French schoolgirls. “But why did you only ask lesbians and single women?” Emily is saying. “Are you afraid breeder DNA is going to, like, infect your kid or something?”

  Chad giggles. He puts his hand lightly on Miguel’s arm, and Miguel stubs the Nick-rolled cigarette against the brick wall of the building. “Well, that was a consideration,” Chad says. “But really, just, you know, what man would say yes to something like that, right? I mean, if a woman had a husband, he’d never go for it—carrying some other man’s baby for nine months . . . why would any man go along with that?”